“Satisfactory.” That was Eugene Debs’s modest appraisal of the boycott’s progress on Saturday morning, June 30, four days into the struggle. In fact, he was thrilled at the response of the men and at the widespread tie-up of the railroads. The union he had spent the last year building was rising and flexing its muscles. LABOR LEADERS ARE JUBILANT, the Chicago Tribune reported.
Not just labor leaders. Philosopher and education reformer John Dewey, who had recently assumed a professorship at the University of Chicago, was also enchanted to watch history unfolding before him. After speaking to a strike organizer in Michigan, he reported to his sister that “my nerves were more thrilled than they had been for years.” He was impressed by the man’s “absolute fanatic sincerity.” Dewey was sure that this “widespread union of men about a common interest” was “a great thing & the beginning of a greater.”
The American Railway Union had developed largely as an underground organization. Because so many members were workers in the railroad shops and yards—not engineers, firemen, or conductors—industry observers underestimated the group’s power to hobble the railroads. Now the ARU was emerging into the open and its impact startled the nation. The boycott was bringing rail traffic to a standstill in large parts of the country and drawing more than two hundred thousand workers into the conflict, the most widespread coordinated work stoppage in American history.
Almost every western railroad reported at least a thousand men on strike. Both railroad managers and union leaders were surprised at the eagerness of the men to quit work in support of the Pullman employees. One railroad after another had to curtail service. Passengers were stranded, commuters could not get to work, freight shipments ground to a halt.
Messengers delivered a stream of telegrams to Debs, more than two hundred in a single day. He would consider for a moment what each added to the jigsaw puzzle of the boycott, then dictate a reply to go back over the wire.
Two hundred brakemen and the same number of firemen and engineers on the Chicago Great Western had defied their traditional brotherhoods, joined the ARU, and walked off the job. In St. Paul, “the community was startled” by the suddenness of the strike.
Strikers had brought to a halt the entire Northern Pacific system where Hogan’s men had hijacked a train in April. No engines were passing Livingston, Montana, in either direction. The action was being felt in Missoula—tourists on their way to visit Yellowstone National Park were stranded.
On the Santa Fe line, “not a wheel is moving on the entire New Mexico Division.” Twelve hundred cars were sitting idle. Passenger service from Sacramento to San Francisco had ceased. In Oakland, Southern Pacific officials were said to be offering a $1,000 bonus and lifetime employment to engineers who remained loyal. There were no takers.
The contest in St. Louis, a newspaper reported, was “in a delightful state of uncertainty.” No one knew when or if the boycott would start there. Uncertainty was the norm. The strike had failed to take hold in Cincinnati and all trains were on schedule. No, another wire read, the situation was serious in Ohio. No trains with Pullman cars were moving.
By Friday of that first week, the General Managers’ Association had reported that the situation was deteriorating and the effect of the boycott “growing more serious daily.” GMA strike captain John Egan admitted that the railroads were losing $250,000 a day and had already taken a hit of $1 million. The strikers, he pointed out, had themselves lost many tens of thousands in wages.
In a bad sign for the railroads, men brought in as substitutes at the beginning of the boycott were losing heart. Scabs on the Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Chicago & St. Louis Railroad, known as the Pan Handle Route, had been induced to quit work. In one group of thirty-two substitutes, five had joined the union and promised to convince their fellows if given protection.
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Not all the wires brought Debs good news. Local ARU men in Omaha refused to strike—Debs threatened to cancel their charter. Engineers on the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad had managed to get trains through Pueblo and Salida by convincing the porters who had been denied ARU membership to couple Pullman cars.
As Debs had warned at the convention, the ARU members had weakened their cause by barring African Americans. “I can see no good reason why the colored people should be concerned in this struggle at all,” wrote A. E. Wilson, publisher of the Chicago Bugle and Africo-American Patriot. He pointed out that “last week the A.R.U. snubbed us by refusing to admit colored men as members.” He advised black workers to “hold themselves aloof” from the strike.
Other black journalists labeled the strike a “white man’s war.” They accused the ARU of fighting for the “dignity of labor while excluding the downtrodden Negro.” In Chicago, African American workers formed an Anti-Strikers Railroad Union to fill the positions of white strikers with unemployed blacks. The secretary of the African-American League of East St. Louis wrote to the General Managers’ Association to offer two hundred black workers to replace striking freight handlers in that city.
