On Sunday, July 1, Eugene Debs rested. He was staying at Chicago’s Leland Hotel on the downtown waterfront barely a block from the Pullman Building. He shared a room with his devoted younger brother, Theodore, then twenty-nine. After the tense and frantic pace of the boycott’s early days, he needed time to regain his wind.
As he relaxed, events buoyed his natural cheerfulness. Momentum is everything in a strike. The boycott had begun on the previous Tuesday, June 26. In the five days since it had gained in extent and velocity. Tens of thousands of men had relinquished their livelihoods in order to stand up for the Pullman car builders. They had shocked the railroad managers with their unity and their determination.
To Debs, the boycott’s success validated his idea that workers organized across an entire industry could confront the consolidated interests of even the largest corporations. It had taken him years to see beyond his affection for the insular railroad brotherhoods and to embrace this far-reaching view. Now all the work he had put into his grand concept was paying off.
Samuel Gompers, the American Federation of Labor leader, would later say that he considered Debs an “emotional intellectual.” It was an apt description. Debs was incisive, informed, and able to grapple with complex, nuanced arguments. At the same time, he had a sentimental side that was typical of many in the Victorian era.
Debs later said, “I have always been partial to poets.” He admired and became friends with the young Carl Sandburg, whom he considered “one of the really great poets of our day.” Sandburg returned the compliment, declaring Debs “an artist, adventurer and sun-treader.”
Debs was also fond of cornball versification and included regular samples of doggerel in the Firemen’s Magazine. He loved the work of the “Hoosier poet” James Whitcomb Riley, famous for his children’s verse and dialect poems.
Riley and Debs had become close friends, and the poet often stayed with Debs and his wife when he visited Terre Haute. His work evoked the nostalgia and homely values that Debs found comforting. In addition to publishing the most popular books of verse of the nineteenth century, Riley regularly gave readings of his poems to large audiences. A consummate performer, he offered Debs advice on sizing up an audience and improving his oratorical skills.
“There’s nothing ’at’s patheticker than jes’ a’ bein’ rich,” Riley wrote in a line Debs especially loved. Riley praised the labor leader in a poem about “Terry Hut”:
And there’s ’Gene Debs—a man ’at stands
And jest holds out in his two hands
As warm a heart as ever beat
Betwixt here and the Jedgement Seat.
* * *
Debs’s warm heart was encouraged by the progress of the great boycott. He felt that the nation was now coming to see that none of this contention was necessary. Strikes and lockouts and boycotts were futile and old-fashioned. Arbitration had to become the modern way to settle disagreements. Harmony between labor and capital was near if only he could hold fast to the tiller, steer the ARU through this stormy sea, and navigate to a port where such matters could be settled by negotiation.
The prospects were bright. The vehemently anti-Debs Chicago Tribune admitted that “the strikers have shown an astonishing degree of strength.” The paper’s editors detailed what was to them a gloomy outlook. “There is always the cry that ‘something must be done’ to stop them,” they noted. “The trouble is that no one has been able to define the ‘something.’” The editors recognized that the breadth of the disturbance made it difficult to contain. The government could not simply lock up the striking railroad men. “You don’t want men in jail, you want them at work.”
* * *
As he left his hotel on Monday morning, July 2, Debs felt a cool breeze blowing in off Lake Michigan. The heat of the previous week had broken and the fresh air carried with it the tang of hope. He returned to work at Ulrich’s Hall with a bounce in his stride. He was unaware that the great strike was about to take a critical turn.
The ARU headquarters swarmed with activity. One telegram after another arrived, each reporting new union members and new actions. But the derailment of the Diamond Special on Saturday night worried him. Controlling the actions of tens of thousands of strikers in cities and towns across the country was difficult. Dampening the tendency of bystanders to use the strike as an excuse to riot was even more problematic.
“We want to win as becomes men,” Debs declared in a statement. “We have got the right to quit in a body, and our rights end there.” The railroad companies, he went on, had the right to hire replacement workers. Union members could not interfere with that right.
