George Pullman’s Palace Cars brought comfort to long-distance travel on the rails; their plush benches converted into beds and the angled hideaway compartments above folded down to form the upper berths.
IN THE SPRING of 1894 the nineteen-year-old seamstress Jennie Curtiss wrote to a Methodist Episcopal minister named William H. Carwardine about her life as an employee of the Pullman Palace Car Company and a resident of Pullman, Illinois, the company town.
Located on the South Side of Chicago hard by Lake Calumet, Pullman was an immaculately groomed community, its spotless streets lined with handsome brick cottages and laid out around a central commons featuring a schoolhouse and an indoor arcade. All this was designed to evoke in real estate terms the luxurious comfort George Pullman strived to provide passengers on his railroad sleeping cars, the source of his fortune. The general impression in town was of an “all-pervading air of thrift and providence,” Johns Hopkins economist Richard T. Ely wrote in Harper’s Monthly. Yet there was something else about what Ely labeled “the experiment called Pullman.”
Jennie Curtiss knew what that something was: George Pullman’s greed. She also knew that Carwardine would lend her a willing ear. The thirty-four-year-old minister was almost unique among local pastors in his willingness to preach from the pulpit on behalf of the workers and against Pullman. Steeped in the populist and pro-labor Social Gospel movement rising at the time, Carwardine had damned Pullman in a sermon on May 20 for paying meager wages, calling him “a pampered millionaire, entrenched behind his gold, . . . to heed not the tears of wives and children who have been simply existing upon the crumbs which fall from the rich man’s table.”
In her letter to Carwardine, Curtiss underscored much of what the minister had already observed in Pullman’s company town. She wrote of her father, who had worked for the company for ten years:
Last summer he was sick for three months, and in September he died. At the time of his death we owed the Pullman Company about sixty dollars for rent. They told me I would have to pay that rent, give what I could every pay-day, until it was paid . . . Many a time I have drawn nine and ten dollars for two weeks’ work, paid seven dollars for my board and given the Company the remaining two or three dollars on the rent, and I still owe them fifteen dollars. Sometimes when I could not possibly give them anything, I would receive slurs and insults from the clerks in the bank, because Mr. Pullman would not give me enough in return for my hard labor to pay the rent for one of his houses and live.
Curtiss also depicted conditions on the Pullman factory floor, where “the tyrannical and abusive treatment we received from our forewoman made our daily cares so much harder to bear . . . No doubt she [the forewoman] will remain in the employ of the Pullman Company, as that is just the kind of people they want at the heads of their departments—one who will help grind down their laborers.” Thus the inescapable dissonance of life as an employee of George M. Pullman: a spotless environment outside the factory, and endless, grinding torment inside.
The conditions Curtiss described grew worse throughout the crushing depression that followed the economic crash of 1893. They would lead to a strike and boycott that began on June 26, 1894, swept across the Midwest, disrupted rail operations across the nation, and finally brought the US government into the fray—on industry’s side. The Pullman Strike was the largest job action in the United States up to that time, dwarfing by several times the Knights of Labor action against the Gould system eight years before. It still ranks as one of the most significant strikes in American history. Neither the railroads nor organized labor would ever be the same.
GEORGE PULLMAN’S TIDY township was part of a movement during the Industrial Revolution to place working men and their families in salubrious surroundings, partially to provide spiritual uplift and partially to enhance productivity. The movement gave rise to two especially notable attempts at industrial utopias: Saltaire, which was founded in 1851 by the woolens manufacturer Titus Salt by the Aire River not far from Liverpool, England; and Familistère, or the Social Palace, which was launched in 1859 by the iron stove manufacturer Jean Baptiste André Godin at Guise, 125 miles from Paris.
The balance between the spiritual and practical elements varied from one to the other of these communities, although their builders always professed to place the contentment and moral improvement of the residents at the forefront of their worldviews. “The Social Palace is not only a better shelter than the isolated house of the workman, it is also an instrument for his well-being, his individual dignity and progress,” Monsieur Godin explained to Harper’s. “It is precisely because it affords him the right conditions for the full development of his physical life, that it opens to the world a new horizon for our moral life.” (Emphasis in the original.)
In the promotional material about his own company town, George Pullman outlined the same general rationale of spiritual improvement, but put a bit more stress on the economic element. “The Pullman car solved the problem of long, continuous railway journeys, and the town of Pullman, along new lines, gives a hope of bettering the relations of capital and labor,” he stated in a company brochure. “The Pullman enterprise . . . has illustrated the helpful combination of capital and labor, without strife or stultification, upon lines of mutual recognition.” In practice, none of the towns’ paternalistic philanthropists exploited their commercial potential as sedulously as George Pullman.
