Brian P. Luskey

Riot and Respectability: The Shifting Terrain of Class Language and Status in Baltimore during the Great Strike of 1877

This essay focuses on people negotiating class boundaries and identities in Baltimore through the revealing prism of the riot that occurred there during the Great Strike of 1877, in order to understand the multiple meanings of class for urban Americans after the Civil War. While working-class consciousness motivated some to support the railroad strikers, the riot illuminates how other participants were situated astride and moved across porous class boundaries, and how vague languages of class lacked the accuracy to describe the social landscape of the Gilded Age. The shifting terrain of class language and status allowed Baltimoreans to contest and shape the meaning of terms like ‘respectability’ by, for instance, wearing ready-made clothing. Yet these unstable categories placed others in uncomfortable positions between working and elite classes in society and between crowd and militia on the streets, threatening their well-being and the ideological fabric of a nation enamored of the virtuous producer-citizen.