The strike was over, but for many of the strikers, the ordeal would go on. Some were lucky—the Illinois Central Railroad took back two-thirds of the employees who had gone out. The Rock Island line rehired all but 450 of 4,500 strikers. But the managers of many other roads were adamant that those who struck would never work again. They tried to identify the men who had been active in the boycott and bar them from further employment.
With the ongoing depression and rampant unemployment, the managers had no trouble filling positions. The Pullman’s Palace Car Company, although it took many of its Chicago employees back, rehired only sixty strikers in St. Louis, none in Ludlow, Kentucky.
The corporations made liberal use of the blacklist to ruin men’s lives. Rather than circulate an actual list, the managers often required clearance papers from the man’s last employer. These would specify the circumstances that had ended his tenure. If a prospective employee could not show a paper, a simple inquiry would reveal if he had been a troublemaker at his previous job. Henry Huntington of the Southern Pacific established a policy of hiring no union men, but kept it secret so as not to arouse public resentment.
In an era when all jobs were scarce, many of the strikers found themselves permanently blocked from earning a middle-class wage. The U.S. Strike Commission would estimate that three-quarters of railroad strikers did not get their jobs back, although some probably found work under assumed names.
* * *
On July 26, with Eugene Debs and the other ARU officers entangled in federal charges and the strike fading, Grover Cleveland decided it was time to establish the investigative commission. He recruited fifty-four-year-old Carroll D. Wright, the first U.S. commissioner of labor, for the job. Ten years earlier, Wright had accompanied a delegation of state labor commissioners on a tour of Pullman’s model town and come away favorably impressed. Two additional pro-labor men filled out the panel.
For Cleveland, the commission was an opportunity for political fence-mending. A report sympathetic to workers would soften the harshly anti-labor image that his own actions had created.
On August 15, the board met in the ornate chambers of the U.S. District Court in Chicago. For the next two sweating weeks, the commissioners listened to more than a hundred witnesses and pored through stacks of documents related to the strike. A historian called the seven-hundred-page report they submitted in November “the most thorough examination of a labor disturbance in American history.”
Eugene Debs, refreshed after his rest in Terre Haute, was his usual talkative self when he appeared before the commission on Monday, August 20. He gave a detailed account of the strike’s origins. He swore that before the Pullman workers walked out, he had been “particularly anxious” to avoid a strike.
Yet when he visited the town of Pullman personally, he said, he had been moved by the workers’ plight. Wages and expenses were “so adjusted that every dollar the employees earned found its way back into the Pullman coffers” in the form of excessive rent. He was determined to “right the wrongs.”
His account hinted at how Debs’s natural sympathy and exuberance seduced him down a path whose destination was disaster. At the ARU convention in June he had followed his head and resisted the delegates’ rush to call a boycott, but his heart was on the side of the strikers.
Debs excoriated General Miles for his alleged statement that he had “broken the backbone of the strike.” The general’s role was only to maintain law and order. “But the fact is,” Debs said, “he was in active alliance with the general managers.” Ultimately, he explained, “the strike was broken up by the Federal courts of the United States, and not by the Army.”
He went on to contend that at the peak of the havoc, he and the ARU directors had decided to call off the boycott, the sole proviso being that the railroads accept the men back. “It was in the crisis when everything was at stake, where possibly it might have eventuated in a revolution.”
Debs did not want a revolution. And it may be that a sense of events barreling out of control had convinced him to call off the action. But his recollection that this had happened “about the 6th day of July, if I am not mistaken,” was indeed mistaken. The violence had reached a crescendo on Friday, July 6, with widespread arson in Chicago. Disturbances had continued across the country during that weekend. But it was not until the next Thursday, July 12, after the failure of the general strike, that Debs had asked Samuel Gompers and his colleagues at the Briggs House meeting to present peace terms to the managers.
It did not really matter. The commissioner asked when the railroad boycott was actually called off. Sticking to his insistence that he was merely a servant of the members, Debs said that the strike could only be cancelled by a vote of the locals. He had called a special ARU convention three weeks after the Briggs House meeting. The delegates had officially called off the boycott on August 2.
The commissioners asked Debs, as they did most witnesses, what he thought were the solutions to the country’s industrial problems. What measures would prevent future strikes?