Almost without exception, visitors to Pullman, Illinois, were struck by its cleanliness and abundant amenities, at least at first. But these always looked most impressive from a distance. “As seen from the railway by a passing tourist, [the town] presents a beautiful picture,” Rev. Carwardine reported in his book The Pullman Strike, published in 1894 while the crisis was still ongoing. “In fact, it appears to be a veritable paradise. Beautiful trees and flowers, pretty fountains, glimpses here and there of artistic sweeps of landscape, gardens, rows of pretty brick houses, church in the distance, public buildings of different description.”
George Pullman’s Palace Cars brought comfort to long-distance travel on the rails; their plush benches converted into beds and the angled hideaway compartments above folded down to form the upper berths.
Yet closer inspection revealed these vistas to be those of a corporate Potemkin village, for “strife, mutual suspicion and discord” simmered behind the facade. Pullman’s luxurious community library could fairly claim to be “one of the most complete of its kind in the United States,” Carwardine wrote, as it was furnished with plush reading chairs and a carpeted floor, stocked with 20,900 volumes including 5,479 reference books, 2,245 scientific treatises, and 2,073 volumes of poetry. But the annual charge for membership was three dollars per adult and one dollar per child. That was a steep rate for Pullman employees struggling to make do on as little as fifteen cents an hour, or nine dollars for a sixty-hour work week, especially at a time when the communities surrounding Pullman were starting to build public libraries open to every resident for free. As a result, out of a population that reached twelve thousand or more, the Pullman library enrolled only about 250 subscribers a year.
The Arcade, in which the library was located, was a large building on the main square that also housed the offices of the Pullman Journal, the community’s only newspaper, its sole bank (owned by the Pullman company, it was the issuer of the company paychecks), and the only retail shops permitted in town (also owned by the company). The Journal was edited by one Colonel Duane Doty, who served as the historian and statistician of the Pullman company and assured all visitors that the community was one “from which all that is ugly, discordant and demoralizing is eliminated.”
Occupying a central location was what was known as the “greenstone church” for the color of the imported serpentine stone of its exterior, a unique material in the largely redbrick community. But the church and its attached parsonage were vacant, because no congregation could afford the rent. Carwardine’s Methodist flock had tried to negotiate Pullman down from $300 a month but met with a firm refusal. “When that church was built,” George Pullman explained to the pastor, “it was not intended so much for the moral and spiritual welfare of the people as it was for the completion of the artistic effect of the scene.” In any case the building was judged useless for sectarian purposes, since it consisted of a single large auditorium but had no classrooms for Sunday school or offices for private conferences. The Catholics and Lutherans built their own churches just over the town line, while the Methodists contented themselves with a meeting room in the Arcade, which they leased for $500 a year. “No private individual owns to-day a square rod of ground or a single structure in the entire town,” observed Ely in Harper’s Monthly. “No organization, even a church, can occupy other than rented quarters.”
Centerpiece of the company town of Pullman, Illinois, the Arcade building housed the community’s library, bank, newspaper, and retail shops, all controlled by the Pullman company. To the left is the greenstone church: George Pullman intended it to host all denominations, but local congregations judged it too expensive to lease and useless for practical church purposes.
What was especially oppressive about life behind the scenes in Pullman was that everything in town came with a price tag posted by the company, with the exception of the public school. (Schoolbooks, however, had to be purchased by the parents.) The school board was an elected body, but the candidates invariably were officers of the Pullman Palace Car Company or other affiliates that bore his name. That was true also of the town clerk and treasurer and officers of the community’s water and gas company.
The Pullman’s Company’s authority reached everywhere. Observed a visiting reporter from Pittsburgh, “the corporation trims your lawn and attends to your trees; the corporation sweeps your street, and sends a man around to pick up every cigar stump, every bit of paper, every straw or leaf; . . . the corporation does practically everything but sweep your room and make your bed, and the corporation expects you to enjoy it and hold your tongue.” The company employed a physician to treat injured employees free of charge; but the doctor in place at the time of the strike, John McLean, was also expected to obtain a statement from every patient of the cause of the injury, which invariably shifted blame away from the company and on to the individual. It was McLean’s habit to urge upon injured workers the wisdom of accepting any settlement offered by the company instead of placing their fate in the hands of lawyers. If a lawsuit followed, McLean was expected to testify for the company.
