Independence Day. A cloudless sky stretched over Chicago and temperatures were expected to top out in the seventies. Perfect weather for picnics.
Eugene Debs awoke early. From his hotel window, he saw the morning star wink out over the lake and heard the distant bang of torpedoes and firecrackers set off by young patriots eager to commence the holiday celebration. And something else: a commotion in the hotel’s courtyard. He glanced down. Soldiers. Men in khaki were stacking their rifles. He called excitedly to his brother. These were not militiamen. “They’re regulars, Theodore, they’re regulars. Do you get that? Cleveland has sent the troops in.”
Debs had known that the deployment was a possibility, but the sight of the soldiers struck him with a jolt. Excited, anxious, and confused, he instinctively reached for a hopeful slant on the development. Federal troops, he imagined, would tamp down the growing disorder. They were not a threat to the ARU. They could not operate trains and would not molest lawful strikers. They would prevent rioters from “destroying property, the stigma of which is placed by capital on labor,” he said.
In his heart, he knew he was wrong. The appearance of federal soldiers marching through an American city was not a good omen for the outcome of the strike.
That Wednesday, July 4, marked a change in the trajectory of the crisis, but at first no one knew the direction events would take. Workers accustomed to long hours and six-day weeks relished the luxury of a day off. All citizens welcomed the brief pause from the tension of the nationwide boycott.
Chicago’s business district was deserted. Even the bustling ARU headquarters at Ulrich’s Hall was quiet that day. Debs had directed union members to stay away from rail depots and yards. All day, he and the other officers roamed the city addressing public meetings, encouraging the strikers, warning against violence.
Paraders strutted through Chicago’s streets to the robust beat of John Philip Sousa tunes. Politicians and clergymen intoned patriotic platitudes. Picnickers thronged the city’s parks. At night, bonfires blazed in residential neighborhoods, accompanied by the bang and sparkle of fireworks. Intoxicated crowds made merry in saloons until closing time. Citizens across the city wore the white ribbons that showed their support of the strikers.
The nation had stopped to acknowledge the 118th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Men and women were still alive whose grandfathers had fought alongside George Washington. Many were prompted to reflect on the questions the current impasse between labor and capital had raised about the country’s founding principles.
Eugene Debs and George Pullman personified two views as to the proper course for the Republic. Citizens revered the sanctity of property, but Debs would wrench control of the railroads from private investors if they did not bend to the needs of employees. Americans also clung to the notion that a workingman should receive fair pay for a day’s labor, but Pullman would run his business as he saw fit, even if his men were forced to work for starvation wages.
The son of immigrants, Debs revered American ideals. His notions were rooted in the era of the country’s founding, when citizens had to join together or perish. He looked to America’s spirit of volunteerism and its history of cooperative enterprises as models for a new society. He believed in a sense of common interest that could balance the dominant ethos of individualism. He was sure that there was more to life than rancor and competition, more than what Walt Whitman called “the mania of owning things.”
The George Pullmans of the nineteenth century had amassed resources and applied their imaginations to creating the fantastic paraphernalia of the modern age. They had convinced Americans of the value of enjoying all the wonderful things they had seen in the White City. Pullman put his faith in bold self-assertion, personal responsibility, and material gain.
Both Debs and Pullman were fighting for deeply held principles: community versus self-interest, cooperation versus competition, equality versus liberty. On this anniversary of independence, each felt that he was a patriot upholding the best of the American tradition.
But for today, citizens were occupied with relaxation rather than rancor. One reminder of the simmering conflict was the absence of excursions to lakes and parks outside the city. Normally, the days leading to the Fourth were busy ones for the railroads. Dispatchers added extra coaches to scheduled runs; political, fraternal, and church groups chartered whole trains so that city folk could spend the day among the trees and flowers. This year, not a single group in Chicago applied for a special train.
“No one cared to take the risk of leaving the city,” a newspaper reported. Rail travel had grown hazardous. At any moment, a tie-up along the line could leave revelers stranded. The railroads reportedly lost $500,000 in revenues on the Fourth alone.
