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Pullman strike
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| US History Encyclopedia: Pullman Strike |
The Pullman Strike began on 11 May 1894, when workers at the Pullman Car Works in Chicago laid down their tools and walked off their jobs. Multiple factors precipitated their action. Pullman's preparations for the 1893 World's Columbia Exposition had raised wages and hours to new highs; the collapse of the national economy even as the exposition continued then drove them down to levels inadequate to meet basic needs. A harsh winter exhausted savings and left Pullman families vulnerable and angry. Exacerbating that anger was their complicated relationship with George M. Pullman and the town that bore his name. Almost half of the car works' employees lived in the Pullman Company's much-publicized planned community that provided residents with services and housing of a quality rarely found in working-class communities and bound their lives even more closely to company policies. Finally, recruiters for the American Railway Union (ARU), confident after the union's recent success against the Great Northern Railroad, promised the union's support for any action the Pullman manufacturing workers, if not its African American porters, took against the company.
George Pullman's refusal to intervene on their behalf and his apparent betrayal in laying off union leaders provoked the strike, but the hesitation of ARU's president Eugene V. Debs to launch a boycott of Pullman cars shaped its early weeks. Strikers realized that the company was too strong and Pullman too opposed to unionization of any kind for them to win alone. Helped by Chicago Mayor John P. Hopkins, himself a disgruntled former Pullman employee, strikers turned the company's publicity for the town on its head. Pointing to the poverty hidden within the town and recalling Richard T. Ely's critique of its undemocratic nature, they painted a portrait of an oppressive, closed environment that denied them and their families their rights as Americans. They especially targeted their message to the press and delegates to the upcoming ARU convention in Chicago.
Their strategy worked. At the end of June, the convention voted a boycott of all trains pulling Pullman cars. Rail traffic slowed and then stopped in the western United States; violence spread from Indiana to California. As the boycott grew, the struggle shifted from the Pullman Company to the ARU, the railroads' General Managers Association, and the U.S. government. Federal intervention ultimately decided the results. Federal judges issued an injunction prohibiting interference with trains and the mail they carried. President Grover Cleveland authorized federal troops to restore order from Chicago to California. ARU President Debs was jailed and later convicted of violating the provisions of the Sherman Antitrust Act.
Although the boycott collapsed by mid-July, the strike at Pullman continued well into August when the company gave most employees the opportunity to return to work if they abandoned the ARU. The legacy of both the company and the ARU, however, continued long after. Led by Governor John Peter Altgeld, the state of Illinois sued to force the company to sell the town. Debs embraced socialism and engaged the political system directly. The ARU and its industrial unionism receded until the federal government in the New Deal finally reversed its policies toward labor and unions forged during the Pullman Strike.
Bibliography
Lindsey, Almont. The Pullman Strike: The Story of a Unique Experiment and of a Great Labor Upheaval. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942.
Smith, Carl S. Urban Disorder and the Shape of Belief: The Great Chicago Fire, The Haymarket Bomb, and the Model Town of Pullman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
| Columbia Encyclopedia: Pullman strike |
Pullman strike, in U.S. history, an important labor dispute. On May 11, 1894, workers of the Pullman Palace Car Company in Chicago struck to protest wage cuts and the firing of union representatives. They sought support from their union, the American Railway Union (ARU), led by Eugene V. Debs, and on June 26 the ARU called a boycott of all Pullman railway cars. Within days, 50,000 rail workers complied and railroad traffic out of Chicago came to a halt. When the railroad owners asked the federal government to intervene, Attorney General Richard Olney, a director of the Burlington and Santa Fe railroads, obtained (July 2) a court injunction. On July 4, President Cleveland dispatched troops to Chicago. Much rioting and bloodshed ensued, but the government's actions broke the strike and the boycott soon collapsed. Debs and three other union officials were jailed for disobeying the injunction.
Bibliography
See A. Lindsey, The Pullman Strike (1942, repr. 1964); W. Cawardine, The Pullman Strike (1973).
