For each step forward, though, there was often a step or two back. In 1944, the Philadelphia Transportation Company, bowing to Roosevelt administration pressure, promoted eight African Americans to streetcar motormen. The Transit Workers Union supported those promotions, but forty-five hundred white workers, opposed to the promotions, went on strike, preventing 300,000 people from getting to work and disrupting war production. Union leaders were unable to persuade the strikers to return to work, and the federal government sent in more than five thousand soldiers to help end the strike.