There is Power in a Union

by Philip Dray

  the present conflict has become surrounded and beset with complications so grave in their nature that we cannot consistently advise a course which would but add to the general confusion…. The public press, ever alive to the interests of corporate wealth, have … so maliciously misrepresented matters that in the public mind the working classes are now arrayed in open hostility to federal authority. This is a position we do not wish to be placed in.

  The document concluded: “We declare it to be the sense of this conference that a general strike at this time is inexpedient, unwise, and contrary to the best interests of the working people.”110

  Gompers’s role at the gathering would become as controversial as the resolution produced there. Surely a nationwide general strike would have been a momentous “act of war” on the part of labor against both the government and private capital, and it’s not clear what strategies its advocates were considering that would have avoided further mass arrests of protestors or greater physical upheaval. Gompers’s opposition to the general strike, nonetheless, became to some critics part of a larger pattern of compromise, even betrayal, unforgivable to many in the left wing of the movement. It was known that Gompers had questioned the ARU’s wisdom in rushing into so major an undertaking as a national rail boycott so soon after its own founding, and rumored that as he had boarded a train to attend the Briggs House meeting he had told an aide, “I am going to the funeral of the ARU.”111

  The labor movement had stepped back from the precipice, but the federal government had no such hesitation. On July 10 it arrested Debs and three of his top aides on a charge of interfering with the U.S. mail and obstructing interstate commerce. Released on bail, they were rear-rested a week later on the more serious charge of contempt of court for disregarding the sweeping injunction against the ARU sympathy strike Judge Grosscup had issued under the Sherman Act. In protest Debs and his lieutenants refused to offer bail and were detained indefinitely behind bars. “If I happen to go to jail don’t worry,” Debs had written to his parents back in Terre Haute. “I would rather a thousand times be a man in prison than a free poltroon. Thousands of the world’s best and noblest have occupied prison cells. After all, I shall go into history right.”112

  THE USE OF THE SHERMAN ACT OF 1890 to restrict the actions of organized labor in the Pullman Strike was a hugely contentious issue, since to many people’s understanding the law’s avowed purpose was to curb trusts and monopolies. The legislation’s namesake, Ohio senator John Sherman, had in fact once offered the Pullman Palace Car Company, with its vast market influence, as an example of why such a law was necessary. Samuel Gompers later recalled having had numerous meetings with members of Congress while the act was being discussed, and that the restriction of illegal trusts was its object, not labor unions. But in 1892, Senator George F. Edmunds, who was credited with having provided the act’s wording, insisted it was meant to

  cover every form of combination that seeks to in any way interfere or restrain free competition, whether it be capital in the form of trusts, combinations, railroad pools or agreements, or labor through the form of boycotting organizations that say a man shall not earn his bread unless he joins this or that society. Both are wrong. Both are crimes, and indictable under the antitrust law.113

  Its initial use against labor appears to have come at New Orleans in March 1893, in a case resulting from that city’s biracial general strike the previous fall. The defendants in U.S. v. Workingmen’s Amalgamated Council asserted that the Sherman Act involved only capital trusts, but a federal court established a precedent disastrous to organized labor by concluding that while the statute “had its origin in the evil of massed capital … [the] subject had so broadened in the minds of the legislators” by the time the law was passed, its restrictions were understood to include excesses of labor.114 An opposing definition of the law, however, was rendered that same year in a Massachusetts case, United States v. Patterson, involving the marketing of cash registers, where the court ruled that the “restraint of trade” clause in the Sherman Act referred to monopolies, and warned against its “careless or inapt construction” to include labor strikes or boycotts. But it was the New Orleans ruling that served as the commonly used precedent.115

