A closer look
Seeing the July 1877 Great Uprising
How do news images of events such as a strike or uprising shape viewers’ understanding of what happened?
By Joshua Brown, The Graduate Center, CUNY, Emeritus
Railroad Strike Spread to Fourteen States
Emanating from isolated protests by railroad workers over arbitrary wage reductions, “The Great Uprising” quickly spread along the nation’s tracks to halt commerce for two weeks in July 1877. The strike extended over fourteen states and paralyzed most of the country’s industrial cities, taking on the character of a popular revolt against persistent hard times and railroad corporation abuses.
If you lived in one of the many towns and cities directly affected by the strike, or you participated in or witnessed the protests and responses of authorities, your direct experience shaped your understanding of the events. But most Americans learned about the Great Uprising through the news media of the era—newspapers and magazines and, to a lesser extent, photographs.
Photographs Documented the Destruction but Not the Event Itself
Among the photographs taken of the nationwide strike, the most well known were the work of Pittsburgh photographer Seth V. Albee, who captured its most violent incident: the destruction of Pittsburgh’s Pennsylvania Railroad yards following a violent clash on Saturday, July 21, between strikers and sympathizers and the Philadelphia militia, which had been sent to the city by the governor when Pittsburgh guardsmen refused to defend the railroad. After the troops fired into the crowd, killing thirty, they retreated to the roundhouse. Set ablaze by the crowd, the conflagration quickly spread from the roundhouse and burned through the night, destroying 39 buildings, 104 locomotives, 46 passenger cars, and more than 1,200 freight cars.
As the railyards still smoldered, Albee photographed the ruins. The result was a set of forty-four stereocards (double photographs that looked three-dimensional when viewed through the popular stereoscope) called The Railroad War.
Why did Albee photograph the wreckage instead of the dramatic events of the previous day? There were three difficulties with photography in 1877 that limited what Albee could do. The cumbersome nature of the equipment, the complicated procedures for developing exposed glass plate negatives, and the slow exposure time involved in taking a picture all made it impossible for photographers to capture action. And it was impractical in the context of a tumultuous event—as gruesomely suggested in this 1863 cartoon.
The best a photographer could do at the time was to record the aftermath.
Finally, to add to their technical difficulties, photographs could not be reproduced in print. It would take more than another decade before the perfection of the half-tone process that allowed photographs to appear in newspapers, magazines, and books.
Newspaper Illustrations Based on Eyewitness Accounts
Many of those publications did feature images of the major news event of 1877—but as illustrations, sometimes based on photographs, but more often derived from eyewitness sketches drawn by “special artists.” Rendered “on the spot,” such drawings had to be transferred onto the surface of a block of wood, then carved out to create an engraving. Finally the engraved block was printed, becoming the published illustration.
In 1877, there were five U.S. periodicals that were devoted to pictorial news. It was via their illustrations that Americans visualized the Great Uprising. Two of the publications were directed to male readers, offering often lurid pictures of scandals, sex, and violence. The National Police Gazette’s 1877 issues haven’t survived—but they very likely resembled The New York Illustrated Times’s coverage of the strike, which featured street battles and looting—including this dramatic and chaotic depiction of the attack on the Pittsburgh roundhouse.
The three other pictorial newspapers also highlighted violent events—but there were significant differences between their visualizations of the strike.
Strike Images in Newspapers Differ According to Readership
Harper’s Weekly, directed to middle-class readers, was the most consistent. Its engravings largely opted for distant, panoramic views of violence, mass destruction, and milling crowds. “The Sixth Maryland Regiment fighting its way through Baltimore” vividly depicted the battle between Maryland militia and strikers, the faces featureless in contrast to the carefully delineated buildings and roiling clouds.
