Hi everyone, I just wanted to give you a quick overview about the Pullman Strike before you look at the primary sources and try to answer the discussion question. So the Pullman Strike takes place in Chicago in 1894 and it's part of a long string of strikes and particularly railroad strikes. The first big railroad strike happens in 1877, and Chicago itself is a place of a lot of union organizing and often violent strikes. The Haymarket Riot, for example, happens prior to the Pullman strike. So you've got a city and an environment that, you know, it's already been pretty turbulent, I guess I'll say that, when the strike happens.
And we've seen Over the years, this increasing tension between employers and workers, or often they talk about labor and capital. And so the Pullman Strike in some ways just encapsulates a lot of that. So what is the Pullman Strike?
The Pullman Palace Car Company made sleeper cars. So this is an era where it's primarily train travel for people and goods. And if you were traveling across the country, you would have a sleeper car where you could sleep, right, while you were on the train for several days.
And so they make these sleeper cars. And in fact, if you go down to the Santa Barbara Railroad Station, you will see, you can see one of the old Pullman cars that's still there. So anyway.
The company itself is located in Pullman, Illinois, which is outside of Chicago. And this is what we would have called a company town. And what this meant is that the Pullman company not only employs the workers, but they basically built and own the town.
So all the houses the company owns and the workers have to rent them from the company itself. The stores are owned by the company. So if you think of yourself as a worker, you're getting paid. buy Pullman and then much of your money is going back to the company through rent and through, you know, buying goods from the company store.
And so the Pullman company sets the rents pretty high because Pullman, the man who owns the company, he wants to make as much money as possible. So Why do we get this strike? All of 1863 is a pretty significant depression. And so to, you know, make money, balance the budget during 1863, the Pullman Company lays off thousands of workers.
And then those that get to keep their jobs, their wages are cut by about 25 percent. And even in the face of all this, the Pullman Company refuses to lower the rents on the houses. And so you've got workers just in this impossible situation where their wages have declined and they can't afford to pay the rent.
And again, like the money's going back to the company. So one would think this would be a point in time where the company would lower the rents just so that everybody could get by. And so workers start to sort of...
band together and start asking for higher pay and better living conditions because these houses were not so great as they were and then shorter work days again it's not unusual for people to be working 10 12 14 hours a day at this in this point in time um Pullman and his company says no to these demands and so on May 11 1894 um the workers walk off the jobs they strike They are supported by the American Railroad Union, the ARU, who's led by a man named Eugene Debs, and this is a picture of him here. They support what the strikers are doing, and they call on union members across the United States to refuse to handle any trains that have Pullman cars. So if you're working in... I don't know, Minneapolis and the train comes into the Minneapolis Railroad Station and there's a Pullman car on the train and you are a member of the ARU, you would just refuse to handle the trains and a lot of the like attaching and detaching of cars and and moving trains through the railroad yards.
It's a lot of manual labor at this point. So if you get ARU members refusing to handle these cars, these trains, you can really shut down the railroad system across the country. And that's basically what happens. So they walk out, you know, May 11th by June because of this strike that includes the ARU. You've pretty much shut down.
both travel and cargo transportation across the country. And so neither Pullman nor the other railroad companies nor the federal government and it's um Cleveland is president at this time are happy about this. So the railroads bring in workers across the strike lines to work in Union lingo, these are called scabs. So these are the workers that come in to break the strike by because they're willing to handle these cars that the ARU members are not. The Pullman company and the railroad companies come up with this idea that if we attach the cars that carry the US mail to the trains with the Pullman cars, that would be a way to go in there and get a federal judge to issue an injunction against the strike.
because they make the argument that the strikers are interfering with the delivery of the U.S. mail, and that violates interstate commerce and is illegal. And so they do go to court, and the judge does say the strike is illegal. That's what an injunction is. It basically says the strike's illegal and it needs to stop because it interferes with the delivery of the U.S. mail.
And once that injunction is set, then Cleveland can send federal troops into Chicago to break up the strike. And so that's what happens. So on July 6th, 1894, we have the first real outbreak of violence.
These striking workers are really mad about the deployment of federal troops into Chicago to break up the strike. They end up destroying hundreds of these Pullman sleeper cars and other cars. And then you have the police and federal troops descending on these railroad yards trying to put down the strike and stop the violence.
And you just end up with this really violent fighting amongst police, federal troops, and workers. So the strike. ultimately comes to an end.
The workers really can't defend the rail yards. They are outnumbered by the police and the federal troops. So the federal troops and police get control of the railroad yards.
They arrest Debs and other union leaders and put them in jail. Debs, at one point, spends almost 10 years in jail because they say, His union organizing is actually socialism. And because of the violence and other issues, public support for this Pullman strike declines. And so that becomes even harder for strikers to continue a strike if the public isn't behind you anymore. The Pullman company, the manufacturing part of it, reopens in August.
And one of the things workers have to... promise to do is to not join a union. It's a condition of their employment that if they want to work at the Pullman company, they're not allowed to join a union or try to organize a union.
And we'll see that ability to prohibit, to declare unions illegal remains until the late 1930s. It's in the 1938 that unions are recognized by the federal government that workers have the right to organize. So as you look at the question, think about how the newspapers are reporting the strike and how those newspaper reports are shaping public opinion around the strike itself.
So I will see you later. Good luck.