100 years ago in The Record
Saturday, March 17, 1917
The New York Central railroad asks Mayor Cornelius F. Burns to protect the company’s property in Troy as the deadline for a nationwide railroad strike approaches, The Record reports.
Union workers are scheduled to walk off their jobs at 7 p.m. unless the railroads adopt the eight-hour workday as mandated by the Adamson Law passed by Congress last year. The law was supposed to take effect last January 1 but is being challenged in the U.S. Supreme Court.
The mayor assures the Central that the Troy police “will be instructed to furnish protection to the company as the law provides.” The Central’s main freight yard in Troy is located on Adams Street.
“Just how soon a cessation of passenger service would take place is the subject today of general speculation,” one reporter writes, “and persons wishing to go out of town on business are debating whether it would be safe.”
Passenger trains may continue to run for up to four days past the strike deadline. Prospects brighten for travelers after our paper goes to press, when the federal government announces that the unions have delayed the strike for 48 hours, to Monday evening.
RUSSIAN REVOLUTION. While the railroad crisis has been the week’s big national news story, the big international story has been the fall of Tsar Nicholas II and the apparent replacement of the Russian monarchy with a republic. According to Stanislau Bessmer, a “prominent businessman in the Twelfth ward” who emigrated from Russia 25 years ago, persecution of Russian Catholics by the Tsar’s “Nationalist” church provoked the uprising.
“The revolutionary movement was one brought on the former government by intolerable methods and that government is at last replaced by a government for the people, by the people and of the people,” Bessmer says, “The nation and subjects are free and their dreams of the last half a century are realized.”
ST. PATRICK’S DAY
The Friends of St. Patrick reaffirm their loyalty to the U.S. government in the event of war during their annual banquet at the Hotel Rensselaer tonight.
“We, as American citizens, faithful to American ideals of justice, liberty and humanity, and confident that the government has with great patience exerted its utmost efforts to keep this country at peace with the world, hereby declare our wholehearted and unqualified loyalty to the government of the United States,” their resolution reads.
Tonight’s guest speaker, former Massachusetts governor David L. Walsh, urges Irish-Americans to “Be true to the glorious Republic that has opened her arms to receive you and give you the rights of citizenship; be true to America.”