The march of “Coxey’s Army” had coincided with the ARU’s Great Northern strike. Together, these episodes prompted the government to step in with a declaration that interfering with trains carrying the mail would be prosecuted as a federal offense. In effect, this order placed under the protection of the US government every car of any train with a mail bag aboard—a “legal time bomb” ticking away, as historian Gerald G. Eggert would describe it, “to explode . . . with full force upon Eugene Debs and the American Railway Union.”
Notwithstanding the threat, the ARU’s boycott of Pullman trains spread rapidly. On June 27, the second day, 5,000 men had left their jobs and fifteen railroads were shut down. A day later, 40,000 workers were participating and traffic had been halted on all roads westbound out of Chicago. On day four, 125,000 had walked off. Some of the sympathetic strikers may have been motivated by their own mistreatment at the hands of railroad managements, including wage and hour cuts; others by news that the General Managers’ Association had begun recruiting strikebreakers through bureaus in New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland, and other cities. Reports reaching Debs said that as many as 250 scabs were being hired every day.
Debs had his hands full trying to discourage violence and ensuring that the mails were unmolested, but sporadic fighting broke out along with the commandeering of mail trains. As had happened in the Great Southwest strike, major newspapers took up the cry against the strikers. The Chicago Tribune ran two alarmist headlines on June 30, one declaring, “Mob Is in Control” and the other, “Law Is Trampled On.” Sporadic outbreaks of violence and the febrile press reaction would soon trigger concrete government action.
Olney and three Chicago-based government appointees—US attorney Thomas Milchrist, John W. Arnold of the US Marshals Service, and Edwin Walker—had spent the first days of the boycott pumping up each others’ hysteria. Milchrist fired the first rhetorical shot with a wire to Olney on June 30, reporting the stopping of two mail trains outside Chicago. He expressed his determination to “aid in the repression of lawlessness” and asked Olney to allow Arnold to appoint deputies by the hundreds “to guard the various mail trains likely to be interfered with.” After Olney obligingly issued the order, Arnold began to pin deputy badges on a ragtag group of armed men that eventually numbered in the thousands, many of them strikebreakers and security guards on the railroads’ payrolls.
That very same day Olney named Walker as special counsel to the government, vesting him with the authority to obtain court injunctions against the strikers and arrest warrants against Debs and other ARU leaders. This placed Walker, a veteran attorney for railroad companies, in a massive conflict of interest, but that disturbed Olney not a whit; to the attorney general, the interests of the railroads and those of the government were indistinguishable.
“It has seemed to me,” Olney told Walker upon his appointment, “that if the rights of the United States were vigorously asserted in Chicago, the origin and center of the demonstration, the result would be to make it a failure everywhere else.” He advised Walker “not merely to rely on warrants against persons actually guilty of the offense of obstructing United States mails, but to . . . secure restraining orders which shall have the effect of preventing any attempt to commit the offense.” This novel strategy of restraining activities before they occurred would have a lasting impact on labor relations.
Arnold was already in full panic mode. By July 1 the US marshal had sworn in more than four hundred deputies. “Many more will be needed to protect the mail trains,” he wired Olney. “Shall I purchase 100 riot guns? I think it very essential that we should have them.”
A day later, Debs and his fellow ARU officers were served with an injunction “sweeping in its terms,” as Walker approvingly described it to Olney, forbidding them to interfere with the mails and interstate commerce by continuing the strike. But it had little effect on the strikers themselves. “Have read the order of court to rioters here,” Arnold reported, “and they simply hoot at it, pay no attention to it, and have made their threats that they will not allow any Pullman car to pass through on the Rock Island road.” He estimated two thousand “rioters” in his way, placing “mail trains in great danger.”
Over the next few days, Arnold’s estimate of the crowds grew even more feverish. He had exhausted the supply of dependable civilians to deputize and was now scraping men in off the street. Initially, the deputies were men known to Arnold or employees of the boycotted railroads. They were vouched for by railroad officials and dragooned by nonstriking railroad staff, although the vetting process for the new recruits was less than rigorous: “Probably every man that was at liberty . . . went out to find men,” a Rock Island executive told the strike commission. “We might find them down town or we might find them elsewhere . . . Perhaps the appearance of a man would indicate whether he could be trusted; that was all that was required of any of them.”
During the later rounds of recruitment, the street denizens press-ganged into service tended to lack even superficial signs of trustworthiness. “The deputies sworn in yesterday were of no possible value,” Walker confided to Olney. “They were men taken from a crowd that applied for employment [i.e., strikebreakers], and in character were scarcely any improvement upon the strikers themselves. The marshal himself [Arnold] was assaulted yesterday, and one of his principal deputies severely injured.”
