Labor Day Chapter Three

 

Behind the heavy oak doors of the second floor club room the incessant click/clack of the telegraph was feeding a mounting panic. That morning – Wednesday, 26 June, 1894 - the secretary of the General Managers Association (G.M.A.) dutifully noted each catastrophe as it was reported over the wires. The Railroad Workers strike quickly spread to Missouri, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Nevada, California, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Oregon, and North Dakota. But the epicenter was in Chicago.

 “A.T.& S.F. (Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe) switching engineers, firemen, switch men and foremen in Chicago...went out at midnight....Kansas City switch men refuse this morning to handle Pullman cars. Switch Men...operators and shop men in New Mexico, gone out. Chicago & Alton —No demonstration as yet. Chicago & Erie....the tower man was badly injured by the mob...Chicago and Eastern Illinois, No men refused to work as yet.” The two words hung in the air, inspiring even more paranoia; as yet.

Built by railroads to service their passengers, the olive tinted sandstone of the Grand Pacific Hotel projected solidity and permanence. But after only 21 years,  modern plumbing and electricity were already driving the six story edifice to obsolesce.  In a year it would be torn down, to rise again at half its size but higher.  And today's hysteria in the club room was just another indication of the failure of “Gilded Age” money men to hold back progress and social change. Still they held onto power because each day they did put more money in their already filled pockets.

Like spiders feeling their web, reporters eagerly waited at head of the grand staircase, should the managers of the 24 railroads servicing Chicago release a joint announcement.  But despite the constant stream of messengers coming and going from the club room, the General Managers were too experienced to show the outside world any blatant joint action, for fear of exposing themselves to the three year old Sherman Anti-Trust act, choosing instead to exercise their power in a shadow play.

The G.M.A. was created by the owners – with congressional approval - in 1872 to solve the “time problem” Every city was it's own time zone, which made coherent schedules almost impossible. Ten years later the G.M.A. had created the four national time zones - Eastern, Central, Mountain and Pacific. 

Now, under the expert leadership of ex-Confederate Colonel Henry Stevens Haines, the “Chicago scale” set wages and working practices for the entire railroad industry. The G.M.A. now represented 
12 railroads with 40,000 miles of track, 221,000 employees - 25% of all railroad workers nationwide -  with net earnings, as of 30 June, 1894, of $102, 710.00.  Such trusts were now illegal, but the unspoken Chicago G.M.A. agreement kept wages low, hours long and working conditions dangerous. They also black listed nationwide any workers who agitated for better working conditions or higher wages. 

When the switch men refused to open the gates at the Grand Crossing on 25 June, the men were immediately fired, as were any others who supported the Pullman boycott. The American Railway Union promised to assist any fired man, and negotiate to get their jobs back. The press was even sympathetic.  Eugene V. Debs told the nation and warned his union members, “We shall not attempt to cut Pullman cars out of trains, but we shall do all in our power to prevent them from being placed in trains...We do not intend to resort to violence under any circumstances, and if violence is attempted against the property of any railroad company we will send our own men to protect that property....we shall do all in our power to peaceably prevent the running of Pullman sleepers." But the G.M.A. had adopted a plan to destroy the union.

On Friday, 22 June, 1894, even before the ARU and the Switchmen's association decided to support the Pullman strikers, the G.M.A. met with managers of the Pullman Company and jointly decided it was “...the lawful, rightful and duty of....railway companies....to resist...” the Pullman boycott, and to “...act unitedly.” They had decided on a two step policy.

Step one was for the obstinate and inflammatory George Pullman to abandoned his Chicago mansion and retreat to his new summer mansion, “Castle Rest”, half a mile offshore in middle of the St. Lawrence River. 

The press fished around “Pullman Island” for weeks but their lines were only teased when the Sleeper King whispered that he was “...too tired to talk.” That did not sound too obstinate or inflammatory – unless you had been forced into poverty by the man.

More to the point, the General Managers Association decided to attach mail and Pullman cars to as many trains as they could, no matter how short their run. Thus, when the unions refused to move Pullman equipment they were also refusing to move the United States Mail. And that gave the federal government an excuse to get involved in the strike, on the railroad's side. And Democratic President Grover Cleveland's Attorney General needed little encouragement.

At 59 years of age, Bostonian Richard Oleny (above) was just the latest in a long line of railroad lawyer/ politicians going back to Abraham Lincoln, who made his financial and political fortunes  representing the Illinois Central Railroad.  Forty years later Mr. Oleny was paid $8,000 a year as AG in Cleveland's second term, but Oleny's yearly retainer from the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad was $10,000. The C.B. & C. also hosted the General Managers Association in their headquarters at the Grand Pacific Hotel.

The man Oleny supposedly worked for, Stephen Grover Cleveland,  was the first Democratic President since the Civil War.  He won the popular vote again in 1885 but was defeated by Republican manipulation of the Electoral College.  Cleveland's rematch victory in 1892  depended upon a new coalition between the solid racist "Jim Crow" south - who, in the words of Alabama Senator John T. Morgan, "I hate the ground that man (Cleveland) walks on" -  and the growing industrial working class voters in the northern states. However Oleny had no doubt which was the most favored member of that coalition. 

Oleny quickly dispatched 5,000 “special” federal marshals to Chicago and other hot spots across the nation “to protect railroad traffic”.

More significantly, as he had done in April against Coxey's army, Olney sought a broad injunction to prevent union officials from “compelling or inducing” any railroad employees “to refuse to preform any of their duties”. This injunction was granted by federal judge Peter Stenger Grosscup (below) , who owed his federal seat on the Northern District of Illinois to the influence of none other than George Pullman.

And Grosscup's (above) ruling, granted five days after the start of the boycott, on Tuesday, 3 July, 1894, even prohibited union officers, such as reluctant rebel Eugene Debs, from all communications with his members. Even Deb's telegrams urging his members to avoid all violence were prohibited. The New York Times accurately described Grosscup's ruling as a “Gatling gun” of an injunction.

The Chicago police could not be counted upon to provide the spark needed to create the images the G.M.A. wanted. The police officers of Grand Crossing had contributed $400 of their own money to help feed the starving Pullman strikers. They would enforce the law, but they were not going to turn a blind eye to violent acts committed by railroad agents which would be used to implicate the strikers. 

That was why the Special Federal Marshals had been brought in. They did not know the locals. They had no idea who the local troublemakers were, or the local peacemakers. 

It was a playbook that would be used again in the summer of 2020, when once again the wealthy  sought to portray a largely peaceful protest as a violent anarchy.  In the summer of 1894 the ruling class had already picked their enemy, who they would blame these strikes on - not the Sleeper King, George Pullman, but the founder of the American Railway Union,  Eugene Debs.

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