There is Power in a Union

by Philip Dray

  At heart, the critics of Coxey’s Army, and of tramps generally, seemed bothered not so much by the real threat of lawlessness, as by the reality that there were large numbers of dispossessed people in the first place, and that, in the case of the Coxey industrials, they appeared to want something they had not earned. Their demands implied that poverty and unemployment did not stem from laziness or even bad luck, but rather from larger, systemic problems in the economy, in society—factors that were beyond any one person’s control.59 Such a claim raised vexing questions. Self-reliance, resourcefulness, individual initiative—these traits were intrinsic to the ideal of what it meant to be American. Americans always made do. If government took greater responsibility for people’s well-being, would that not alter the very essence of the United States, seduce and possibly corrupt its character? Was that not the aim of those foreign theories spread in workers’ enclaves in the big cities—anarchism, Communism, Socialism?

  Coxey’s sympathizers couldn’t help note the irony that government largesse was acceptable to manufacturers protected by high tariffs, to railway corporations receiving massive land grants, to homesteaders, to black voters protected from the Ku Klux Klan, to governors who called in federal soldiers to quell labor unrest. Why then shouldn’t workers, the people, enjoy the same deference and concern, and be comforted in knowing that those in authority saw the hardships they endured and would act to ameliorate them?60

  Such questions were for the moment unanswerable; the government’s response to the demands of the Coxeyites had been muted, to say the least, although federal authorities had not hesitated to call out the army to confront “General” Hogan and his railroad mutineers. The Pullman Strike, however, was about to draw Washington more fully and irrevocably into the nation’s deepening labor conflict.

  BUILDERS OF LUXURY PULLMAN CARS were not railroad workers, but because there was a short railroad track at the Pullman shops south of Chicago, they were deemed eligible for membership in the American Railway Union (ARU), the country’s newest and most innovative labor organization. Founded in 1893, the ARU was national in scope and inclusive of all railroad workers; its unification across all crafts was meant to break the tradition of solitary railway brotherhoods that had long complicated effective worker representation, and better equip rail workers to meet the expanding power of the major railroads. Its founder and president, Eugene V. Debs, was a veteran trainman, an officer of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, and the well-regarded editor of its magazine. Intimately familiar with the virtues and shortcomings of craft orientation, he had championed the need for an industrial railroad union.

  A grocer’s son from Terre Haute, Indiana, Debs seems to have been destined from childhood for a life in the public arena. He was smitten as a youngster by the power of the spoken word, the fierce oratory of Patrick Henry and John Brown; while still in his teens he began organizing visiting lectures by men of national stature such as Wendell Phillips and the freethinker Robert Ingersoll. As if in coordination with his promising intellect, Debs’s body sprouted like an Indiana beanstalk; he emerged into adulthood gangly and storklike, six and a half feet in height, a Lincolnesque combination of sinew and brains, hardened by years of physical labor on the railroad. Bald at an early age, with a distinctive egg-shaped head, he was unmistakable in appearance, with a kindly face and warmth of character that made him seem more seminary graduate than railroader.

  Beginning in 1880, Debs’s union work as grand secretary of the firemen’s brotherhood was “one perpetual organizing trip” of overnight train rides, stump speeches, meeting halls, saloons, and the shops and roundhouses where railway men could be found. His devotion to the cause was unquestionable, but what began to make Debs truly memorable was his giving nature, a passion for identifying with the lost, the desperate, or underprivileged. He became known for simple Christ-like acts of generosity, such as presenting clothes from his own valise to those in need, or making impulsive gifts of money. “While there is a lower class I am in it; while there is a criminal element I am of it; while there is a soul in prison I am not free,” he once declared. By the time the ARU emerged in 1893 he was one of America’s most admired labor leaders, a man surely marked in the eyes of his followers for glory and greatness.61