“This is a corporation made and a corporation governed town, and is utterly un-American in its tendencies,” Carwardine wrote in his book. Pullman’s dominance fostered not only corporate arrogance, but indifference. The company rotated its own executives through municipal offices, where “each new superior appears to have his own friends, whom he appoints to desirable positions,” Ely reported. “Favoritism and nepotism, out of place as they are in an ideal society, are oft-repeated and apparently well-substantiated charges . . . The power of Bismarck in Germany is utterly insignificant when compared with the power of the ruling authority of the Pullman Palace Car Company in Pullman . . . Every man, woman, and child in the town is completely at its mercy, and it can be avoided only by emigration.” That was more easily said than done, however, for it was widely understood that the town’s residents gained preference for promotion or for reemployment after layoffs—indeed, during slack periods, workers living outside the town limits were required to move into Pullman if they wished to keep their jobs. (The exceptions were Pullman’s sleeping car porters, who were all African Americans and often former slaves and were not welcome in his company town. The job of porter was the only employment open to black workers in the Pullman company.)
This situation might have been marginally tolerable, had the company not expected a minimum return of 6 percent a year on all its investments in the community, including the houses it built and the utilities it provided. The company’s position was that its residences were superior to those available in neighboring suburbs such as Kensington, and cheaper too. Hundreds of apartments were available for rent in Pullman for six to nine dollars per month, plus two dollars for cooking gas; the company claimed it was supplying water to its tenants at a loss, based on what it was paying to the local public waterworks. The company was earning only 3.82 percent on its investment in the residences—“a manifestly inadequate return,” George Pullman told a government commission empaneled by President Grover Cleveland in July 1894 to investigate the strike’s causes. Pullman spoke as though the accommodations he provided to his workers for a fee were tantamount to philanthropy.
But Pullman’s figures were highly dubious. The commission determined that rents in neighboring communities were typically 20 to 25 percent lower than equivalent lodgings in Pullman—and during the post-1893 depression, as much as 50 percent less. The company was reselling water to its residents not at a loss but at five times its cost, and gas at a threefold gain. Pullman’s relentless rent-seeking from his own employees would soon prove to be the flashpoint for a historic conflagration.
GEORGE PULLMAN HAD had reason for concern about the effect of the Panic of 1893 and the ensuing depression on his business. Orders for new sleeping cars had evaporated, leaving only the Pullman repair shops busy. For efficiency’s sake, the company closed its Detroit maintenance shops, idling about eight hundred workers, and shifted all remaining repair activity to Pullman.
But the company also instituted wage cuts that piled almost all the burden of lost business on the rank and file. By April 1894, Pullman employees were earning 30 percent less per hour on average than they earned in May 1893. On May 7, 1894, a committee of forty-six workers from the Pullman plant met with Vice President Thomas H. Wickes to request that wages be restored to the levels of June 1893. Wickes was in the process of explaining the “absolute necessity” of the wage cuts when Pullman himself strode into the room. He informed the workers that restoring the old wage scale would be “a most unfortunate thing for the men,” because no one would place an order for cars at prices based on the wages of mid-1893. Under those conditions “the works would necessarily close down and the great majority of the employees be put in idleness, a contingency I am using my best effort to avoid.”
But wages were not the workers’ only concern. There was also the matter of rents, which the company flatly refused to lower. Pullman maintained that the portion of the company that managed the residential properties was entirely independent from the car shops—“The renting of the dwellings and the employment of workmen at Pullman are in no way tied together,” he told the disbelieving delegation—adding that in any case the company was losing money on rent.
Employees were under no illusion that there was any distinction between Pullman the employer and Pullman the landlord. On payday, anyone in a Pullman house or tenement received two checks—one for the rent (payable in advance), and one for anything left over. At the bank, they were required to sign the rent check over to the company on the spot.
Thomas Heathcote, a sleeping car builder who would become one of the labor leaders at Pullman, would later tell of having seen family men weeping at the pay window “because they only got 3 or 4 cents after paying their rent . . . I have seen them stand by the window and cry for money enough to enable them to keep their families; I have been insulted at that window time and time again by the clerks when I tried to get money enough to support my family, even after working every day and overtime.”
The employees were painfully aware that no company executives, officers, or forepersons had suffered any reduction in pay, nor had the shareholders suffered a reduction in their annual dividend of 8 percent. From July 1893 through July 1894, wages had fallen from $7.2 million to $4.5 million, but the dividends paid had actually risen, to $2.9 million from $2.5 million.
The railroad industry’s habit of imposing the costs of economic downturns largely on its workforce had inspired a surge in labor activism dating back to the mid-1880s. But it also exposed the vacuum of leadership among workers: The traditional railroad brotherhoods were not designed to directly challenge management prerogatives, and by 1890 the Knights of Labor were already in eclipse. The desire to counter the policies of the tycoons was hamstrung by the absence of instruments to do so.
