Pullman Strike

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Pullman Strike
Demonstrations
Resulted inStrike unsuccessful
  • Federal government obtains an injunction against strikers
  • President Grover Cleveland orders the Army to stop the strikers from obstructing trains
  • Strike leader Eugene V. Debs arrested and convicted of conspiracy and violation of a court order and is sentenced to six months in prison
  • American Railway Union
dissolved
Parties
American Railway Union;
Railroad workers
US National Guard
Lead figures
Number
~250,000
~12,000
Casualties and losses
Deaths: 70 est.
Injuries: 57
Arrests: 4+

The Pullman Strike was two interrelated strikes in 1894 that shaped national labor policy in the United States during a period of deep economic depression. First came a strike by the

US labor law. It pitted the American Railway Union (ARU) against the Pullman Company, the main railroads, the main labor unions, and the federal government of the United States under President Grover Cleveland. The strike and boycott shut down much of the nation's freight and passenger traffic west of Detroit, Michigan. The conflict began in Chicago, on May 11 when nearly 4,000 factory employees of the Pullman Company began a wildcat strike in response to recent reductions in wages. Most of the factory workers who built Pullman cars lived in the "company town" of Pullman just outside of Chicago. Jennie Curtis who lived in Pullman was president of seamstress union ARU LOCAL 269 gave a speech at the ARU convention urging people to strike.[2] It was designed as a model community by its namesake founder and owner George Pullman.[3]

As the

employees (such as conductors and porters) did not go on strike.[3]

Debs and the ARU called a massive boycott against all trains that carried a Pullman car. It affected most rail lines west of Detroit and at its peak involved some 250,000 workers in 27 states.[5] The American Federation of Labor (AFL) opposed the boycott because the ARU was trying to take its membership. The high prestige railroad brotherhoods of Conductors and Engineers were opposed to the boycott. The Fireman brotherhood—of which Debs had been a prominent leader—was split.[6] The General Managers' Association of the railroads coordinated the opposition. Thirty people were killed in riots in Chicago alone.[7] Historian David Ray Papke, building on the work of Almont Lindsey published in 1942, estimated another 40 were killed in other states.[8] Property damage exceeded $80 million.[9]

The federal government obtained an injunction against the union, Debs, and other boycott leaders, ordering them to stop interfering with trains that carried mail cars. After the strikers refused, President Grover Cleveland ordered in the Army to stop the strikers from obstructing the trains. Violence broke out in many cities, and the strike collapsed. Defended by a team including Clarence Darrow, Debs was convicted of violating a court order and sentenced to prison; the ARU then dissolved.

Background

The condition of laboring man at Pullman. The employee is being squeezed by Pullman between high rent and low wages, July 7, 1894.

Low wage, expensive rent, and the failing ideal of a utopian workers settlement were already a problem for the Pullman workers. Company towns, like Pullman, were constructed with a plan to keep everything within a small vicinity to keep workers from having to move far. Using company-run shops and housing took away competition leaving areas open to exploitation, monopolization, and high prices. These conditions were exacerbated by the Panic of 1893. George Pullman had reduced wages 20 to 30% on account of falling sales. However, he did not cut rents nor lower prices at his company stores, nor did he give any indication of a commensurate cost of living adjustment. The employees filed a complaint with the company's owner, George Pullman. Pullman refused to reconsider and even dismissed the workers who were protesting. The strike began on May 11, 1894, when the rest of his staff went on strike. This strike would end by the president sending U.S. troops to break up the scene.[10]

Boycott

The American Railway Union escalated the Pullman strike beginning with the blockade of the Grand Crossing in Chicago during the night of June 26, 1894.

