St. Paul residents who sat down to read their copies of the Union Advocate in 1922 couldn’t have missed the two major events of that year: the formation of a new progressive political coalition and the struggle by rail workers to improve their lives. Huge headlines on the front page condemned the "tyranny" of rail management, called for government ownership of the rails, and predicted a brighter future under the leadership of the fledgling Farmer-Labor Party.

"What threatens to be the greatest industrial struggle that ever occurred in America has entered its first stage," Advocate editor William Mahoney wrote. He was talking about the Shopmen’s Strike of 1922, a largely forgotten episode of workers’ history. The strike -- and the political organizing it encouraged -- had a lasting impact on St. Paul and much of the country.

Following victory in the First World War, the United States entered upon its modern era. Railroads were the nation’s first big business and St. Paul was the pre-eminent rail center of the greater Northwest. The city was headquarters for three lines owned by James J. Hill -- the Great Northern, Northern Pacific, and Chicago, Burlington & Quincy railroads.

With the railroads came an enormous workforce to operate and maintain the industry’s lines and equipment. Railroad employee campaigns to organize collectively, subsequent union activities at system-wide headquarters in St. Paul and, increasingly, their willingness to engage actively in politics at a local and national level, inherently affected the city’s general populace.

Gains for rail workers
Rail workers had made dramatic gains during the period prior to the ’22 strike. The 1916 Adamson Act, reluctantly advocated in that election year by President Woodrow Wilson, established the eight-hour day for operating workers, who ran the trains, in interstate commerce. After America’s entry into the First World War, Wilson established the federal Railroad Administration to operate the nation’s chaotic rail system. Before management of the railroads was returned to the private sector in 1920, the Railroad Administration, anxious to avoid any labor turbulence, extended a number of benefits, including the eight-hour day, increased pay, improved working conditions and the right of union membership to all railroad employees.

After the Great War ended, however, federal support for those gains began to erode. Railroaders reacted angrily. Their frustration found its most spectacular expression in the Shopmen’s Strike of 1922. Arguably the greatest strike of the 1920s, that conflict was the first truly national conflict on the rails since the Pullman Boycott and the Strike of 1894, itself the greatest strike of the 19th century. St. Paul, as headquarters for management and labor, became a center for the conflict.

Drastic changes
In one sense, the strike was a protest against the new transportation act, which returned operation of the industry to private hands -- legislation the rail unions had opposed bitterly -- and its mediation agency, the Rail Labor Board. As one of its first decisions, on July 21, 1920, the Board granted a wage increase that amounted to roughly 60 percent of the unions’ demands. Labor leaders in the industry felt the award was inadequate. Dissatisfaction increased when the board declared an absolute wage reduction in 1921 and terminated the rules, working conditions and agreements instituted by Wilson’s Railroad Administration.

A flurry of decisions in April, May and June, 1922, further reduced the wages of maintenance-of-way, shopcraft, clerical and station forces, stationary engine and boiler room employees, signalmen and others. A storm of criticism came from labor organizations to whom it seemed the board had simply adopted the carriers’ demand that wages be driven back to pre-1920 levels. Labor’s contention that increases were justified and necessary was supported later by a federal labor report that, even before the 1922 reduction went into effect, shopcraft wages were lower than those paid for comparable work in other industries. The shopmen demanded better wages, restoration of overtime pay for Sunday and holiday work and the abolition of the hated practice of contracting out shop work. They expressed their resentment of the board’s apparent inability or unwillingness to enforce decisions unfavorable to the roads’ management.

Frustrated by the rail managers and the RLB’s continuing intransigence, more than 400,000 shopcraft and other non-operating employees struck on July 1. Within two weeks, it was reported that as many 600,000 were out. The strikers included 4,000 workers in St. Paul and another 4,000 in Minneapolis, according to a Union Advocate article. The workers included machinists, boilermakers, sheet metal workers, blacksmiths, carmen and electrical workers. It did not include conductors, locomotive engineers and other operating employees. While they expressed sympathy for the strike, they continued to work, a decision that had serious consequences for the strikers.

