IN 1894 THE PULLMAN Palace Car Company, like many other firms, felt the pinch of hard times caused by the economic recession that had begun the previous year. The company had reduced wages five times within twelve months, and in May the workers went out on strike. Members of the American Railway Union, to which many of the Pullman workers belonged, soon refused to handle Pullman cars, and by the end of June, 20,000 men working on railroads emanating from Chicago went out on strike, and eventually 125,000 men and women were striking throughout the country. A boycott declared in sympathy with the Pullman workers quickly escalated into the largest labor stoppage in the country’s history, even since then, and affected the nation’s entire railroad system.
President Grover Cleveland declared that nothing should be allowed to halt delivery of the mails, and over the protest of Illinois governor John Peter Altgeld, Cleveland sent in troops to quell the disturbance. Federal courts issued injunctions, or orders to cease certain actions; the U.S. Supreme Court weighed in and, despite its own precedents, upheld the use of the injunction in labor disputes, giving conservative courts and industrial management a powerful tool that it would use against organized labor for the next four decades.
George Mortimer Pullman (1831–1897) had come to Chicago in 1859 from upstate New York, where he had taken over and greatly expanded his father’s business of physically relocating residential and business structures. He established a similar company in Chicago, and while successful, realized that as the city grew and new buildings were erected with better foundational structures, there would be less need for his services. After exploring several possibilities, he decided on the manufacture and leasing of railroad cars.
After starting modestly in the 1830s, the American railroad system had expanded enormously, as many railroad lines were constructed by private entrepreneurs to serve local and regional needs. By 1850 the nation had 9,000 miles of track, and a decade later the figure had risen to 31,000. Government aid in the form of land subsidies helped fuel the expansion, and the development of the iron business led to the replacement of the old wooden rails with stronger and more durable iron ones. In the North, railroads agreed on a standard width, so that engines and cars from one road could connect to other lines, a development that did not take place in the South until after the Civil War. Smaller lines also merged into larger ones. In 1853 seven companies joined to form the New York Central, and in that same year the Pennsylvania Railroad began running trains directly from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh. On the eve of the Civil War trains crisscrossed the Northeast and Midwest, and ran all the way to St. Joseph, Missouri. Once the Southern states seceded, Congress pushed through a subsidy bill to help build a transcontinental line, ultimately completed in 1869, connecting the West Coast to the more populous eastern part of the country.
Although the greatest impact of the expanded rail lines may have been on the transport of raw materials and finished goods, Pullman’s interest lay in passenger travel. He himself frequently used railroads in pursuit of business, but did not like rail journeys. Regular cars were uncomfortable and dirty. He booked a berth in one of the new sleeping cars that were just beginning to appear, and found it unsatisfactory, with cramped beds and inadequate ventilation. He decided to build a better sleeper, one that was not only comfortable but also luxurious, and he persuaded the small Chicago, Alton and St. Louis Railroad to try out his work. The debut of the new cars came in August 1859, and they were an immediate success. Some reviews declared that the Pullman sleepers were comparable to cabins in a steamboat, and the most luxurious way to travel.
Pullman, like most well-to-do men, hired a replacement to serve in his stead in the Civil War, and devoted the years to expanding his business; he even managed to have several of his cars included in the train that bore Abraham Lincoln’s body back to Illinois in 1865. He and his company survived the fire that ravaged Chicago in 1871 and the Panic of 1873. By 1879 the Pullman Palace Car Company boasted 464 cars that it leased to railroads, gross annual earnings of $2.2 million, and net annual profits of almost $1 million. In the following decade the company continued to grow. For the most part it leased rather than sold the sleeping cars, charging two cents a mile and also making money on maintenance. The company also manufactured and sold freight, passenger, refrigerator, street, and elevated cars. By the early 1890s the company had a capitalization of over $36 million, and despite the vagaries of the economy, had paid robust dividends for two decades.
The most unusual aspect of Pullman’s business involved the construction of Pullman, Illinois. Pullman, the man, began planning the town in 1879, and in 1880 he purchased 4,000 acres adjacent to his factory and near Lake Calumet, some fourteen miles south of Chicago, for $800,000. Pullman, the town, which opened on January 1, 1881, was not a municipality in the normal sense, but an effort—as George Pullman saw it—to solve the issue of labor unrest and poverty. All 1,300 of the original structures were designed by the architect Pullman hired, and in addition to housing for the workers, included shopping areas, churches, theaters, parks, and a library. The centerpiece was a towered administration building, and the Hotel Florence, named for Pullman’s daughter, was erected nearby.