  Initially he had viewed the firemen’s brotherhood he led as a benevolent society, looking after sick and injured workers and occasionally their widows and families. Violence and confrontation were not in his nature, and he heartily disliked the idea of strikes and the vandalism and carnage that too often accompanied them. He was a student of the railroad upheavals of 1877, and saw in that terrible uprising little practical gain. But over the years he’d become disabused of the assumption that capitalists were willing to be instructed by judicious argument and transformed by reason; he’d also learned that rank-and-file workers expected their union to be comfortable with the strike as an ultimate weapon, and to be ready for its use. It was a failed 1888 strike by a brother union, the locomotive engineers, against the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad, that first suggested to Debs the need for one large rail workers’ union; his hunch was confirmed in 1892 when a strike by railroad switchmen in Buffalo fell flat because other rail brotherhoods withheld support. By fall of that year Debs was urging the nation’s six hundred thousand rail workers to make better use of their collective might.

  The response to the birth of the ARU was favorable, thousands seeking membership, including unskilled laborers previously excluded by the brotherhoods.62 “There was never a time in the history of labor when it was so enlightened, so defiant, and so courageous as now,” Debs wrote. “It is organizing and every lodge is a school and an army post. These schools are educating and sending forth leaders and champions of labor. They are voices in the wilderness, and they are blazing a new pathway.”63

  A second surge of interest came in spring 1894 after the ARU, in the first flexing of its strength, struck successfully against the St. Paul–based Great Northern Railroad. Workers shut down the road for two weeks, leading the St. Paul Chamber of Commerce to pressure the company and its powerful owner, James J. Hill, into arbitration. The strikers won nearly all of their demands, including a pay hike. There had been no violence, no bloodshed, only a disciplined and coordinated strike action. Even Hill wound up congratulating Debs and the other ARU leaders for their principled handling of the affair. At the strike’s conclusion, Debs glanced from a window as his train departed St. Paul to return him to Indiana and saw hundreds of track workers doffing their hats in his honor; it was a “tribute,” he would later recall, “more precious to me than all the banquets in the world.”64

  The ARU victory over the Great Northern had a galvanizing effect on the labor movement much as had the Knights of Labor in 1885, when the momentarily brilliant Terence Powderly stayed the mercenary hand of rail baron Jay Gould. “The unskilled workers had been unprotected, underpaid, exploited,” wrote biographer Ray Ginger of Debs and the ARU’s accomplishment. “Now the dikes snapped and a reservoir of bitterness and hope drove men pell-mell into the ARU…. The [union’s] officials did not have to coax or persuade; their main job was to sign cards and issue charters.”65 An ebullient Debs posed the question of the hour: “ ‘What can we do for labor?’ It is the old, old query repeated all along the centuries, heard wherever a master wielded a whip above the bowed forms of the slaves … but [now] our ears are regaled by a more manly query … ‘What can labor do for itself?’ ”66 Encompassing all white rail workers, skilled and unskilled, with an active membership of 125,000, the ARU was soon larger than the four existing rail brotherhoods combined.

  On June 12, 1894, exactly a year after its founding, the ARU opened a two-week convention at Chicago’s Uhlich’s Hall. Pullman workers, having joined the ARU in March, appeared before the gathering of four hundred delegates on June 15 to urgently request the union’s help. As of May 11, all but 10 percent of Pullman’s thirty-eight hundred workers had walked out. “We joined the American Railw
ay Union because it gave us a glimmer of hope,” their spokesman told the conclave. “Twenty thousand souls, men, women, and little ones, have their eyes turned toward this convention today.”67 One disgruntled Pullman worker, a father of four, rose before the gathering. “I think that when a man is sober and steady, and has a saving wife, and after working two and a half years for a company he finds himself in debt for a common living,” he said, “something must be wrong.”68 Most affecting were the words of seamstress Jennie Curtis, the youthful head of a women’s local at the Pullman works, who told the convention that after her father, a thirteen-year Pullman employee, had passed away, she had been made to pay the $60 in back rent he had owed the company at his death. Her story elicited oaths from the ARU men as to how “the bloodsucker” George Pullman had mistreated and robbed “a girl.”69 It was another blatant example, all too familiar to workers of the 1890s, of what Samuel Gompers had termed “the barbarity of capitalism.”70 Debs left the convention to tour the Pullman village and came away distressed by what he saw—a model town meant to reveal the future, sadly revealing all too much about the present. “The paternalism of Pullman is the same as the self-interest of a slaveholder in his human chattels,” he assured the strikers. “You are striking to avert slavery and degradation.”71

