The 1917 strike and the jitney wars

1913–1926 · LABOR AND COMPETITION

The strike: The Northern Indiana Railway's standard history gives the labor record of the streetcar era a chapter of its own, and its place in the company's chronology is fixed: between the chapters on the storms, jitney buses, track extensions and new cars of 1913–1917 and the Columbia Street fire of 1919 stands the 1917 strike. The strike belongs to the same wartime season that produced streetcar strikes across the country in 1917 — the year the Amalgamated Association's locals struck from Kansas City to the Twin Cities over wages, hours and recognition — and South Bend's walkout is documented in the company's own history at that size. The detail of the South Bend strike — its demands, its length, its settlement — sits in that history and in the Tribune and News-Times files of 1917, which are not digitized in the record reached for this section; it is recorded here at the size the reachable record proves, and the gap is named rather than filled.

The jitneys: The street railway's other fight of those years was against the jitney — the private automobile, and soon the small bus, carrying passengers for a nickel along the car lines' own streets. The company's history treats the jitney competition as one of the defining pressures of 1913–1917, and the city's answer survives in the law reports. By Ordinance No. 2135, adopted 12 January 1921, South Bend declared every motor or electric vehicle carrying passengers indiscriminately for hire along its streets — taxicabs and hotel buses excepted — to be a commercial vehicle "commonly known as a jitney bus," and made it unlawful to operate one without filing a liability insurance contract with the city controller and taking out a license. The ordinance was tested by Otis Sprout of Mishawaka, who ran a bus carrying passengers between South Bend and Niles, Michigan, without the insurance or the license, and on 14 October 1926 the Supreme Court of Indiana upheld the city's ordinances against him in full — Sprout v. City of South Bend, 198 Ind. 563 — holding that a city may license and require insurance of vehicles run for public hire on its streets, Sprout's interstate passengers notwithstanding. The railway's own answer to the competition ran parallel to the city's: the Northern Indiana bought up most of the competing motor bus operations outright, as its history records, after which the surviving buses ran on schedules that complemented the electric cars instead of fighting them. The jitney as an unregulated rival was finished in South Bend by the middle of the 1920s — regulated by the ordinance the Sprout case sustained, and absorbed by the company it had undercut.

Sources:

1. George K. Bradley, Northern Indiana Railway Inc., CERA Bulletin 132 (1998), contents and published summary — the chapters "1913–1917: Storms — Jitney Buses — Track Extensions — New Streetcars" and "1917 Strike"; the purchase of most competing motor bus operations and the complementary schedules that followed.
2. Sprout v. City of South Bend, 198 Ind. 563, 153 N.E. 504 (Ind. 1926) — Ordinance No. 2135 of 12 January 1921 quoted in the opinion; Sprout's South Bend–Niles bus operation; the ordinances upheld, 14 October 1926.