Pullman believed the country air and fine facilities, with labor agitators, saloons, and red-light districts excluded, would produce a happy and loyal workforce. The model planned community became a leading attraction during the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, and the nation’s press praised Pullman for his benevolence and vision.
What enthusiasts failed to see was that while Pullman had built a beautiful town—considered by some to be the most healthful place in the country—it was a company town that Pullman ruled like a feudal baron. Within it the housing reflected the social hierarchy of the workforce. Freestanding homes were for executives, row houses for skilled or at least senior workers, tenements for unskilled workers, and rooming houses for common laborers. Pullman prohibited independent newspapers, public speeches, town meetings, or open discussion. His inspectors regularly entered homes to check for cleanliness, and the company could terminate leases on ten days’ notice. The church often stood empty because approved (Protestant) denominations would not pay the high rent, and no other congregations were allowed. Professor Richard Ely, the noted Wisconsin economist and progressive social commentator, wrote that the power exercised by Otto von Bismarck, the chancellor who had unified modern Germany, was “utterly insignificant when compared with the ruling authority of the Pullman Palace Car Company in Pullman.” One worker allegedly wrote, “We are born in a Pullman house, fed from the Pullman shops, taught in a Pullman school, catechized in the Pullman church, and when we die we shall go to the Pullman Hell.”
Although workers were not required to live in the town, they were strongly encouraged to do so, and while rents were higher—averaging $14 a month—many chose to reside there because living conditions were in fact better than in surrounding areas, something even Pullman’s critics conceded. As pleasant as the town might be, Pullman expected it to make money. On payday he issued workers who lived in the town two checks, one for the rent and the other for the balance of the wages. A paymaster delivered the checks with a rent collector in tow, and workers had to immediately endorse and hand back the rent check. By 1892 the community was indeed profitable, and had a valuation of more than $5 million.
When business fell off in 1894, Pullman cut jobs and wages, and increased working hours in order to lower costs, but he did not reduce the rents or the prices of goods and utilities in the town. For those who lived in Pullman, wages beyond rent had been barely enough to live on in prosperous times; now there was hardly anything left afterward.
The economic depression, however, did not affect all branches of Pullman’s business equally. He enjoyed a near-monopoly in the manufacture of the palace cars, and although he leased no new cars in the first part of 1894, the revenues from cars already leased and from their maintenance and repair continued unreduced. In the manufacture and sale of ordinary cars, he had to compete with other companies, and this part of his business did suffer greatly in 1893. He laid off 40 percent of his workforce and reduced wages several times, but he did not reduce dividends. The workers, driven to desperation, joined the American Railway Union. The union sent a grievance committee to confer with management, and the company fired all of the committee members. On May 11, 1894, the Pullman workers went on strike, and looked to the American Railway Union and its leader for help.
Perhaps the most charismatic leader in American labor history, Eugene Victor Debs (1855–1926) would later become the head of the Socialist Party in the United States and run for president of the United States four times, the last from a federal prison cell in Atlanta.
Born in Terre Haute, Indiana, to middle-class parents who had emigrated from Alsace, he dropped out of high school at age fourteen to work as a painter in the railroad yards. He then became a railroad boilerman, and attended business school at night. In 1874 he returned to his parents’ home, got a job for a while as a grocery clerk, and then became involved as a founding member and the secretary of a new lodge of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen.* The personable Debs rose quickly in the union ranks, going from an assistant editor of the union magazine to editor and then to grand secretary in 1880, when he was only twenty-five years old. Debs was far from a radical at this time; he spoke out for the Protestant work ethic and civic responsibility. He seemed to be a nice young man on his way up and became well-known in the Terre Haute community, which elected him twice as city clerk and to one term as a Democrat in the Indiana General Assembly.
