The train from Pittsburg arrived precisely at noon on the second of March. Expectant passengers all along the Joplin depot's boarding platform breathed a sigh of relief, not that the train was on time, but that it had arrived at all. Almost three weeks earlier, the operators – known as “carmen” – of every train that plied the Joplin & Pittsburg Railway line had walked off the job, leaving the J&P's passengers without reliable transportation. With the trains now operated by replacement carmen, service looked to be back to normal, just as J&P president Joseph. J. Heim had promised. Satisfied riders bustled off the newly-arrived car toward job or home, while those passengers who waited for boarding began to edge forward on the platform, the coins in their hands eager to fulfill their appointed task. Suddenly the cars and the lights went dark. The J&P railroad strike was not over after all - it was about to veer off on a course which would lead from Pittsburg and Joplin to Kansas City and Detroit, carrying passengers, politicians, owners, and union officers along with it. None would be more surprised at the strike's path than the railroad operators who started it.
From its inception in 1907 until its demise in the late 1920s, the J&P provided public transportation in and around the capital of the Kansas coal fields, Pittsburg. Anchored at their main depot on Broadway - Pittsburg’s main street then as today - the J&P’s electric tracks stretched north to Franklin, and from there east to Mulberry and west to the county seat of Girard. Its lines carried people, freight, and mail south to Columbus, Kansas, from which a short spur shot westward to West Mineral. Crossing the state line into Missouri, the longest of the J&P’s tracks ended in Joplin, directly joining the two towns who lent their names to the company. In total, the J&P's lines provided nearly seventy miles of consistent, affordable transportation for those who, like most of the frustrated patrons milling about Joplin's darkened platform, did not have automobiles of their own.
In the summer of 1917, the owners of the now-silent railroad had signed a contract with the carmen, represented by the Amalgamated Association of Street and Electric Railway Employees of America (known as the “Amalgamated”), that granted them a 20% raise. Though that contract was designed to last until 1920, barely nine months after its ink dried the company's carmen demanded still another raise. The Amalgamated sided firmly with the railroad; it ordered the Pittsburg carmen back to work immediately and when they refused, revoked their union charter.
That reaction to the carmens' walkout changed the strike from a union action to something far more volatile and unpredictable: a “wildcat” strike, one in which union workers could not rely on their own union for support. When their now-expelled local leaders issued monthly union cards for March, the Kansas City branch of the Amalgamated publicly declared the cards “unauthorized and illegal,” exposing any worker who relied on one as evidence of union membership to charges of fraud. Now the carmen had to worry not only about criminal prosecution, they had to be concerned that their own union might be the driving force behind it. It also meant that if the J&P replaced them with other Amalgamated members – which it quickly did – their former union would side with the men who were now driving “their” trains.
When the J&P brought in their new carmen on March second – having placed newspaper ads for experienced operators in newspapers as far away as Kansas City - the engineers who provided power for the J&P turned off the switches. The lines of the J&P went dead, leaving stranded passengers milling about boarding platforms from Joplin to Mulberry. Unfortunately, the carmen would learn that this show of solidarity would prove far less helpful than they initially assumed.
It was not greed that drove the carmen to defy both their employer and their union; it was simple economics. “War,” the newspaper noted, “changed the price on nearly every article,” and few people knew that truth more keenly than the carmen. Unlike farmers who enjoyed almost guaranteed markets and business owners who profited from higher prices, hourly workers found their paychecks buying less and less every month. The day President Wilson first arrived in Washington a carman could have purchased five pounds of chili beans for a shiny silver quarter, just about what he might have earned in an hour. The day he went on strike, that same quarter would buy only two pounds, a 150% increase in price.
Other foodstuffs suffered the same fate. Hard-earned pay that had purchased six pounds of pinto beans in 1913 now brought home only two. The price of syrup rose 33% in a matter of months, soap was up 50%. Dried peaches cost half again what they had before. And lard had risen a massive 200% in the months since America's war efforts began in earnest. Despite the best efforts of the newly-established United States Food Administration, the price of nearly every item that supported their families far surpassed the significant raise the carmen had accepted in July of 1917. There seemed no end to the price increases, and no way short of another raise to escape their disastrous effects.
