Folks on both sides of the boycott pleaded with George Pullman to return to Chicago and help resolve the crisis that was now causing Americans to be killed in the streets. Instead, that weekend he traveled from his oceanfront home to his secluded retreat in the Thousand Islands. He told a reporter that he did not feel up to giving an interview. “I am so worn out and tired.” In any case, “the strike has gone beyond me, and I could say little of interest.”
He denied the rumor that President Cleveland had urged him to arbitrate. Others certainly had. Cook County judge Murray F. Tuley expressed the opinion that “Pullman could have, I am satisfied, prevented it all.” Detroit’s Republican mayor Hazen Pingree traveled to Chicago with telegrams from the mayors of fifty other cities urging a negotiated settlement. To all came the same answer. Nothing to arbitrate.
Pullman’s brother-in-law George West suggested to reporters: “Let [the employees] return to us as they went out, non-union men, and we will then see what amicable arrangements can be made.”
Positions showed no sign of softening. The General Managers’ Association strike leader, John Egan, noted that in Chicago “only two roads are making any pretense of operating.” The situation had reached a point “where none but violent measures can produce a better condition of affairs. This thing must come to an end.”
“The railroads,” Egan said, “can do no more than they have done.” He described Debs as “an egotistical ass” who could be “squelched by a strong hand.” He insisted that “quibbling over legal technicalities and hair’s breadth definitions of the constitutional rights of the citizens will not ease up matters in the slightest.” Saturday’s gunfire, he thought, was “a move in the right direction.”
Reporters asked Egan’s colleague, U.S. Attorney Edwin Walker, whether Debs was about to be arrested. No warrants for ARU officials had yet been issued, he said. “He will not be arrested until after the grand jury meets.”
Debs himself was in good humor and standing firm. He told reporters the strike was strengthening hour by hour. “I consider our position impregnable. I am not worrying much about this rumored arrest.” He had consulted with his lawyer, a friend from Terre Haute, and was sanguine that the injunction was an absurd overreach by the government.
The South Side of Chicago, where violence had flared the day before, remained calm on Sunday. It was, a reporter noted, the “quietest day that the neighborhood experienced in many years.” Most saloons near Loomis and Forty-Ninth Streets were closed. Instead, sightseers came to view the scene of Saturday’s violence as if it were a Civil War battlefield. They stared at the bullet holes, which riddled the modest frame cottages near the Grand Trunk tracks. “Relic hunters and camera-snappers were plentiful,” a reporter wrote.
The wreckage of hundreds of burned freight cars that filled the Pan Handle yards was also a tourist draw. A pall of smoke still hung over the neighborhood. The air was filled with the acrid smell of the anthracite that continued to smolder on the tracks. All afternoon, a nearby boulevard swarmed with the brougham carriages of the well-to-do and the hired hacks of the middle class. Bicycle riders chose the area for their outings, and the day found the “bloomer girl much in evidence.”
* * *
Grover Cleveland had never seen a gun fired in anger. During the Civil War he had hired a Polish immigrant to take his place in the ranks. An isolationist at heart, he had avoided overseas conflicts during his first term. Now he found himself unexpectedly directing a military campaign at home. He had not gotten a good night’s sleep since activating the troops on the previous Tuesday, July 3. Emergency meetings with Olney, General Schofield, and Cleveland’s old law partner, Postmaster General Wilson S. Bissell, often went on until two or three in the morning.
“The pulse of the great strike was being felt in the White House,” a news report said. All day Saturday and Sunday, July 7 and 8, visitors streamed in and out to report and consult. Cleveland handled a deluge of letters and telegrams—he established a direct wire to General Miles’s headquarters in Chicago.
The feeling among members of the high command was that more force was needed. All day Sunday, Cleveland consulted with his confidants. After dinner, he called the entire cabinet together.
General Schofield, the army commander, still grumbled about General Miles’s tactic of dividing his command. He thought the shooting by militiamen at Loomis Street offered a clear example of how facing crowds with too little force “may have a bad effect on the mob.” He convinced Cleveland to send a thousand additional federal troops to Chicago, including more artillery and cavalry. Infantry would be dispatched immediately from as far away as Sackets Harbor, on the eastern end of Lake Ontario. Three thousand more U.S. Marshals would be recruited and sworn in.
The cabinet members perused a long dispatch that Eugene Debs and James Sovereign of the Knights of Labor had sent to the president earlier in the day. The labor leaders once again pleaded their case against George Pullman’s stubborn refusal to talk. They blamed the railroads, not the strikers, for any disruption of the mails. They noted that the military, so quickly deployed during the strike, had never been called out to protect working people “from the ravage and persecution of corporate greed.”
The message ended with a pledge that they would use the power of both their organizations to maintain peace and good order, even as they struggled on behalf of the “inherent rights of all men.” Cleveland ignored the message. He had something else in mind.