National walkout
The 1922 national walkout came on the heels of the widely reported clash between striking coal miners and strikebreakers in Williamson County, Illinois, heightening the sense of national crisis. President Warren G. Harding quickly took a hard-line stand, declaring his intention to force both parties to accept the Railroad Labor Board’s decisions. However, privately he and the Republican Party generally were uncertain as to the proper response to the labor crisis. Within his cabinet, Attorney General Harry M. Daugherty insisted the strikers were outlaws and, accordingly, urged drastic action to end the conflict. Secretary of Labor James J. Davis and Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover sharply disagreed, contending there was some justice in the strikers’ demands.

Initially, Harding wavered while outside the administration, individual Republicans dissented. Senator William E. Borah of Idaho damned the board’s wage reduction for maintenance-of-way workers, thundering that the decision was "in its nature peonage."

While the Harding administration vacillated, worker bitterness grew as the railroads issued ultimatums demanding that the striking shopmen return to work or be fired. The Hill lines attempted to coordinate strike policy with other transcontinentals, such as the Milwaukee Road, and with the National Association of Railway Executives to combat the strikers and to mobilize public opinion. By the end of July, however, management of the Hill lines were disgusted with such efforts and ready to go it alone.

Increasingly, any settlement of the strike turned on the issues of seniority -- i.e., whether all striking shopmen would be reinstated with full seniority if they returned to work.

On the Northern Pacific, for example, 7,950 shopmen out of a normal workforce of 8,421 had walked out. Although the road had recruited 4,724 replacements by Sept. 23, it was still short 3,226 shopmen. Many returned to work over the ensuing months, but by March 27, 1923, only a little over 36 percent of the railroad’s pre-strike workforce was employed. 

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Many put on black list
Not all were welcomed back. The Northern Pacific began compiling its "black list" as early as August 1922. "This is the time to carefully analyze the situation and, if opportunity offers when final settlement is made," General Mechanical Superintendent H.M. Curry insisted, "to rid the service of chronic agitators, fault finders, time servers, etc." Curry’s office compiled a detailed list, now in the Northern Pacific records at the Minnesota Historical Society, which shows more than 1,800 such "undesirables." The Great Northern experienced a high percentage of walkouts and probably pursued similar policies of weeding out "undesirables."

Only 27.7 percent of the Great Northern’s original shopcraft workers remained on the job after the strike’s termination.

The hard-pressed Milwaukee Road, where a pattern emerged reminiscent of the disputes of the 1890s, was hit harder. "They lost 100 percent, including all electricians" at Spokane, with heavy defections at other points, one superintendent’s office reported. "Their situation (is) more difficult than NP," he informed his superiors, "because division headquarters in small towns where employees control local situation and hold public offices, making it difficult to protect strikebreakers, also experiencing more trouble than we are having on account (of) sympathetic attitude of train and engine men towards strikers."

The Advocate documented the widespread use of strikebreakers, as in this article on the situation at the Great Northern: "Rather than settle the strike with its men, (the railroad) has spent millions of dollars, employing guards by the hundreds. Thousands of men and boys have been packed into its shops, boarded free for a long period and in a great many cases have been paid double and triple what they would have to pay to their striking employees who are experienced and competent mechanics."

The newspaper also reported at least one circumstance in which strikebreakers to change sides and join the strikers. Each week, the newspaper praised the solidarity of the strikers and documented efforts by other unions to provide assistance.

Support from other unions
At the August 1922 St. Paul Trades & Labor Assembly meeting, for example, the milk wagon drivers, Machinists Lodge 459, the carpenters and other organizations gave large amounts and in some cases levied special assessments, the Advocate reported. "The response received shows clearly that the labor movement as there represented are solidly behind the railroad workers to the limit."

In reality, however, many strikers were finding it hard to continue. Many left the rail industry entirely and took up jobs in other occupations.

By the fall of 1922, President Harding, unable to secure a national compromise and anxious over the political effects of the coal strike and the threat of a complete breakdown of the transportation network, threw off his ambivalent stance. He sided with the hardliners in his cabinet, authorizing Daugherty to seek an injunction against the strikers from Judge James Wilkerson of Chicago, who promptly issued the order on September 23.

The Daugherty-Wilkerson injunction bore a striking resemblance to the "omnibus injunctions" levied against the American Railway Union in the 1894 Pullman strike. Among the most extreme federal measures ever executed regarding labor relations, the injunction forbade union officials from picketing and from encouraging in any way any person to stop work on the railroads.

