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Blaming Martin Irons: Leadership and Popular Protest in the 1886 Southwest Strike1
By Theresa A. Case, University of Houston—Downtown
The story of the Great Southwest strike, a textbook example of the upheavals of 1886, has long been told as an epic battle between railway millionaire Jay Gould, national Knights of Labor head Terence Powderly, and Martin Irons, with many historians and contemporaries casting strike leader Irons as the epitome of impatient, romantic, and even deluded labor activism. District Assembly 101's call to walk out on Gould's southwestern system of roads was, arguably, strategically ill-advised. It vastly overestimated the Knights' power in the wake of two victories against Gould in 1885 and certainly ignored the district's lack of funds, lax support among skilled trainmen, and the terms of an historic agreement between the national Knights and Gould. A closer look at Irons's life and leadership, however, reveals a more complicated explanation of the strike and takes into fuller account the experiences and perceptions of striking railroaders. This essay holds that events on the ground, combined with the heady context of the Great Upheaval, influenced Irons and his supporters' decisions to strike, to expand the effort, and to defend it with violence. The ensuing attacks on Irons stemmed partly from his unstable personal history but largely from the broader social anxieties that the conflict had exposed.
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Martin Irons was the leader of a disastrous 1886 railway strike. He died in 1900 a disreputable, isolated man in a small Texas town south of Waco. For the more famous, longstanding labor organizers Mother Jones and Eugene Debs, he was not a pitiable, transitory figure; he was a martyr, a persecuted opponent of tyranny in the tradition of Jesus Christ and abolitionists John Brown and Elijah Lovejoy. Historian Ruth Allen, who chronicled the Great Southwest Strike that Irons led, also saw him as a heroic figure. She argued that, as head of the western-based District Assembly 101 of the Knights of Labor (KOL), he drew upon the region's democratic, egalitarian spirit to confront railroad baron Jay Gould, and to defy national Knights leaders, whose eastern character had them approach labor conflict more conservatively.2 |
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Many of Irons's contemporaries, some of whom were pro-union, painted him in a much different light. A congressional committee appointed to investigate the causes and consequences of the 1886 walkout took up the arguments of railroad officials and much of the mainstream press in condemning Irons as a "dangerous if not pernicious man," and Knights in his home base of Sedalia, Missouri, ran him out of town following Gould's triumph. Numerous historians have echoed this negative judgment, casting his role as either that of a reckless, "aggressive" autocrat or as a man in over his head, "so emotionally involved" that "he lost all perspective."3 For historians Norman Ware and, more recently, Craig Phelan, Irons's failings were symptomatic of the KOL's fatal flaw—its inability to rein in the inexperienced, rash recruits flooding the membership rolls in the mid-1880s. In his defense of national Knights leader Terence Powderly, Phelan argues that a beleaguered Powderly struggled to deal with the explosion of strikes called by local Knights. Many of these conflicts, Phelan concludes, were motivated more by "passion rather than reason."4 |
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