“Alarm becoming general among thoughtful citizens,” U.S. Attorney Thomas Milchrist wired to his superiors in Washington on Friday, July 6.
Although the thoughtful citizens of Chicago liked to imagine themselves living in a modern metropolis, the city still had the heart of a raw western town. The combination of crowded slums, widespread poverty, and rampant vice made for a coarse and unruly atmosphere. An Italian visitor during the 1890s observed that “the dominant characteristic of the exterior life of Chicago is violence.”
Chicago led the nation in its rate of criminal arrests. Almost two thousand citizens died violent deaths each year, a fifth of them run down by trains at grade crossings. Men routinely carried pistols when they went abroad. A stretch of Randolph Street that accommodated gamblers was known as the Hairtrigger Block. The infamous Levee vice district adjacent to downtown had scandalized out-of-towners for a decade. “All America,” a tourist wrote, “looks with fear at this city.”
City residents were not easily intimidated, even by armed soldiers. Aware that the troops had been sent into the city in spite of Governor Altgeld’s protest, working-class Chicagoans were angered by the presumption of the federal authorities. They took the troops’ presence as a personal insult. ARU vice president George Howard, himself a veteran of the Union Army, noted that “the very sight of a bluecoat arouses their anger. They feel it is another instrument of oppression.”
That Friday, citizens awoke to a cascade of alarming headlines:
MOB WILL IS LAW
GUNS AWE THEM NOT
RIOTERS DEFY UNCLE SAM’S TROOPS
REGULARS POWERLESS BEFORE CHICAGO’S RIOTOUS ARMY
Residents anxious to keep up on events paid premium prices for extra editions. The Tribune judged that the strike had become an “insurrection.” Editors hoped Dictator Debs and his drunken followers “will be fired upon, they will be bayoneted, will be trampled under foot by cavalry, and mowed down by artillery.” The Washington Post predicted “war of the bloodiest kind in Chicago.”
It was clear that most of the rioters were, as a police inspector affirmed, “not railroad men.” A Chicago Herald reporter recognized them as “rough, vicious and lawless elements” from local neighborhoods. Another witness said that those engaged in destruction “are not strikers, most of them are not even grown men.”
Whoever they were, they held the city under siege on Friday. For Eugene Debs, the developments were ominous. There was no question that the mobs in the Chicago rail yards were running riot. They attacked any train that the railroad supervisors had the audacity to operate. With the help of marshals and police, Baltimore & Ohio officials tried to bring four passenger trains through during the morning. By the time the trains reached the station, all the windows on each of them had been smashed.
Police began to respond with pistol fire. A lieutenant fired once in the air to disperse a crowd, then directly into a mass of people. A “young Pole” was seen to drop—his friends helped him limp away.
By afternoon, pitched battles were breaking out around the stockyards, with “heads cracked by the score.” Police made no attempt to arrest rioters, a reporter observed, but those who could not run fast enough “felt the hickory.” A squad of army regulars made three charges on gangs of rioters who were overturning cars, driving the culprits out of the yards and returning with blood on their bayonets.
* * *
As the day went on, fire became a dominant theme of the disturbances. It was as if the immolation of the White City the night before had touched an incendiary nerve. Crowds overturned more than 150 empty boxcars on a mile-long stretch of tracks near the stockyards. Starting in the morning, they also set fire to isolated switching towers and other railroad property. The arson spread during the afternoon and by nightfall a “roaring wall of fire” had formed along the tracks from Fifty-Fifth to Sixty-First Street, a few blocks west of the site of the fair.
Along the Pan Handle road outside the stockyards, as many as seven hundred freight cars burned. Arsonists removed oil-soaked rags packed into the axle bearings of the cars and fashioned them into torches. Local residents roamed the yards, looting loaded boxcars before dispatching them in flame. Twenty meat cars went up, lacing the air with the prehistoric aroma of roasting flesh. Two hundred open-topped gondola cars filled with anthracite coal were lit. When their wood frames burned through, the glowing coal spilled onto the right-of-way. Ties burned. Iron rails warped in the intense heat.
Another fire tore through more than 250 boxcars on sidings. It was reported that two of them contained loads of provisions gathered by a relief committee to aid the Pullman strikers.
Exhausted firemen struggled to keep the blazes from spreading. Many of the fires were located far from any hydrant. Crowds actively interfered with their efforts to save railroad property. They jammed the fireboxes used to send alarms, threw stones at fire trucks, and in some cases slashed hoses. The frenzy at the stockyards culminated in the burning of a huge barn holding almost seven hundred tons of hay. Overtaxed fire brigades could only watch the inferno vomit its dense gray-white smoke as tongues of orange flame licked up its sides.
