On Thursday night, July 12, as the AFL representatives were meeting in Chicago, labor supporters crowded into a mass meeting at the Cooper Union in New York City. “Eugene V. Debs is battling in the cause of humanity,” a speaker exclaimed. “The time will come when all Americans will adjudge Debs right and our present Federal judiciary wrong.”
Reformer Henry George stood up to insist that “the most vociferous shouters for law and order are they whose official actions have violated law and incited to disorder.”
Frank Foster, the editor of a labor newspaper, promised that “George Pullman is but of today, Olney is but of today, and Grover Cleveland is but of today. But the cause of labor … and the cause of American citizenship are for now and all time to come.”
* * *
In Washington, Grover Cleveland had that day announced that as soon as the disorders were over, he would appoint a commission to investigate the issues raised by the strike. He would create the body under the Arbitration Act of 1888, which he had signed into law during his first term. The legislation was the first to give the government an official role in labor relations and was specifically aimed at railroad companies. It provided for the voluntary arbitration of disputes as well as the appointment of temporary commissions to analyze strikes and other labor problems.
Cleveland was invoking the second provision. The act’s title led many to believe that he was finally demanding arbitration of the Pullman strike. A Knights of Labor official who met with the president called his decision “a great victory for the labor organizations and everything the A.R.U. has fought for.” Eugene Debs said that he was gratified and hoped the move would bring “a speedy settlement of the existing conflict.” But the commission’s task was to start an investigation after the dust settled and report its findings to the president, nothing more.
* * *
The next morning, Friday, July 13, George Pullman, together with company lawyer Robert Lincoln, arrived in a blisteringly hot New York City from the Thousand Islands. The two men had slept comfortably through the night aboard a sleeping car made by Pullman’s rival, the Wagner Palace Car Company. Lincoln, then fifty years old, had long been friendly with George Pullman and was serving both as a company employee and as Pullman’s personal legal adviser.
After breakfasting at the Murray Hill Hotel, Pullman, looking tanned but careworn, proceeded to his office. He spent the day compiling a detailed rehash of his dispute with his employees.
“The deplorable events of the last few weeks have not been caused by the Pullman Company taking an obstinate stand,” he obstinately insisted. He proceeded once again to reduce the entire dispute to dollars and cents.
The boycott, he declared, had nothing to do with the discontent of his employees anyway—it was a way for the unions to target the railroads, which happened to have had contracts with his company. He believed his employees were loyal but had been duped by outside interests who wanted to establish gambling dens and brothels in Pullman. The workers went on strike “under the excitement of their recruiting into the new organization.”
“What is the demand concealed under the innocent sounding word arbitration?” He answered his own question: “Arbitration always implies acquiescence.”
* * *
In Chicago, Mayor John Patrick Hopkins received a visit from Eugene Debs and James Sovereign of the Knights of Labor to talk about the future of the still-sputtering strike. Debs seemed to imply that Cleveland’s proposed commission somehow settled the matter. Arbitration had been decreed. Now the railroads needed to do their part by taking back the men on strike. As soon as they did so, the union would call off the boycott. That was his offer.
Hopkins agreed to carry Debs’s message to the general managers. He and Alderman John McGillen went to the Rookery and presented what the press was calling the “terms of surrender” to GMA chairman Everett St. John. While they were there, strike strategist John Egan showed up and read over the proposal. St. John said he could take no action until the managers met to discuss the matter.
Hopkins pressed him. He urged a settlement that would leave laboring men “in good humor.” He explained that unless the strike was officially declared off, some hotheads might persist in rioting or committing acts of vandalism. He pointed out that a quick resolution was in the interest of the state, which was paying $18,000 a day to keep the militia in Chicago.
Throughout the day, other railroad managers came by individually. Each looked over Debs’s offer with twinkling eyes. Egan decided they need not meet as a body. At seven that evening, Debs’s proposal was returned to the mayor. A polite note explained that the managers could not receive or consider any communication from Debs or the American Railway Union. They had decided that scorn was a better tactic than conciliation.
“It doesn’t make any difference to the members of this association,” Egan stated, “whether Mr. Debs declares the strike on or off.”
* * *
On Saturday, July 14, a Chicago Tribune headline announced: DEBS’ STRIKE DEAD. It was not quite true, but the flood of turmoil had crested and was definitely receding. Marshal John Arnold dismissed five hundred deputized men from duty in Chicago.
Sioux City was quiet. Workingmen in Peoria celebrated the peace with a parade. In Decatur, Illinois, the strike was over. The Wabash line was moving all trains. Men were returning to work in Fargo.
Produce was now abundant in Chicago markets. Wholesaler outlets were crowded with country buyers who had not been able to reach the city for weeks. Business at theaters was picking up.