The way was open for a new approach, and a new leader. He would appear in the person of Eugene Victor Debs. The Pullman Strike would catapult him into worldwide fame.
A native of Terre Haute, Indiana, the thirty-eight-year-old Debs had worked as a railroad painter and fireman—that is, a stoker of locomotive boilers—before moving into the public sphere and labor leadership, first as a Democratic state legislator in Indiana, and then as leader of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, one of the old-style mutual-aid organizations. Having witnessed the disaster of the Knights of Labor’s strike against the Gould system at close hand, he drew from it some useful lessons about organization and strategy when he founded the American Railway Union in June 1893.
In personality and outlook, Debs was the polar opposite of Terence Powderly, the Knights’ bookish grand master workman. He was a spellbinding orator and charismatic leader of working men; throughout his career he braved unstinting vituperation from railroad executives and conservative politicians while commanding the admiration of his members and such luminaries as Clarence Darrow, who would serve Debs as defense counsel during his trial on conspiracy charges arising from the Pullman Strike. “There may have lived some time, somewhere, a kindlier, gentler, more generous man than Eugene V. Debs,” Darrow would write in his memoirs, “but I have never known him. Nor have I ever read or heard of another.”
Debs was not opposed in principle to strikes or other job actions aimed at securing recognition for his organization and its members. But the Great Southwest strike had shown him the hazards of staging a walkout before the workers and the union were ready. His ARU aimed to avoid an error that had weakened the Knights from the start—the division of railroad workers into individual brotherhoods that destroyed any sense of cohesiveness, making the differences among the workers more important than their similarities, obscuring their common interests and handing railroad managements a wedge with which to set worker against worker. The ARU’s goal was to unite the nation’s 850,000 railroad workers into a single great brotherhood so they could negotiate as one for wages, work conditions, and hours. (The cause was unfortunately qualified, for unlike the Knights, the ARU’s membership was restricted to whites—a policy enacted by ARU convention delegates ostensibly against the wishes of Debs.) By the beginning of 1894 the ARU already had 150,000 members. That was enough to ignite genuine panic among railroad presidents who perceived that, at last, a force may have emerged that could challenge their unassailable power over the workplace. The panic would soon spread to their friends in politics.
To Debs, however, a large-scale strike seemed premature. That was so even though in April 1894, less than a year after its founding, the ARU had staged a strike on James J. Hill’s Great Northern Railway over a wage cut, managing to bring its freight service to a complete halt and—somewhat to its surprise—forcing the pugnacious Hill to agree to arbitration. It was a clear union victory, but in Debs’s reckoning the time was not yet ripe for turning it into a broader campaign.
Debs sensed the same overconfidence that had forced the Knights into their disastrous strike against Jay Gould. At a meeting of union officers in late April, he recounted, “we concluded that many of our members might possibly be flushed with the triumph of that strike [i.e., on the Great Northern], and if we were not extremely careful we would be precipitated into other disturbances.” Debs was anxious “to avoid any strike if it was possible to do so.” So he was perturbed when, days later, on May 11, he received word that the Pullman workers, acting one step ahead of a rumored lockout by Pullman, had walked off the job.
“THE GREAT TROUBLE with the Chicago strike,” opined Carroll D. Wright, the chairman of the presidential commission, “was that it was a pig-headed affair all around.”
Wright’s judgment was unfair, in that the outstanding pigheadedness belonged to the railroad bosses. Their instrument was a body known as the General Managers’ Association, which had been formed in 1886 to coordinate the operations of the twenty-four railroads serving Chicago. The GMA initially confined itself to organizing switching and loading schedules, and livestock weighing and transfers. But it presently assumed the role of establishing regionwide wage rates, the better to suppress pay demands by one railroad’s workers that might force raises upon the others.
The railroads tried to conceal their collusion but it was no secret to the ARU, which could not help noticing that wage cuts were always applied in concert by railroads across the region. Since Chicago rates influenced those of all connecting lines, moreover, the cuts rapidly propagated nationwide. By late 1893, with labor discontent spreading, the GMA became the agency through which the railroads colluded on lockouts of workers and the recruitment of strikebreakers. “Today there is no more air-tight railroad organization on the face of the earth,” the unabashedly pro-business Chicago Herald declared admiringly in May 1893, a year before the Pullman Strike was launched. “All the roads have bound themselves to act exactly as if the strike were on their own line.”
