The Pullman Strike of 1894
Pullman, Illinois was a company town housing workers who built the Pullman Passenger cars and their families. Workers paid rent for their homes in Pullman, which had been established by George Pullman and in which he controlled all aspects of community government, utility rates, and other costs to the workers. In 1894 Pullman reduced wages in response to decreased demand for his railcars as a result of the Panic of 1893. He did not reduce rents and other costs in Pullman, and the response was a wildcat strike by over 4,000 workers.
Many of these workers joined Eugene V. Debs’ American Railway Union (the Pullman factory was not yet unionized) and the ARU acted to support the strike in Pullman by refusing to move any Pullman cars, anywhere. At the time porters in Pullman Cars were employed by Pullman, rather than the railroad on which the car moved, and the over the rail employees of the Pullman Company refused to support the strike. Despite other unions, including the AFL, opposing the boycott against Pullman, by the end of June the railroads were largely paralyzed west of Chicago, as sympathy strikers refused to allow any trains using Pullman cars to move.
The railroads responded by hiring strikebreakers, many of whom were blacks, adding racial tensions to the already volatile situation. President Grover Cleveland directed the Attorney General, Richard Olney, a former railroad attorney, to resolve the impasse. Olney obtained an injunction prohibiting labor leaders from supporting the strike by calling for supportive strikes, which was ignored, leading to the call-up of federal troops to enforce the order.
In city after city across the Midwestern and Western states federal troops and local authorities clashed with strikers, and violence led to injuries and death as well as the destruction of property. Newspapers and the public generally opposed the strikers, and the federal troops were welcomed by most communities as protection against the violence of the strikers and their destruction of property and disruption of rail service. Debs was eventually arrested on charges which included conspiring to disrupt mail service.
The Pullman strike failed in the sense that it did not end with the strikers winning the concessions they demanded, but it led to the state ordering the company to sell its real estate holdings, ending Pullman as a company town. More than 30 people were killed in clashes with federal troops or local authorities during the course of the strike, which led to more than $80 million in damages, the imprisonment of Eugene Debs (for six months) and public resentment of labor unions. In part to appease the unions and workers, the federal government created the holiday of Labor Day later that same year.