Chapter 18
By the 1890s Chicago had fully recovered from the fire of 1871, and the city fathers were eager to debut their darling child to the world. The 1889 Exposition Universelle, a world’s fair in Paris that featured a thousand-foot iron tower designed by Alexandre Gustave Eiffel, inspired American politicians and business leaders to ponder how they might outdo the French and assert commercial and technical preeminence for the United States. The approaching quadricentennial of Columbus’s landing in the New World provided the occasion, and the principal cities of the country vied for the honor. New York, Washington, and St. Louis made serious proposals, but when Congress—which would underwrite the fair—finally voted, Chicago won out.
The architectural firm of Burnham and Root took charge of the planning, but before it got far John Root suddenly died. Daniel Burnham paid his partner the appropriate respects in public, yet privately he fumed. “I have worked,” he said. “I have schemed and dreamed to make us the greatest architects in the world. I have made him see it and kept him at it. And now he dies. Damn! Damn! Damn!” Burnham pressed on, enlisting Frederick Law Olmsted, the designer of New York’s Central Park and most recently of the California university Leland Stanford dedicated to the memory of his deceased son, to carve a fairgrounds from swampland along Lake Michigan south of the Loop. Louis Sullivan, Burnham’s Chicago rival, lately feted for the new Chicago Auditorium, would design the centerpiece structure: the transportation building. Frank Lloyd Wright, Sullivan’s young assistant, would help. George Ferris volunteered to make the world forget Eiffel and his tower by engineering something more impressive: a giant structure of iron that would rotate, lofting visitors high and sending them soaring above the fairgrounds and the city. George Westinghouse, the inventor of the railroad air brake, which was saving hundreds of lives each year, and recently the developer of electrical dynamos, or generators, won the contract to power the fair. Thomas Edison, Westinghouse’s foe in the “battle of the currents”—alternating current (Westinghouse) or direct current (Edison)—lost the power contract but won the consolation prize of lighting the fairgrounds with tens of thousands of his incandescent bulbs.
Burnham envisioned a “white city” of gleaming neoclassical structures set among lagoons and greenswards. Sullivan grumbled that Greece and Rome were no model for a progressive country; besides, he detested decoration and insisted on letting function dictate form. He ignored Burnham’s directions and built what turned out to be the sensation of the fair. But the other architects conformed to Burnham’s blueprint, albeit more slowly than he wished. As opening day approached, Burnham had to figure out how to get the buildings painted white in time. A New York painting contractor, Francis Millet, was brought in. Millet and his crews devised a novel method of applying the mixture of white lead and oil—through hoses and nozzles from tanks pressurized by air. The “whitewash gang,” Burnham called them, and their spray equipment, even while launching a revolution in the painting industry, finished the Chicago job with just hours to spare.
The World’s Columbian Exposition, as it was formally styled, opened on May 1, 1893. (Burnham could never have made a deadline of the actual four-hundredth anniversary, in October 1892; but anyway no one wanted to hold a fair during Chicago’s winter.) Half a million people crammed the grounds that first day. President Cleveland came from Washington; the Infanta Eulalia arrived from Spain. The organizers found two direct descendants of Columbus. Governor John Peter Altgeld greeted the guests on behalf of the state of Illinois.
The throng gawked at a telescope donated by Chicago railroad magnate Charles Yerkes to the University of Chicago. They ogled the latest weapons technology from Germany’s Krupp works. Edison displayed his phonograph and the Kinetoscope, a forerunner of the motion picture projector. The exhibit of the American Bell Telephone Company enabled fair-goers to communicate by long-distance telephone with friends in New York. Many visitors got their first direct appreciation of standard time zones (adopted by American railroads during the 1880s) by observing the fair clocks, which were connected electrically to the Naval Observatory in Washington, an hour ahead of Chicago. George Ferris’s giant wheel wasn’t finished when the fair began, but its size and shape drew gasps nonetheless.
The fair brought out reformers of every stripe and cause: prohibitionists, who found themselves swimming upstream against the river of liquor that flowed through Chicago for the fair; consumer safety advocates, who protested the shocking conditions in the slaughterhouses of the city; bicyclists, who agitated for better roads on which to ride their two-wheeled vehicles; labor unionists, who hoped to promote solidarity; silverites, who plumped the white metal; feminists, who demanded the vote for women. Exotic dancer Little Egypt made a feminist statement of a different sort, against conventional notions of a woman’s role; the size of the crowds at her performances suggested substantial agreement, at least among those many who stayed for the encores.
