How did a railway car business, a recession, a labor strike, and a reelection campaign over 110 years ago result in most of us having the day off Monday?
It’s an interesting story.
In the days before airplanes and automobiles, the only way to travel from town to town was by train. The network of tracks laid in the second half of the 19th century made the country mobile and allowed people to travel from coast to coast and border to border.
One of the entrepreneurs who capitalized on America’s increasing mobility was George Pullman. Rail travel in his day alternated between boredom and hunger, but Pullman solved both problems with his eponymously named sleeper car, also called the “palace car,” and later his dining car. Pullman named his company The Pullman Palace Car Company.
After Lincoln’s assassination, George Pullman – always alert to PR opportunities – arranged to have the president’s body transported from Washington to Springfield in a sleeper, giving his invention national attention. The orders poured in from the railroads despite the fact that the cost of sleepers was more than five times that of a regular railway car. The Pullman car was marketed as "luxury for the middle class" – a market the railroads wanted to attract.
In 1867 the company introduced The President, a sleeper with an attached kitchen and dining car, which he called “the first hotel on wheels.” The food was as good as that served in the best restaurants and the service was without equal. The Delmonico, the world's first sleeping car devoted to fine cuisine, was launched the following year, and its menu was prepared by chefs from New York's famed Delmonico's Restaurant. Both the President and the Delmonico and subsequent Pullman sleeping cars offered first-rate service which was provided by recently-freed house slaves who served in the combined roles of porter, waiter, chambermaid, entertainer, and valet.
Pullman went on to create the “vestibule car” in 1887 which virtually made an entire train into a single car by enclosing the space between cars. An accordion connector kept out wind and noise and allowed passengers to move from car to car during their journey.
Pullman never sold his cars – he leased them and charged the railway lessees the premium they charged their passengers to travel in luxury. In time he would have 2,000 cars in operation, making his company worth $62 million in 1893 – $1.5 billion in today’s dollars.
Always pushing the innovation envelope, Pullman built the town of Pullman, Illinois just south of Chicago. It was designed to be a utopian workers' community that would be insulated from the moral and political seductions of nearby Chicago. No alcohol was permitted to be sold or consumed in his town.
The town of Pullman was feudally, organized: row houses for the assembly and craft workers, modest Victorians for the managers, and a luxurious hotel where Pullman himself lived and where visiting customers, suppliers, and salesman would lodge while in town. Housing construction was state-of-the-art with underground sewage lines, and the town included a library and church.
Residents were exclusively the employees of the Pullman Company. Like his rail cars, Pullman leased the housing to them at prices that were established to make a profit for the company’s shareholders, and the monthly rental was automatically deducted from paychecks, which were drawn on the Pullman bank. Pullman sold city water and gas to the residents – at a 10% markup, of course. The church was never occupied because there was no sect that could afford the rental.
A Pullman employee characterized life in Pullman, Illinois this way:
We are born in a Pullman house, fed from the Pullman shops, taught in the Pullman school, catechized in the Pullman Church, and when we die we shall go to the Pullman Hell.
Nevertheless, despite its fiefdom-like quality, the town and company operated successfully for more than a decade.
After years of economic expansion and national prosperity, however, a two-year recession began in 1893 during which the demand for Pullman cars declined markedly. Pullman has promised his shareholders a 6% return, and to keep that promise he laid off hundreds of workers and cut the wages of those who remained. Rents were not cut and it was not unusual for workers to have little to live on after rent. "I have seen men with families of eight or nine children crying because they got only three or four cents after paying their rent," one worker complained. Another described living conditions as "slavery worse than that of Negroes of the South."
On May 12, 1894, therefore, 3,000 employees walked out of the Pullman factory, demanding lower rents and higher pay. The American Railway Union, led by the young pacifist and socialist, Eugene V. Debs, came to the help of the striking workers by offering to represent them. Debs gave Pullman five days to respond to the union demands. But Pullman refused to negotiate, locked up his home, and left town, causing a fellow business owner to say of him, "The damned idiot ought to arbitrate, arbitrate and arbitrate! ...A man who won't meet his own men halfway is a God-damn fool!"
On June 26, all Pullman cars were cut from trains. Within four days, 125,000 workers on 29 railroads had quit work rather than handle Pullman cars. When union members were fired, entire rail lines were shut down. Chicago was under siege.
One consequence of the strike was the interruption of federal mail delivery. Debs agreed to let mail trains into the city, but rail owners mixed mail cars into all their trains. Interference with the mails is a federal crime, and on July 2 a federal injunction was issued against the leaders of the American Railway Union. The injunction claimed that the strike interfered with the delivery of mail, violated the Sherman Antitrust Act, and represented a threat to public safety. Among other things, it enjoined the union leadership from communicating with their subordinates. Absent any leadership, chaos began to reign among the strikers.
