Also, don’t forget – you know all those armories in your towns and cities? Look around, there’s a good bet that your area has at least one, possibly many. They often look like little medieval fortresses or something. These days, they are often used as public spaces – they have big open spaces indoors, and they get used for conventions, fairs, performances. They seem like benign civic spaces, don’t they?
They were built in the late 19th and early 20th century specifically because of the labor unrest in the U.S., as a central point in communities from which the National Guard could operate AGAINST labor demonstrations.
Approximately 120 armories were built in New York State from the late eighteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, and most date from the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when the National Guard was America’s primary domestic peacekeeper during the post–Civil War era of labor-capital unrest.
https://www.sunypress.edu/p-4344-new-yorks-historic-armories.aspx
Since Colonial times, local militia units drilled on village greens or met in rented space, often taverns, hotels or Masonic halls. Even the Civil War did not bring a outcry for more publicly owned military buildings. What did was the intense domestic unrest of the 1870s.
A national recession struck in 1873. Conditions got progressively worse and boiled over in 1877, when a railroad strike in Baltimore triggered strikes and riots across the country. Rebellious workers in St. Louis briefly installed a communist government until troops were sent in.
“More than anything else, these outbursts initiated the first great wave of armory building in America. Throughout the remainder of the century, urban and industrial tensions between management and labor, immigrant and native and affluent and disadvantaged ebbed and flowed,” Rossano and Donohue write.
“It was the time of the Pullman Strike, Homestead Riot, Haymarket Riot – a time of great labor unrest,” said Donohue, a historian who is survey and grants director of the historic preservation and museum division of the state Commission on Culture and Tourism, in an interview last week.
City officials and corporate elites, fearing the wrath of the riff-raff, now saw the National Guard’s mission as the maintenance of public order. That meant the troops needed their own buildings: secure, comfortable, impressive, impregnable.
https://www.courant.com/news/connecticut/hc-xpm-2007-05-27-0705270184-story.html
You can find out more if you dig around, and especially if you know to start searching for the history of armories along with labor unrest.
It’s nice that they were largely able to be repurposed into civic spaces open to the entire population… but it’s hard to ever look at them the same way again when you know that THIS is why they were built.