During these years, Debs’s views on organized labor evolved. In general, labor organization in the 1880s and early 1890s was plastic and diverse, and as industrialization changed the marketplace, labor leaders seemed to be seeking some institutional form that would serve as a means of expressing and protecting labor interests. Craft unions, composed only of skilled workers from a particular trade, evolved from earlier craft guilds, but no craft union ever enrolled more than a third of the workmen in its trade, and craft union membership never exceeded 10 percent of the workforce. The Knights of Labor under the leadership of Terence V. Powderly had tried to enlist workers from every field, both skilled and unskilled, and it had reached its peak membership of approximately 730,000 in 1886, and then began a steep decline. Soon after that, Samuel Gompers succeeded in rallying the craft unions to form the American Federation of Labor (AFL), although there would continue to be cries for organizing the unskilled that would, in the 1930s, lead to the Congress of Industrial Organizations.
As general secretary of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, Debs saw the railroad brotherhoods as elite and exclusive, just the type of craft union that Gompers wanted in the AFL. The brotherhood had succeeded not through militant labor policies and strikes, but because of the cheap insurance policies it secured for members. Debs was clearly no wild-eyed agitator, and in 1883 he wrote an editorial in the Locomotive Firemen’s Magazine declaring that “we do not believe in violence and strikes as means by which wages are to be regulated, but that all differences must be settled by mutual understanding arrived at by calm reasoning.” In a burst of enthusiasm that he would later rue, he even boasted that he had secured Pullman cars for the use of delegates travelling to the brotherhood’s national convention.
In the late 1880s Debs began to move to the left on the labor/political spectrum. The defeat of Chicago packinghouse workers in an 1885, strike as well as the loss of several strikes by railroad brotherhoods, seems to have led him to rethink his views. In particular, a disastrous strike against the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad, in which the firemen were involved, led Debs to change his mind. In February 1888 the engineers and firemen went out on strike, and management scurried to hire men to replace the striking workers. Realizing that the line might be run without them, the strikers tried to tie up the system with a boycott of all Burlington trains. Management then secured an injunction against such a tactic, and Debs watched as unemployed men eagerly lined up to take the place of the strikers, while the other brotherhoods ignored the picket lines. Within a few weeks the strike was completely broken.
Because of the failure of other unions to participate, Debs began to think that the railroad workers needed some form of federation, so that all the brotherhoods would back a strike. He rather naively believed that if all of the railroad workers united, there would be no strikes, because the owners would understand the strength of the union and agree to arbitration of disputes. But most of the brotherhoods did not believe in federation; they had a hierarchy of their own, and looked down upon people they considered unskilled, such as firemen.
So Debs left the brotherhoods to become president of the newly formed American Railway Union (ARU), an organization founded in Chicago in June 1893. Any Caucasian who worked for a railroad in any capacity, from janitor up to engineer, could join. Any ten workers could unite to form a local chapter, which could then affiliate with the national union. Although Debs still preached that there ought to be cooperation between labor and management, the ARU was from the beginning more confrontational than its predecessors, its members frustrated by the failures of the brotherhoods. In the spring of 1894 the ARU struck the Great Northern Railroad, which had ordered three pay cuts in the span of eight months. The owner of the Great Northern, James J. Hill, agreed to arbitration, and this victory brought even more members flooding into the ARU. Debs no doubt felt some vindication. The brotherhoods had spurned his idea of federation, and so he had turned to the ARU. Less than a year after its founding the ARU had 465 locals and 150,000 workers—far more than any of the brotherhoods—and Debs had overnight become one of the nation’s most prominent labor leaders. Many workers, especially among the unskilled, believed that the type of industrial unionism that Debs preached—that is, a union covering all jobs, skilled as well as unskilled, in any industry—would bring them the pay and respect they deserved.
Following the pay cuts, when a delegation of Pullman employees complained of the low wages and sixteen-hour days, George Pullman declined even to talk with them, and had them all fired. His vision of a contented labor force living in a clean, healthful environment had no room for organized labor. When President Grover Cleveland later appointed a commission to look into the causes of the strike, workers said that when the town of Pullman had first been opened, the company fired any man who joined a union.
Pullman saw the labor contract as a deal between employer and employee. He wanted to buy labor on certain terms, and some workers were willing to sell their labor on those terms. Each party exercised free will, and the labor agreement represented freedom of choice on both sides. But the contract had no guaranteed duration. If Pullman disapproved of how a man worked, or if economic conditions dictated a reduction in the workforce or a lowering of wages, then Pullman could renegotiate the contract or just let the man go. Workers, in turn, also had options; if they did not like the new terms, they could leave and offer their labor to another employer.