* * *
In Chicago that Sunday, July 8, delegates from the city’s trade unions filed into Ulrich’s Hall for a late-afternoon meeting. They represented a wide array of professions: wire workers, horseshoe-nail makers, waiters, iron molders, stationary engineers, carpet salesmen, theatrical stage workers, bakers, stonecutters, harness makers, and cap makers. The great meeting room was filled to suffocation, and the corridors were packed with those who could not get in. Hours were spent sorting through the men’s credentials to make sure no railroad detectives were present.
The delegates represented more than a hundred local trade unions. Each had the authority to act for his members. The chiefs of several national unions were also on hand, including John McBride of the mine workers, James J. O’Connell of the machinists, and William B. Prescott of the typographers.
Every day, Eugene Debs had seen the stakes mount. Hundreds of thousands of railroad men were in economic freefall, without income or resources. Great corporations had watched their revenues dry up. Americans were divided and afraid. The U.S. Army was in the streets. Thousands of militiamen were on patrol. Men and women had died. People in towns cut off by the boycott were going hungry. There was only one way to resolve the situation, Debs told the meeting: a general strike.
Faced with a momentous decision, the delegates argued late into the night. The booming contention of the voices at times rattled the windows of the hall. Reporters sat on fences outside, trying to hear. A man shouted: “If you want to save united labor, if you want to save the unions, if you want to save Chicago, you must strike and help us.”
Others protested. Now was not the time. Too many unemployed men were desperate for work. The printers of the International Typographical Union were reluctant. The plumbers did not want to strike. The radicals, comprised largely of Germans and other immigrant laborers, wanted to declare a general strike immediately. Many native-born delegates were more cautious.
Leaders of the teamsters shouted their eagerness to strike. Their union had great “fighting ability,” allowing them to virtually shut down the transportation of cargo throughout the city. With the workers on Chicago’s elevated lines also threatening a strike, they said, “interminable broils” were likely to tie up the town. Members of the National Union of Seamen, sailors on the lake schooners that frequented Chicago’s harbor, also planned to walk out, cutting off another mode of transportation.
Many saw in a general strike a benefit beyond helping the Pullman employees. “If this fight is won,” one man said, “it will establish a recognition of all labor and not organized labor alone.” The president of the Journeymen Horse Shoers Union called the boycott “a battle between capital and labor in which labor must hold together.”
John McBride, president of the United Mine Workers, who had met with Debs for breakfast that morning of July 8, held what some called a trump card. He was prepared to call out forty-five thousand miners. Such an action would quickly starve the railroads of coal and bring trains to a halt in every corner of the nation.
Ballots were taken to judge the mood of the meeting. With a solid majority in favor of striking, the delegates began to shape a plan of action. They would give George Pullman one final chance to agree to arbitration. Some wanted to set the ultimatum for the next afternoon, Monday, July 9. Others insisted they should wait until they could effect a general strike across the whole country.
At midnight, a bombshell erupted. Word of the development spread in a murmur that quickly grew into a howl of anger. President Cleveland, having sent troops into Illinois without even a courtesy call to authorities there, had now issued a proclamation to the state’s civilians.
“I, Grover Cleveland, President of the United States,” it read, “do hereby admonish all good citizens … against aiding, countenancing, encouraging, or taking part in … unlawful obstructions, combinations, and assemblages.” It ordered anyone already involved in the disturbances to disperse before noon on Monday. “Those who disregard this warning … cannot be regarded otherwise than as public enemies.” Cleveland made it clear that troops would not discriminate between “guilty participants and those who are mingled with them.” The “only safe course” was to stay home.
It was not a declaration of martial law—not exactly. But, General Miles said, it “amounts to the same thing.” It gave Miles ample authority to act as he saw fit. “Whoever disobeys it,” Miles said, “is a public enemy, and as such is to be destroyed.” Now simply talking with a group of friends in the street could get a man shot.
The proclamation was delivered to local authorities and to newspapers late on Sunday night. Mayor Hopkins thought it unnecessary but said he was “not prepared to criticize the President’s Proclamation.”
To the delegates at Ulrich’s the proclamation was an outrage and a bold provocation. It slapped the label “public enemies” on working men and women who were standing up for their rights. Radical union men welcomed the decree, which they assumed would further spur the representatives to action.
The delegates voted to send the Pullman strikers a thousand dollars for their relief fund. They would also forward a wire to Grover Cleveland denouncing corporations drunk “with the wine of special privilege” and asking him to “no longer drink of the poisoned cup that is now being held to your lips.”
A committee of union members would approach Mayor Hopkins and ask him to serve as a go-between with Pullman officials to plead once more for arbitration. If the request was denied, a general strike would begin on Wednesday, July 11. They requested American Federation of Labor chief Samuel Gompers to hurry to Chicago as soon as possible to help broaden the impact of the walkout.
Questioned by reporters in New York, Gompers said that yes, certainly he was in sympathy with the Pullman boycott. Would he commit to a general strike? “We have not come to the bridge yet. When we get to it we may cross it.”
E. J. Lindholm, the Master Workman of District Council 24 of the Knights of Labor, said, “The Pullman Company has taken away the last hope of an amicable settlement of these labor troubles. Now it must be war to the bitter end. Wednesday morning will witness the biggest strike ever known in this country.”