When workers did organize, many of them immigrants, cities like Boston and New York followed London’s lead and created formal police forces to suppress the unrest. Leaders of commerce urged northern cities to build armories in urban industrial areas where strikes were imminent. Labor historian Philip Dray writes that although “Americans have come to think of these dour, substantial buildings as historic rallying places for troops in the case of foreign threats to U.S. soil…their original purpose was to allow the rapid deployment of the militia to keep workingmen in check.”
