“Twenty thousand souls, men, women, and little ones, have their eyes turned toward this convention to-day,” the Pullman strikers proclaimed in their appeal to the American Railway Union delegates.
At eleven thirty on the morning of Friday, June 15, delegates disposed of routine business, formed themselves into a committee of the whole, and took up the issue of the Pullman strike. Central to the debate was the message from representatives of the local unions at Pullman, several of whom spoke at Ulrich’s Hall.
The strikers went on: “We struck because we were without hope. We joined the American Railway Union because it gave us a glimmer of hope.… We will make you proud of us, brothers, if you will give us the hand we need. Help make our country better and more wholesome.”
They enumerated the now-familiar list of complaints about intolerable pay cuts, high rents, shop abuses, and the restrictive life in the model town. During the depression, rents had fallen in Chicago, sometimes by half, but they had remained constant in Pullman. For what they were paying, Pullman residents could have moved to nearby communities and lived in homes “compared to which ours are hovels.” Instead, they were forced to contribute “to make a millionaire a billionaire.” George Pullman sold them water at a 500 percent markup. He forced them to pay $2.25 for gas that neighbors bought for 75 cents. Painters received 35 cents an hour on the open market, Pullman painters only 23 cents. Many employees suffered under supervisors who crushed them in spirit on behalf of a “merciless, soulless, grasping corporation.”
Their complaint was personal. “Pullman, both the man and the town, is an ulcer on the body politic,” they insisted. No man or woman among them had “felt the gentle pressure of George M. Pullman’s hand.”
One Pullman employee declared: “We are born in a Pullman house, fed from the Pullman shops, taught in the Pullman school, catechized in the Pullman Church, and when we die we shall go to the Pullman Hell.”
Another asserted that he was the father of four children and that “when a man is sober and steady, and has a saving wife, and after working two and a half years for a company he finds himself in debt for a common living, something must be wrong.”
Something must be wrong. The strikers tried to express a fundamental issue that lay at the heart of their discontent. Was labor a commodity? Were their lives subject to the laws of supply and demand that applied to commercial transactions? Pullman vice president Wickes had declared, “We go into the market for men just as we go into the market for anything else.” Such a notion was commonplace in the industrial era, but the Pullman workers were dismayed to think that an impersonal market could reduce them to starvation.
Something must be wrong. If any employer could cut pay indiscriminately, it must inevitably begin a vicious cycle. Relying on lower unit costs, that company could underbid competitors. Those competitors in turn would be forced to reduce the pay of their own employees in order to compete in the market. Then another round of wage cuts, and another.
“And so the merry war—the dance of skeletons bathed in human tears—goes on, and will go on, brothers, forever,” the Pullman employees predicted, “unless you, the American Railway Union, stop it.”
Individual Pullman workers explained in detail how this dance of skeletons had impinged on their own lives. The most affecting story was told by Jennie Curtis, the young seamstress who had now become a union activist. When she stood to speak, the audience fell silent to allow her earnest voice to carry.
She was nineteen years old, Curtis said. She had been employed at Pullman for five years. She was a diligent worker.
The young women in her department spent their time sewing the elaborate carpeting, curtains, upholstery, and mattresses that made the Pullman sleepers so luxurious. The work was demanding. Their reward was to see their wages cut again and again.
Curtis described how her father had worked at the Pullman factory for thirteen years. When he fell ill, he was laid off but continued to occupy a cottage in the model town. The previous September he had died in debt. The company now insisted that his daughter pay the $60 back rent that he had accumulated on his deathbed. Before the strike, she had tried to make good the debt from her paltry wages at a rate of $3 a month.
“Many a time,” she explained, “I have drawn nine and ten dollars for two weeks’ work, paid seven dollars for my board and given the Company the remaining two or three dollars on the rent.” The company was not grateful for her honest effort. “Sometimes when I could not possibly give them anything, I would receive slurs and insults from the clerks in the bank, because Mr. Pullman would not give me enough in return for my hard labor to pay the rent for one of his houses and live.”
Curtis finished her speech with a clarion appeal to ARU delegates. “We ask you to come along with us,” she told them, “because we are not just fighting for ourselves, but for decent conditions for workers everywhere.”
Her words electrified the gathering. They stirred the heart of Eugene Debs, who did not want the union members to plunge into a boycott. The representatives cursed Pullman as a “bloodsucker” for robbing a girl.