* * *
More than one observer noted that the freight cars seemed to be set on fire systematically. The perpetrators showed “none of the wild howlings and ravings that marked their work of the night before.” The accusation would be floated, although never proven, that railroad managers had hired provocateurs to ramp up the riots and add to the arson. “We have it upon reliable authority,” Debs said, “that thugs and toughs have been employed to create trouble so as to prejudice the public against our cause.”
Many of the targets of arson were worn-out and surplus freight cars. Few Pullman cars were attacked. The cars that burned were packed very close together, beyond the reach of fire hoses. The announcement by the corporations that they intended to sue the city for damages because police had failed to protect their property—losses were estimated at as much as $1 million—added to the suspicion.
Others pointed to the role of the detectives and other employees of the railroad corporations who were serving as deputies. These marshals “were armed and paid by the railroads and acted in the double capacity of railroad employees and United States officers.” A report by fire department officials, who kept track of all damage, said that when firefighters extinguished blazes on the night of July 6, “they caught men in the act of cutting the hose and that these men wore the badges of deputy marshals.”
City officials put the total railroad losses for that Friday at $340,000. On no other day of the strike had the damage reached more than $4,000.
* * *
As turmoil engulfed the stockyards, violence also flared ten miles away in the rail yards of the southern suburbs. At daybreak on Friday, a mob gathered in Kensington along the Illinois Central tracks just opposite the Pullman works. At 9:00 a.m., a Michigan Central train approached and was surrounded by a mass of humanity. Gerald Stark, chief detective for the road and now a deputized marshal, stood on the platform of a car. The crowd surged around him. He pulled his revolver, pointed it at the crowd, and fired. Its sharp report sounded above the clamor. Again. One shot wounded spectator Frank Udess over his right eye. Another caught William Anslyn in the forehead. According to witnesses, Anslyn tried to rise, but Stark fired a third bullet into his back. He died of his wounds.
The mob erupted. Police managed to get Stark off the train as a woman cried, “Lynch him!” The officers pulled the detective to a police station and disguised him as one of the wounded men. They spirited him away in a patrol wagon.
Soon afterward, a milk train passed through the station on the way to Chicago. The rioters forced the engineer to stop. They chased him and his fireman out of the cab, uncoupled the cars, opened the engine’s throttle, and jumped off. The empty locomotive went careening wildly up the tracks until it collided with an overturned boxcar and derailed.
This was the closest the rioting had come to the model town. Strike leader Thomas Heathcoate had worked hard to keep the wave of vandalism and arson from spreading to the shops and to the four hundred idle Pullman cars parked nearby. Union men were still manning a guard force around the plant.
That afternoon, two hundred rioters overpowered several watchmen and entered the Pullman factory. They forced out the skeleton crew still employed in the plant. Panicked office workers locked financial records in safes and fled. The invaders destroyed nothing. More company watchmen, now armed with riot guns, appeared to hasten their departure. A threat by mob leaders to return and burn down the Hotel Florence convinced most of the guests there to depart before evening.
Pullman vice president Thomas Wickes, along with plant manager Harvey Middleton, had been inspecting the shops three times a day since the strike began back in May. Wickes had asked Mayor Hopkins to station more police around the facility. Hopkins said he did not think the beefed-up security was warranted. But with a mob now burning cars just across the tracks, Hopkins sent to Pullman 240 men of the First Regiment of the Illinois National Guard. They brought along a Gatling gun, a weapon considered superior for crowd control.
Although Heathcoate criticized the deployment of the troops as inflammatory, the soldiers set up their bivouac on the lawn of the hotel and their officers commandeered rooms inside the building. Sentries were ordered to admit no civilian to the factory without a pass. Additional state troops took up positions in surrounding towns.
* * *
It was not only in Chicago where the strike was entering a crisis. Montana had been caught up in the action from the beginning. The state’s agriculture, lumber, and mining depended on rail transport. In the first days of the boycott, switching crews on the Northern Pacific Railway had refused to handle Pullman cars. They were discharged by railroad managers, touching off a strike up and down the line. Engineers, conductors, and firemen soon joined the boycott. The state’s far-flung towns were isolated from each other and dependent on rail lines. By early July, the stores in many of them were barren. Tons of strawberries rotted in Missoula. In Billings, with poultry, vegetables, and other foodstuffs on the verge of going bad, officials sponsored a “feast of famine,” serving hearty meals to two thousand citizens at nominal prices in order to use up the perishables.