* * *
The troops that Eugene Debs had seen outside his hotel that morning had come down by train from Fort Sheridan the night before. They had marched through the streets to Lake Front Park. Along the way, bystanders in middle-class neighborhoods had cheered; working-class spectators had met the soldiers with icy silence. In a few instances, city police had to intervene to protect the infantrymen from abuse.
Now the troops were setting up their camp in the park facing the hotels and office buildings of Michigan Avenue. In the absence of General Miles, who was boarding a train in Washington as the men entered the city, the regulars were commanded by Colonel Robert E. A. Crofton, who had arrived with eight companies of the Fifteenth Infantry. He had also brought two troops of the Seventh Cavalry, a reconstituted version of the famed unit that General George Armstrong Custer had led at the Battle of the Little Bighorn eighteen years earlier.
Crofton conferred with U.S. Marshal John Arnold, with Special U.S. Attorney Edwin Walker, and with GMA strike czar John Egan on what they thought was the best way to get the mail moving and to enforce federal laws and court edicts. He conspicuously avoided any conversation with police officials or with state or city authorities.
Earlier that year, General Schofield had told department commanders that in the event of domestic disturbances, regulars were to operate only as cohesive tactical units under direct orders from their military superiors. Troops, he ordered, “should not be scattered or divided into small detachments.” The commander recognized that the ability of a corps of soldiers to intimidate a crowd was dangerously diluted when they were broken into small groups, each of which could be overwhelmed by a mob.
Nor were U.S. troops to serve as reinforcements for law enforcement agencies. Their only duty was “to protect federal property and prevent obstruction of the mails—not to restore order.” Schofield, who recognized that the antagonists the troops faced would likely contain innocent observers as well as lawbreakers, cautioned against firing into groups of citizens without specific orders from commanding officers. Bayonets should be the weapon of choice when facing mixed crowds.
Nevertheless, Arnold and the railroad men convinced Crofton to ignore the directive and to disperse his men to the various railroad hot spots around town. Crofton sent four companies, about 250 men, to Blue Island, two companies to the Union Stock Yard, and two companies to Grand Crossing. Arnold would persuade the infantry commander to break up his force further, assigning squads of as few as ten soldiers to help arrest strikers. During such operations, the men necessarily received their orders from the marshals.
The soldiers had expected to arrive in a city on the edge of anarchy. But when they boarded local trains at four thirty in the morning and rode through the streets before dawn, they found no signs of disturbance. The strikers had heeded Debs’s call to stay away, and the rail yards were “quieter than a blue law Sunday.”
Grand Crossing was placid. The engineer kept up steam in case the soldiers needed to move to where the trouble was. After a breakfast of coffee, bread, and beans with bacon, the troops were able to move two freight trains through the rail yard without incident. One held meat from the Swift plant; the other was loaded with fruit. Otherwise, the soldiers had little to do. They even had time for a game of baseball. Just after dark, they watched the Diamond Special roll by, protected by a carload of police.
Only in the maze of rails that adjoined the Union Stock Yard was there a hint of trouble. The two companies sent there arrived as the sun was coming up. By seven thirty they had their tents pitched in Dexter Park, a horse racing track along Halsted Street adjacent to the yards. Curious onlookers began to gather early, drawn by the novelty of the federal troops themselves. The officers’ nerves tightened as they eyed a growing crowd of rough-looking immigrants. They sent a message to Colonel Crofton requesting reinforcements. He dispatched by train a troop of cavalry and a battery of artillery. They would be delayed for hours as they tried to make their way through the awakening city.
* * *
During the holiday respite, reporters questioned both Eugene Debs and George Pullman about their views of the strike. Pullman spent the Fourth at his desk facing the ocean off New Jersey. He kept in touch with events in Chicago and around the country by telephone and wire. A reporter noted that “he preserves his customary calmness and evenness of temper” in spite of the anxiety generated by the strike.