Curtis’s words and the report from the Pullman committee prompted an immediate proposal that ARU members on the roads refuse to handle Pullman cars. Debs stepped in again to advise caution. He was willing to label George Pullman a “monumental monster, a pirate on the high seas of labor,” but the thought of a full-blown boycott gave him a sinking feeling. Instead, he counseled the delegates to form a committee of twelve, six of them Pullman representatives, to meet with Thomas Wickes and propose arbitration. With the muscle of the ARU behind the request, George Pullman would have to see the value of reaching an agreement.
Eleven men plus Jennie Curtis walked into Wickes’s office that same afternoon. Their demand was simple and urgent. The members asked Wickes directly, “Will you arbitrate?”
He told them that George Pullman was in New York. The time of his return was not known. He could not respond to anyone who came as a representative of the American Railway Union—the company did not recognize the ARU’s existence. He could say no more.
Would he meet with a committee if it were comprised only of Pullman employees? Yes, he said, but he would speak with them only as individuals, not as representatives of any union.
After reporting to the convention, Curtis and five other Pullman employees returned to Wickes’s office the next day without the ARU men. Wickes, having conferred with George Pullman, showed no inclination to waver.
“The situation with regard to wages has not changed,” he told them. Would the company arbitrate? No. Would he consider restoring the wage scale of 1893? They had no right even to ask such a question, he replied. They had relinquished their employment. As far as the company was concerned, they “stood in the same position as the man on the sidewalk.” Even longtime employees were, in George Pullman’s view, expendable ciphers.
* * *
Back at the convention, Wickes’s response ignited the delegates’ fury. Debs continued to maneuver. He convinced the conventioneers to refer the next step to yet another committee. The representatives voted $2,000 for the strikers’ relief and put in place a weekly assessment of ten cents on every member to build a strike fund.
The company’s hard line put Debs in a corner. It meant that the union would have to either back down or take action. Giving in would make the ARU look weak, deflate members’ morale, and hamper organizing efforts. Action meant attacking the company’s revenue by asking all union members to cease handling Pullman cars. Such a boycott would steer the group into uncharted waters.
Debs understood that the delegates were eager to flex their muscles. The victory over the Great Northern had inspired them. So had Debs’s own words in his opening address: “The forces of labor must unite. The salvation of labor demands it.”
Like Debs, ARU vice president George Howard, who had worked most closely with the Pullman employees during the strike, was now eager to avoid a boycott. He thought an effective tactic would be to close down additional Pullman facilities in St. Louis and Ludlow, Kentucky. These shops handled the repair of Pullman cars, and he had helped organize workers in both of them. Strikes against them, he felt, would pressure the company without requiring the thousands of ARU members on the railroads to put their jobs at risk.
On Wednesday, June 20, the convention appointed a committee to recommend “a suitable line of action” regarding Pullman as soon as possible. The delegates heard reports of telegrams coming in from as far west as Sacramento indicating that locals were ready to begin “aggressive action.”
That same day, George Pullman stepped down from his private railcar in Chicago, having returned from his stay in the East. The ongoing strike against his works, he found, might be on the verge of becoming a national issue. If the prospect disturbed him, he gave no sign of it.
After two days of deliberation, the ARU action committee reported back to the convention on its last day in session. Its recommendation was succinct: “Unless the Pullman Palace Car Company does adjust the grievances before 12 o’clock on Tuesday, June 26, 1894, the members of the American Railway Union shall refuse to handle Pullman cars and equipment.” The delegates approved the ultimatum. They also resolved to send men to lead walkouts at the other two Pullman plants, as Howard had advised.
Three men were assigned to carry the final demand to Wickes. He flatly refused to deal with them. The next day, Saturday, June 23, the first American Railway Union convention adjourned. In his closing speech, Debs told members that the only action he disagreed with was the continued exclusion of Negroes from the union. He sent the convention delegates home, advising them to become “missionaries” for the cause.
* * *
On Sunday, June 24, the Chicago Tribune predicted “serious complications” and “widespread disorders” if the ARU went ahead with its threatened boycott. The paper had long advocated for the pro-business policies of the Republican Party. The reporter foresaw conflict between the new union and the established railroad brotherhoods, although he judged that many individual firemen and engineers sympathized with the Pullman strikers.
