Although Debs had started that Saturday, June 30, feeling events were proceeding satisfactorily, by midday he sensed a change in the tone of the action. Maybe it was the accumulated impatience of the strikers. Maybe it was the weather—temperatures in Chicago pushed into the high eighties that day, with occasional rumbles of thunder. Whatever the cause, the mood—not just in Chicago—grew darker and more ominous all day.
For Debs, the main business of the morning was a meeting with officials of Chicago’s Trades and Labor Assembly. They gathered in Ulrich’s Hall to show support for the ARU and to discuss the potential for coordinated action. Enthusiasm for the boycott verged on euphoria as hundreds of union representatives expressed their elation at its progress.
Although the gathering had the flavor of a pep rally, the boycott’s success raised a question. Was this the time for more unions to join in? Did the boycott represent the great crisis of industrialism that some had long predicted? Should working people across the city and the nation unite to tear down, once and for all, the plutocratic capitalist system?
Speakers followed each other on the platform. They raged against the hiring of private armed forces by the railroads. A representative of the American Federation of Labor called George Pullman a czar more vile than any in Russia. Another orator said this was the greatest battle for human rights in history. The announcement that the Rock Island line was entirely tied up brought an eruption of cheers.
George Howard took the stage to declare that the railroads could not stand the losses they were enduring. Five lines were close to negotiating peace. The companies were clearly violating their franchises by refusing to supply transportation to the public as required by their charters. Their insistence that Pullman cars be attached even to trains that did not normally include them violated the law.
Fanny Kavanaugh, an ally of Jane Addams and a prime mover of the Illinois Women’s Alliance, took an important role in shaping the resolutions that the labor representatives passed. She proposed they call on Governor Altgeld to demand that railroad officials run their trains without Pullman cars within twenty-four hours or have their charters forfeited and the lines taken over by the state.
The representatives demanded to hear from Debs. He mounted the podium, sweating in the sultry heat. In the days before microphone amplification, the ability to project speech was important. Debs, an inveterate self-improver, had applied himself to the techniques of elocution and the principles of oratory. He talked in pictures and parables, offered visions rather than statistics. He had learned to enunciate, to explode his vowels and control his pitch. His speaking style was gymnastic—he threw out his rangy arms, pointed with his bony finger, pounded home his message.
It was absolutely certain, he said, that labor would prevail. This was not a fight of the American Railway Union alone, but of all the men on the roads. The railroad directors “for once will feel the full power of organized labor.” The strike was a first step toward government ownership of the railroads, the telegraph companies, and any other monopolies that scorned the public good.
“It no longer turns on the question of Pullman cars.” The struggle had gone beyond the point of any armistice. “They are going to import scabs,” he predicted. “They will employ some miserable persons to set fire to a few old box cars as a pretense for calling out the militia.”
But workers would remain united. They would bring to bear their mighty weapon, the withholding of labor. “There will not be a man left to sweep the streets of Chicago.” He was sure that the General Managers’ Association would fall within a fortnight. A soldier of the Coxeyite armies rose to nominate Debs for president of the United States in the next election.
The participants resolved that the unions of the assembly be prepared to call out their members in the coming week if such an action was deemed necessary to support the railroad men. Debs accepted the potent threat with the provision that they not strike until called upon.
Union men, a newspaper said, “have caught strike fever.” It was widely feared that the trade union members would not wait for ARU approval but would soon initiate a general strike in Chicago. “The ultimate disaster which is bound to follow,” a New York Times reporter declared, “is sufficient in appearance to cause the most courageous to shudder.”
* * *
That weekend, journalists were estimating that railroads covering two-thirds of the nation had been completely tied up or seriously impaired. Tens of thousands of men were continuing to walk out.
The struggle had so far been a contest between the American Railway Union and the nation’s railroad corporations as represented by the General Managers’ Association. If that had remained the contest, the outcome was uncertain, although the union was thought by many to have the edge. But on that muggy Saturday, a new element entered the equation.
Many assumed that in a controversy between two private entities—the railroads and the union, both acting within their rights under the law—the government would serve as a neutral umpire, maintaining order and enforcing statutes but otherwise staying out of the matter. Grover Cleveland had other ideas.
When forming his cabinet, Cleveland had asked Richard Olney, a railroad attorney with no political experience, to become his attorney general. Olney agreed on the condition that he be allowed to continue representing his clients while in office. He had served as corporate counsel for the Boston & Maine Railroad for the past ten years and, along with George Pullman, was still a director of that company. He continued to supplement his $8,000 government salary with the $10,000 he received as counsel to the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad. He also sat on the boards of directors of the Vanderbilts’ New York Central system and the Santa Fe line.
