Pullman Strike is a national train strike in the United States that runs from May 11 to July 20, 1894, and is a turning point for US employment law. It pitted the American Railway Union (ARU) against the Pullman Company, the main railway, and the federal government of the United States under President Grover Cleveland. Strikes and boycott shut down a lot of goods and passenger traffic west of Detroit, Michigan. The conflict began in Pullman, Chicago, on May 11 when nearly 4,000 employees of the Pullman Company plant started a wildcat strike in response to recent wage reductions.
Most of the factory workers who build Pullman cars live in Pullman's "corporate town" on the South Side of Chicago, Illinois. Industrialist George Pullman has designed it as a model community. Pullman has a diverse workforce. He wants to hire African-Americans for certain jobs in the company. Pullman uses ads and other campaigns to help bring workers to his company.
When his company fired workers and lowered wages, it did not reduce the rent, and the workers called for strikes. Among the reasons for the strike were the lack of democracy in the city of Pullman and its politics, rigid paternalistic control over workers by companies, excessive water and gas levels, and refusal by companies to allow workers to buy and own homes. They have not yet formed a union. Founded in 1893 by Eugene V. Debs, ARU is an organization of unskilled railroad workers. Debs took the ARU organizer to Pullman and listed many unsatisfied factory workers. When the Pullman Company refused any ARU recognition or negotiations, ARU strikes against the factory, but shows no sign of success. To win the strike, Debs decides to stop Pullman's car movement on the railroad track. Over-the-rail Pullman employees (such as conductors and porters) do not break down.
Debs and ARU called a massive boycott of all trains carrying Pullman cars. It affects the most western rail line from Detroit and at its peak involves about 250,000 workers in 27 countries. The Railroad Fellowship and the Federation of American Workers (AFL) opposed the boycott, and the General Association of railway companies coordinated the opposition. Thirty people were killed in response to the unrest and sabotage that caused a $ 80 million loss. The federal government gets orders against unions, Debs, and other boycott leaders, ordering them to stop harassing the train carrying mail cars. After the strikes refused, President Grover Cleveland ordered in the Army to stop the strikers from blocking the train. Violence broke out in many cities, and the strike failed. Defended by teams including Clarence Darrow, Debs was convicted of violating a court order and sentenced to jail; ARU then dissolved.
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During a period of severe recession (Panic of 1893), Pullman Palace Car Company cut wages as demand for new passenger cars fell and company revenues declined. A worker delegation complains that wages have been deducted but not leased in their corporate housing or other expenses in the company's city. The owner of the company, George Pullman, refuses to lower the rent or go to arbitration.
Maps Pullman Strike
Boycott
Many Pullman factory workers joined the American Railway Union (ARU), led by Eugene V. Debs, who supported their strike by launching a boycott in which ARU members refused to run a train containing Pullman cars. At the time of strike about 35% of Pullman workers were ARU members. The plan was to force the train to bring Pullman to compromise. Deb started a boycott on June 26, 1894. Within four days, 125,000 workers on 29 railways had "left" the job instead of handling Pullman cars. The railway coordinated their responses through the General Manager's Association, which was formed in 1886 and included 24 lines linked to Chicago. Trains begin to employ replacement workers (strikebreakers), which increases hostility. Many blacks were recruited as problem solvers and crossed the picket line, because they feared that the racism expressed by the American Railway Union would lock them out of the other labor market. This adds to the racial tension of union difficulties.
On June 29, 1894, Debs held a peaceful meeting to garner support for a strike from railroad workers in Blue Island, Illinois. Afterwards, groups in the crowd became angry and set fire to nearby buildings and deflected locomotives. Elsewhere in the western countries, sympathizers sympathize prevents the transport of goods by walking outside of work, blocking railroad lines, or threatening and attacking strikers. This raises national attention and demand for federal action.
Federal intervention
Under the direction of President Grover Cleveland, US Attorney Richard Olney dealt with the strike. Olney has been a train attorney, and still receives $ 10,000 followers from Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Railroad, compared to $ 8,000 as Attorney General. Olney obtained an order in federal court that banned union leaders from supporting strikes and demanded that strikes stop their activities or face dismissal. Debs and other leaders of the ARU ignored the order, and federal forces were called to enforce it. While Debs is reluctant to start a strike, she throws her energy to set it up. He called the general strike of all union members in Chicago, but this was opposed by Samuel Gompers, head of AFL, and other unions, and failed.
