Martin Irons

• Martin Irons
• Born: 1833
• Died: November 17, 1900

Knights of Labor official and leader of the Great Southwest Railroad Strike of 1886, was born in Scotland to a family with several children. His parents were moderately well off, and it was not poverty that brought young Martin Irons to America at the age of fourteen. He became a machinist’s apprentice in New York City, where his pugnacious sympathy for the poor was intensified by the ill treatment of working people. He was particularly incensed by the ingenious methods employers devised to cheat workers of their wages, and after he became a full-fledged machinist and saved some money he personally hired a lawyer to take an employer to court in behalf of thirteen employees.

Searching for better working conditions, Irons moved to New Orleans, where he was led to question the institution of capitalism when his success in extricating a machine shop from ruinous debt resulted only in increased profits for the alcoholic employer who had put him in charge. He then moved to Lexington, Kentucky, where he worked in a machine shop, helped to organize machinists citywide, and joined several fraternal organizations. There he married Mary Brown, a fellow Scot who had also emigrated as a child. After the birth of seven children, Martin Irons, restlessly seeking some way to the betterment of humanity, left his family and after spending some time in St. Louis and Hannibal, Missouri, went to Lexington, Missouri. In Lexington Irons became a member of the Grange and spent several years advocating unionism, the eight-hour day, and the abolition of monopoly and of child and female labor in factories. He next moved on to Kansas City and then to Sedalia, Missouri. He had become a member of the Knights of Labor, a nationwide union with many of the trappings of a fraternal organization, and in 1886, at the time of the outbreak of the strike against the southwestern railroad system controlled by the financier Jay Gould, he was chairman of District Assembly 101.

The central issue of the strike was the Knights of Labor organization itself. The strike had begun when a member of the union was dismissed, and throughout the strike the general manager of the railroad insisted on negotiating with the workers as employees only, not as a committee of the Knights of Labor. It was clear that management welcomed the opportunity to defeat and discredit the Knights of Labor, and defeat was indeed the outcome of the strike.

The strike was confused and ill-organized from the beginning. The national headquarters of the Knights of Labor was neither consulted nor informed before it began, and Grand Master Workman Terence V. Powderly apparently considered it an attempt by unruly westerners to diminish his authority. Irons himself opposed the strike on the ground that the workers were not sufficiently disciplined or informed on the fundamentals of the labor movement. He also believed that the overwhelming strike vote had not been honestly obtained, but his investigation of the matter ended abruptly, as he later testified, when he was forced at gunpoint to sign a statement that the vote had been honest and was then trailed by armed strangers for several days. In spite of the efforts of a congressional committee that held on-the-spot hearings in several railroad towns in 1886, and in spite of the efforts of later historians, many of the details of the strike are still unclear. What is evident is that for their own reasons both Jay Gould and the top officials of the Knights of Labor made a scapegoat of Martin Irons and that most of the press and the labor movement believed them. Irons was held responsible for both the failure of the strike and the consequent loss of prestige and membership that eventually ended the existence of America’s first important national labor organization.

For years Martin Irons was literally a pariah. He could not get a job; he was hounded from place to place; when he opened a small business, his stock was destroyed by vandals; he was unable to care properly for the young son left by his second wife, who died during the strike. A New York Herald reporter who recognized him wrote, “He has the mark of premature age; he is a ghost, the ghost of the dead hopes of the 14,000 men under his leadership.” Irons was finally befriended and given a home by a wealthy and eccentric Texas physician, a man named Harris, who admired his social views. He was cordially welcomed by the Waco lodge of the Knights of Labor, and worked as an organizer for the Knights and for Social Democratic clubs. “When he spoke of Socialism,” wrote the socialist leader Eugene V. Debs, who visited Irons during that period, “he seemed to be transfigured, and all the smoldering fires within his soul blazed forth from his sunken eyes once more.”

Ten years after the death of Martin Irons at sixty-seven, the Knights of Labor erected a monument over his grave in Bruceville, Texas, describing him as a Fearless Champion of Industrial Freedom. His friend Dr. Harris had called him “a martyr to the hate of the capitalist, the slander of the thoughtless, the jealousy of those for whom he worked, the victim of traitors. . . . With him died many of the secrets of the Southwest Strike, for he ever remembered his obligation, and died as he had lived, a true and faithful Knight.”

Biographical sources include M. Irons, “My Experience in the Labor Movement,” Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, June 1886; Harper’s Weekly, April 10, 1886; R. A. Allen, The Great Southwest Strike (1942); E. V. Debs, Life, Writings and Speeches (1948); G. Grob, Workers and Utopia (1961); T. V. Powderly, The Path I Trod (1940).