Even in his own time Pullman was something of a dinosaur in terms of his thinking. Other employers emphasized not the labor contract but market conditions. The price of labor would be determined by the laws of supply and demand. If workers had skills that were in demand, employers would offer higher wages; if there was an oversupply of particular skills, the price (the wage) would drop. But even those employers who argued for a market standard did not call for unions. They understood that even by market standards they held the upper hand, and did not want unions to equalize the relationship. On this the market standard owners and the free labor barons like George Pullman agreed.
Following the ARU victory over the Great Northern, 35 percent of Pullman’s workforce joined the union. They were eligible because some twenty miles of track ran into or through the company’s plant, and the ARU charter said that anyone working in any capacity on railroad lines could join. After Pullman refused to negotiate with a committee, its members voted to strike. On the morning of May 11, 1894, Pullman’s workers reported to the plant, but upon a signal by their leader they walked out. Management and labor disagreed about how many men worked at the plant at the time (the union said 4,300, management said 2,850) and how many wanted to keep working (the union said only 300, managers said twice that number), but as soon as the plant had emptied, company representatives posted signs at all the gates: “The works are closed until further notice.”
Technically, the ARU had not yet been involved, but union officials had been in Pullman and at the meeting in which the strike vote had been taken, and Pullman workers undoubtedly believed that the ARU would back them. When the ARU gathered in Chicago in June for its first annual convention, the Pullman strike was the issue on the delegates’ minds.
Debs, on the other hand, perhaps because of his experience with earlier railroad strikes, tried to get the delegates to understand that given the economic downturn and the fact that tens of thousands of workers were unemployed, Pullman would have little trouble getting men to replace those who had gone out. He warned the delegates to proceed cautiously, but few listened.
Instead, they paid more attention to representatives from the company, such as seamstress Jenny Curtis, who headed the “girls’ union local”—those women who made carpets, drapes, linen, and seat coverings for the palace cars. Her father had worked for Pullman for thirteen years, she told the convention, and when he died the company demanded that she assume responsibility for the $60 he owed in back rent. When she refused, the company merely began taking deductions from her biweekly paycheck. She only earned between nine and ten dollars, and she paid seven of that for room and board in Pullman. “We ask you to come along with us,” she declared, “because we are not just fighting for ourselves, but for decent conditions for workers everywhere.” The delegates shouted back that they would. First they would try to talk to Pullman one last time, but the company owner refused to meet with them. Instead his lieutenant, Thomas Wickes, declared that the company would never negotiate with the ARU, and he informed the six members of the company on the delegates’ committee that they were fired.
A great deal of sympathy existed in Chicago and elsewhere for the Pullman workers, common men and women tyrannized by an abusive employer and landlord. But how could the ARU support the workers, who, after all, did not exactly work on the railroads? One plan was to refuse to handle Pullman cars, unhitching them from the rest of the train; in fact, some ARU locals in St. Paul and elsewhere had sporadically cut Pullman cars out of trains. Another idea involved a total boycott of railroads using Pullman cars to force them to sever their ties with the Pullman Company.
Even people who supported the idea of a union and the right of workers to strike for better pay and conditions considered a boycott inappropriate. A boycott would affect all the roads, since they all utilized Pullman cars in their passenger trains. A strike was direct action by employees against their employer; a boycott was an indirect weapon that could hurt many more thousands of workers, passengers, and shippers, and in turn aggravate the already severe economic downturn. Debs said he did “not really like the term ‘boycott.’ . . . There is a deep-seated hostility in the country to the term ‘boycott.’” After Pullman declined to talk to them, however, the ARU delegates on June 22 passed a motion to refuse to handle Pullman cars or any trains with Pullman cars unless the company responded to grievances by June 26, and then made the vote unanimous. They then jumped up and began to cheer loudly, although as one commentator noted, it was not certain whether in bravado or anxiety. The union president, Eugene Debs, certainly felt a great deal of anxiety.
Crucial to the success of any boycott would be the switchmen, but as it turned out, switchmen had joined the ARU in large numbers. Debs predicted that the switchmen would refuse to add Pullman cars or to remove them. The railroads would then fire the switchmen and try to replace them, and this in turn would lead other union members to walk out in solidarity, thus bringing more and more trains to a halt.
