No Americans had more vivid nightmares of fire than the citizens of Chicago. The 1893 world’s fair had been the crown on the city’s miraculous, generation-long rebirth after the devastating conflagration of 1871. The Great Chicago Fire had killed three hundred citizens and left ninety thousand, a third of the city’s population, homeless. The building boom that followed had given the city the reputation of a phoenix. On Thursday, July 5, the element of fire entered the Pullman boycott and set nerves on edge across the city.
Just before noon on a track outside the stockyards, rioters torched a string of freight cars. Firefighters were on the scene quickly and were able to extinguish the flames, but it was an ominous sign. A block away, rioters overturned a dozen freight cars and set one of them on fire. Around the city, firemen found switch towers and railroad tool sheds burning as well.
General Miles seemed intent on exacerbating rather than calming tensions. “A grave crisis is before Chicago,” he said. He was afraid the crowd of rioters, “worked up to a fever,” would desert the rail yards and bring their wrath into the city’s residential and business districts.
Throughout the disturbance, Miles often seemed more concerned about revolutionary and anarchist conspiracies than about performing his assignment of protecting federal property and getting mail trains moving. He even assigned a Polish private to infiltrate union ranks to gather intelligence.
After praising the “extraordinary coolness of the men,” he added the unsettling observation that “fifty of those soldiers could mow down two thousand people in a few minutes.” Asked if the government might soon put the city under martial law, he conceded that it was a good possibility.
Attorney General Olney, irritable in the best of times, said “if Miles would do less talking to newspapers and more shooting at strikers he’d come nearer fulfilling his mission on earth and earning his pay.”
Even with the additional soldiers who were on their way, Miles thought his force inadequate. He sent General Schofield a request for even more troops. The army commander mobilized more men at forts around the country. In the end, sixteen thousand federal soldiers would take part in actions against the strike, including almost two thousand in Chicago.
* * *
That Thursday began with a dispute on paper that put a spotlight on the collusion between the government and the railroads. When Grover Cleveland sent federal troops to Chicago to act within Governor Altgeld’s jurisdiction, he did not wait for the customary request from local authorities. He did not even notify the governor of his intention. Altgeld wired a protest to Washington.
Cleveland did not know what was going on, he wrote, “or you would not have taken this step.” The State of Illinois was “able to take care of itself.” State troops, he said, “have been ordered promptly whenever and wherever they were needed.” He had stationed three regiments of infantry and a troop of cavalry in Chicago, but the local officials had not yet requested their aid. He thought the federal government had been manipulated “by men who had political and selfish motives.”
While it was true that some railroads were paralyzed, Altgeld contended, it was “not by reason of obstruction, but because they cannot get men to operate their trains.” The railroads were “anxious to keep this fact from the public.” There was no anarchy in the city or state. Any disturbances could easily be handled by local officials.
Perhaps, he suggested, the president had been influenced by newspaper accounts, many of them wild exaggerations. “You have been imposed upon in this matter,” he wrote, and went on to lecture Cleveland that “local self-government is a fundamental principle of our Constitution.” He asked for the immediate withdrawal of federal troops.
Grover Cleveland replied that “Federal troops were sent to Chicago in strict accordance with the Constitution.” He briefly listed his reasons, including the need to execute the court order and to maintain interstate commerce.
Altgeld fired off another vitriolic wire, asserting that Cleveland’s curt message “involves some startling conclusions and ignores and evades the question at issue,” which to Altgeld was the principle of self-government. The president was putting forth his right to send federal troops into any community “at his pleasure.”
Caught up in his own indignation, the governor declared that “the autocrat of Russia could certainly not possess or claim to possess greater power than is possessed by the Executive of the United States if your assumption is correct.” Only at the end of his telegram did he tack on his most cogent objection: Far from tamping down violence, the very presence of the troops “proved to be an irritant, because it aroused the indignation of a large class of people.”
No doubt grinding his teeth as he dictated his message, Cleveland replied: “I neither transcended my authority or duty in the emergency that confronts us.” He thought that “in this hour of danger and public distress,” they should all be working to restore order.
Altgeld told reporters that Attorney General Olney had given many the impression that he was “the especial representative of the great trusts and monopolies of the country that have been plundering the public and are trying to use the government as a convenience.”
The reaction to the public exchange was predictable. Newspaper editors fell over each other to castigate the impudent governor. The Philadelphia Evening Telegraph called him “a sausage-maker from Wurttemberg,” who had offered “a gross and outrageous affront to the President of the United States.”
Altgeld had touched on a crucial issue. Before his first term, Cleveland had run on a typically Democratic states’ rights platform. Ten years later he was, at the behest of railroad corporations, trampling state prerogatives and assuming police powers usually exercised by local officials. Rejecting any attempt to settle the dispute peacefully, he was expanding federal executive authority in ways that troubled even those who had little sympathy with striking workers.