With no declaration from Debs, the strike still limped along in the hinterlands. A train was dynamited in Oakland. An explosion a few miles west of Missoula, Montana, blew off the front of a locomotive. Strikers let loose a train of thirty cars on an incline in Indianapolis. Picking up speed, it slammed into the Home Brewing Company stables, slaughtering numerous horses.
People continued to die. A New York express train on the Big Four line was wrecked at Fontanet, Indiana, on Friday morning. Both the engineer and fireman were killed in the crash after a vandal broke a lock and threw open the switch.
In Sacramento, troops provoked by stone throwers fired shots, killing one striker and wounding another. ARU organizer Harry Knox was arrested there for conspiracy in the fatal wreck at the trestle on Wednesday. He claimed he was innocent, but the confession of another man purportedly implicated him.
Soldiers guarding the Northern Pacific line outside St. Paul saw a man pouring oil on a trestle. When he ran, they shot him dead. A man tampering with railroad property in Hope, Idaho, met the same fate.
The overriding concern of many of the strikers was no longer to harass the railroads but to get their jobs back. The general managers knew they could not operate without taking back many of their old men, but they ordered that “no men will be discharged to make room for applicants.” Strikebreakers had been promised permanent jobs. In many cases they had gone to work at peril to their safety amid the riots. Some regarded them as cowardly scabs, others as heroic defenders of public order.
Scores of penitent strikers were lining up at railroad offices. Managers turned many away. Some of those who did find work had spent their careers climbing slowly up the railroad hierarchy, starting with a long stint as a fireman, then spending more years as a freight engineer before reaching the exalted position of passenger engineer at $150 a month. Now they would have to start over, perhaps driving a switch engine for half the money.
* * *
Eugene Debs redoubled his activity and seemed genuinely surprised when the general managers rejected his peace terms out of hand. He looked frantically for signs of hope and found them. Two days after his offer was scorned he declared, “We will win our fight in the West because we are better organized there. There is brawn and energy in the West. Men there are loyal, fraternal and true.” But while the strike was taking longer to wane in Montana, Utah, and California, the trajectory there was the same as it was in the rest of the country.
If the West was not the key, then something—perhaps a general strike—might still save the day. He wired a friend in Terre Haute: “Pay no attention to newspaper rumors. Indications of settlement by tomorrow but no strike off yet.”
Snatching at every positive sign, he seemed to lose sight of the somber reality. The Northern Pacific, he said, was “tied up as stiff as a petrified whale.” In fact, federal troops were opening the line along its entire length. “The Northwestern will not be turning a wheel tonight,” Debs asserted. He toyed with a scheme for new leaders to take over management of the strike while the indicted ARU directors would “enter the field to spread the gospel of unionism.”
Still interpreting President Cleveland’s call for an investigatory commission as an initiative to arbitrate the strike, he said the gesture was pointless. The boycott was already over. “There is no dispute to be settled.”
“What will become of the original issue?” a reporter asked him.
The Pullman strike would be dealt with later, Debs answered. “It has got beyond the specific issue which started this great movement.” Like so many, he had lost sight of Thomas Heathcoate, Jennie Curtis, and the others at the Pullman shops. Their strike was still going on. For them, nothing had been resolved.
Debs’s desperate faith was shared by the other ARU directors. Louis Rogers told a mass meeting of supporters that the boycott was not over. He seemed to imagine that the union had emerged victorious. “We started out with a demand for arbitration and we have won our point,” he said. “All that is left for us to do is to put our men back in the places they left.” He told the audience that the press was falsifying news of the strike’s collapse. The men at the rally shouted their enthusiasm.
General Miles was equally unable to realize that the cataclysm had run its course. He continued to raise dire prospects if his troops were pulled out of Chicago. Anarchists, he was sure, were “plotting methods of destruction, plunder and terror.” On July 16, Secretary of War Lamont had to remind him of the danger of “overstaying our welcome.”
* * *
The activity by Debs and all the ARU directors to sustain the crumbling boycott came to a halt on Tuesday, July 17. They received word at union headquarters that the government was now charging them with violating the omnibus injunction. By continuing to communicate with and urge on their members after the injunction was issued, they had put themselves in contempt of court. Federal authorities ordered them to appear at 10:00 a.m. to answer the charge.
Debs, Howard, Keliher, and Rogers walked into the federal building with three counselors, including Stephen S. Gregory, one of the city’s most prominent lawyers. U.S. Attorneys Thomas Milchrist and Edwin Walker were waiting with a lawyer from the Santa Fe Railway, the company that was making the formal complaint against the four men. Judge Grosscup, who would preside over the case, was out of town. Milchrist laid the facts before federal judge William Seaman, and he issued warrants for contempt.