He recognized that the acts of violence and sabotage that had already occurred had begun to sour the public’s view of the union. Major rioting would inevitably lead to defeat. He asked ARU men to help identify troublemakers and see that they were arrested.
Debs was gratified that his members had, for the most part, acted in the same disciplined manner that had brought victory over the Great Northern Railway. Although they had now lost a week’s pay, they were bearing up with determination and enthusiasm. The railroads had incurred an enormous price for supporting George Pullman’s wrongheaded intransigence.
Pressure was growing on all sides. The simplest course of action was to select impartial arbitrators and let them devise an equitable solution to the issues roiling the Pullman works. How much longer could such logic be denied? On that Monday, the GMA’s John Egan admitted that railroads had been “fought to a standstill.”
* * *
Maintaining peace just in Chicago was a challenge. The city was “practically a network of railways,” the city’s police commissioner, Michael Brennan, said. Its neighborhoods were filled with “railway tracks, yards, towers, switch houses and freight houses.” Each of these facilities was a potential target for saboteurs and mobs. Rail lines snaked down streets adjacent to crowded tenements. The summer weather, which brought crowds of slum dwellers out of doors, added another element of volatility. Any rumor could flare into a spasm of violence.
The mobs that congregated in the suburban rail yards at Blue Island and other suburban facilities also worried Debs. Participants had taken to uncoupling cars, spiking switches to prevent their operation, and damaging railroad property.
The day after the boycott began, the railroad managers met with Mayor Hopkins and Superintendent Brennan to discuss the situation in Chicago. John Egan found Brennan cooperative. He reported back to his colleagues at the General Managers’ Association that the superintendent had promised to remove any officer who was negligent in his duty and to arrest strikers causing trouble along the rail lines. Hopkins was determined to resist lawlessness, but he emphasized that the police were there only to suppress disorder and protect property, not to turn switches or make up trains.
During the early days of the strike, Brennan had rushed squads around the city to extinguish outbreaks of disorder. Sometimes they found that the reports submitted by Egan were exaggerated or based only on rumor. Police officers, who were generally sympathetic to the strikers, found little to do. But as the days passed, crowds in the train yards grew more raucous and Brennan’s men were kept busy. Sheriff Gilbert, who had sworn in 250 special deputies to patrol Cook County beyond the city limits, also found his force taxed. Still, on that Monday Brennan said he was aware of no riots and that his men were equal to any emergency.
The course of the strike was prompting more and more railroad workers to join the American Railway Union. New locals were forming across the country. Each was told to set up a strike committee and forward the name of the chairman to headquarters so that ARU directors would have a point of contact. Debs sent one telegram after another assuring the men that the strike would soon be won if they stood together.
Rumors that militia or even federal troops would bring the heavy hand of the government against the strikers were worrisome, he admitted. But soldiers, although they might intimidate crowds, could not move trains. “Pay no attention to rumors,” he wired a union local in Clinton, Iowa. “We are gaining ground everywhere. Don’t get scared by troops or otherwise. Stand pat. None will return to work until all return.”
* * *
In California, the pervasive hatred of the railroads provided the tinder-dry landscape through which the flame of the strike spread. Frank Norris, a Chicago native who had settled on the West Coast, later wrote a novel called The Octopus. He called the railroad corporation a “leviathan, with tentacles of steel.” He cataloged the many sins of the Southern Pacific Railroad, whose trunk line ran from New Orleans, through the Southwest, and up the Pacific coast. Its owners had solidified their monopoly by absorbing the Central Pacific, the western portion of the original transcontinental line.
Norris’s novel reflected more than two decades of suspicion and animosity that diverse segments of the American public felt toward the railroads. The hatred had begun with the financial flimflams that accompanied the building of the first transcontinental line in the 1860s. The railroads received land grants, loans, and subsidies from the public purse. The owners formed construction companies that overcharged for work done, funneling government money back to the railroads, their promoters, and pliable politicians. When one of these companies, known as Crédit Mobilier, was exposed in 1872 as the “King of Frauds,” the resulting scandal besmirched the vice president of the United States, the speaker of the House, and numerous senators and congressmen.