Altgeld was an immigrant who had risen to high office. It was testimony to the robustness of the country’s political system that he would feel comfortable lecturing the president in such scathing language. He may have been a dead man politically—indeed, he would not be reelected—but his attack on Cleveland was consistent with a lifelong devotion to justice.
* * *
The morning of Thursday, July 5, the crowds around the rail yards were sparse. Many Chicagoans were at home nursing hangovers from the previous day’s celebration. Then just before noon, a thousand people gathered spontaneously along the Rock Island line near the stockyards. The crowd attracted a crowd—within minutes the single policeman on the scene was facing three thousand unruly citizens. He ran to a call box and begged for reinforcements. Before additional officers arrived, the mob began tipping over cars.
The boxcars of the day had two main parts: an upper body that was essentially a large wooden box and two trucks below, each consisting of four iron wheels, axles, springs, brakes, and coupling mechanism. The box and the trucks were attached at swivel points, allowing the wheels to follow the curves of the track as the train moved. A hard shove by a group of men could get the car swaying on those pivots. Eventually the momentum of the upper part carried it beyond the car’s center of gravity. It overcame the weight of the trucks and carried the whole thing over onto its side.
In less than half an hour, the rioters were moving on, leaving scores of overturned cars scattered along the tracks. These hit-and-run tactics made life difficult for the authorities trying to guard the lines. During the day, the scene took on an antic quality as the police and troops rushed from one point to another in pursuit of crowds that could easily melt away into alleys and tenements.
Shortly after noon in the stockyards, authorities attempted to use federal troops to move a train of cattle along the Baltimore & Ohio line. A hundred police officers were on hand to protect the cars, but within minutes they were surrounded by an angry mob. While rioters screamed curses and the steers bellowed their laments, the police swung their clubs with little effect. Eighty cavalrymen and two companies of infantry rushed to the scene. Having forced the crowd back, the horsemen preceded the train while soldiers took up positions on top of the cattle cars, rifles at the ready. They moved only a few blocks before they encountered overturned cars obstructing the tracks. Judging it unlikely that a wrecking train could reach the scene, the rail officials conceded defeat. Late in the afternoon they returned the train and put the cattle back in their pens “amid the wildest enthusiasm on the part of the strikers,” a reporter observed.
The day continued in a series of clashes and obstructions. General Miles dispatched small bands of troops to trouble spots around the city. The soldiers might quell the disturbance around them only to have it break out a hundred yards farther up the line. Rioters stopped trains. They stoned cars. Strikers halted a passenger train and induced its engineer and fireman to quit. Stranded passengers were called fools for riding trains during the strike. They had to walk or take streetcars to reach their destinations.
Hope of conciliation dimmed as GMA representatives insisted that their demand was for unconditional surrender. Their stance “acted as a kind of wet blanket on the good intentions of the would-be mediators of the Studebaker stripe,” a New York Times reporter noted.
Hopes were also dashed that the conference proposed the day before by Mayor Hopkins would lead to a settlement. The arbitration committee of the Chicago City Council found that the railroad managers would not sit down with union representatives under any circumstances.
Hopkins sent a message to George Pullman in the name of the City of Chicago requesting that he return to the city, meet with his employees, and arbitrate their differences. Such an action, the mayor felt, would speedily settle the crisis. Pullman refused.
Hopkins would later testify that railroad officials had assured him their property had been afforded “the most efficient protection they had ever received during similar troubles; that condition of things lasted until July 5.” But as the level of rioting accelerated on that same Thursday, July 5, Hopkins’s concern about the city overcame his sympathy for the strikers. Seeing the federal troops as both inadequate and counterproductive, he asked Governor Altgeld to assign an Illinois National Guard force to the city.
The federal government had initially sent five companies of soldiers to Chicago. Altgeld mobilized a much larger force, five regiments of the state militia totaling three thousand men. At noon they began to take up positions in the city. Altgeld urged caution. “There is no glory shooting at a ragged and hungry man.” The soldiers were to keep their rifles unloaded and strictly obey the orders of their officers.
Hopkins sent men to fifty train stations and crossings around the city and assigned other units to switching areas and to the stockyards. He would eventually deploy almost six thousand soldiers—Altgeld told him that fifty thousand could be raised if needed. But the governor also warned that the troops were not the “guards or custodians of private property.” Their duty was only to “keep the peace, quell riots and enforce the law.”
Chicago citizens were seeing more and more soldiers patrolling their streets and rail facilities. With his reinforcements, General Miles commanded a thousand men. Several thousand deputy marshals were operating, in addition to five hundred sheriff deputies and more than three thousand police officers. The arrival of the state troops brought the total to more than ten thousand armed men on patrol in a city of 1 million.