  On behalf of the workers, the ARU appealed to Pullman to submit its issues with the employees to arbitration. When the company refused, Debs faced a dilemma: he detested Pullman’s arrogance, but was unsure how deeply to involve the ARU and hesitated to make strike threats in its name. Despite the Great Northern victory his organization was still new and unproven, and had little money on hand. Yet the more George Pullman remained unwilling to compromise the more he became the object of intense worker resentment, an evil assailing the life of young Jennie Curtis and thousands like her. The nation’s railroad men were spoiling for a fight with the “management” of America; unlike 1877, now they were not only angry but organized, and in Eugene Debs they saw their crusader.

  On June 21 the convention voted that its members who were switchmen would not handle Pullman cars after June 26 unless the company agreed to arbitration. Pullman again refused, and with the switchmen’s work stoppage the great Pullman Strike began. The sides quickly formed, the big railroads aligning with Pullman and, as a deliberate provocation to labor, declining to remove his sleeper cars from their trains. The once-splintered rail brotherhoods gathered for the fight, while friendly unions of carpenters, mechanics, and warehousemen signaled their intended support. “The sons of toil must stand together, shoulder to shoulder,” urged Knights leader James Sovereign, and for once reality appeared ready to match labor’s hopeful rhetoric.72

  THE ARU BOYCOTT OF Pullman’s railcars and, by extension, America’s railroads, was, in the eyes of commerce, a far more reprehensible act than a run-of-the-mill trade union strike. Because it engaged diverse groups of train workers across occupational boundaries, as well as sympathetic backing from other unions, it had more the feel of a full-fledged rebellion. The potential harm to business and the economy as a whole, which was now reliant on rail transport even more than it had been at the time of the 1877 troubles, was almost beyond measure, “a particularly flagrant intrusion by society into the hallowed preserve of the market.”73 And while 1877 had been frightening for its violence and destruction, that insurrection had been spontaneous; the threat that now loomed appeared darker for its being coordinated by centralized leadership.

  The switchmen’s refusal to handle trains with Pullman cars multiplied swiftly over the next few days, as rail workers in twenty-seven states and U.S. territories joined the action. One hundred thousand men had voluntarily stopped work nationwide. Soon both freight and passenger train traffic in and out of Chicago was at a standstill, and had slowed to a crawl as far west as San Francisco. News bulletins from Chicago reported that

  the Illinois Central, Wisconsin Central, Chicago Great Western, Baltimore & Ohio, Chicago and Northern Pacific, and the lines interested in the Western Indiana System are tied up completely. Seventy-five cars of perishable freight tonight lie side-tracked. One hundred carloads of bananas are between New Orleans and Chicago, and it is not thought they can be delivered.74

  “The railroads were paralyzed,” reported Eugene Debs. “The people demanded of the railroads that they operate their trains. They could not do it. Not a man would serve them.”75 The complications quickly spread to the major cities of the East, with the New York Times relating on July 4 that

  the big ice companies have been making almost superhuman efforts today to avoid suspending operations, but they gave up tonight, and thousands of sick and suffering in hospitals, public institutions, and private homes, will be added to the already gigantic roster of innocent victims of the strike. Just outside the city there are miles of loaded cars with their contents rotting in the sun.76

  Editorial pages lost no time in naming the villain responsible for the tie-up. “King Debs” he was dubbed—the would-be “dictator” who sought to grind the nation to a halt, deny families their meat and coal, children their milk, all in the name of making false promises to several hundred disgruntled Pullman workers. He was “a lawbreaker,” certainly, averred one paper, but also “an enemy of the human race.” To the Chicago Herald he was a “reckless, ranting, contumacious, impudent braggadocio.” A much-reprinted cartoon pictured Debs as a misbehaved man-child, wearing a cheap crown, straddling the Chicago rail yards.77 The Times was so agitated it abandoned its usual journalistic standards, and stunned readers, with a 210-word lead sentence:

  Eugene V. Debs, who within one week has sprung from obscurity to a position of the most absolute and potential power over all classes, millionaires, merchants, and mechanics, who by a mere nod controls and closes the business of great railway systems as if these were but his toys, who commands a fairly well disciplined and blindly obedient army of about 1,000,000 desperate and determined men, who now controls all the traffic of fourteen states, and coolly notifies the railway officials of all other states that he will attend to their cases unless they are very careful how they behave themselves, who has halted and sidetracked upward of 200 railway trains at various points of a territory far greater than all of Europe, who has crippled the commerce and manufactures of twenty great cities, who has halted the United States mail in hundreds of places and defied the federal government even to molest him, who spends $400 a day in telegraphic orders to his subordinates, who commands all of his great army of followers to cease all labor and to give up all their daily wages, who is costing the great railways and cities a loss in trade and traffic of fully $10,000,000 each day, is yet a young man.78

  The paper went on to scrutinize Debs’s personal life, publishing an account by a physician who claimed to have treated the ARU president for alcoholism.79 “Those who knew Debs well while he was in this city,” the Times reported, “believe that his personal conduct is in large measure, if not wholly, due to the disordered condition of his mind and body, brought about by the liquor habit…. Indeed, serious doubts are expressed by them as to his responsibility as a rational individual.”80 The confidence that intemperance was at fault formed the basis for a sermon titled “The Strike and Its Terrors,” which was delivered from one prominent New York pulpit, lamenting the passing of labor’s reins from the moderate Terence V. Powderly to the “saloon-trained men of the Debs pattern.”81

  The assault on Debs’s character was one thing; more harmful was the press’s willingness to exaggerate the strike’s impact. “Mob Is in Control, Law Is Trampled On, Strike Is Now War,” blared the headlines of the Chicago Tribune, while a Washington Post article, “Chicago Is at the Mercy of the Incendiary’s Torch,” fed a rumor that the entire city of Chicago, not just its rail yards, was under siege.82 “Meat Famine Near at Hand,” the Times threw in for good measure, ratcheting up public fear.83

  While press and pulpit thrashed Debs and his union, the railroads were also taking concerted action against the embargo. Much as t
he ARU represented an unprecedented coalition of rail workers, the rail corporations had their own consortium—the General Managers Association (GMA), founded in 1886—which consisted of all twenty-six railroads that served Chicago. The GMA had in recent days transformed itself into an antistrike task force. Deciding that the ARU had entered the Pullman standoff somewhat recklessly and that it was not truly capable of administering a sustained national labor stoppage, the GMA resolved to crush the adolescent organization; to do this, it quickly settled on a strategy to bring the federal government into the fray.

  Washington, it was clear, shared the country’s outrage at the crisis Debs and the ARU had made. As William Howard Taft, judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit, denounced “the gigantic character of the conspiracy of the American Railway Union” for “the starvation of a nation,”84 Attorney General Richard Olney moved to take back control of the railroads. He had spent the spring of 1894 dealing with the outlandish “borrowing” of trains by the misfit soldiers of Coxey’s Army, and had played a decisive role in stopping the freight train–stealing Hoganites in Montana. Olney was determined that such abuse of the nation’s railroads would not be again tolerated and that “the ragged edge of anarchy” would be trimmed promptly and completely.85 He believed it essential that the government make its stand in Chicago, “the origin and center of the demonstration,” in order to “make it a failure everywhere else, and to prevent its spread over the entire country.” Himself a veteran railroad lawyer, he quickly appointed a former colleague, Chicago attorney Edwin Walker, to the position of special federal attorney in Chicago. Walker, after receiving instructions from Olney, sought a court injunction against the ARU based on the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, as well as the law against interfering with the U.S. mail.