He pointed to labor-saving machinery and “unrestricted foreign immigration” as leading causes of falling wages and joblessness. In Pennsylvania, he pointed out, miners had been displaced after the corporations had sent agents to Europe to import “the most vicious element of European countries.” The unemployment that resulted from this importation of cheap labor, he said, was “where the Coxey army comes from.”
Going deeper, Debs complained that venal courts had handed enormous advantages to the corporations. Samuel Gompers, who testified earlier, had made a similar point. He noted that laws about conditions in tenements, laws prohibiting sweatshops, laws requiring pay to be handed out at least every two weeks, even laws dictating that wages be paid in “lawful money” rather than scrip, all had been voided by the federal courts, which had declared them unconstitutional. The Constitution, with its eighteenth-century bias toward property rights, did not have enough flexibility for the industrial age. An Illinois law prohibiting women and children from working more than eight hours a day was then being challenged in court by business interests.
“No matter what may be said about the freedom of contract under our Constitution,” Debs declared, “no man has a right to sell himself into slavery.”
One of the remedies repeatedly raised during the hearing was government ownership of the railroads. Debs recycled an applause line he had used at the ARU convention. “To avert railroad strikes,” he said, “I would propose this: ‘That Government ownership of railroads is decidedly better for the people than railroad ownership of Government.’”
Debs weighed in on what he thought was a bigger issue. “I believe,” he said, “in a cooperative commonwealth as a substitute for the wage system.” If industry were organized into workers’ cooperatives, he thought, those who produced the wealth would receive their fair share.
Debs took the phrase from an influential book by the Danish immigrant Laurence Gronlund, who had popularized the insights of Karl Marx. Citing the contradictions of capitalism, Gronlund had in The Cooperative Commonwealth imagined a system in which national wealth would be distributed more equitably.
Chairman Wright asked if a commonwealth was not “another name for State socialism?”
“No, sir, I do not call myself a socialist,” Debs insisted. “My idea, is to secure harmonious relations, there must be kindness and mutual confidence as a basis.”
Flames had scorched the rail yards, brickbats had flown, men had hurled bombs and wrecked trains, bayonets and gunfire had inflicted wounds and death, yet none of it had shaken Eugene Debs’s bedrock notion that harmony and cooperation, trust and solidarity were not only possible but essential. Kindness, that most fragile of human attributes, had to be the foundation of national healing.
* * *
August 27 was a humid, eighty-degree scorcher in Chicago, but the galleries of the high-ceilinged courtroom were packed. During the afternoon session, George Pullman sat down in front of the commissioners to give his version of the recent upheaval. His haughty demeanor, his superficial deference, his frequent deflection of questions to subordinates, his unflappable self-righteousness, all set a pattern for the corporate chief executives who, down the years, would find themselves being grilled by public officials.
Asked why he had created the model town, he read a prepared answer. “Working people are the most important element which enters into the successful operation of any manufacturing enterprise,” he said. The town was an attempt to attract “the best class of mechanics.”
He wanted to eliminate “baneful influences,” citing saloons and brothels and “other bad places.” That, he said, was what explained his refusal to allow employees to buy their homes—they might use them for wicked pursuits.
Yes, he had intended the town to earn a “reasonable” 6 percent return, but it never had. During the past two years, the return was only 3.82 percent.
The commissioners dug in to what they called the “phenomenal success” of the Pullman’s Palace Car Company. “I don’t know just what you mean by ‘phenomenal,’” Pullman averred. They cited total dividends paid over twenty-six years of more than $28 million at an annual rate of 8 and sometimes 12 percent. The company currently retained an additional $25 million in undistributed earnings. That very year, in spite of the depression and strike, the firm had earned more than $5.2 million on revenues of $9.6 million, a 54 percent rate of profit. Pullman conceded the truth of these accomplishments.
But when it came to paying his men, he said simply: “The wage question is settled by the law of supply and demand.”
The commissioners pressed him. Given the firm’s financial success, should the company not have “borne some losses for employees who had been working for a long time?”
That would have amounted to giving the employees a gift, Pullman said, and he was not about to hand out gifts. “It was simply a matter of business.”
He was asked if the company had ever divided any of its profits with its employees. “The Pullman Company,” he answered, “divides its profits with the people who own the property.”