* * *
By early evening, the soldiers were worn out and discouraged. Their officers acknowledged that they were “utterly unable to cope with the mob that now holds sway in the district.” It would require “nine miles of soldiers strung out along the tracks,” a lieutenant observed. U.S. Chief Deputy Marshal J. C. Donnelly said nothing short of placing Chicago under martial law would improve the situation. “No ordinary force can handle these men.”
“The police and the soldiers were as helpless to preserve the peace,” a New York Times reporter wrote, “as a regiment of two-year-old children.”
The only bullets that flew that day were not fired by troops. A detective on the Western Indiana line was accompanying a locomotive and tender southward when an overturned railcar forced the train to stop. A crowd surrounded the locomotive and threatened to take it over. The detective fired his revolver from the window of the cab, killing striking switchman Edward O’Neill and wounding another man. Under a hail of rocks, the desperate engineer threw open the throttle and pushed the obstruction aside. The engine surged forward, outdistancing the furious mob.
* * *
Around the country, the boycott continued to generate anxiety. In New York, papers reported that the meat shortages were driving up the cost of fish. “California fruits are now so scarce,” the New York Times declared, that by Monday they would be unavailable. There were poultry famines, milk famines, even a lemon famine. It turned out that the lemons for most of the country were normally shipped through New York on trains affected by the strike. Meanwhile, carloads of peaches, strawberries, and cherries were rotting on sidings. The shortages were a sign of how in a single generation the railroads had woven the U.S. economy into a vast, interconnected network.
California remained in turmoil. Large mobs roamed the rail yards of Oakland. After the state militia’s failure to restore order, officials at Sacramento admitted they were unable to cope. Strikers had secured all the rifles in the area of the state capital and enough blasting powder to wreck any bridge or tunnel. Southern Pacific Railroad officials were shipping supplies of Winchester rifles to their loyal employees to help protect property. In San Francisco, waterfront stevedores, who loaded and unloaded ships, walked off the job because of earlier wage cuts. “Strike fever” was spreading.
Some federal troops went about their duties reluctantly. One soldier in Los Angeles told a reporter he did not like “this idea of shooting down American citizens simply because they are on a strike for what they consider to be their rights.”
Milwaukee unions representing a wide swath of workers were threatening a general strike. The Federated Trades Council in that city had called an open meeting to discuss the matter. The brewers and streetcar men declared themselves ready to go out at a moment’s notice.
Colorado’s Populist governor Davis Waite said that “Deputy United States Marshals have no right whatever to be employed by any individual or corporation.” A conservative newspaper blasted back with the headline: GOV. WAITE ON ANARCHY’S SIDE.
Eugene Debs issued a statement to clarify the position of the American Railway Union. He reiterated the fact that the Pullman employees had struck “entirely of their own accord” and against union advice. “Patience deserted them,” he said, because their “souls rebelled.” One reason for this insistence was the injunction that had been issued on Monday, July 2, and had now been hanging over the ARU leaders’ heads for three days. Advised by his lawyers, Debs felt he had not violated the edict. But rumors that he would be arrested for contempt of court continued to circulate.
Debs responded to George Pullman’s contention that there was nothing to arbitrate by asking, Why not allow a fair and impartial board to determine that it was so? Pullman’s employees, he guaranteed, would accept any reasonable proposition. He put his faith in the American people, who “believe in fair play.”
That day, the Chicago Tribune carried a notice of a coming theatrical entertainment to raise money for the women and children of Pullman, who were suffering “want of the actual necessaries of life.” The sponsors appealed to all, no matter their position on the boycott. Debs raised “the spectacle of Mr. Pullman fanned by the breezes of the Atlantic while his employees are starving.” The image would rouse workers across the country, he asserted. “Labor will stand by labor.”
* * *
Labor would stand by labor. The government had raised the stakes, first by issuing the omnibus injunction, then by inserting federal troops into the dispute. Debs conceded that the situation had become “alarming” and a subject of “grave concern” to every citizen. He was increasingly contemplating a contingency that had arisen in the Trades and Labor Assembly on Saturday.
“A million of men stand ready to quit work and unite in the struggle for justice and liberty whenever called upon to do so,” Debs declared. He raised the prospect that the boycott would swell into a general strike, a rebellion of workers in all fields, the apocalyptic struggle of labor against capital that some had long been predicting. The vast legions of the unemployed with little to lose, of which Coxey’s armies had been merely a vanguard, made the prospect all the more frightening.
Samuel Gompers, who stood at the head of the American Federation of Labor, would be a key player if the boycott were to expand its scope. He had expressed his support for the railroad workers and lamented the fact that the interstate commerce law, enacted to protect the people from discrimination and injustice on the part of the railroads, was being used as “an instrument of oppression” to deprive workers of the right to strike. However, his position on a general strike to aid the boycott was unknown.
