View from Rotary Hall of the mob at the intersection of Rush and Vine streets. The U.S. Government Building is to the left across Rush Avenue from the M&NA headquarters. St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 23, 1923.
The University of Arkansas Press is pleased to announce the forthcoming publication of Railroad War in the Ozarks: The Missouri and North Arkansas Railroad Strike, 1921–1923 by Kenneth C. Barnes.
On January 15, 1923, a crowd of more than a thousand angry men assembled in Harrison, Arkansas, near the headquarters of the Missouri and North Arkansas Railroad that ran from Joplin, Missouri to Helena, Arkansas. The mob was prepared to use any measure necessary to end the strike of railroad employees that had dragged on for nearly two years, endangering livelihoods and businesses—particularly those in the rural Arkansas Ozarks, where residents had few other transportation options. Supported by local officials, the mob terrorized strikers and sympathizers—many were stripped and beaten, and one was lynched, hanged from the railroad bridge south of town. Over the next several days, mobs targeted strikers in two other towns on the M&NA line: Leslie and Heber Springs.
This violence effectively ended of one of the longest rail strikes in American history—and the only one that was quelled by a mob uprising. In Railroad War in the Ozarks, Kenneth C. Barnes outlines the way the M&NA Railroad strike reflected some of the major economic concerns that preoccupied the United States in the wake of World War I, and created a rupture within communities of the Arkansas Ozarks that would take years to heal. It also foreshadowed, for both the region and the country as a whole, that the pendulum was swinging back to moneyed interests, away from Progressive Era gains for labor. Poignantly for Barnes, who sees parallels between this historic upheaval and present-day political tensions, the strike revealed the fragile line between civil order and mob rule.
Kenneth C. Barnes is distinguished professor emeritus of history at the University of Central Arkansas. He is the author of Who Killed John Clayton? Political Violence and the Emergence of the New South, 1861–1893 and Anti-Catholicism in Arkansas: How Politicians, the Press, the Klan, and Religious Leaders Imagined an Enemy, 1910–1960. For his most recent book, The Ku Klux Klan in 1920s Arkansas, Barnes garnered his fourth J. G. Ragsdale Book Award in Arkansas History.
Railroad War in the Ozarks will be published in the Fall of 2024 and is part of the Arkansas History Series, edited by Jeannie Whayne and Kelly Houston Jones.