The Food Administration, established as a wartime measure to ensure sufficient food supplies to American troops and civilians in allied countries, issued a continuous stream of regulations designed to ensure that the shiploads of American farm products being sent overseas would be underwritten by increased production and efficient distribution at home. But their continuing modification of rules and quotas often had the opposite effect: food producers had to continually guess how much food they would be allowed to produce and at what price, forcing work stoppages and exacerbating shortages. On March fifth, the Milling Division of the Food Administration announced a repeal of its “75% of a 90% basis” rule – allowing companies to return to 90% of pre-war production at controlled prices – after half of the mills in Kansas City became unprofitable and closed their doors. Four days prior to that repeal, they had announced the extension of a rule that allowed bakers to use rye flour as a substitute for wheat flour. That rule was scheduled to expire March first; however, the Food administration was forced to extend it for another month. Many areas of the country, they discovered, lacked the ingredients they had mandated to serve as a replacement for rye flour, which was currently serving as a replacement for wheat flour, which was in shortage at least partially because their prior rules had unexpectedly closed down dozens of mills that produced it.
To reduce the nation's reliance on its farmers and on the railroads which moved their produce from the farms to the cities, the federal government established a commission tasked with promoting “War Gardens” in every city, town, yard, and sun-drenched window across the nation. The National War Garden Commission issued booklets explaining the basics of gardening, from pest control to home storage, and worked with employers to ensure that every field and vacant lot would be available to employees who wished to grow their own food. President Wilson joined that effort personally, publicly expressing the hope that “every school will have a regiment in the volunteer war garden army” and encouraging school children to raise a half-billion dollars' worth of food that might further reduce railroad traffic and high prices.
But with ever-increasing requisitions of food being shipped across the Atlantic, increased production alone proved unable to keep the supply/demand equation in balance. To reduce the domestic demand for food, the government declared “meatless days,” announced via newspaper cartoons that featured patriotic families forgoing meat, symbolically reaching across the Atlantic to provide that valuable commodity to the boys in France instead. “The final success of the war effort depends upon our thrift in conserving food products,” noted Food Administrator Herbert Hoover. Making the same point more bluntly, Cara Binzel of the Food Administration scolded an assembly of citizens in Parsons, “Every bit of bacon consumed by you people at home is taken from the soldiers and our allies across the sea.” High prices, while unwelcome to those forced to pay them, also served as a valuable ally in the effort to decrease Americans' food consumption.
Elected officials did their part to help the food situation, which in their inimitable style was accomplished mostly by looking for witches to burn. While accusing the president of neglecting the nation’s farmers, Senator Kenyon of Iowa held Senate hearings on a proposed takeover of the packing industry to alleviate the recurring shortages. “I believe Hoover . . . would do a lot of things,” one witness testified before the assembled solons, if only Wilson would give him authority to implement a better plan. Three days later, former Kansas Governor W. R. Stubbs laid responsibility for the same problems at Hoover's door, asserting that due to mismanagement, “the meat division of the Food Administration is controlled by the large packers.”
Food Administration bureaucrats at the state and county level tried to deal with the situation through vigorous enforcement of the administration's myriad rules. When meetings to explain the rules publicly proved insufficient to garner compliance, Dr. H. M. Grandle, food administrator for Crawford County, ominously announced that he had received reports that unnamed ladies in Pittsburg were violating the so-called “50-50 rule” on the use of wheat flour, selling contraband bread at church bazaars and thereby unfairly competing with law-abiding merchants. Those merchants in turn complained that ladies at church bazaars believed the merchants had caused the rise in food prices through price-gouging and war profiteering. “The Federal Food Administration,” claimed A. G. Johnson, a Salina grocer addressing a convention of retailers meeting in Pittsburg, “is unjust in proclaiming this to the public.”
Uninterested in whom to blame, some members of the public took it upon themselves to enhance their personal food supplies through more direct means than growing or buying it. Robert Clark and two of his friends appeared in juvenile court to explain the disappearance of a load of beans from a barn attached to the Kansas Normal School, now Pittsburg State University. While the boys thought they had escaped undetected with their loot, Clark's dog had been “arrested” at scene of the crime, revealing their identity to unamused law enforcement officers.
Whoever was to blame for the incessant price rises, J&P maintained that since these unfortunate side effects of the war lay beyond their power to remedy, the contract signed with their workers the prior summer remained in force. They again ordered the carmen and now the engineers back to work.