On July 3, President Cleveland injected a new element into the conflict by sending troops to Chicago. He did so at Olney’s urging but over the objection of Illinois governor John Peter Altgeld, who had expected the government to follow the traditional protocol governing federal deployments for law enforcement: First, rely on local civil authorities as the front line to keep order; then, if the police were overwhelmed, respond to a request by the governor for militia troops (not yet widely known as the National Guard); and, solely as a final measure, dispatch federal military units. Altgeld would blame Olney and Cleveland for conniving at the creation of a new policy in which the federal government became the strikebreaking force of first resort. “The trouble at Chicago,” he reflected, “was so magnified to make it seem that we were bordering on anarchy and that consequently federal interference was necessary.” The only thing holding up railroad traffic, in Altgeld’s view, was the railroads’ inability to hire workers to run the trains.
Olney and Walker shared the conviction that the key figure in the labor disturbances was Debs; they thought the best option for ending the strike was to put him on ice. On July 6, a day on which gunfire erupted between Arnold’s deputies and the strikers, resulting in the deaths of two of the latter, Walker reported to Olney that “we have now sufficient evidence at hand for indictment of Debs and all the leaders of the association for conspiracy.” He was confident that local judges would impose punitive bail, so that the defendants “will remain in jail until their cases are called in the Federal court for trial.”
Olney was known to have expressed misgivings about Walker’s tactics against the ARU only once, when federal agents seized Debs’s private papers in the course of his arrest; Olney ordered the action “publicly disavowed and the papers at once returned,” observing that “the Government, in enforcing the law, can not afford to be itself lawless.” Walker complied begrudgingly, but it was a unique upbraiding by Olney and the storm quickly passed. The attorney general and his special counsel remained united in their obsessive quest to defeat the strikers at all costs.
* * *
ONE NIGHT A few weeks into the strike, the general counsel of the Chicago & North-Western Railway Company stood in a railroad yard, deeply conflicted as he watched several cars go up in flames. He was Clarence Darrow, who had entered into corporate law two years earlier after a long stint as a Chicago city attorney and despite a personal affinity for the progressive ideology of Henry George. Now thirty-seven, Darrow noticed that most of the crowd sharing the view with him were boys and young men; not a few were ruffians whom Arnold had hired to keep the peace. What was clear
to Darrow, however, was that most of the onlookers were in sympathy with the strikers.
Once the strike loomed on the horizon, Darrow’s heart had ceased to be with his employers. The railroads’ stubborn refusal to grant their employees better pay and working conditions seemed destined to goad the rank and file into walking out. “I realized my anomalous position,” Darrow would write years later. “I really wanted the men to win, and believed that they should.” Unable to reconcile his conflicted loyalties, he resigned from his corporate job.
As a free agent, Darrow gained a clearer view of the legal inequities confronting the strikers. First there was the effort by the government and the railroads, acting in collusion, to obtain court injunctions against the strike. He considered this strategy a raw abuse of judicial authority—“Preserving peace is part of the police power of the state, and men should be left free to strike or not,” he observed. “When violence occurs this is for the police department and not for a court of chancery.”
Then there was the appointment of Edwin Walker as a lawyer for the government in the injunction cases while he remained counsel to the railroads’ General Managers’ Association. In fact, Walker was wearing three hats, not two, for he also served as attorney for the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railroad. “I did not regard this as fair,” Darrow remarked dryly. Finally, there were the conspiracy charges against Debs and the other ARU leaders—another distortion of the law, in Darrow’s view, for they were framed in a way that allowed prosecutors to magnify any misdemeanor into a felony. “If there are still any citizens interested in protecting liberty, let them study the conspiracy laws of the United States,” Darrow would write in his memoirs, published in 1932. “They have grown in the last forty years until to-day no one’s liberty is safe.”
Darrow came into court as defense counsel for Debs in his criminal case for conspiracy to violate the federal injunction. The conspiracy case would collapse after almost all the testimony was heard when a juror was taken ill, leaving only eleven to finish the case. After a mistrial was declared, the government chose to drop the charges, possibly because word had emerged that before it was sent home, the first jury had been leaning 11 to 1 for acquittal.
The outcome of the civil injunction case was less equivocal. Debs and his fellow ARU leaders consistently lost in federal court, beginning with a federal judge’s holding them in contempt for violating the injunction in July 1894 and culminating in a unanimous Supreme Court decision on May 27, 1895, upholding the government’s authority to enjoin any interference with interstate commerce, such as the rail boycott. Despite these unhappy results, Darrow’s representation of Debs would launch his career into a new phase as a warrior against legal oppression.
By the time of the Supreme Court decision, the Pullman Strike was widely recognized as a failure. Its leadership had been disrupted through arrests and jailings, the railroads had been able to resume traffic without settling with the American Railway Union, which had failed to gain recognition as a representative of the rank and file. Years later, Darrow recapped the disaster in detail: “The A.R.U. was destroyed. For many years its members were boycotted; they changed their names and wandered over the land looking for a chance to work.” Economic historian Alfred Chandler (among many other experts) judged that “the strike never had a chance.” The ARU was still too unorganized and impoverished to carry on an extended walkout, while the railroads had prepared themselves with armies of strikebreakers and secured the promise of federal intervention well in advance.
