Great Railroad Strike of 1922

The Great Railroad Strike of 1922 was a nationwide railroad shop workers strike in the United States. The action began on July 1 and was the largest railroad work stoppage since 1894.

History

The immediate cause of the strike was the Railroad Labor Board's announcement that hourly wages would be cut by seven cents on July 1, which prompted a shop workers vote on whether or not to strike. The operators' unions, representing the engineers, trainmen, firemen, and conductors, did not join in the strike. The railroads employed strikebreakers to fill three-fourths of the roughly 400,000 vacated positions, increasing hostilities between the railroads and the striking workers. By the end of July, US National Guard troops were on duty in seven states and some 2,200 deputy U.S. marshals were actively clamping down on meetings and pickets.

President Warren G. Harding proposed a settlement on July 28 which would have granted little to the labor unions, but the railroad companies rejected the compromise despite interest from the desperate workers. Attorney General Harry M. Daugherty, who opposed the unions, pushed for national action against the strike, and on September 1 a federal judge named James H. Wilkerson issued a sweeping injunction against striking, assembling, picketing, and a variety of other union activities, colloquially known as the "Daugherty Injunction."

There was widespread opposition to the injunction and a number of sympathy strikes shut down some railroads completely, but the strike eventually died out as many shopmen made deals with the railroads on the local level. The often unpalatable concessions, coupled with memories of the violence and tension during the strike, soured relations between the railroads and the shopmen for quite some time.

Further reading

• Colin J. Davis, Power at Odds: The 1922 National Railroad Shopmen's Strike. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997.