The scenario played out as Debs had predicted. On June 27, the day after the deadline for the Pullman Company to respond, 5,000 men left their jobs, and fifteen railroads were tied up. By the next day, 40,000 had walked off, and rail traffic was snarled on all lines west of Chicago. On the third day, the number of strikers had climbed to 100,000, and at least twenty lines were either tied up or completely stopped. By June 30, 125,000 workers on twenty-nine railroads had quit work rather than handle Pullman cars. The ARU had few locals in the East or the Old South, but the boycott seemed remarkably effective everywhere else.
Debs may have been pleased by the effectiveness of the boycott, but he was also alarmed by the anger expressed by the workers, anger he feared would break out into violence. He sent telegram after telegram to the locals, urging them to avoid violence and not to stop entire trains. He reminded them that the union was merely refusing to handle Pullman cars; it was not a strike against all railroads. In the course of the strike Debs sent out some 4,000 telegrams, hundreds every day, urging ARU members to eschew violence.
On June 29, Debs spoke at a large and peaceful gathering in Blue Island, Illinois, to get support from fellow railroad workers. After he left, however, groups within the crowd became enraged, set fire to nearby buildings, and derailed a locomotive. Unfortunately for the strikers, it was a mail train. This greatly upset President Grover Cleveland, in that the strike had now prevented the federal government from exercising one of its most important responsibilities, and he vowed that even a postcard deposited in the U.S. mail must be delivered. Even worse, from that point on, the ARU lost control of the situation.
The first hint of how bad things would get came when groups of strikers began stopping entire trains. Given that most of the 150,000 members of the ARU were either on strike or actively helping the strikers, that other unions had joined the cause, and that wildcat strikes were breaking out against individual lines, violence may have been inevitable. Certainly Debs continued to try to keep things under control, with nonstop telegrams urging locals to show restraint and to eschew violence. But it was no use.
When the sheriffs in Vermilion and Marion Counties informed Governor Altgeld that they feared that local situations would spiral out of control, Altgeld sent six companies of militia to Danville at the beginning of July and another three to Decatur, with orders to quell any rioting and clear the way for the trains.
In Chicago, mobs, which the U.S. Strike Commission (appointed by Cleveland after the strike had been quelled) described as “composed generally of hoodlums, women, a low class of foreigners, and recruits of the criminal classes,” took possession of railroad yards, overturning and burning railroad cars and stealing whatever they could lay their hands on. When Mayor John P. Hopkins requested help, Governor Altgeld sent additional troops to Chicago on July 6, explaining that he had not sent them earlier because local authorities had not requested them.
By then, however, the federal government had acted. In Washington a majority of the members of the president’s cabinet supported Attorney General Richard Olney’s demand that federal troops be sent into Chicago to end a “reign of terror.” No evidence existed that the American Railway Union had any part in fomenting the violence. Nonetheless, a great deal of property had been destroyed, twelve people had been killed, and there had been a disruption of the mails.
Acting on orders from Attorney General Olney, federal attorney William A. Woods went into federal court to seek an injunction against the boycott. Woods chose a judge he knew had anti-union sentiments, Peter S. Grosscup, who on July 2 gladly issued an order preventing ARU leaders from “compelling or inducing by threats, intimidation, persuasion, force or violence, railway employees to refuse or fail to perform duties.” The injunction, which Grosscup based on both the Sherman Antitrust Act and the Interstate Commerce Act, also prevented the ARU leadership from communicating with their subordinates. Debs, who had been trying to prevent violence, could no longer even send telegrams advising against violence.
For Grover Cleveland, with the derailing of a train carrying the mail and the issuance of an injunction by a federal court, the strike had now become a federal issue, and he ordered troops into Chicago on July 3. Altgeld was outraged when he learned that Cleveland had ordered in federal troops, and immediately wired the president, saying, “surely the facts have not been correctly presented to you in this case, or you would not have taken the step, for it seems to me unjustifiable. Waiving all questions of courtesy I will say that the State of Illinois is not only able to take care of itself, but it stands ready to furnish the federal Government any assistance it may need elsewhere.” Despite Altgeld’s repeated protests, Cleveland continued to send in troops, even though state militia seemed quite capable of handling the situation.
Nervous that, given the terms of the injunction, he could no longer exercise any control over the strikers, Debs at first welcomed the troops, thinking they might maintain order and allow the strike and boycott to proceed peacefully. Before long Debs realized that the federal troops were to make sure the trains moved and this would inevitably undermine the boycott. The troops were not a neutral peacekeeper, but an enforcer for the railroads.