The New York Daily Graphic had a smaller circulation but was the only daily illustrated paper, using a less complicated and consequently less detailed illustration method to swiftly offer visual news. The Daily Graphic showed scenes of violence and looting, including this July 26 cover page containing picturesque and grotesque character studies of the Pittsburgh crowd’s looting after the destruction of the train yards. “It is hardly worth while,” the Daily Graphic declared, “for the press of the leading cities to be giving advice to the rioters on the railroads, or to be propounding lessons in good conduct which they will not heed. Those who are now in revolt against the constituted authorities in five States of the Union, are not as a class newspaper readers.”
Apparently, some did consult newspapers. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper had the widest range of readers, and many sympathized with the plight of the railroad workers. The weekly also offered a more varied pictorial coverage. The panoramic and complex visual narrative in this double-page engraving of the clash between the Philadelphia militia and Pittsburgh strikers was lauded in Pittsburgh shortly after its publication.
Noting the illustrated papers’ general “representation . . . of the wild scenes of last week in various American cities,” the Pittsburgh Leader singled out Frank Leslie’s artist John Donaghy, a resident of the city, for accurately portraying “the mob.” The other pictorial publications, the newspaper complained, “represent it as a wild and heterogeneous collection of rough men and virago women, in every variety of costume, some with blouses, some in open shirts and bare arms, some with bandannas around their brows and all with coarse, brutish features, exhibiting every phase of ignorance and malignity.” But, the Leader continued, “American workmen . . . dress in the ordinary male costume of coat, vest and pants, sometimes, however, going in their shirt-sleeves. . . . The South-side delegation, which marched up to the Round-House to help the strikers on that fatal Saturday evening, was led by a man in a good frock-coat, with a white neck-tie, and the men generally were well clad, and many of them had their boots blacked. An American mob,” the Leader concluded, “is a pretty fair representation in appearance of the American people.”
International Views of the Strike
Pictorial news about the Great Uprising extended beyond American shores. Across the Atlantic, illustrated newspapers provided readers with scenes of social conflict that rivaled in extent and intensity British and European strikes and insurrections.
The 1877 railroad strike was an international event—one that counted immigrants among its thousands of participants.
For the most part, readers abroad viewed images that duplicated illustrations in the U.S. press. The Illustrated London News, the first pictorial newspaper, directly reproduced Harper’s Weekly’s pictures—or copied Seth Albee’s Railroad War stereoviews.
The Parisian Le Monde Illustré adapted some of Frank Leslie’s illustrations of the strike—and in its full-page engraving of the burning of the Pittsburgh railyards reversed the perspective of the latter’s complex, violent picture to offer a view from the surrounding hills. It was a panoramic scene, showing the distant burning railroad buildings and, in the foreground, a stream of strikers and sympathizers carrying items taken from the freight cars smoldering below. And yet, in contrast to the U.S. images of drunken and boisterous pillage, the French illustrated weekly’s looters appeared determined and organized—as workers victimized by the railroads and four years of economic depression.
But in the years following the Great Uprising, the vision of drunken and violent strikers prevailed in the visual record of the event. Typical was Strikers, Communists, Tramps and Detectives, published in 1878 by Allan Pinkerton, the head of the detective agency renowned and reviled for its railroad clients and suppression of trade unions. The heavily illustrated account of the railroad strike provided readers with sensational and terrifying portrayals of bestial men and women out to destroy the nation.
Reflection Questions
If all you knew about the 1877 railroad strike came from the images in the illustrated press, what impressions would you have about the strike?
How would you characterize the different presentations of the 1877 uprising in the various newspapers?
How do the images of the 1877 uprising compare to news images today of mass protests or uprisings?
Additional Reading
Joshua Brown, “The Great Uprising and Pictorial Order in Gilded Age America,” in The Great Strikes of 1877, ed. David O. Stowell (Urbana: University of Illinois, 2008).
American Social History Project, 1877: The Grand Army of Starvation, documentary (1985): https://ashp.cuny.edu/eighteen-seventy-seven.
David O. Stowell, Streets, Railroads, and the Great Strike of 1877 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).