Support for the strike in the state was widespread. A minister in Billings said the corporations were “the pliant tools of the codfish monied aristocracy who seek to dominate this country.” In the south-central railroad town of Livingston, which huddled along the Yellowstone River where it dropped out of the mountains, nine of every ten residents supported the strikers. Valley farmers with deep grievances against the railroads provided the men with donations of food and provisions.
On Tuesday, July 3, Northern Pacific managers had demanded relief from the federal courts, and Judge Hiram Knowles, who in April had authorized troops to arrest William Hogan and the train-stealers of Coxey’s Army, issued an injunction against the strike. Like other federal magistrates, he was guided by a legal theory that sacrificed government neutrality to a sanctified view of property rights.
That same day, Brigadier General Wesley Merritt, commander of the Department of Dakota, wired Washington to say that mail was being obstructed along the Nothern Pacific. Nor was he able to send a paymaster or supplies along the line. He recommended to Secretary of War Lamont that he be allowed to “remove the obstruction.” Railroad managers concurred, insisting that troops be sent.
President Cleveland asserted that he had a duty to keep open any railroad over which military supply trains or the U.S. mail ran. “If it takes the entire army and navy of the United States to deliver a postal card in Chicago,” Cleveland was reported to have said, “that card will be delivered.”
On Friday, July 6, the president ordered General Schofield to open the Northern Pacific. In dispatching troops to Chicago three days earlier, Cleveland could cite reports, however inaccurate, of rioting and violence. The strike in Montana had been entirely peaceful. Without any pretense of restoring order, Cleveland was choosing to occupy the state with federal forces. His goal was clear—to break the strike.
General Merritt headed west from St. Paul and ordered another force to set out from Seattle in a pincer operation. A third battalion, fifty Tenth Cavalry troopers, African American enlistees known as Buffalo Soldiers, rode on horseback the forty-five miles from Fort Custer to Billings.
A speaker at a rally in Helena insisted that discontent could not be conquered by force. Another orator called it “a battle for supremacy between dollars and cents on one side and humanity on the other.” A Livingston newspaper warned of “military despotism.”
While the military maneuver was getting under way, officers of the ARU local at Butte sent a crew to rescue a circus train stranded in the mountains near Lima. In gratitude, the Great Syndicate Shows and Paris Hippodrome put on a free performance that night in Butte. More than twelve hundred spectators from all over the region welcomed the break from strike-induced anxiety and hard times. They filled the bleachers to watch the clowns, the equestriennes, and Rialto, a strong man who could lift the soldiers of an entire army platoon with his teeth.
On Tuesday, July 10, the first regular train, complete with Pullman cars, reached Livingston under military guard. The officer in charge, Captain B. C. Lockwood, feared a violent reception. He ordered his soldiers to walk in front of the train with loaded carbines and fixed bayonets. Seven hundred residents turned out to hurl insults and threats at the invaders.
Soldiers hammered with rifle butts any citizen who did not move out of the way fast enough. Captain Lockwood whacked the flat of his sword against the head of I. F. Toland, a Northern Pacific foreman who backed the ARU. He wildly drew back the blade, accidentally striking a small boy. Approaching hysteria, the captain screamed at Livingston’s mayor: “I am running this town!”
* * *
On that same busy Friday, July 6, the U.S. attorney in Chicago, Thomas Milchrist, wired Olney for permission to draw up a request for an order of contempt against Debs for violating the injunction, which had been in effect since Monday. The attorney general gave the go-ahead. Lawyers working for the railroads offered to help Milchrist with the wording of the charge. He wrote the document on his own but thought it wise to submit it to the railroad managers for their approval before filing it with the court.
The next step was to indict union officials for conspiracy. Edwin Walker, who was putting together that case, told Olney the same day that he had enough evidence and planned to present it to a federal grand jury the following Tuesday, July 10. Olney was sure Debs and the ARU officers could not escape this finely woven net.
John Egan, representing the General Managers’ Association, felt that since the contempt charge was ready to go and would require only a judge’s order to enforce, the government should make that their first line of attack. Walker thought that if Debs were to make bail on the contempt charge, it would add impetus to the general strike rumored to be in the works. He wanted to wait and file his criminal charge first. Bail on that could be set so high that the “dictator” would have to remain in jail. He predicted that as a result, a “strike upon any railroad will not again occur for a series of years.”