The strikers reacted with outrage to the appearance of the troops, and what had been basically a peaceful strike (there had been little or no violence in the railroad yards) turned into mayhem. On July 4, strikers and their sympathizers set off fireworks and tipped over railcars. They then built blockades to prevent troops from reaching the rail yards. ARU leaders could do nothing, prevented by the injunction from any communication with the workers. On July 6, some 6,000 rioters destroyed 700 railroad cars and caused $340,000 of damage in the South Chicago Panhandle yards.
By this time there were 6,000 federal and state troops, 3,100 police, and 5,000 deputy marshals, but they could not contain the violence. On July 7, national guardsmen, after being assaulted, fired into a mob, killing at least four people (some estimates put it nearer to thirty) and wounding many others. With trains at a standstill, railroads lost $4.7 million in revenue ($120 million in current dollars), while the striking workers lost $1.4 million in wages. Violence led to further deaths, and then the strike ran out of steam. The ARU tried to enlist the help of the American Federation of Labor, but the craft unions had little use for the non-skilled ARU workers. Debs then tried to call off the strike, urging that all workers except those convicted of crimes be rehired without prejudice. The General Managers’ Association, the federation of railroads that had overseen the response to the strike, refused and instead began hiring nonunion men. The strike dwindled, trains began to move with increasing frequency until normal schedules had been restored, and on August 2 the Pullman works reopened.
By then the original public sympathy for Pullman’s workers had all but evaporated. At the peak of the walkout, as many as a quarter-million workers in twenty-seven states had gone on strike, disrupted rail traffic, or rioted. Harper’s Weekly thought the nation was “fighting for its own existence just as truly as in suppressing the great rebellion.” The disruption of the rail system had farmers worried about getting their crops to market, individuals concerned about the mails, and consumers apprehensive over what the strike would do to the price and availability of goods. Ministers preached against the boycott; Congress supported Cleveland’s use of troops; and the press, in Chicago and elsewhere, turned against Debs, the union, and labor in general. During the violence the Chicago Tribune headed its story with “LAW IS TRAMPLED ON—RIOTOUS EMISSARIES OF DICTATOR DEBS.” Jane Addams of Hull House, who supported the strike, had nonetheless been unable to reach her dying sister because of the rail disruption. She later wrote that the series of events “had dispelled the good nature which in happier times envelopes the ugliness of the industrial situation.”
On July 7, at the height of the violence, federal officers arrested Debs and four other ARU leaders for violating the terms of the injunction, and all five were soon released on a $10,000 bond. Debs and the others would face two trials, one in civil court for failing to obey the injunction and the other in criminal court for criminal conspiracy. Eventually the government abandoned the criminal charges, but Debs and his codefendants, all officers of the ARU, stood trial for violating the injunction.
At the heart of the government argument was a stack of telegrams Debs had sent, dozens every day, to ARU locals. Even though nearly all of them counseled restraint and abjured violence, they did urge union leaders to get the men to strike and boycott. “Tie up the roads that insist on handling boycotted cars,” Debs wired A. P. Merriman in Memphis. “Every true man must quit now and remain out until the fight is won,” he declared in identical messages to ARU locals in different parts of the country.
Debs and his counsel tried to argue that the union leadership itself had never been involved in seizing any railroad property or engaged in violence, and therefore they were not in contempt of court and had not violated the injunction. But the close ties among the government attorneys, the railroads, and federal judges made the union argument futile. On December 14, 1894, U.S. circuit court judge William A. Woods ruled that Debs and the others were in contempt of court for violating the original injunction issued on July 2. Woods, who clearly hoped that the trial would lead to a Supreme Court appointment, wrote an overly long opinion that said far more about his own anti-union credentials than it did about the case. He ordered the defendants to serve three to six months in the McHenry County Jail in Woodstock, Illinois. They could remain out on bail while their attorneys, who by now included Clarence Darrow, took an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
On March 25 and 26, 1895, former senator Lyman Trumbull, Clarence Darrow, and the distinguished Chicago attorney Stephen Gregory argued for Debs and his fellow defendants. Attorney General Richard Olney, Assistant Attorney General Edward Whitney, and U.S. attorney Edwin Walker represented the government. The galleries of the Old Senate Chamber were packed, and according to the Chicago Tribune, “Laboring people thronged every available nook and corner of the courtroom.”
