Pullman strike how many people died

On August 2, the ARU officially ended the boycott. The strike lingered in Pullman until September when two thousand Pullman strikers surrendered unconditionally. At the time, Terre Haute was a booming coal and railroad town, and at age 15 the young Debs started working on the railroads.

Five years later, he was respected enough to be elected secretary of the local of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen. During his youth, Debs imbibed the small town values of upwardly mobile skilled workers in the railroad brotherhoods. He was a strong believer in the Protestant work ethic of industry, frugality, sobriety, and benevolence.

In the early phases of railroad development, the railroad corporations paid skilled workers premium wages, acquiesced in their work rules, and accepted collective bargaining. But by the mids, railroad managers responded to labor scarcity and cutthroat competition by reclassifying occupations, adopting individualized pay schemes, and cutting wages. These policy shifts resulted in three great strikes during the late s: the Reading Railroad strike of , the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Strike of , and the New York Central strike of Each strike resulted in union defeat, and each defeat could be attributed to mutual scabbing by the railroad brotherhoods and the railroad workers organized by the Knights of Labor.

The conclusions that Debs drew from these defeats permanently modified his earlier conceptions. First, Debs came to believe that individualism could not be achieved in isolation from his fellows; accepting a condition of mutual dependence was not a negation of manliness but a higher form of it—brotherhood. Debs new belief in working-class solidarity manifested itself in his indefatigable efforts to create unity among the railroad brotherhoods.

During the late s and early s he led his fellow skilled railroad workers in experimenting with various forms of federation of the existing craft brotherhoods. But, none were successful. Debs also modified his earlier belief in class harmony, which had led him as a young man to oppose the strikers during the railroad strike and to view local railroad entrepreneur William Riley McKeen as his role model. For these reasons he began to use republican language to endorse working-class resistance to corporate despotism.

It was the first large national industrial union, a forerunner of the great industrial organizations that formed the Congress of Industrial Organizations CIO in A national organization, which by then boasted , members, struck not to secure any demands of its own, but rather to help several thousand Pullman workers win their strike. For Debs the Pullman defeat was a bitter one.

But, far more, Debs resented the collusion between the federal government, especially the judiciary, and the large corporations. From that point forward, Debs believed that the only way to redeem American liberty and the American republic from corruption was through political action to destroy the overweening power of the large corporations. When released from prison, Debs was not yet—contrary to legend—a Marxian socialist, but he had become a working-class martyr.

He arrived in Chicago from Woodstock by train, and was met by , people who had gathered despite the pouring rain. He had become more than a hero to late nineteenth century workers; he had become a prophet. But in with the depression over, Debs followed Berger into electoral politics; he threw his considerable talents into formation of the Social Democracy of America.

The SPA was the first working-class socialist party not dominated by immigrants and with a majority of its members speakers of English.

For these factions and individuals Debs served as a unifying symbol and rallying figure. The Pullman Strike was only the most spectacular of a number of disturbing events during the s, which marked that decade as a crisis period for a decaying order of competitive individualism and proprietary capitalism.

During this crisis, a massive depression , bitter class conflict including two large strikes in the bituminous coal industry as well as the Pullman Strike, a national insurgency of the Populist Party which threatened the dominance of the two major parties, and a closely watched march of thousands of unemployed workers on Washington D. While labor was clearly the loser of the Pullman Strike and most unions suffered membership losses due to the depression, the trajectory of American labor organization and power still pointed forward and upward.

Between and , the AFL grew from , to 2. Nonetheless, the defeat at Pullman portended an extended period of exclusion of labor organizations from the bastions of corporate-run, large-scale industry. AFL unions hunkered down in industries characterized by large numbers of small employers using less advanced, smaller-scale production methods.

After , national employers and their associations picked up the weapon of the labor injunction used so effectively against the boycott of the American Railway Union ARU and set labor back on its heels for more than a decade. The devastating defeat of the ARU was also a setback for a type of unionism—industrial unionism--that enrolled all workers employed by an industry, regardless of their craft or skill level. Though industrial unions, such as the United Mine Workers flourished, the vast majority of AFL unions remained occupational or craft unions like the railroad brotherhoods.

