The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896 (Oxford History of the United States)

by Richard White

The police, disproportionately Irish Catholic and working-class, did not naturally side with employers, but Harrison, eager to stave off the resurgent Citizens League, put men sympathetic to business in command. Foremost among them was Capt. John Bonfield, Irish but Republican and able but brutal. Bonfield rose to prominence by violently breaking a streetcar strike that had paralyzed the city in 1885. The company, as widely hated by its customers as by its workers, had precipitated the strike by firing men for belonging to a union. Crowds initially blocked the tracks, stopping trains run by scabs and occasionally pelting them and the police with stones. On July 3 Bonfield unleashed the police to clear the streets. He led by example in cracking the skull of a seventy-year-old man. A teenage girl, vendors selling vegetables and newspapers, and ditch diggers fixing a gas main, as well as strikers, felt the clubs.