Friday, August 14, 2009 4:09 PM CDT
USA's Yesterdays: Pullman strike -- Well-intended Utopian confronts hard actualities
By Hal Malehorn
The bitter and bloody Pullman strike of 1894 was demonstrably a clash between railroad workers and a powerful railroad magnate. But it was also a conflict between concepts of idealism and reality — concepts that co-existed in the mind of George Pullman, founder and president of the Pullman Palace Car Company.
On the one hand, George Pullman saw himself as a philanthropic benefactor of his workmen. After all, on several thousand acres a few miles southwest of downtown Chicago, he had erected on their behalf a model community.
Pullman claimed that this ideal town (which he named after himself) would provide ideal living conditions, thereby “removing from workers the discontent and desire for change, thus protecting the employer from intemperance, dissatisfaction and strikes.”
And so, the homes the workers rented featured indoor plumbing, gas piping and underground sewage disposal. The grounds surrounding the buildings were carefully landscaped. A public library provided access to books; company stores stocked necessities; schools educated the young; and a community church served the residents’ spiritual needs.
On the other hand, however, realities were not so Eden-like: rents on the homes (which workers were required to inhabit, as long as there were vacancies) ran much higher than those in surrounding localities. And workers were not allowed to purchase their homes.
Rents and store purchases were deducted from workers’ paychecks, often leaving workers deep in debt. There were extra charges for using the library and the schools. Even congregants of the church were assessed an extra fee, for Pullman was determined that all real estate must earn him at least 6 percent on his initial investment.
Then, too, all homes were periodically inspected for cleanliness. Moreover, independent newspapers were prohibited, as well as any charitable organizations. Pullman prohibited town meetings, and he forbade public speeches related to working conditions in nearby railway shops.
In the railcar shops the foremen (who seldom were mechanically trained) exercised broad powers to set production goals, promote workers, and hire and fire men. This latitude led to favoritism and to other abuses over which the workers had no control.
So suffocating did the paternalistic atmosphere become, in fact, that a local minister characterized the place as “a civilized relic of European serfdom.”
Unhappily, a crushing blow to this supposed nirvana fell in the form of the Depression of 1893. With businesses faltering and industries failing all across the land, Pullman reduced his local work force from 5,500 to 3,300. And the remaining workers’ paychecks were drastically curtailed.
However, it became known that the Pullman company had ample funds laid by — sufficient to pay dividends to stockholders, and maintain salaries of foreman, managers and superintendents at their previous levels.
But the crowning insult came when George Pullman refused to lower rents, in keeping with workers’ dwindling pay. After all, he sniffed, the company that controlled rents was quite a different body from the one that operated the shops.
Even worse, when a delegation of workers came to protest, Pullman refused to talk with them. And, he fired their leaders. As anger smoldered among the men, Pullman refused to change his mind.
Then, when a concerned Chicago civic group offered to arbitrate differences, Pullman refused. And he similarly turned down mediation services offered by Jane Addams, by then a well-known Chicago social activist.
As a consequence of Pullman’s intransigence, on May 11, 1894, the remaining Pullman workers went out on strike. Pullman promptly hired some 4,000 strikebreakers, equipping many of them with badges and guns. A tumultuous riot ensued.
After Gov. Altgeld’s National Guardsmen had proved ineffective in quelling the disturbance, over Altgeld’s vigorous protests pro-railroads President Grover Cleveland called out 12,000 federal troops from nearby Fort Sheridan. Further enraged, the strikers assaulted the soldiers with rocks and bricks. In turn, the soldiers fired randomly into the crowds, killing at least 13, and wounding scores.
Meanwhile, some 50,000 members of the recently-organized American Railway Union under Eugene V. Debs decided to act in sympathy with the strikers. The ARU workers refused to handle any passenger train that included one or more Pullman sleeping cars. This boycott effectively tied up all rail traffic, both freight and passenger, between Chicago and the West Coast.
In response, Pullman ordered that mail cars be attached to every single sleeping cars, and petitioned U.S. Attorney General Richard Olney for an injunction preventing the workers from interfering with the passage of the U.S. mails.
Olney, at the time also a director of two of the nation’s major railroads, was only too happy to oblige. Pro-business judges promptly denied appeals, all the way up to the Supreme Court.
Ignoring the injunction, strikers added to the mayhem by tipping over and torching hundreds of boxcars, derailing locomotives, tearing up tracks, blockading crossings and smashing switches.
But after the heads of 43 mainline railroads had organized into the General Managers Association, the 150,000 members of the ARU could not counter the magnates’ political power.
In sum, by the end of August 1894, the strike was broken.
About a third of the former workforce straggled back into the shops, where they were required to sign so-called “yellow dog” contracts, prohibiting them from joining the union ever again.
Elsewhere, Eugene V. Debs and two other officers of the ARU were thrown into jail for ignoring the injunction. While imprisoned, Debs read Karl Marx and decided to become a Socialist.
The strike constituted a setback for unionism, for it established a precedent for federal intervention, and it introduced the use of injunctions to stop strikes.
But all was not lost: by 1898 Congress had passed legislation mandating arbitration in cases involving railroads and their unionized workers.
And, it also effectively curtailed Grover Cleveland’s political career, as he lost his bid for a third term at the 1896 Democrat convention. Ironically, the person there who led the campaign against his candidacy was Gov. Altgeld of Illinois.
The following year Pullman died. He was buried in a lead-lined casket, inside a steel casing, all enclosed in several tons of concrete. Apparently, George Pullman preferred not to have anyone digging up any more dirt about him.
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