City by city federal forces violated ARU efforts to shut down the national transportation system. Thousands of US Marshall and about 12,000 US Army troops, ordered by Brigadier General Nelson Miles, took action. President Cleveland wants the train to move again, based on its legal liability, constitutional for submissions. His lawyers argue that the boycott violates the Sherman Antitrust Act, and represents a threat to public safety. The arrival of the military and the deaths of the workers in the violence led to widespread violence. During the strike, 30 strikers were killed and 57 wounded. Damage to property exceeds $ 80 million.
Local response
Strikes affect hundreds of cities and cities across the country. The train workers were divided, because the established old Brethren, which included skilled workers such as engineers, firefighters and conductors, did not support labor action. ARU members support the action, and often consist of unskilled land crews. In many areas city dwellers and entrepreneurs generally support trains while farmers - many affiliated with populists - support the ARU.
In Billings, Montana, an important railroad, a Methodist local pastor, J. W. Jennings, supports ARU. In a sermon he compared Pullman's boycott to the Boston Tea Party, and attacked Montana State officials and President Cleveland for neglecting "the faith of Jacksonian fathers." Rather than defending "people's rights against aggression and oppressive corporations," he says party leaders are "the bending tools of the aristocracy of nobility that seek to dominate the country." Billings remained calm but on July 10, troops reached Lockwood, Montana, a small railway center, where troop trains were surrounded by hundreds of angry strikers. Quickly preventing violence, soldiers opened the line through Montana. When the strike ended, the train fired and blacklisted all the employees who had supported it.
In California, the boycott was effective in Sacramento, a labor camp, but weak in the Bay Area and minimal in Los Angeles. The strike continues as strikes reveal long-standing complaints over wage reductions, and show how unpopular the South Pacific Railroad is. Strikers engage in violence and sabotage; the company saw it as a civil war while the ARU proclaimed it was a crusade for the rights of unskilled workers.
Public opinion
Public opinion largely opposes strikes and supports Cleveland's actions. Republicans and Eastern Democrats support Cleveland (the pro-business wing of the party's northeastern wing), but southern and western Democrats and populists have generally denounced him. Chicago mayor John Hopkins supported the strikers and stopped the Chicago Police from interrupting before the strike turned violent. Governor John Peter Altgeld of Illinois, a Democrat, denounced Cleveland and said he could handle all the disturbances in his country without federal intervention.
Broad media coverage and generally negative. A common metaphor in news and editorial reports describes boycotts as strangers fighting over patriotism expressed by militias and troops involved, as many new immigrants work in factories and on railroads. The editors warned the masses, aliens, anarchists, and legal defiance. The New York Times called it "the struggle between the largest and most important labor organizations and the entire capital of the railroad." In Chicago established church leaders denounced the boycott, but some younger Protestant ministers defended it.
Aftermath
Debs was arrested for federal accusations, including a conspiracy to block the letter and disobeyed the order directed at him by the Supreme Court to stop the barrier of the train and dismiss the boycott. He was defended by Clarence Darrow, a prominent lawyer, as well as Lyman Trumbull. At the conspiracy trial, Darrow argued that it was a train, not Debs and his union, who met secretly and conspired against their enemies. Feeling that Deb would be released, the prosecutor dropped an indictment when a jury fell ill. Although Darrow also represented Debs at the United States Supreme Court for violating federal orders, Debs was sentenced to six months in prison.
Early in 1895 General William M. Graham erected a memorial memorial at the San Francisco National Cemetery in Presidio, honoring the four 5th Artillery soldiers killed in a Sacramento train accident on July 11, 1894, during a strike. The train passes across a bridge bridge supposedly dynamite by union members. Graham's monument includes an inscription, "Killed by Strikers", his description is very defensive. Obelisk remains in place.
