With the risk of arrest and imprisonment hanging over their heads, Eugene Debs and the other ARU leaders continued to act in defiance of the omnibus injunction. Their first reaction was that the order was so egregious that it would guarantee their victory by prompting many more outraged railroad men to join the boycott. On Monday, July 2, Debs sent out a telegram stating that “if strike not settled in forty-eight hours, complete paralysis will follow. Potatoes and ice out of sight.”
The railroad managers, caught in an unexpected stalemate and concerned about the strike’s increasingly painful impact on their operations, applauded the injunction. John Egan declared that the roads were being held up by “conspirators and lawless men.” He recommended that regular army soldiers stationed in Fort Sheridan be sent to Chicago without delay. On their arrival, he predicted, “the strike would collapse like a punctured balloon.”
The fort, twenty-five miles up the coast of Lake Michigan, had been the pet project of George Pullman, Marshall Field, and other Chicago businessmen. Alarmed by the Haymarket bombing, they felt that the federal troops five hundred miles away in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, were too distant to respond quickly to a disturbance in Chicago. They sent their neighbor, Civil War hero Philip H. Sheridan, to Washington to lobby for the post that would be named for him.
Egan glossed over the fact that the main reason trains were not running was because they lacked crews. The GMA members’ idea that they could fill empty positions with strikebreakers had yet to bear much fruit because of the vast extent of the boycott. Privately, the managers recognized that replacing an entire labor force overnight was a huge logistical undertaking.
But instead of admitting a draw and suing for peace, the managers complained about the crowds swarming rail yards and the occasional acts of sabotage against railroad property. Raising the specter of anarchy, they insisted that legal maneuvering had to be backed up with military action. After all, Olney had promised “force which is overwhelming” to suppress all resistance.
Grover Cleveland was circumspect about calling out the military. He understood that the deployment of federal troops against American citizens was a momentous and politically perilous course of action. If he was going to do it, he wanted to be sure he had the solid support of the public. In this, he was encouraged by the newspaper coverage of the boycott.
During the first days of July, many of the editors of the thousands of papers around the country gave over their entire front pages to strike coverage. The stories were inevitably contradictory, distorted, and deeply colored by the papers’ editorial philosophy. In Chicago, all the dailies except the Times took positions against the union. The Inter Ocean declared that “the belligerent invasion of the country by a foreign foe could not be more injurious” to the nation than the boycott.
Some papers printed outright falsifications, including fake interviews with Eugene Debs. Several reported that a New York City doctor had labeled Debs non compos mentis because of his drunkenness. Two years earlier, the physician said, he had treated Debs for “neurasthenia and dipsomania.” The labor leader was no longer responsible for his own actions and should give up his position.
Another widely reported story said that Debs had luxuriated on a Pullman car while traveling during the strike and was therefore a hypocritical humbug. Debs vehemently denied the truth of these accounts. He also scoffed at the tale that a railroad worker in Danville, Illinois, had struck him because the man had lost his job. That fiction had gone out on the Associated Press wire and been picked up by papers around the nation.
The press was quick to link the murder of French president Carnot by an anarchist with the unsettled conditions in America. Covering a July 1 memorial service for the assassinated leader, the Inter Ocean had labeled labor agitators “another form of anarchy.”
Newspapers of the day relied on drawings and cartoons for illustrations. Sketches left everything to the artist’s imagination, and illustrations of stories about the strike showed disorder, vandalism, buildings in flames, and crowds rampaging along rail lines. The artist Frederic Remington was among those who sketched the action near the Chicago stockyards. He saw the rioters as “a seething mass of smells, stale beer, and bad language.” One soldier, he wrote, surveyed the crowd and remarked: “Them things ain’t human.”
Although the ARU took the brunt of the press’s scorn, George Pullman was also vilified, even by dailies like the Tribune. His refusal to arbitrate had come to seem churlish and petty. The Chicago Times printed a drawing on July 2 of Pullman as a malevolent Richard III, obese and glowering. He was, the paper declared, a “cold-hearted, cold-blooded autocrat.”
Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World regarded the government’s bias with skepticism. “More dangerous and menacing than any strike,” an editor wrote, “is the carefully laid plan for bringing about the intervention of the Federal Government on the side of the railroads.”
