With the strike under way, Eugene Debs traveled to the model town. Over the next few days, he spent more time listening to Pullman workers than George Pullman had in years. He heard their complaints about pay and rents, about restrictions on political activity, dictatorial foremen, piecework.
The workers at the car shops were only a fraction of the growing American Railway Union membership. Debs was determined to advise and support them, but he did not intend to throw his still-fragile organization into a larger fight. He did not need to point out to the strikers the headwinds they faced. They well knew that legions of unemployed men in Chicago were eager to take their jobs.
Four days after the workers walked out, directors of the Pullman’s Palace Car Company declared their customary 2 percent quarterly dividend. Debs was furious. Years earlier he had hammered “King” Pullman in the Firemen’s Magazine, grouping him with “codfish, coal oil and bucket shop snobs.” Now the “palace car nabob” was divvying up among a small group of capitalists the $600,000 in profit that had been accumulated in just three months from the labor of his employees.
Unable to meet in Pullman, a central strike committee with Thomas Heathcoate as chairman gathered daily across the tracks at Turner Hall. Heathcoate had advised the men to keep away from the plant, to avoid congregating in public, and to abide by the law. Knowing that employees would be blamed for any damage, the committee had assigned three hundred strikers to surround the plant and keep it safe from saboteurs and other intruders. This force, which the company chose to regard as a picket line, stood guard around the clock.
Debs addressed a large meeting of employees. “I am with you heart and soul in this strike,” he said. In general, he told them, he was against a work stoppage. But if the only alternative was “the sacrifice of manhood,” he preferred the strike.
At another rally two days later, he declared: “I believe a rich plunderer like Pullman is a greater felon than a poor thief.” He felt he had a duty to “strip the mask of hypocrisy from the pretended philanthropist and show him to the world as an oppressor of labor.” He proclaimed the company’s actions “a terrible illustration of corporate greed … which for years has prevailed in this country.” Pullman workers would win the strike, he insisted, if they held together.
Privately, Debs worried. The Pullman’s Palace Car Company was not the Great Northern Railway. George Pullman was in a financial position to keep the plant closed for months. Now the prestige of the American Railway Union was tangled in the dispute. The railroads might try to pull the young, unprepared, and virtually penniless organization into a wider dispute in order to hobble or destroy it. Debs would have to tread a fine line between appearing weak and plunging into a contest he could not win.
Neither the local unions nor the entire ARU could support four thousand workers and their families for any length of time. They appealed to the public for relief. Laundresses and seamstresses from Local 269 went around Pullman to determine the most urgent needs. Help started to arrive. Sympathetic police officers from Chicago’s South Side solicited aid from shopkeepers. The Chicago Daily News offered a downtown storefront rent-free as a place in the city to accept contributions. Many Chicagoans sympathized with the strikers’ courage and gave what they could.
The workers had a friend in the Springfield statehouse. Governor John Peter Altgeld, who had risen from the working class himself, was an avid reformer. Last September, as the depression was tightening its grip, he had declared that “it will be the duty of all public officials to see to it that no man is permitted to starve on the soil of Illinois.” The statement was revolutionary. The idea that government officials were responsible for citizens’ well-being was widely rejected on principle by politicians.
The most generous donations came from Chicago mayor John Patrick Hopkins. Born in Buffalo just before the Civil War, Hopkins had arrived in Chicago in 1879 and taken a job at the Pullman works. He started as a lumber shover, unloading boards at the waterfront. Sharp of mind, he quickly ascended to timekeeper, then to paymaster. He opened a shoe store in the town’s Arcade, expanding it to a general dry goods emporium.
During the 1888 election, Hopkins, a Democrat, rented the theater in the town of Pullman for a party rally. The staunchly Republican George Pullman was not amused. After Pullman employees backed Grover Cleveland in his losing bid for reelection, Pullman fired his paymaster. Hopkins went on to form a prosperous mercantile partnership, the Secord-Hopkins Company, in nearby Kensington.