| Wikipedia: Pullman Strike |
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The Pullman Strike occurred when 3,000 Pullman Palace Car Company workers reacted to a 30% wage cut by going on a wildcat strike in Illinois on May 11, 1894, bringing traffic west of Chicago to a halt.[1]
Contents |
The Strike
During the economic panic of 1893, the Pullman Palace Car Company cut wages as demands for their train cars plummeted and the company's revenue dropped. A delegation of workers complained that the corporation that operated the town of Pullman didn't decrease rents, but company owner George Pullman "loftily declined to talk with them."[2]
Many of the workers were already members of the American Railway Union (ARU), led by Eugene V. Debs, which supported their strike by launching a boycott in which union members refused to run trains containing Pullman cars. The strike effectively shut down production in the Pullman factories and led to a lockout. Railroad workers across the nation refused to switch Pullman cars (and subsequently Wagner Palace cars) onto trains. The ARU declared that if switchmen were disciplined for the boycott, the entire ARU would strike in sympathy.[2]
The boycott was launched on June 26, 1894. Within four days, 125,000 workers on twenty-nine railroads had quit work rather than handle Pullman cars.[2] Adding fuel to the fire the railroad companies began hiring replacement workers (that is, strikebreakers), which only increased hostilities. Many African Americans, fearful that the racism expressed by the American Railway Union would lock them out of another labor market, crossed the picket line to break the strike; that added a racially charged tone to the conflict.[3]
On June 29, 1894, Debs hosted a peaceful gathering to obtain support for the strike from fellow railroad workers at Blue Island, Illinois. Afterward groups within the crowd became enraged and set fire to nearby buildings and derailed a locomotive. Elsewhere in the United States, sympathy strikers prevented transportation of goods by walking off the job, obstructing railroad tracks or threatening and attacking strikebreakers. This increased national attention to the matter and fueled the demand for federal action.[4]
The railroads were able to get Edwin Walker, general counsel for the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railway, appointed as a special federal attorney with responsibility for dealing with the strike. Walker obtained an injunction barring union leaders from supporting the strike and demanding that the strikers cease their activities or face being fired. Debs and other leaders of the ARU ignored the injunction, and federal troops were called into action.[5]
The strike was broken up by United States Marshals and some 12,000 United States Army troops, commanded by Nelson Miles, sent in by President Grover Cleveland on the premise that the strike interfered with the delivery of U.S. Mail, ignored a federal injunction and represented a threat to public safety. The arrival of the military led to further outbreaks of violence. During the course of the strike, 13 strikers were killed and 57 were wounded. An estimated 6,000 rail workers did $340,000 worth of property damage (about $6,800,000 adjusted for inflation to 2007).
Trial
Clarence Darrow agreed to represent Debs and, after a "brilliant" defense, may have been "robbed of a victory" due to the U.S. attorney dropping the prosecution of a charge of conspiracy to obstruct the mail after a juror's illness. Debs was then tried for, and eventually found guilty of violating the court injunction, and was sent to prison for six months.[6]
At the time of his arrest, Debs was not a Socialist. However, during his time in prison, he read the works of Karl Marx. After his release in 1895, he became the leading Socialist figure in America. He ran for President for the first of five times in 1900.
A national commission formed to study causes of the 1894 strike found Pullman's paternalism partly to blame and Pullman's company town to be "un-American." In 1898, the Illinois Supreme Court forced the Pullman Company to divest ownership in the town, which was annexed to Chicago.
Pullman thereafter remained unpopular with labour, and when he died in 1897, he was buried in Graceland Cemetery at night in a lead-lined coffin within an elaborately reinforced steel-and-concrete vault. Several tons of cement were poured to prevent his body from being exhumed and desecrated by labor activists.
Notes
- ^ "Within three days 40,000 railroaders had walked out in a sympathy strike, bringing traffic west of Chicago to a halt." Bell, Daniel. Marxian Socialism in the United States, page 49)
- ^ a b c Lukas, Anthony. Big Trouble, 1997, page 310.
- ^ Bernstein, David E. Only One Place of Redress, 2001, page 54
- ^ Illinois History: A Magazine for Young People, Volume 48, Number 1, December 1994, Chapter 8
- ^ Lukas, Anthony. Big Trouble, p. 310-311
- ^ Lukas, Anthony. Big Trouble, p. 311
Further reading
- Smith, Carl (1995). Urban Disorder and the Shape of Belief: The Great Chicago Fire, the Haymarket Bomb, and the Model Town of Pullman. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0226764168.
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Mentioned in
- Henry Demarest Lloyd (literature)
- Chap Book (literature)
- Richard Olney
- Clarence Darrow (1978 Drama Film)
- Darrow (1991 Drama Film)
- Eugene Victor Debs (US politician)
- John Peter Altgeld (American statesman)
- Richard Cory (Sources) (poem)
- Cleveland Democrats (American history)
- The Pullman Strike and Boycott (American history)
- Clarence Seward Darrow (American jurist)
- Nelson Appleton Miles (American military leader)
- Grover Cleveland
- In Re Debs (American history)
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