• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1136 0

on a new dimension when the use of injunction in the Pullman strike made a Socialist out of Eugene Victor Debs. Named for Eugène Sue and Victor Hugo by his father, an émigré from Alsace, Debs was brought up on Les Misérables, the bible of father and son. He went to work as a railroad fireman at fourteen, founded the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, and resigned from it in 1892 when he was thirty-seven to organize all railwaymen in an industrial union, the American Railway Union. When in 1893 and 1894 the Pullman Company cut wages by 25 to 33⅓ per cent without lowering rents in company houses and while continuing to pay dividends to investors, Debs called a sympathy strike on all trains carrying Pullman cars. More than a hundred thousand men came out in what developed into the greatest strike effort yet seen in the United States. Mobilizing all the powers of capital, the owners, representing twenty-four railroads with a combined capital of $818,000,000, fought back with the courts and the armed forces of the Federal government behind them. Three thousand police in the Chicago area were mobilized against the strikers, five thousand professional strikebreakers were sworn in as Federal deputy marshals and given firearms; ultimately six thousand Federal and state troops were brought in, less for the protection of property and the public than to break the strike and crush the union. A regular Army colonel, drunk in a Chicago club, wished he could order every man in his regiment to take aim and fire at every “dirty white ribbon,” the emblem of the strikers.

Although the union had agreed to furnish necessary men for the mail trains, delivery of the mail was made the pretext for an injunction, the most sweeping ever granted. As the arm of the State used in support of property, injunction was capitalism’s most formidable weapon and the most resented. Attorney-General Olney, who had been a lawyer for railroads before entering the Cabinet and was still a director of several lines involved in the strike, persuaded President Cleveland of the necessity. The United States District Attorney in Chicago drew up the injunction with the advice of Judges Grosscup and William Wood of the Federal Circuit Court, who then mounted the bench to confirm their own handiwork. When Governor Altgeld refused to request Federal troops, the judges certified the need of them in order to justify the injunction. It was war, proclaimed Debs, between “the producing classes and the money power of the country.” Refusing to obey the injunction, he was arrested along with several associates, imprisoned without bail, tried and sentenced in 1895 to a term of six months.

After his arrest the strikers, by then more or less starving, gave up. Thirty had been killed, sixty injured and over seven hundred arrested. In rehiring, Pullman imposed yellow-dog contracts, requiring every worker to relinquish his right to join a union. The American Railway Union was destroyed but the strike had made a hero of Debs and a villain of injunction. It showed that strikes could not be won when government sided with capital; therefore labour must attain political power.

Debs pondered the lesson in prison. He read Progress and Poverty, Bellamy’s Looking Backward, Fabian Essays, Blatchford’s Merrie England and Kautsky’s commentary on the Erfurt Program. He received a visit from Keir Hardie. He became convinced that the cause of the working class was hopeless under capitalism, and when, in the election of 1896, the forces of Mark Hanna and McKinley defeated Bryan and Populism, his conviction was confirmed. Capitalism, too strong to be reformed, must be destroyed. In return, the ruling class felt no less strongly about “Debs the revolutionist.” While campaigning for McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt said in a private conversation, “The sentiment now animating a large proportion of our people can only be suppressed as the Commune was suppressed, by taking ten or a dozen of their leaders out, standing them against a wall and shooting them dead. I believe it will come to that. These leaders are