The railroad corporations had used their dominance to wrest special privileges from the government with no corresponding public control. They distorted competition, not only by merging with competing railroads and forming pools with potential rivals, but also by fixing rates to favor one shipper, one product, or one area of the country over another.
Public resentment of the railroads translated into support for the Pullman boycott. By one account, nine of ten businessmen in California were in sympathy with the strikers. An opponent had labeled the Southern Pacific Railroad the most “stupidly managed, the greediest, in the whole union.”
Debs was encouraged by the news from Sacramento, a major rail hub and the state’s capital. Almost all the city’s railroad men had joined the strike and residents were overwhelmingly in sympathy. That Monday, Southern Pacific division superintendent J. B. Wright informed Sacramento’s mayor that “the passenger depot, depot grounds, yards and other property of this company are and have been for the past two days crowded with strikers and idlers,” preventing the company from moving any trains. He demanded protection from the city authorities. The mayor, sensitive to the mood in town, said he would not act unless the strikers resorted to violence.
When U.S. Marshal Barry Baldwin arrived, the city was baking under blistering summer heat. He noted more than three thousand men, women, and children milling around the rail station. “This looks more like a fair,” he observed, “than a desperate strike.” The marshal was known for his opposition to railroad monopolies, but he had a job to do.
To test the strikers’ seriousness, Baldwin ordered a mail train made up. Acting according to Debs’s general order not to interfere with the mails, ARU members helped to clear the yards of bystanders and coupled together the cars required for the train. But when supervisors defied them by attaching a Pullman sleeper, the angry strikers rushed the station, uncoupled the cars, and pushed them back into the yard.
Baldwin ordered the crowd to disperse. Instead, the men pressed against him, knocked him down several times, and gave him what a newspaper called “a pretty severe handling.” Regaining his feet, he came up with a revolver in each hand. For a moment the incident teetered on the edge of a bloody battle. Then a striker grabbed Baldwin from behind. The marshal wrestled free and was joined by several deputies, who were able to hold off the crowd. Baldwin hurried to Superintendent Wright’s office, where he immediately wired Governor Henry Markham, demanding he send state troops to restore order. Markham was himself marooned in Los Angeles because of the tie-up.
“Peace officers here are in thorough sympathy with strikers,” Baldwin noted. A newspaper reported, “Never in the history of the capital city of California has there been so exciting a day.”
Elsewhere in the state, the situation was nearly as tense. In Oakland, where half the population was employed by the Southern Pacific, a large group of strikers and sympathizers took possession of the rail yards. They shut down engines by raking fires and blowing the steam from the locomotives.
That same day, Jane Lathrop Stanford became stranded in the northern California town of Dunsmuir. She was the sixty-five-year-old widow of the railroad tycoon and former California governor Leland Stanford. The union men said they could not let her private car proceed unless she received permission from ARU directors. She wired Debs in Chicago and he graciously offered her safe passage to her home in San Francisco. She was to show his telegram to any striker who questioned her right to break the boycott. A squad of strikers accompanied her as guards. By the time she reached Oakland, her train was festooned with bunting and the letters A-R-U were spelled out in flowers on the side of the engine. Strikers cheered and Mrs. Stanford bowed to them from her car’s rear platform.
* * *
In Washington, Attorney General Olney had already thought out his next move. On Sunday, he had wired U.S. Attorney Milchrist in Chicago and told him to begin a concerted legal attack against the strikers. Milchrist had stayed up until the wee hours writing out the language of a petition for an injunction.
Injunctions, which superseded ordinary laws, were a potent weapon that had been used only sparingly in labor disputes. Olney had tried them out while combating the battalions of Coxey’s Army. Now he saw the legal remedy as a way to both end the boycott and bludgeon the upstart American Railway Union to death.