As a result of Pullman Strike, the state ordered the company to sell its ownership of the housing. In the decades after Pullman died (1897), Pullman became just a South Side neighborhood. It remained the largest company in the region before it closed in the 1950s. This area is a National Historic Landmark as well as the Chicago Landmark District. Due to the significance of the strike, many state agencies and nonprofit groups expect a lot of Pullman environmental revivals starting with Pullman Park, one of the largest projects. It was a $ 350 million joint development at the site of the old steel plant. The plan is to 670,000 square feet of new retail space, 125,000 square feet of environmental recreation centers and 1,100 housing units.
Politics
After being released from prison in 1895, President ARU Debs became a committed advocate of socialism, assisting in 1897 to launch the American Social Democracy, the pioneer of the American Socialist Party. He ran for president in 1900 for the first five times as head of the Socialist Party ticket.
Civil and criminal allegations were lodged against strike organizers and Debs in particular, and the Supreme Court issued a unanimous decision, In Re Debs, that rejected Debs' actions. Illinois Governor John P. Altgeld was furious at Cleveland for placing the federal government to serve the employers, and for refusing Altgeld's plan to use his country's militias rather than federal troops to maintain order.
The Cleveland Administration appoints a national commission to study the causes of the 1894 strike; he found the paternalism of George Pullman partly to blame and described the operations of his company's city to be "not American". In 1898, the Illinois Supreme Court forced the Pullman Company to relinquish ownership in the city, because its corporate charter did not allow such operations, and the land was annexed to Chicago. Most are now designated as historic districts, listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Labor Day
In 1894, in an attempt to reconcile organized labor after the strike, President Grover Cleveland and Congress set Labor Day as a federal holiday. Legislation for holidays was pushed through Congress six days after the strike ended. Samuel Gompers, who has sided with the federal government in an effort to end the strike by the American Railway Union, speaks for the sake of the holidays.
See also
- US labor law
- The history of railway transportation in the United States
- The killing of workers in labor disputes in the United States
References
Source
- Cleveland, Grover. Government and Chicago Strike 1894 [1904]. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1913.
- DeForest, Walter S. Periodic Press and Pullman Strikes: Analysis of Coverage and Interpretation of Highway Strikes in 1894 by Eight Journal of Opinion and Reporting MA Thesis. University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1973.
- Ginger, Ray. The Bending Cross: A Biography of Eugene V. Debs. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1949.
- Hirsch, Susan Eleanor. After Strike: The Labor Struggle Period in Pullman. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2003.
- Lindsey, Almont. The Pullman Strike: A Unique Story of Experiments and a Great Upheaval of Labor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1943.
- Lindsey, Almont. "Paternalism and Pullman Strike," American History Reviews, Vol. 44, No. 2 (Jan., 1939), pp.Ã, 272-89 at JSTOR
- Nevins, Allan Nevins. Grover Cleveland: A Study in Courage. (1933) pp.Ã, 611-28
- Papke, David Ray. The Pullman Case: Clash of Labor and Capital in Industrial America. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1999.
- Rondinone, Troy. "Keeping Rather: Cultivating Nationalism During Pullman Attacks," Gilded Age Journal & amp; Progressive Era 2009 8 (1): 83-109 27p.
- Salvatore, Nick. Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist. Urbana, IL: Illinois University Press, 1984.
- Schneirov, Richard, et al. (eds.) The Pullman Strike and Crisis of the 1890s: Essays on Employment and Politics. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1999.
- Smith, Carl. Urban Disorders and Forms of Trust: The Great Chicago Fire, Haymarket Bomb, and Model Town Pullman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
- Winston, A.P. "Significance of the Pullman Strike," Journal of Political Economy, vol. 9, no. 4 (Sept. 1901), pp.Ã, 540-61. In JSTOR
- Wish, Harvey. "The Pullman Strike: A Study in the Battle of the Industry," Journal of Illinois State Historical Society (1939) 32 # 3 pp.Ã, 288-312 at JSTOR
Primary source
- United States Strike Commission, Report on Chicago Strike in June-July, 1894. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1895.
External links
- Pullman Strike Timeline
- Chicago Strike
- Pullman Strike, Illinois During the Gilded Age 1866-1894, Illinois Historical Digitalization Project at the Library of Northern Illinois University
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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