“The story of the origin of this strike has been pretty fully told,” Pullman said to the correspondents, but he did not hesitate to tell it again. By his account, workers in his plant were satisfied with their lot until they “were called out by the American Railway Union.” The union had inaugurated the strike at Pullman “as a pretext to spread their influence.” Although it was not true, the story helped him justify his obstinate stance.
The sole demand of the ARU was that Pullman submit his differences with workers to arbitration, but the sleeping-car magnate concluded that “the Pullman Company could not settle the strike now if it would. It is now in other hands.”
He applied to the situation a simplistic logic. There was nothing to arbitrate. No outsider could dictate the market price of his cars. If he were to let others determine what he charged for housing in the model town, then all landlords would have to set rents by arbitration. That was absurd. As for the sympathy strike, “the question, to my mind, has resolved itself into this: Shall the railroads be permitted to manage their own business, or shall they turn it over into the hands of Debs, Howard, and the American Railway Union?”
When it was pointed out that neither the model town nor the Pullman works had been subject to rioting, he insisted that “credit be given to the administration of the company which prohibits drinking saloons and provides various sources for the elevation of character.”
He said that he had received a telephone message from Chicago saying that companies of cavalry and artillery were just then marching by the company offices. “We think that the presence of the troops on the ground is having a very good effect.”
He ended by expressing his feeling “that the employees will, on sober second thought, conclude that the owners and managers of railroads are the proper parties to control the policy and operation of the roads.” But he modestly added that “one citizen’s opinion on such a question is as good as another’s.”
For his part, Eugene Debs did not see matters with George Pullman’s cool composure. He predicted dire consequences if Pullman and the railroad managers continued their obstinacy. He momentarily broke his rule of tamping down talk of violence. He predicted: “The first shot fired by the regular soldiers at the mobs here will be the signal for a civil war.”
The sudden appearance of the military may have pushed Debs toward apocalyptic utterances as dire as those of Richard Olney. “Bloodshed will follow,” he declared. He envisioned 90 percent of the country’s population warring with the privileged 10 percent. “And I would not care to be arrayed against the laboring people in the contest.” He was not an alarmist, he said, but speaking “calmly and thoughtfully.”
“It is corporation greed and avarice alone,” he judged, “that have brought us to the verge of a revolution.” Retreat from the struggle would mean enslavement and the workingman’s “complete and utter degradation for all time to come. And I would rather be dead.”
Almost all the parties to the strike had come to see themselves as bystanders. Pullman had shifted responsibility to the railroads. Debs insisted that matters were beyond his control as well. “I have ordered no boycott or strikes personally, and have acted as a servant of my organization.”
In Washington, Richard Olney declared, “The subject has now passed out of my hands.” This was not true, as he continued to monitor every detail. But the effort would now be spearheaded by “other branches,” namely the U.S. Army.
John Egan, the strike leader for the railroads, insisted that his group had also become mere spectators. “It has now become a fight between the United States Government and the American Railway Union,” he noted. “And we shall leave them to fight it out.” At the same time, he could assure the public that the railroad managers were not about to break ranks—they were determined “to fight this strike shoulder to shoulder to the finish.”
Edwin Walker, erstwhile railroad lawyer and now an agent for the government, took the most pugnacious stance. “Every man who has trampled on the law will be punished,” he declared. “It is the instigator of the lawlessness that the government wants to punish. That is Debs. We shall have Debs. We have the evidence against him now and he will be punished.”
* * *
General Miles arrived in Chicago just past noon to take command of the federal troops. He was known by all as a competent, ambitious officer. Coming up from poverty in New England, he had advanced his career with conspicuous heroism during the Civil War. Miles had served in the army through the decades-long wars against the Plains Indians. He had taken Geronimo into custody and had helped subdue the Apache, the Cheyenne, and the Sioux.