Railroad managers had assumed that the hordes of unemployed workers in the eastern states would make union inroads there difficult. In rail hubs like Baltimore, Boston, and New York, Pullman cars were running without trouble.
But Debs had sent a dozen organizers eastward two days after the boycott began to try to infect men along the seaboard with strike fever. The union announced a plan to tie up eastern roads as soon as sufficient members were recruited. The Baltimore & Ohio, which already had ARU men aboard, was the first target. ARU representatives went to Jersey City to persuade switchmen and trainmen of the huge Pennsylvania Railroad system to join the boycott. When Monday came, the union, said to have five thousand sympathizers in western Pennsylvania, would ask railroad men in Pittsburgh to stop handling Pullman cars.
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Federal circuit court judge William Howard Taft of Ohio had made deputies of trainmen to help managers operate trains on the Queen & Crescent Route out of Cincinnati. “The starvation of a nation,” the future president stated, “cannot be a lawful purpose of a combination.” He said that the “gigantic character of the conspiracy of the American Railway Union staggers the imagination.”
The affair had grown far beyond the Pullman works. “Mr. Pullman is not being considered in the controversy nor will he be,” John Egan said. He told the press that he thought the strikers capable of anything. “The situation is becoming critical and in a few hours we will be in the midst of a reign of physical violence.”
The New York Times declared that the strike had “assumed the proportions of the greatest battle between labor and capital that has ever been inaugurated in the United States.”
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In Chicago, the first days of the strike had brought the prospect of trouble to the Union Stock Yard. A cutoff of rail service to “Packingtown” would throw twenty thousand butchers and meatpackers out of work. The nation’s largest source of meat would be shut down. A union official was reported to have said that the plan was “to starve the people of the East and bring ’em in line.”
The Chicago Tribune had called the Union Stock Yard the “eighth wonder of the world.” This enormous reeking warren of pens, chutes, and slaughterhouses in the center of Chicago’s South Side had opened just after the Civil War. Meatpackers like Philip Armour and Gustavus Swift now used assembly-line logistics and cheap labor to kill as many as twenty-five hundred steers and seven thousand hogs every day. The operation, which processed three-quarters of the nation’s meat, was America’s first big step toward the industrialization of food.
The yard was a city in itself. Twenty separate rail lines ran through and around the great complex to bring livestock in and haul dressed beef and pork out in cars packed with blocks of ice. “We have in our power to cut off all food supplies from Chicago,” the chairman of the stockyard strike committee said, “and we will do it, if necessary, to win this contest.”
Packingtown was both a boon and a bane to Chicago. An engine of prosperity, it also contributed an effluvium of rancid smells that wafted over whole neighborhoods. The continual bellowing, bleating, and squealing of doomed animals added to the city’s discordant music. The tenements around the yards were among the worst in the city, filled with slaughterhouse workers and poor immigrants. Many of the butchers employed by the meat companies had complaints of their own about pay, hours, and working conditions.
By Saturday, the disruption of rail traffic had virtually shut down the vast abattoir, throwing many hog stickers and meat cutters out of work. Supervisors stored as much meat as possible in ice houses, but without deliveries of coal to run the engines that manufactured the ice, the carcasses of steers and hogs would soon begin to stink. The Illinois Humane Society sent inspectors to examine the trainloads of cattle sitting motionless on Illinois Central tracks near Forty-Third Street. The beeves were packed into cars without food or water under a relentless sun. The Society reported great suffering.
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It was not just animals that were suffering. Across the country, the effects of the boycott were beginning to be felt, and citizens’ fascination was turning to distress. Particularly in the West, many communities were utterly dependent on the railroads. Horses and wagons could not begin to fill the void. As Jacob Coxey had pointed out, most of the nation’s roads were rutted dirt tracks.
Food, fuel, and friends arrived by rail. Milk that was not quickly loaded onto refrigerated cars spoiled. Vegetables rotted. During the first days of the boycott, the Illinois Central began refusing perishable loads. By the end of the week, the line was no longer taking freight of any kind. The Baltimore & Ohio also stopped accepting perishables.
The price of provisions across the country quickly jumped to “astonishing figures,” a newspaper reported. The price of meat and vegetables doubled. It was predicted that the price of all foodstuffs would skyrocket the following week. This during a withering depression when many families were struggling to afford a meal. With Chicago baking in eighty-degree heat, the price of ice jumped from $2.50 to $10.00 a ton.