The New York Herald printed a cartoon labeled “The Dictator of Dreams.” It showed Eugene Debs seated on a throne with his feet propped on a cushion identified as “Labor Rank and File.” Uncle Sam, hat in hand, paid homage to the dictator.
Debs struck back on July 2, urging ARU members and sympathizers to boycott anti-union publications. He asked merchants to stop advertising in them and newsboys to stop selling them. If advertisers persisted in supporting the papers, union proponents should take their trade elsewhere.
That same day, Debs requested all who supported the strike to wear a white lapel ribbon, the device the ARU had picked up from the Pullman strikers. Within days, Jane Addams reported she saw “almost everyone on Halsted Street wearing a white ribbon, the emblem of the strikers’ side.” Even policemen were wearing them. Debs’s wife, Kate, helped by fashioning white rosettes, which were distributed to women who supported the union.
* * *
While the decision to send federal troops against the strikers hung in the balance, state military forces were already active in suppressing outbreaks of rioting around the country. The militias had traditionally served as the guardians of order when local law officers were unable to cope with a situation. The men could be called up quickly and were familiar with the local terrain. Since before the Civil War, they had included both state-sponsored troops and volunteer corps. During the 1890s, the units were being modernized into a more professional but still part-time National Guard.
From the beginning of the boycott, Illinois governor John Peter Altgeld had been keeping a close watch on the drama unfolding in his state. For the time being, the decision to militarize the dispute there rested entirely with him.
During his short tenure, Altgeld had experienced both the glory of the world’s fair and the dire consequences of the depression. His physical appearance, New York World reporter Nellie Bly observed, “marks him peculiarly as a caricaturist’s prey.” Sporting short-cropped hair and beard, along with a lean and hungry-looking countenance, the forty-six-year-old Altgeld could have played Cassius in a production of Julius Caesar. Like the Roman senator, he thought too much and was considered, by some, to be dangerous because of his reformist and pro-labor views.
Altgeld’s family had emigrated from Germany in 1848, when he was six months old, and settled on a farm in Ohio. Following a hardscrabble childhood and a brief stint in the Union Army, he had pieced together an education while working as a teacher and a railroad laborer. He became a lawyer, settled in Chicago, made money in real estate, entered politics as a Democrat, and served for a number of years as a state superior court judge before winning the governorship in 1892.
Because of his background, Altgeld possessed an instinctive sympathy for laborers and immigrants. Working-class voters formed his political base. He was one of the most forward-looking politicians in the country and an early prophet of the coming Progressive Era. Having been taunted during his youth as a “little Dutchman,” he had published a fierce defense of the rights of immigrants and their value to society. His 1884 essay entitled “Our Penal Machinery and Its Victims” brought a remarkably modern perspective to reform of the prison system, putting the emphasis on rehabilitation. The criminal justice system, he noted, seemed to recruit its victims “from among those that are fighting an unequal battle in the struggle for existence.”
As governor, he had faced a political dilemma. Like many, he felt that the anarchists who had been tried for the Haymarket bombing had been convicted entirely for their beliefs rather than for their involvement in the crime. They had been prosecuted, he thought, with “malicious ferocity,” and he saw the judicial wrongdoing as a greater threat to society than any anarchist bomb. As he contemplated pardoning the three convicted men still alive, Altgeld told his protégé Clarence Darrow that if he did so, “I will be a dead man, politically.”
In June 1893, Altgeld announced the pardon. The reaction was what he had predicted. In spite of the abundant evidence of the men’s innocence and the jury’s bias, newspaper editors across the country had heaped contumely onto Altgeld. The New York Times had accused him of doing everything in his power “to encourage again the spirit of lawless resistance and of wanton assault upon the agents of authority.”
The opposition to Altgeld’s action, like the frenzy surrounding the bombing itself, was rooted in a surging nativism. The fact that most of the accused were immigrants fed Americans’ xenophobia. The Chicago Tribune said Altgeld was motivated by his “alien temperament.” Even his appearance suggested perfidy—a college professor decided that Altgeld looked like “a typical German anarchist, fanatical and intense.” The New York Times questioned his citizenship and suggested a search for his “papers.” Angry crowds burned him in effigy.
