George Pullman preferred the simplicity of business arithmetic to the calculus of social reciprocity. “Nothing to arbitrate” was a tool that could hew a path through a jungle of entangling considerations like equality, manhood, dignity, and fairness. To him, the ideas of property, ownership, and control were clear and absolute. He was willing to expend his effort and imagination in measures that he was sure would benefit his employees but would not let his employees tell him what to do.
What many sensed would be the decisive week of the crisis began on Monday, July 9. Pullman was aware that his role in the calamity had been roundly criticized. Secretary of State Walter Gresham bluntly asserted that “a serious mistake has been made by the Pullman people in refusing to meet and counsel with their employees as to real or fancied grievances.” Pullman, he said, had made it appear that he was using the power of the federal government “to crush out labor organizations.” He called for the sleeping-car magnate’s resignation.
Congressmen were also complaining about Pullman’s intransigence. Senator John Sherman was one who suggested that the government should begin regulating the fares for sleeping cars, as it already did the rates for freight. This slap at Pullman’s monopoly would pay him back for the obstinacy that had proven so costly to the country.
More than one contemporary commentator described Pullman as soulless. Yet Pullman never showed the malicious streak or the disdain for others that were attributed to men like Henry Clay Frick and Jay Gould. The model town was evidence of his idealism. Pullman’s paternalism may have been outmoded, but his intentions were at least in part altruistic. He was never effusive or sentimental about his concern for others, but the construction of libraries, progressive schools, parks, and athletic clubs was not the action of a man lacking a soul.
Pullman stood on principles of which he had no doubt. He felt he must adhere to his precepts whether the goal was to make a profit or to benefit humanity. If his company failed, no one would have a job. If his model town did not earn a profit, it would be a meaningless charity.
Pullman was obsessive in his determination to control his own affairs. He knew how to run his business better than his employees, better than government bureaucrats, better than labor leaders, and better than any arbitrator. That fact was so transparently clear that Pullman was willing to allow the whole population of the country to be inconvenienced, willing to watch railroad property burn and men die violent deaths rather than waver.
* * *
The criticism Eugene Debs faced was far more vociferous than that endured by Pullman. The strike was now a rebellion, a New York World reporter wrote. Debs was directing “open war against the state.” The New York Times decided that Debs was not only a “lawbreaker,” he was also “an enemy of the human race.” He needed to be locked up. As for the violence, “no friends of the Government of the United States are ever killed by its soldiers—only its enemies.”
Although dark clouds of arson and bloodshed had gathered over the boycott, Debs kept insisting that the sun, which he had never lost sight of, was about to break through. “We will win,” he told newsmen.
Debs rose early on Monday morning, July 9, in spite of the previous night’s prolonged meeting with the trade unions. He was “cheerful and hopeful as ever,” a reporter noted, adding, “He is a smiler.” His seemingly indestructible optimism had helped sustain the boycott through all the turmoil. An essayist would later write of him: “He has ten hopes to your one hope.”
Debs was subject to the whims of hundreds of American Railway Union locals. Some of their members had struck, returned to work, and struck again as hopes and fears sloshed back and forth. Mobs of rioters with no relation to the union had taken up the banner, turning the situation into what the London Daily News reported was “a madman’s dream.”
Debs’s fixed idea of the rightness of his cause, like Pullman’s bedrock notion of business principles, served as a moral compass. He firmly believed what he had read in Victor Hugo, that the invasion of an army could be resisted, but not the spread of an idea. Debs’s idea was solidarity. The labor leader was steeped in and guided by just those ambivalent human qualities that the sleeping-car mogul could not grasp. Although he tossed rhetorical bombs at capitalists, Debs’s dream was always a harmony of interests that would allow owners their rewards and workers their dignity.
Like Pullman, Debs was inclined to ignore certain home truths. The first was that solidarity had its limits. Certainly the boycott, waged almost entirely for the benefit of the relatively small group of employees at the Pullman works, was a stunning example of selfless action. Tens of thousands of men had walked away from paying jobs out of sympathy for others. But Debs’s idea that the railroads would never be able to replace the strikers was a chimera. Selfishness, animosity toward fellow workers, and pure desperation prompted hundreds of firemen, engineers, switchmen, brakemen, and humble laborers to seek the positions that had been vacated by the strikers.