Cleveland saw no conflict of interest in the arrangement, but the San Francisco Call noted that the attorney general had “not shown any disposition to quarrel with the corporations he formerly served and which, so far as the public knows, he still continues to serve.”
Olney was the son of an upper-class Boston family and had been a brilliant student at Brown and Harvard Law. He was said never to have had direct contact with any member of the working class except his own servants. He had disowned his daughter for marrying a lowly dentist.
A cold, gruff individual of fifty-eight, he sported a walrus mustache similar to Cleveland’s. His official portrait showed a pudgy, neckless man with arms crossed in a defiant, protective gesture—a historian wrote that he “raised truculence to an art form.” His thirty-five years of practicing law had left him devoted to property rights and to the worthiness of corporations.
Although he had only met Cleveland once before joining the cabinet, Olney became his trusted adviser. His stubborn inflexibility lent him an aura of authority.
Viewing the Pullman strike and boycott through his railroad-colored spectacles, Olney saw no merit whatever in the position of the American Railway Union. Rather than seek a negotiated solution, he was determined to throw the weight of the government on the side of the GMA and break the strike, by force if necessary. In the ARU he saw a more dangerous version of the fractious marchers of Coxey’s Army, whose shenanigans continued to keep him awake nights. His experience that spring had taught him that a muscular response, in the form of court orders and troops, was the best antidote to disorder. He viewed the ARU boycott as an attack on the way of life of the responsible, well-to-do people of the country—his people. He made it his personal mission to bring the union to its knees.
Olney’s man on the scene in Chicago was U.S. Attorney Thomas Milchrist. Two days earlier, on Thursday, June 28, Milchrist had sat in on a GMA meeting and assured the managers of Olney’s support. He had asked them to provide the names of any strikers guilty of interfering with the mails, promising to expedite warrants for their arrest. The direct collusion between the government and the managers had begun.
Having served almost two decades as a state prosecutor in a remote western Illinois prairie town, Milchrist was suspected by his superiors of having hayseeds in his cuffs. As the scope and intensity of the boycott increased during the week, Olney wanted a more forceful leader for the government’s anti-strike effort. On Saturday, without consulting Milchrist, he appointed Edwin Walker to be the special U.S. attorney in Chicago. Although ostensibly Milchrist’s assistant, Walker was to take over command of the federal response to the boycott.
With Walker’s appointment, Olney dropped all pretense of impartiality. The attorney had spent the past twenty-four years as counsel for the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railroad. His law partner was a member of the General Managers’ Association’s legal committee. The sixty-one-year-old Walker was well connected in Chicago political circles and had served as counsel for the Columbian Exposition.
Walker immediately began to work closely with the GMA to cripple the strike, communicating directly with Olney, sometimes by coded telegram. Lawyer Clarence Darrow said of this blatant partisanship: “The government might with as good grace have appointed the attorney for the American Railway Union to represent the United States.”
Walker’s appointment offered evidence that the government was going beyond a simple bias toward one party in the great upheaval. The railroads, through their agents Olney and Walker, were now calling the shots. The corporations had been handed the power to prosecute American citizens with the goal of putting down the strike.
In his letter of instructions to Walker, Olney was blunt. He focused not on restoring law and order, not on compromise, but on stopping the lawful effort of the railroad workers to pressure their employers. “It has seemed to me that if the rights of the United States were vigorously asserted in Chicago, the origin and center of the demonstration,” he wrote, “the result would be to make it a failure everywhere else.” “It” meant the ARU boycott. Privately, he spoke of crushing the strike.
Olney wrote that it was “advisable not merely to rely on warrants against persons actually guilty of the offense of obstructing United States mails, but to go to a court of equity and secure restraining orders which shall have the effect of preventing any attempt to commit the offense.” He was warming to the idea of using federal courts as an ally in the war against the union.
* * *
Olney understood that he could employ the government’s duty to safeguard the mail as an effective tool against any railroad strike. Because mail cars were normally hauled by passenger trains, the issue was sure to become entangled with the boycott of Pullman cars.
The rapid delivery of letters and parcels held an importance then that is hard to appreciate in an age of electronic communication. Almost all business communication, as well as private correspondence, relied on the postal system. One of the important effects of the spread of railroads had been to speed and extend the delivery of mail. Clerks on special cars picked up letters from small towns by hooking bags on the fly. They sorted mail while speeding down the tracks.
The U.S. postal system was seen as sacrosanct. Obstruction of mail was a federal crime. Debs had given specific instructions that all mail trains were to be allowed to move without delay. In the first days of the boycott, some mail was held up in the chaos. Twenty-six mail trains were delayed in Cairo, Illinois. Others were stopped in Indiana, Idaho, and San Francisco.