For now, he was the man in charge of Illinois. He felt that his duty was to maintain order but not to break the strike. The distinction was not always clear. “I have reason to fear,” Altgeld wrote, “that these troops were wanted at that place only to help the railroad defeat the demands of their men for higher wages, but I cannot refuse to send them, in the face of allegations of public danger.”
Four days into the boycott, on Saturday, June 30, events outside Chicago forced Altgeld’s hand. Illinois Central officials asked the governor to dispatch state militia troops to Cairo, at the southern tip of the state, where strikers and sympathizers were choking off the line. The governor asked a militia colonel to investigate and readied several companies of soldiers. He soon dispatched three hundred state militiamen.
The next day, Sunday, July 1, a telegram arrived reporting passenger trains detained in Decatur, not far from Springfield. The local sheriff was unable to handle the situation. Altgeld immediately sent 265 soldiers. That same day, the sheriff in Danville, on Illinois’s eastern border, asked for a supply of rifles to use for confronting strikers. The governor sent 220 soldiers instead. Shifting militia forces as needed, he followed the action on a map dotted with colored pins.
* * *
The dispatch of state troops was not unusual and was covered by existing laws. A call for intervention by the federal army raised two thorny issues. The first was practical. The regular army numbered barely 28,000 soldiers stationed in forts across the country. Could this force effectively control railroad workers, whose numbers topped 750,000? Could it deal even with the riotous mobs in Chicago? Could it patrol the vast reaches of the rail lines? Any military force directed at a large group of civilians had to have enough mass to intimidate rioters and quell the disturbance by its presence. The danger of sending too few troops into a riotous situation was that it would provoke rather than subdue violence.
The second issue was a matter of principle. The idea of a permanent army whose purpose was to restrict the rights of citizens had been detested since colonial times. Jefferson had complained of such armies in the Declaration of Independence. “A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty,” James Madison had written in The Federalist Papers. Politicians were always wary of using federal forces for domestic duty.
Under the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, Congress had explicitly prohibited the army from taking a role in domestic law enforcement. That law had been aimed at ending Reconstruction, during which federal troops had occupied territory of the former Confederacy. Any use of the army on U.S. soil required a strict constitutional justification, such as protection of federal property or support of specific U.S. government functions.
As to whether the army was up to the job of suppressing the boycott, Olney had been assured by military men that civilians, even if many were armed with pistols and rifles, could not stand up to disciplined squadrons of infantry and cavalry, no matter what the disparity of the numbers. Army officers pointed out that state militiamen, with far less training, might give in to personal sympathies. Hardened soldiers were far less likely to flinch when called upon to apply the bayonet, the saber, or the bullet.
When it came to justifying the extraordinary use of federal troops in the current crisis, Olney was careful to build a legal foundation on which the action could stand. Before he had the blanket excuse of the omnibus injunction at his disposal, he had fallen back on the same rationale that he had used to justify calling out federal forces against the western factions of Coxey’s Army—interference with federally controlled property.
During their boycott, ARU members had disrupted insolvent railroads that had been placed under the control of government-appointed receivers. The lines were, in effect, government operations, and the attorney general construed any interference with them as a direct challenge to federal authority.
The bankrupt Santa Fe line, which ran south through Colorado and into New Mexico, was one of these federally controlled railroads. Managers had neglected to pay workers their wages for the past four months, and the men were in an ugly mood even before the boycott. Trouble broke out along a dry, sparsely populated stretch of line south of Denver. The men sidetracked Pullman cars and brought traffic to a halt, isolating towns like Trinidad, Colorado, and Raton, New Mexico. Both mail and passengers were stranded along the line.
On Saturday, June 30, Olney had asked the federal attorney for the district, J. B. H. Hemingway, to request a writ from a judge to suppress the strike. Hemingway said he knew of no mail obstruction in the Territory of New Mexico, only a refusal of employees to do their jobs. “I do not understand that the mere refusal to work is obstruction of the mail,” he said.
Olney told him that the Cleveland administration did indeed consider such a refusal obstruction. And since the road was in the hands of federal receivers, authorities could do as they pleased. Hemingway quickly realized the error of his ways and asked for a restraining order. He sent U.S. Marshals to protect the Santa Fe trains.