The thirty-five-year-old Hopkins won a special election in December 1893 after the assassination of Mayor Carter Harrison by an aggrieved office seeker. He took over leadership of the city in the midst of the crippling economic depression. Well liked, respected by his own employees, quick to remember a man’s name, Hopkins struck what newspapers described as an “Apollo figure.” His glossy black hair fell into ringlets, a ready smile winked from beneath his mustache.
His business success allowed him to provide generous aid to the strikers. Through his store, he donated $1,500 in produce, including twelve tons of meat, and another $1,000 in cash. Early in June, the Chicago City Council asked the mayor to appeal to the public on behalf of the Relief Committee at Pullman. Hopkins set aside a day to encourage all city residents to contribute money, clothing, and food.
Physicians and druggists donated their services. Members of the Chicago Fire Department gave $909.75. A German singing society chipped in $140. A supply of tobacco was donated “to solace the minds of anxious strikers.”
It was not enough. On May 22, Pullman workers received their last paychecks. Few had been able to maintain savings during the depression. Many fingered overdue butcher and coal bills as well as demands for back rent. Malnutrition began to haunt the town.
Yet it hardly seemed like a strike. As May wore on, a newspaper noted the “absence of excitement” in the town. A Chicago Inter Ocean reporter wrote that the town was “as quiet as a New England village, and there was nothing to indicate that the workers in the car shops were in the throes of a strike fever.” After a month of strife, “it is rather as though each day was a Sunday.” Strikers took to wearing white ribbons as an emblem of solidarity.
On Sunday, May 27, members of Chicago trade unions attended a mass meeting at Pullman to boost morale and to gather contributions for the relief fund. Debs told the assembled workers that George Pullman’s “specious interest in the welfare of the ‘poor workingman’ is in no way different from that of the slaveowner of fifty years ago.… You are striking to avert inevitable slavery and degradation.”
The crowd took advantage of Pullman’s park for a picnic. In the evening, they attended a dance upstairs in the Market Building. Jennie Curtis, now president of the “girls’ local,” enjoyed the first promenade with Mayor Hopkins himself.
Picnics and dances belied all common notions of an industrial strike. But the question on the minds of anxious town residents as they entered the third week of the walkout was simple: when will it end?
* * *
Among those who took a keen interest in the Pullman strike was Jane Addams. At thirty-three, the young woman from rural Illinois had already acquired an international reputation as a social reformer. During the world’s fair, thousands of visitors had stopped by Hull House, the settlement house she had founded in the middle of the city’s slum-clogged West Side. There, working with her close friend Ellen Gates Starr, Addams dispensed aid and moral uplift to the poor at a time when public assistance was minimal.
At the time, three of every four citizens of Chicago were foreign-born. Many worked in factories or in sweatshops scattered throughout the neighborhoods. Hull House offered them a chance to learn English and to socialize with each other. Volunteers taught classes in everything from dietetics to the philosophy of Plato. Mothers were especially appreciative of the innovative kindergarten, nursery, and daycare opportunities. Playgrounds were a rarity then—Hull House had one of the first.
The work of Jane Addams was one sign of an awakening of middle-class citizens to the egregious conditions in urban slums. But the 1893 depression had shaken Addams’s faith in the efficacy of her strategy. A third of Chicago’s factories had closed. Nearly half its working population was unemployed. Now she was seeing that real poverty, “dire poverty,” meant starvation, homelessness, and despair. “We are sunk under a mass of the unemployed morning, noon, and night,” Ellen Starr observed in August 1893.
The panic that had swept Wall Street was nothing compared to the mental anguish of those who shouldered the real economic burden. Already engulfed in poverty, they grew confused as their livelihoods disappeared. Mental depression turned to terror. The fears of the people Addams saw every day were not abstract. She found that residents were especially terrified of three things: debt, the shame of appearing as paupers to their children, and dying of hunger. Addams had been impressed by the resilience and generosity of the poor. Now she saw that extreme poverty could break the spirit, that anxiety could drive a person mad.
She and her colleagues kept asking if they were doing enough. The soul of the worker was put “in a state of siege” by the brutality of urban life, Starr wrote. “It is merciful and necessary to pass to him the things which sustain his courage and keep him alive (i.e., art, music, etc.) but the effectual thing is to raise the siege.”