Many of the Pullman factory workers joined the American Railway Union (ARU), led by Eugene V. Debs, which supported their strike by launching a boycott in which ARU members refused to run trains containing Pullman cars. At the time of the strike approximately 35% of Pullman workers were members of the ARU.[5] The plan was to force the railroads to bring Pullman to compromise. Debs began the boycott on June 26, 1894. Within four days, 125,000 workers on twenty-nine railroads had "walked off" the job rather than handle Pullman cars.[11] The railroads coordinated their response through the General Managers' Association, which had been formed in 1886 and included 24 lines linked to Chicago.[12][13] The railroads began hiring replacement workers (strikebreakers), which increased hostilities. Many African Americans were recruited as strikebreakers and crossed picket lines, as they feared that the racism expressed by the American Railway Union would lock them out of another labor market. This added racial tension to the union's predicament.[14]

On June 29, 1894, Debs hosted a peaceful meeting to rally support for the strike from railroad workers at Blue Island, Illinois. Afterward, groups within the crowd became enraged and set fire to nearby buildings and derailed a locomotive.[12] Elsewhere in the western states, sympathy strikers prevented transportation of goods by walking off the job, obstructing railroad tracks, or threatening and attacking strikebreakers. This increased national attention and the demand for federal action.[citation needed]

Federal intervention

Violence erupted on July 7, 1894, with hundreds of boxcars and coal cars looted and burned. State and federal troops violently attacked striking workers, as this study by Frederic Remington illustrates.

The strike was handled by US Attorney General Richard Olney, who was appointed by President Grover Cleveland. A majority of the president's cabinet in Washington, D.C., backed Olney's proposal for federal troops to be dispatched to Chicago to put an end to the "rule of terror." In comparison to his $8,000 compensation as Attorney General, Olney had been a railroad attorney and had a $10,000 retainer from the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Railroad. Olney got an injunction from circuit court justices Peter S. Grosscup and William Allen Woods (both anti-union) prohibiting ARU officials from "compelling or encouraging" any impacted railroad employees "to refuse or fail to perform any of their duties." The injunction was disobeyed by Debs and other ARU leaders, and federal forces were dispatched to enforce it. Debs, who had been hesitant to start the strike, put all of his efforts into it. He called on ARU members to ignore the federal court injunctions and the U.S. Army:[15]

Strong men and broad minds only can resist the plutocracy and arrogant monopoly. Do not be frightened at troops, injunctions, or a subsidized press. Quit and remain firm. Commit no violence. American Railway Union will protect all, whether member or not when strike is off.[16]

Debs wanted a general strike of all union members in Chicago, but this was opposed by Samuel Gompers, head of the AFL, and other established unions, and it failed.[17]

Debs first welcomed the military, believing that they would help to keep the peace and allow the strike and boycott to continue peacefully. The military was not, however, impartial; they were there to ensure that the trains ran, which would eventually weaken the boycott.

Nelson Miles, took part in the operation. President Cleveland claimed that he had a legal, constitutional responsibility for the mail; however, getting the trains moving again also helped further his fiscally conservative economic interests and protect capital, which was far more significant than the mail disruption. His lawyers argued that the boycott violated the Sherman Antitrust Act, and represented a threat to public safety. The arrival of the military and the subsequent deaths of workers in violence led to further outbreaks of violence. During the course of the strike, 30 strikers were killed and 57 were wounded. Property damage exceeded $80 million.[7][8][18]

Local responses

Depiction of Illinois National Guardsmen firing at striking workers on July 7, 1894, the day of greatest violence.

The strike affected hundreds of towns and cities across the country. Railroad workers were divided, for the old established Brotherhoods, which included the skilled workers such as engineers, firemen and conductors, did not support the labor action.[

Populists—supported the ARU.[citation needed
]

In

blacklisted all the employees who had supported it.[20]

In California, the boycott was effective in

Southern Pacific Railroad was. Strikers engaged in violence and sabotage; the companies saw it as civil war, while the ARU proclaimed it was a crusade for the rights of unskilled workers.[21]

Public opinion

American Railway Union President Eugene V. Debs was pilloried in the press for the disruption of food distribution and passenger traffic associated with the 1894 Pullman Strike.

