Pullman Strike

United States 1894

Synopsis

The Pullman strike—also known as the Chicago strike, Pullman boycott, Debs Revolution, or the American Railway Union strike—was the most dramatic U.S. labor challenge to the power of capital in the 1890s. A local strike that expanded into a national boycott and strike, it grew to include outright class warfare. A turning point for the U.S. labor movement, especially the American Federation of Labor, it was also an economic and political turning point for the United States as a whole. While labor suffered a resounding defeat, the strike lent impetus to both radical labor currents and more moderate social reformers and led directly to what has become known as the Progressive Era of 1900 to 1920.

Timeline

• 1876: General George Armstrong Custer and 264 soldiers are killed by the Sioux at the Little Big Horn River.
• 1880: Completion of Cologne Cathedral, begun 634 years earlier. With twin spires 515 feet (157 m) high, it is the tallest structure in the world and will remain so until 1889, when it is surpassed by the Eiffel Tower. (The previous record for the world's tallest structure lasted much longer—for about 4,430 years following the building of Cheops's Great Pyramid in c. 2550 B.C.)
• 1885: Belgium's King Leopold II becomes sovereign of the so-called Congo Free State, which he will rule for a quarter-century virtually as his own private property. The region in Africa, given the name of Zaire in the 1970s (and Congo in 1997), becomes the site of staggering atrocities, including forced labor and genocide, at the hands of Leopold's minions.
• 1891: French troops open fire on workers during a 1 May demonstration at Fourmies, where employees of the Sans Pareille factory are striking for an eight-hour workday. Nine people are killed—two of them children—and 60 more are injured.
• 1894: French army captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jew, is convicted of treason. Dreyfus will later be cleared of all charges, but the Dreyfus case illustrates—and exacerbates—the increasingly virulent anti-Semitism that pervades France.
• 1895: German physicist Wilhelm Roentgen discovers X-rays.
• 1895: Brothers Auguste and Louis Lumiè re show the world's first motion picture—Workers Leaving the Lumiè re Factory—at a caféin Paris.
• 1895: Guglielmo Marconi pioneers wireless telegraphy, which in the next three decades will make possible the use of radio waves for commercial broadcasts and other applications.
• 1895: German engineer Rudolf Diesel invents an engine capable of operating on a type of petroleum less highly refined, and therefore less costly, than gasoline.
• 1898: Marie and Pierre Curie discover the radioactive elements radium and polonium.
• 1901: U.S. President William McKinley is assassinated by Leon Czolgosz, an anarchist. Vice President Theodore Roosevelt becomes president.
• 1905: In the industrial Ruhr region in Germany, 200,000 miners go on strike.

Event and Its Context

The Pullman strike in Chicago, Illinois, was part of a nationwide crisis, generated by the social turbulence of the industrialization process that had been dramatically transforming the United States since the end of the Civil War. The rail strike of 1877 and the eight-hour uprising of 1886, culminating in the violence of the Haymarket affair in Chicago, had ended in defeats for the working class. However, these incidents were harbingers of deeper, better-organized, and more sustained challenges to the new industrial order that emerged in the final decade of the nineteenth century.

Intensifying Confrontation

The economic depression of the1890s (following similar downturns in the 1870s and 1880s) intensified the rise of radical populism among insurgent small farmers and many urban workers, while at the same time increasingly pushing industrialists to centralize and rationalize production to restore and enhance profit margins. In response, there was a growing trend among skilled workers to forge alliances with less skilled workers in more inclusive organizations. Industrial unions made their appearance among certain sectors of the working class: miners, garment workers, and railway workers, for example.

In the face of the growing power of business interests that many saw as profiteering "robber barons," increasing numbers of organized workers turned to more militant forms of collective action. For example, in 1877 Eugene V. Debs—then a prominent member of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen—agreed with other railway labor leaders that the railroad corporation was "the architect of progress" and that the 1877 strikes represented "anarchy and revolution" to be rejected by the railway brotherhoods. By 1893, however, he was calling for "all railway employees to meet upon common ground and there unite forces for the protection of all" through the American Railway Union (ARU). He added that "such an army would be impregnable" to the assaults of the corporations that "trample on the divine declaration 'that all men are created equal.'" He had also come to believe that "the strike is the weapon of the oppressed, of men capable of appreciating justice and having the courage to resist wrong and contend for principle."