A touching scene unfolded after Susan B. Anthony crashed a meeting of managers discussing whether to keep the fair open on Sundays. Anthony, despite having no voice in the decision, volunteered that it should stay open. A sarcastic male inquired whether she’d prefer having a son of hers—if she had had any—attend the Wild West show Buffalo Bill Cody was putting on at the fair or go to church. She opted for Cody’s show. “He would learn far more,” she said. When Cody heard of her sacrilege, he sent her tickets. She sat in the best box in the house, and at the beginning of the show he galloped up and saluted her. She stood—“as enthusiastic as a girl,” a friend remarked—and waved her handkerchief in reply.1
LIKE MOST SUCH expositions, the Chicago fair cost a great deal of money to stage, and the fair organizers and sponsors were counting on heavy attendance to recoup their investment. The enormous opening day crowd boded well for the bottom line. But before the week was out, the fair was blindsided by an event that seemed to have no connection whatsoever to the exposition—unless one assumed that all things capitalistic were connected, one to the other. Since the passage of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act in 1890 the world financial markets had looked askance at the United States, wondering whether the Treasury would or could fulfill its promise to redeem the dollar for gold. The emergence of the Populist party increased the worries; should the agrarian radicals have their silver way, the dollar would plunge in value, leaving dollar holders drastically short. During the early months of 1893 the Treasury received an unusual quantity of dollars for redemption, till the government’s gold reserve approached the $100 million minimum generally thought necessary to maintain investor confidence. On April 22, just nine days before the fair opened, the gold reserve briefly touched the threshold, causing throats to catch on both sides of the Atlantic.2
The stock market shared the nervousness, as it always did. Railroads were especially vulnerable. Jay Gould had died of consumption, or tuberculosis, the previous December, and though editors and other keepers of the public conscience bade the arch-speculator good riddance—Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World called Gould “one of the most sinister figures that ever flitted bat-like across the vision of the American people”—many investors had come to perceive him as a stabilizing force in the railroad industry. Two months later the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad closed its doors. The Reading wasn’t the nation’s largest railroad, but it was one of the oldest, and its failure made brokers and investors wonder who or what was next.3
They got their answer the week the Chicago fair opened. It wasn’t a railroad that went down but the National Cordage Company—the “rope trust.” National Cordage was arguably less central to the country’s economy than the Reading Railroad, although it did command four-fifths of the market for rope and related binders. But the already skittish markets took the failure as cause for panic. Banks folded by the scores. In June the British government of India, one of the last large consumers of silver, declared that it would no longer purchase the metal, sending silver stocks, which had risen after the Sherman silver law and upon the emergence of Populism, into a death spiral. In July the New York, Lake Erie & Western Railroad (the successor to Jay Gould’s Erie) failed. This drove the financial system off a cliff, despite the swift repeal of the Sherman law. Now banks by the hundreds—more than six hundred in all—closed their doors, leaving depositors pounding helplessly outside. Persons solvent just weeks before found themselves bereft and disoriented. Henry Adams awoke one day to discover that his inherited savings had all but vanished. “As a starting point for a new education at fifty-five years old,” he later wrote with an equanimity he didn’t feel in the moment, “the shock of finding oneself suspended, for several months, over the edge of bankruptcy, without knowing how one got there, or how to get away, is to be strongly recommended.” Though a student of other people’s money, Adams had never much worried about his own. Suddenly he had to, but to little avail. “The more he saw of it,” he wrote of the panic, “the less he understood it. He was quite sure that nobody understood it much better. Blindly some very powerful energy was at work, doing something that nobody wanted done.” Yet the effects of this imponderable, implacable force were inescapable. “Men died like flies under the strain, and Boston grew suddenly old, haggard, and thin.”4
By this point in America’s economic development, bank drafts and checks played a larger role in the day-to-day money supply than currency, and the collapse of the banking system caused a strangling shrinkage of the money supply. Interest rates soared, capital investment clanked to a halt, inventories clogged warehouses, new orders vanished, businesses failed by the thousands, and workers lost jobs by the millions. Twenty years further into the industrial age than at the last such panic, twenty years further from the comparative safety net of the farm, the American economy suffered that much more. Evictions followed layoffs, and hunger followed both. The tide of immigration slowed, and even reversed for some countries, but unemployment continued to rise.
THE DEPRESSION INTENSIFIED the strain between labor and management. After the Haymarket riot of 1886, organized labor had retrenched. Smaller, focused unions of skilled workers emerged from the remnants of larger groups; among the most successful skilled unions was the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers, with some twenty-five thousand members, concentrated in the mills around Pittsburgh. The state of the art in steel production was Andrew Carnegie’s Homestead works, seven miles east of Pittsburgh on the bank of the Monongahela River, where Carnegie had installed open-hearth furnaces and other equipment that dramatically improved efficiency. Yet these very improvements threatened the wages and even the jobs of members of the Amalgamated union, as the innovations allowed Carnegie to employ unskilled, nonunion workers in place of the Amalgamated men. Carnegie and the union first collided in 1889, when he proposed a 25 percent wage reduction. The Amalgamated leadership rejected the proposal but was forced to accept a three-year deal pegging wages to steel prices. If prices rose, the workers would share the gain; if prices fell, they’d suffer the loss, albeit only till prices hit a floor of $25 per ton of steel billets. The company would swallow any loss beyond that.5
As the contract approached its end in the summer of 1892, the price of billets had fallen substantially, and the company proposed to lower both the sliding scale and the minimum. Carnegie fancied himself an enlightened employer. “For twenty-six years I had been actively in charge of the relations between ourselves and our men,” he wrote, “and it was the pride of my life to think how delightfully satisfactory these had been.” Doubtless sensing that his record might soon be spoiled, he delegated authority to Henry Clay Frick and departed for a holiday in Scotland. Frick had no such unsullied record as Carnegie and few compunctions about utilizing whatever leverage he had over the workers and their union. Frick made clear that the company’s offer was nonnegotiable; the workers could accept it or seek work elsewhere. His demeanor and overall approach indicated he’d be just as happy if the union rejected his proposal, as he could then replace the union workers with non-union men. This interpretation gained credence when company workmen constructed a twelve-foot-high fence about the Homestead works, with steel gates, barbed wire, and rifle slits. What the workers didn’t know was that Frick had meanwhile contracted with Robert Pinkerton, the son and successor of Allan Pinkerton, to provide a private security force to the Homestead plant.6
The June 30 deadline arrived without agreement. Frick informed the workers that the plant would close till July 6; any who wished to return could apply for jobs then, but as individuals rather than union members. The Amalgamated union had laid in supplies and saved what cash its members could spare; it organized a strike committee to assist members in need and maintain solidarity. Union members, in round-the-clock shifts, kept watch over the plant lest Frick try to slip scabs onto the premises.