Debs himself was not so sure. It was only his arrest by federal authorities that killed the strike, he told the strike commission. He recounted having answered a knock on his door at Chicago’s Leland Hotel, finding Arnold on the threshold with a warrant issued that morning, after a federal grand jury had handed up an indictment for conspiracy to interfere with interstate commerce and other related crimes. “It was not the soldiers that ended the strike; it was not the old brotherhoods that ended the strike; it was simply the United States courts,” Debs testified. ARU headquarters were “demoralized” by his arrest, he said. Had the ARU leaders remained in the field, “our men were in a position that never would have been shaken.”
Olney regarded the deployment of federal troops in Chicago as a triumph for government policy, but it would prove to be a Pyrrhic victory for the administration he served. His own rhetoric would come under more concentrated scrutiny as the strike passed into memory. On the eve of the deployment, for example, Olney had told newsmen, “We have been brought to the ragged edge of anarchy.” Such language seemed distinctly hyperbolic in retrospect, especially once it was learned that Debs and the ARU had offered to submit the boycott issues to arbitration if the railroads would only agree to rehire all the men, union members and others, without discrimination.
President Cleveland emerged from the episode looking like an ineffectual, detached leader all too willing to cede his authority to his attorney general, who had taken it and run wild. Populists in Congress joined with members of Cleveland’s own Democratic Party to empanel an investigative committee to examine the strike. Democrats also considered a bill making it unlawful to enjoin workers from job actions if they offered to arbitrate and the employers refused.
Stung by this repudiation by his own party and looking ahead toward a reelection campaign in 1896, Cleveland signed a bill establishing Labor Day as a national holiday just days after the strike was crushed. The party was moving away from its old association with big business, and at the 1896 Democratic convention the nomination of William Jennings Bryan for president ended Cleveland’s bid for a third term. In the eyes of history, the sole victor in the Pullman Strike may have been Eugene V. Debs, who spent six months in federal prison in Woodstock, Illinois, and emerged with worldwide fame as a defender of the rights of the working person.
But Debs’s members and their fellow unionists were among the losers. The Pullman Strike signified to labor that industry was in command of working conditions, backed by the government and its newfound power of injunction. Discontent may have continued to simmer under the surface, but fears of unemployment in the still uncertain economy helped to keep labor unrest in check. After Cleveland, the Democratic Party tried to position itself as a populist bulwark against capitalist abuse of the working person by nominating Bryan for president, but it was the Republicans and their candidate, William McKinley, who secured the workers’ support by promising an era of prosperity that would bring jobs and higher wages—“a full dinner pail,” as McKinley’s reelection slogan in 1900 put it.
Organized labor went into eclipse. Wages fell, and the eight-hour day seemed as remote as ever—the average workweek stuck at between fifty-four and sixty-three hours, and even longer in steel mills and the textile sweatshops where women and children toiled for pennies an hour. Nothing would be heard from America’s political leadership about workers’ rights to collective action and a living wage until the Progressive Era began with the accession of Theodore Roosevelt to the presidency, at the dawn of the next century. It was a short eclipse, to be sure. But in the meantime, the path was cleared for the creation of a system of imperial railroad companies—and a new and more fearsome phase in their struggle for supremacy.
The unwillingness of the federal government to contain the worst impulses of these new railroad emperors was nowhere clearer than in the proceedings of the strike commission itself. During their inquiry, the commissioners questioned Pullman closely about why he had not reduced the wages of officers, managers, and superintendents, rather than rolling back some of the pay cuts or reducing some of the rents borne by the workers. Here Pullman revealed, perhaps despite himself, that he regarded the line workers as essentially disposable—unlike supervisory staff, who were irreplaceable. “It would be impossible for me, as the president of a corporation, to reduce the salaries of my officers arbitrarily, because I would find myself possibly without them,” he said.
“You might reduce your own, perhaps,” Commis
sioner John D. Kernan remarked.
“I might, if I chose,” Pullman retorted brusquely, “but the difference that it would make on the cost of a car would be so infinitesimal and fractional that it would not be worth considering.”
The commission observed that reductions in the executive salaries “would have shown good faith, would have relieved the harshness of the situation, and would have evinced genuine sympathy with labor in the disasters of the times.” But that was not on Pullman’s agenda—not as long as government power weighed on the railroads’ side. A change in the balance would not occur for more than thirty years.
14
The Empire Builder
DR. CLINTON HART MERRIAM was working in his cramped office at the US Department of Agriculture on the morning of March 25, 1899, when Edward H. Harriman arrived uninvited and introduced himself in what Merriam recalled as an “unassuming, matter-of-fact way.” The visitor informed Merriam that he was planning to cruise the Alaskan coast in a private steamer and planned to bring along a party of scientific men. Could Merriam help him select the passengers?
Merriam scrutinized his visitor quizzically, his lips pursed behind his drooping bottlebrush mustache. Contemplating this proposal by a stranger to bring fifteen or twenty eminent naturalists along on a family vacation, he thought at first he must be the victim of a hoax. But in due course he would help launch one of the most unusual ventures undertaken by a business leader entering the prime of his career. At a moment when he had millions of dollars of crucial transactions pending on Wall Street, Harriman absented himself for a two-month expedition to the coastal wilderness of Alaska.
Iron Empires Page 26