Pullman Strike and Boycott

Pullman Strike and Boycott. On 11 May 1894, employees at the Pullman Car Works on Chicago's far South Side walked off their jobs, launching one of the most notable labor actions of the late nineteenth century. Recently organized by the American Railway Union (ARU), the strikers protested the company's wage cuts in response to the depression of 1893 that left them, their families, and their communities impoverished.

The strike quickly attracted national attention. The company town of Pullman that the industrialist George Pullman (1831–1897) had built adjacent to his railroad car works had for a dozen years stood as a highly contested model of a managed urban environment where workers' families could theoretically enjoy capitalism's opportunities in a carefully planned, closely supervised paternalistic environment. By striking, Pullman's employees, half of whom lived in Pullman, challenged the idea of shared labor‐capital interests that underlay the town's design and corporate control.

The strike spread in late June when the ARU national convention voted to boycott all trains carrying Pullman sleeping cars. Beginning 26 June, the boycott disrupted rail traffic nationwide. When the railroads tried to resume operations, violence erupted in Chicago. The federal government under President Grover Cleveland intervened, sending troops to restore order. Attorney General Richard Olney (himself on the board of several railroads) secured an injunction against the boycott, on the grounds that the strike was disrupting the U.S. mail. ARU officers, including the president, Eugene V. Debs, were prosecuted and imprisoned. The success of the injunction, upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1895, ensured that similar injunctions would be used against unions for years to come.

Although the railroad boycott collapsed in mid‐July, the strike at Pullman continued for another month. By then, many political and business leaders sympathized with the strikers. Pullman's stubbornness, they felt, had possibly caused the strike and definitely prolonged it. The U.S. Strike Commission chaired by Carroll Wright, head of the Bureau of Labor in the Department of the Interior, concurred, acknowledging that unions and government regulation might be necessary safeguards against unbounded corporate power.
See also Depressions, Economic; Gilded Age; Industrialization; Labor Movements; Strikes and Industrial Conflict.

Bibliography

Almont Lindsey , The Pullman Strike, 1942.
Carl Smith , Urban Disorder and the Shape of Belief, 1995.
Richard Schneirov, Shelton Stromquist, and Nick Salvatore, eds., The Pullman Strike and the Crisis of the 1890s, 1999.

Janice L. Reiff