People's History of the United States_ 1492 to Present, A - Zinn, Howard [167]
In June 1894, workers at the Pullman Palace Car Company went on strike. One can get an idea of the kind of support they got, mostly from the immediate vicinity of Chicago, in the first months of the strike, from a list of contributions put together by the Reverend William H. Carwardine, a Methodist pastor in the company town of Pullman for three years (he was sent away after he supported the strikers):
Typographical Union #16
Painters and Decorators Union #147
Carpenters’ Union No. 23
Thirty-fourth Ward Republican Club
Grand Crossing Police
Hyde Park Water Department
Picnic at Gardener’s Park
Milk Dealer’s Union
Hyde Park Liquor Dealers
Fourteenth Precinct Police Station
Swedish Concert
Chicago Fire Department
German Singing Society
Cheque from Anaconda, Montana
The Pullman strikers appealed to a convention of the American Railway Union for support:
Mr. President and Brothers of the American Railway Union. We struck at Pullman because we were without hope. We joined the American Railway Union because it gave us a glimmer of hope. Twenty thousand souls, men, women and little ones, have their eyes turned toward this convention today, straining eagerly through dark despondency for a glimmer of the heaven-sent message you alone can give us on this earth. . . .
You all must know that the proximate cause of our strike was the discharge of two members of our grievance committee. . . . Five reductions in wages. . . . The last was the most severe, amounting to nearly thirty per cent, and rents had not fallen. . . .
Water which Pullman buys from the city at 8 cents a thousand gallons he retails to us at 500 percent advance. . . . Gas which sells at 75 cents per thousand feet in Hyde Park, just north of us, he sells for $2.25. When we went to tell him our grievances he said we were all his “children.”. . .
Pullman, both the man and the town, is an ulcer on the body politic. He owns the houses, the schoolhouses, and churches of God in the town he gave his once humble name. . . .
And thus the merry war—the dance of skeletons bathed in human tears—goes on, and it will go on, brothers, forever, unless you, the American Railway Union, stop it; end it; crush it out.
The American Railway Union responded. It asked its members all over the country not to handle Pullman cars. Since virtually all passenger trains had Pullman cars, this amounted to a boycott of all trains—a nationwide strike. Soon all traffic on the twenty-four railroad lines leading out of Chicago had come to a halt. Workers derailed freight cars, blocked tracks, pulled engineers off trains if they refused to cooperate.
The General Managers Association, representing the railroad owners, agreed to pay two thousand deputies, sent in to break the strike. But the strike went on. The Attorney General of the United States, Richard Olney, a former railroad lawyer, now got a court injunction against blocking trains, on the legal ground that the federal mails were being interfered with. When the strikers ignored the injunction, President Cleveland ordered federal troops to Chicago. On July 6, hundreds of cars were burned by strikers.
The following day, the state militia moved in, and the Chicago Times reported on what followed:
Company C. Second Regiment . . . disciplined a mob of rioters yesterday afternoon at Forty-ninth and Loomis Streets. The police assisted and . . . finished the job. There is no means of knowing how many rioters were killed or wounded. The mob carried off many of its dying and injured.
A crowd of five thousand gathered. Rocks were thrown at the militia, and the command was given to fire.
. . . To say that the mob went wild is but a weak expression. . . . The command to charge was given. . . . From that moment only bayonets were used. . . . A dozen men in the front line of rioters received bayonet wounds. . . .
Tearing up cobble stones, the mob made a determined charge. . . . the word was passed along the line