Each July marks a little-known anniversary in US history, when St Louis, Missouri became the site of the first American soviet — for about one day. White and black workers united in a citywide general strike, culminating in a transfer of power that St Louis elites compared to the Paris Commune. The extraordinary event occurred amid a nationwide walkout that historians have given a thoroughly boring name: the Great Railroad Strike of 1877.

Unlike much of the South, St Louis — a border state — had dodged the annihilation that swept through the former Confederacy. The country rebuilt, expanded, contracted, and so did the Mississippi River–based foundries in East and West St Louis — smelting plants, refineries, massive cattle stock yards. Freed slaves took badly paid jobs loading and unloading steamships on the river wharf; white laborers took the better-paying jobs with the railroad — one rung up the transportation/technological ladder. With Minneapolis and Chicago up stream, and New Orleans downstream, the cross path of trains and barges became one of the central pressure points of a rail network choked with capital.

And in July 1877, a strike — the big one — forced a brief regime change. The reins of power slipped from the capitalist city fathers, into the hands of the workers.