Three and a half years earlier, in December 1890, he had ordered a band of Lakota braves to give up their rifles and move back to their reservation in the Dakotas. According to a regimental adjutant, they responded “with the sullen defiance so often displayed by strikers during labor troubles.” Miles wired to a subordinate: “Use force necessary.” Seventh Cavalry troopers surrounded the Indians and began to disarm them. Gunfire broke out. More than 150 Lakota, including many women and children, died in the fusillade. “I have never heard of a more brutal, cold-blooded massacre,” a furious Miles wrote, “than that at Wounded Knee.”
Miles was now in line to take over the leadership of the entire U.S. Army. Many said that his sights were fixed even higher, that he saw himself occupying the White House. During October 1892, he had served as grand marshal of the spectacular Chicago parade that celebrated the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in the New World and heralded the coming Exposition.
Arriving back in Chicago on the Fourth, Miles did not seem inclined to defuse the situation. He made a statement from his headquarters in the Pullman Building, pointing out that his men were not deployed “for display or for picnic purposes.” He discussed the lethal nature of modern rifles and said the soldiers would not “stand too much nonsense.” If his men were to open fire “they will take aim and will shoot to kill, and will keep on shooting as long as is necessary.”
* * *
No one had been shot yet, but the holiday atmosphere that prevailed in the morning became increasingly strained as the Fourth of July progressed. An excited crowd grew hour by hour around the stockyards. By afternoon, twenty-five thousand strikers, sympathizers, and thrill seekers were challenging the 150 soldiers of Companies C and D. The police handled crowd control as railroad supervisors and loyal employees tried to move stalled trainloads of chilled meat.
When the crowd grew too rowdy, the federal soldiers advanced on them with bayonets, quickly dampening the bystanders’ enthusiasm. The anti-union newspapers, which had castigated the strikers for their audacity, now mocked them for falling back “like a flock of frightened sheep.” The troops, divided into small squads, marched through the maze of cattle pens and rail lines to support police and defend engineers and firemen who were trying to move trains. General Miles had not, after his arrival on the scene, countermanded the orders of Colonel Crofton. His command remained fragmented.
The men soon found themselves lining up beside a locomotive, loading their guns, and moving along the tracks at double time, scattering the jeering onlookers as they went. A police officer rode on each car. The troops kept pace for a half mile, ending at a brisk run, before the trainload of meat, which had been stalled in refrigerated cars for two days, was deemed safe. The winded and sweating soldiers halted and watched the train depart on its way east. Similar duties filled the rest of the day.
Mayor Hazen S. Pingree of Detroit said that the federal troops had been sent to Chicago “not so much to quell a riot as to crush labor unions.” Adding to the problem was the continued presence of several thousand deputy marshals, consisting mainly of railroad detectives and what Chicago police superintendent Michael Brennan called “thugs, thieves, and ex-convicts.” Although they were brawny men, they tended to panic and retreat when confronted by a crowd. Their effect was to goad and anger the rioters rather than establish order.
The harried infantrymen at the stockyards kept looking up the line for the arrival of the cavalry troops coming to reinforce them. Unfortunately, this force was stranded on the train bringing them south from their waterfront camp. Railroad rights-of-way ran down the middle of city streets and were vulnerable to interference by residents darting out from tenements. More than twenty times, bystanders were able to pull coupling pins, breaking the train into pieces that had to be laboriously recoupled. By late afternoon, the troopers had still not covered the six miles to the stockyards. Officers decided to leave the train, unload the horses, baggage, and artillery pieces, and walk the rest of the way.
Drinking was a time-honored tradition on the Fourth, and as the sun relaxed into the West, alcohol was having an effect on the mood of the populace. False courage induced rowdy onlookers to taunt the troops. The civilians sensed correctly that the men had orders from superiors to fire their rifles only to ward off a direct assault. After dark, crowds roamed from one train yard to another. Vandals tied up the lines by overturning boxcars and a few passenger cars. Rioters set fire to some old cattle cars they found on a siding.
