There is Power in a Union

by Philip Dray

  The defense of the mail’s sanctity was based on the fact that it was handled by a federal agency using federal equipment and employees, as well as the assumption that the contents of any given mailbag likely contained missives involving government business; any interference with it potentially threatened the ability of the government to function. President Grover Cleveland bought wholly into this construction, vowing, “If it takes every dollar in the Treasury and every soldier in the United States Army to deliver a postal card in Chicago, that postal card shall be delivered.”86 Debs and the ARU saw this for the trap that it was—turning the mail into a sacred cow whose defense could justify strong reactive measures—and expressly informed its members everywhere not to impede the movement of mail cars.

  As for injunctions under the Sherman Act, the government’s intended use of the antitrust law, which had been designed to curb the excesses of corporations, not labor unions, offered a convenient end run around ordinary rights of due process. It gave the government a convenient lever with which it might hold individuals in contempt, and perhaps put them in jail, without having to meet the higher bar of indicting them for specific criminal acts. The violated court injunctions could also serve as an argument for federal military involvement. The success of the army in halting “General” Hogan’s hijacked train of unemployed miners in Montana that spring, when all attempts by local lawmen had failed, had helped convince Olney of the efficacy of deploying federal soldiers. Such extreme measures were justified, the attorney general and the GMA contended, because the ARU boycott was not simply a labor action against a specific employer, but an assault on the nation’s business, “an exercise of tyrannical power by a labor union,” as the Times wrote, “such as would not be tolerated on the part of public authority in any civilized country.”87

  Debs naturally saw the crisis through a different lens. To him the unprecedented extent of the boycott was an impressive act of solidarity and goodwill by labor’s rank and file; he had only praise for the ARU members and trainmen across tar-flung regions and state boundaries who had thrown their lot in with the Pullman workers. Rejecting the charge that he had assumed dictatorial powers over the nation’s railroads, he warned President Cleveland by telegram that “a deep-seated conviction is fast becoming prevalent that this Government is soon to be declared a military despotism.”88 Cleveland heard similar protests from Illinois governor John Peter Altgeld. Citing Article IV of the Constitution, which permits federal troops to enter a state only if a condition of insurrection exists and the state’s executive specifically requests such aid, Altgeld explained that reports of strike-related violence had been greatly overstated and warned against sending soldiers. As for the city of Chicago being under siege, Altgeld reassured the president that news reports to that effect were barefaced lies. Chicago mayor John P. Hopkins, it so happened, had given $1,500 to a fund to benefit the families of Pullman workers, and had been seen conducting the city’s business with a white strike ribbon in his lapel.89

  Altgeld echoed Debs in warning that real violence would begin if and when soldiers were introduced, reminding Cleveland that “local self-government is a fundamental principle of our Constitution. Each community shall govern itself so long as it can and is ready and able to enforce the law.”90 He also took the opportunity to upbraid the president on his attorney general’s misuse of court injunctions under the Sherman Act. “This decision marks a turning point in our history,” the governor stated, “for it establishes a new form of government never before heard of among men; that is government by injunction…. Under this new order of things a federal judge becomes at once a legislator, court and executioner.”91 Cleveland was said to be furious—fed up with the Pullman workers, who, on what seemed to him little foundation, had joined with the ARU, but also with the resistance of a troublesome Illinois reform governor whose thinking appeared to be in step with “Dictator Debs.”

  JOHN PETER ALTGELD’S NAME is synonymous with the dawn of the Progressive era. Like his hero Abraham Lincoln, he saw resilience and character in the American people, believed some of their better qualities too often went untapped, and wished for all a greater say and a role in the life of their country. Because a society based on the idea of “the survival of the fittest” was, in Altgeld’s view, inherently unjust, the so-called lower classes must be lifted up and educated in the values of cleanliness, good health, and temperance, as well as the virtues of citizenship. Labor unions had a vital role in this transformation, he believed, providing a counterforce to big business and giving workers a foothold on democracy, a means to organize, to seek redress and a fair wage.

