The Pullman Strike was a nationwide conflict between labor unions and railroads that occurred in the United States in 1894. The conflict began in the town of Pullman, Illinois on May 11 when approximately 3,000 employees of the Pullman Palace Car Company began a wildcat strike in response to recent reductions in wages, bringing traffic west of Chicago to a halt.[1] The American Railway Union, the nation's first industry-wide union, led by Eugene V. Debs, subsequently became embroiled in what The New York Times described as "a struggle between the greatest and most important labor organization and the entire railroad capital" that involved some 250,000 workers in 27 states at its peak.[2]
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During the economic panic of 1893, the Pullman Palace Car Company cut wages as demand for their train cars plummeted and the company's revenue dropped. A delegation of workers complained of the low wages and sixteen-hour workdays and the company's failure to decrease rents or the price of goods. Company owner George Pullman "loftily declined to talk with them."[3]
Many of the workers were already members of the American Railway Union (ARU), led by Eugene V. Debs, which supported their strike by launching a boycott in which union members refused to run trains containing Pullman cars. The strike effectively shut down production in the Pullman factories and led to a lockout. Railroad workers across the nation refused to switch Pullman cars, and subsequently Wagner Palace cars, onto trains. The ARU declared that if switchmen were disciplined for the boycott, the entire ARU would strike in sympathy.[3]
The boycott was launched on June 26, 1894. Within four days, 125,000 workers on twenty-nine railroads had quit work rather than handle Pullman cars.[3] Adding fuel to the fire, the railroad companies began hiring replacement workers (that is, strikebreakers), which only increased hostilities. Many Blacks, fearful that the racism expressed by the American Railway Union would lock them out of another labor market, crossed the picket line, which added a highly racial division to the union's predicament.[4]
On June 29, 1894, Debs hosted a peaceful gathering to obtain support for the strike from fellow railroad workers at Blue Island, Illinois. Afterward, groups within the crowd became enraged and set fire to nearby buildings and derailed a locomotive. Elsewhere in the United States, sympathy strikers prevented transportation of goods by walking off the job, obstructing railroad tracks or threatening and attacking strikebreakers. This increased national attention and fueled the demand for federal action.[5]
The railroads succeeded in having Richard Olney, general counsel for the Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul Railway, appointed as a special federal attorney with responsibility for dealing with the strike. Olney obtained an injunction barring union leaders from supporting the strike and demanding that the strikers cease their activities or face being fired. Debs and other leaders of the ARU ignored the injunction, and federal troops were called into action.[6]
The strike was broken up by United States Marshals and some 12,000 United States Army troops, commanded by Nelson Miles, sent in by President Grover Cleveland on the premise that the strike interfered with the delivery of U.S. Mail, violated the Sherman Antitrust Act and represented a threat to public safety. The arrival of the military and subsequent deaths of workers led to further outbreaks of violence. During the course of the strike, 13 strikers were killed and 57 were wounded. An estimated 6,000 rail workers did $340,000 worth of property damage (about $8,818,000 in 2010 dollars).
Clarence Darrow agreed to represent Debs and, after a "brilliant" defense, may have been "robbed of a victory" due to the U.S. attorney dropping the prosecution of a charge of conspiracy to obstruct the mail after a juror's illness. Debs was then tried for, and eventually found guilty of, violating the court injunction, and was sent to prison for six months.[7]
At the time of his arrest, Debs was not a socialist. However, during his time in prison, he read the works of Karl Marx. After his release in 1895, he became the leading socialist figure in America. He ran for President for the first of five times in 1900.
Civil as well as criminal charges were brought against the organizers of the strike and Debs in particular, and the Supreme Court issued a unanimous decision, In re Debs, validating President Cleveland's actions. Nevertheless, Illinois Governor John P. Altgeld was incensed at Cleveland for putting the federal government at the service of the employers, and for rejecting Altgeld's plan to use his state militia to keep order, instead of federal troops. As the leader of the Illinois delegation to the Democratic Party Convention in 1896, Altgeld used his influence and blocked President Cleveland's bid for renomination at the 1896 Democratic National Convention.[8]
A national commission formed to study causes of the 1894 strike found Pullman's paternalism partly to blame and Pullman's company town to be "un-American". In 1898, the Illinois Supreme Court forced the Pullman Company to divest ownership in the town, which was annexed to Chicago.[9]
George Pullman remained unpopular with labor, and when he died in 1897, he was buried in Graceland Cemetery at night in a lead-lined coffin within a reinforced steel and concrete vault.[9] Several tons of concrete were placed to prevent his body being exhumed and desecrated by labor activists.[9]
Labor Day became a federal holiday in 1894 after the strike when President Grover Cleveland and Congress made appeasement of organized labor a top priority. Legislation for the holiday was pushed through Congress six days after the strike ended. Samuel Gompers, head of American Federation of Labor, which had sided with the government in its effort to end the strike by the American Railway Union, spoke out in favor of the holiday.[10][11]
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