The sudden loss of labor had crippled the railroads at first. But now the companies were hiring replacements and climbing back to their feet. They did not lack for applicants. The work of skilled railroad men was a commodity that the corporations could purchase on the open market. This was an idea that repelled Debs, for if it was accepted as truth, not only this boycott but any strike was vulnerable.
Nor was it accurate, as Debs consistently asserted, that the tremendous tie-up along the rails was entirely the result of the managers not having the men to run the trains. From the beginning, strikers had done more than walk away from their jobs. Some at least had actively interfered with trains, uncoupled cars, cut brake lines, caused derailments. In spite of Debs’s repeated calls to obey the law, the rioting had played a significant role in paralyzing rail traffic. With the deployment of state and federal troops now smothering the mobs’ interference, the railroads were beginning to bounce back.
The doubt that occasionally floated to the surface of Debs’s sea of confidence was that his great idea, the American Railway Union, might have been ill-timed. He had moved too quickly. He had overreached. If the strike failed, the union itself was in jeopardy.
For Debs, solidarity was the sun and he could not keep himself from staring into its light. Now it had taken the form of a general strike. He was not able to make out clearly what lay beyond its brilliance—the dazzling vision was enough. He was convinced that a wider display of brotherhood would save the situation. All the workingmen of Chicago—all the workingmen across the continent, if it came to it—would rise up and support the railroad men just as the railroad men had supported their brothers and sisters at Pullman. A general strike was the answer.
* * *
That Monday, July 9, Chicago was quieter than it had been since the boycott began. The prospect of a general strike convinced many that the calm was a portent of even more serious trouble. If Pullman did not agree to arbitrate, a reporter predicted, “the most tremendous strike known to history will be inaugurated tomorrow when the evening whistles blow.”
Perhaps with this great threat hanging over his head, George Pullman would finally agree to a peaceful solution. That morning, a group of union representatives went to see the Chicago City Council’s Committee on Arbitration. Their visit prompted committee chairman John McGillen, accompanied by three other aldermen and three union men, to proceed to the Pullman Building to meet with Vice President Wickes.
Ushered into the plush office, the men put forth their proposition. No, they were not asking Wickes to agree to arbitration. Rather, they suggested that a committee be established, with representatives from both sides, to ascertain whether there was a cause for arbitration or not. In other words, they were asking the company to agree to arbitrate the question of arbitration.
Perhaps all involved, if they had reflected on the absurdity of this notion, would have laughed out loud. But the stakes were too high. They all knew what was really being proposed. This was George Pullman’s last chance. By the convoluted nature of the arrangement, the aldermen were affording him an opportunity to save face. They appealed to him “in behalf of the community.”
The company, Wickes stated, “cannot recede from the position it has already held.” McGillen pleaded the enormity of the decision.
Wickes now excused himself. He and a company lawyer left the room. The others assumed that in the ten minutes they were gone, they had communicated by wire with George Pullman at his Thousand Islands retreat. When Wickes came back, his face showed no sign of conciliation. “The Pullman Company,” he stated, “has nothing to arbitrate.”
McGillen was dazed. “Am I to understand that the Pullman Company refuses this slight request, made at so grave an hour, and upon which so much depends?” When Wickes repeated the mantra once again, the alderman argued that a corporation was a “kind of quasi-public” entity. Pullman had invoked the protection of patents issued by the government. The company had relied on the government to protect its property and business. “Yet you ignore a fair request made by the city?”
“There is a principle involved in this matter, which the Pullman Company will not surrender,” Wickes said, echoing his boss. “We must manage our own business. We cannot allow our employees to do it for us.”
The meeting was over.