An injunction gave a court the power to forbid actions that were not illegal under penal law. The rationale was that if the activity of one party unfairly damaged the interests of another, it could be enjoined by the court. To Olney, the attraction of the injunction was that it put the power of enforcement in the hands of a judge, not a jury. Anyone deemed to be defying the order could be jailed for contempt without trial.
Milchrist received plenty of suggestions from railroad lawyers, who wanted a court order that was as comprehensive as possible. He cobbled together a justification for the order from concerns about interference with commerce and obstruction of mail. He added a controversial reference to the Sherman Antitrust Act. The law had been applied to labor only twice before, including a case in which Olney himself had declared its use a “perversion” of the intent of Congress, which had designed the law to be used against corporate trusts, not unions.
In his private practice, Olney had defended the Whiskey Trust, one of the few businesses prosecuted under the Sherman Act. He would later pronounce its reasoning “no good.” While attorney general, he consistently refused to enforce its provisions against corporations’ monopolistic practices, its intended target.
Now he saw that its ban on any “combination” that restrained trade among the states could be applied to a labor union. Leaving no base uncovered, he allowed Milchrist to employ it as one more weapon against the union.
To make sure the net was fine enough, two federal judges, William A. Woods of the circuit court and Peter S. Grosscup of the district court, relinquished their judicial objectivity and helped Milchrist polish his petition. Both judges were known for pro-business bias from the bench. Grosscup had been labeled “an earnest individualist” opposed to any regulation that impinged on property rights.
Having ascertained the thoroughness of the government petition, they mounted the bench that Monday and granted the injunction they had helped to write. The edict, which forbade “any act whatever” that might hamper a railroad, would initially apply in Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin, but its language was quickly picked up by other federal judges who fashioned similar injunctions for their own districts.
The judges’ order was known as an omnibus injunction, a set of restrictions that in effect required all ARU members to cease all activity connected with the boycott. Legal experts were amazed at its scope. Eugene Debs and ARU directors were forbidden from “ordering, directing, aiding, assisting, or abetting” any act in furtherance of the boycott. They could not communicate with members or with each other on any matter related to the strike. They could not send telegrams or otherwise contact workers to encourage them to forsake their duties on the railroad.
All railroad men had to cease coercion or interference with the trains—the definition of interference was left to railroad officials. Strikers could not block replacement workers or induce “by threats, intimidation, persuasion, force, or violence any of the employees of said railroads not to perform any of their duties.” For union men to try to talk scabs out of taking their jobs was henceforth illegal.
The writ put no restrictions whatever on the railroads. They could confer together to set strategy all they wanted, could refuse to run trains that did not include Pullman cars. The court might have deemed the General Managers’ Association an illegal combination that was actively restraining trade. Instead, the group went unscathed by the order.
The idea that an attempt to persuade a fellow citizen could be a crime struck many as un-American. The judges declared that the injunction was justified by the fact that the men were creating a public nuisance, which the government had a duty to remove. They were also obstructing the mails, contrary to law. For good measure, they were breaking the Sherman Antitrust Act by restraining interstate commerce.
The New York Times reported that the judges who had written the injunction had proudly referred to it as a “Gatling gun on paper.” Even the anti-strike Times was taken aback by this “extraordinary injunction,” which editors called a “a veritable dragnet in the matter of legal verbiage.”
The order made it punishable for men to do things that were, in ordinary circumstances, perfectly legal. No one needed to be served personally with the order. It would be promulgated by being published in newspapers and read in public. Once any man committed a forbidden act—suggested to a friend that he stay home from work, for example—he could be arrested and locked up for contempt.
The Chicago Tribune crowed that the injunction was “so broad and sweeping that interference with the railroads, even of the remotest kind, will be made practically impossible.” So far, the Gatling gun was only on paper, but Richard Olney saw the injunction as groundwork for an even more dramatic attack on the alarmingly successful strike.