On July 5 union sympathizers at Bellevue, Pennsylvania, not far from Homestead, reported the arrival by train of the Pinkerton men, who boarded two barges for the final approach to Homestead. Before the barges came within sight of the plant, the workers had spread the alarm. An informal militia of workers raced to the waterfront below the plant, and as the barges, propelled by a tug, drew near, the workers opened fire.
How much the Pinkertons knew of the details of the dispute between the company and the union is hard to tell; their surprise at the violence their arrival provoked suggests that Robert Pinkerton hadn’t informed them of the depth of the workers’ determination. When Pinkerton’s lieutenants began handing out rifles, some of the agents declined, preferring not to fight it out with the workers. Yet others accepted the weapons and returned the workers’ fire.
After the captain of the tugboat grounded the barges on the bank of the Monongahela, several of the Pinkertons tried to get off. The leader of the squad, Frederick Heinde, boldly declared that he and his men had been hired by the steel company to secure the steelworks, and they intended to do precisely that. The workers, he warned, had better step aside. The workers refused, and when Heinde attempted to force his way past, one of the workers shot him in the thigh. Several more shots followed, one hitting Heinde in the shoulder, another hitting a Pinkerton standing beside Heinde and killing him instantly. Four more Pinkertons were wounded. Their fellows returned the fire, killing two workers and wounding about twenty others before the agents returned to the barges and the workers retreated up the bank.
An ugly standoff ensued. The Pinkertons suffered from the summer heat and the close quarters of the barges, and the thought of what the angry workers might do to them. Some of the workers tossed sticks of dynamite at the barges; these effected little damage to the steel craft but seriously dented the Pinkertons’ morale. Another group of workers pumped hundreds of gallons of oil into the river upstream from the barges and attempted to set it alight as it drifted down. But the fuel wouldn’t catch. Still another group improved on the incendiary idea, commandeering a raft, filling it with oily refuse, setting it ablaze, and pushing it downstream toward the barges. This variant came close to succeeding, but the current redirected the fiery vessel at the last moment and spared the Pinkertons from roasting.
Gradually the leaders of the workers recognized that further bloodshed, even if justified as retaliation for those killed, would jeopardize popular sympathy for the workers’ cause. As the afternoon waned, this view caught hold among the rank and file. When the Pinkertons expressed a desire to have done with private policing, the union leaders offered to let them leave the barges and get out of town. The Pinkertons accepted. But they had hardly set foot on the bank when the union leaders lost control of the workers, who fell upon the Pinkertons quite brutally. Most of the agents were cuffed and kicked; some were beaten unconscious. Two died. Those who remained on their feet took refuge in the town theater, where the union leaders posted guards to protect them from further abuse. Finally a special train sent by Henry Frick from Pittsburgh fetched them and carried them off.7
THE UNION LEADERS were right to be concerned about a loss of popular sympathy. Diehard unionists praised the Homestead workers for standing up to arrogant capital, but neutral observers—and of course apologists for management—tended to think the workers had gone too far. This feeling intensified two weeks later when a man posing as an employment agent from New York entered Frick’s office and fired at the steel executive twice from close range. The first bullet clipped Frick’s ear before penetrating his neck; the second just missed his spinal column below the skull. Frick’s assistant knocked the gunman’s hand awry as he fired a third shot, which missed. The intruder thereupon pulled a knife and stabbed Frick three times—in the hip, in the leg, and just over the kidney. Finally Frick, bleeding profusely, and the assistant wrestled the intruder down.8
Investigation revealed the man to be a Russian-born anarchist named Alexander Berkman. He had no connection to the strike beyond reading about it in the papers, which gave him the idea that he might begin dismantling the capitalist order by killing Frick. In fact he could not have done Frick a greater favor. Frick didn’t have to equate the Amalgamated union with anarchy; the workers’ own actions against the Pinkertons and now this assassination attempt did the job for him. When his newborn son, Henry Jr., coincidentally died just days later, the image of the brave, beleaguered man of business—“man of steel” was the favored phrase—crowded out the specifics of the dispute with the Amalgamated union. The governor of Pennsylvania sent the state militia to prevent additional violence, and under the guns of the guard Frick hired replacements for the union men. By the time the union conceded defeat, in November, it had become irrelevant to the operations of Carnegie Steel. “We had to teach our employees a lesson,” Frick wrote Carnegie. “And we have taught them one that they will never forget.”9
THE LESSON—that capital would protect its prerogatives, by force if necessary—was amplified two years later. Workers at the Pullman Palace Car Company in Pullman, Illinois, just south of Chicago, lived in one of the finest company towns in America. Modeled after Saltaire in England, where Titus Salt had built a community for his woolen workers, and similar projects in Essen, Germany, and Guise, France, the town of Pullman boasted neat brick houses with gas, water, sewer connections, and basements. Fenced yards contained tidy lawns and flower beds; a larger commons included a lake, an artificial waterfall, a concert stage, and athletic fields. Although more densely populated than parts of many cities, the town had a mortality rate far below the urban norm. Epidemics—of cholera, yellow fever, typhoid—that still scourged American cities bypassed Pullman. It employed but a third of the national average of physicians per capita and scarcely produced enough illness to support those.10
But there was something about Pullman that bothered the inhabitants. Visitors noticed it right away. “The corporation is everything and everywhere,” a journalist from Pittsburgh recorded. “The corporation trims your lawn and attends to your trees; the corporation sweeps your street, and sends a man around to pick up every cigar stump, every bit of paper, every straw or leaf; the corporation puts two barrels in your back yard, one for ashes and one for refuse of the kitchen; the corporation has the ashes and refuse hauled away.… The corporation does practically everything but sweep your room and make your bed, and the corporation expects you to enjoy it and hold your tongue.”11
In flush times the residents of Pullman—the workers in the company shops and their dependents—accepted the trade-off. For a decade after its founding in the early 1880s the town thrived. But the Panic of 1893 and the ensuing depression punished the Pullman company severely. The company sold luxury items—the sleeping and parlor cars favored by first-class passengers—and when traffic slumped, the roads postponed new purchases. George Pullman was a paternalist, but before that he was a capitalist, and when orders ceased he slashed his workforce by three thousand men and women and cut piecework pay rates by as much as half. Had he trimmed rents in the company town and prices at the company stores, the workers might have tolerated the wage cuts, but he didn’t, treating his landlord role as separate from his role as employer. The workers suffered for several months before deciding to strike. On May 11, 1894, they walked out of the company shops.