Unlike in current practice, where each side presents its entire argument and then is followed by the other, in 1895 the government and defense attorneys took turns, so that the points raised by one could be rebutted by the following speaker. Although the attorneys, especially Darrow, spoke passionately, their arguments to the nine justices essentially followed what they had presented in their extensive briefs.
For the union men, three main points had been emphasized. First, the notion of a judge charging a man with an offense, even a civil offense, and then another judge finding guilt and imposing a jail sentence, deprived the defendants of one of their basic constitutional rights: trial by jury. Second, as Gregory put it, “this injunction was aimed at a strike; these men were imprisoned because they were leaders of a strike.” The injunction had not been narrow, but was so broad that it struck at what everyone acknowledged to be part of the freedom of labor, the right to go on strike against intolerable conditions. Judge Grosscup had not been trying to prevent damage, but to cripple the ability of Debs and others to protest against the Pullman Company. Finally, Darrow attacked the very idea that the Sherman Act, aimed at the predatory practices of industrial corporations, had ever been meant to apply to labor unions.
The government argued that the case should never have been accepted by the Supreme Court, since it lacked jurisdiction. The contempt citation was “interlocutory”—that is, provisional or temporary, and not final—and only final decrees could be appealed to the Supreme Court. Everyone understood that this technical point was there only to give the justices a hook if they wanted to dismiss the case as improvidently accepted and thus avoid a ruling. The real heart of the government argument was that the Court indeed had the power to issue such a sweeping injunction, since the union leaders were challenging the authority of the federal government. The government had not only the power but the responsibility to protect interstate commerce and the delivery of the U.S. mail. The Supreme Court should affirm what the lower court had done, since “similar conditions are likely to arise in the future.” The government also emphasized that this was not a criminal case; it was not trying to label a strike a “criminal conspiracy,” and in fact the government abandoned its efforts to try Debs and the others under that charge.
On May 27, 1895, two months after oral argument, Justice David J. Brewer delivered the unanimous opinion of the Court, and as everyone had expected, upheld the government. He saw two important questions in the case. First, did the federal government have power to prevent obstructions of interstate commerce and the transportation of the mail? Second, did a federal court acting through its equity jurisdiction* have the authority to issue an injunction in support of those efforts to protect interstate commerce and mail delivery? It was clear by this point that the Court had completely rejected all of the arguments made by the defense team. This was how Richard Olney had wanted the case decided—not on whether workers had a right to strike, but on whether the federal government could respond.
Brewer left no doubt that the Constitution unambiguously gave the federal government powers relating to interstate commerce and the mail. “The entire strength of the nation may be used to enforce in any part of the land the full and free exercise of all national powers and the security of all rights entrusted by the Constitution to its care,” he said. “The strong arm of the national government may be put forth to brush away all obstructions to the freedom of interstate commerce or the transportation of the mails.” This “strong arm” included the army and state militia, which had in fact been called out against the strikers.
Two years earlier, in Pettibone v. United States, the Court had reversed a federal conviction for conspiracy to obstruct justice in a labor dispute, ruling that federal courts did not have jurisdiction, directly or indirectly, over a state’s criminal process. Because Debs had been imprisoned by a federal court for an offense committed solely within Illinois, the Pettibone decision should have led to his release. But Brewer, who had dissented in Pettibone, as had all of the justices who had been in the majority in that case, ignored it.
Instead, Brewer developed the idea that the injunction was a special form of relief that could be used to prevent irreparable damage to property that could not be adequately compensated in later actions at law. This use of the injunction had long been available through equity to private parties, but Brewer expanded its use to protect public rights and punish public wrongs. In doing so, he significantly enlarged the federal courts’ equity jurisdiction and gave the federal and state governments powerful tools to use against labor.
Brewer made no bones about his dislike of the strike. While one might admire the self-sacrifice of the workers,
It is a lesson which cannot be learned too soon or too thoroughly under this government of and by the people that the means of redress of all wrongs are through the courts and at the ballot-box, and that no wrong, real or fancied, carries with it legal warrant to invite as a means of redress the cooperation of a mob, with its accompanying acts of violence.