* * *
George Pullman had again forced the hand of the organized workingmen. Grand Master Workman James Sovereign, whose Knights of Labor would be a crucial ally in any wider strike, issued a statement that set the tone for the day. “A crisis has been reached in the affairs of the Nation that endangers the peace of the Republic,” he proclaimed. Every union man would be “remiss in his duty” if he did not act to help the strike succeed. “Every labor union in the country should go out.”
It was not known how many men in Chicago were union members. Some said seventy-five thousand, others a hundred or even two hundred thousand. Most reporters and union leaders alike predicted that a mass walkout would spread to all workers, including non-union men. The city would face unprecedented paralysis.
Enthusiasm for the general strike ran high and citizens across the country worried that the escalating dispute would drive the country over a cliff. A representative of Chicago’s Amalgamated Clothing Cutters envisioned the beginning of a revolution. The result would be “a remodeling of the Government.”
“The question,” Debs told reporters, “is in the hands of the allied trades.” He tried his best to ignore a fly in the ointment. At the previous night’s meeting, trade union members had made an urgent call for Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor, to rush to Chicago. His presence on the scene was “imperative.”
The careful and thoughtful Gompers agreed that it was his duty to “make an effort to bring order out of what threatens to become chaos and confusion.” Certainly he would come. He hoped, by his presence, advice, and action, “to help in bringing this industrial crisis to a peaceful and honorable ending.”
Gompers called for a meeting at Briggs House, an elegant Chicago hotel. The conference would include the AFL’s Executive Council and a wide range of other union officers. But the meeting would take place, Debs was disappointed to hear, on Thursday, July 12, the day after the general strike was to begin.
Any call by the federation for a nationwide walkout would have to await the judgment of AFL officers. Local trade unions would need to decide on their own whether to lay down their tools as planned on Wednesday.
Perhaps after Gompers’s arrival, the giant Federation would endorse and widen the general strike. Perhaps not. Debs harbored deep suspicions that Gompers’s expression of sympathy for the strike might not translate into forceful action, that peace rather than honor might be his priority.
* * *
On Monday evening, July 9, the idea of the general strike received a boost from an unexpected source. Grover Cleveland decided that his proclamation of the day before, which labeled strikers as “public enemies,” was not good enough.
Now he extended the prohibition of “unlawful obstructions, combinations, and assemblages” from Illinois to all the western states where there had been major disturbances, as well as along all rail lines where mail or interstate commerce was carried. Citizens connected with the disturbances in any way were to “disperse and retire peaceably to their respective abodes on or before three o’clock in the afternoon on the tenth day of July, instant.” The president was, in effect, putting most of the country under martial law as of Tuesday afternoon. The general strike was now almost certain to begin Wednesday morning.
To back up his order, Cleveland set in motion even more federal troops. Eight infantry companies from New York arrived at the Lake Front Park camp in Chicago. He mobilized a force of U.S. Navy sailors and Marines at Mare Island in San Francisco Bay and gave them orders to proceed against the strikers who were besieging Sacramento.
General Miles was still worried. The next day he wired Washington that in Chicago “rioters or anarchists have 6000 Winchester rifles and bushels of dynamite bombs.”
* * *
For Debs it was the best of times and the worst. The flow of wires was encouraging and disheartening. Brakemen had joined firemen to tie up Indianapolis, but the Santa Fe line had resumed accepting livestock and perishable freight. Workers in Guthrie, Oklahoma, had struck, but Illinois Central passenger trains were running on schedule. Conductors and brakemen had walked out in St. Louis, but in Sioux City, the strike was reported to be over. A general strike was likely in Cleveland if the railroad brought in non-union men. Five hundred federal infantrymen were moving trains in New Mexico. In Toledo, employees of both the Pennsylvania Railroad and the Ohio Central had walked off “with a final good-bye cheer.”