Illinois Governor John Altgeld, a pro-labor Democrat, refused to use the armed force of the state militia to break the strike, but he did not interfere with local authorities who were responding to the developing situation. Altgeld agreed to use the National Guard to protect private property if necessary, but above all, he did not want federal troops involved as strike breakers. Nevertheless, President Grover Cleveland, hemmed in by nervous railroad executives, interrupted mail trains, and a federally-issued injunction declared the strike a federal crime and deployed 12,000 troops to break it up.
The timing was awful. On July 3, Federal troops entered Chicago against Governor Altgeld's repeated protests. Early Independence Day celebrations were exploding fireworks, putting everyone on edge. When federal troops appeared, the strikers flew into a rage. What had been a reasonably peaceful strike now turned into complete mayhem. On July 4 mobs of people began tipping over rail cars and building blockades to combat the federal troops. The chaos was made worse because the injunction prevented the union leaders from communicating with the strikers. Therefore, the rioting grew and spread, fires were set to seven buildings, and by July 6 over 6,000 rioters had destroyed about 700 railcars and caused an estimated $340,000 in damages – the equivalent of almost $9 million today.
Even though there were 6,000 federal and state troops, 3,100 police, and 5,000 deputy marshals in Chicago fighting the strikers, they were unable to prevent the violence from growing, and on July 7 an attack on the federal troops caused soldiers to fire into the crowd killing at least four and wounding at least 20. With the deaths of strikers, their rioting began to lose momentum.
Eugene Debs and four other union leaders were arrested and later released on $10,000 bond. As the strike began to fail, Debs tried to get the American Federation of Labor to join them with sympathy strikes. The AFL leaders refused. Then Debs tried to abandon the strike, proposing to the railroad owners, who had hired replacement workers, that they rehire their original workers except those accused of strike crimes. His proposal was turned down.
By the end of the month, 34 people had been killed, the strikers were dispersed, the troops were gone, the courts had sided with the railway owners, and Debs was in jail for contempt of court. On August 2 the Pullman works reopened and on August 3 the strike was declared over.
Debs went to prison, his American Railway Union was disbanded, and Pullman employees signed a pledge that they would never again unionize. Other than the American Federation of Labor and the various railroad brotherhoods, industrial workers' unions were effectively stamped out and remained so until the Great Depression.
Notwithstanding a unanimous Supreme Court decision validating Cleveland's actions, Governor Altgeld continued to protest that, in breaking the Pullman strike, President Cleveland had put the federal government at the service of the railway owners. Altgeld would become an outspoken opponent of Cleveland’s nomination at the upcoming 1896 Democrat convention.
The Pullman strike had made national news. President Cleveland realized that he had to do something to curry favor with the growing labor movement, which viewed him with contempt. Moreover, people across the nation continued to protest Cleveland’s actions. Six days after the strike had ended an Illinois congressman introduced a bill establishing a national holiday called Labor Day to recognize – and for all practical matters, to appease – the American worker. It passed both houses unanimously and Cleveland signed it into law. Samuel Gompers, head of American Federation of Labor, which had sided with the government in its effort to end the strike by the American Railway Union, spoke out in favor of the holiday.
George Pullman died of a heart attack two years after the strike on October 19, 1897. He was hated to the end. His family was so concerned that his corpse would be desecrated by former employees that he was buried at night in an eight-foot deep tomb with floor and walls of steel reinforced concrete then covered with asphalt and more steel rails and concrete. Pullman will have a hard time getting out of that on Resurrection Day.
Grover Cleveland was the first Democrat to be elected president after the Civil War. He is the only president to serve two non-consecutive terms in that office, and it was his intention to be nominated by his party in 1896 and win a third term – the first president at the time to do that. That made him anxious to placate organized labor and to cooperate with a Republican House and Senate and the Republican congressman who proposed the establishment of Labor Day.
But it was not to be. Cleveland could not shake his handling of the Pullman strike. Altgeld made sure the convention was reminded of it. William Jennings Bryan won the Democrat nomination but went on to lose the general election to Republican William McKinley – who was followed by two more Republican presidents.
Labor Day has come to symbolize the end of summer, although technically summer does not end until the autumnal equinox, which falls on September 23 this year. For trivia collectors, Waffle House, the southern cultural icon, opened its first restaurant in 1955 on Labor Day in Avondale Estates, a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia. For fashionistas and the acolytes of Miss Manners, white clothing is not worn after Labor Day. And for the sports-minded, Labor Day is the official beginning of the NFL regular season. But it all began with a railway car business, a recession, a labor strike, and a reelection campaign over 110 years ago.
That’s why we don’t have to work this Monday.
It’s an interesting story.
