Pullman Strike of 1894

7 Key excerpts on "Pullman Strike of 1894"

• 

  eBook - ePub

  Turning The Century

  Essays In Media And Cultural Studies

  • Carol Stabile(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

    10   Constructions of Violence: Labor, Capital, and Hegemonic Struggle in the Pullman Strike of 1894 KEVIN AYOTTE

  The closing decades of the nineteenth century in the United States were anything but peaceful for the working class, or for capitalist industry. Labor conflicts over exploitative working conditions and low wages resulted in a series of strikes across all sectors of the economy. These disputes were the inevitable result of a rapidly expanding capitalist economy that was as yet largely unregulated by the federal or state governments. The repression of labor dissent was realized in a variety of forms, but all represented a struggle on the part of the capitalist ruling class to maintain its economic and political hegemony over American society. On May 11, 1894, the workers at the Pullman Palace Car Company in Chicago, Illinois, left their jobs to protest a reduction in wages and untenable living conditions in the company town of Pullman, Illinois. As long as the strike remained localized at the Pullman Company in Chicago, the federal government, indeed much of the country, took little notice. Then, on June 26, 1894, members of the American Railway Union (ARU) initiated a sympathetic strike by refusing to handle any trains carrying Pullman cars, and eventually the strike halted virtually all railway commerce throughout major sections of the country. In a capitalist nation that depended upon rail transportation for the provision of industrial supplies, foodstuffs, and passenger conveyance, which ultimately produced profit for great numbers of business interests, the nationwide strike represented a challenge to the very ruling order of society.

  As Antonio Gramsci has explained, one of the scenarios for a true hegemonic crisis may come about “because huge masses … have passed suddenly from a state of political passivity to a certain activity, and put forward demands which taken together, albeit not organically formulated, add up to a revolution. A crisis of authority’ is spoken of: this is precisely the crisis of hegemony, or general crisis of the State.”1

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Urban Disorder and the Shape of Belief

  The Great Chicago Fire, the Haymarket Bomb, and the Model Town of Pullman, Second Edition

  • Carl Smith(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • University of Chicago Press

    (Publisher)

  Or, perhaps, an imbalance and lack of rules. This viewpoint was present in the analyses of the fire that spoke of the im- portance of Chicago to the national economy and the insistence by the Haymarket defendants that technology, massed capital, and urbaniza- tion had made America a qualitatively different country than it once had been. By the time of the Pullman strike, this recognition extended into official public policy put into practice by the president and backed by the Supreme Court. The Pullman strike was a groundbreaking event in the history of federal intervention in labor disputes. 53 Speaking for the court in In re Debs, Associate Justice David J. Brewer maintained that there was in this modem age the possibility of "wrongs" that "are such as affect the public at large, and are in respect of matters which by the Constitution are entrusted to the care of the Nation, and concerning which the Na- MAKING SENSE OF THE AGE 251 tion owes the duty to all the citizens of securing to them their common rights." The president could use "[t]he strong arm of the national gov- ernment ... to brush away all obstructions" to interstate commerce and the mails. "The entire strength of the nation," Brewer held, "may be used to enforce in any part of the land the full and free exercise of all national powers and the security of all rights entrusted by the Constitu- tion to its care." The case at hand involved "vast interests ... not merely of the city of Chicago and the State of lllinois, but all of the States, and the general confusion into which the interstate commerce of the country was thrown. "54 Far from restoring the ideal village com- munity as a.model for the future, the town of Pullman had proved that the entire nation was now an interconnected whole. Thinking of the city as separate from the country, or Chicago from America, was unre- alistic and impossible.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  The American State from the Civil War to the New Deal