The commissioners tried another approach. “Would it not have been a good business investment to have paid those men a little more wages and had the works continue?”
The implication was clear. Although George Pullman swore by “business principles,” his inflexibility had caused his own company, the railroads, and the country to incur enormous losses. He groped for an answer. It would not have been a good business investment, he said, because “the wages had been fixed.”
“Who fixed them?”
“They were to work at an agreed scale.”
“They were forced to?”
“No, they were not forced.”
“They had to take that or quit?”
“Exactly.”
A commissioner suggested that a lack of bread and meat might compel a man to work for less money.
“Then,” Pullman replied, “I would say it was agreed.”
Pullman parried in the same opaque manner questions about “what is known to workmen as the living wage.”
Pullman said that his employees’ claim that before the strike they were not receiving a living wage was not true “because they are working for it now.” Their strike broken, their union membership canceled, the men had taken what they could get. They were living on it, therefore it must be a living wage.
The commissioner naturally tried to delve into the question of why Pullman had so adamantly refused to arbitrate.
“It was the principle involved,” Pullman said. “We must be the parties to decide whether we were willing to continue the manufacturing business at a loss.” To arbitrate would have been “a piece of business folly.”
He went on to explain that the question of whether the shops would be operated at a loss was “impossible for the company, as a matter of principle, to submit to the opinion of any third party.”
“You use the expression, ‘Impossible to be submitted.’ Why is it impossible?”
“Because it would violate a principle.”
“What principle?”
“The principle that a man should have the right to manage his own property.”
Carroll Wright would later observe that “stubbornness in men is often claimed, by those having it, as a virtue, as a principle.”
At a number of points during his testimony, George Pullman’s apparent lack of knowledge of his own property went beyond an executive’s habit of delegating responsibility. He repeatedly deferred to Thomas Wickes about fundamental details of the business.
With wages the central issue of the strike, Pullman was unable to tell what the average wage had been in 1893 or what the company had reduced it to the following year. He was unsure of the extent to which the men work by the day or were paid for piecework. Although he said he was the one who would have decided about reducing rents in the town, he did not know the details of the leases or exactly who maintained the buildings.
“Are you at the town of Pullman much?” he was asked.
“Not much.”
His version of how the strike had come about was that in spite of the good tendencies inculcated by his model town, “outside influences were brought to bear.” When business had slumped after the world’s fair, the American Railway Union had organized those workers he had been forced to lay off. He did not explain how men who were already separated from the company could initiate a strike.
Raising one last point, the commissioners asked: When wages were reduced for the workers, were the salaries of executives, superintendents, and foremen also cut? They were not. Why not?
“Because it is not easy for the manager of a corporation to find men to fill the positions.” If a company executive had worked there twenty-five years, Pullman said, “it don’t lie with me to go to him and say to him, ‘I am going to reduce your salary $1,000’ because he will quit.”
“You might reduce your own, perhaps, but not theirs.”
“I might, if I chose, but the difference that it would make on the cost of a car would be so infinitesimal and fractional that it would not be worth considering.”
Should he not have reduced his own pay out of fairness and justice?
“We cannot,” Pullman murmured, “do everything at once.”
After his testimony, Pullman returned to his mansion and spent the next four days in bed, laid low by exhaustion and nervous depression.
* * *
The commissioners, in the voluminous report they sent to the government, called the strike “epochal,” an event that had shifted the landscape of industrial America. Their conclusions made labor supporters cheer and capitalists wrinkle their noses.
They saw that the problems of the railroads had their roots in the fact that “the rapid concentration of power and wealth … has greatly changed the business and industrial situation.” The competition that was supposed to make corporations self-regulating had been extinguished by monopolies and collusive agreements. If the government did not actually take over the railroads, the commissioners stated, it “must restrain corporations within the law.”
George Pullman, instead of being a forward-thinking leader, was backward in his methods. “The Pullman Company,” the commissioners stated, “is behind the age.” The aesthetic features of his model town, they said, “have little money value to employees, especially when they lack bread.” His workers had no interest or responsibilities in the company-owned town. The library and theater were not amenities for them but window-dressing for elite visitors. “The air of business” that pervaded the place excluded the men from management of their own affairs while away from the job. “Men, as a rule, even when employees, prefer independence to paternalism in such matters.”