But, the defeat of industrial unionism did not prevent the organization of the new groups of workers. By the turn of the century, most craft unions began organizing workers outside their craft, many of them less skilled laborers.

By , only 28 of unions active in the labor movement could still be classified as craft unions. The rise of large business corporations, the widespread use of the labor injunction against strikes and boycotts, and the inability of labor to organize in corporate-run industry led many workers and their middle class allies to turn to socialism.

Here, too, the events of the Pullman Strike prophesied the future. Following his incarceration for violating a court injunction, Eugene V. Debs spent six months in prison and began to investigate the possibilities of socialism.

After avowing himself a socialist in , he emerged as the leading spokesperson for the Socialist Party of America during the first two decades of the twentieth century and served five times as its presidential candidate.

The turn of many Americans toward socialism was part of a larger transformation going on in American liberalism. According to nineteenth century liberal doctrine, Americans could trust individual liberty and free competition in the market to secure the public good. The corollary to this public faith was that government should remain severely limited and relegated to protecting and extending the market and providing individuals with the resources—usually land and education—necessary for property ownership.

But, the advent of industrial capitalism turned the majority of Americans working outside the household into non-propertied wageworkers. At the same time, individually-owned businesses gave way to trusts and large, consolidated business corporations. In law and government Americans began to accept the efficacy and benevolence of a corporate-dominated economy and society. During the Progressive Era, they amended the Sherman Act and set up government commissions to regulate the behavior of corporations rather than seeking to break them up and return to the outdated competitive economy.

Building on this new trend, labor leaders contended that they had the same right to organize and regulate the labor market as the corporations did the product markets. The Pullman Strike was an important turning point in this regard. Even Richard Olney, the U. Attorney General who had asked for the injunction that defeated the boycott, had a change of heart.

He sponsored the Erdman Act passed by Congress in that outlawed yellow-dog contracts requiring workers to renounce unions as a condition of employment, recognized the railroad brotherhoods for purposes of collective bargaining, and inaugurated a long era of government intervention on behalf of labor peace on the railroads. In this new era it was far more difficult to sustain an older paternalism in which white male wielders of property like Pullman could be trusted to stand in judgment of the interests of those under them.

Addams argued not for the victory of the labor over capital, but rather for a broadened public interest that included the two sides. The same rejection of an autocratic paternalism that the public increasingly accepted on behalf of workers should be accorded to daughters and wives within the patriarchal family. But opting out of some of these cookies may affect your browsing experience. Necessary Necessary.

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It does not store any personal data. Functional Functional. George Pullman also built a planned community or company town for his workers in Illinois, where workers enjoyed many amenities but were also financially dependent on the Pullman Company for their homes and utilities.

After a severe depression in , wages fell about 25 percent for the Pullman workers while living costs remained the same. The workers then sought out union representation. Former railroad worker Eugene V.

Debs and his American Railway Union, which had won a strike earlier in , became involved in the Pullman situation. A mob burning freight cars during the Pullman Strike in Chicago, In , during a nationwide economic recession, George Pullman laid off hundreds of employees and cut wages for many of the remaining workers at his namesake railroad sleeping car company by some 30 percent. Meanwhile, he refused to lower rents or store prices in Pullman, Illinois, the company town south of Chicago where many of his employees lived.

Debs , declared a sympathy boycott of all trains using Pullman cars. Burned freight and coal cars lining the expanse of the Panhandle Railroad, during the Pullman Railway Union strikes in Chicago, July On June 29, some crowd members attending a Debs speech in Blue Island, Illinois, set fires to nearby buildings and derailed a locomotive attached to a U.

Attorney General Richard Olney used the incident as an excuse to ask for an injunction against the strike and its leaders from the federal district court in Chicago, which he got on July 2.