  In December 1894 hearings related to the Pullman Strike, an Illinois federal judge ruled that while Congress had discussed but not acted on a provision to exempt farmers and laborers from the antitrust law, the only logical interpretation was that Congress did not countenance any such exemption. This argument was a reference to the so-called Sherman Amendment, a proposed addition to the bill crafted by the legislation’s namesake that pointedly exempted labor unions; the amendment was left off the final draft of the bill, suggesting to some that Congress did mean for the legislation to reach labor unions. But others insisted it had been left off because the final draft of the bill was so written as to make any such amendment superfluous.116

  The confusion about the proper application of Sherman stemmed in part from the fact that the law had been conceived initially more as a sop to public concern than as an actual weapon to be deployed. “Trust-busting” was a nice-sounding term, but capital had sufficient control over the press, the legislatures, and the courts to keep it from becoming the fearsome instrument of anticorporate reform its advocates envisioned. Several prominent legal cases of the period demonstrate why. One was the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in United States v. E. C. Knight Co., known as the “Sugar Trust” case. In 1892 the American Sugar Refining Company had taken over E. C. Knight and other sugar refining firms, giving it a near monopoly over the nation’s production of sugar. The Cleveland administration asked for a government suit against Knight under the Sherman Act. In a questionable opinion issued in January 1895, the Supreme Court ruled that Sherman had been intended to address the activities of corporations only as they pertained to interstate commerce, and that issues relating strictly to the behavior of large manufacturers were more properly the responsibility of the states. Coming at a time when Sherman was being misused against labor unions, the court’s willingness to nitpick the act’s language in this manner to protect big business was especially maddening.117 It was, quipped one observer, a decision “based upon Webster’s Dictionary rather than upon economic reality.”118

  Another revealing history was that of Standard Oil, which dominated the U.S. oil trade through its methods of buying up smaller companies, fixing rail rates, monopolizing oil pipelines, and corporate spying. In 1890 the Ohio Supreme Court ordered the Standard Oil Trust dissolved. Instead it “retained its character,” notes historian Patrick Renshaw, “and in 1899 reincorporated under the laws of New Jersey as a holding company. In 1907 it was fined almost $30 million (which was reversed on appeal) and in 1911, in Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey v. United States, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered its dissolution.” But in doing so the high court set new limits on the Sherman Act, saying its restrictions must be interpreted with an eye for only those violations that constituted “undue restraints” against commerce, thus softening the act’s initial thrust and creating an invisible bar of what might be termed a “reasonable” monopoly or an “unreasonable” restraint of trade.119 This left only a marginal possibility that misbehaved trusts would actually be brought to heel.

  In a separate opinion in Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey, Justice John Marshall Harlan alleged that the new, flexible criteria amounted to “judicial legislation,” that is, the court’s succumbing to pressures from the business community to reverse laws that duly elected legislators had put in place. “By mere interpretation,” Harlan wrote, the Court had “modified the act of Congress, and deprived it of practical value as a defensive measure against the evils to be remedied.” He went on to warn against “aggregations of capital in the hands of a few individuals and corporations controlling, for their own profit and advantage exclusively, the entire business of the country, including the production and sale of the necessities of life.”120

  To say the use of antitrust
injunctions against labor unions remained controversial would be an understatement; it became a major preoccupation, figuring in hundreds of labor cases in the coming years. In the Pullman affair there was never a doubt that the government had wielded it to devastating effect, validating the fear Gompers had expressed at Briggs House that labor risked being overwhelmed by the mix of judicial and executive powers the railroad interests had arrayed against the ARU. The injunctions that allowed the government to arrest Debs and other strike leaders and hold them behind bars, depriving the insurrection of its guidance, and the introduction of soldiers to disrupt the roving crowds and in some cases help man trains, had had the effect of breaking both the Pullman Strike and the ARU boycott. Two hundred rank-and-file strikers had also been arrested under the injunctions, joining several hundred ordinary citizens rounded up for rioting in the rail yards. “I have broken the backbone of this strike,” reporters quoted General Nelson Miles of the U.S. Army.121 As the mobs dispersed, train lines gradually reopened, troops safeguarding locomotives and riding shotgun on trains exiting big-city yards.

