The Pullman boycott was the most consequential labor conflict of the nineteenth century, the last credible threat of a nationwide general strike, the last time workers seriously imagined overturning the industrial order and establishing a more equitable society.
It was a power struggle rooted in American values. The players were marked by traits thought to be typical of Americans—self-reliance and impatience, invention and resolve, endless longing, stubborn dignity. For all the destruction, killing, and hatred it evoked, the many thousands who were involved on both sides joined the battle with an eager fervor and the love of a good fight that were also deeply American.
The system of government in the United States has often been deemed an experiment. We have repeatedly put to the test the question of whether our creed rests on a foundation of individualism and private property or of solidarity grounded in equality and mutual sympathy. During the great railroad conflict of 1894, these two ideals collided violently. A resolution could not be found then. It eludes us to this day.
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In practical terms, the Pullman crisis and the destruction of the American Railway Union were bad news for unions. Although railroad workers saw gains in succeeding years, the strike was followed by three decades of setbacks and retrenchment for the labor movement as a whole. America’s privileged classes had been stunned by the scope of the strike and were determined never to approach the ragged edge of anarchy again. Workers’ organizations were no match for determined capitalists and a government armed with the power of the injunction. Almost any sign of radical action brought violent repression.
Yet the wake-up call of the great sympathy strike did contribute to the dawning of the Progressive Era. The nation took steps along a path mapped out by middle-class reformers like Jane Addams and John Peter Altgeld. Even Richard Olney admitted after the strike that “the mass of wage-earners can no longer be dealt with by capital as so many isolated units.… Organized labor now confronts organized capital.”
As years passed, the federal government moved to dismantle the trusts and holding companies that enforced the most egregious monopolies. Cities established new standards for tenement housing. Legislation limited child labor and rectified some unsafe working conditions. Congress passed a Workmen’s Compensation Act in 1902, the first minimum wage law ten years later. Arbitration and collective bargaining were used more frequently to resolve conflict.
More substantial gains for American laborers arrived during the New Deal of the 1930s. The rise of industrial unions in the automobile, steel, and other industries—organizations similar to the American Railway Union—aided by a fundamental shift in federal labor laws, ushered in a golden age for workers. By the early 1950s, the proportion of unionized employees reached nearly 35 percent of the nonagricultural labor force. The unions’ clout boosted wages and benefits for members and for non-union laborers as well. Over the fierce opposition of corporations, pressure from unions helped push through programs ranging from Social Security to Medicare.
Beginning in the 1980s, a sea change swept over the American workplace. Deindustrialization, which had accelerated through the 1970s, was presenting working people with problems parallel to those that had accompanied the industrialization of the nineteenth century. The country’s institutions were ill prepared to deal with the social disruption and loss of jobs brought on by the steady decline in manufacturing. Unemployment in the early 1980s shot up to levels not seen since the Great Depression. Corporations shuttered plants. Capitalists shifted their investment to low-wage countries overseas. Non-union jobs, especially in service industries, paid employees far less than positions protected by organized labor.
With the election of Ronald Reagan, the federal government adopted an increasingly pro-business stance. In August 1981, Reagan fired and permanently blacklisted eleven thousand air traffic controllers, who had struck for more pay. His action signaled an open season on labor unions. The gains for workers resulting from nearly a century of struggle were threatened.
Americans debated in different terms the same issues that had raged in the 1890s. Did workers have a right to organize? Was labor a mere commodity subject to the law of supply and demand? Should those who invested brains and sweat and time in an enterprise have a say in how it was run? Or was all power in the workplace to be retained by capitalists? The nation struggled to resolve the conflict between what Samuel Gompers had called “autocracy in the shop and democracy in political life.”
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In May 1981, eighty-seven years after Pullman workers laid down their tools and walked off the job, a railcar rolled out of a modern factory only a few blocks from the brick buildings of the old Pullman shops. It was a bi-level sleeping car, a Superliner, part of an order of equipment for Amtrak, the entity that now operated all of the nation’s long-distance passenger rail service.
The railroad boom, which had lasted until the middle of the twentieth century, was long over. Automobiles and airplanes had replaced trains. The classic Pullman car had become an artifact of old movies.
The manufacturing arm of George Pullman’s company had, under the name Pullman-Standard, come to dominate the entire railcar-making business in the United States. The previous year, it had been bought out for $600 million by a diversified conglomerate known as Wheelabrator-Frye. The Pullman operation became a victim of mergers, spin-offs, and leveraging—financial maneuvering that would have impressed George Pullman. Citing “restrictive labor contracts,” the new owners decided to close down much of the company’s railcar business. This would be the last Pullman car ever made.
Stunned workers had begun a “save-our-jobs” campaign in an attempt to stem the inevitable. They proposed legislation that would make it illegal for companies to pull out of a community without softening the transition for workers and residents. They lobbied for more spending on mass transit. Neither the company nor the government heeded their pleas.
They had no options. The mood in the nation had turned against unions. Eugene Debs’s advice to working people that they should abandon the major parties, build their own political power, widen their solidarity, and pursue fundamental changes in society now took on a prophetic ring.
Instead, bureaucracy and corruption within unions had demoralized the labor movement. The racial exclusion and misogyny that Debs had preached against had sapped the organizations’ vitality. Workers found themselves powerless in the face of ever larger and more efficient corporate employers and a hostile government.
During our own time, which some call the New Gilded Age, workers are beset by trends that would have sounded familiar to the strikers of 1894. More than half the states have, at the behest of business interests, passed “right to work” laws intended to cripple labor organizing. Union representation has withered to less than 7 percent of private-sector workers. Wages have stagnated, benefits evaporated. The spread of the “contingent workforce”—employees converted to contract workers—has allowed corporations to duck state and federal laws regarding the minimum wage, overtime, and benefits. Demeaning and abusive treatment of employees, wage theft, and neglect of workplace safety rules have infected many industries.
The workers at Pullman-Standard in 1981 found themselves facing a situation that another generation of Pullman employees had warned against, one that those workers were afraid would go on forever. It was the creative, destructive dynamic of unregulated capitalism. Rooted in human greed, it was spreading around the globe, lifting up some, dashing down others, creating wealth beyond imagining for a few, forcing many more into economic and spiritual poverty. It was what the Pullman workers had called “the dance of skeletons bathed in human tears.”
The workers who put the finishing touches on the last Pullman car were the men and women of the Eugene V. Debs Local of the United Steelworkers of America. When they completed their work, they attached a brass plaque announcing the car’s name: the George M. Pullman. Then they laid down their tools and their jobs disappeared forever.