The strike locked up the Chicago and Calumet Terminal, cutting off fuel oil to the Standard Oil plant and the Chicago Sugar Refinery. Two thousand men lost their jobs when the sugar plant curtailed operations.
In northern California, fruit growers and canners were worried. Without a rapid restoration of rail transport, the ripening crop would become worthless. In West Superior, Wisconsin, two flour mills, dependent on the Northern Pacific and the Wisconsin Central, had to close. Three coal docks could no longer operate.
In Milwaukee, brewers could send out only half their usual daily production. Pabst planned to charter a steamboat to take beer to Chicago if the tie-up continued.
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None of this had been the intended result of the boycott. Debs and the other ARU leaders had envisioned a struggle over the inclusion or cutting out of Pullman cars. They had not expected the railroad managers to declare all-out war or to risk bringing about such a profound impact on the nation’s population.
The effect on passengers in particular preyed on Debs’s mind. The traveling public was growing fearful. In Chicago, a Baltimore & Ohio train had been pelted with rocks. The missiles smashed windows and injured several passengers. Police could not cope with the situation. Many patrons began to avoid trains—the Pennsylvania Limited train pulled out of Chicago twenty minutes late with only thirty Pullman passengers aboard.
On that first Saturday of the boycott, a Pan Handle train from New York was halted by a crowd of more than a thousand strikers in Hammond, Indiana, an industrial and residential city that abutted Chicago’s South Side. While the crew argued with the rioters, many of the passengers climbed down from the Pullman cars and made their way to Chicago as best they could.
Debs was concerned that public support for the strikers might give way to sympathy for passengers. On some stopped trains, women and children were left for up to twenty hours with no water or food. He gave orders to union men not to interfere with passenger trains already on the road. But the dark green Pullman cars were a tempting target for strikers’ anger.
The tie-up of travel produced serious inconveniences. A man trying to reach his desperately ill child in Chicago found himself stranded in Decatur, Illinois. ARU members manned a handcar to help a woman and child from Ellensburg, Washington, travel four hundred miles to reach the bedside of her dying husband in Idaho.
Jane Addams was one of many citizens whose life the strike disrupted. Her sister Mary, who had helped raise her after their mother’s death, was gravely ill in a Kenosha, Wisconsin, sanitarium. Jane, occupied with her duties at Hull House and her attempts to mediate the strike, could only get away briefly for visits. When Mary’s condition worsened, she rushed to Kenosha, using her connections with the strikers to be allowed passage on a mail train. Mary’s husband, hampered by the strike, was not able to reach Kenosha for another day. By then, his wife was unconscious from a brain hemorrhage. She died the next day.
At 10:00 a.m. on Saturday, June 30, strikers in southern Illinois stopped a train carrying a troop of militiamen. It turned out that the passengers were thirty members of a volunteer Zouave unit, decked out in colorful pantaloons and fezzes. They were already late for a drill contest in Memphis and would now have to search out alternative transportation.
Later that day, the Hammond strikers stopped an express train from Louisville. They uncoupled the Pullman sleeper and dining car and pushed them by hand onto a side track. Passengers protested but had no choice but to climb into the remaining day coaches and find standing room. Strikers boarded the disabled dining car and availed themselves of a banquet, a newspaper reported, consisting of “Mr. Pullman’s bouillon, porterhouse steaks, ice cream, Apollinaris water, champagne and other good things.”
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More than anything else, Debs was worried that the strike would descend into violence. He understood that it was the peaceful nature of the Great Northern action that had given the union its opportunity for a victory there.
“I appeal to the striking men everywhere to refrain from any act of violence,” he pleaded. “Let there be no interference with the affairs of the several companies involved, and above all, let there be no act of depredation. A man who will destroy property or violate law is an enemy and not a friend to the cause of labor.”
Up to that point, the strike had been remarkably peaceful. There had been some minor sabotage—switches jammed open, padlocks on car couplings forced, stones hurled by vandals—but no widespread disorder. The crowds of strikers and sympathizers had been vociferous but not unruly. For the most part, strikers had tried to talk replacements over to their side rather than intimidate or assault them. All of this was gratifying to Debs.