For a month the strike proceeded uneventfully. Pullman might have evicted striking workers—for arrears of rent, if nothing else—but he didn’t. Skeptics said he feared a public backlash; cynics contended he wanted the arrears to mount so he could squeeze the workers even further. The town remained calm, if tense.
Things changed when the American Railway Union entered the dispute. The ARU wasn’t a year old, having been founded just the previous summer in Chicago. Less ambitious than the Knights of Labor, which had aimed to organize the entire working class, but more ambitious than the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers, which focused on skilled labor within a single industry, the ARU proposed to organize the railroad industry as a whole. From engineers to porters (except for black porters: African Americans weren’t accepted as members) and brakemen to boilermakers (the union included not simply persons who operated railroad equipment but also those who built the locomotives and cars, which was how it became interested in the Pullman strike), the ARU hoped to weld the rail workers into an organization powerful enough to meet the railroad owners as their equal. In his dreams, ARU president Eugene V. Debs envisioned the rail union as the first step toward something broader. “The forces of labor must unite,” he told the second annual meeting of the ARU in June 1894. “The dividing lines must grow dimmer day by day until they become imperceptible, and then labor’s hosts, marshaled under one conquering banner, shall march together, vote together, and fight together, until working men shall receive and enjoy all the fruits of their toil. Then will our country be truly and grandly free, and its institutions as secure and enduring as the eternal mountains.”12
But the millennium had to start somewhere, and Pullman appeared as good a place as any. At the June 1894 meeting, as the Pullman strike entered its second month, the ARU voted to refuse to handle Pullman cars.
This raised the stakes dramatically, for it brought most of the American railroad network into play. Debs and the union hoped to pressure railroad management into leaving the Pullman cars on the sidings; if the railroads did so, Pullman must cave in before long. But if the managers defended Pullman, then a relatively minor contest in a Chicago suburb would become a major test of strength over the nation’s transportation lifelines.
In fact the railroads, represented by the General Managers’ Association, were itching for just such a test of strength. The ARU had won a surprising victory in a smaller strike against James J. Hill’s Great Northern, and the other owners, while cursing Hill as a class traitor, determined to crush the union before the idea of industry-wide solidarity caught on. The ARU, by backing the Pullman strikers so explicitly, played into the managers’ hands.
The nature of the contest was no secret. “While the boycott is ostensibly declared as a demonstration of sympathy in behalf of the strikers in the Pullman shops,” the New York Times remarked, “it in reality will be a struggle between the greatest and most powerful railroad labor organization and the entire railroad capital.”13
Yet it was an egregiously unequal fight. The railroads enjoyed the advantage not merely of their much greater financial resources but of a friendly federal government. Richard Olney had made a lawyer’s fortune representing railroads before becoming Grover Cleveland’s attorney general—an appointment he accepted only after being assured by Cleveland that he could continue his private practice and receive his customary retainers from the railroads. Olney had advised his rail clients on breaking strikes in the past, with singular success. Indeed, one such broken strike, against the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy, helped convince Debs of the futility of the brotherhood model of organizing rail workers, driving him to the industrial approach embodied by the ARU. In the Pullman strike, Olney and Debs squared off again.14
Olney very quickly decided that the ARU’s boycott was illegal. The railroads refused to uncouple the Pullman cars, and ARU members refused to handle the trains, many of which included cars carrying mail. Olney might have determined that the railroads were at fault and arranged an order for them to shunt the Pullman cars from trains transporting the mail, but, true to form, he took the opposite tack. He blamed the union and persuaded a judge to issue an injunction against the ARU boycott.