Yet Addams was wary of radical action. She preferred to apply reason and conciliation to social problems. Her efforts at Hull House bore some resemblance to George Pullman’s at his model town. He had contributed funds to help further her work. Each of them was making an attempt to change people by changing their environment, giving citizens access to order and beauty. Each offered courses and facilities intended to teach working people middle-class values. Each emphasized an appreciation of art. Each had organized a kindergarten and a playground.
The year before, Addams had joined some of the city’s middle- and upper-class reformers to found the Chicago Civic Federation. The group was headed by the prominent banker Lyman Gage and included merchants, lawyers, professors, and union leaders. The members worked to maintain labor peace and urged employers to heed the grievances of their workers. In May 1894, they formed a conciliation board to look into the Pullman strike.
Addams had taken the initiative early in the strike to consult with Thomas Heathcoate and the union’s relief committee about providing for the desperate strikers. While at Pullman she had eaten supper with some of the women and gone around to look at their homes. She spoke with George Howard and learned that the ARU might be open to arbitrating a settlement to the dispute. But no talks could begin, he told her, until company officials expressed their own willingness to negotiate.
Addams took this information back to the federation. When they procrastinated, she went to see Pullman vice president Wickes herself. She cooled her heels in the Pullman Building lobby for an hour before being told Wickes was “not in.” She persisted, returning on Saturday, June 2, with another committee member. Although Wickes finally agreed to see them, he said the company could not allow third parties to become involved in something that was “not their issue.” Nor would the company negotiate with “ex-employees.” Mr. Pullman, he said, was convinced that there was “nothing to arbitrate.” The phrase became a Pullman mantra throughout the strike and would haunt George Pullman to his grave.
* * *
As the strike wore on into June, time began to work against the employees. The strikers could be sustained only so long by the union’s frantic relief efforts. Some workers who could manage it had already left the model town, seeking lower rents and the chance of work elsewhere. Most were too destitute to move away.
While the press and public admired the David-and-Goliath nature of the contest, few newspapers gave the strikers much chance of winning. Some called the action a stupid blunder. The strike was “a grave mistake,” the Chicago Record declared, “at a time when mistakes are dear and dangerous.” The workers were simply joining the already-crowded ranks of the unemployed. The Evening Journal said that those who encouraged the strike were “almost criminal in their disregard of the consequences.” The Tribune called the strike “wanton, causeless, and suicidal.”
The Pullman’s Palace Car Company was well able to endure a long work stoppage. The firm still enjoyed a steady stream of revenue from its operation of sleeper, diner, and parlor cars on railroads all over the country. Its war chest, unlike that of the strikers, was enormous.
But George Pullman understood that publicity was important—and his “brand” was being damaged by the strike. His model town had drawn favorable attention to the firm and had become an emblem of its enlightened, forward-looking operations. The strike had turned it into a symbol of his autocratic disregard for his workers.
Pullman was on his way to becoming the sole competitor in the industry and he knew that “monopoly” was an increasingly dirty word. The strike amplified the talk that was already circulating about government regulation of sleeper-car fares, a move that could seriously crimp Pullman’s enormous profits.
The strike also tarnished Pullman’s personal reputation. Even the newspapers that opposed the strike, which were the majority, had taken to referring to him as “Baron” or “Duke” and comparing the town to a feudal manor. On May 30, the Chicago Inter Ocean noted that for the Marquis de Pullman to become a proper tyrant “there is nothing needed but the knout, a liberal supply of shackles, and cheap transit to Siberia.” Editors of the Chicago Times, the only Chicago paper that consistently defended the strike, found the situation in the town “almost deplorable,” and declared on June 9 that the overwhelming majority of Chicagoans supported the strikers.
Yet George Pullman was determined not to give in. He owed it to his shareholders, he said. He had run his company and the town on business principles, and he would stand on those principles.
* * *
There the matter stood on Tuesday, June 12, when four hundred delegates from American Railway Union locals all over the country met in Chicago. This would be the first national convention of the burgeoning organization. The agenda included writing a formal constitution and setting up the union’s administrative structures. All knew that the Pullman strike would also be prominent on the agenda. All looked to Eugene Debs for guidance and inspiration.