“We will test the question,” Debs said, “as to whether men can be sent to jail without trial for organizing against capital.”
Seaman scheduled a hearing on the case for the following Monday and set bail at $3,000 for each man. In a surprise move, the men refused to post bond. As he was led away to jail, Debs said they were forgoing bail to demonstrate to what lengths corporate power would go. “I would rather be a free man behind prison bars,” Debs said, “than a slave under the sunlight.”
Having plotted his strategy in advance, Debs had written his parents to prepare them for news of his incarceration. The next day they wired him: “Stand by your principles, regardless of consequences. Your Father and Mother.”
Debs’s wife, Kate, and one of his sisters came from Terre Haute to visit him in jail. A reporter described Kate as “a graceful woman of strong physique. Her head is adorned with dark, short, wavy hair, and her black eyes snap as she discusses the questions at issue.” Another paper noted “sparklers of about a carat and a quarter each on her left hand.” She told reporters that she believed in the principles of the American Railway Union and supported her husband’s stand.
Some claimed that Debs and the others had gone to jail to depict themselves as martyrs. Debs said, “The poor striker who is arrested would be thrown in jail; we are no better than he.” Jail also offered a respite from the relentless duties of running the boycott. Rogers frankly admitted, “I am getting a rest such as I have not had for weeks.”
The accommodations in the ancient Cook County Jail were grim. The decrepit facility was chronically overcrowded, the more so with vandals and rioters arrested during the strike stuffed into cells. Bedbugs and other vermin left prisoners scratching. The rustling of rats interrupted sleep. Through a window, the ARU directors could see the site of the gallows where the innocent men accused in the Haymarket bombing case had been hanged. A jailer showed them the bloodstained rope “by way of consolation.” As he did everywhere he went, Debs made friends among the thieves, vagrants, and drunks who crowded the jail. His supporters sent him food, flowers, and cigars, all of which he shared freely with his fellow inmates.
The following Monday, the defendants appeared before Judges Grosscup and Woods. The question was whether the union directors had called their members out on strike and had continued to direct their activities after the injunction was issued. Making the contempt charges stick was crucial to the government’s strategy. The criminal case was more serious, but to prove a criminal conspiracy required hard evidence and reliable witnesses. It also depended on a potentially fickle jury. The contempt case left the matter entirely to the discretion of the two judges. If the government won there, Edwin Walker wrote to Olney, injunctions would become permanent weapons and “there would be no more boycotting and no further violence, in aid of strikes.”
One of the pillars of Debs’s defense was the contention that the American Railway Union left all strike decisions to its local unions. Debs could advise, but he could not order. The boycott was the “free, voluntary and peaceable action of the employees.” In addition, the lawyers pointed to Debs’s continual reminders to his men not to commit violence or break any law, only to withhold their labor if they chose to do so.
To counter this argument, the federal attorneys again hauled out the slew of telegrams that had been sent from ARU headquarters, many of them under Debs’s signature. The messages gave the impression that Debs was trying his best to guide the activities of the strikers, not just acceding to their decisions.
To Litchfield, Illinois: “Take action to have all classes of employees withdrawn from service. Pledge full support for all, whether members or not.”
To Fort Wayne, Indiana: “Call out all loyal employees.”
To Peoria, Illinois: “Withdraw from the service immediately.”
The sheer numbers of wires in this tone suggested his active role. The government would also make much of a telegram to a union man in South Butte, Montana, that advised: “Save your money and buy a gun.” Was this the encouragement of violence? The union produced a letter as proof that the catchphrase had been added by a secretary who was simply sharing a private joke with a former colleague.
More to the point was a wire sent to strikers at the Union Stock Yard that they should allow a train to come through to pick up rotting animal carcasses, which were threatening public health. Before receiving this instruction, the men had not allowed the train to proceed; afterward, they did. That clearly showed Debs’s power to order the men to act. Prosecutors even produced his courtesy telegram allowing the passage of Mrs. Stanford in California as evidence of his dictatorial power.
The hearing went on for two days, then assistant prosecutor Edwin Walker fell ill—from the summer heat and, he said, the proximity of the unwashed strikers who crowded the courtroom to watch the proceedings. The two judges decided to postpone the matter until September. They tacked on an additional $7,000 bail for each defendant. This time, the men posted bond and went free.
Debs returned to his home in Terre Haute. Kate barred all visitors. Hollowed out by fatigue and stress, her husband spent most of the next two weeks in bed.
* * *
On July 15, the Sunday before Debs’s arrest on the contempt charge, the Illinois National Guard troops at Pullman had staged a field day. A crowd of several thousand friends and supporters came to the model town for the spectacle. The men lined up in their dress uniforms to march behind the town band. The parade was a welcome diversion after two months of tense waiting.
