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Quote of the Day
“When the 19th century shall have passed into history, the impartial eyes of the reviewers will be amazed to find that the U.S., supposed to be conservative of human liberty and human right, tolerated the presence of the most gigantic, the most cruel, impudent, pitiless and grasping monopoly that ever fastened itself upon a country.”
Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. This day in 1877 would see Rockefeller make one of his biggest moves in building his empire.
July 14th- This Day in Stock Market History
July 14, 1877 – The Great Railroad Strike Begins
On July 14, 1877, workers at the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad’s Martinsburg, West Virginia station walked off the job after the B&O, under president John W. Garrett, imposed a 10% wage cut — the third pay cut in a year.
What began as a local action metastasized within days into the first nationwide strike in American history, spreading across 14 states to Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Chicago and St. Louis. At its peak more than 100,000 workers had halted over half the nation’s freight; by the time federal troops and militias suppressed it 45 days later, roughly 100 people were dead and property damage ran into the millions.
The market relevance is direct. The strike compounded the carnage that was already rolling through the industry. Pennsylvania Railroad president Tom Scott, who had triggered his own line’s walkout with wage cuts, saw damage so severe that he canceled dividends, sending the stock down and forcing him to sell his oil interests to John D. Rockefeller for pennies on the dollar.
This purchase, which taxed even the mighty Standard and Oil for cash at the time, would provide Rockefeller additional refineries and railroad to complete his monopoly.
As Ron Chernow’s says in his biography of John D. Rockefeller:
“Having outsmarted the largest railroad, Rockefeller had acquired a stranglehold on the three major roads, and his taming of the imperious Tom Scott guaranteed that no railroad president would ever dare to tangle with him again…only five years after the Cleveland Massacre, the thirty-eight-year-old Rockefeller… had come to control nearly 90 percent of the oil refined in the United States.”
Besides fueling Rockefeller’s rise, the strike also planted the seeds of organized labor (the Knights of Labor, later the American Federation of Labor) that would reshape corporate cost structures for generations.
July 14, 2020: Moderna’s Vaccine Data Powers a Reopening Rally
On July 14, 2020, the Dow Jones Industrial Average surged 556.79 points, or 2.13%, to close at 26,642.59. The catalyst: Moderna reported that its mRNA COVID-19 vaccine candidate had produced neutralizing antibodies in all 45 healthy adults in an early trial.
The move was emblematic of 2020’s COVID market volatility, in which every positive clinical readout triggered sharp rotations from stay-at-home winners into travel, leisure and cyclical.
Reopening plays such as cruise lines and airlines rallied hard in the sessions around the vaccine news.
The rally proved prescient. Moderna’s vaccine was authorized within five months, and the reopening trade that began on days like this one anchored one of the fastest bull markets in history. By 2026, Moderna had pivoted its mRNA platform toward oncology and rare disease, a reminder that the pandemic winners had to reinvent themselves for the next act.
Read of the Day
Ron Chernow, Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.
Chernow’s definitive biography is the essential source for the 1877 hinge, showing in granular detail how the Great Railroad Strike wrecked Tom Scott’s Pennsylvania at the exact moment it was already losing its oil war, forcing the $3.4 million fire-sale of Empire Transportation to Standard Oil.
It’s the best case study in print of how a low-cost, cash-rich operator turns someone else’s catastrophe into a monopoly.
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