  George Pullman had stayed largely out of public sight for most of the strike, only emerging once the Debs forces had been routed. “The public should not permit the real question which has been before it to be obscured,” he advised. “That question was as to the possibility of the creation and duration of a dictatorship which could make all the industries of the United States and the daily comfort of millions dependent upon them, hostages for the granting of the fantastic whim of such a dictator.”122

  PULLMAN WAS CORRECT IN implying that the strike that bore his name had been a defining moment for American labor. The movement learned decisively that it had no friends in Washington, and that the federal government would not hesitate to send soldiers to confront workers pressing legitimate grievances. Most disturbing was the government’s use of an antitrust law to halt union organizing and even gag communication from a union’s leaders to its members, a throwback to the supposedly discarded notion that routine labor union activity represented a “combination” or “conspiracy” dangerous to society. Not unexpectedly, the business community and the conservative press widely praised President Cleveland’s firmness in putting down “Debs’ Rebellion” and setting organized labor in its place.

  Far from convincing workers of the error of their ways, the means the authorities had used had the effect of radicalizing many unionists. As Debs acknowledged:

  We have no power of the government behind us … no recognized influence in society on our side…. On the other side the corporations are in perfect alliance; they have all of the things that money can command, and that means a subsidized press … the clergy almost steadily united in thundering their enunciations, then the courts, then the state militia, then the federal troops.123

  Among moderate laborites like Gompers, of course, the Pullman experience reinforced cautious attitudes about the efficacy of boycotts and strikes; the ARU’s fate was proof that, given the opposition’s strength, a more judicious advocacy might be preferable for securing functioning agreements with capital.

  If it was any solace to the whipped ARU, Pullman and his company did not emerge unscathed. The events of summer 1894 brought criticism of the very notion of company towns, most prominently Pullman’s. One Chicago cleric, the Reverend William H. Carwardine, denounced the model community as so thoroughly undemocratic as to be un-American, as well as an affront to God, since Pullman himself, not God, ruled the community and the lives of its inhabitants. Within a decade the town, many of its once-impressive amenities grown shabby with neglect, was declared by the Illinois State Supreme Court to exist in opposition “to good public policy and incompatible with the theory and spirit of our institutions.” The court cited the Pullman Company’s ownership of it as being in violation of the community’s own articles of incorporation, and the state ordered the firm to relinquish all parts of it not essential to manufacturing. Pullman, Illinois, per se ceased to exist, some of its structures were altered or disassembled, and what remained was incorporated within the city of Chicago.124 Although company towns would not cease to spring up, as they often did in mining regions, the term increasingly took on a pejorative meaning, and the Pullman experience had the effect of dissuading the wiser planners of such communities from assuming absolute control over their residents. Many corporations in the Progressive Era and beyond, guided by the unhappy fate of Pullman, turned the responsibility for company housing of workers and other employer-employee relations over to an emerging class of sociologists and industrial relations experts who could serve as “buffers between capital and labor.”125

  While the press continued to belittle Debs, and wipe its collective brow that a “dictator” of labor had been stymied in his harmful ambition, a more considered appraisal of the Pullman Strike came, ironically, from a commission of inquiry set to work by President Cleveland. George Pullman, Eugene Debs, and numerous others testified before the panel. The commission’s report bemoaned the fact that both capital and labor had become so concentrated that they were capable, in times of strife, of wreaking great havoc with the entire economy; it noted that the strike had caused the deaths of thirty people, engaged fourteen thousand soldiers and police, and had cost railroads $4 million in revenues and workingmen $1.6 million in lost wages. While challenging the wisdom of the ARU’s decision to allow Pullman factory employees into a railroad union, the report saved some its strongest criticism for George Pullman for assuming the dual role of employer and landlord and for his refusal to submit disputed issues to arbitration; most surprising, it scolded the rail barons and their GMA for scheming to destroy the ARU as an illegitimate labor combination when it was itself a combination, albeit one of business. It also held the government responsible “for not adequately controlling monopolies and corporations, and for failing to reasonably protect the rights of labor and redress its wrongs.” As Debs testified, employers would reduce workers to a state of near slavery if no one ever stood up to them. “If it were not for resistance to degrading conditions,” he offered, “the tendency of our whole civilization would be downward.”126

