On Wednesday, July 11, the general strike in Chicago failed.
Plenty of workmen made good on their promise to walk out. Teamsters. Foundry workers. Boilermakers. But the city’s lumber shovers reported to work. Longshoremen fought each other for scarce jobs on the docks. German waiters and bartenders decided to hold on to their positions rather than participate. Cigar makers postponed their strike until Thursday afternoon. Carpenters resolved to strike later but fixed no date. Bakers, who knew there were plenty of men to fill their jobs if they struck, continued to work. Plumbers, who had fought a tough strike three months earlier, did not want to jeopardize their gains. They subscribed $1,200 for the relief of the Pullman strikers but remained on the job.
The teamsters’ places were filled by new men in less than six hours. Commerce in the city went on with barely a hitch.
The great walkout that would paralyze the city and serve as the nucleus of a nationwide shutdown had attracted twenty-five thousand strikers. In other circumstances, it could have been viewed as a potent showing. But expectations and momentum demanded a far larger result.
In the model town, George Pullman’s employees stood in groups discussing the glum news. Their relief fund had shrunk to $1,500. Providing a single meal a day to all the families cost $500. In the ARU paper Railway Times, editor Louis Rogers wrote that “it was not expected that all the trades unions of this city would promptly stop work this morning.” Workers needed time to prepare. “It is thought that by Saturday everybody will be out.” The claim rang hollow.
That evening, Kensington bars were crowded with angry, disappointed Pullman men who drank and talked in dark terms. Tomorrow’s meeting of the American Federation of Labor became their last best hope. Members of many Chicago trade unions were waiting for the decision of that gathering before acting. All eyes turned to Samuel Gompers.
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Although he had gone to work when he was ten, Gompers had continued his education at night. He had learned Hebrew and studied the Talmud, the ancient record of Jewish civil and ceremonial law. Such study, he later wrote, “develops the more subtle qualities of mind.” He had learned “to make careful discriminations.”
Like Eugene Debs, Gompers possessed an enormous reservoir of sympathy for working people, a hatred of injustice, and a desire to purge the world of some of its pervasive cruelty. But where Debs was a dreamer, Gompers was a realist. Where Debs saw his American Railway Union confronting and defeating the growing power of the monopolies, Gompers shaped the American Federation of Labor to defend limited gains. Where Debs saw a new, cooperative society, Gompers saw a larger paycheck for his members.
On the surface, Debs and Gompers were cordial and supportive, yet their different perspectives contributed to a complex relationship. Before the strike, Debs had praised his colleague as “one of the most brainy men now connected with the great labor movement.” But Gompers bluntly rejected the idea of industrial unions like the one Debs had created. In his view, workers’ power was in their skills. Merging their interests with those of unskilled laborers dangerously diluted that power.
The differences between the two men were apparent in their approach to the railroad brotherhoods. Debs, after long and intimate involvement with them, had come to see the brotherhoods as disunited, overly conservative, and weak. Gompers saw in them the most effective way to pressure the railroad companies on pay and working conditions. Gompers was not about to support Debs’s radical new approach. He would later judge the ARU a “disruptive movement.”
Gompers also felt that workers needed to accommodate the corporate reality, not harken back to an earlier age of artisans and yeomen. He disagreed with Debs that strikes would ever become obsolete. The best chance for working people to advance was by incremental steps and by leveraging their advantages. That meant organizing around skills that employers depended on. It meant withdrawing those skills when a strike offered a tactical advantage.
To Debs, a union was more than a business arrangement intended to secure higher wages. Solidarity was more than a tactic. “I would make an injury to one in the cause of labor the concern of all,” he insisted.
Before Gompers left New York, his friend and fellow organizer Peter McGuire wired him to “go slow on Chicago meeting of Council.” McGuire was afraid Gompers might catch the “strike fever” that seemed to be infecting so many of the labor leaders in the West. He had no reason to worry.
