The Pullman Strike, One Man Against America

George Pullman had built something unusual on Chicago's Far South Side in eighteen eighty: a town. Not a neighborhood, not a development, a company town, purpose-built from scratch, where the workers who built his sleeping cars would also live in company houses, shop at the company store, attend the company church, and read books from the company library. Every structure in Pullman, Illinois was owned by the Pullman Palace Car Company. The rents were set by the company. The prices at the company store were set by the company. There was no independent city council, no elected mayor. George Pullman was the government.

For over a decade, Pullman presented the town as a model of industrial benevolence. Visitors came to tour it. The architecture was attractive, the streets were clean, the housing was better than what most workers could afford elsewhere. What it did not have, because George Pullman had not designed for this, was any mechanism for workers to push back when the company's interests and their own diverged.

The Panic of eighteen ninety-three hit the Pullman Company hard. Orders fell. Pullman cut wages by roughly twenty-five percent. He did not cut rents. Workers who earned less continued to pay the same amount to live in the same houses, effectively working some of their hours purely to subsidize Pullman's balance sheet. A delegation of workers met with company management in May eighteen ninety-four to present their grievances. Three of the delegation members were fired the next day.

The workers struck. Eugene V. Debs and the American Railway Union, which had been organizing railroad workers nationally, turned the local dispute into a nationwide action. By late June, railway workers across the country were refusing to handle Pullman cars. American rail transportation was effectively paralyzed.

President Grover Cleveland sent twelve thousand federal troops to Chicago over the explicit objection of Illinois Governor John Peter Altgeld, who argued that the state's own forces were sufficient and that the federal intervention was unconstitutional. At least thirty strikers were killed, with historians counting dozens more dead in other states. Debs was arrested for contempt and eventually sentenced to six months in federal prison, during which time he read widely in socialist theory and emerged a committed socialist.

Congress passed legislation creating Labor Day as a federal holiday while the strike was still underway, just days before federal troops moved into Chicago. The timing was not a coincidence. It was a political gesture to organized labor in the middle of a confrontation the government was about to settle on behalf of capital, an acknowledgment that cost the government nothing and changed nothing about the conditions that had produced the strike.