“It was hoped the presence of the troops would have a quieting effect,” a reporter noted, but it “only inflamed the mob.”
* * *
Nationwide, the effects of the strike were becoming more worrisome as the second week of the tie-up began. Drug wholesalers were complaining that they were not receiving shipments. The price of quinine had soared. Much less milk than usual was arriving in Chicago and shortages were being felt. The price of meat was up across the country—it was feared that soon only the well-to-do would be able to afford it. Shortages of coal and ice affected a wide range of businesses.
Some saw signs of the strike losing momentum. The Chicago Tribune was sure that the government had “Mr. Debs where the hair is short, and that it will yank him from his throne with a shock that will jar his entire system.” Illinois Central officials declared that they would move local trains the next day if possible. The news “created joy in the hearts of the tens of thousands of suburbanites” who depended on trains to get to work.
But when a marshal in Ogden, Utah, read publicly a copy of the omnibus injunction, strikers laughed him off. He did not dare arrest anyone. In Mattoon, Illinois, a supervisor had climbed aboard a New York–bound train and told the engineer to go ahead.
“Where’s my fireman?” the man asked.
“I am going to fire for you.”
“Then I’ll not go.” The engineer turned and climbed down from the cab.
A nervous General Miles ordered four companies of regulars from Fort Leavenworth to hurry to Chicago. Traveling by train at breakneck speed, they would arrive in Chicago during the night. Three more companies were on their way from Fort Brady in Michigan. The new men would double his force. They would also bring a battery of Hotchkiss revolving cannon whose five barrels could spit out sixty-eight lethal rounds in a minute.
Contention did not reign everywhere. Passengers who had been stranded on trains tied up in Grand Junction, Colorado, celebrated the holiday by joining with local residents for a game of baseball against the striking railroad men. U.S. Marshals joined the audience to watch the travelers and townsmen beat the strikers by 29 to 19.
* * *
Violence was spreading in the West. Oakland newspaperman Frank A. Leach remembered in his memoir: “No act of violence or mob action took place prior to July 4, but on that day the West Oakland men gathered for desperate work, which had evidently been carefully pre-arranged. The railroad yards were rushed by mobs of strikers, engines were stopped and killed, and engineers and firemen were lucky if they escaped a beating. The mechanics in the shops were made to quit work.”
Sacramento remained one of the most volatile spots in the country. After U.S. Marshal Barry Baldwin had lost control of the situation there the day before, Governor Markham ordered out several regiments of state troops from San Francisco to support the militia already on the scene. Their commander, General William H. Dimond, issued his soldiers twenty rounds of ammunition each and told them: “You will fire low, and fire to kill.” An artillery unit with a brass Gatling gun accompanied them. They had marched down Market Street in San Francisco to both cheers and jeers before riding a ferry to Oakland and boarding a train to Sacramento.
Taking a roundabout route to dodge obstructions or sabotage, the men arrived in the state capital at midmorning on the Fourth. They ate a quick breakfast and marched to the Sacramento armory, where local troops were already waiting. Officers questioned the men and found all ready to do their duty except one company of Sacramento militia, who said they would not fire on friends and family. Those men were disarmed and left at the armory.
The remaining soldiers demonstrated their inexperience by twice accidentally discharging rifles, killing one bystander. At 1:00 p.m. the battalion marched to the train station. A large crowd of spectators, including many children, had turned out to watch what they thought would be a parade and drill to commemorate the holiday. When it became clear that the troops would not be putting on a demonstration, they decided “to go over to the scene of the strife,” a reporter wrote, “and witness a ‘sure-enough’ riot drill.”
The strikers who occupied the depot and the surrounding area alerted the town by setting off a nearby factory whistle. A mass of citizens rushed to block the east entrance to the depot. The first two units of soldiers in the line of march were both from Sacramento. They fixed bayonets and came face-to-face with their neighbors. Their commander, Sacramento newspaperman Timothy Sheehan, fearful that a celebratory firecracker could incite a massacre, pleaded with the ARU leaders to allow a mail train to leave the station. The strikers, who felt they had been deceived by a similar request the day before, said they would rather die on the spot than give in.