President Cleveland did not think Illinois Governor John Peter Altgeld could manage the strike as it continued to cause more and more physical and economic damage. Altgeld's pro-labor mindset and social reformist sympathies were viewed by outsiders as being a form of ‘German Socialism’. Critics of Altgeld worried that he was usually on the side of the workers. Outsiders also believed that the strike would get progressively worse since Altgeld, "Knew nothing about the problem of American evolution."[22] Public opinion was mostly opposed to the strike and supported Cleveland's actions.[23] Republicans and eastern Democrats supported Cleveland (the leader of the northeastern pro-business wing of the party), but southern and western Democrats as well as Populists generally denounced him. Chicago Mayor John Patrick Hopkins supported the strikers and stopped the Chicago Police from interfering before the strike turned violent.[24] Governor Altgeld, a Democrat, denounced Cleveland and said he could handle all disturbances in his state without federal intervention.[25] The press took the side of Cleveland and framed strikers as villains, while Mayor Hopkins took the side of strikers and Altgeld. The New York Times and Chicago Tribune placed much of the blame for the strikes on Altgeld.[22]

Media coverage was extensive and generally negative. News reports and editorials commonly depicted the strikers as foreigners who contested the patriotism expressed by the militias and troops involved, as numerous recent

immigrants worked in the factories and on the railroads. The editors warned of mobs, aliens, anarchy, and defiance of the law.[26] The New York Times called it "a struggle between the greatest and most important labor organization and the entire railroad capital."[27] President Cleveland and the press feared that the strike would foment anarchy and social unrest. Cleveland demonized the ARU for encouraging an uprising against federal authority and endangering the public. The large numbers of immigrant workers who participated in the strike further stoked the fears of anarchy.[22] In Chicago the established church leaders denounced the boycott, but some younger Protestant ministers defended it.[28]

Aftermath

Debs was arrested on federal charges, including conspiracy to obstruct the mail as well as disobeying an order directed to him by the Supreme Court to stop the obstruction of railways and to dissolve the boycott. He was defended by Clarence Darrow, a prominent attorney, as well as Lyman Trumbull. At the conspiracy trial Darrow argued that it was the railways, not Debs and his union, that met in secret and conspired against their opponents. Sensing that Debs would be acquitted, the prosecution dropped the charge when a juror took ill. Although Darrow also represented Debs at the United States Supreme Court for violating the federal injunction, Debs was sentenced to six months in prison.[29]

Early in 1895,

General Graham erected a memorial obelisk in the San Francisco National Cemetery at the Presidio in honor of four soldiers of the 5th Artillery killed in a Sacramento train crash of July 11, 1894, during the strike. The train wrecked crossing a trestle bridge purportedly dynamited by union members.[30] Graham's monument included the inscription, "Murdered by Strikers", a description he hotly defended.[31]
The obelisk remains in place.

In the aftermath of the Pullman Strike, the state ordered the company to sell off its residential holdings.

Politics

Harper's Weekly labeled Eugene Debs and the strike organizers as "The Vanguard of Anarchy", July 21, 1894.

Following his release from prison in 1895, ARU President Debs became a committed advocate of socialism, helping in 1897 to launch the Social Democracy of America, a forerunner of the Socialist Party of America. He ran for president in 1900 for the first of five times as head of the Socialist Party ticket.[35]

Civil as well as criminal charges were brought against the organizers of the strike and Debs in particular, and the

John P. Altgeld was incensed at Cleveland for putting the federal government at the service of the employers, and for rejecting Altgeld's plan to use his state militia rather than federal troops to keep order.[36]

Cleveland's administration appointed a national commission to study the causes of the 1894 strike; it found George Pullman's

Illinois Supreme Court forced the Pullman Company to divest ownership in the town, as its company charter did not authorize such operations. The town was annexed to Chicago.[39] Much of it is now designated as an historic district, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places
.

