numerous locales, and in some places triggering general non-railroad work stoppages. Interstate commerce was paralyzed for weeks. As the Strike spread, destructive and deadly violence erupted in some major cities — Baltimore; Pittsburgh, Reading and Scranton, Pennsylvania; Buffalo, Chicago, and San Francisco. Almost immediately upon his return from Europe, on the very day the Great Strike broke out, Gowen instituted massive layoffs of brakemen across the railroad, in effect both sanctioning and reinforcing the other railroads' moves while he was gone. In Reading, back in April and May, striking BLE engineers had been quickly displaced by strikebreakers and then blacklisted—but the strikebreakers, as well as other workers, were not paid by the cash-strapped Reading Railroad from May through mid-July. While the Great Strike gathered momentum, Gowen found the money to pay back wages in Reading. Local outrage at Gowen and the Reading was intensified as newly laid-off brakemen swelled the ranks of unemployed railroad men and strikebreakers saw their wages as a transparent effort to buy loyalty. Ultimately, within a month of the first Mollie Maguire hangings (June 20, 1877), the ongoing BLE strike in Reading, which Gowen believed he had broken just as he had the WBA strike in 1875, gained fresh momentum from the unfolding Great Strike; tensions in the city escalated until, on July 23, 10 citizens were killed by the Pennsylvania state militia in the Reading Railroad Massacre. Federal troops were dispatched to Reading to restore order. Following the Massacre, in October 1877 Gowen personally prosecuted men whom Pinkerton spies had pinpointed as the local BLE ringleaders, but they were acquitted. Three months later, in January 1878, Reading was the site of the first national convention of the Knights of Labor, which grew into one of the important U.S. labor organizations of the nineteenth century. As with many early labor organizations, its membership rolls and meetings were secret, to help avoid infiltration and blacklisting. The Knights creed and organization crossed occupational lines, attempting to become a sort of "union of unions." As such, after the collapse of the WBA/M&LBA, miners in the anthracite region formed locals of the Knights of Labor. In one incident, when Coal & Iron Co. workers struck for back pay, Gowen once again raised the issue of terrorism. Seeking to avert the spread of the strike, he sent an open letter to the Miner's Journal newspaper in Pottsville exposing the names of