* * *
As he dealt with the tactics of the boycott, Debs was also thinking strategically. On the one hand, he felt the need to prevent retaliation against the scabs who were filling ARU members’ jobs. On the other hand, if the corporations were free to bring in replacements and operate trains, the strike would be lost. Increasingly, he was coming to think that the solution to the dilemma was to broaden the attack, to throw his support behind a general strike. The prospect of all workers joining in solidarity spoke to his deepest principles.
Debs knew the history of the labor movement. The few general strikes in the United States up to that point had been limited to single cities. A strike of all workers in Philadelphia back in 1832 had won a ten-hour day. A nationwide strike for shorter hours had been tried in 1886, but it ended in the disastrous bombing in Chicago’s Haymarket Square.
More recently, in 1892, the American Federation of Labor had helped organize a successful general strike in New Orleans. A labor alliance representing both white packers and black teamsters there struck for shorter hours and better pay. The employers’ Board of Trade offered to settle only with the white workers. The alliance members refused to be divided. They were joined by forty-nine other AFL trade unions in a general strike. More than twenty-five thousand workers, half the city’s workforce and almost all its union men, walked off the job. The Board of Trade agreed to arbitration, which won the employees many of their demands.
Debs had already begun reaching out to his many contacts in labor unions around the country. “We have assurance,” he declared to reporters, “that within forty-eight hours every labor organization in the country will come to our rescue.” The prediction heartened workers and shocked the public.
On that Friday evening, workingmen and their representatives from around Chicago poured into Ulrich’s Hall. The Building Trades Council represented twenty-five thousand organized workingmen including architectural ironworkers, cement finishers, plumbers, and gas fitters. The overflow conference met behind closed doors until two in the morning to discuss a strategy to meet this unprecedented attack by the government on working people. Talk of a general strike buzzed through the hall.
Although excited by the prospect, Debs continued to hope for conciliation. Labor, he said, was willing to meet “any gentlemen of standing” who could effect an honorable settlement. “Let Mr. Pullman agree to the appointment of arbitrators,” he declared. “And if they agree there is nothing to arbitrate, Mr. Pullman’s position will be sustained.”
If arbitration was the carrot, the men of the Building Trades Council hefted a stick to back up the offer. It would be good for all if George Pullman would accept arbitration. If he refused, they agreed to promote “a general cessation of all industries throughout the country.”
The delegates called on the American Federation of Labor to take the lead in organizing the action. They scheduled another conference at Ulrich’s Hall on Sunday, with each Chicago trade union to send three delegates. While not agreeing to an immediate strike, they had set the machinery in motion for an action whose consequences could shake the country.
* * *
As Debs monitored the wires, the flames of anarchy crackling through Chicago seemed to be dropping embers in distant locations. In Sacramento, two days after the failure of the militia to restore order on July 4, the standoff continued. “Not a wheel is turning,” a newspaper reported. Strikers there upped the ante and now said they would not return to work until the company restored the wages of the railroad men to the 1893 scale.
Tie-ups in Detroit and Cleveland were strangling lines from the East. Switchmen, trainmen, and firemen were ready to strike in Buffalo. Fire had erupted during the night in Cairo, Illinois. The Cudahy Packing plant in Omaha had laid off three hundred hog killers. The nearby Omaha Smelter was nearly out of ore and would soon be shut.
In Pittsburgh, ARU organizers spoke to a standing-room-only mass meeting and employees there were ready to strike. “You had all better get on the band wagon when it comes along,” the union men advised.
That afternoon, Debs sent a telegram to ARU members in Jackson, Michigan. “The fight is on, and our men are acquitting themselves like heroes. Our cause is gaining ground daily.” Success, he wrote, “is only a question of a few days.”
* * *
The federal infantry and cavalry troops in the stockyards had sought greater security by combining their camps. The soldiers removed fences surrounding Dexter Park in case they needed to flee a fire in their midst. The night sky took on a rosy hue. “The whole horizon seemed afire,” one man said.
The assistant fire marshal for the area around the stockyards said nearly 150 boxcars had burned there, along with eight switch towers. In the district to the south, more than 750 cars had been ignited.
A reporter for the Chicago Inter Ocean that night had observed a “moving mass of shouting rioters” from which squads of a dozen would break away and run into the yards with firebrands. Silhouetted against the flames were “men and women dancing with frenzy.” It was, he said, a grand spectacle. “It was pandemonium let loose.”