Labor Day

In 1894, in an effort to conciliate organized labor after the strike, President Grover Cleveland and Congress designated Labor Day as a federal holiday in contrast with the more radical May Day. Legislation for the holiday was pushed through Congress six days after the strike ended. Samuel Gompers, who had sided with the federal government in its effort to end the strike by the American Railway Union, spoke out in favor of the holiday.[40][41]

See also

  • United States labor law
  • History of rail transport in the United States
  • Murder of workers in labor disputes in the United States
  • List of US labor strikes by size

References

  1. ^ A standard scholarly history is Almont Lindsey, The Pullman strike : the story of a unique experiment and of a great labor upheaval (1942) online
  2. ^ https://www.nps.gov/people/jennie-curtis.htm
  3. ^ a b c d "The Pullman Strike and Boycott". Annals of American History. Retrieved January 24, 2014.[permanent dead link]
  4. .
  5. ^ a b "Pullman Strike | United States history". Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved November 16, 2017.
  6. ^ White (2011) p 436.
  7. ^ a b Ray Ginger; et al. (1962). Eugene V. Debs. Macmillan. p. 170.
  8. ^ .
  9. ^ John R. Commons; et al. (1918). History of Labour in the United States. Vol. 2. Macmillan. p. 502.
  10. .
  11. .
  12. ^
  13. ^ David E. Bernstein, Only One Place of Redress (2001) p. 54
  14. ^ a b "Pullman Strike | Causes, Result, Summary, & Significance | Britannica". www.britannica.com. Retrieved December 16, 2021.
  15. ^ Quoted in Wish, (1939) p. 298.
  16. ^ Salvatore, Debs pp 134–37
  17. ^ John R. Commons; et al. (1918). History of Labour in the United States. Vol. 2. Macmillan. p. 502. Archived from the original on April 26, 2016.
  18. ^ Brendel, Martina (December 1994). "The Pullman Strike". Illinois History: 8. Archived from the original on November 6, 2017. Retrieved November 16, 2017 – via Illinois Periodicals Online.
  19. ^ a b c Carroll Van West, Capitalism on the Frontier: Billings and the Yellowstone Valley in the Nineteenth Century (1993) p 200
  20. ^ .
  21. ^ Allan Nevins, Grover Cleveland: A Study in Courage (1933) pp. 624–27
  22. ^ Schneirov, Richard. "The Pullman Strike and Boycott". Northern Illinois University Libraries. Retrieved October 16, 2017.
  23. from the original on April 27, 2016.
  24. from the original on April 28, 2016.
  25. from the original on May 10, 2016.
  26. ^ Leach, Frank A. "Recollections of a newspaperman; a record of life and events in California". U.S. Library of Congress. Archived from the original on November 2, 2016. Retrieved April 14, 2017.
  27. ^ "General Graham Writes of Treason" (PDF). San Francisco Call via Library of Congress. August 22, 1895. Archived (PDF) from the original on April 14, 2017. Retrieved April 14, 2017.
  28. ^ "The History of Pullman". Historic Pullman Foundation. Retrieved February 26, 2024.
  29. ^ Historical NY Times
  30. ^ "Pullman Park". CNI Group. Retrieved June 20, 2022.
  31. ^ "Eugene V. Debs | American social and labour leader". Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved November 16, 2017.
  32. from the original on June 17, 2016.
  33. ^ Stanley Buder, Pullman: An Experiment in Industrial Order and Community Planning, 1880–1930
  34. ISSN 0003-8113
    . Retrieved September 15, 2010.
  35. from the original on April 25, 2016.
  36. ^ "Online NewsHour: Origins of Labor Day – September 2, 1996". PBS. September 3, 2001. Archived from the original on February 9, 2014. Retrieved July 25, 2011.
  37. ^ Bill Haywood, The Autobiography of Big Bill Haywood, 1929, p. 78 ppbk.

Sources and further reading

Primary sources

External links