  Immersion in the problems of the Pullman Strike came naturally for the governor, for after arriving in the Midwest from Germany as a young man, he, too, had swung a hammer on a track crew before going on to work as a teacher and lawyer. He had been on hand for the building boom that followed the Chicago Fire of 1871, diverting part of his income into the purchase of real estate. In 1884 he came out as a public man, winning a seat in Congress and publishing a small but incisive tract on penal reform, Our Penal Machinery and Its Victims. Altgeld’s essay argued that rather than reform youthful first offenders, incarceration was turning them into hardened criminals. He suggested that the well behaved be permitted to work outside of the prison each day, railed against the system of paying fees to police based on the number of arrests they made, and decried as unjust the practice of holding indigent prisoners for long periods before trial because they lacked the means to make bail.

  Through his efforts on behalf of prison reform, Altgeld met and befriended Clarence Darrow, a young criminal attorney from Ohio whose family had roots in the abolition movement. With Altgeld’s help, Darrow became corporation counsel for the city of Chicago. Among the advice that Darrow gave his friend when Altgeld won the Illinois governorship in 1892 was the recommendation that Altgeld alleviate the shame still hanging over the state from the Haymarket case and free the men still in custody—Oscar Neebe, Samuel Fielden, and Michael Schwab. August Spies, in his last words upon the gallows, had declared, “The time will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today.” Darrow and Altgeld were among those who still “heard” that silence, and were troubled by it.

  Since the trapdoors had opened beneath the condemned Haymarket martyrs on November 11, 1887, it had become widely recognized that the convictions had been unfair and the executions a gross mistake. With an Amnesty Association active on behalf of the prisoners, countless briefs and petitions had been submitted to Springfield, and such influential men as former U.S. senator Lyman Trumbull and banker E. S. Dreyer, who had been foreman of the grand jury that had originally indicted the Haymarket defendants, had demanded a pardon on the grounds that the three men still imprisoned were either innocent or had by now been sufficiently punished. Darrow reminded Altgeld that, unlike most people who resented this awful blemish on American justice, he had the power to actually do something about it. Both men understood, of course, the tremendous potential cost to the governor of any act of commutation or pardon. “If I do it I will be a dead man politically,” Altgeld acknowledged. Yet, he vowed, “By God, if I decide that these men are innocent I will pardon them if I never hold office for another day.”92

  Altgeld proceeded carefully. Although already familiar with the case, he took a hard second look, researching it closely and writing his own detailed legal analysis; he reviewed the method of jury selection, Judge Gary’s rulings against defense motions, and the possibility that incriminating evidence had been obtained through bribery and threats. He also questioned the trial’s essential premise that men could be convicted of murder for their words, when no physical connection had been made between them and the crime. One insight Altgeld offered was that even if sentiments published by Parsons, Spies, and the others were inflammatory, there was no evidence that the bomb thrower, whoever that person was, had read those words or acted upon them. Finally, Altgeld excoriated Judge Gary for
conducting the trial “with malicious ferocity,” for his numerous prejudicial remarks against the defendants, and for his general disregard for fairness and the law. The governor’s not unexpected conclusion was that those executed and those remaining behind bars had been convicted solely for their political beliefs, and that the means used to convict them represented “a greater menace to the republic” than anything the accused may have actually done.93

  Full pardons were granted by Altgeld on June 26, 1893. The timing of their issuance was symbolic, for only the day before, eight thousand people had gathered in Chicago’s Waldheim Cemetery for the unveiling and dedication of a heroic “martyrs” monument at the executed men’s graves.94 At Joliet State Prison, Neebe, Fielden, and Schwab, who had had no advance warning of Altgeld’s possible ruling, were suddenly notified of their good fortune and summoned to the office of Warden R. L. Allen. There they were given new clothes along with envelopes containing a railroad ticket and “a snug bundle of crisp bills.” After a brief sit-down supper with the warden, who distributed cigars and offered to vouch for their characters if they should ever require job references, the three men, still in a state of stunned disbelief, were chauffeured to the depot to catch the evening train for Chicago.95