John Egan of the GMA, on the other hand, seemed to relish the possibility of disorder. “I do not see how the police will be able to battle such an extended evil,” he said. He too knew that Americans’ nightmares included keen memories of the labor unrest of the past. The violence of the 1877 rail strike was still vivid to many. The bombing at Haymarket Square in 1886 had been stamped into the consciousness of Chicagoans. And echoes of the gunfight that accompanied the 1892 Homestead steel strike had barely died away.
The railroad managers pointed to the dangerous potential of the crowds that were gathering at various rail yards and switching points in Chicago and elsewhere. They demanded that the authorities act. Neither Chicago mayor Hopkins nor police superintendent Michael Brennan thought there was cause for alarm. Cook County sheriff James H. Gilbert recruited some extra deputies but reported no violence in his jurisdiction around Chicago’s outskirts.
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With summer, the marching drums of Coxey’s industrial armies had become muted. The Pullman strike was now the big news. The traveling bands of the unemployed elicited only a paragraph or two on the inside pages.
Yet the murmur of their protest kept the nation on edge. The men would not give up. Coxeyites had gained free passage on more than fifty trains across the West, sometimes simply riding boxcars en masse, sometimes commandeering a whole train. Where one newspaper said it came down to “law or anarchism,” another pointed a finger at corporate directors, asserting that stealing trains was insignificant when “so-called railroad kings steal entire railroads.”
A manager of the Rock Island Railroad described Charles Kelley as “a man of brains and character and great determination.” He said it was sad to find so many “respectable, well-meaning men reduced to such desperate straits in this country.”
The men of Kelley’s contingent had walked 130 miles from Council Bluffs eastward to Des Moines. One of the recruits who had joined them looking for adventure was an eighteen-year-old Californian named Jack London. The author was impressed by the warm welcome that awaited the bedraggled men at each town.
“Deputations of little girls and maidens came out to meet us,” he wrote. “And the good citizens turned out by hundreds, locked arms, and marched with us down their main streets. It was circus day when we came to town.”
But having reached the Iowa state capital, they were not about to march anymore. Kelley saw that if they took boats down the Des Moines River they could reach the Mississippi, then the Ohio. Navigating eastward to Wheeling they would find themselves only three hundred miles from Washington, D.C.
Des Moines citizens donated money, lumber, rope, and caulking. Kelley’s men built more than a hundred eighteen-foot-long flat-bottom boats. On Wednesday, May 9, 1894, a good part of Des Moines’s population came out to watch nine hundred men embark on what London called “our colossal picnic.” Kelley’s army had become a navy. Twelve days later, they were on the banks of the mighty Mississippi.
They continued to struggle eastward, determined to bring their message to Washington. Along the way, thousands of citizens cheered them on. They landed north of Cairo and prepared to head up the Ohio River. Relying on donations, they hired a tug and two barges. They reached Cincinnati. Labor unions there helped them continue on another hundred miles to Portsmouth, Ohio. By this time Kelley had taken ill. He sent his men on to reach Washington any way they could, promising to join them there later.
The men of the industrial armies accomplished something by standing for something. Critics questioned how these jobless crusaders, a portion of them inveterate hoboes, could represent respectable workers. But they did. They personified the underlying feeling of dread that afflicted so many industrial wage earners. Every workingman in the country knew that a shift in the market or the whim of a supervisor could leave him unemployed and destitute. The Coxeyites were a living demand that something had to change.
“These men,” a reporter for the Seattle Press-Times wrote, “after their own fashion are building more wisely than they know.” They were pressuring a reluctant, laissez-faire government to take more responsibility for the nation’s economy and for the well-being of its citizens. It could be called paternalism, or it could be called simple decency, but many Americans were inspired to give it consideration.
“This movement,” Jacob Coxey said, “has attracted the attention of the country as nothing else in the way of labor agitation has ever done, and nothing else without violence ever could have done.”
In the process, his followers established the march on Washington as a typically American form of protest. It would become with time a venerable tradition. Citizens would march for women’s suffrage in 1913, for relief from hard times in 1932, for civil rights in 1963, and for other causes down the years.
Editors of the Tacoma Daily News told readers that they had reason to be proud of Coxey’s Army, whose members upheld American values. “These men who feel themselves wronged do not propose to kill and overthrow—they do not march with guns—they do not threaten—they appeal—they petition—they protest—they reason.”