As for Pullman’s refusal to arbitrate, the report blandly stated that a “different policy would have prevented the loss of life and great loss of property and wages.” In the opinion of the commissioners, if George Pullman had shown good faith, he would have “relieved the harshness of the situation, and would have evinced genuine sympathy with labor in the disasters of the times.”
The General Managers’ Association came in for criticism as well. The organization was an example of “the persistent and shrewdly devised plans of corporations to override their limitations.” Given the GMA’s own dubious legality, its refusal to recognize and deal with the American Railway Union was “arrogant and absurd.”
The report went easier on the union, declaring: “There is no evidence before the commission that the officers of the American Railway Union at any time participated in or advised intimidation, violence, or destruction of property.”
The commission’s recommended solutions looked forward to the coming Progressive Era. They suggested a permanent U.S. strike commission to look into all major labor disputes. A government mechanism to facilitate voluntary arbitration would be an important advance. They said unions should be required to write bans on violence into their bylaws. Because strong rather than weak unions were conducive to labor peace, the government should encourage companies to recognize labor organizations. They said that the yellow-dog contracts that barred employees from union membership should be illegal. Mentioned in passing were restrictions on immigration, compulsory arbitration, pensions for workers, and statutes that limited hours of work and fixed a minimum wage.
These measures, none of them very radical, were intended to ease the cruelest of the effects of industrialization. Some would find favor soon. Others would have to wait forty years until they were enacted as part of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Commissioner Wright even suggested a need to reexamine “socialist” proposals and to “apply some of the features involved in them” to railroad labor.
The commissioners recognized that the strike had deep roots. The nation had long neglected the problems that industrialization had inflicted on American society. “Much of the real responsibility for these disorders,” they wrote, “rests with the people themselves and with the Government for not adequately controlling monopolies and corporations, and for failing to reasonably protect the rights of labor and redress its wrongs.”
John Dewey, while acknowledging that labor had lost the strike, wrote that “if I am a prophet, it really won.” The Pullman boycott was an “exhibition of what the unions might accomplish, if organized and working together.” He thought the few thousand freight cars burned were a cheap price “to get the social organism thinking.”
Never before had working people shown the true—and to some frightening—power of solidarity. Alarmed government officials, with all their resources, had joined with corporations and the press to quell the uprising. But only barely.
In defeat, the railroad workers had taught America a lesson. The powerful show of strength by the American Railway Union had planted the seed of reform and left the traditional railroad brotherhoods with new muscle. Eugene Debs had shown workers that if they organized and consolidated their forces, they could indeed gain the power to “demand and command.”
Even Samuel Gompers, who had harbored many doubts about Debs’s strategy, said that a lost strike was a “warning to the employing class generally that the working men will not go down further, that any attempt to force them down will be very expensive.”
* * *
In 1898, with the support of none other than Richard Olney, Congress passed the Erdman Act, which wrote into law some of the recommendations of the Strike Commission that had examined the Pullman boycott. The law spelled out the right of railroad workers to unionize, banned yellow-dog contracts in that industry, and created a federal board to facilitate voluntary arbitration of railroad labor disputes. Strike Commission chairman Carroll Wright called it “practically a bill of rights for labor.” This early reform envisioned a new role for government as mediator and regulator. The law was necessary, one senator said, to deal with both “the tyranny of capital” and “the unjust demands of labor organizations.”
Congress had already enacted a law to improve the safety of railroad workers. By 1900, automatic couplers, air brakes, and other measures became mandatory on all roads. The rate of accidents and injuries declined precipitously.
Railroad workers would enjoy collective bargaining and systematic arbitration a generation earlier than other industrial workers. Mediation would head off more than sixty strikes over the next decade and a half. The membership of the railroad brotherhoods soared and workers gained new clout in negotiations with employers. They did not, however, loosen their racist opposition to African American members. It was not until after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that black workers would gain full access to railroad jobs.
Reacting to the Strike Commission report, Eugene Debs said the corporations “might as well try to stop Niagara with a feather as to crush the spirit of organization in this country.” He welcomed the commission’s conclusions as fair and impartial, a “vindication” of the American Railway Union.
Debs had testified that his union was “stronger to-day, numerically and in every other way, than it ever was since its organization. We are adding to our memberships every day.” But the massed forces of Capital were not done with the ARU or with Debs himself.