Debs's shifting outlook reflects a broader radicalization of the American working class. After completing an extensive speaking tour through the United States in 1887, Eleanor Marx, the daughter of Karl Marx, commented on the prevalence of "unconscious socialism" among workers and others she encountered. She called the workers "grievously misled by capitalist papers and capitalist economists and preachers" about what socialism actually means, and therefore hostile to it, but in fact embracing its essential ideas and values. "[Many] persons, finding . . . that Socialism does not mean equal division of property, nor application of dynamite to capitalists, nor anarchy, have . . . declared, 'Well, if that is Socialism we are Socialists.'"

While relatively few American workers saw themselves as socialists, a significant number, particularly among organized workers, embraced a popular ideology of labor radicalism (what some historians have dubbed "producerism"). This radicalism blended the labor theory of value ("labor creates all wealth") and inclusive labor solidarity ("an injury to one is an injury to all") with a vision of American society being transformed into a new order of economic justice and social democracy. Outside of the working class, a growing number of intellectual, political, and cultural figures—including writer Henry Demarest Lloyd, social worker Jane Addams, lawyer Clarence Darrow, Governor John Peter Altgeld of Illinois, and others—were challenging the dominant social and economic orthodoxies of laissezfaire capitalism and social Darwinism.

Local Strike

In the early spring of 1894, after winning an 18-day strike against the Great Northern Railroad, the ARU found itself with 150,000 members—60,000 more than all the railroad brotherhoods put together, and only 25,000 fewer than the combined unions of the American Federation of Labor (AFL). While this dynamic new force inspired hostility from leaders of the old craft brotherhoods and uneasiness on the part of AFL president Samuel Gompers, the organization was a magnet for the employees of the Pullman Company involved in an escalating dispute with their employer.

Pullman was a 600-acre "model town" of roughly 12,000 residents founded in 1880 by luxury sleeping car manufacturer George Pullman. Annexed by the city of Chicago in 1889, in 1894 it housed over 3,000 Pullman Company wage earners, as well as a large number of laid-off Pullman workers. The company owned every inch of property in Pullman, including the town's only church. An experiment in labor and public relations, the town's brick construction, careful design, order, cleanliness, amenities, and lack of saloons both advertised the Pullman Palace Car Company and represented a bold, innovative attempt to preempt class conflict.

During the depression of 1893, the utopian town proved spectacularly unsustainable. Pullman residents had long been dissatisfied with Pullman's paternalism, which many characterized as industrial feudalism. One resident is reported to have stated that "we are born in a Pullman house, fed from the Pullman shop, taught in a Pullman school, catechized in the Pullman church, and when we die we shall be buried in the Pullman cemetery and go to the Pullman hell." Likewise, employees had standing grievances against corrupt, incompetent, and arbitrary foremen. By April 1894 the ARU had enlisted about 4,000 members in Pullman.

During the winter of 1893-1894 the company had slashed wages by an average of 25 percent. The company also reduced commercial rents paid by shopkeepers; yet, the town's retail prices and high residential rents remained unchanged. Moreover, management accepted no cuts in salary or personnel, and the company did not reduce dividends paid to investors. On 7 and 9 May committees of Pullman workers presented their demands to Pullman management: either lower rents or return to the wage levels of May 1893.

The company responded by firing three local union leaders, so Pullman workers voted to strike on 10 May 1894. The ARU, which was holding its first annual convention in Chicago 9-26 June, received appeals for help. Debs, fearing that the ARU had not developed sufficient organization or alliances for a major confrontation, urged caution. On 21 June, nevertheless, moved by the testimony of "girls' union" president Jennie Curtis, the ARU determined to stop handling Pullman cars on 26 June unless the company agreed to arbitration. Likewise, the powerful Chicago Trades and Labor Assembly, itself representing 150,000 members, pledged its support, though setting its own strike date of 11 July in order to give Pullman an opportunity to accept arbitration.

Instead of replying to the ARU, the company consulted with the General Managers Association (GMA). The association, which represented at least 24 railroads terminating in or passing through Chicago, vowed to fire and replace any worker who participated in the ARU boycott of Pullman cars. It also worked single-mindedly to secure government support, particularly that of President Grover Cleveland, in the campaign to break the strike.

A Nationwide Strike

This boycott changed the struggle from a local dispute into what Debs called "a contest between the producing classes and the money power of the country." Starting on 26 June, the boycott of Pullman cars led immediately to a nationwide strike against the GMA, as ARU locals walked off the job whenever a switchman was fired for boycotting a Pullman car.