In the days before airplanes and automobiles, the only way to travel from town to town was by train. The network of tracks laid in the second half of the 19th century made the country mobile and allowed people to travel from coast to coast and border to border.
One of the entrepreneurs who capitalized on America’s increasing mobility was George Pullman. Rail travel in his day alternated between boredom and hunger, but Pullman solved both problems with his eponymously named sleeper car, also called the “palace car,” and later his dining car. Pullman named his company The Pullman Palace Car Company.
After Lincoln’s assassination, George Pullman – always alert to PR opportunities – arranged to have the president’s body transported from Washington to Springfield in a sleeper, giving his invention national attention. The orders poured in from the railroads despite the fact that the cost of sleepers was more than five times that of a regular railway car. The Pullman car was marketed as "luxury for the middle class" – a market the railroads wanted to attract.
In 1867 the company introduced The President, a sleeper with an attached kitchen and dining car, which he called “the first hotel on wheels.” The food was as good as that served in the best restaurants and the service was without equal. The Delmonico, the world's first sleeping car devoted to fine cuisine, was launched the following year, and its menu was prepared by chefs from New York's famed Delmonico's Restaurant. Both the President and the Delmonico and subsequent Pullman sleeping cars offered first-rate service which was provided by recently-freed house slaves who served in the combined roles of porter, waiter, chambermaid, entertainer, and valet.
Pullman went on to create the “vestibule car” in 1887 which virtually made an entire train into a single car by enclosing the space between cars. An accordion connector kept out wind and noise and allowed passengers to move from car to car during their journey.
Pullman never sold his cars – he leased them and charged the railway lessees the premium they charged their passengers to travel in luxury. In time he would have 2,000 cars in operation, making his company worth $62 million in 1893 – $1.5 billion in today’s dollars.
Always pushing the innovation envelope, Pullman built the town of Pullman, Illinois just south of Chicago. It was designed to be a utopian workers' community that would be insulated from the moral and political seductions of nearby Chicago. No alcohol was permitted to be sold or consumed in his town.
The town of Pullman was feudally, organized: row houses for the assembly and craft workers, modest Victorians for the managers, and a luxurious hotel where Pullman himself lived and where visiting customers, suppliers, and salesman would lodge while in town. Housing construction was state-of-the-art with underground sewage lines, and the town included a library and church.
Residents were exclusively the employees of the Pullman Company. Like his rail cars, Pullman leased the housing to them at prices that were established to make a profit for the company’s shareholders, and the monthly rental was automatically deducted from paychecks, which were drawn on the Pullman bank. Pullman sold city water and gas to the residents – at a 10% markup, of course. The church was never occupied because there was no sect that could afford the rental.
A Pullman employee characterized life in Pullman, Illinois this way:
We are born in a Pullman house, fed from the Pullman shops, taught in the Pullman school, catechized in the Pullman Church, and when we die we shall go to the Pullman Hell.
Nevertheless, despite its fiefdom-like quality, the town and company operated successfully for more than a decade.
After years of economic expansion and national prosperity, however, a two-year recession began in 1893 during which the demand for Pullman cars declined markedly. Pullman has promised his shareholders a 6% return, and to keep that promise he laid off hundreds of workers and cut the wages of those who remained. Rents were not cut and it was not unusual for workers to have little to live on after rent. "I have seen men with families of eight or nine children crying because they got only three or four cents after paying their rent," one worker complained. Another described living conditions as "slavery worse than that of Negroes of the South."
On May 12, 1894, therefore, 3,000 employees walked out of the Pullman factory, demanding lower rents and higher pay. The American Railway Union, led by the young pacifist and socialist, Eugene V. Debs, came to the help of the striking workers by offering to represent them. Debs gave Pullman five days to respond to the union demands. But Pullman refused to negotiate, locked up his home, and left town, causing a fellow business owner to say of him, "The damned idiot ought to arbitrate, arbitrate and arbitrate! ...A man who won't meet his own men halfway is a God-damn fool!"
On June 26, all Pullman cars were cut from trains. Within four days, 125,000 workers on 29 railroads had quit work rather than handle Pullman cars. When union members were fired, entire rail lines were shut down. Chicago was under siege.
One consequence of the strike was the interruption of federal mail delivery. Debs agreed to let mail trains into the city, but rail owners mixed mail cars into all their trains. Interference with the mails is a federal crime, and on July 2 a federal injunction was issued against the leaders of the American Railway Union. The injunction claimed that the strike interfered with the delivery of mail, violated the Sherman Antitrust Act, and represented a threat to public safety. Among other things, it enjoined the union leadership from communicating with their subordinates. Absent any leadership, chaos began to reign among the strikers.