The labor leaders saw other intolerable conditions clearly. A few days after the strike began, Debs arrived in Pullman for a personal inspection tour. Reluctant as he had been to countenance a job action, he determined that in this case, the employees were “fully justified . . . in the course they had taken.” Their wages and expenses were “so adjusted that every dollar the employees earned found its way back into the Pullman coffers” and “they were daily getting deeper into the debt of the Pullman company. . . . I made up my mind, as president of the American Railway Union, of which these employees were members, to do everything in my power that was within law and within justice to right the wrongs of those employees.”
For the first few weeks of the Pullman Strike, or until the beginning of June, it remained possible to reach a settlement and keep it from spreading. The strikers sought chiefly to arbitrate their grievances, which in addition to the pay cuts and the rent charges included the firing of three of their organizers on the eve of the walkout. George Pullman, however, seemed intent on exacerbating the situation. The moment the strike was declared, he shut his shops and laid off six hundred employees who were not themselves strikers, thus spreading pain across his company town and the larger community. He flatly refused to arbitrate; a delegation from the Civic Federation of Chicago, composed of eminent citizens from “all grades of respectable society,” tried twice to bring Pullman to the table. Both times his reply was that there was “nothing to arbitrate.” He scorned the ARU as illegitimate, refusing to meet with anyone representing the union or to consider appeals from anyone retaining membership. Debs, still hoping to keep the walkout from expanding, leaned over backwards to allow the company to arbitrate on its own terms, even waiving the right to name any member of the arbitration panel, “virtually permitting them to select three out of five representatives,” he recounted later. (The other two would be selected by the other arbitrators.) Pullman rejected the overture.
Pullman’s stubbornness—his pigheadedness, so to speak—pushed the situation toward a nationwide crisis. The tinderbox was the first national convention of the ARU, which opened in Chicago on June 9, barely a month before the strike began, with four hundred delegates in attendance. The sessions were open to the press and public. On June 15, the delegates heard from a procession of Pullman workers, including Jennie Curtiss, who repeated what she had told Carwardine and pleaded for the ARU’s support. The convention appointed a committee to meet with Wickes, the Pullman vice president, but he refused to make any concessions. On June 21, the convention voted to give the company five days to agree to arbitrate. If not, ARU members nationwide would refuse to operate any locomotive hauling a Pullman sleeping car. There was not a single dissenting vote. With no response having arrived from the company, the boycott began on June 26.
The stage was now set for the entry of the US government into the conflict. But its intercession would be far from evenhanded.
No one could have been surprised that in his second term President Grover Cleveland would favor the railroads, for his cabinet could have passed for any railroad company’s board of directors. Cleveland himself had made a fortune in the four-year interregnum between his terms by practicing law in partnership with Francis Lynde Stetson, who was Pierpont Morgan’s attorney. Secretary of State Walter Q. Gresham, in his pre-cabinet post as a federal judge, had issued a string of pro-railroad rulings in labor disputes dating back to 1877. Secretary of War Daniel S. Lamont had been an active investor in urban railways on Wall Street. Postmaster General Wilson S. Bissell had been an executive, director, and counsel of at least three railroads operating out of Buffalo, ties that he refused to sever upon joining the cabinet.
The outstanding railroad man in the cabinet was Attorney General Richard Olney, who had spent a decade as a director and counsel of the Boston & Maine and almost as long with the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy. The latter kept Olney on its payroll for $10,000 a year even after he assumed his duties as attorney general, which paid only $8,000.
As if this was not enough to stack the deck against the strikers, popular sentiment was starting to turn against labor. The public was growing weary of worker unrest, as the myriad strikes following the Panic of 1893 evolved from small, localized disputes into regional work stoppages and threatened to spread even further. In April 1894 an Ohio reformer named Jacob Coxey assembled a band of one hundred unemployed men to march on Washington. His call reverberated across the country, and soon platoons of jobless men, including many laid-off railway workers, were heading east. They demanded free transport on the rails and, when refused, commandeered trains and turned them toward the capital. At first they won considerable public support. But as demonstrations yielded to violence, the fellow feeling of unemployed onlookers began to dissipate. (The “army,” which reached an estimated five hundred men, dissipated after Coxey was arrested and charged with trespassing for walking on the grass of the US Capitol.)
The march of “Coxey’s Army” had coincided with the ARU’s Great Northern strike. Together, these episodes prompted the government to step in with a declaration that interfering with trains carrying the mail would be prosecuted as a federal offense. In effect, this order placed under the protection of the US government every car of any train with a mail bag aboard—a “legal time bomb” ticking away, as historian Gerald G. Eggert would describe it, “to explode . . . with full force upon Eugene Debs and the American Railway Union.”