The basis for the boycott was an imaginative reading of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. Congress had passed the Sherman law after years of agitation by victims and other opponents of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil and its monopoly-minded mimics. The law barred “every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several states, or with foreign nations.” During discussion of the bill, spokesmen for labor worried that it might be applied against unions. John Sherman asserted that such was not the intent at all. “Combinations of workingmen to promote their interests, promote their welfare, and increase their pay if you please, to get their fair share in the division of production, are not affected in the slightest degree, nor can they be included in the words or intent of the bill,” he said.15
This may have been Sherman’s view, and it was probably the view of most of those voting in favor. But it didn’t take corporate lawyers long to craft an interpretation that persuaded courts to include unions under the act’s proscription. “A strike is essentially a conspiracy to extort by violence,” a federal judge in Milwaukee declared the month before the Pullman strike began. “Whatever other doctrine may be asserted by reckless agitators, it must ever be the duty of the courts, in the protection of society, and in the execution of the laws of the land, to condemn, prevent, and punish all such unlawful conspiracies and combinations.” The Chicago court to which Olney applied for an injunction in the Pullman case agreed in principle if not in detail, and the ARU was ordered to move the mail.16
Although the strike put the whole national rail network at risk, both sides—the railroad managers and the ARU—reckoned that Chicago was where the contest would be won or lost. Twenty-six rail lines converged on Chicago, making it the choke point of the nation’s transport system. Not by accident had the General Managers’ Association and the ARU alike chosen the city for their headquarters. Olney believed that the strike must be defeated at Chicago, where the ARU and sympathizers were already well mobilized, lest it mushroom out of control. “It has seemed to me that if the rights of the United States were vigorously asserted in Chicago, the origin and center of the demonstration,” he wrote to the Chicago federal attorney’s special counsel (who was also chief counsel to the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railroad), “the result would be to make it a failure everywhere else and to prevent its spread over the entire country.”17
To enforce the injunction against the strikers, who besides halting trains committed vandalism against rolling stock and fixed facilities, President Cleveland directed Nelson Miles, still the commander of the Westarn army, to deploy federal troops against the strikers. Cleveland took no chances; speaking through chief of staff General John Schofield, the president ordered “the entire garrison at Fort Sheridan—infantry, cavalry, and artillery—to the lake front in the city of Chicago.”18
The troop deployment made the tense situation explosive. General Miles was as determined to crush this labor rebellion as he had been to crush the Ghost Dancers. “Men must take sides either for anarchy, secret conclaves, unwritten law, mob violence, and universal chaos under the red or white flag of socialism on the one hand, or on the side of established government,” he declared. Eugene Debs feared that the government action made much larger violence almost inevitable. “The first shot fired by the regular soldiers at the mobs here will be the signal for a civil war,” Debs warned. “I believe this as firmly as I believe in the ultimate success of our course. Bloodshed will follow, and ninety percent of the people of the United States will be arrayed against the other ten percent.”19
For a time it appeared matters would come to that. Strikers, sympathizers, and elements of Chicago’s floating population—their numbers swollen by the depression—surged through the streets of the city on the evening of July 4. The crowd tipped over railcars and hurled bricks through windows. The excitement brought out many more people; the next day the mob, by now utterly beyond the control of Debs and the ARU, numbered perhaps ten thousand. The rioters wrecked and burned more cars and swarmed across the Union Stock Yards, where they challenged the federal troops, who responded with bayonet and cavalry charges. Arsonists set a fire that was whipped by the infamous Chicago winds into a blaze that consumed part of the fairgrounds left over from the Columbian Exposition and conjured terrifying memories of the 1871 conflagration.
The next evening the arson expanded. A security guard shot two rioters, enraging the crowd, which marched as a body on the Panhandle yards below Fiftieth Street in South Chicago. A reporter for the Chicago Inter Ocean watched in amazement.
From this moving mass of shouting rioters squads of a dozen or two departed, running toward the yards with fire brands in their hands. They looked in the gloaming like specters, their lighted torches bobbing about like will-o’-the-wisps. Soon from all parts of the yard flames shot up and billows of fire rolled over the cars, covering them with the red glow of destruction.… It was pandemonium let loose, the fire leaping along for miles and the men and women dancing with frenzy. It was a mad scene where riot became wanton and men and women became drunk on their excesses.20
As satisfying as the destruction may have been to the primal urges of the mob—and as profitable as the associated looting may have been to those rioters who took care to empty the cars of marketable items before setting them afire—the violence proved a public-relations disaster for the ARU. The Chicago riots triggered outbreaks in several other cities across the Midwest and West, and although many of those persons smashing, burning, and looting had no connection with the ARU, anxious observers could easily fear that what the rail workers had started might turn into a revolution. Cleveland received requests for federal troops from half a dozen governors; the president responded by sending a total of sixteen thousand soldiers into the riot zones. The federal troops in Chicago were supplemented by Illinois militia ordered out by Governor Altgeld, who resisted the introduction of the federal troops but nonetheless felt obliged to take action. The soldiers in Chicago engaged the rioters with bayonets and gunfire; ultimately more than a dozen people were killed and more than fifty wounded. Fighting in the other states between rioters and federal and state troops produced forty additional deaths and many more injuries.21
Public comment almost universally condemned the rioters and demanded that the president take even stronger action. Harper’s Weekly called the strike and boycott “blackmail on the largest scale” and said the country was “fighting for its own existence just as truly as in suppressing the great rebellion.” The Washington Post ran an article under the banner “Fired by the Mob, Chicago at the Mercy of the Incendiary’s Torch.” The Chicago Tribune denounced the “riotous emissaries of dictator Debs,” while the Chicago Inter Ocean asserted, “This is not a fight of labor against capital. It is a criminally injudicious attack of certain forces of organized labor upon every other kind of labor and upon all popular interests in common.” Chicagoans and citizens of other afflicted cities deluged the White House with appeals for sternness. “I write for the interest of my wife and babies,” a Chicago man wrote, “and pray God to guide you and show you the terrible volcano on which we stand.”22
Cleveland responded with an executive proclamation that stopped just short of placing Chicago under martial law. All persons involved in the riots would be considered “public enemies”; all other persons had better stay home or risk being mistaken for rioters. “Troops employed against such a riotous mob will act with all the moderation and forbearance consistent with the accomplishment of the desired end,” the president said, “but the stern necessities that confront them will not with certainty permit discrimination between guilty participants and those who are mingling with them from curiosity and without criminal intent.”23
THE SHOW OF military force suppressed the violence, but what broke the back of the strike was the arrest of Debs and other ARU leaders. Debs was charged with conspiracy in inciting the riots; he was also charged with contempt of court for violating Olney’s injunction. The conspiracy charge was potentially the more serious but also the more pedestrian; union leaders had been charged with conspiracy for years. Debs beat the conspiracy charge, although not without difficulty. His attorneys, Stephen Gregory and Clarence Darrow, mounted a defense that seemed to be persuading the jury that if anyone had been conspiring, it was the railroad managers. But shortly before the scheduled closing arguments, one of the jurors became mysteriously ill. Debs and the lawyers moved to replace the juror, but the judge refused. He suspended the trial, only to have the prosecution, after some face-saving delays, drop the charges.