The first morning of the convention, Debs stood on the podium in Ulrich’s Hall to welcome the delegates. He noted that in the nine months since the first ARU lodge was formed, 425 locals had come into existence, an astounding reception for the new organization. This was a different type of railroad union. Its purpose was not to quarrel with the brotherhoods of engineers, firemen, or conductors. The ARU had another purpose. It would represent all railroad men, particularly those “left in the cold to endure the pitiless storms of corporate power.” It would set out to create a balance between labor and capital.
“When men accept degrading conditions and wear collars and fetters without resistance,” he declared, “when a man surrenders his honest convictions, his loyalty to principle, he ceases to be a man.”
Throughout the speech, Debs mixed caution with enthusiasm. The convention had serious work ahead. Delegates needed to promulgate thoughtful policies. “There is danger in extremes,” he warned. The organization “must be built for war” but not provoke war. They had to choose their battles, to avoid “continuous embroilment,” to exercise “patience and forbearance.” They were meeting at a time of unprecedented demoralization of workers. The “cyclonic disturbances” of the depression “fall with crushing force upon labor.”
He vowed to stand up for the adherents of the Coxey armies, many of them still on the road. He criticized Grover Cleveland for his harshness toward these “victims of a greedy and heartless capitalism.” The ARU must continue to push for the eight-hour day, not only to give hardworking Americans leisure, but to expand employment to those idled by layoffs.
Turning to the Pullman strikers, he shaped a verbal effigy of George Pullman and proceeded to bash it. He compared the industrialist to the “proprietor of the lake of fire.” George Pullman was as “greedy as a horse leech.” He had “a soul so small that a million of them could dance on the little end of a hornet’s stinger.”
“The boys all over the country,” Debs said, “are clamoring to tie up the Pullman cars.” A boycott was a logical move. It did not make sense for ARU members to handle the sleepers that supplied Pullman with his profits, while their brothers and sisters were locked in a battle with the company. But Debs stopped conspicuously short of advocating direct action by the larger union. “Nobody ever knew how hard I tried to prevent that strike,” he said later. For now, he acknowledged that the strike at Pullman “will, I doubt not, engage the attention of this convention.”
He quickly moved to other issues. “The time is approaching,” he said, “when the government will be required to own the railroads, to prevent the railroads from owning the government.” He welcomed women members to the ARU and affirmed that the union would insist that “when a woman performs a man’s work, she ought, in all justice, to have a man’s pay.” It was an idea so far ahead of its time that it left many of the male delegates with puzzled grins.
Workers, Debs declared, must “march together, vote together and fight together.” Returning to a perennial theme, he foresaw a “reign of justice” in which there would be no need for strikes, “an era of good will” between labor and capital.
Committees were formed, and the men got down to work. They needed to decide issues of leadership and finance. It was crucial that they continue to organize additional members—only a fifth of the nation’s 750,000 railroad employees had signed up with the ARU so far. Workers on most of the eastern roads remained to be brought aboard. Debs felt the urgent need to strengthen the organization and to build a war chest before taking on any further struggles with the railroads.
Delegates rode trains or streetcars down to the model town to look over the situation and talk to the strikers. The Pullman employees became emblems of the fact that workers were being asked to bear the burden of hard times, while plutocrats continued to revel in their wealth.
The business before the ARU convention was consequential, but the men also needed to get to know one another. Many delegates were new to the labor movement. Informal talk and serious drinking would lubricate the wheels of the organization. And for men from the hinterland, this was an opportunity to take in the sights of Chicago—the stockyards, the skyscrapers, and the fleshpots of the vice district that the boys back home would be asking about.
* * *
Members of the Civic Federation, concerned about how the Pullman strike was harming Chicago, decided to make another try at convincing George Pullman to arbitrate. Banker Lyman Gage suggested that the conciliation board approach the strikers and focus strictly on the rents in Pullman. Just as the ARU convention was getting under way, Jane Addams and activist Ellen Henrotin arranged a meeting with Eugene Debs to suggest this starting point for the arbitration process.
Debs jumped at the chance. He had surveyed the mood of the convention delegates and found them leaning toward a nationwide boycott of Pullman cars. The Civic Federation effort could be a last opportunity to avoid the risk that such an action would pose for the union.
