This Day in Labor History: May 8, 1863

On May 8, 1863, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen was founded at a meeting in Marshall, Michigan. Today, the Engineers are one of the oldest unions in the country. Telling their story gets at many of the limitations of the American labor movement.

It did not take railroad workers long to start thinking about unions. The work was so dangerous and workers rights were not respected. Safety wasn’t even an afterthought on the early trains. The entire justification for contract doctrine came out of the railroads–it was up to the worker whether they wanted to labor in such dangerous conditions and if they were paid more, well that was the compensation. So employers had no responsibility to ensure workers didn’t die. And railroad workers died all the time.

In 1855, there was an initial meeting in Baltimore to try and form a union of some kind. This was the National Protective Association of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers of the United States. It didn’t do much. It stumbled along for a few years and closed around the time the Civil War began. But its secretary, William Robinson, wanted to start over. In 1863, 19 men met at his house and formed the new union.

The Engineers were strictly a craft union. The labor movement came out of such early visions of class that had more to do with medieval guilds than it did with the realities of industrial capitalism. But the native born American working class really struggled to move beyond those ideas, often frustrating immigrants with greater knowledge of socialism and ideas of solidarity. Such ideas had no place in the Engineers. Their job identity was strictly as a locomotive engineer. So a brakeman on the same train? Nothing in common, why work with them? They didn’t work them or the other rail brotherhoods that developed.

It wasn’t just that the Engineers wouldn’t support a kind of radicalized general strike type action. None of the brotherhoods would. They all opposed the Great Railroad Strike in 1877, for example. That was more of a general revolt against the railroads and the Locomotive Engineers weren’t going to have any tuck with that. But in 1888, the various brotherhoods decided to strike against the railroads, but none of them acted in concert with the others. The strike was a disaster, totally crushed by the railroad companies. There was simply no sense of solidarity at all. Even worse, there was no sense of strategy. This kind of extreme craft unionism might have its purpose. But it did not work with striking. In fact, it was that strike that convinced Eugene Debs, who worked for the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, that the rail brotherhoods were hopeless and to move toward industrial unionism. But the brotherhoods mostly had no interest in his message, he left the movement, formed the American Railway Union, and then the brotherhoods were horrified by his union going out in support of the Pullman strike in 1894, having no problem with the Cleveland administration sending in the U.S. military to crush it. After all, their men weren’t working.

Now, the Engineers were so snooty about what it meant to be a member of their union that even the other railroad brotherhoods found them impossible. They never supported anyone else’s action. The rest of the labor movement considered all the brotherhoods a problem in strikes or any political action. By contrast, the rest of the brotherhoods found the Locomotive Engineers a problem in strikes or any political action.

What the Locomotive Engineers did do was invest the money of their members and create a very large pension fund, even by the 1920s. I suppose this is a good time to get at a more existential question about the labor movement. Is it for broader political action or is it for the narrow needs of the members of each individual union? This is not an either/or question. Now, whatever you want to think this or any other labor movement should be, the actual structure of the American labor movements leads that toward the self-interested part of the question. Of course many unions operate on various points along this continuum, but the Locomotive Engineers were pretty far at the far extreme of complete disinterest in doing literally anything at all but asking employers for more money.

One problem with this kind of unionism is that you’d better hope your leaders are investing the money wisely. In the mid 20s, it was discovered that much of that pension fund was in extremely sketchy stocks, even for that period. So the fund was in some sort of collapse, especially because it was heavily invested in Florida development schemes, at the time a great way to lose money. But the union switched leadership and it mostly survived the Depression. Alvanley Johnston led the Locomotive Engineers from 1927 to 1950, chosen to fix the funds. Freight traffic did decrease during the Depression and employment of Locomotive Engineers declined, but the union survived.

The Locomotive Engineers did not avoid politics entirely, not when it served their interests. Johnston was a Republican and so were many union leaders in this era, including John L. Lewis. But Johnston and other rail leaders saw a friend in Harry Truman and did a lot to promote his career from the moment he reached Congress. Truman personally hated Johnston and considered him a Republican hack, but still, he took Locomotive Engineer money happily enough. Johnston and other Engineer leaders were involved in World War II railroad policy, as unions were brought into the workings of the government like never before. Of course, despite previous support for Truman, The Locomotive Engineers endorsed Thomas Dewey in both 1944 and 1948. Later, it got worse. The Locomotive Engineers endorsed Robert Taft for president in 1948, despite him just writing the Taft-Hartley Act, merely making illegal everything the labor movement had done to grow during the 1930s and 1940s. But then there was nothing about the Locomotive Engineers that would suggest support for a stronger American labor movement.

The Locomotive Engineers actually went on strike in 1946, as part of the strike wave that had led to Taft-Hartley. They stopped American rail traffic and infuriated Truman, who started to threaten them, as was his wont. But of course they were unable and unwilling to make any connections with any other union in all this.

The Locomotive Engineers merged with the Teamsters in 2004.

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