The contempt charge was the more ominous, for it turned on the legality of the injunction in the first place. Injunctions were relatively new in labor actions, and the scope of the injunction in the Pullman case was unprecedented. Debs and his colleagues were barred from engaging in any action that even indirectly obstructed the mails—which was to say they were forbidden from engaging in ordinary strike activities.
Debs lost in the lower courts and appealed to the Supreme Court, which took the case in light of the obvious importance of the principle at issue. Stephen Gregory denounced injunctions in labor cases as a subordination of democracy to capital. A judge, unelected and irresponsible, could frustrate the will of legislatures; he could circumvent grand and petty juries. “No more tyrannous and arbitrary government can be devised than the administration of criminal law by a single judge by means of injunction and proceedings in contempt,” Gregory asserted. “To extend this power generally to criminal cases would be absolutely destructive to liberty and intolerable to a free people. It would be worse than ex post facto legislation. No man would be safe; no limits could be prescribed to the acts which might be forbidden nor the punishment to be inflicted.” Clarence Darrow, junior to Gregory and hardly the celebrity he would become, appealed to the justices’ humanity and patriotism.
When a body of 100,000 men lay down their implements of labor, not because their rights have been invaded, but because the bread has been taken from the mouths of their fellows, we have no right to say they are criminals. It is difficult for us to place ourselves in the position of others, but this Court should endeavor to do so and should realize that the petitioners in this case are representatives of the great laboring element of this country, upon which this country must so largely depend for its safety, prosperity, and progress.24
The justices were unmoved. All nine found for the government in favor of injunctions. Associate Justice David Brewer, writing for the court, cited the commerce clause as granting the federal government jurisdiction over rail transport, and he asserted that to deny the federal courts the authority to issue injunctions would impair this jurisdiction. Should the government be required to wait until criminal obstruction of commerce had been committed before taking action, the interests of the entire nation would be at the mercy of small groups. “There is no such impotency in the national government,” Brewer declared. “The entire strength of the nation may be used to enforce in any part of the land the full and free exercise of all national powers and the security of all rights intrusted by the constitution to its care. The strong arm of the national government may be put forth to brush away all obstructions to the freedom of interstate commerce or the transportation of the mails. If the emergency arises, the army of the nation, and all its militia, are at the service of the nation, to compel obedience to its laws.”25
This carte blanche to federal strike-breaking sealed the doom of the Pullman strike, and indeed of the ARU. From jail and the various courtrooms, Debs found it impossible to coordinate the activities of the strikers, who were already overmatched by the federal and state troops. The boycott of the Pullman cars disintegrated, and the trains began running again. The workers at Pullman, deprived of the leverage the ARU boycott had provided, had no choice but to capitulate. The railroad managers’ victory became complete when the ARU, having staked its credibility on the Pullman strike, disintegrated in the wake of the strike’s failure. Not for two more generations would the industrial principle of labor organization take hold in the United States. In the interim the injunction would be used again and again to handcuff labor leaders as the courts continued to side with capital.
Yet Debs refused to be discouraged. The failure of the Pullman strike simply made him more radical; he entered jail a moderate unionist and emerged a socialist. The courts had been corrupted by capital, he declared after serving six months on the contempt charge. “If not this, I challenge the world to assign a reason why a judge, under the solemn obligation of an oath to obey the Constitution, should, in a temple dedicated to justice, stab the Magna Carta of American liberty to death in the interest of corporations, that labor might be disrobed of its inalienable rights and those who advocated its claim to justice imprisoned as if they were felons.” But the support of the many ordinary people who had expressed their confidence in him—including the hundred thousand who cheered his release from jail—gave him hope, for it suggested that change was coming. “It means that American lovers of liberty are setting in operation forces to rescue their constitutional liberties from the grasp of monopoly and its mercenary hirelings. It means that the people are aroused in view of impending perils and that agitation, organization, and unification are to be the future battle cries of men who will not part with their birthrights.”26
IT WAS DOUBTLESS small comfort to the defeated rail workers, as they straggled back to their jobs, to know that others were worse off than they. Millions of Americans had no jobs at all during the depression of the 1890s, and until the economy revived they had little hope of finding any. Government officials lamented the high unemployment but lacked the knowledge of economic theory and the tools of monetary policy to do much about it. The Populists thought they had the answer, in the form of free silver. They may have been right; eventually the government would learn to loosen the money supply to prevent recessions from deepening into depressions. But theirs was a minority view for the time being; conventional wisdom dictated that the economy would have to find its own way to recovery.