By the end of June, most of the nation's train traffic—and virtually all of it to the west of Chicago—had been shut down. In some cases crowds of 2,000 or more gathered to encourage or require switchmen to disengage Pullman trains. Approximately 260,000 railroad workers were involved in the strike, almost half of them not affiliated with the ARU, and the boycott spread to 26 states, idling about 500,000 workers from California to Maine.

The association responded cunningly, reassigning mail cars to trains containing Pullman cars in order to create a rationale for federal intervention. The GMA also responded brutally, assembling a private army to subdue the strikers. Over 1,000 unsupervised, newly deputized U.S. marshals employed and armed by the railroads assumed duty on 30 June—in some cases firing, with fatal consequences, into unarmed crowds.

Class War

On 2 July U.S. attorney general Richard Olney obtained an indictment against the strikers under the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. (This was the first time the Sherman Act, supposedly a curb on corporate monopolies, had been applied.) Simultaneously, 2,000 federal troops were dispatched to Chicago by order of President Cleveland. Debs and three other ARU officials were arrested, charged with interrupting the mails and with various vague "conspiracy" charges, and then released under $10,000 bail.

The arrival of troops in Chicago and the imprisonment of the principal officers of the ARU escalated the level of destruction and violence associated with the strike. Debs's dream of peaceful, nonprovocative action—a reality in Pullman, which reported no property destruction whatsoever—became a nightmare of riot and reprisal. Trains were overturned and fires were set. Chicago, specifically the Blue Island junction, remained the epicenter of the conflict: roughly 14,000 armed men maintained "order" for the railroads, ransacking union offices, arresting hundreds of strikers and union sympathizers, and killing dozens. No one was indicted for any of these murders, and strikers and their allies suffered all reported fatalities. The vast American West was an equally significant battleground, and it took 12,000 federal troops—roughly half of the U.S. standing army—to repress the strike.

The strike had earned significant, though far from unanimous, labor solidarity and community support. Some local and national representatives of the middle class also supported the strikers. Attorney Clarence Darrow represented the ARU, while a young Methodist minister, William Carwardine, served as an influential strike leader in Pullman. The populist senator from Kansas, William A. Peffer, denounced Pullman from the floor of the U.S. Senate. The Chicago Civic Association, led by social worker Jane Addams, offered to mediate; Debs was receptive, but the Pullman Company responded that "there is nothing to arbitrate." Chicago mayor John Hopkins supported the strikers materially as well as politically. Most appreciated by the strikers, Illinois governor Peter Altgeld strenuously opposed the introduction of federal troops, insisting in a 5 July telegram to President Cleveland that "so very little actual violence has been committed."

Public sympathy for the strike, initially strong, diminished over the course of the boycott. Consumers were inconvenienced by the disruption of transportation and the resulting rise in the price of commodities, especially perishable food. As the Pullman conflict grew to national proportions, a shift in press coverage (partly reflecting the political and economic differences between local and national opinion making) influenced public perceptions as well. Initially scornful of the company's refusal to negotiate and of the GMA's dependence on a reportedly lawless and drunken private army of deputy marshals, journalists tended to become more critical of "King Debs" and the ARU as the disruption continued.

Defeat and Legacy

Force of arms got the trains running again by 9 July—a situation not reversed by the one-day Chicago general strike of 11 July. Debs urgently reached out to the AFL for assistance. Gompers and his colleagues backed away, saluting the ARU's "impulsive, vigorous protest against the gathering, growing forces of plutocratic power and corporation rule," but considering it "folly" to join the ARU in being destroyed. The AFL committed only $1,000 to Debs's defense and even refused to act as a liaison between the ARU and the GMA.

On 17 July, Debs and other ARU officers were arrested again, this time for contempt of court. (Finally sentenced in January 1895, they served six months.) Most troops were withdrawn from the rail lines by 19 July. On 2 August the Pullman works reopened. Returning workers were forced to sign an oath repudiating the ARU, and many were blacklisted. Though never officially ended, the strike's last gasps came as the United States celebrated its first national Labor Day, which was signed into law by a president anxious to counteract the taint of being a strikebreaker.

The Pullman strike was a blow from which the ARU never recovered. Yet the strike also discredited Pullman's attempt to merge urban planning and labor relations, and it split the Democratic Party (with such key figures as Cleveland and Altgeld at loggerheads), resulting in the party's shift to radical populism in 1896.