The warlike atmosphere of the past weeks had dissolved. Residents handed soldiers bouquets of flowers. Seven hundred visitors took dinner with the officers at the Hotel Florence. More dined with the troops in their camp. A thousand people, many of them wearing white ribbons, attended an outdoor religious service conducted by the militia chaplain.
The strikers were still wary. Thomas Heathcoate said, “I don’t believe the strike has been declared off.” He was waiting to hear from ARU officials. One man denounced Debs. “If he has given up the fight what are we going to do? We will be worse off than we were before.”
On Tuesday, July 17, with Chicago suffering the worst heat of the summer, notices were tacked up on the gates of the Pullman shops: “These works will be opened as soon as the number of operatives taken on is sufficient to make a working force in all departments.”
Vice President Wickes made it clear the company was ready to take back former employees and even to investigate their grievances. “I have always told the men I was ready to talk with them,” he said to reporters. “I have the kindest of feelings toward them.” The news flew through Pullman and Kensington. Scores of idle workmen stood in groups discussing the development. Union men appealed to their comrades to stand firm.
As the company began to accept applications, First Regiment soldiers and a large force of police stood by. Hundreds of men swallowed their pride and asked for their jobs back. To do so, they had to surrender their union membership cards and sign a “yellow dog” contract stating that they would not rejoin the ARU or any other union. They agreed to accept their old wages and their old rents. Numerous unemployed men also made the journey to Pullman in hope of getting work.
Strike leaders like Heathcoate knew they would not be welcome and did not bother to apply. Theodore Rhodie, a veteran employee of Pullman, also declined the offer. “Because,” he said, “when a man asks me to give up my principles, my rights as an American citizen, he might just as well ask me for my life.”
The factory departments opened gradually. Dissension continued in the community as union stalwarts watched friends and neighbors give up the struggle and rejoin the workforce. By the end of August, the company had hired nineteen hundred former workers and eight hundred new men.
During the drawn-out process of restarting the plant, continuing hardship pressured the men to accept the company’s terms. The arson and violence during the strike’s climax had drained public sympathy and dried up contributions to the workers’ relief fund. Now as the boycott faded, appeals went unheeded. During July, the Scandinavian Painters Union No. 194 contributed $15 to the relief fund; a local of the Cigar Makers International Union gave $50. Individuals subscribed a dollar or two. The relief committee sponsored a picnic at South Chicago that raised $600. It was a pittance for the sixteen hundred destitute families.
Few of the strikers had any savings left. Shoes and clothing were wearing thin. Many families lacked sufficient food. When the factory finally opened, it operated with fewer employees, leaving more than a thousand of the old men still jobless. The relief committee begged a ton of flour from the Chicago Trade Council. Men living on black bread and coffee, short of car fare, had to walk the fourteen miles to central Chicago to seek work. On August 17, Pullman residents appealed to Governor Altgeld. “Starvation stares us in the face.”
George Pullman had finally returned from his sojourn in the East. He kept busy at the downtown Pullman Building and avoided the public eye. A visitor reported him “very quiet, worn out by the strike.” Governor Altgeld wrote to him directly, pleading with him to contribute to the relief of the residents of his model town. Many had “practically given their lives to you.” Even if they were foolish to strike, Altgeld wrote, they had “served you long and well and you must feel some interest in them.”
The state, the governor reminded Pullman, had paid out more than $50,000 to protect the company’s property. Should the people of Illinois be asked to pay the cost of his employees’ relief as well?
Visiting the town, the governor found alarming conditions. The relief committee had made its last distribution: two pounds of oatmeal and two of cornmeal per family. “The men are hungry and the women and children are actually suffering,” Altgeld wrote to George Pullman. “I assume that … you will not be willing to see them perish.”
The company president replied that he did not “doubt that there are many cases of need,” but he denied all responsibility. The men were destitute because they had left their jobs. He would do nothing to relieve the suffering they had brought on themselves.
Finally, Altgeld issued a proclamation to the state calling on “all humane and charitably disposed citizens to contribute what they can” to a relief committee. Some Chicago newspapers also started fund drives. The people of Illinois, struggling through the depression themselves, responded generously to the emergency. Enough donations of clothing, provisions, and money came in to allow Pullman families to again receive weekly allotments.
George Pullman’s final outburst of meanness was never forgotten. He had triumphed in the great dispute that had cost the city, state, and nation so much. All knew that the trouble was rooted in his stubborn willfulness. Now he turned a blind eye to hungry, desperate people.
Only a year earlier, Pullman had been hailed as a visionary, an idealist, and a great benefactor of workingmen. Now he was widely seen as a petulant and selfish plutocrat without a soul.