  Altgeld’s act, as expected, stirred a fierce reaction. By issuing the pardons and offering explicit official acknowledgment of the fraudulency of the Haymarket convictions, the governor had “insulted” the memory of the policemen killed in the bombing, undermined the leverage the courts had grown accustomed to using against labor unions, and punctured, at least for a moment, the public’s reflexive attitude toward anarchists and other radicals.96 “In every street car, in every place of public meeting, and on sidewalks as people hurried homeward,” it was reported, “could be heard expressions of intense disgust with the governor.”97 Newspapers questioned Altgeld’s patriotism, reminding readers the governor was not American-born; he was an alien much like the men he’d set free. But Altgeld, knowing he had acted in good conscience, managed to remain stoic in the face of such criticism. “Let them pitch in and give me the devil if they want to,” Altgeld confided to a friend. “They could not cut through my hide in three weeks with an axe.”98

  Altgeld’s reputation clearly suffered, however, complicating his stance with the ARU against federal intervention the following summer in the Pullman Strike. “Having pardoned Anarchists who murdered the police of that city,” observed a Philadelphia paper, “it is only reasonable to assume that he is wholly in sympathy with the mob that now rules Chicago and shames his great state.”99 Some writers went so far as to link both Altgeld and Debs with Alexander Berkman, the would-be assassin of Frick, who was still in prison in Pennsylvania.100 Thankfully, the Baltimore Sun assured readers, even if the governor of Illinois was a fool and the plaything of radicals, the country could still rely on President Grover Cleveland, “the big, strong man and sturdy patriot whom the people have placed in the White House.”101

  THE GOVERNMENT’S LEGALISTIC TRAP designed by President Cleveland’s attorney general, Richard Olney, was set to close on the ARU. The railroads of the GMA had begun placing both Pullman sleepers and mail cars strategically in regular trains in order to provoke a violation. The union did make a good-faith effort to allow the U.S. mail through, as the ARU sent hundreds of telegrams to far-flung locals with instructions not to disrupt the mail; at one point it proposed to the railroads that crews might be assembled for special “all mail” trains, an idea that would have sounded reasonable to the railroads if their actual concern was the transmittal of the mail. Instead the railroads ignored the offer and, inevitably, mail cars were delayed in the strike.

  On July 2 federal district court judge Peter J. Grosscup issued an injunction banning the ARU from interfering with the mails or other rail movement in interstate commerce, or from attempting to convince rail workers to stop work. The invoking of the interstate commerce law was a perversion of its original intent, which had been to protect small businesses and farmers from price manipulations by the railroads, and the injunction was so broadly written as to disallow Debs and his colleagues from having anything to do with the maintenance of the boycott. Under threat of arrest and incarceration, they were not to send telegrams or respond to questions about the labor action, or to encourage others who were involved in the boycott. “A Gatling gun on paper,” one newspaper termed the edict from Grosscup’s pen.102

  On July 3, “a mob of from two to three thousand” surrounded U.S. marshal J. W. Arnold in the Chicago rail yards as he read the injunction aloud; at one point he was interrupted by a voice that shouted, “To hell with the United States court!”103 Afterward Arnold wired Olney:

  The reading of the writ met with no response except jeers and hoots. Shortly after, the mob threw a number of baggage-cars across the track, since when no mail train has been able to move. I am unable to disperse the mob, clear the tracks, or arrest the men who were engaged in the acts named, and believe that no force less than the regular troops of the United States can procure the passage of the mail trains or enforce the orders of the courts.104

  Soldiers arrived later that day from nearby Fort Sheridan, the outpost created in the aftermath of Haymarket to have federal troops available “not so much to quell a riot as to crush labor unions,” in the view of Detroit mayor Hazen S. Pingree, who had hurried to Chicago bearing telegrams from the mayors of more than fifty U.S. cities urging an arbitrated settlement to the Pullman Strike.105 The army troops—eight companies of infantry, one troop of cavalry, and an artillery battalion, constituting a federal force of about two thousand—spread out along the railroad tracks leading into Chicago and encamped by the lakefront near the business district.