In Addams, Debs recognized a sympathetic spirit. A reporter described her face as “a window behind which stands her soul.” She was pale, with deep-set eyes, a mellow voice, and a manner at once gracious and deadly serious. Debs agreed to set up a meeting between the conciliation board and the strike committee.
Addams was the only board member to turn up for the meeting with about sixty representatives of Pullman locals. They were skeptical, worried that considering arbitration at this point would make them look weak. But her sincerity convinced them to trust her. She acknowledged that the workers had many demands, but she felt that examining the rent issue first would be a productive step away from conflict.
Debs, whose cagey use of arbitration had won the victory over Jim Hill’s Great Northern Railway, applied his influence. The strikers agreed to arbitrate not only rents but all issues. Addams was delighted to report to her board that “we had made a beginning toward conciliation.”
It was a one-sided beginning. George Pullman agreed to listen to the proposal but would talk only with the male members of the board, excluding Jane Addams. He met in his office with the group only to tell them that the situation had not changed. He would not arbitrate. He would not adjust employees’ rents. He would not raise their pay. “It was impossible to come to any understanding with the Pullman Company,” Addams said. “We considered the effort a failure.”
A few days later, speaking to the female graduates of Western Reserve University, Addams warned of the “narrow individuality” of those who lacked “that broad conscience which takes in those around them.”
As the strike continued, Addams grew increasingly nervous. She told English newspaper editor William Stead that Chicagoans were feeling “unrest, discontent, and fear.” She sensed that they were “on the edge of some great upheaval but one can never tell whether it will turn out a tragedy or a farce.”
* * *
Contentious issues split the ARU delegates at the convention. The most bitter was the question of whether to include African American members. The original statement of principles hammered out by Debs, Howard, and the other founders a year earlier had not mentioned race. It left membership criteria to the locals. All of them had followed the pattern of the railroad brotherhoods, which had confined their rolls to men who were “white born … and able to read and write the English language,” barring blacks and most new immigrants from competing for jobs. Now, as the massed delegates considered a constitution, some proposed that the preamble specify that only railroad employees “born of white parents” be eligible for membership. This raised a pressing and thorny problem.
The abolition of slavery had left four million newly freed black Americans in need of subsistence. Now, three decades later, the relationship of the races remained a fraught subject. Northern white workers asserted that blacks were incapable of the skills that the railroad trades entailed. But blacks had already performed these and other skilled jobs in the South, disproving the claim. Whites saw a threat to their jobs and wages. They excluded African Americans from fellowship. Very few blacks had been hired by northern railroad companies.
George Pullman was an exception. As a Republican, he was touched by the spirit of Lincoln and felt a responsibility to provide for the slaves whom the Great Emancipator had freed. He donated to Negro causes. He hired a black coachman and black household help—most wealthy Chicagoans preferred English servants. He allowed black customers to ride his cars, much to the consternation of Southern whites. Arthur A. Wells, a black man who served as the porter on Pullman’s private car, was a trusted assistant and would be the beneficiary of a generous $5,000 legacy in the magnate’s will.
For Pullman, the idea of employing former slaves fit neatly into his conception of making a profit while doing good. The Pullman Company furnished conductors to take tickets on its cars and porters to attend to passenger needs. The porters performed the vital duty of making up berths, a complicated chore that transformed a daytime coach car into a sleeper at night.
Pullman began to hire black workers as sleeping-car porters soon after he started in the business. Many were indeed former slaves. The benevolent effort to give these men jobs turned Pullman into the largest employer of African Americans in the country. There was, of course, a catch. The position of porter was the only one open to blacks at the Pullman Company. None were allowed to work in manufacturing. None could advance to become conductors.
The racial distinction served Pullman well. The porters were forced to work for pay that white workers would not have tolerated. At first, Pullman paid them nothing at all—they worked for tips. By 1879, they were making $10 a month for a ninety-hour week. The fact that they continued to rely on gratuities shifted the cost of their services to Pullman customers and encouraged the porters to feign cringing deference and to perform additional duties such as shining passengers’ shoes. Conductors, all of them white, earned $65 a month.