  The Twilight of Constitutionalism and the Triumph of Progressivism

  • Paul D. Moreno(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  3 The Crisis of the 1890s the labor problem The economic depression of 1893 produced significant labor upheaval, particularly in the national railway strike of 1894. Eugene V. Debs had formed an industrial union of railroad workers, the American Railway Union (ARU). The powerful, skilled, and established railway brotherhoods (engineers, conductors, firemen, and trainmen) remained outside of it, and the ARU was limited to men “born of white parents,” but otherwise it included the mass of railway workers. When the Pullman Palace Car Company cut the wages of its employees, the ARU began a sympathy strike, or “secondary boycott,” its members refusing to handle Pullman cars. When the railroad companies discharged ARU members engaged in this boycott and tried to carry on operations with replacements, a general railroad strike ensued, accompanied by violence and sabotage. Over the objec- tions of pro-union Illinois Governor John P. Altgeld, the U.S. Attorney General, Richard Olney, sought an injunction in the U.S. District Court, which ordered an end to all efforts to interfere in the operations of the railroads by “threats, intimidation, force, and violence.” Debs and other ARU leaders violated the injunction, were convicted of contempt of court, and sentenced to jail terms of three to six months. 1 The Debs case brought into high relief the difficult question of the status of labor unions in American society. It was the common argument of progressive historians, and remains the dominant view to this day, that American law severely disfavored organized labor. But this is quite far from the truth. In the nineteenth century, American courts extended the same privileges to labor organizations as they did to other voluntary associations. They had never treated 1 Susan E. Hirsch, “The Search for Unity among Railroad Workers: The Pullman Strike in Perspective,” in The Pullman Strike and the Crisis of the 1890s: Essays on Labor and Politics, ed.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Presidents from Hayes through McKinley, 1877-1901

  Debating the Issues in Pro and Con Primary Documents

  • Amy H. Sturgis(Author)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • Greenwood

    (Publisher)

  The shift from Cleveland to Bryan as the Democratic presidential candidate marked a watershed moment for the party. Cleveland was the last limited-government, pro-business, economically conservative Dem- ocrat to become president; the Democrats of the twentieth century re- flected different policies and political agendas. Cleveland's forthright honesty, stubborn attachment to his positions, and willingness to be un- popular when necessary—truly a unique attribute in any politician— marked him as a different breed of leader, and brought him the admi- ration of generations of presidential historians, who mark him as the most successful, and perhaps the greatest, president of the post-Lincoln nineteenth century. THE ISSUE: THE PULLMAN STRIKE Populism, an agrarian backlash against industrialism, fed on the eco- nomic problems of the era and created new urgency in labor activism. 162 FROM HAYES THROUGH MCKINLEY Toward the end of the Harrison administration, growing labor discontent led to several strikes, including a violent steel strike in Homestead, Penn- sylvania, in July of 1892. Cleveland inherited the challenge of maintain- ing peace in a time when the patience and endurance of both labor and management were under severe strain. His leadership was especially tested during the Pullman Strike of 1894. Financial crisis and severe economic depression, known in short as the Panic of 1893, placed hardship on industries that already faced signifi- cant problems over the last two decades. The Pullman Palace Car Com- pany, which serviced the railroad industry, cut wages by nearly one fourth. Employees who lived in the company-controlled town of Pull- man, outside of Chicago, found that rent and other expenses did not decrease in relation to incomes, however, so families spent the same although they earned far less than they had earlier. Members of the American Railway Union in Pullman went on strike in Pullman on May 11, 1894, to protest the situation.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Chicago: Its History and its Builders, Volume 3

  • Josiah Seymour Currey(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Jazzybee Verlag

    (Publisher)

  It will be seen that the employees of the Pullman Company had no part in the American Railway Union, and although local unions had been formed among them during the previous winter and spring they did not join in the great combination of labor unions we have just referred to. The previous year, the year of the World's Fair, was marked by a severe financial panic which affected all industries. During the following fall and winter the Company reduced its force to about two thirds of its previous numbers, and at the same time reduced wages from thirty to fifty per cent. "The result was," says Bancroft, "that the wages earned in the lower grades of service were hardly sufficient to provide the ordinary necessities of life. The irritation caused by the reductions was much aggravated by the fact that the company was also the landlord of the majority of the workmen, and that it made no reduction in rents.... It was, therefore, both natural and reasonable that the employees should be dissatisfied and restless under the conditions existing in the spring of 1894."

    THE COMMENCEMENT OF THE STRIKE  

  On the 11th of May a strike among the Pullman employees began, and for the following seven weeks there was no disorder among the strikers. "The universal comment," says Carwardine, "was complimentary to the decorum of the strikers." As time elapsed the company made no effort to resume work. "The strike had become a lockout; the strikers seemingly were worsted. In the meantime the officers of the American Railway Union investigated conditions at Pullman, and decided that the strikers ought to be sustained with the full strength of the union."