With temperatures climbing over a hundred degrees, the sweating soldiers could do nothing but stand in ranks under the sun and await orders. Their officers conferred among themselves and tried to conciliate the strike leaders. A number of soldiers collapsed from the heat and had to be carried into the shade.
Marshal Baldwin, who had been roughed up by strikers the day before, announced that trains would now commence running. ARU strike committee chairman Frank Knox urged his men not to molest the militiamen, but the strikers were adamant that no Pullman cars would move.
As the sweltering afternoon progressed, strike sympathizers mixed with the troops, urging them not to fire on workers who were only trying to achieve justice. “Don’t you know that we were raised with you,” one striker pleaded, “that we are your brothers and that the fight you are making on us is only to enable a hungry corporation to grind its employees down.”
Another said, “Frank, if you kill me you make your sister a widow.”
In spite of their officers’ efforts, discipline among the troops began to slacken. Some soldiers unloaded their rifles. Some lowered their guns and left the scene, the union men cheering them on. A few handed over weapons to the strikers. The Stockton contingent walked off in a group to sit in the shade. Soon, according to a San Francisco Examiner reporter, “soldiers and strikers were wandering off arm in arm, drinking together, laughing together.”
General Dimond ordered militia commander Sheehan to clear the tracks and depot. Sheehan refused to act without a written order from Baldwin to open fire. Baldwin did not want the responsibility. He mounted the top of a locomotive and exhorted the strikers to relent. No one budged.
Negotiations lasted until 6:00 p.m. Militia officers then ordered all their men to march back to the armory. Strikers cheered their victory in what was called the Bloodless Battle of the Depot.
Even a hint of insubordination from a military force was unsettling. The New York Times noted that this was the “first instance of this sort of lawlessness on the part of the militia.” It was well understood that both militiamen and private soldiers of the regular army were drawn from the same class as the railroad workers. The idea that they would support rather than crush the strike was terrifying to the country’s elite. At Sacramento, the soldiers had not switched sides, but they had disobeyed orders and turned away from their duty. The Times called the incident “disgraceful and dangerous.”
Equally ominous was the arrival at Sacramento of another contingent of railroad men. They had commandeered a train at Dunsmuir two hundred miles to the north and run it down to the scene of the action at the state capital. Having collected rifles and ammunition at towns along the way, they appeared ready for open rebellion. The prospect of an armed revolt rattled nerves across the state.
* * *
Two glimmers of hope glowed, however dimly, on the evening of the Fourth. Peter Studebaker, one of five brothers who ran the nation’s premier carriage manufacturing works in South Bend, Indiana, was said to have inserted himself into the controversy. He lived in Chicago, was a friend of George Pullman, and owned a significant chunk of stock in the Pullman’s Palace Car Company. He also knew Eugene Debs, who called him “a true friend of the working men.”
A rumor reached reporters that he had met with Debs as well as with Pullman vice president Thomas Wickes. Studebaker’s interest in resolving the matter was blown up into an effort authorized by George Pullman himself to seek a compromise. Others said he was acting on behalf of stockholders fed up with Pullman’s intransigence. The news cheered all those who simply wanted the boycott to be over.
Studebaker’s efforts were shrouded in mystery. Chicago mayor John Patrick Hopkins acted publicly in his attempt to resolve the dispute, which was increasingly threatening his city with chaos. Joined by an arbitration committee of his city council, he attempted to arrange a negotiated settlement. He called in ARU secretary Sylvester Keliher on the Fourth and set up a meeting for eleven the next morning.
Representatives of the General Managers’ Association were also invited. The usual posturing—the union making no promises, the managers denying they would meet with the archfiend Debs—did not completely quell the hope among ordinary citizens that reason would now prevail. Those of an optimistic bent breathed more easily as they went to bed that night.