  The next day, July 4, as both Debs and Altgeld had warned, the federal troops’ presence sparked violence. “All the bitterness, the hoodlumism, the despair, stored up at the bottom of Chicago’s soul … boiled over into the railroad yards,” notes a popular history of the city. “Here and there engines were crippled, capsized on tracks; whole trains of standing freight cars were overturned, tower-men were dragged from switch-towers.”106 As in 1877, the main antagonists were not so much Pullman strikers or even rail workers, but large crowds of belligerent citizens—the poor, the unemployed, families of railroad men, other sympathizers—provoked by the appearance of federal uniforms and “inflamed by passion and frequent draughts from the neighboring saloons.” They catcalled and cursed at the soldiers, and hurled brickbats, stones, and rail spikes. So determined and numerous were they, the rioters even managed to uncouple the cars of an army troop train.107

  Hopelessly worsening the situation was the introduction of two thousand “special deputies” hired by the federal marshals. As was often the case with men enlisted as last-minute enforcers in strike disputes, the deputies were for the most part untrained toughs, who despite their muscular physiques tended to be the first to panic when confronted with large groups of protestors. Police chief John Brennan described them as “thugs, thieves, and ex-convicts” willing to trade their brawn for some quick cash, and criticized “their careless use of pistols.”108 In the chaos at the rail yards they were also not above helping themselves to the contents of some of the stalled freight cars.109

  The following day a mob estimated at ten thousand men and women advanced from the packinghouse district to the rail yards, destroying property and setting railroad cars afire. After roughing up a railroad official and pushing freight cars off the tracks, one group of protestors entered the World’s Fair site and attempted to vandalize buildings. More volatile crises arose on July 6, when a trigger-happy Illinois Central manager shot two rioters, inspiring numerous acts of revenge, including arson. Seven hundred freight cars were put to the torch, as well as bridges and railroad buildings. Telegraph lines were cut. On the outskirts of Chicago, crowds gathered on the tracks to temporarily halt passenger trains from entering the city. By sunset thirteen people had been killed and fifty-three injured. Similar scenes we
re reported at rail yards across the country.

  Chicago’s organized labor movement did not sit idly by as these developments occurred; talk of a general strike in support of the rail workers had been bandied about for days, and intensified once the president committed the troops from Fort Sheridan. In an urgent call, two dozen national labor leaders including Samuel Gompers were summoned to an emergency conference at Chicago’s Briggs House hotel to help steer labor’s course. Representatives of the nation’s labor press, the so-called knights of the notebook, gathered downstairs in the lobby, ready to transmit the conclave’s decision. Many of the Chicago unions continued to back the idea of a general strike, as did Eugene Debs; AFL locals from across the country advised Gompers that they stood ready to join any such action at his word. Had the order for it emanated from the conference, there’s little doubt a general strike on a national scale would have been attempted.

  While Gompers had joined Debs and Governor Altgeld in cautioning President Cleveland about the government’s improper use of the courts and the military, he had been convinced by the reversals at Homestead and in the Coeur d’Alene two years earlier that labor could not launch successful actions against the combined might of industry and government. Particularly now that federal injunctions had been issued and troops put in place in the Pullman Strike, Gompers believed the cause was lost. The conferees passed a resolution that damned George Pullman as “a public enemy,” praised the ARU boycott as a “vigorous protest against the gathering, growing forces of plutocratic power and corporation rule,” and applauded the nation’s trainmen for exposing “the hollow shams of Pullman’s pharisaical paradise,” but noted with regret that