That same day, the highly popular president of France, Sadi Carnot, was stabbed and mortally wounded by an anarchist. The assassination sent a wave of revulsion around the world, raising the specter of new chaos inspired by radicals. The murder also added another dose of apprehension to the tense situation in America, where the Coxey armies, the anger in the coal fields, and the ravages of the depression all kept nerves on edge.
On the surface, Pullman vice president Wickes was sanguine. He said he did not think that railroad workers were “likely to precipitate a disturbance at this time, when so many people are out of employment.” In any case, the question of a boycott was “wholly a matter between the railroads and their employees.”
In fact, nobody knew what would happen. Debs was frantically planning for contingencies. He understood that the switchmen would be the front line of any boycott. If they disconnected Pullman cars from trains or refused to couple them, they could inspire other railroad men to act. But, as the Tribune said, “the measure of success in this is speculative.”
The intent of the union’s action was to dry up Pullman revenues, which now came entirely from the operation of company-owned sleeping cars. But Debs knew that railroad workers had a long list of complaints against their own employers, including pay cuts, blacklisting, increased hours, arbitrary treatment, disregard of seniority rights, and discrimination against ARU members. These grievances could prompt ARU locals around the country to take actions on their own. Wildcat strikes would quickly wrench the matter out of the control of the directors in Chicago.
Debs wanted to keep the issue as focused as possible. He insisted that the union was not pushing for recognition by the railroads or trying to undo all wrongs. Members would simply refuse to handle Pullman cars in sympathy with the aggrieved strikers in Chicago. Union officials were sure the public would see that this was a selfless action, necessitated by George Pullman’s intransigence.
As events approached a climax, Debs swung between reluctance and excitement. He suddenly knew what it felt like to be sitting on the engineer’s side of the cab in the locomotive of history, to have a hand on the throttle of power. The entire nation, for better or worse, would feel the impact of what Debs did, how he exercised control, how he inspired and directed his men.
He set up his headquarters at Ulrich’s Hall and spent Sunday and Monday communicating with ARU locals around the country. In frantic dots and dashes, his orders went out over the wires. Although the long-distance telephone had been demonstrated at last year’s world’s fair, its application was still limited. Western Union remained the principal means of communication between cities.
Debs instructed car inspectors to refuse to approve Pullman cars, switchmen not to attach them, engineers and brakemen not to haul trains that included them. It would be up to railroad managers to decide. They could continue to operate without the sleeping cars, putting pressure on George Pullman to arbitrate. Or they could bring on a tie-up of their own lines by dismissing employees who disobeyed orders or by replacing them with non-union men. In that case, Debs directed all members to stop work on that line until their brothers were reinstated.
On the morning of Tuesday, June 26, the nation held its breath. The clock ticked down. Noon came with no word from Pullman. Messengers wore out their legs running from Ulrich’s Hall to the telegraph office.
Officials of the Illinois Central Railroad had ordered that the trains for that day be made up before the deadline, with Pullman sleepers included. The cars were padlocked together and guards assigned to each train.
Large crowds gathered near Chicago rail stations hoping to see “sensational developments,” a newspaper said. They were disappointed. A limited train to New Orleans, including a Pullman car, was scheduled to leave at 1:35 p.m. Switchmen made up the train. The engineer backed the locomotive down the track to couple with the cars. The passengers stepped aboard. The train pulled out. A Sioux City express with a Pullman car left twenty-five minutes later, also without incident.
In the evening, with the glow of midsummer washing the sky, George Pullman took a short walk from his Prairie Avenue mansion to the Twelfth Street Station on the Illinois Central line. He wanted to watch the Diamond Special depart. The luxury train, made up entirely of Pullman cars, ran from Chicago to St. Louis every evening. Tonight it was crowded with delegates headed to the Democratic state political convention in Springfield.
The scene was tense but orderly. A dozen police officers eyed curious spectators. Pullman and a group of Illinois Central officials waited. At twenty minutes past the train’s scheduled 9:00 p.m. departure time, the conductor shouted his signal. The engine released a chuff of steam. The couplings clicked together. The cars lurched gently into motion.
Disappointed spectators turned away. George Pullman, with a taste of victory on his tongue, headed home. As dark settled on the scene, a roughly clad youth shouted, “Look out for tomorrow!”