The injunction drew swift condemnation from Advocate editor William Mahoney. Calling the injunction an "act of infamy," he went on to write, "the czar of Russia in his palmiest days never undertook to employ more drastic or despotic methods. . . "

Despite the harshness of that measure and similar orders issued by the lower courts, the injunctions had little impact on the strike’s outcome. Most strikers had either already left the industry or were in the process of reaching agreements with individual roads along the lines of the September 13 Baltimore and Ohio formula, which did allow for seniority rights. However, most carriers in the Pacific Northwest decided to make a clean sweep as railroads in other regions did later, despite the B & O agreement. The Hill lines simply recruited new employees, accepted a few repentant strikers and quickly established their own company unions.

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Important consequences
Despite the fact that the 1922 conflict proved a decisive defeat for the shopmen and ushered in an era of company unionism that held sway until the early days of the New Deal, it nonetheless had important consequences, in both the labor and political spheres. Prior to the strike, operating and non-operating unions had drawn closer together as a result of their shared experiences under the Railroad Administration and its successor, the Railroad Labor Board. Although the operating brotherhoods did not walk out with the shopmen in 1922, they did vow "that under no circumstances (would) they do the work or take the place of striking shop craft men." Further, the independent brotherhoods cooperated closely with the American Federation of Labor in the fights over the course of postwar railroad policy and together they launched the publication Labor as a platform to broadcast their mutual concerns.

The 1922 strike prompted the passage of the Railway Labor Act of 1926. Although the railroads had won much of what they wanted, they wished to avoid another costly and disruptive strike by setting up a mechanism to settle disputes without a walkout. The Act, amended during the New Deal, remains the cornerstone of labor relations in the railroad industry to this day.

The effects of the shopmen’s struggle could also be seen in the elections of 1922. Railroaders joined with other disaffected citizens to register their protests. Throughout the Northwest, they played an important role in supporting candidates in both parties who had supported their struggles. Senators Borah of Idaho, Burton K. Wheeler of Montana and Clarence C. Dill of Washington, as well as others, had identified themselves with labor’s and farmers’ concerns. Their victories were due in no small measure to the railroaders’ votes and work on their behalf.

Building the Farmer-Labor Party
In Minnesota, the newly founded Farmer-Labor Party made dramatic gains. Most notably, Henrik Shipstead decisively defeated incumbent Republican Senator Frank B. Kellogg. Ramsey County, with its heavy concentration of railroaders, surpassed the statewide endorsement of Shipstead, giving him over 48 percent of the vote, compared with 32+ percent for Kellogg and 19+ percent for Democratic challenger Anna D. Olesen. In the special senatorial election to fill the deceased Senator Knute Nelson’s office the following year, Ramsey County again supported the Farmer-Labor candidate. Magnus Johnson easily carried the state with 57 percent. The race was tighter in Ramsey County, but with labor’s support, Johnson won a majority with more than 51 percent of the vote.

In 1924, an important presidential year, St. Paul and Ramsey County voters again registered a strong protest against the established parties. Insurgent Wisconsin Republican Robert M. LaFollette and Montana Democrat Burton K. Wheeler formed a Progressive ticket with substantial aid from the railroad brotherhoods and the AFL unions. Calvin Coolidge prevailed, of course, but the LaFollette-Wheeler ticket won more than 5 million protest votes nationally. In Minnesota, as in northern tier states generally, the Progressive ticket did particularly well, again displacing the Democrats, who got only 56,000 votes, as the principal opposition party, with 339,000 votes for LaFollette to Coolidge’s 421,000.

Once again, Ramsey County voters registered their own protests with 35,000 for LaFollette, compared with 40,000 for Coolidge and a very distant 8,000 for Democrat John W. Davis. In St. Paul and its environs, railroaders joined with other wage earners, progressives and dissidents in general again supporting Farmer-Labor candidate Magnus Johnson over the established parties.

Labor’s defeat in the bitter 1922 conflict left an enduring legacy. St. Paul’s railway workers and their supporters would play an important role in the emergence of the Farmer-Labor Party, which displaced the Democrats as Minnesota’s principal opposition party. Though it probably was scant comfort to the strikers and their allies of 1922, their loss of the greatest strike of the decade did have important and enduring results.

W. Thomas White is curator of the James J. Hill Reference Library in St. Paul and a community faculty member at Metropolitan State University. He has written widely on labor and railroad history. This article is adapted from one that appeared in the Spring 1992 issue of Ramsey County History, a publication of the Ramsey County Historical Society.