The St. Louis Republic reports a full…
May 1900 CE
The St. Louis Republic reports a full page of riot conditions across the entire city on the first day of the streetcar strike, May 9: multiple bystanders shot, an attempted lynching, a crowded streetcar being stoned by a mob sympathetic to the strikers, and policemen assaulted with thrown bricks and bottles.
Strikers seek to disrupt service by cutting cables, lighting bonfires, and piling boulders, rubble, and other obstructions onto the tracks. St. Louis has significant union membership, and many working-class citizens shut down the lines in their own neighborhoods in solidarity.
There had been ten independent streetcar operating companies in St. Louis, providing regular transit service in the fourth-largest city in the United States until 1899, when those ten lines were consolidated into two: the St. Louis & Suburban Railway, and the St. Louis Transit Company, headed by Edwards Whitaker.
Under pressure of long hours, low pay, and poor working conditions, the employees of both lines had attempted to unionize as Local 131.
Whitaker had fired his thirty-three hundred workers summarily and was soon running streetcars only with the help of the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department, who had volunteered up to a thousand men for that duty.
Whitaker had fired his thirty-three hundred workers summarily and was soon running streetcars only with the help of the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department, who had volunteered up to a thousand men for that duty.
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Northern North America
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