by H. W. Brands
Investigation revealed the man to be a Russian-born anarchist named Alexander Berkman. He had no connection to the strike beyond reading about it in the papers, which gave him the idea that he might begin dismantling the capitalist order by killing Frick. In fact he could not have done Frick a greater favor. Frick didn’t have to equate the Amalgamated union with anarchy; the workers’ own actions against the Pinkertons and now this assassination attempt did the job for him. When his newborn son, Henry Jr., coincidentally died just days later, the image of the brave, beleaguered man of business—“man of steel” was the favored phrase—crowded out the specifics of the dispute with the Amalgamated union. The governor of Pennsylvania sent the state militia to prevent additional violence, and under the guns of the guard Frick hired replacements for the union men. By the time the union conceded defeat, in November, it had become irrelevant to the operations of Carnegie Steel. “We had to teach our employees a lesson,” Frick wrote Carnegie. “And we have taught them one that they will never forget.”9
THE LESSON—that capital would protect its prerogatives, by force if necessary—was amplified two years later. Workers at the Pullman Palace Car Company in Pullman, Illinois, just south of Chicago, lived in one of the finest company towns in America. Modeled after Saltaire in England, where Titus Salt had built a community for his woolen workers, and similar projects in Essen, Germany, and Guise, France, the town of Pullman boasted neat brick houses with gas, water, sewer connections, and basements. Fenced yards contained tidy lawns and flower beds; a larger commons included a lake, an artificial waterfall, a concert stage, and athletic fields. Although more densely populated than parts of many cities, the town had a mortality rate far below the urban norm. Epidemics—of cholera, yellow fever, typhoid—that still scourged American cities bypassed Pullman. It employed but a third of the national average of physicians per capita and scarcely produced enough illness to support those.10
But there was something about Pullman that bothered the inhabitants. Visitors noticed it right away. “The corporation is everything and everywhere,” a journalist from Pittsburgh recorded. “The corporation trims your lawn and attends to your trees; the corporation sweeps your street, and sends a man around to pick up every cigar stump, every bit of paper, every straw or leaf; the corporation puts two barrels in your back yard, one for ashes and one for refuse of the kitchen; the corporation has the ashes and refuse hauled away.… The corporation does practically everything but sweep your room and make your bed, and the corporation expects you to enjoy it and hold your tongue.”11
In flush times the residents of Pullman—the workers in the company shops and their dependents—accepted the trade-off. For a decade after its founding in the early 1880s the town thrived. But the Panic of 1893 and the ensuing depression punished the Pullman company severely. The company sold luxury items—the sleeping and parlor cars favored by first-class passengers—and when traffic slumped, the roads postponed new purchases. George Pullman was a paternalist, but before that he was a capitalist, and when orders ceased he slashed his workforce by three thousand men and women and cut piecework pay rates by as much as half. Had he trimmed rents in the company town and prices at the company stores, the workers might have tolerated the wage cuts, but he didn’t, treating his landlord role as separate from his role as employer. The workers suffered for several months before deciding to strike. On May 11, 1894, they walked out of the company shops.
For a month the strike proceeded uneventfully. Pullman might have evicted striking workers—for arrears of rent, if nothing else—but he didn’t. Skeptics said he feared a public backlash; cynics contended he wanted the arrears to mount so he could squeeze the workers even further. The town remained calm, if tense.
Things changed when the American Railway Union entered the dispute. The ARU wasn’t a year old, having been founded just the previous summer in Chicago. Less ambitious than the Knights of Labor, which had aimed to organize the entire working class, but more ambitious than the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers, which focused on skilled labor within a single industry, the ARU proposed to organize the railroad industry as a whole. From engineers to porters (except for black porters: African Americans weren’t accepted as members) and brakemen to boilermakers (the union included not simply persons who operated railroad equipment but also those who built the locomotives and cars, which was how it became interested in the Pullman strike), the ARU hoped to weld the rail workers into an organization powerful enough to meet the railroad owners as their equal. In his dreams, ARU president Eugene V. Debs envisioned the rail union as the first step toward something broader. “The forces of labor must unite,” he told the second annual meeting of the ARU in June 1894. “The dividing lines must grow dimmer day by day until they become imperceptible, and then labor’s hosts, marshaled under one conquering banner, shall march together, vote together, and fight together, until working men shall receive and enjoy all the fruits of their toil. Then will our country be truly and grandly free, and its institutions as secure and enduring as the eternal mountains.”12
But the millennium had to start somewhere, and Pullman appeared as good a place as any. At the June 1894 meeting, as the Pullman strike entered its second month, the ARU voted to refuse to handle Pullman cars.
This raised the stakes dramatically, for it brought most of the American railroad network into play. Debs and the union hoped to pressure railroad management into leaving the Pullman cars on the sidings; if the railroads did so, Pullman must cave in before long. But if the managers defended Pullman, then a relatively minor contest in a Chicago suburb would become a major test of strength over the nation’s transportation lifelines.