The workers, the strikers, and the union leaders had all been wrong in the Pullman dispute; more generally, in an increasingly industrialized America, workers should rely on the courts and the legislatures to protect their interests. Brewer ignored the fact that most laborers in the country saw the courts and the legislatures as their enemies and not their protectors.
In re Debs was one of a trio of cases decided by the Supreme Court in 1895 that left a widespread impression that the Court was simply a tool of the wealthy and big business interests in the country. In United States v. E. C. Knight Co., it had for all purposes emasculated the Sherman Antitrust Act by announcing such a narrow definition of interstate commerce as to make the act unenforceable. Then, in Pollock v. Farmers’ Loan & Trust Co., it had struck down as unconstitutional the income tax provision of the Wilson-Gorman Act of 1894.
The general outcry against the Pollock case led to the 1913 adoption of the Sixteenth Amendment, allowing Congress to levy income taxes, while changes of administration as well as personnel on the Court led to a more receptive judicial attitude on the meaning of antitrust law. The effects of the Debs case lingered longest, and for the next forty years business interests hostile to labor unions found the courts willing partners in suppressing strikes through injunction. Finally, Congress passed the Norris-LaGuardia Act in 1931, stripping federal courts of the power to issue injunctions in labor disputes.
George Pullman and his enterprises thrived in the years immediately following the strike. He headed a company that built the Metropolitan elevated railway system in New York, and his factory continued to build palace cars for the nation’s rail system. The Pullman Company merged in 1930 with the Standard Steel Car Company to become Pullman-Standard, and it built its last car for Amtrak in 1982. After that the company faded away, its plants shut down, and the remaining assets were sold off in 1987.
Labor continued to revile Pullman, and when he died of a heart attack in 1897, he was buried at night in a lead-lined coffin within an elaborately reinforced steel-and-concrete vault. Workers then poured several tons of cement over the vault to prevent his body from being exhumed and desecrated by labor activists.
Debs and his codefendants surrendered themselves at the Woodstock jail in June 1895, and while confined, Debs began his journey from labor activism toward socialism. In January 1897 he formally announced his adoption of his new creed. “The issue,” he declared, “is Socialism vs. Capitalism. I am for Socialism because I am for humanity. . . . The time has come to regenerate society—we are on the verge of a universal change.”
Debs would lead American socialism for the next three decades, and be the Socialist Party’s candidate for president five times. He would oppose American involvement in the First World War, and for his efforts would be convicted of sedition. This would send his case back to the Supreme Court, which once again ruled against him (Debs v. United States [1919]).
Debs v. United States, 249 U.S. 211 (1919)
In re Debs, 158 U.S. 564 (1895)
Pettibone v. United States, 148 U.S. 197 (1893)
Pollock v. Farmers’ Loan & Trust Co., 158 U.S. 601 (1895)
United States v. E. C. Knight Co., 156 U.S. 1 (1895)
The best single book on the subject is David Ray Papke, The Pullman Case: The Clash of Labor and Capital in Industrial America (1999). For Pullman, see Liston Edgington Leyendecker, Palace Car Prince: A Biography of George Mortimer Pullman (1992), and for the town he built, Stanley Buder, Pullman: An Experiment in Industrial Order and Community Planning, 1880–1930 (1967). For Debs, see the older but still valuable Ray Ginger, The Bending Cross (1949), and Nick Salvatore, Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist (1982). The labor troubles of this period are examined in many works; especially good is Gerald G. Eggert, Railroad Labor Disputes: The Beginnings of Federal Strike Policy (1967). There is an enormous amount of primary material in United States Strike Commission, Report on the Chicago Strike of June–July, 1894 (1895).
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* At this time there were four brotherhoods of railroad workers—engineers, firemen, conductors, and trainmen; eventually there would be six more; the last, that of sleeping car porters, organized in 1924. They had started out as benevolent associations to provide insurance and other benefits, and gradually began to act as unions. They eschewed association with the more conservative American Federation of Labor (although, like the AFL, they were organized by skills) as well as the more radical Knights of Labor. Despite the decline in importance of railroads in American economic life, they are still in existence and function primarily as labor unions.
* In England there were separate civil courts for law and equity. Law cases involved monetary damages, while judges in equity could impose nonmonetary remedies, such as an injunction, to resolve a conflict. The Constitution gave federal courts jurisdiction in both law and equity.