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The forty-four-year-old Gompers stepped down from the New York train late on Wednesday evening, July 11, and ate dinner at a Chicago hotel. Short and solidly built, he had a large head and broad face. His dashing handlebar mustache, curly dark hair, and suave manner gave him the aura of a stage actor. When he finished his midnight meal, he agreed to talk to reporters. Yes, he said, he would meet at Briggs House with the AFL Executive Council and with the leaders of Chicago’s trade unions. Yes, he had invited the railroad brotherhoods to attend. About the current strike, he could say nothing. For George Pullman, he had utter contempt.
Summer heat returned to the city the next morning, with temperatures headed toward the nineties. The morning sun was already glancing from the awnings that shaded the windows of the banquet room where the men were to meet. As they filed in, they traded rumors and opinions. All knew that their decisions that day would, one way or another, have a mighty influence on the course of the greatest labor uprising any of them had known.
Fanny Kavanaugh, an important figure in the Chicago labor movement, was told she could attend as a delegate of the Ladies’ Federal Labor Union but could not participate in the deliberations. Offended by the treatment, she walked out.
In addition to the AFL officials, the attendees included representatives from two dozen Chicago trade unions. Gompers’s invitation to the officers of the railroad brotherhoods, which were not affiliated with the AFL, put him at odds with Eugene Debs. While many brotherhood members had supported the boycott, their leaders had either actively opposed it or remained neutral. Gompers said those leaders were “men who were clothed with responsibility as well as authority” over railway workers, so it made sense to hear their views.
In fact, the AFL leader had been trying to get the brotherhoods, with their thousands of members, to join his federation for years. Gompers considered them more in line with orthodox trade unionism, even if their success in battles with the railroads had been limited. He was even willing to overlook their exclusion of African Americans, despite the fact that the AFL was nominally free of discrimination. Each brotherhood had potential power because of its members’ particular skills. The tens of thousands of unskilled laborers who had rushed to join the American Railway Union had no leverage—they could be replaced too easily.
Peter M. Arthur, the conservative head of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, said he could not attend. Edgar E. Clark, leader of the Order of Railway Conductors, flatly refused to come. The Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen’s Frank W. Arnold and Patrick H. Morrissey of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Trainmen did show up at the meeting and weighed in with their view of the situation.
As things got under way, Charles Dold, representing a committee from the city’s cigar makers, proposed that the AFL fully support the general strike in Chicago and across the country. He emphasized the enormity of the situation. It was not a question of union organizing, he said, but “one of capital and labor.” He knew the American Federation of Labor could settle the dispute if member unions joined the general strike. He was equally sure that the group would be held responsible for the boycott’s failure if they did not.
Gompers questioned him. If the AFL did not enter the fray, would the general strike, which had gotten off to a feeble start, decide the matter? No, Dold admitted, that would mean certain defeat. How would a vastly larger number of workers joining the battle compel George Pullman to submit? Dold, grasping for an answer, insisted that “united action would accomplish it.” Gompers said nothing.
In his autobiography, Gompers admitted that he had come to Chicago with little hope that the situation could be salvaged. An unprecedented nationwide strike of all workers in the middle of a depression smacked more of fantasy than reality.
Members of the AFL council hotly debated the question but reached no decision. After additional discussion, the group agreed to send a telegram to President Cleveland suggesting that the urgency of the situation required his presence in Chicago. They envisioned a summit meeting that would put pressure on Pullman and the railroads to relent and submit the matter to arbitration.
Most of the afternoon was spent drafting this message to Washington. They stressed the seriousness of the matter and urged the president to use his influence to end this grave industrial crisis in a fair manner. Cleveland did not bother to respond.
With the question of the general strike still unresolved, they invited Eugene Debs, free on bail after his arrest, to speak to the conference after supper. The men filed out of the room at five and returned three hours later. The pastel light of a summer evening washed the sky and the air was still thick with the day’s heat.
Debs rose to address the conference. Gompers described his demeanor as “calm, dispassionate.” What he had to say was stunning. He proposed that Samuel Gompers serve as go-between to deliver a message from the American Railway Union to the General Managers’ Association. The message was a “proposition as a basis of settlement.”
