Downtown’s street’s clattered with the footsteps of some 10,000 people, marching with spirited chants, songs and shouts. They recognized that they were part of a national mass movement. The congregated mass moved through the business district’s usually quiet channels, showing the city that they would not stand for injustice. Speakers addressed the mass, encouraging the integration of struggles and the formation of a long-term movement to fight the oligarchy. In the end, their gathering would help change history, although its promised fruits would ripen in time.
Who were these people?
These were the laborers who gathered in defiance of local capitalist bosses during the General Strike on July 25, 1877, and whose assembled parade was powerful enough to essentially paralyze the city’s factories and railroads for several days. The assembly arose in the midst of a national labor uprising that had begun when workers on the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad went on strike for better wages and a shorter work day. The St. Louis uprising may have been the most successful that any major city saw in the General Strike, effectively forming what some called the “St Louis Commune” of workers handing out orders to factory owners and elected officials alike.
The 10,000 who gathered in January 2017 at the St. Louis Women’s March garnered significant headlines as well, but certainly did not shut down the city or invert economic or political power to the people. The certainty of the 1877 strikers to seize power was replaced by an ambivalence among local activists, some of whom turned to Facebook to decry the march for its lack of inclusion of certain movements’ goals, the timidity of the organizers and the lack of real goals. Perhaps the march only reinforced the diffusion of political power that many theorists ascribe to social media, where unbridled expressions of identity preclude larger solidarity and participatory mass movement.
The purpose of the local and national women’s marches, however, was to quantify the mass of people who oppose the announced policies of the new president. These events did not constitute the germination of a careful, deliberate and ideologically pure movement for political change. The ambiguity of the word “progressive” in contemporary American parlance demonstrates the breadth of dissent. Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Tishaura O. Jones, Francis G. Slay and Claire McCaskill have all laid claim to being progressive. Some activists raise the mystifying banner of “real progressive,” as if appending an empirical adjective makes a very open-ended word’s usage any more clear.
Yet mass movements are necessarily diverse and agonistic creates, because people are not born into totalitarian concurrence. Mass actions are not good vehicles for ideologies, but can be effective paths toward achieving certain defined political goals. The demonstrations in favor of open immigration policies lately show what clear, ideologically diverse and radical actions can look like. The ambiguity of the goals of marching against Donald Trump are clear, and the many efforts to state that obvious reality constitute more a retreat from politics as an act than a valiant reconstitution of a radical left.
The end of the 1877 demonstration in St. Louis offers a reminder that radical actions can falter without strong goals.
After successfully instituting a commune of sorts, the movement that claimed over 22,000 members reached a power hold over St. Louis that could have built a new society. Instead, the executive council stumbled over the shape of the political formation (some wanted to build a Workingmen’s Party), the intersection of labor and race (while the masses generally fought for black laborers, some labor leadership was white supremacist) and the formation of trade unions (the leadership wad divided on whether to support unions). The insurrection dissolved after the police captured the movement’s headquarters. No shots were fired, and the order of the city resumed quickly after a daring experiment at communism held St. Louis for a few days.
While reactionary civic forces followed the 1877 events with the creation of the Veiled Prophet parade and ball, which instilled a sense of aristocratic order to the city, the general strike was far from a failure. The organizers who participated in the general strike led many paths to local trade unionization, which in the long run produced the long-sought eight-hour work days, wage increases and safety protections.
In some ways, the lack of clarity in 1877 was not as definitive as the participatory radicalization that propelled more focused movements within specific trades. The short-lived revolution in St. Louis provided a show of power, as well as the potential for realizing a new set of relations between capital and workforce. Without the general strike, labor progress may have been far slower. Alternately, with a stronger agenda and more transparent and inclusive structure, the commune may have rewritten urban history.
Today’s marchers may take heed from the 1877 strike in St. Louis. A powerful mass can accomplish a lot in a short period, even when its members are not aligned in common mission. A common set of agitating circumstances draw a mass together faster than carefully-debated ideological programs. The resulting strength may not be a mass that achieves everything under the sun, but a mass whose biggest accomplishment is the instilling of leadership and agency in participants who then go on to lead the longer campaigns.
The multitude is a formation of singularities, and never will be a total mass with one character. All participants need to decide what they want to get out of participating, and what they need to do in countless other ways. St. Louis should never forget the days when its civil government and manufacturing economy were under the control of a quickly formed group of aggrieved, passionate and powerful workers.
History urges us to examine the city’s past before making judgments about what is possible today – 140 years later, when we have greater means to watch, shape and know change as it happens.
Michael R. Allen is senior lecturer in Architecture and Landscape Architecture and lecturer in American Culture Studies at Washington University in St. Louis.
