Money / Overview

The National Guard’s History of Violent Labor Repression

Donald Trump recently deployed California’s National Guard to repress protests in LA. The National Guard has a long history of breaking up protests and strikes.

by Dana Frank via Jacobin on June 30, 2025

...often in tandem with federal forces. It’s important that we remember the full class and racial politics of the National Guard’s history, which often involved hostility to working-class immigrants and overlapped with the use of federal troops to suppress domestic dissent and anti-racist protests.

Anti-Labor Shock Troops

The National Guard evolved out of state and local militias during the colonial period. In the South, militias served as organized vigilantes, who rode on horseback with whips to hunt down enslaved people, enforcing a captive labor force. After the Civil War though, militias declined in popularity; by 1870 most states had no militias at all.

But as industrialization took off in the late nineteenth century, drawing in tens of millions of immigrants from Europe and elsewhere, and generating horrific working conditions, working people began to protest and strike by the tens of thousands. Business interests and their allies in government promoted militias — renamed the National Guard in 1903 — to repress popular protest and, most centrally, to break strikes. Elites worked with the mainstream media to fuse immigrants, left-wing radicals, and unions into a single, violent threat to the nation, embodied in the racialized image of the black-mustached, bomb-throwing anarchist.

The turning point was the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. Four years into a deep economic depression, a cabal of four major railroads announced they were cutting wages an additional 10 percent. In response, workers in Martinsburg, West Virginia, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, began uncoupling rail cars and blocking tracks. Working-class members of the Pittsburgh militia refused to attack their fellow workers; so the companies sent in the Philadelphia militia, which attacked a crowd with bayonets and opened fire. Twenty people died.

The class politics were raw: “My troops will see the trains pass,” declared Tom Scott, president of the Pennsylvania Railroad. In response, rage spread like wildfire along the nation’s railway lines, producing strikes, track blockages, and riots by desperate workers, largely without unions at this point, and stretching all the way to Galveston, Texas, and San Francisco. General strikes shut down large swaths of St Louis and Chicago. President Rutherford B. Hayes then sent in 3,700 federal troops, who joined local militias, police, and private forces to viciously and successfully repress the rebellion.

After that, business interests poured private funds and political power into the development of state Guard units. Their efforts paid off most famously during the next recession. When workers struck steel mills in Homestead, Pennsylvania, and private Pinkerton forces engaged in a pitched battle with strikers, the state militia escorted strikebreakers into the plants, breaking the strike.