If Jacob Coxey had known either more or less about economics he might have agreed. Coxey had operated businesses in Pennsylvania and Ohio; a quarry in the latter state earned him a modest fortune. In 1893 he traveled to Chicago for the Columbian Exposition, where he marveled at the sights and especially the sound of the voice of a Californian named Carl Browne, an accomplished huckster and agitator who currently flogged free silver and reincarnation, not necessarily in that order. Coxey’s material success had failed to fill his soul. “I felt within a craving and a longing on the subject of religion which the churches seemed entirely unable to satisfy,” Coxey recalled. “There were many undefined beliefs in my mind which I was unable to concentrate into any concrete form, and when Carl Browne explained to me his theories of reincarnation, I knew in a flash that it was what I had been searching for.”27
Browne’s promise of future lives didn’t prevent Coxey from focusing on his current existence and a pet enthusiasm of his own. His travels across the Ohio Valley had convinced him that the nation desperately needed better roads. Railroads sufficed for big cargoes and long journeys, but for the farm-to-market coming and going that occupied the daily and weekly lives of most Americans, the dirt surfaces they traveled on were an anachronistic disgrace. In spring the roads’ mud swallowed wagons to the hubs and horses to the flanks; in summer their dust made hacking, gasping ghosts of travelers; in winter their icy ruts broke axles and bones. Coxey had long believed the country couldn’t prosper without better roads, and the depression of the 1890s reinforced this conviction. Viewed properly, the depression was a godsend, for—by Coxey’s thinking, publicized in Bulletin Number 1 of his Good Roads Association—it provided just the excuse the government needed to get to work on the roads. Among the millions of able-bodied unemployed were men who would eagerly take shovel and mule team to the nation’s roads. All that was required was for Congress to appropriate $500 million.
Carl Browne’s contribution to the scheme was the idea of a march to Washington. The lawmakers could ignore petitions and circulars; they’d be harder pressed to ignore a caravan of voters. Coxey’s Bulletin Number 3 announced a starting date of Easter Sunday, March 25, 1894, and the starting point of Massillon, Ohio, Coxey’s home. The marchers would arrive at Washington by May 1. The movement needed a name; Browne supplied the “Commonweal of Christ.” It needed a banner; he commissioned an oil painting of the Savior, for which he personally sat.
The gloom of the depression had been darker than ever that winter, and Massillon’s merchants were eager for anything that would bring business to town. The local paper set a young reporter on the Coxey-Browne story; his dispatches went out over the Associated Press wires and provided light relief from the prevailing misery. Browne made good copy, and Coxey chimed in with extravagant promises. “The success of my undertaking is assured,” he said. “I shall camp on the Capitol steps at Washington with 500,000 men.” Letters brought promises of reinforcement. Pittsburgh pledged 1,500 recruits to what the papers began calling “Coxey’s Army,” to the chagrin of Browne. Wabash, Indiana, volunteered 1,000. One H. B. Clark of Illinois offered to field 150 baseball players, who would scrimmage townsfolk along the way to raise money. A convicted murderer in Chicago said he wanted to come but unfortunately had a date with the hangman.28
On the morning of departure the army numbered somewhat more than a hundred, including undercover agents sent by the nervous chief of Pittsburgh’s police to reconnoiter the radical column headed his way. The press corps was smaller, but only by about half; editors throughout the region decided the Coxey story was the best one going. Carl Browne kept the reporters entertained. He gave interviews by the dozen, revealing such secrets as that he was a partial reincarnation (whatever that meant) of Jesus Christ. He lectured on the currency question, in favor of silver. And he introduced, so to speak, the journalists to “the Great Unknown,” a mysterious fellow who appeared one day preaching class warfare of the poor against the rich. The reporters naturally inquired into his background. He silenced them with a ferocious glower. “I am the Great Unknown,” he said, “and the Great Unknown I must remain.”29
All the coverage of Coxey’s army inspired imitators. In San Francisco jobless men gathered by the hundreds, pledging to join Coxey in Washington if they could find rail passage. By the time their number topped a thousand, local elected officials and police were pleading with the Southern Pacific to carry the men east, simply to get them out of town. The company tried to charge full fares; when the men refused to pay, it knocked the price down and the journey began. All went smoothly to Utah, where the Southern Pacific lines linked up with those of the Union Pacific. The latter company hadn’t been consulted about the discount for the protesters and declined to match it. The men insisted, the railroad resisted, and now the Utah authorities began to sweat. The depression was punishing the mining industry; the last thing the state needed was another thousand angry drifters. The men started walking toward Wyoming before the official pressure and the bad publicity prompted the Union Pacific management to hitch some empty boxcars to an eastbound train and let the men climb aboard.
A similar problem developed at Council Bluffs, Iowa, where the Union Pacific tracks terminated. The plight of the California Coxeyites attracted the interest of some locals who didn’t like the railroad and determined to help out by hijacking a train and offering it to the travelers. Some of the protesters would have happily accepted the favor, but others, preferring not to lend credence to allegations that they were bums and hooligans, declined for the group.