The union men pricked up their ears. They had expected from Debs an impassioned plea that the trade unions join the general strike. But now the lanky young man was saying that ARU members would “agree to return to work at once in a body, provided they shall be restored to their former positions without prejudice.”
Calmly, dispassionately, Eugene Debs was conceding defeat. He added the proviso that the railroads would be justified in denying employment to any worker who had been convicted of a crime during the strike, “if any there be.”
He was sure the strike would not be for naught. “Sacrifices … will have their compensation.” The lessons learned from the experience “will prove a blessing of inestimable value in months and years to come.” It was hard for AFL delegates to discern either the lesson or the blessing.
All the forces of labor, Debs said, should be mustered now to save the jobs of union members. If the GMA rejected the terms he had put forth on behalf of the ARU, then a general strike must be called and fought to the bitter end.
The astonished delegates thanked Debs for his contribution. Gompers told him he would call him later to let him know the outcome of their deliberations. Debs returned to his hotel.
The entire tone of the meeting changed. It was clear that the ARU was throwing in the towel. The railroad men were no longer concerned with the boycott or with the fate of the Pullman employees. They wanted their jobs back. The AFL delegates put the question of pursuing a general strike aside. They offered to send a member to petition the GMA, but only if Debs went along. It was a half-hearted gesture, since the managers had made clear they would never agree to meet Dictator Debs. The board voted to contribute a thousand dollars to a legal defense fund for Debs and the other ARU officers. They knew the men would need it.
Gompers later said, “The conference regarded the proposition made by the American Railway Union as a declaration that this strike had been lost.”
The delegates appointed a committee to draw up a statement setting forth the AFL position on the crisis. “The heart of Labor everywhere throbs responsive to the manly purposes and sturdy struggle of the American Railway Union,” they asserted. The suppression of the strike showed “the immense forces held at the call of corporate Capital for the subjugation of Labor.”
But strikes should be “entered only as a last resort.” They pointed out that the press had “maliciously misrepresented matters.” They condemned the railroads for cloaking themselves in law while their monopolistic practices flouted legality. They took a parting shot at George Pullman, describing him as “the most consummate type of avaricious wealth absorber, tyrant and hypocrite of this age.”
They recognized the ARU boycott as “an impulsive, vigorous protest against the gathering, growing forces of plutocratic power and corporation rule.” They expressed sympathy for the railroad workers but “disclaimed the power to order a strike of the working people of the country.” It was the sense of the conference “that a general strike at this time is inexpedient, unwise, and contrary to the best interests of the working people.” They recommend that the members of any trade unions now on strike return to work.
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In the immediate aftermath and in later recounting of the events of that July, many commentators tried to saddle Samuel Gompers with the failure of the Pullman boycott. Debs himself, who would veer ever further from Gompers’s conservative brand of unionism, thought of him as a traitor who delivered “one of the final blows that crushed the strike.” He declared that Gompers and the trade unionists “not only did no good, but did great harm. The whole capitalist press exulted over the decision of Mr. Gompers and his colleagues.”
It was true that newspapers praised Gompers for “saving the people of this country from a most far-reaching and bloody revolution.” But the labor leader explained that supporting a general strike in a lost cause would have been unfair to wage earners, and that “such a course would destroy the constructive labor movement of the country.”
Debs had made the right decision in calling off the strike. People were dying in this contest and the odds of success had shrunk to zero. Gompers had regarded the struggling ARU in the same way that Debs had initially looked at the Pullman strikers. Debs, puffed up by his Great Northern victory and overflowing with sympathy for the oppressed factory workers, had been unable to prevent his union from diving into the struggle to the aid of their brothers. Gompers refused to do the same. Another man drowning would achieve nothing.
When the meeting at Briggs House finally broke up at one thirty in the morning, Samuel Gompers telephoned Debs at his hotel. He was informed that Debs had retired and asked not to be disturbed.