Trade unions in New York City were actively discussing the possibility of a wider strike. Grand Master Workman James Sovereign of the Knights of Labor wired Debs advising him to “neither make nor accept any compromise. Nothing but complete victory would satisfy our people.”
Debs met with members of Chicago Typographical Union on the afternoon of July 5. The typesetters offered to strike if it would help the boycott. That would mean closing down all the newspapers in town.
A general strike was labor’s ultimate weapon. When successful, it could paralyze a city. Debs understood the serious and unpredictable ramifications of such a move. His perpetual optimism was buoyed by the ARU’s success. The momentum of the boycott was so powerful, the prospects so hopeful that it made sense to consider a final push, an effort that could result in an overthrow of the economic system and the arrival of a new order.
A meeting of all the leaders of the building trades unions had been called for the next night to discuss the crisis. It was widely rumored that if nothing changed, many unions were ready to call their members out. It all foretold to a sudden and alarming escalation of the conflict that had begun in the Pullman factory.
* * *
Around 6:00 p.m. on that July 5, the sun was being eclipsed by scudding clouds driven by hot, blustery winds. Angry mobs were roaming up and down Chicago’s railroad tracks. In Jackson Park, on the South Side, the buildings of last year’s Columbian Exposition stood deserted, a vast, derelict wonderland waiting for the wrecker’s ball. Some of the buildings had been damaged by a fire in January. The remaining exhibit halls where the marvels of the coming century had been shown to millions were now used for shelter by unemployed men and women stranded by the sudden collapse of the economy.
A band of the homeless had started a small cooking fire in the Terminal Station, the ornate portal through which so many had stepped into the magic of the fair. The tramps left after consuming a meager meal. Some boys, coming in after them, found the fire still smoldering. And spreading. They tried to stamp out the flames, but fire had already crept into the building’s walls. The rail station’s interior, which elicited dreams of a vast Roman bath, quickly filled with smoke.
The entire White City, although it appeared to be made of stone, was a pipe dream of wood and iron framing supporting whitewashed plaster mixed with fiber. Exposed to fire, the materials shed their false fronts and burned like kindling. The second floor of the terminal was in flames before the alarm reached Chicago’s fire brigades. Burning embers leapt onto gusts of wind and sought new fuel along the splendid Court of Honor. The Administration Building, where President Cleveland had officially opened the fair, was soon ablaze.
Alerted by sirens and smoke, citizens rushed to watch. Tens of thousands of spectators soon roamed the grounds, seeking vantage points from which to take in the blaze that rivaled the Great Chicago Fire itself. In the center of the city, citizens rushed to rooftops to marvel at the smoke billowing over Lake Michigan, the flames dancing a hundred feet in the air, and the great explosions of sparks that surpassed the previous day’s fireworks.
The massive dome of the Administration Building came crashing down in less than twenty minutes. Firefighters could do little to abate the destruction. A willful wind whipped the flames. The men of Engine Company 18 had to abandon a pumper as the fire counterattacked. They were unable to rescue one of their draft horses, which suffocated in the smoke. Three men barely escaped death.
The stupendous Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building, the largest structure in the world, fell with a crash that was heard for thirty blocks. The Transportation Building, where George Pullman had proudly displayed his luxury cars, caught fire. It was far enough from the central inferno that firemen were able to save it.
Flames crept into an underground passage that carried electrical lines and burned away the supports. At seven thirty, the ground caved in under two Marshall Field’s bookkeepers who had come to behold the spectacle. One man was incinerated. Bystanders managed to pull his badly burned companion from the flames.
Sparks landed on the statue of the Republic. The giant golden effigy was, like the age, merely gilded. The plaster and wood underneath caught, and Big Mary went up in flames.
Most of the buildings of the White City had already been sold to a salvage company, whose owners planned to remove valuable lumber and steel girders. Many citizens thought the fire was a more appropriate and glorious ending. “There was no regret,” a reporter wrote, “rather a feeling of pleasure that the elements and not the wrecker should wipe out the spectacle.”
The most popular song of the decade, which had been played all through the summer of the Exposition, was “After the Ball.” Its lyrics lamented:
After the stars are gone;
Many a heart is aching,
If you could read them all;
Many the hopes that have vanished
After the ball.
No evidence ever surfaced to suggest the fire that consumed the White City had anything to do with the railroad boycott. Yet the symbolism was lost on no one. The overflowing promise of the fair had made Chicago an icon of progress. The strike and boycott had turned the city into the focal point of anger and anarchy. The future had disappointed. Instead of wonders, it had delivered unemployment; instead of abundance, soup kitchens; instead of hope, despair. At the fair’s opening, General Miles had been hailed by the crowds as their heroic grand marshal. He now threatened to kill citizens wholesale.
Three hours after it began, the fire had scythed the entire White City. In the quiet that followed, the bell-like voice of girl was heard to exclaim, “O, it’s all over.”
The next day, all hell broke loose.