Prologue: Owe My Soul to the Company Store
The Glowing Dream
Part I
In the Gloom of Mighty Cities: The Birth of American Socialism
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“I dreamed I saw Gene Debs last night, alive as you and me.
Says I, ‘but Gene, you’re ten years dead’. ‘I never died,’ says he.
‘The railway bosses killed you, Gene; they shot you, Gene,’ says I.
‘Takes more than guns to kill a man,’ says Gene, ‘I didn’t die’.”
- ‘Eugene Debs’, by Joe Hill (1907)*
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Conceived in Liberty: The Life and Death of the American Republic, 1776 to 1919 by Richard White (Excerpt)
(© 1995, Melbourne University Press)
Part I
In the Gloom of Mighty Cities: The Birth of American Socialism
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
“I dreamed I saw Gene Debs last night, alive as you and me.
Says I, ‘but Gene, you’re ten years dead’. ‘I never died,’ says he.
‘The railway bosses killed you, Gene; they shot you, Gene,’ says I.
‘Takes more than guns to kill a man,’ says Gene, ‘I didn’t die’.”
- ‘Eugene Debs’, by Joe Hill (1907)*
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Conceived in Liberty: The Life and Death of the American Republic, 1776 to 1919 by Richard White (Excerpt)
(© 1995, Melbourne University Press)
George Pullman considered himself a philanthropist. Disturbed by the squalor he saw among the burgeoning industrial classes of the American Republic, the intrepid entrepreneur decided his workers would be a model to the rest, and free from the vice and misery that so afflicted their compatriots.
To this end, Pullman bought acres of land in the south of Chicago, and established here a utopic ‘workers’ city’, in which the men who built his vaunted, luxury ‘Pullman cars’ might dwell, along with their families. As presented to the world, the little settlement was idyllic. It boasted libraries, schools, neat and pleasant housing, recreational centers, and even churches. Clean and orderly, it seemed a bold answer to the ramshackle slums that sprouted up along the edges of America’s great metropoles like so many mushrooms.
Indeed, many came to see Pullman’s little experiment from afar and returned with glowing reports of the company town and its contented, industrious residents.
But to many of the workers who actually dwelt in the place, Pullman city seemed less a patch of heaven on earth than a slave camp, and Pullman himself less a benevolent father than a feudal lord.
For Pullman may have provided his workers with any number of amenities, but he made sure they paid for them. Pullman was a firm believer in the ideals of thrift and self-sufficiency he believed had made the United States great, and demanded his employees live up to them. There would be no mollycoddling on his watch. Workers were expected to pay their (often quite high) rent on time and in exact amount, with little leeway. Company spies infested the town, carrying rumors of discontent or worse, brewing unionization, back to the boss. Indeed, suspicion that one had affiliated to the AFL, or was friendly with those who had, was enough to lose him his home in the town, and his job with the company. Pullman also imposed curfews on his workers, proscribed alcohol and tobacco within town limits, and staunchly refused any ‘hand-outs’ to the workers, in accord with his philosophy of self-help.
The men and women of the Pullman company lived their lives under his auspices—as one worker complained; “We are born in a Pullman house, fed from the Pullman shop, taught in the Pullman school, catechized in the Pullman church, and when we die we shall be buried in the Pullman cemetery and go to the Pullman hell.”
When the great crisis of 1893 hit, and Pullman found his profits tumbling, he wasted little time in slashing wages. Representatives of the workers complained to their boss, who insisted he had had no choice, and that the company was working best as it could to keep on as many workers as possible. He promised there would be no retaliation against those who had organized to present grievances.
However, only days later, several men who had been party to this bargaining committee were fired—Pullman averred their dismissal had nothing to do with their recent activities, but understandably, the workers did not believe him, and days later went out on strike.
The action was immediately brought to the attention of the American Railway Union, a new player on the labor stage, fresh from a well-publicized victory over the Great Northern Railway. The union’s president was forty-nine year old Eugene V. Debs, a grocer’s son and long-time labor organizer.
Strange as it may seem, considering the symbol he was to become, Debs was in fact something of a conservative in the world of labor. Beginning as a member of a railway firemen’s brotherhood, he had been leery about strikes, fearing the violence that often resulted. But by 1894 he was one of the country’s best-known labor leaders, and so it was to him and his union that the Pullman workers appealed.
It is perhaps one of the great ironies of history that Eugene Debs was in fact one of the less revolutionary of the many luminaries tied up in the storm of ’94. When the ARU pushed for a boycott of Pullman company cars in response to the petition from the Chicago workers, Debs fought the motion and instead sought an arbitrated settlement, fearing (rightly, as it would turn out) that such large-scale action might spiral into disaster.
Of course, like so many men, Debs soon found that history had gotten away from him, and simply would not wait. Pullman would not negotiate, and the boycott went ahead. So, the strike began, as the first act of the tragedy that would set the course of American history for decades to come.