Illinois Governor John Altgeld, a pro-labor Democrat, refused to use the armed force of the state militia to break the strike, but he did not interfere with local authorities who were responding to the developing situation. Altgeld agreed to use the National Guard to protect private property if necessary, but above all, he did not want federal troops involved as strike breakers. Nevertheless, President Grover Cleveland, hemmed in by nervous railroad executives, interrupted mail trains, and a federally-issued injunction declared the strike a federal crime and deployed 12,000 troops to break it up.
The timing was awful. On July 3, Federal troops entered Chicago against Governor Altgeld's repeated protests. Early Independence Day celebrations were exploding fireworks, putting everyone on edge. When federal troops appeared, the strikers flew into a rage. What had been a reasonably peaceful strike now turned into complete mayhem. On July 4 mobs of people began tipping over rail cars and building blockades to combat the federal troops. The chaos was made worse because the injunction prevented the union leaders from communicating with the strikers. Therefore, the rioting grew and spread, fires were set to seven buildings, and by July 6 over 6,000 rioters had destroyed about 700 railcars and caused an estimated $340,000 in damages – the equivalent of almost $9 million today.
Even though there were 6,000 federal and state troops, 3,100 police, and 5,000 deputy marshals in Chicago fighting the strikers, they were unable to prevent the violence from growing, and on July 7 an attack on the federal troops caused soldiers to fire into the crowd killing at least four and wounding at least 20. With the deaths of strikers, their rioting began to lose momentum.
Eugene Debs and four other union leaders were arrested and later released on $10,000 bond. As the strike began to fail, Debs tried to get the American Federation of Labor to join them with sympathy strikes. The AFL leaders refused. Then Debs tried to abandon the strike, proposing to the railroad owners, who had hired replacement workers, that they rehire their original workers except those accused of strike crimes. His proposal was turned down.
By the end of the month, 34 people had been killed, the strikers were dispersed, the troops were gone, the courts had sided with the railway owners, and Debs was in jail for contempt of court. On August 2 the Pullman works reopened and on August 3 the strike was declared over.
Debs went to prison, his American Railway Union was disbanded, and Pullman employees signed a pledge that they would never again unionize. Other than the American Federation of Labor and the various railroad brotherhoods, industrial workers' unions were effectively stamped out and remained so until the Great Depression.
Notwithstanding a unanimous Supreme Court decision validating Cleveland's actions, Governor Altgeld continued to protest that, in breaking the Pullman strike, President Cleveland had put the federal government at the service of the railway owners. Altgeld would become an outspoken opponent of Cleveland’s nomination at the upcoming 1896 Democrat convention.
The Pullman strike had made national news. President Cleveland realized that he had to do something to curry favor with the growing labor movement, which viewed him with contempt. Moreover, people across the nation continued to protest Cleveland’s actions. Six days after the strike had ended an Illinois congressman introduced a bill establishing a national holiday called Labor Day to recognize – and for all practical matters, to appease – the American worker. It passed both houses unanimously and Cleveland signed it into law. Samuel Gompers, head of American Federation of Labor, which had sided with the government in its effort to end the strike by the American Railway Union, spoke out in favor of the holiday.
George Pullman died of a heart attack two years after the strike on October 19, 1897. He was hated to the end. His family was so concerned that his corpse would be desecrated by former employees that he was buried at night in an eight-foot deep tomb with floor and walls of steel reinforced concrete then covered with asphalt and more steel rails and concrete. Pullman will have a hard time getting out of that on Resurrection Day.
Grover Cleveland was the first Democrat to be elected president after the Civil War. He is the only president to serve two non-consecutive terms in that office, and it was his intention to be nominated by his party in 1896 and win a third term – the first president at the time to do that. That made him anxious to placate organized labor and to cooperate with a Republican House and Senate and the Republican congressman who proposed the establishment of Labor Day.
But it was not to be. Cleveland could not shake his handling of the Pullman strike. Altgeld made sure the convention was reminded of it. William Jennings Bryan won the Democrat nomination but went on to lose the general election to Republican William McKinley – who was followed by two more Republican presidents.
Labor Day has come to symbolize the end of summer, although technically summer does not end until the autumnal equinox, which falls on September 23 this year. For trivia collectors, Waffle House, the southern cultural icon, opened its first restaurant in 1955 on Labor Day in Avondale Estates, a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia. For fashionistas and the acolytes of Miss Manners, white clothing is not worn after Labor Day. And for the sports-minded, Labor Day is the official beginning of the NFL regular season. But it all began with a railway car business, a recession, a labor strike, and a reelection campaign over 110 years ago.
That’s why we don’t have to work this Monday.
This was a real eye-opener for me! I'll bet most people have no idea about the complete history of Labor Day. Today's events certainly brought out the worst of "labor" rhetoric. Would you mind if I link your blog on my Facebook page. I would like to invite more people to read it.
ReplyDeleteFeel free to link to the blog and thanks for reading!
ReplyDelete