Contract or not, the carmen dug in their heels while hoping the addition of diplomacy might bring success where direct action alone had failed. A committee of three carmen traveled to Kansas City to meet personally with J&P president Joseph Heim. The scion of the Heim brewing family of East St. Louis and Kansas City, Heim's business interests included a telephone company and a food products company, both based in Kansas City. Unfortunately for the carmen, he proved singularly unsympathetic to the complaints of recalcitrant employees from one of his lesser ventures. When R. L. Reeves, the general secretary of Amalgamated, sent a telegram to the Headlight reiterating that the ad hoc committee could not represent a union whose officers had all been suspended, the talks broke off. The trio immediately departed for the Amalgamated's main offices in Detroit, hoping to salvage some support from the union that was now publicly undercutting their efforts at reconciliation.
Pittsburg's city council finally began to look at the issue. The J&P carmen quickly offered a regulation that promised to bring the strike to an immediate end. While the city lacked the authority to force a settlement, it could enforce training requirements upon any railway operating within the city limits. If Pittsburg would simply require that all carmen be trained by men with three years' experience in Pittsburg and who had worked in the city in the previous twelve months, the carmen reasoned, that would make it impossible for J&P to hire replacements. They would simply have to meet the carmens' demands, and service would thereby resume. Though several large meetings were scheduled for Pittsburg for March in addition to the assembled retailers, meetings which all but demanded that rail service be in operation, the city council sat on the request, hoping for a settlement in the meantime.
Stunned by the city council's inaction and dejected by word back from Detroit that the national union office would not even meet with their ambassadors, the carmen voted to return to work on March twelfth. But they quickly discovered they were powerless in more ways than they anticipated. Though they expected to be running their cars by noon, upon their arrival the carmen found that because the engineers were still not working, there was no power on the lines. The cars sat motionless and the strike went on, now beyond the control of the men who started it.
The engineers, who had been drawing their salary since the carmen first walked off the job in February, insisted, much to the dismay of both the company and the carmen, that since “they had not left their places” they were not on strike at all. After stopping the engineers' pay when they cut the power, the J&P had offered to provide carmen who were members in good standing of Amalgamated, which excluded the original carmen, since their local union charter had been revoked. The engineers refused the offer, adding to their own salary demands the stipulation that they would only supply power for the original carmen. Now while those carmen stood ready to take up the jobs they had refused the month before, the engineers demanded to be paid for the ten days that had passed since they first cut the power in addition to the previously-demanded raise. The carmen could no more address that situation than they could make the trains run.
One speaker in Pittsburg might have encouraged the carmen in their despondency, or at least illuminated their circumstances. The United Mine Workers District 14 convention opened on March fourteenth with a surprise visit from “one of the most striking figures of the labor union movement,” Mary Harris “Mother” Jones. Now in her eighties, Mother Jones had been at the forefront of the labor union movement for four decades. She told the assembled miners not only about the ongoing organization of miners in places like Colorado and West Virginia, but also revealed how companies infiltrate the labor movement to undercut the efforts of unionized workers.
Whether or not that was the reality in which the carmen now found themselves, they could certainly appreciate the sentiment. With the national office of their own union standing arm in arm with the J&P, there remained little for them to do but to await word from the governor, who had been asked by a fellow union in Kansas City to intervene or to pray for the city council to act. If those avenues failed, they could only fall back on the hope that the engineers could force the railroad into a settlement that included them.
The hoped-for solution was not long in coming, though neither the city council nor the engineers had any hand in it. On March 16th, a week after the house and senate agreed on a bill that would put all short line railroads under President Wilson's control until the end of the war, the Railroad commission announced that railroads should offer assistance to their workers to help with the inexorable price rises. Much to the carmens' joy, the commission also proposed that “the lowest-priced man should have the greatest amount of assistance.” Suddenly the engineers' demands, which represented the last remaining obstacle to their return to work, did not seem so impossible to overcome. Five days later, the J&P agreed to them; the lights came on, the tracks hummed, and the carmen who had started the wildcat strike six weeks prior returned to work, though they had not yet agreed to a specific pay raise. “It is a patriotic duty for the men to keep the cars running,” declared Amalgamated's Frank O'Shea, in announcing the end of the standoff. Whether they felt patriotic about it or not, the carmen were just happy to be back at work.
On April tenth, the Joplin & Pittsburg Railway awarded all their employees, union or not, a raise “in consideration of the high cost of living.” While the raise did not modify the existing railroad contract, it did amount to about a 10% increase for the carmen. The new money failed to overcome the continuing price inflation, but it provided a welcome down payment on what they hoped would be an opportunity to catch up on six weeks of lost work. As the lights flashed on and the cars left their stations, the Carmen Strike of 1918 sputtered to an end.
Obama or your lying ears?
View Bill Hoyt's profile
Posts
