An Illinois Railroad Fight Gives A Nation A Holiday
by
John J. Dunphy
(originally published in 9.4.06 edition of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch)
American history textbooks note that Labor Day came into existence in the United States in 1894, when legislation establishing this national holiday passed both houses of Congress and was signed into law by President Grover Cleveland. It remains largely unknown, however, that a few thousand courageous Illinoisans played a crucial role in winning this day of recreation for their fellow workers.
It began in Pullman, Illinois, a community of about 20,000 on the outskirts of Chicago founded in 1880 by George Pullman, a millionaire manufacturer of railroad sleeping cars. Its wage-earners all worked for Pullman’s company.
Employees lived in company-owned houses. Their rent automatically withdrawn from their paychecks. Even the town’s church was company-owned and rented out to various denominations that were expected to conduct services like shifts in the factory. One minister described the town as “a relic of European serfdom.”
When a recession cut into the sales of sleeping cars in the winter of 1893-’94, Pullman fired about half of his 5,500 workers and slashed the wages of those who remained by an average of 25 percent. Rent for company housing, however, stayed the same and automatic deductions continued — even though the paychecks were smaller.
Pullman workers organized a local of the American Railway Union (ARU) in the spring of 1894 to fight for their rights. When a committee of workers met with Pullman to protest the wage cuts, however, its leaders were fired the next day. Pullman then delegated responsibility for dealing with the disgruntled workers to his vice-president, Thomas Wickes. Pullman then headed for his summer home on the New Jersey shore.
The remaining Pullman workers walked off their jobs. Eugene Debs, the charismatic young president of the ARU, assumed leadership of the strike. When Wickes refused to settle through arbitration, the ARU refused to work any train that carried a Pullman car after June 26. The general managers of the 24 railroads terminating in Chicago unanimously agreed to support Wickes and, as a deliberate provocation, attached Pullman cars to trains carrying U.S. mail.
The railroads then requested U.S. Attorney General Richard Olney, a former railroad lawyer, to persuade President Cleveland to appoint a special counsel to end the strike on the grounds that the ARU was interfering with the delivery of mail. Cleveland’s choice was Edward Walker, a railroad attorney, who hired 4,000 armed strikebreakers, made them deputy marshals and ordered them to end the Pullman strike.
The trains soon began to roll, although enraged workers in the Chicago area sometimes attacked them. Some 12,000 federal troops, about half the entire U.S. Army at the time, were sent to Chicago to assist the strikebreakers. The Pullman company announced on July 18 that it would reopen and hire only employees who signed “yellow dog contracts” promising never to join unions. On August 3, the strike was declared ended. Debs went to prison, and the ARU collapsed.
But 23 states had already adopted Labor Day as a national holiday honoring workers. When a bill establishing it as a national holiday passed Congress that summer, Cleveland signed it into law, of course. He was planning to run for re-election in 1896 and knew that he had alienated America’s workers by his role in breaking the Pullman strike.
And, indeed, his opportunism in the Pullman strike came back to haunt him. Angered by Cleveland’s use of federal troops to break a strike in his state, Illinois Democratic Gov. John Peter Altgeld used his influence at the party’s 1896 convention to deny Cleveland renomination.
This Labor Day, let’s honor those embattled Pullman employees who lost their struggle but inadvertently helped to win a national holiday for all American workers. Let’s also honor the labor movement for giving the United States a standard of living that is the envy of the world.
John J. Dunphy is the author of Abolitionism and the Civil War in Southwestern Illinois and Unsung Heroes of the Dachau Trials: The Investigative Work of the U.S. Army 7708 War Crimes Group, 1945 to 1947.