Notwithstanding the threat, the ARU’s boycott of Pullman trains spread rapidly. On June 27, the second day, 5,000 men had left their jobs and fifteen railroads were shut down. A day later, 40,000 workers were participating and traffic had been halted on all roads westbound out of Chicago. On day four, 125,000 had walked off. Some of the sympathetic strikers may have been motivated by their own mistreatment at the hands of railroad managements, including wage and hour cuts; others by news that the General Managers’ Association had begun recruiting strikebreakers through bureaus in New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland, and other cities. Reports reaching Debs said that as many as 250 scabs were being hired every day.
Debs had his hands full trying to discourage violence and ensuring that the mails were unmolested, but sporadic fighting broke out along with the commandeering of mail trains. As had happened in the Great Southwest strike, major newspapers took up the cry against the strikers. The Chicago Tribune ran two alarmist headlines on June 30, one declaring, “Mob Is in Control” and the other, “Law Is Trampled On.” Sporadic outbreaks of violence and the febrile press reaction would soon trigger concrete government action.
Olney and three Chicago-based government appointees—US attorney Thomas Milchrist, John W. Arnold of the US Marshals Service, and Edwin Walker—had spent the first days of the boycott pumping up each others’ hysteria. Milchrist fired the first rhetorical shot with a wire to Olney on June 30, reporting the stopping of two mail trains outside Chicago. He expressed his determination to “aid in the repression of lawlessness” and asked Olney to allow Arnold to appoint deputies by the hundreds “to guard the various mail trains likely to be interfered with.” After Olney obligingly issued the order, Arnold began to pin deputy badges on a ragtag group of armed men that eventually numbered in the thousands, many of them strikebreakers and security guards on the railroads’ payrolls.
That very same day Olney named Walker as special counsel to the government, vesting him with the authority to obtain court injunctions against the strikers and arrest warrants against Debs and other ARU leaders. This placed Walker, a veteran attorney for railroad companies, in a massive conflict of interest, but that disturbed Olney not a whit; to the attorney general, the interests of the railroads and those of the government were indistinguishable.
“It has seemed to me,” Olney told Walker upon his appointment, “that if the rights of the United States were vigorously asserted in Chicago, the origin and center of the demonstration, the result would be to make it a failure everywhere else.” He advised Walker “not merely to rely on warrants against persons actually guilty of the offense of obstructing United States mails, but to . . . secure restraining orders which shall have the effect of preventing any attempt to commit the offense.” This novel strategy of restraining activities before they occurred would have a lasting impact on labor relations.
Arnold was already in full panic mode. By July 1 the US marshal had sworn in more than four hundred deputies. “Many more will be needed to protect the mail trains,” he wired Olney. “Shall I purchase 100 riot guns? I think it very essential that we should have them.”
A day later, Debs and his fellow ARU officers were served with an injunction “sweeping in its terms,” as Walker approvingly described it to Olney, forbidding them to interfere with the mails and interstate commerce by continuing the strike. But it had little effect on the strikers themselves. “Have read the order of court to rioters here,” Arnold reported, “and they simply hoot at it, pay no attention to it, and have made their threats that they will not allow any Pullman car to pass through on the Rock Island road.” He estimated two thousand “rioters” in his way, placing “mail trains in great danger.”
Over the next few days, Arnold’s estimate of the crowds grew even more feverish. He had exhausted the supply of dependable civilians to deputize and was now scraping men in off the street. Initially, the deputies were men known to Arnold or employees of the boycotted railroads. They were vouched for by railroad officials and dragooned by nonstriking railroad staff, although the vetting process for the new recruits was less than rigorous: “Probably every man that was at liberty . . . went out to find men,” a Rock Island executive told the strike commission. “We might find them down town or we might find them elsewhere . . . Perhaps the appearance of a man would indicate whether he could be trusted; that was all that was required of any of them.”
During the later rounds of recruitment, the street denizens press-ganged into service tended to lack even superficial signs of trustworthiness. “The deputies sworn in yesterday were of no possible value,” Walker confided to Olney. “They were men taken from a crowd that applied for employment [i.e., strikebreakers], and in character were scarcely any improvement upon the strikers themselves. The marshal himself [Arnold] was assaulted yesterday, and one of his principal deputies severely injured.”