Significantly, the tie-up of traffic around Chicago’s Union Stock Yard had fallen apart. Forty-five mounted men of the Chicago Hussars, a volunteer militia, were patrolling there. Illinois National Guardsmen were on the scene with a shiny brass Gatling gun mounted on the roof of a boxcar. At 11:00 a.m. that morning, a shipment of meat had rolled out of the yards. Cavalrymen rode in front and an army sharpshooter sat on the roof of the last car. Tomorrow, butchers would begin killing cattle, sheep, and hogs for the first time in almost two weeks. General Miles, fortified by President Cleveland’s proclamation, had declared a literal “dead line” a hundred feet from all railroad tracks. Any unauthorized person crossing it could be shot.
* * *
Late Tuesday, July 10, the trade unions’ ultimatum for George Pullman to accept arbitration came and went. Around five o’clock that afternoon, Chief U.S. Marshal John Arnold and several deputies knocked at Eugene Debs’s room in the Leland Hotel. When Debs opened the door, Arnold did not need to show him his gold star—the labor leader knew him well.
Arnold said he had a warrant for Debs’s arrest, charging him with conspiracy to interfere with interstate commerce, obstruct mail, and hinder execution of the laws of the United States. Debs put on his coat. His brother, Theodore, joined him. The men proceeded to the office of U.S. Attorney Thomas Milchrist.
Milchrist, in consultation with John Egan and the general managers, had decided that the eve of the general strike was a strategic time to arrest Debs and ARU officers George Howard, Sylvester Keliher, and Louis Rogers. Fourteen rank-and-file union men who had allegedly participated in acts of sabotage or riot were included in the warrants.
The members of the grand jury had been empaneled before noon that day in the courtroom of federal judge Peter Grosscup. The only glitch was the initial refusal by Western Union manager E. M. Mulford to hand over copies of the hundreds of telegrams Debs had been sending around the country. Mulford, acting on the advice of his company’s attorney, asserted the wires were privileged communications. But when threatened with jail for contempt, he sent a clerk to bring in the bundle of papers.
By four that afternoon, the evidence had been laid out and the jurors were listening to Judge Grosscup’s charge. He began by saying he recognized that “the opportunities of life under present conditions are not entirely equal, and that changes are needed to forestall some of the dangerous tendencies of industrial life.” Nevertheless, the law had to be obeyed. He proceeded to charge the jury in a way that left little doubt there were grounds for them to indict the ARU officers.
The arrests had been anticipated, but the timing was unsettling. As the news spread through the city, it generated outrage in some sectors, glee in others. The accused, insisting on their innocence, took the matter in stride. “The arrest will not deter from our work,” Debs insisted. Grosscup set bail at $10,000 for each man. He scheduled a trial for October.
Debs’s mood flashed from nonchalance to white anger when deputy marshals appeared with all the records of the ARU, including Debs’s personal papers and unopened mail. He protested vehemently at what he considered “an infamous outrage” worthy of the czar of Russia. Milchrist insisted that he had a subpoena that allowed the seizure. “It is no longer a question of right in this country,” Debs said, “but a question of force.” He sent Theodore running out to secure a bail bondsman.
Debs would later learn that the marshals had thoroughly ransacked union headquarters while gathering the documents. Judge Grosscup realized that the seizure was illegal. He ordered court officers to return Debs’s personal papers and mail the next day.
Theodore quickly returned with First Ward gambler Bill Skakel and Black Bill Fitzgerald, a political logroller from the stockyards. They signed bonds for Debs and the other officers—bondsman was a sideline of many of the city’s saloon keepers and petty politicos. Union lawyer John F. Geeting said the defense would be handled by an up-and-coming young lawyer named Clarence S. Darrow.
The grand jury was not finished. They continued to hear evidence and finally indicted sixty-nine individuals for conspiracy. Most were men whom detectives had identified as participants in the rioting, either by committing acts of violence or delivering incendiary speeches. The charges were grave and the arrests sent a warning to all involved.
Reporters asked Milchrist if he had any intention of instructing the jury to investigate the railroad managers. By law, the companies had an obligation to deliver the mail under virtually any circumstances. During the boycott they had refused to move mail simply because the trains lacked Pullman cars. “As to whether they will be criminally investigated I do not know,” the U.S. attorney said, “but I know of no such intention on the part of the government.”