America ground to a halt. The strike had a knock-on effect, and soon multiplied far beyond Pullman’s factory town, or even the Chicago trainyards. Soon, railway workers, switchmen, firemen, and all the rest, across 27 states were refusing to move Pullman’s cars in solidarity with their Illinois comrades. Meat and produce rotted in the sun as trains sat idle. The country feared what might transpire should this strike continue once the weather turned, and coal was desperately needed.
Pullman stubbornly refused any arbitration or concession. But the greater part of national opprobrium, at least as measured by the vicissitudes of the country’s papers, fell on Debs and his colleagues. He was described as ‘King Debs’ or ‘Dictator Debs’, the man who would deprive and even starve America to satiate the ‘communistic demands’ of a few disgruntled Pullman workers. But to the workers themselves, and indeed, to hundreds of thousands of laborers across the land, he was a hero, a champion who had found the courage to stand up to the great titans of industry in the name of the common man.
The polarization grew ever starker as it became quite clear which side the administration of President Grover Cleveland was on.
Pullman obtained an injunction from the Supreme Court, declaring that the strikers had no right to interfere with the US mail services, regardless of their grievances. It was a wonderful pretext to undermine the cause of the railwaymen as a whole—the strikers attempted to comply with this injunction, allowing mail cars to pass through where others were barred. But the government and the General Managers Association, lined up behind Pullman, eagerly exploited this opening, mixing up mail cars with all the rest, and making it clear that the trains would run in toto or not at all. And if they did not run at all, then the velvet glove would slip off, and out would come the mailed fist.
On 3 July, US Marshal J.W Arnold read out the injunction in the Chicago railyards. Surrounded by hundreds of hooting, cat-calling strikers, Arnold kept his cool and informed them that any further interference with the passage of federal mail would be dealt with ‘severely’.
The response was a shower of bricks and stones from the workers. Arnold was struck in the face and the chest, severely injured, and barely escaped the angry mob with his life. That same day, bandaged and bloodied, he wrote to AG Olney, a long-time friend of the rail lines, and informed him he did not believe that the orders of the court could be enforced by any less than the full force of federal troops.
And so, the next day (4 July), regular soldiers arrived in Chicago from nearby Fort Sheridan.
Their presence merely served to further inflame the sentiments of the strikers, who now felt their own government had clearly come out against them (as, indeed, it had).
The troops camped out on the lakefront, bayonets gleaming menacingly in the summer scene, were regularly hounded by packs of railwaymen, out of work laborers, and young street toughs, who assailed them with jeers and occasionally missiles. It seemed much of the lower quarters of Chicago were now in sympathy with the beleaguered workers, which further unnerved the respectable people of the city, as well as the rail bosses of the GMA and Cleveland himself in his Washington offices. The next several days brought Chicago to a state of near war. Mobs torched train cars, clashed with soldiers, and gathered beneath the windows of those known to sympathize with the ‘bosses’ to chant threats and make demands. By 6 July, thirteen people were dead. The labor movement in Chicago began to speak of a general strike to support the railway workers, now facing down the might of the entire federal government. Such talk spread like wildfire, and soon AFL locals across the country, comprising everyone from timbermen, longshoremen, miners, to stonecutters, pledged their support should the call be put out for such an action.
But now the ARU, and the leaders of organized labor as a whole, began to lose their nerve. Debs himself feared bloodshed, and in private conversation with his brother wondered if this was indeed worth all the tears and sweat.
In an emergency conference held in Chicago’s Briggs House hotel, the AFL’s Samuel Gompers came out forcefully against Debs and against a general strike. After some hours of fierce debate, Debs began to lose ground, and the conclave of some twenty labor leaders drafted a resolution that ““a general strike at this time is inexpedient, unwise, and contrary to the best interests of the working people.” It seemed Gompers would get his way, and (reluctantly, admittedly) hand Pullman the victory.
But then, a frantic telegram burst in on the debating representatives with news—skittish federal troops had, as the delegates debated, again fired on a group of demonstrators near a rail yard just south of the city. This time, it looked as if upwards of twenty were dead. This included, pointedly, several young women and a child of eight years old.
The emotion generated by this new development (which, as it turned out, would have been exaggerated—only six people had died, and the child had survived) was enough to tip the scales in Debs’ favor, and pull the rug out from under Gompers’ feet.
A general strike was called.†
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*I got the idea for 'Joe Hill' (or its ATL equivalent) being written instead in honor of a martyred Debs from some old thread I read once, so credit to whoever came up with it back then.
†This is the POD. IOTL, the AFL and ARU came very close to calling for a general strike, but ultimately decided against it (though there is also a slight earlier POD in Marshal Arnold being attacked physically by the strikers; in reality he read out the statement and departed unharmed)
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