On July 3, President Cleveland injected a new element into the conflict by sending troops to Chicago. He did so at Olney’s urging but over the objection of Illinois governor John Peter Altgeld, who had expected the government to follow the traditional protocol governing federal deployments for law enforcement: First, rely on local civil authorities as the front line to keep order; then, if the police were overwhelmed, respond to a request by the governor for militia troops (not yet widely known as the National Guard); and, solely as a final measure, dispatch federal military units. Altgeld would blame Olney and Cleveland for conniving at the creation of a new policy in which the federal government became the strikebreaking force of first resort. “The trouble at Chicago,” he reflected, “was so magnified to make it seem that we were bordering on anarchy and that consequently federal interference was necessary.” The only thing holding up railroad traffic, in Altgeld’s view, was the railroads’ inability to hire workers to run the trains.
Olney and Walker shared the conviction that the key figure in the labor disturbances was Debs; they thought the best option for ending the strike was to put him on ice. On July 6, a day on which gunfire erupted between Arnold’s deputies and the strikers, resulting in the deaths of two of the latter, Walker reported to Olney that “we have now sufficient evidence at hand for indictment of Debs and all the leaders of the association for conspiracy.” He was confident that local judges would impose punitive bail, so that the defendants “will remain in jail until their cases are called in the Federal court for trial.”
Olney was known to have expressed misgivings about Walker’s tactics against the ARU only once, when federal agents seized Debs’s private papers in the course of his arrest; Olney ordered the action “publicly disavowed and the papers at once returned,” observing that “the Government, in enforcing the law, can not afford to be itself lawless.” Walker complied begrudgingly, but it was a unique upbraiding by Olney and the storm quickly passed. The attorney general and his special counsel remained united in their obsessive quest to defeat the strikers at all costs.
ONE NIGHT A few weeks into the strike, the general counsel of the Chicago & North-Western Railway Company stood in a railroad yard, deeply conflicted as he watched several cars go up in flames. He was Clarence Darrow, who had entered into corporate law two years earlier after a long stint as a Chicago city attorney and despite a personal affinity for the progressive ideology of Henry George. Now thirty-seven, Darrow noticed that most of the crowd sharing the view with him were boys and young men; not a few were ruffians whom Arnold had hired to keep the peace. What was clear to Darrow, however, was that most of the onlookers were in sympathy with the strikers.
Once the strike loomed on the horizon, Darrow’s heart had ceased to be with his employers. The railroads’ stubborn refusal to grant their employees better pay and working conditions seemed destined to goad the rank and file into walking out. “I realized my anomalous position,” Darrow would write years later. “I really wanted the men to win, and believed that they should.” Unable to reconcile his conflicted loyalties, he resigned from his corporate job.
As a free agent, Darrow gained a clearer view of the legal inequities confronting the strikers. First there was the effort by the government and the railroads, acting in collusion, to obtain court injunctions against the strike. He considered this strategy a raw abuse of judicial authority—“Preserving peace is part of the police power of the state, and men should be left free to strike or not,” he observed. “When violence occurs this is for the police department and not for a court of chancery.”
Then there was the appointment of Edwin Walker as a lawyer for the government in the injunction cases while he remained counsel to the railroads’ General Managers’ Association. In fact, Walker was wearing three hats, not two, for he also served as attorney for the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railroad. “I did not regard this as fair,” Darrow remarked dryly. Finally, there were the conspiracy charges against Debs and the other ARU leaders—another distortion of the law, in Darrow’s view, for they were framed in a way that allowed prosecutors to magnify any misdemeanor into a felony. “If there are still any citizens interested in protecting liberty, let them study the conspiracy laws of the United States,” Darrow would write in his memoirs, published in 1932. “They have grown in the last forty years until to-day no one’s liberty is safe.”
Darrow came into court as defense counsel for Debs in his criminal case for conspiracy to violate the federal injunction. The conspiracy case would collapse after almost all the testimony was heard when a juror was taken ill, leaving only eleven to finish the case. After a mistrial was declared, the government chose to drop the charges, possibly because word had emerged that before it was sent home, the first jury had been leaning 11 to 1 for acquittal.
The outcome of the civil injunction case was less equivocal. Debs and his fellow ARU leaders consistently lost in federal court, beginning with a federal judge’s holding them in contempt for violating the injunction in July 1894 and culminating in a unanimous Supreme Court decision on May 27, 1895, upholding the government’s authority to enjoin any interference with interstate commerce, such as the rail boycott. Despite these unhappy results, Darrow’s representation of Debs would launch his career into a new phase as a warrior against legal oppression.