The other advantage of employing black porters was the fact that the social distance between the races allayed any suspicion that porters would overstep boundaries while waiting on patrons who might be in a state of undress or intoxication. Small children were entrusted to their care. Pullman, the porters noted, wanted to hire the “blackest man with the whitest teeth.” Since few northern whites had black servants at home, they saw the porters’ services as an exotic bit of luxury.
Eugene Debs had spoken about the injustice laid on the porters in the pages of the Firemen’s Magazine. “Everything is in the line of degradation,” he wrote. The use of company spies was particularly reprehensible. The honesty of both porters and the white conductors who supervised them was tested by company agents, “spotters,” who tempted them to cheat the company. “It is such detestable practices,” Debs said, “that breed the unrest and vindictive spirit abroad in the lands that furnish anarchists and socialists with the raw material for their diatribes against law and social order.”
George Pullman’s operation demeaned African Americans in many of the same ways that it denied dignity to industrial workers. Work rules could be petty and arbitrary. Spies lurked in and out of the workplace to report on employee behavior. Supervisors treated subordinates with disrespect and outright cruelty. Pullman gave the porters a job and he paid his manufacturing employees a wage, but in neither case did he acknowledge their humanity.
The porters insisted that their jobs required intricate skills, but George Pullman asserted that blacks were “by nature adapted faithfully to perform their duties.” Company officials did not see the porters’ smiling, ever-attentive demeanor as the well-honed act that it was. They considered it the product of a naturally obsequious nature. Porters had to endure the further indignity of being called by the name George, presumably a reference to George Pullman. Passengers, especially those from the South, sometimes insisted that a porter sing or perform a dance.
The paucity of jobs for blacks during these decades made it more likely that Pullman porters would offer steady and reliable service to the company even as they accepted a starvation wage. Indeed, the position of porter carried great prestige in black communities. Porters had the opportunity, available to few other blacks, to travel around the country, protected from racial violence by their Pullman uniforms. They earned enough to move their families into the lower middle class and to provide a platform for the black professionals of the next generation. Future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall was the son of a porter and worked at the job himself while attending law school.
* * *
During a blistering six-hour debate at the convention, Debs firmly opposed drawing the color line. He did not, however, propose anything as radical as social equality for blacks. “I am not here to advocate association with the negro, but I am ready to stand side by side with him, to take his hand in mine, and help him whenever it is in my power.”
Others rose to argue for the formal exclusion of black workers. A Detroit delegate said the ARU “would lose 5,000 members in the West if colored men were allowed to become members.” One fireman said he “would not ‘brother’ the negro under any circumstances.”
Debs countered that “if we do not admit the colored man to membership, the fact will be used against us.” Unions that had excluded blacks had seen company managers bring in African American workers to take their jobs during strikes. Debs wanted instead to promote his core idea: to make the American Railway Union an organization that was open to all.
He emphasized that in the event that the union was drawn more deeply into the ongoing Pullman strike, barring black porters from membership would mean relinquishing a potentially decisive advantage in the struggle. If the union members invited these workers into the ARU, the porters could shut down Pullman’s sleeping-car service more effectively than any other group of employees. Those cars were the most profitable—during the depression, the only profitable—sector of the firm. Without the knowledgeable porters, the car operation would be crippled.
“It is not the colored man’s fault that he is black,” Debs told the convention. “It is not the fault of six million negroes that they are here. They were brought here by the avarice, cupidity, and inhumanity of the white race.” It was a startling sentiment at a time when race relations in America were reaching a nadir.
Debs could argue, but he could not dictate. When the proposal finally came to a vote, his view did not prevail. By 112 to 110, the delegates declared that their union was for whites only. Years later, when Debs looked back on the events of 1894, he thought that the inclusion of the porters might have resulted in “a different story of the strike, for it would certainly have had a different result.”
The anti-union stance of George Pullman and his successors meant that the porters would suffer low pay, long hours, and demeaning working conditions for another two generations. Only in 1937, under the inspired leadership of A. Philip Randolph, who looked on Eugene Debs as one of his heroes, would the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters win recognition from the Pullman Company.