Postal authorities complained to the union. Debs responded that the men were not obstructing anything. They had simply withdrawn their labor, as was their right. He pointed out that most mail was getting through and that only a few mail cars had been rerouted. A postal supervisor confirmed that there was no buildup of undelivered mail in Chicago.
Nevertheless, both the railroad managers and the government saw the issue of obstruction as a fruitful pretext for attacking the ARU. The union’s position was that no train carrying mail would be molested, as long as it was free of Pullman cars. The railroads complained that leaving the sleepers off scheduled trains would violate their contracts with George Pullman. They had to attach them. The fact was that those contracts in no way obligated the railroads to haul Pullman cars. Legally, their inclusion was entirely at the discretion of the roads’ managers.
That was not all. The railroads normally attached mail cars directly behind the tender. Supervisors began to couple them to the backs of trains so that if Pullman cars were detached, the mail car would be as well. They began including mail cars on all suburban passenger trains as well, a move that brought those trains under federal protection.
Even government attorney Milchrist was admitting on Saturday that “all regular mail trains, except those on the Great Western, have gone out to-day about on regular time.” Debs hoped he could keep the mails moving and thus deny his opponents a weapon to use against the strike.
* * *
Olney could easily have arranged to run a mail train free of Pullman cars down every line daily to assure the timely delivery of letters and parcels. That was not his goal. Like the railroad managers, he wanted the mail to be held up. He had discarded any idea of mediation. “I feel that the true way of dealing with the matter is by a force which is overwhelming and prevents any attempt at resistance.” He directed the chief U.S. Marshal in Chicago, John W. Arnold, to begin amassing an armed federal force. Arnold swore in four hundred deputies.
Sparkling with names like Wyatt Earp, Bill Hickok, and Bat Masterson, the myth of the U.S. Marshals Service was already the stuff of dime novels. Those men, who sometimes straddled the line between peace officer and outlaw, had been the guardians of order in the western territories yet to achieve statehood. Most new deputies in Chicago were drawn from the hordes of unemployed men in the city, chosen more for their brawn than for their understanding of federal law.
Arnold would ultimately recruit five thousand marshals in Chicago. He sent them out in groups, mostly by stagecoach, to suburban railroad facilities in Blue Island, Riverdale, and Hammond to guard mail cars. Many more would be deployed in other jurisdictions across the country.
The marshals were, in effect, strikebreakers. At first, Arnold signed up what the railroad managers called “idlers.” Then they convinced him to select deputies from the ranks of their own men. Railroad supervisors would select their strongest and most dependable employees, swear them in, give them a revolver, and pin on their chests the stars issued by the U.S. Marshal’s office. The men, who made up a majority of the federal force in Chicago, continued to be paid by the companies. They constituted a private army authorized to make arrests and use deadly force.
During the strike, these marshals, aided by police, arrested about eight hundred men in Chicago. In some cases, strikers were arrested “because they refused to turn switches when told to” or “refused to get on an engine and fire an engine.”
The idea of turning over the authority of the government to a police force whose clear purpose was to serve a private interest veered far from American ideals and legal traditions. On several occasions, Chicago police officers had to arrest deputy federal marshals for “indiscriminate shooting.”
In Colorado, the deputies were instructed to ignore local law officers and arrest strikers without warrant. Governor Davis H. Waite protested that this amounted to “a private army” intent on “waging an active war in Colorado without any declaration thereof by the United States.” The Justice Department ignored him.
Attorney General Olney, hardly given to Wild West romanticism, was skeptical of the effectiveness of these amateur lawmen. The Chicago Herald described them as “a low, contemptible set of men.” A reporter for the Record said he saw more deputy marshals than strikers drunk in the streets. Even Edwin Walker would later admit to Olney the men were “worse than useless.” For the time being, they were the face of the federal government confronting the strikers.
* * *
Eugene Debs had yet to appreciate the new role the government was assuming, but he was becoming more and more aware of the depth of anger prevalent among his own men. He gazed out on a hot, dry emotional landscape ready to burst into flame, and he knew it was up to him to arrest any spark that might ignite a conflagration.
Men of the Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific line, the first road to bridge the Mississippi River forty years earlier, struck at seven that Saturday morning. The railroad managers, not expecting the stoppage, were taken by surprise. The road had extensive tracks through Chicago and soon found its switches spiked and some of its coaches being struck by stones as they moved along the rails.