These federal officers had no effect. A crowd disarmed fifty-two deputies as they approached the town of Trinidad and tore up the restraining order. On Monday, July 2, President Cleveland ordered five companies of army troops to proceed to the scene from Fort Logan near Denver. Along the way, they found the telegraph wires cut in Pueblo and trains unable to move. The soldiers repaired the damage and pushed on to Trinidad. They managed to partially restore rail service at bayonet point while marshals arrested forty-eight ringleaders supposed to have made “incendiary speeches.” The men were charged with contempt of court for disobeying the restraining order.
Down the line in Raton, five hundred ARU members were backed up by three hundred striking miners from the local coal fields. The sheriff was sympathetic to labor and warned the U.S. Marshal to stay out. Not to be defied, the marshal and eighty-five deputies marched into Raton. The employees of the hotel where they planned to stay quit rather than wait on them—the law officers had to serve themselves. They found that they could do nothing to get trains moving. The marshal wired Olney for federal troops. Men of the Tenth Infantry would arrive two days later, on Wednesday, Independence Day.
* * *
Olney saw that the omnibus injunctions against the strike offered the clearest path to military intervention. On Monday, the day the judges issued the first writ, Chief U.S. Marshal Arnold and Sheriff Gilbert took 135 deputized men to the Blue Island yards just outside Chicago where the train had been derailed on Saturday night. A sentinel began clanging the bell on the overturned engine as soon as the marshals’ train approached. A crowd of more than two thousand gathered within minutes.
Numerous trains had been stranded at Blue Island, and Arnold announced to the bystanders that he was determined to move them. They included five passenger trains that had been immobilized for a day and a half. Their passengers had found themselves stuck on an isolated stretch of prairie twenty miles from downtown Chicago. They had suffered from the heat, from lack of food and water, and from the stress of the uncertain situation.
After Arnold ordered the onlookers to keep off the right-of-way, leaders of the mob told him that only mail trains could move. They had the numbers to enforce their will—strike sympathizers were now standing a hundred deep across the track. A standoff followed, while both sides eyed each other warily and negotiations proved fruitless.
Arnold ordered his men, who included deputized railroad officials, to form up in front of the first train he planned to move. Even a reporter from the Chicago Tribune was drafted and handed a star. All the deputies were armed with revolvers.
The train’s engineer eased open the throttle and the locomotive began to creep toward the crowd at a “very slow walk.” The deputies marched forward in front of the cowcatcher. The protesters did not give way. A shoving match began. A barrage of stones and coupling pins flew toward the deputies. Shouts and abuse turned to blows. One man cut Arnold’s deputy John Logan in the back with a knife. The lawmen drew their pistols, but, as the Tribune reporter noted, “nobody wanted to be the first to shoot.”
Now a general melee broke out. Arnold “in all his dignity was rolled in the dirt.” The marshals and sheriff deputies swung clubs freely. Dozens of rioters were dragged from the crowd and arrested, but most of these prisoners quickly broke free with the aid of their fellows. The train’s engineer was hit in the head by a stone. Men pulled coupling pins to break the train into its separate cars. After dozens of deputies “literally fell over one another in their rush to the rear,” Arnold gave up the attempt.
Calm returned until about 4:00 p.m. By then, the excitement had drawn even more of the curious to the scene. A passenger train from Chicago appeared and began to crawl slowly through the yards. The crowds moved in to block it.
By this time, the omnibus injunction had been issued and ten thousand copies printed. Marshal Arnold climbed into the doorway of a mail car and told the mob that he was going to read an order from the federal government. At first, the reading was met with quiet attention. As soon as the gist of the injunction began to register, the onlookers erupted.
“I command you in the name of the President of the United States to disperse and go to your homes,” Arnold shouted. The people cursed and laughed. Screams of “To hell with the courts!” and “We are the government!” rang out.
Mob leaders offered to let the passenger train go on its way as soon as the Pullman cars were detached. Arnold would not allow the train to be altered. His remaining men managed to clear a way through. The train finally navigated the crossing and proceeded on its way.
At 6:15 p.m., Arnold wired Olney directly. “I am here at Blue Island. Have read the order of the court to the rioters and they simply hoot at it.… We have had a desperate time here all day and our forces are inadequate … impossible to move trains without having the Fifteenth Infantry.… Mail trains are in great danger.”