By the time of the Supreme Court decision, the Pullman Strike was widely recognized as a failure. Its leadership had been disrupted through arrests and jailings, the railroads had been able to resume traffic without settling with the American Railway Union, which had failed to gain recognition as a representative of the rank and file. Years later, Darrow recapped the disaster in detail: “The A.R.U. was destroyed. For many years its members were boycotted; they changed their names and wandered over the land looking for a chance to work.” Economic historian Alfred Chandler (among many other experts) judged that “the strike never had a chance.” The ARU was still too unorganized and impoverished to carry on an extended walkout, while the railroads had prepared themselves with armies of strikebreakers and secured the promise of federal intervention well in advance.
Debs himself was not so sure. It was only his arrest by federal authorities that killed the strike, he told the strike commission. He recounted having answered a knock on his door at Chicago’s Leland Hotel, finding Arnold on the threshold with a warrant issued that morning, after a federal grand jury had handed up an indictment for conspiracy to interfere with interstate commerce and other related crimes. “It was not the soldiers that ended the strike; it was not the old brotherhoods that ended the strike; it was simply the United States courts,” Debs testified. ARU headquarters were “demoralized” by his arrest, he said. Had the ARU leaders remained in the field, “our men were in a position that never would have been shaken.”
Olney regarded the deployment of federal troops in Chicago as a triumph for government policy, but it would prove to be a Pyrrhic victory for the administration he served. His own rhetoric would come under more concentrated scrutiny as the strike passed into memory. On the eve of the deployment, for example, Olney had told newsmen, “We have been brought to the ragged edge of anarchy.” Such language seemed distinctly hyperbolic in retrospect, especially once it was learned that Debs and the ARU had offered to submit the boycott issues to arbitration if the railroads would only agree to rehire all the men, union members and others, without discrimination.
President Cleveland emerged from the episode looking like an ineffectual, detached leader all too willing to cede his authority to his attorney general, who had taken it and run wild. Populists in Congress joined with members of Cleveland’s own Democratic Party to empanel an investigative committee to examine the strike. Democrats also considered a bill making it unlawful to enjoin workers from job actions if they offered to arbitrate and the employers refused.
Stung by this repudiation by his own party and looking ahead toward a reelection campaign in 1896, Cleveland signed a bill establishing Labor Day as a national holiday just days after the strike was crushed. The party was moving away from its old association with big business, and at the 1896 Democratic convention the nomination of William Jennings Bryan for president ended Cleveland’s bid for a third term. In the eyes of history, the sole victor in the Pullman Strike may have been Eugene V. Debs, who spent six months in federal prison in Woodstock, Illinois, and emerged with worldwide fame as a defender of the rights of the working person.
But Debs’s members and their fellow unionists were among the losers. The Pullman Strike signified to labor that industry was in command of working conditions, backed by the government and its newfound power of injunction. Discontent may have continued to simmer under the surface, but fears of unemployment in the still uncertain economy helped to keep labor unrest in check. After Cleveland, the Democratic Party tried to position itself as a populist bulwark against capitalist abuse of the working person by nominating Bryan for president, but it was the Republicans and their candidate, William McKinley, who secured the workers’ support by promising an era of prosperity that would bring jobs and higher wages—“a full dinner pail,” as McKinley’s reelection slogan in 1900 put it.
Organized labor went into eclipse. Wages fell, and the eight-hour day seemed as remote as ever—the average workweek stuck at between fifty-four and sixty-three hours, and even longer in steel mills and the textile sweatshops where women and children toiled for pennies an hour. Nothing would be heard from America’s political leadership about workers’ rights to collective action and a living wage until the Progressive Era began with the accession of Theodore Roosevelt to the presidency, at the dawn of the next century. It was a short eclipse, to be sure. But in the meantime, the path was cleared for the creation of a system of imperial railroad companies—and a new and more fearsome phase in their struggle for supremacy.
The unwillingness of the federal government to contain the worst impulses of these new railroad emperors was nowhere clearer than in the proceedings of the strike commission itself. During their inquiry, the commissioners questioned Pullman closely about why he had not reduced the wages of officers, managers, and superintendents, rather than rolling back some of the pay cuts or reducing some of the rents borne by the workers. Here Pullman revealed, perhaps despite himself, that he regarded the line workers as essentially disposable—unlike supervisory staff, who were irreplaceable. “It would be impossible for me, as the president of a corporation, to reduce the salaries of my officers arbitrarily, because I would find myself possibly without them,” he said.
“You might reduce your own, perhaps,” Commissioner John D. Kernan remarked.
“I might, if I chose,” Pullman retorted brusquely, “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.”
The commission observed that reductions in the executive salaries “would have shown good faith, would have relieved the harshness of the situation, and would have evinced genuine sympathy with labor in the disasters of the times.” But that was not on Pullman’s agenda—not as long as government power weighed on the railroads’ side. A change in the balance would not occur for more than thirty years.