Settling down in bed after watching the Diamond Special chug out of the station on the first evening of the boycott, George Pullman may have imagined that the whole thing had been a bluff. His friends among the railroad managers had let him know they intended to stand firm. Why would their employees risk their jobs solely for the benefit of a few ungrateful mechanics, carpenters, and seamstresses in his shops? A sympathy strike, they called it, but how far could sympathy go? In his experience, not far.
The passengers on that night’s Special soon found out differently. Their trip was interrupted before they cleared the city limits. The train stopped and started, stopped again. They could hear voices outside in the dark. The Illinois Central night switchmen were refusing to handle the all-Pullman train. Supervisors, with much confusion and delay, had to work the unfamiliar switches to direct the cars onto the proper rails.
By morning, Illinois Central switchmen were refusing all Pullman cars. The railroad company promptly dismissed any man who refused to follow orders. By midmorning, thirty-five hundred trainmen and shop workers had walked off the job, demanding that their brothers’ employment be returned and that the company stop running Pullman cars. Debs quickly offered protection to all categories of Illinois Central workers, whether ARU members or not. The boycott was taking hold. The entire line was soon paralyzed.
Illinois Central officials were surprised by the suddenness of the action. Other lines, including the Chicago & North Western, the Burlington, and the Santa Fe, soon began to have trouble moving trains as well. “If the railroad companies insist on handling Pullman cars, they will be tied up,” ARU director and secretary Sylvester Keliher announced.
Within three days, the New York Times was reporting that “the Illinois Central, Chicago Great Western, Baltimore & Ohio, Chicago and Northern Pacific, and the lines interested in the Western Indiana System are tied up completely. Seventy-five cars of perishable freight tonight lie sidetracked. One hundred carloads of bananas are between New Orleans and Chicago, and it is not thought they can be delivered.” It was not long before the heavy sweetness of rotting fruit began to pervade rail yards across the country’s midsection.
The Pullman plant in Chicago remained closed. George Howard had organized ARU locals at the Pullman shop in Wilmington, Delaware, but only a minority of the workers there had joined the strike—the rest continued to work on cars. At maintenance and repair shops in St. Louis and Ludlow, Kentucky, most men walked out on the second day of the boycott. Company managers immediately began to recruit replacements. St. Louis reopened after two weeks, Ludlow a short time later. Keeping the lucrative sleepers rolling was far more important to Pullman executives than the shutdown of the company’s manufacturing operation.
Recognizing the growing scale of the action, Eugene Debs kept pulling back on the reins. “We do not wish to interfere with trains that are already made up,” he said. Nor should members waylay cars containing passengers. “The switchmen are with us and will obey orders.” He did not intend to shut down any rail line unless its managers insisted on hauling Pullman cars.
Debs urged railroad employees not to make their own demands an issue. Of course they were eager to regain the wages they had received before recent cuts, but he asked that the matter “be postponed and our whole attention devoted to the Pullman boycott. When it is won, restoration of wages will be an easy matter.”
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To turn water and fire into motion, a locomotive depended on a firebox and smoke box, steam chest and pistons, side rods and main rods and valve rods, brakes and couplings, crosshead, flue tubes, blast pipes, superheater, journal box, and many other pieces of intricate machinery. But another complex technical system was equally critical. A proliferation of roundhouses, train yards, switches, signals, crossings, frogs, points, gates, and interlocking towers enabled men to make up, maneuver, and direct the trains along the vast web of tracks that spanned the country. Dozens of lines crisscrossed, intersected, and merged near stations and terminals. Seeing that each train found its way onto the right set of rails at the right time was a crucial skill.
Switchmen, signalmen, make-up and break-down crews, all worked to shuffle and couple together the cars. Tower men hauled on levers to throw switches to regulate traffic in a station. Shop men cleaned and repaired engines. These men were lower on the labor hierarchy than engineers, firemen, and conductors, but they could add a Pullman car to a train or cut it out. They could pull a switch or close a gate, forcing a train carrying the contraband cars to stop.
The boycott teetered on a fulcrum of action and example. Every switchman looked to his fellow switchmen, every fireman or brakeman cast a glance at what others were doing. If men around them were walking off, they might take heart and join. If not, they were inclined to hesitate. The decision to risk your livelihood and perhaps your career as a railroad man was a weighty one. Often it was the courage of a single man who set the process in motion.
On the Illinois Central, gate tender Frank G. Hackett walked away from his post in a Chicago rail yard. No one at the crossing was authorized to open the gate—a suburban train had to stop. Other trains could not proceed. More men quit.
In St. Louis, John Lally, a boss switchman on the Missouri Pacific, flatly refused to make up trains with Pullman cars. He was dismissed. Sixty switchmen walked out with him. Lally became a strike leader.
Debs encouraged the men. “There will be no settlement on any basis,” he assured them, “until each man on every road is reinstated. This is a fight to the finish.”
Thousands of individual actions were now taking effect. The vital, intricately organized system of American railroads was slowing down and, in much of the western part of the country, grinding to a halt.
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On June 27, the day after the boycott began, congressmen in Washington signaled their regard for the country’s workingmen by making Labor Day a national holiday. The day was already an official end-of-summer tradition in more than half the states. The federal representatives now declared the first Monday in September a federal holiday—Grover Cleveland signed the bill the next day.
The timing of the action led many commentators down the years to cite Labor Day as a direct legacy of the Pullman strike. In fact, the legislation had been reported out of a Senate committee months before the Pullman walkout, and no contemporary observers drew a connection to the strike, which was only beginning to receive national prominence.