* * *
As the nation held its breath awaiting the onset of the general strike, outbreaks of violence continued to flare across the country. The boycott had exacerbated the bitterness of miners, some of whom had yet to return to work after the recent strike in coal country. In the central Illinois mining town of Spring Valley, a passenger train protected by federal troops pulled into the depot on Tuesday afternoon. It was met with a barrage of stones from protesting miners, recent immigrants from Lithuania, Belgium, and Poland. Soldiers scrambled onto the platform. The crowd refused to disperse. The troops opened fire. One man was shot through the head. Another, hit in the leg, bled to death. Several more were wounded. Angry miners looted two grocery stores in a nearby town.
At Grape Creek, another mining town on the eastern edge of Illinois, miners blocked the line by overturning coal cars and removing rails. State militiamen rushed to the scene and fired indiscriminately. They killed a woman, a sixteen-year-old girl, and one miner.
The situation in California remained critical. The three thousand American Railway Union supporters in Sacramento were armed with sixteen hundred rifles and shotguns and plenty of ammunition. They had already faced down federal marshals and the state militia. Now two troops of federal cavalry were riding east along the Sacramento River as an advance guard. They were followed by riverboats loaded with infantrymen, marines, five batteries of light artillery, and several Gatling guns. It was feared that the streets of the state capital would soon run ankle-deep in blood.
The steamers landed outside Sacramento at six on the morning of July 11. The regulars and marines marched into town, arriving at the rail depot at seven. The show of force took the wind out of the strikers’ resistance. The soldiers’ bayonets restored order in the rail yard and the station. Troops arrested four men for complicity and seized a number of rifles and shotguns.
The battalion’s colonel recruited Sam Clark, the oldest engineer on the line, who was willing to drive the Overland Express to Oakland. The train had been sitting in the yards since the disturbances began. Now it was made ready: five mail cars, six coaches, three Pullman sleepers, and a dining car. The train carried eight porters but only one passenger, a couple of newspapermen, and twenty-two army guards. Six of the soldiers sat on the coal in the tender, “their Springfields leveled threateningly at the dense crowd.” The locomotive chugged out of the station at twelve miles an hour.
Two and a half miles west of Sacramento, the engine approached a wooden bridge over a muddy creek. Someone had removed the spikes and fishplates that held the rail to the ties. As the engine moved onto the trestle, it pushed the loose rail out of alignment. Its momentum carried it partway across the long bridge before it tipped and plunged ten feet into the shallow river. The tender remained upright, but several mail cars also fell.
Four soldiers were killed. Sam Clark was crushed beneath his engine. Several other soldiers were injured, including an artillery private who lost an arm.
The soldiers who rode out to the scene of the disaster returned in an ugly mood, but the only further violence was an exchange of gunfire back and forth across the river. Militiamen accidentally shot and killed a Japanese boy who stood by the bank watching.
* * *
Following his arrest, Eugene Debs made a final appeal to all workingmen who had offered to help. It was essential, he said, that they be “orderly and law-abiding” in this supreme hour. “Our position is correct, our grievances are just.” They must work patiently toward the time when “right will be enthroned.”
A man in a Hammond saloon said, “I for one will die rather than submit. I say let every workingman turn out and fight to the death.”
Tuesday night, the White House experienced its quietest evening since the boycott had begun two weeks earlier. Having nailed the principal culprits, Secretaries Lamont and Gresham, Postmaster Bissell, Attorney General Olney, and General Schofield all puffed on celebratory cigars with President Cleveland and talked over the mostly favorable news coming over the wires.
It was apparent to everyone that night that cracks were opening in labor’s united front. John McBride had not, as he had promised, ordered out forty-five thousand coal miners. Because of dissension in their ranks, the Building Trades Council in Chicago had put off their strike until Saturday. Forty trade unions in Milwaukee had expressed their sympathy with the ARU but delayed taking action.
The government men smiled at a statement from a leader of the Chicago musicians’ union. “To strike now,” he said, “would be like standing on the shore watching a man drown and saying to him, ‘never mind, another man is coming out there to drown with you.’”