Pullman Strike

Pullman Strike

In the early 1880s, as his company prospered and his factories grew, George Pullman began planning a town to house his workers. The community of Pullman, Illinois, was created according to his vision on the prairie on the outskirts of Chicago.

In the new town of Pullman, a grid of streets surrounded the factory. There were row houses for workers, and foremen and engineers lived in larger houses. The town also had banks, a hotel, and a church. All were owned by Pullman's company.

A theater in the town put on plays, but they had to be productions that met moral standards set by George Pullman.

The emphasis on morality was pervasive, as Pullman wanted to create an environment vastly different from the rough urban neighborhoods that he viewed as a major problem in America's rapidly industrializing society.

Saloons, dance halls, and other establishments that would have been frequented by working class Americans of the time were not allowed within the city limits of Pullman. And it was widely believed that company spies kept a watchful eye on the workers during their hours off the job.

Things changed dramatically with the Panic of 1893, a severe financial depression that affected the American economy. Pullman cut the wages of workers by one-third, but he refused to lower the rents in the company housing. When the economy improved Pullman refused to increase the employee wages.

In response, the American Railway Union, the largest American union at the time, with 150,000 members, took action. The local branches of the union called for a strike at the Pullman Palace Car Company complex.

The Pullman Strike Spread Nationwide

Outraged by the strike at his factory, Pullman closed the plant, determined to wait out the workers. The A.R.U. members called on the national membership to get involved. The union's national convention voted to refuse to work on any train in the country that had a Pullman car, which brought the nation's passenger rail service to a standstill.

The American Railway Union managed to get about 260,000 workers nationwide to join in the boycott. And the leader of the A.R.U., Eugene V. Debs, was at times portrayed in the press as a dangerous radical leading an insurrection against the American way of life.

The U.S. Government Crushed the Pullman Strike

The U.S. attorney general, Richard Olney, became determined to crush the strike. On July 2, 1894 the federal government got an injunction in federal court which ordered an end to the strike.

President Grover Cleveland sent federal troops to Chicago to enforce the court ruling. When they arrived on July 4, 1894, riots broke out in Chicago and 26 civilians were killed. A railroad yard was burned.

On July 10, 1894 Eugene V. Debs was arrested. He was charged with violating the court injunction, and was eventually sentenced to six months in federal prison. While in prison, Debs read the works of Karl Marx and became a committed radical, which he had not been previously.

Significance of the 1894 Pullman Strike

The use of federal troops to put down a strike was a milestone, as was the use of the federal courts to curtail union activity. In the 1890s the threat of more violence inhibited union activity, and companies and government entities relied on the courts to suppress strikes.

1.  Explain the Pullman town created by George Pullman. Notate who lived in this “town”.

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2.  Why do you think Pullman had company spies within his town and did not allow saloons and dance halls in the town?

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3.  What did the Pullman Company do as a result of the Panic of 1893?

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4.  What did the Pullman Company do in response to the ARU strike?

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5.  What did the national ARU do that brought rail service to a “standstill”?

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6.  How and why did the strike end?

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Haymarket Square

What has come to be known as the Haymarket Affair began on May 3, 1886, when Chicago police fired into a crowd of striking workers at the McCormick Reaper Works, killing and wounding several men. The following evening, anarchist and socialist labor leaders organized a meeting of workingmen near Chicago's Haymarket Square. Speakers at the meeting denounced the police attack of the previous afternoon and urged workers to intensify their struggle for an eight-hour workday and other improvements in labor conditions.
Just as the meeting was breaking up, the police, led by Captain William Ward and Inspector John Bonfield, arrived on the scene and attempted to disperse the crowd. During this effort, someone threw a dynamite bomb into the ranks of the police, killing one officer outright and injuring others. A melee ensued, the police, and probably others in the crowd, fired shots. Seven police officers were killed or mortally wounded, and one died of his wounds several years later. How many casualties the workers sustained that evening is not known, as those who fell were quickly dragged to safety or to medical attention by their comrades.
The unknown bomber's act resounded nationwide. Public opinion was instantly galvanized against the radical left, resulting in the first "Red Scare" in America. In a climate of political paranoia fueled by the popular press, the police arrested eight prominent Chicago anarchists and charged them with conspiracy to murder. The eight were tried before Judge Joseph E. Gary in the Circuit Court of Cook County. Although no evidence emerged to tie any of the men to the bombing, the jury returned a verdict of guilty after deliberating for less than three hours. The court sentenced Oscar Neebe to fifteen years in the penitentiary and the others to death by hanging.
The attorneys for the defense immediately appealed the verdict to the Illinois Supreme Court which upheld the verdict against the anarchists on September 14, 1887. The defense then petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court for a writ of error. After three days of testimony by counsel for the convicted, however, the Supreme Court dismissed the petition on November 2, 1887.
On November 11, 1887, Albert Parsons, August Spies, George Engel, and Adolph Fischer were hanged. Louis Lingg escaped the hangman's noose by committing suicide in his cell the day before he was scheduled to climb the scaffold. Illinois governor Richard Oglesby commuted the sentences of Samuel Fielden and Michael Schwab to life in prison. In 1893, Oglesby's successor, John Peter Altgeld, pardoned the three surviving defendants, Fielden, Schwab, and Neebe, at the cost of his own political career.
The Haymarket Affair was a momentous and controversial event in Chicago's history and in the history of the American labor movement. In Chicago, a monument was erected in Haymarket Square to memorialize the police officers who lost their lives. Throughout the United States and Europe the executed anarchists became known as "the martyrs of Chicago."