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At the union’s headquarters just north of the Chicago River, Debs and the ARU executive committee stayed in session all night. Telegrams arrived almost nonstop. Local unions wanted information and guidance. Should they strike now? Later? What would decide them to act?
If a railroad ran a Pullman car or if managers dismissed a man for refusing to handle such a car, Debs replied, that was cause for the rest of the men to stop work. But he urged the officers of each local to make sure that they had enough support on their line before they declared a strike. If a few men walked out and were quickly replaced, the rest of the employees on the line would be demoralized.
Debs made clear that it was the local union officials who would make the decision. This was a practical necessity—he could not know the conditions faced by hundreds of separate organizations spread across the country. It was also a legal safeguard. The ARU had no official standing in the Pullman dispute, nor was the union recognized by any railroad. Debs wanted to protect the leadership from charges of conspiracy. The entire action, he said, was resulting from the men’s initiative, not from his orders. The decisions were made by men “who say they are bound to quit work until the troubles at Pullman are adjusted and ask us to direct them.”
In spite of his initial reluctance to commit the ARU to a boycott, Debs embraced his role as a duty and a pleasure. He was a man who liked a fight when he saw it as a struggle for justice. When he knew he was in the right, his moral certainty verged on smugness.
The Chicago Tribune labeled the union leader Dictator Debs, a title other newspapers quickly adopted. Editors pictured him as a potentate whose whim was law on the railroads. Yet both his nature and the circumstances made Debs the opposite of a dictator. He was not driving the strike. From the day the boycott began, he was riding a bucking bronco. The actions and aspirations of 150,000 men—their frustration, fear, courage, and rage—were in control.
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Having spent most of his career as an organizer and leader of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, Debs knew that he could not count on the traditional railroad unions for support. These conservative organizations had fought hard to protect their members—engineers, firemen, brakemen, and others—during a time of layoffs and pay cuts. They were not about to discard their agreements in order to aid the Pullman manufacturing workers. Their leaders viewed the ARU as a potential competitor, but they were well aware that many of their members sympathized with ARU goals and had become members of that union as well.
The railroad companies focused all of their animosity on Debs and the ARU.
“I think there is no necessity for an organization of that kind,” judged Everett St. John, manager of the Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific Railroad. “We have gotten along comfortably … with the old orders,” he asserted, meaning the brotherhoods.
Debs wired all the leaders of the old orders on the first day of the strike. He knew that most of their members would, out of pride and principle, refuse to work alongside non-union men if the railroads brought in scabs. It was in their blood and he counted on it.
The brotherhood leaders were Debs’s longtime friends and colleagues. All relayed their reluctance to get involved in the boycott. Some softened their opposition—Frank Sargent, the leader of the BLF, said he respected the strikers for putting up a fight. Others were more blunt—Miles Barrett of the Switchmen’s Mutual Aid Society said his group had no argument with the Pullman Company. Thousands of switchmen ignored his directives and joined the boycott.
Officials of the Knights of Labor, on the other hand, backed the ARU enthusiastically. On the second day of the boycott, Debs and Howard met with James Sovereign, the Grand Master Workman of the Knights. The forty-year-old Sovereign, a former marble cutter and experienced labor organizer, had urged all his members to oppose “plutocratic enslavement” and to fight “tyranny and the tyrant.” He sent wires to KOL-affiliated freight handlers and stevedores around the country, telling them to be ready to go out at a moment’s notice.
“The fight is on,” Sovereign declared. “The crisis has come. At no time in the history of the nation was the issue between labor and corporations so sharply drawn and well defined.”
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On Friday, June 29, three days into the boycott, George Pullman decided to forgo the social season in Chicago in order to repair to his summer home on the New Jersey seashore. Pullman and his servants rode a Pennsylvania Railroad train out of Chicago. His family followed the next day.
“Strike situation very serious,” his wife, Hattie, recorded in her diary. “Did not take our private car.” The worry was that the distinctive Pullman “varnish” would attract attention from strikers. Hattie, Florence, Harriett, and George Jr. traveled in a special car hooked to a Pennsylvania Railroad train. The departure was accomplished quietly, with the Pullmans evading the journalists camped outside their mansion. Guards took up posts to police the property.
While the railroad boycott swept over the country, Pullman, ensconced in his seaside mansion, made a show of his nonchalance. He commuted to New York as usual. He kept in close touch with Thomas Wickes and other company executives, but he publicly showed no sign of concern. He followed the course of events through his many contacts among railroad directors.
Wealth often carries with it an underlying dread. Below his placid surface, Pullman was subject to fits of nervousness. During the strikes that had marked the eight-hour movement in the 1880s, he had written to Hattie: “My anxiety is very great although it is said that I appear very cool and unconcerned.”
Now he shared the worries of America’s propertied class. Like many, he sensed that what the country was facing was not a simple demand for a few dollars more in a paycheck but a concerted effort by workingmen to overturn society and put themselves in the driver’s seat. He was determined that it would not happen.
“This trouble has now outgrown our jurisdiction,” he observed, insisting that the strike in his shop was merely a”subsidiary feature” of the developing conflict. The ARU boycott, he declared, was “pernicious, destructive to order in society, and in truth anarchistic.”
Anarchism, a political philosophy with deep historical roots, was frequently conflated with anarchy, which implied chaos, disorder, and violent action. During the crisis, the editors of hostile newspapers—most of the dailies in Chicago and across the country—hurled the slur of “anarchy” against the railroad workers and their leaders. Soon it would be voiced even by the attorney general of the United States.