A separate western wing of the Coxey movement suffered no such scruples. Two hundred unemployed Montana miners asked the Northern Pacific for cheap passage to Washington; when the company refused, the miners and some sympathetic railmen simply stole a train and headed east. The company found a federal marshal and deputies and dispatched a second train in pursuit. Across the mountains and plains of Montana the Coxeyites flew, with the law on their tail. A rockslide had closed a tunnel near Bozeman; the runaway train stopped, and the men got out to move the debris aside. But the chase train was closing in, and to thwart capture the engineer of the Coxey train called the diggers back on board, summoned a full head of steam, and crashed into the blockage. Rocks flew, sparks shot into the air, metal shrieked, but the train got through and continued east. The Northern Pacific management arranged another roadblock, this one deliberately contrived by dynamite. But the artificial landslide only partly crossed the track, and it scarcely slowed the fugitives. The company, which had the signal advantage of controlling the telegraph lines, then ordered its station managers to drain the water tanks all the way to Dakota. Without water, the fugitive train would quite literally run out of steam.
Yet the company didn’t count on the sympathy for the hijackers among the Montana populace. The Northern Pacific was as hated as many railroads in that era, and townsmen along the route offered assistance to the Coxeyites. At Billings they threw a feast for the hungry miners; when the chase train rolled into town and the deputies tried to seize the fugitives—shooting several, one fatally—the townsfolk rallied to the Coxeyites’ defense. They threw rocks, swung sticks and metal pipes, and gave every appearance of wanting to massacre the Pinkertons, as they called the deputies. The Coxeyites, their stomachs full and their ranks now swollen to five hundred, tore off east again.
By this time the chase had made headlines across the country. “Blood Flows from Coxeyism,” the New York Times blared. “Battle between Law and Anarchy.” Grover Cleveland and Richard Olney grew alarmed. The attorney general persuaded the president to mobilize federal troops; the Northern Pacific obliged by sending a special train to fetch them. The troop train intercepted the miners at Forsyth, Montana, where they had to stop for spare parts. In the dark the troops surrounded them with leveled bayonets; the Coxeyites had no choice but to yield.30
The dramatic escapades in the West made the progress of the main column of Coxey’s army appear mundane by comparison. Coxey and Browne led their men through the mud of Pennsylvania’s spring, reminding themselves of the need for better roads. They crossed into Maryland wet, footsore, and famished; Browne and the Great Unknown began bickering. The animosity grew until the Unknown attempted a mutiny. Coxey called for a vote of the marchers; they sided with the Unknown by 158 to 4, whereupon Coxey declared, “I cast 154 votes for Brother Browne.” While the rank and file puzzled over how Coxey rated so many votes, the Unknown conceded defeat and left, almost as mysteriously as he had arrived. (Reporters eventually revealed that they had discovered the Unknown’s identity—he was one A. P. B. Bozarro, a purveyor of patent medicine whom Browne had met at the Columbian Exposition—but had kept his secret to improve their stories.)31
The army trailed into Washington at the end of April, just hours before Coxey’s May Day deadline. The capital police turned out in force, augmented by federal soldiers from the Washington Barracks and Fort Myer. The police refused Coxey’s request for a parade permit and threatened to arrest him if he proceeded. He answered that he and his men had marched four hundred miles and didn’t intend to be stopped four miles short of their goal. The police hovered but didn’t descend upon the column as it proceeded down Fourteenth Street and then turned up Pennsylvania Avenue toward Capitol Hill. Curious crowds thronged the sidewalks, wondering whether there would be a riot.
The column halted at the east entrance to the Capitol grounds. Coxey and Browne conferred, then approached the Capitol steps. A policeman on horseback blocked the way and told them to turn back. Coxey, now within just yards of his goal, refused. He darted past the officer, hurdled a stone wall, and ran through the crowd toward the building. Browne, apparently by plan, tore off in another direction. The police gave chase.
They caught Browne, who resisted with surprising vigor. Dozens of onlookers joined him, making a melee of the affair. Batons cracked heads and broke arms till Browne was manhandled into a police wagon.
The diversion allowed Coxey to reach the Capitol steps. He began to speak but was cut short by two policemen who dragged him away and threw him bodily back into his carriage. The crowd started chanting his name and seemed ready for a set-to. Had Coxey been a little more belligerent, a full-scale riot might have erupted. But he merely acknowledged the crowd, said a few words no one could hear above the shouting, and led his army back down Capitol Hill to a campsite a short distance away.
The protest fizzled to an end in the following days. Coxey was arrested the next morning and charged, along with Browne, with breaking an 1882 law governing the use of the Capitol grounds. The trial and the guilty verdict elicited derision among persons with any sympathy for Coxey’s cause. “Every detail of the proceedings was stamped with the effort on the part of the prosecutor to make a mountain out of a mole hill,” the Omaha World-Herald hooted. “The crime: Carrying banners on the Capitol grounds! Trespassing on the grass! Great Caesar! If the several kinds of fools who are managing the anti-Coxey crusade at the national capital were in the employ of Coxey, they could not do him better service than they are doing today.”32
Coxey spent twenty days in jail. The army dissolved; those who had homes to return to headed there; those who didn’t simply wandered off.
The Western Coxeyites never got anywhere near Washington. The Californians stranded without rail transport in Iowa eventually took to the Des Moines River in homemade boats. They drifted down to the Mississippi, where friendly tugboat captains pushed them upstream into the Ohio. They reached Cincinnati before fatigue, boredom, and the knowledge that they had long missed Coxey and the main branch of the army caused them to give up the quest. The Montana contingent sat in jail in Helena till the citizens of that state decided they didn’t want to feed and house the miners any longer. The city funded a flotilla of riverboats and sent the Coxeyites down the spring-swollen Missouri. They got as far as St. Louis before their enthusiasm gave out, almost three months after Coxey’s arrest in Washington.33