In fact the railroads, represented by the General Managers’ Association, were itching for just such a test of strength. The ARU had won a surprising victory in a smaller strike against James J. Hill’s Great Northern, and the other owners, while cursing Hill as a class traitor, determined to crush the union before the idea of industry-wide solidarity caught on. The ARU, by backing the Pullman strikers so explicitly, played into the managers’ hands.
The nature of the contest was no secret. “While the boycott is ostensibly declared as a demonstration of sympathy in behalf of the strikers in the Pullman shops,” the New York Times remarked, “it in reality will be a struggle between the greatest and most powerful railroad labor organization and the entire railroad capital.”13
Yet it was an egregiously unequal fight. The railroads enjoyed the advantage not merely of their much greater financial resources but of a friendly federal government. Richard Olney had made a lawyer’s fortune representing railroads before becoming Grover Cleveland’s attorney general—an appointment he accepted only after being assured by Cleveland that he could continue his private practice and receive his customary retainers from the railroads. Olney had advised his rail clients on breaking strikes in the past, with singular success. Indeed, one such broken strike, against the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy, helped convince Debs of the futility of the brotherhood model of organizing rail workers, driving him to the industrial approach embodied by the ARU. In the Pullman strike, Olney and Debs squared off again.14
Olney very quickly decided that the ARU’s boycott was illegal. The railroads refused to uncouple the Pullman cars, and ARU members refused to handle the trains, many of which included cars carrying mail. Olney might have determined that the railroads were at fault and arranged an order for them to shunt the Pullman cars from trains transporting the mail, but, true to form, he took the opposite tack. He blamed the union and persuaded a judge to issue an injunction against the ARU boycott.
The basis for the boycott was an imaginative reading of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. Congress had passed the Sherman law after years of agitation by victims and other opponents of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil and its monopoly-minded mimics. The law barred “every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among th
e several states, or with foreign nations.” During discussion of the bill, spokesmen for labor worried that it might be applied against unions. John Sherman asserted that such was not the intent at all. “Combinations of workingmen to promote their interests, promote their welfare, and increase their pay if you please, to get their fair share in the division of production, are not affected in the slightest degree, nor can they be included in the words or intent of the bill,” he said.15
This may have been Sherman’s view, and it was probably the view of most of those voting in favor. But it didn’t take corporate lawyers long to craft an interpretation that persuaded courts to include unions under the act’s proscription. “A strike is essentially a conspiracy to extort by violence,” a federal judge in Milwaukee declared the month before the Pullman strike began. “Whatever other doctrine may be asserted by reckless agitators, it must ever be the duty of the courts, in the protection of society, and in the execution of the laws of the land, to condemn, prevent, and punish all such unlawful conspiracies and combinations.” The Chicago court to which Olney applied for an injunction in the Pullman case agreed in principle if not in detail, and the ARU was ordered to move the mail.16
Although the strike put the whole national rail network at risk, both sides—the railroad managers and the ARU—reckoned that Chicago was where the contest would be won or lost. Twenty-six rail lines converged on Chicago, making it the choke point of the nation’s transport system. Not by accident had the General Managers’ Association and the ARU alike chosen the city for their headquarters. Olney believed that the strike must be defeated at Chicago, where the ARU and sympathizers were already well mobilized, lest it mushroom out of control. “It has seemed to me that if the rights of the United States were vigorously asserted in Chicago, the origin and center of the demonstration,” he wrote to the Chicago federal attorney’s special counsel (who was also chief counsel to the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railroad), “the result would be to make it a failure everywhere else and to prevent its spread over the entire country.”17
To enforce the injunction against the strikers, who besides halting trains committed vandalism against rolling stock and fixed facilities, President Cleveland directed Nelson Miles, still the commander of the Westarn army, to deploy federal troops against the strikers. Cleveland took no chances; speaking through chief of staff General John Schofield, the president ordered “the entire garrison at Fort Sheridan—infantry, cavalry, and artillery—to the lake front in the city of Chicago.”18
The troop deployment made the tense situation explosive. General Miles was as determined to crush this labor rebellion as he had been to crush the Ghost Dancers. “Men must take sides either for anarchy, secret conclaves, unwritten law, mob violence, and universal chaos under the red or white flag of socialism on the one hand, or on the side of established government,” he declared. Eugene Debs feared that the government action made much larger violence almost inevitable. “The first shot fired by the regular soldiers at the mobs here will be the signal for a civil war,” Debs warned. “I believe this as firmly as I believe in the ultimate success of our course. Bloodshed will follow, and ninety percent of the people of the United States will be arrayed against the other ten percent.”19
For a time it appeared matters would come to that. Strikers, sympathizers, and elements of Chicago’s floating population—their numbers swollen by the depression—surged through the streets of the city on the evening of July 4. The crowd tipped over railcars and hurled bricks through windows. The excitement brought out many more people; the next day the mob, by now utterly beyond the control of Debs and the ARU, numbered perhaps ten thousand. The rioters wrecked and burned more cars and swarmed across the Union Stock Yards, where they challenged the federal troops, who responded with bayonet and cavalry charges. Arsonists set a fire that was whipped by the infamous Chicago winds into a blaze that consumed part of the fairgrounds left over from the Columbian Exposition and conjured terrifying memories of the 1871 conflagration.