* * *
That was Monday, July 2. Olney did not act immediately on Arnold’s request. Instead, he wired U.S. Attorney Milchrist about the injunction: “Congratulate you upon the legal situation, which is all that could be desired. Trust use of United States troops will not be necessary. If it becomes necessary, they will be used promptly and decisively.” He added that Milchrist should make sure that, if the time came, Arnold, Edwin Walker, and Judges Grosscup and Woods should all join in the request for troops. The hint was taken.
On Tuesday, July 3, the pieces of Olney’s plan fell into place. He brought the president alarming telegrams from federal officials in Illinois, New Mexico, Colorado, and California. Together, they painted a landscape aflame with lawlessness. The report angered the one-time sheriff who now occupied the White House.
In recent weeks, Grover Cleveland had been struggling to get a bill through Congress to achieve his longtime goal of dramatically lowering tariffs. Only in the past few days had he turned his full attention to events on the railroads. Now he called an emergency meeting of his cabinet. After a general discussion of the situation, he huddled with his inner circle to settle on a course of action. Besides Olney, they included Secretary of State Walter Gresham, Secretary of War Daniel Lamont, and two chief military advisers. Army commander John Schofield, who had shared a lunch with the president following the opening of the Columbian Exposition, was a career soldier. At sixty-two he was marked by florid muttonchop whiskers and a brusque manner. General Nelson Miles, whose territory as head of the Department of the Missouri included Chicago, had been on leave in the East and had to be summoned urgently to the White House.
At first, Miles, Schofield, and Gresham were reluctant to dispatch troops. Although Miles expressed the view that the strike was “more threatening and far reaching than anything that had occurred before” and might “paralyze if not overthrow the civil government,” he hesitated at the thought of ordering his men to fire on fellow citizens.
While the discussion was under way, Olney played his trump card. He announced that he had received a telegram from Marshal Arnold. The marshal said that the defiant crowd at Blue Island had thrown “a number of baggage cars across the track, since when no mail trains have been able to move.” Arnold could not disperse the mob or clear the tracks.
“Believe that no force less than the regular troops of the United States,” he wrote, “can procure the passage of the mail trains or enforce the orders of the court.” For good measure, Arnold amplified rumors circulating in Chicago that a wider strike was imminent. The Chicago trade unions “are quitting employment today, and in my opinion will be joining the mob tonight, and especially tomorrow.” The troops should be dispatched “at the earliest possible moment.” As Olney had suggested, Arnold’s message came with the endorsement of Milchrist, Walker, and Judge Grosscup.
Olney ignored the fact that Monday’s disturbance at Blue Island had largely dissipated by Tuesday. Nor did he bother explaining why a combination of police and state troops could not at least try to handle the situation first. Lacking the president’s political instincts, he looked only to his own constituency, the directors of the nation’s railroad corporations.
It was a consequential decision. President Rutherford B. Hayes had reluctantly called out federal troops during the spontaneous labor upheaval of 1877, but that had been at the request of state officials. Governor Altgeld had not asked for help and was not about to. The president, who had run on a states’ rights platform in 1884, would have to take action while ignoring local authorities, a politically risky and legally dubious course.
But John Arnold’s description of the disorder in Chicago brought all participants of the meeting on board. Olney made his case that only bullets and bayonets aimed at American citizens could keep the country from plunging into chaos or worse. The president was convinced. At 4:00 p.m., Grover Cleveland made the fateful decision.
Only General Miles, whose roots were in the working class, still harbored qualms. He worried about giving orders that might lead to a massacre. He asked the president point-blank if he should order his men to fire on the rioting strikers.
The short-tempered Cleveland snapped that it was Miles, the man in command, who would “be the judge on questions of that kind.”
Miles left to book passage to Chicago. Secretary Lamont returned to the War Department and sent orders to officers at Fort Sheridan that their units should begin moving immediately. A locomotive had been waiting under steam to speed the transport. Troops gripped their Springfield rifles and clattered aboard the train. Wranglers loaded cavalry horses. Artillerymen wheeled cannon onto flatcars. The U.S. Army was on the move.
The next day, Richard Olney declared: “We have been brought to the ragged edge of anarchy.”