  In its challenge to management’s reflexive hostility toward organized labor, the commission pointed out that “capital abroad prefers to deal with these [labor] unions rather than with individuals or mobs, and from their joint efforts in good faith at conciliation and arbitration much good and many peaceful days have resulted.” It pondered whether in America it would not also be “wise to recognize them by law, to admit their necessity as labor guild protectors, to conserve their usefulness, increase their responsibility and to prevent their follies and aggressions by conferring upon them the privileges enjoyed by corporations, with like proper restrictions and regulations.”127

  Such rumination pointed toward a question that would become central in the post-Pullman decades: What was the proper role of government in labor disputes? In the eyes of the ARU, governmental interference of the wrong kind had been the grievous error of the Pullman Strike. Debs was convinced that had his union been left alone to deal with management, it could have wrought concessions peacefully and in a way far less disruptive to commerce and public convenience. Reformers would soon argue that government’s obligation in industrial relations should not be to rush to aid private enterprise, but would best be directed toward passing legislation and creating enforcement agencies to safeguard employee rights, improve conditions, and ameliorate labor abuses. If a third party was to be involved in resolving labor strife, it should take the forms of neutral government boards of mediation or similar entities made up of nongovernmental actors. One of the Cleveland commission’s recommendations was that a permanent three-person U.S. strike commission be created to intervene in and mediate future railroad strikes.128

  Pullman was a deeply patriotic man who cherished his image as a benevolent giver of convenience and value to society, so he was wounded by the perception that his actions had in any way endangered the country, or that he wa
s to blame for the strike. Usually meticulous at managing his own image and that of his business—he was known for the lavish junkets for reporters and VIPs who attended the formal rollouts of his new railroad cars—he seemed to not have appreciated the bad press that could adhere to a company or an individual as the result of poorly handled labor relations. He had “won” the strike but lost the public’s favor; no longer was he the admired innovator and knight of commerce. For a perfectionist of his bent this was maddening, humiliating even in that he had been taken down, exposed as cold and self-interested, by his own lowly shop workers; they had “found the chink in his armor,” as one historian suggests, and for the first time in a career largely triumphant, “opened him to criticism, something he could not abide.” Pullman tried to recover his reputation through various charitable works, with limited success. That the shock of the strike had disoriented him and vanquished some of his habitual confidence was evident to leading company stockholders, who briefly considered asking for his resignation as head of the firm.129

  In fall 1895 there were two amateurish, easily foiled attempts on Pullman’s life. Already in poor health (he suffered from a heart ailment), he became convinced that his former employees were behind the assassination plots. He likely knew the rumors about Franklin B. Gowen, the onetime president of the Reading Railroad and titan of the Pennsylvania anthracite fields, who had been found dead in a Washington hotel room in 1889, an apparent suicide, although it was whispered he’d met his end at the hands of vengeful Molly Maguires.130 Pullman eventually became prey to an even more macabre obsession—that upon his death, ex-employees of the Pullman Palace Car Company would steal or desecrate his remains. Wealthy enough to act on such fears, however irrational, he left strict orders regarding his anticipated internment in Graceland Cemetery in Chicago, designing a burial vault fortified to resist all forms of forced entry. Drawing one last time on his passion for innovative engineering, the man who had hoisted whole city blocks and redefined American rail travel arranged for his coffin to be lined in lead, set in concrete, covered with asphalt, then protected from any attempt at excavation by a set of heavy iron bars laid across the top of the vault.131