The next evening the arson expanded. A security guard shot two rioters, enraging the crowd, which marched as a body on the Panhandle yards below Fiftieth Street in South Chicago. A reporter for the Chicago Inter Ocean watched in amazement.
From this moving mass of shouting rioters squads of a dozen or two departed, running toward the yards with fire brands in their hands. They looked in the gloaming like specters, their lighted torches bobbing about like will-o’-the-wisps. Soon from all parts of the yard flames shot up and billows of fire rolled over the cars, covering them with the red glow of destruction.… It was pandemonium let loose, the fire leaping along for miles and the men and women dancing with frenzy. It was a mad scene where riot became wanton and men and women became drunk on their excesses.20
As satisfying as the destruction may have been to the primal urges of the mob—and as profitable as the associated looting may have been to those rioters who took care to empty the cars of marketable items before setting them afire—the violence proved a public-relations disaster for the ARU. The Chicago riots triggered outbreaks in several other cities across the Midwest and West, and although many of those persons smashing, burning, and looting had no connection with the ARU, anxious observers could easily fear that what the rail workers had started might turn into a revolution. Cleveland received requests for federal troops from half a dozen governors; the president responded by sending a total of sixteen thousand soldiers into the riot zones. The federal troops in Chicago were supplemented by Illinois militia ordered out by Governor Altgeld, who resisted the introduction of the federal troops but nonetheless felt obliged to take action. The soldiers in Chicago engaged the rioters with bayonets and gunfire; ultimately more than a dozen people were killed and more than fifty wounded. Fighting in the other states between rioters and federal and state troops produced forty additional deaths and many more injuries.21
Public comment almost universally condemned the rioters and demanded that the president take even stronger action. Harper’s Weekly called the strike and boycott “blackmail on the largest scale” and said the country was “fighting for its own existence just as truly as in suppressing the great rebellion.” The Washington Post ran an article under the banner “Fired by the Mob, Chicago at the Mercy of the Incendiary’s Torch.” The Chicago Tribune denounced the “riotous emissaries of dictator Debs,” while the Chicago Inter Ocean asserted, “This is not a fight of labor against capital. It is a criminally injudicious attack of certain forces of organized labor upon every other kind of labor and upon all popular interests in common.” Chicagoans and citizens of other afflicted cities deluged the White House with appeals for sternness. “I write for the interest of my wife and babies,” a Chicago man wrote, “and pray God to guide you and show you the terrible volcano on which we stand.”22
Cleveland responded with an executive proclamation that stopped just short of placing Chicago under martial law. All persons involved in the riots would be considered “public enemies”; all other persons had better stay home or risk being mistaken for rioters. “Troops employed against such a riotous mob will act with all the moderation and forbearance consistent with the accomplishment of the desired end,” the president said, “but the stern necessities that confront them will not with certainty permit discrimination between guilty participants and those who are mingling with them from curiosity and without criminal intent.”23
THE SHOW OF military force suppressed the violence, but what broke the back of the strike was the arrest of Debs and other ARU leaders. Debs was charged with conspiracy in inciting the riots; he was also charged with contempt of court for violating Olney’s injunction. The conspiracy charge was potentially the more serious but also the more pedestrian; union leaders had been charged with conspiracy for years. Debs beat the conspiracy charge, although not without difficulty. His attorneys, Stephen Gregory and Clarence Darrow, mounted a defense that seemed to be persuading the jury that if anyone had been conspiring, it was the railroad manager
s. But shortly before the scheduled closing arguments, one of the jurors became mysteriously ill. Debs and the lawyers moved to replace the juror, but the judge refused. He suspended the trial, only to have the prosecution, after some face-saving delays, drop the charges.
The contempt charge was the more ominous, for it turned on the legality of the injunction in the first place. Injunctions were relatively new in labor actions, and the scope of the injunction in the Pullman case was unprecedented. Debs and his colleagues were barred from engaging in any action that even indirectly obstructed the mails—which was to say they were forbidden from engaging in ordinary strike activities.
Debs lost in the lower courts and appealed to the Supreme Court, which took the case in light of the obvious importance of the principle at issue. Stephen Gregory denounced injunctions in labor cases as a subordination of democracy to capital. A judge, unelected and irresponsible, could frustrate the will of legislatures; he could circumvent grand and petty juries. “No more tyrannous and arbitrary government can be devised than the administration of criminal law by a single judge by means of injunction and proceedings in contempt,” Gregory asserted. “To extend this power generally to criminal cases would be absolutely destructive to liberty and intolerable to a free people. It would be worse than ex post facto legislation. No man would be safe; no limits could be prescribed to the acts which might be forbidden nor the punishment to be inflicted.” Clarence Darrow, junior to Gregory and hardly the celebrity he would become, appealed to the justices’ humanity and patriotism.
When a body of 100,000 men lay down their implements of labor, not because their rights have been invaded, but because the bread has been taken from the mouths of their fellows, we have no right to say they are criminals. It is difficult for us to place ourselves in the position of others, but this Court should endeavor to do so and should realize that the petitioners in this case are representatives of the great laboring element of this country, upon which this country must so largely depend for its safety, prosperity, and progress.24