Under the impact of the defeat of labor radicalism and industrial unionism in 1894—with the Pullman defeat as well as the bituminous miner's strike that nearly destroyed the United Mine Workers of America—labor's mainstream shifted in a very different direction from Debs's open embrace of socialism. Gompers accelerated his turn away from labor radicalism. He asserted that the AFL should focus on building strong craft unions with a "pure and simple" orientation that explicitly accepted capitalism and further maintained that "responsible" labor leaders should forge alliances with "liberal-minded" businessmen.

The Pullman strike contributed to the rise of a major new force in American life: the progressivism that flourished in the next two decades. The trajectory of writer and social critic Henry Demarest Lloyd encapsulated the shift in thought. Initially hopeful over the prospects of the emergence of a mass socialist workers' movement in the 1890s (to be led by Gompers), Lloyd was bitterly disappointed by the workers' defeat and, with many other reformers, concluded that a less radical, cross-class, urban "progressivism" held more promise for the country. In response to the arbitrary powers of employers and judges, as well as to the unpredictable behavior of aggrieved workers, progressives pursued policies to make government power a neutral intermediary in the conflict between the classes.

Perhaps the most enduring legacy of the strike was the seeming miracle of a powerful working-class solidarity that shook the structures of power. Debs affirmed, "This act will shine forth in increasing splendor long after the dollar worshipers have mingled with the dust of oblivion."

Key Players

Curtis, Jennie (ca. 1875-1927): Played a central role in the organization of workers at Pullman, especially women. Through her consultation with Debs, her speech to the ARU convention, and perhaps also her legendary dance with Chicago mayor Hopkins at a strike-support fundraiser, Curtis stands out as a significant leader of the early phases of the strike. She was interviewed by the U.S. Strike Commission on 16 August 1894.

Debs, Eugene Victor (1855-1926): Active in the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and by 1880 the editor of its national journal. By the early 1890s Debs had become convinced of the necessity of a more industrial unionism and helped to form the American Railway Union (ARU). After its destruction in the Pullman strike, and after imprisonment for his role in that strike, Debs became a prominent socialist, helping to form the Socialist Party of America in 1901 and running five times as the socialist candidate for president of the United States. He helped to form the Industrial Workers of the World, although he also favored supporting AFL unions. He was imprisoned again for his opposition to U.S. involvement in World War I.

Gompers, Samuel (1850-1924): Prominent in the Cigar Makers Union, Gompers became the long-time (1886-1924) and increasingly conservative president of the American Federation of Labor, a spokesman for the "pure and simple union" orientation initially developed by his colleague Adolph Strasser. In his later years he became an outright opponent of socialism, though he never lost his admiration for Karl Marx, whose outlook he viewed as consistent with his own "pure and simple" unionism.

See also: American Federation of Labor; Eight-hour Day Movement; Haymarket Riot; Panic of 1893; Railroad Strike of 1877; Sherman Antitrust Act.

Bibliography

Books

Boyer, Richard O., and Herbert M. Morais. Labor's UntoldStory. New York: United Electrical, Radio, & Machine Workers of America, 1975.

Brecher, Jeremy. Strike! Boston, MA: South End Press,1997.

Carwardine, William H. The Pullman Strike. Chicago, IL:Charles H. Kerr & Company, for the Illinois Labor History Society, 1971.

Foner, Philip S. History of the Labor Movement in the United States. Vol. 2: From the Founding of the American Federation of Labor to the Emergence of American Imperialism. New York: International Publishers, 1988.

Lindsey, Almont. The Pullman Strike: The Story of a Unique Experiment and of a Great Labor Upheaval. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1942.

Manning, Thomas G., ed. The Chicago Strike of 1894:Industrial Labor in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1960.

Marx, Eleanor, and Edward Aveling. The Working-Class Movement in America, edited by Paul Le Blanc. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2000.

Salvatore, Nick. Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1982.

Schneirov, Richard, Shelton Stromquist, and Nick Salvatore, eds. The Pullman Strike and the Crisis of the 1890s: Essays on Labor and Politics. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1999.

Stromquist, Shelton. A Generation of Boomers: The Pattern of Railroad Labor Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1987.

Warne, Colston E., ed. The Pullman Boycott of 1894 and the Problem of Federal Intervention. Boston, MA: D.C. Heath and Company, 1955.

—Paul Le Blanc/Joel Woller