Early on Saturday, trouble also began to brew in the vast network of rail yards and intersecting tracks south of Chicago. Lines from the east making the turn around the bottom of Lake Michigan met there with other roads from Springfield, St. Louis, and Kansas City. The area had become increasingly urban and industrial since George Pullman built his model town fourteen years earlier. In industrial communities like Riverdale and Blue Island, just south and west of the Pullman factory, great stretches of parallel tracks filling hundreds of acres were used for making up trains and for switching and storing cars. Hammond, across the Indiana border to the east, was dense with more tracks and rail facilities.
In Riverdale, a Pan Handle freight train was taken over by strikers and the cars removed. The crew and engineer were told to man what was left—an engine and caboose—and get out. The strikers said that they would kill anyone who tried to run a Pullman car down the line.
Evidence of frayed tempers began to reach Debs. In Blue Island, just south of Chicago, a mob grew enraged when two men operated a switch engine to move freight cars. Members of the crowd attacked James Stewart, who had recently arrived from Nebraska to take the place of a striking worker. They pulled him down from the locomotive and tried to drag him to a nearby saloon. He broke free and returned to the engine, bleeding and limping on a bruised foot. His companion fled and relayed his resignation by telephone.
A telegram from downstate said that in Cairo, a railroad division superintendent had argued with the switchmen’s union president, who accused him of breaking his word by running a New Orleans train with six Pullman cars attached when the union had agreed to only two. They came to blows. The union man knocked the superintendent down and he had to be taken to a nearby hotel in a carriage to be treated by a physician.
A report from St. Paul detailed another tense situation. A switchman making up a train was hit by a rock, then beaten. At one in the afternoon, strikers tried to induce flagman Thomas Cole to quit. He refused. They told him that if he did not clear out he would be killed. Cole drew a revolver and said if they tried violence they were the ones who would die. Strikers jumped him from behind and knocked him down while others kicked him in the face. A policeman ran down the tracks and drove off the assailants. Cole was carried to the roundhouse and then to a hospital.
As the hot day progressed, violence continued to bubble up. Late in the afternoon, a train made up of three coaches, two Pullman sleepers, and a mail car approached Blue Island from the north. The yardmaster was guarding the switch that would allow the train to proceed. A switchman named James Murvin pushed him aside and threw the switch in the opposite direction. The massive engine, traveling slowly, left the tracks, careened down a small embankment, and came to rest at a forty-five-degree angle. Deputy sheriffs arrested Murvin. Although no injuries resulted, the derailment tore up the tracks and the disabled cars blocked the main line.
* * *
That evening, the tension even got the best of George Howard. Addressing a gathering of Chicago & North Western Railway men, he told them that the general managers, those “bladder-belly bosses,” were on the verge of breaking. “They can’t find ‘scabs’ enough to take your places.”
He referred to George Pullman as “a hypocrite and the rottenest-hearted individual who ever stood on American soil.” Responding to raucous cheers, he shouted, “I’d like to see him hung!” Shouts of “Let’s hang him!” echoed in the hall.
* * *
With the arrival of darkness, the engine man who operated the electric plant at Blue Island shut off the power and joined the strike. The arc lights that glared across the yard went dark. Strikers moved through the shadows. The occasional flash of lightning from a summer thunderstorm scalded the scene.
A few minutes later, the Diamond Special, the luxury train to St. Louis, was just approaching Grand Crossing. The all-Pullman train had managed to leave Chicago and was close to clearing the environs. The engineer had made his way carefully through the city and suburbs. He eyed each crossing and switch and watched for debris on the rails. An armed special officer named McConfey was riding in the cab with him in case of trouble.
The engineer suddenly felt the sickening sensation of the engine slipping off the rails. Someone had removed the spikes from a long section of the line. The weight of the engine pushed the steel rails apart. For a moment, the massive machine continued to bump along the ties. The engineer heaved on the brake.
Passengers lurched in their seats. Place settings crashed to the floor in the elegant dining car. Muffled screams could be heard. The engine’s momentum kept it moving another hundred yards, but the driver’s quick action prevented the train from veering into the ditch. The tender crashed into the engine from behind, pinning McConfey’s ankle. The special officer was trapped until the crew finally freed him and rushed him to St. Luke’s Hospital. His foot was nearly severed.
* * *
Across the country, Americans awoke on Sunday morning, July 1, to the news of the strike’s ominous turn.
“LAW IS TRAMPLED ON,” the Chicago Tribune declared. “With the coming of darkness last night,” it went on, “Dictator Debs’ strikers threw off the mask of law and order and began the commission of acts of lawlessness and violence.”
The meeting of the trade unions was seen as especially ominous. The ARU had shown how a concerted effort could tie up one mighty railroad after another. If other workers joined in, the prospect was utter chaos.
New York Times editors declared it the “GREATEST STRIKE IN HISTORY.”