Class Conflict and the Suppression of Tramps in Buffalo, 1892-1894

Abstract

Class struggle shapes every aspect of the law. In Buffalo, New York, the railroad strikes of 1892 and 1894, coupled with a major depression, heightened the level of class conflict. Hundreds of thousands of American workers had “taken to the road,” both as a form of political protest and to look for work. When one of these “tramp armies” reached Buffalo, it was greeted by a show of working class solidarity among the Polish immigrant community, and by massive police repression under the control of the bourgeoisie. This paper analyzes the economic, political, and social context of those events. Every workingman is a tramp in embryo. [Alarm, October 11,1884] The policemen swung their long nightsticks right and left, left and right, and every time they hit a man he fell bleeding like a stuck pig, and whining and moaning like a kicked dog… . The horses were pulled up on their hind legs; they pawed the air with their front legs and mowed down the hoboes like grass, tearing their scalps open and bruising and wounding them. [Buffalo Evening News, August 25, 1894]

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