  At a convention of the governing body of the American Railway Union, held on the 12th of June, President Debs in his opening address said that the Union was the first of the railway organizations that was properly constructed; that all others "had blow-holes in their armor while this one was built for war, and no weakness would be found in it when it came time to test its armament." The convention declared in favor of taking up the fight against the Pullman Company. A committee was appointed to wait upon the manager who, however, refused to recognize them or treat with them. On June 22, the delegates, having been so instructed by their respective unions, voted that if the Pullman Company did not adjust its differences with its employees by noon of June 26, a boycott would then be enforced against the hauling of its cars.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  The Selected Works of Eugene V. Debs Volume II

  The Rise and Fall of the American Railway Union, 1892–1896

  • Tim Davenport, David Walters, Tim Davenport, David Walters(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Haymarket Books

    (Publisher)

  Since that period of vanquishing wrong and the enthronement of the right, a system of wage-slavery has been introduced. Warmed into life in the womb of greed, and fostered by laws and legislation as unholy as that which legalized slave stealing and the breeding of human beings like swine for the market, it has gained power and prestige until wage-slaves, under the domination of the money power, acting through trusts, syndicates, corporations, and monopoly-land stealing, capitalization, railroad wrecking, bribery, and corruption, defying proper characterization, we are confronted with conditions bearing the impress of peonism, infinitely more alarming than was African slavery in its darkest days.

  Under such circumstances, what, I ask, is more natural within the entire realm of human duties than that wage-men should organize, agitate, and strike for their rights?

  The Pullman strike, confessedly more far-reaching in its sweep and significance than any other struggle the continent has witnessed, will pass into history as having been the one thing needful to arouse the nation to the perils which the money power has spawned upon the country.

  The American Railway Union, having from the first discountenanced violence and deplored the destruction of property, may, I think, suggest that the Pullman strike, notwithstanding such unfortunate features, has its compensations. No one will deny that the Pullman strike has aroused the government from its stupor to a sense of its obligations to ascertain the cause of the phenomenal disturbance, and the work of investigation, once begun, the hope and the belief may be entertained that it will be prosecuted until foundation infamies are discovered and dragged forth for the enlightenment of those who, in the absence of such information, find it profitable to apply the epithet of “anarchist” to those whose courage created the necessity for investigation, which, if honest and thorough, as indications warrant, the inevitable conclusion will be reached that men who strike against starvation wages and for the protection of those who are dependent upon them against corporate and plutocratic spoliation represent the true American spirit and courage which, once destroyed by the rapacity of heartless employers of the Pullman stripe, aided by United States courts and United States troops, would foreshadow calamities which it would be difficult to exaggerate. If, through the agencies of investigation and legislation, the curse of wage-slavery disappears, or is so modified as to produce greater contentment in the armies of labor, fruitful of the hope that at no distant day full emancipation shall be secured by wise legislation, the American Railway Union will expand to colossal proportions of organized philanthropy such as the ages have not witnessed, because the lesson it will have taught legislators and courts, presidents and governors, and men in command of military machines is that the majesty of truth and justice, rather than the tyranny of injunctions, aided by the persuasive power of powder, must preserve our free institutions if they are to be perpetuated. Never since the colonies were rescued from the grasp of King George has man’s capacity for self-government been so confessedly on trial as in these closing years of the century. Thoughtful Americans are adopting the views expressed by Lord Macaulay,7

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  The United States Since the Civil War

  • Charles Ramsdell Lingley(Author)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Perlego

    (Publisher)

  During the four decades between the opening of the Civil War and the close of the nineteenth century, the United States became in many respects an economic unit. The passage of the Interstate Commerce Act in 1887, for instance, was an early recognition of the fact that the transportation problem of the nation transcended state bounds; the Sherman Anti-trust law of 1890 arose from the realization that commercial and industrial unity were rapidly coming to pass; the American Federation of Labor brought workmen from all states and many trades into a single organization. The election of 1896 and the amazing consolidation of business enterprises at the close of the century were further proofs that the day had passed when any section of the United States could live an isolated economic life without relation to other parts of the country. Instead of remaining a federation of diverse economic sections, we became increasingly homogeneous. Much of the economic and political legislation enacted after 1896, and many of the practices and standards which were adopted by leaders in economic and political life were an outgrowth of the new conditions.

  It will be remembered that the eighties and early nineties had been years of labor unrest. Costly and bitter strikes on the part of the workmen, and resolute and powerful resistance on the part of the employers were the commonplaces of the history of labor. The culmination was the Pullman Strike of 1894.[1] Its cost in money and suffering was appalling; it placed the federal military power in the hands of the employers; and although it was a failure as far as the strikers were concerned, yet an impartial investigation after the struggle was over established the justice of much of which the men had complained. If discriminating justice were to be measured out to both sides, instead of victory to the side of the strongest battalions, and if intolerable waste and discomfort were to be avoided, some remedies for industrial unrest must be discovered which would replace strikes and violence. Happily, signs were not wanting that such a change was slowly taking place.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book