In Chicago regular Cavalry escorted mail trains through strike lines with additional heavily armed troops mounted on the engine and the tops of cars.
On
May 11, 1894 one of the greatest battles in American labor history erupted as employees of the Pullman
Palace Car Company walked off of their jobs to protest wage cuts. When Eugene V. Debs and the American Railway Union took up their
cause with a national boycott of trains with Pullman cars attached, the strike became a nationwide event. National
Guard and Federal troops were
called in to suppress the strike and
“move the mails.”
1894
was the nadir of one of those devastating financial
panics that erupted with regularity
in the 19th Century. Just outside of Chicago George Pullman,
a pious and leading Universalist layman
famous as a benevolent and paternalistic employer, deeply cut the wages of the thousands of employees at his railway sleeping car factory. But he did not also reduce the rents he charged his workers for their
homes in his model community or the prices
at the company stores, which were
the only ones allowed to operate in the Town
of Pullman.
Only the labor press was sympathetic to the plight of the workers in George Pullman's "ideal" company town.
Some
workers found their wages reduced below what they owed in rent. Workers complained that, “We are born in a
Pullman house, fed from the Pullman shops, taught in the Pullman school,
catechized in the Pullman Church, and when we die we shall go to the Pullman
Hell.”
When
a committee went to petition Pullman for relief, they were all
summarily fired. The workers, who had not been organized by
any union, went out on strike. They
petitioned Debs and the ARU for assistance.
Despite the misgivings of some of his associates, Debs felt that the
union owed the Pullman workers support.
Eugene V. Debs in 1897.
The
ARU was just coming off of a highly successful strike against the Great Northern Railroad in which the united power of all workers organized in a single industrial union instead of divided
between skilled craft unions and
unorganized laborers was demonstrated. The prestige of Debs and his union among
working people was undisputed.
Debs
ordered a boycott of all trains
carrying a Pullman Palace Car. Ordinarily, this would have affected only long distance passenger service. But the railroad
companies, seeing an opportunity, attached Pullman cars to all mail trains.
The
strike at its peak involved
some 250,000 workers in 27 states. Violence
erupted across the country as workers determined to keep trains from moving. Hundreds of rail cars were destroyed and
there were pitched battles between armed railroad guards, police, and National Guardsmen on one side and strikers on the other.
The national press depicted Debs as an evil manipulator strangling the mails and American commerce.
Debs
and the ARU Executive Board were charged
with conspiracy to interfere with the
mails.
President Grover Cleveland ordered federal troops in to “insure that the
mails move.” This was done despite the
pleas of fellow Democrat, Illinois Governor John Peter Altgeld,
who assured the President that local and state forces could handle the
situation.
Democratic Illinois Governor John Peter Altgeld who in an earlier term had pardoned the surviving Haymarket prisoners, tried to dissuade President Grover Cleveland from intervening with Federal Troops arguing that the National Guard and local police had the situation in hand.
Federal
troops arrived in Chicago on July 6. Cavalry “escorted” strike breakers moving trains in Chicago and other cities, charging
strikers with drawn sabers. Within days
the boycott and the strike in Pullman were crushed and the ARU was shattered.
Debs
and other leaders were tried and convicted of contempt of court for interfering with the mails and sentenced to jail.
Fearing that mobs of workers would attack the Cook County Jail in Chicago and free the men, authorities whisked
Debs and his associates to sleepy Woodstock,
Illinois nearly 50 northwest of the
city and presumed to be safe.
But
Debs’ stay in the Woodstock jail was far from unpleasant. Sheriff George Eckert, like Debs of Alsatian heritage, promptly made Debs and his associates trustees. They often gathered on chairs in front of the
jail to conduct education and self-improvement sessions. Debs was very fond of the Sheriff’s children and sometime watched them for the
family. In return, Mrs. Eckert fed the prisoners sumptuous home cooked meals.
Debs
conducted the business of his dying union from the jail and entertained a
string of visitors from around the
country. Among them was a Milwaukee socialist and future U.S. Representative, Victor Berger, who brought volumes of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital newly translated into English for the first time and published
in Chicago by Charles H. Kerr & Co. Armed with these and other books like Edward Bellamy’s popular novel Looking
Backward, Debs and his friends embarked on a systematic study and a discussion adapted from the Platonic question and response method.
By
the time his sentence was up Debs, a Democrat
who had served as Terra Haute, Indiana
City Clerk and in the Indiana legislature
had become a committed socialist.
Debs addressing the huge crowd assembled in Woodstock Square after his release from the McHenry County Jail (middle building. After speaking the crowd carried him on their soldiers to railway depot for a special train to Chicago.
When
Debs was released from jail on
November 22, 1895, he was greeted by the largest crowd ever to assemble in
Woodstock, estimated to number about 10,000 and including many admiring locals. The cheering crowd hoisted him on their
shoulders and carried him to the railroad
station two blocks away where a special
train awaited to take him to Chicago.
In the city more than 100,000 thronged to greet him.
Within
a few years Debs founded the Socialist Party, a social democratic party.
Four times he was the Party’s nominee for President of the United States, garnering more than three million
votes in 1912. Along the way, he was
also a founding member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW),
which kept his dream of industrial unionism alive. He was a tireless orator and a gifted writer.
A campaign pin from Debs's final run for President on the Socialist Party ticket as an inmate of the Federal prison in Atlanta.
In
1919 he would return to prison under much harsher circumstances after being
convicted of giving a speech in
opposition to American participation in the First World War. He ran for
president a final time as an inmate of
the Federal prison at Atlanta.
Despite
being pardoned by President Warren G. Harding in 1921, Debs’
health was broken. He died in an Elmhurst, Illinois sanitarium in 1926.
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