1.  On May 3, 1886 Chicago police did what to a crowd of striking workers at the McCormick Reaper Works? ______

2.  As a result of police actions the prior day, a group of extremists organized a meeting for the next day. What did the speakers talk about? ______

3.  Just as the meeting was breaking up, police arrived and someone in the crowd ______and then the police and others in the crowd ______.

4.  After the “skirmish” ended, ______police officers lay dead.

5.  The police arrested 8 prominent Chicago ______and the jury returned a verdict of ______for all of them even though no evidence tying them to the bomb existed.

6.  The Illinois Supreme Court _____ the verdict and the US Supreme Court ______the petition.

7.  4 of the men were ______.

8.  How do you think the events at Haymarket impacted labor unions?

Homestead Strike

In 1890, the price of rolled-steel products started to decline, dropping from $35 a gross ton to $22 early in 1892. In the face of depressed steel prices, Henry C. Frick, general manager of the Homestead plant (in Homestead, PA) that Carnegie largely owned, was determined to cut wages and break the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers, one of the strongest craft unions in the country.
Behind the scenes, Carnegie supported Frick's plans. In the spring of 1892, Carnegie had Frick produce as much armor plate as possible before the union's contract expired at the end of June. If the union failed to accept Frick's terms, Carnegie instructed him to shut down the plant and wait until the workers buckled. "We... approve of anything you do," Carnegie wrote from England in words he would later come to regret. "We are with you to the end."
With Carnegie's carte blanche support, Frick moved to slash wages. Plant workers responded by hanging Frick in effigy. At the end of June, Frick began closing down his open hearth and armor-plate mills, locking out 1,100 men. On June 25th, Frick announced he would no longer negotiate with the union; now he would only deal with workers individually. Leaders of Amalgamated were willing to concede on almost every level -- except on the dissolution of their union. Workers tried to reach the Carnegie who had strongly defended labor's right to unionize. He had departed on his annual and lengthy vacation, traveling to a remote Scottish castle on Loch Rannoch. He proved inaccessible to all -- including the press and to Homestead's workers -- except for Frick.

Although only 750 of the 3,800 workers at Homestead belonged to the union, 3,000 of them met and voted overwhelmingly to strike. Frick responded by building a fence three miles long and 12 feet high around the steelworks plant, adding peepholes for rifles and topping it with barbed wire. Workers named the fence "Fort Frick."
Deputy sheriffs were sworn in to guard the property, but the workers ordered them out of town. Workers then took to guarding the plant that Frick had closed to keep them out. This action signified a very different attitude that labor and management shared toward the plant.

Frick turned to the enforcers he had employed previously: the Pinkerton Detective Agency's private army, often used by industrialists of the era. At midnight on July 5, tugboats pulled barges carrying hundreds of Pinkerton detectives armed with Winchester rifles up the Monongahela River. But workers stationed along the river spotted the private army. A Pittsburgh journalist wrote that at about 3 A.M. a "horseman riding at breakneck speed dashed into the streets of Homestead giving the alarm as he sped along." Thousands of strikers and their sympathizers rose from their sleep and went down to the riverbank in Homestead.
When the private armies of business arrived, the crowd warned the Pinkertons not to step off the barge. But they did. No one knows which side shot first, but under a barrage of fire, the Pinkertons retreated back to their barges. For 14 hours, gunfire was exchanged. Strikers rolled a flaming freight train car at the barges. They tossed dynamite to sink the boats and pumped oil into the river and tried to set it on fire. By the time the Pinkertons surrendered in the afternoon three detectives and nine workers were dead or dying. The workers declared victory in the bloody battle, but it was a short-lived celebration.
The governor of Pennsylvania ordered state militia into Homestead. Armed with the latest in rifles and Gatling guns, they took over the plant. Strikebreakers who arrived on locked trains, often unaware of their destination or the presence of a strike, took over the steel mills. Four months after the strike was declared, the men's resources were gone and they returned to work. Authorities charged the strike leaders with murder and 160 other strikers with lesser crimes. The workers' entire Strike Committee also was arrested for treason. However, sympathetic juries would convict none of the men.
All the striker leaders were blacklisted. The Carnegie Company successfully swept unions out of Homestead and reduced it to a negligible factor in the steel mills throughout the Pittsburgh area.

1.  The Homestead Steel Company was owned by ______, the general manager was ______.

2.  What was Henry Frick’s plan for the union and workers’ wages? ______

3.  What was the Pinkerton Detective Agency? What was its purpose?

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4.  What happened when the Pinkertons tried to step off the barge and enter the premises?

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5.  What was the governor of PA’s reaction to the Homestead Strike?/What did he do?

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6.  What happened to the strike leaders and the union?

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7.  What do the events at Homestead tell you about workers during this era?

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