LABOR DAY Chapter Four

 

The engine's stealthy approach to Kennisinton station was unmasked with a deafening burst of steam. The startled crowd shouted obscenities. A fireman leapt from the engine and ran toward the black switching stand between the tracks. 

Individuals broke from the throng to stop him and he was forced to swing his switching rod to ward them off. Another handful of figures bolted for the engine and mail car.  The railroad agents aboard shouted a muddled threat. 

And as the host reached for a handhold, shots rang out. The fireman broke free and was pulled back aboard as the black beast laboriously retreated whence it had come, leaving two dead and several wounded on the ground.

Also a victim of this brief confused shoot out at Kennisinton station was the American Railroad Union and it's president, Eugene V. Debs. And amazingly, yet another victim, shot in the foot actually, was the Democratic Party and its President of the United States, Stephen Grover Cleveland.

Just after dawn the day before, President Debs had been awakened by Federal Marshals, delivering the injunction issued by Judge Grosscup. The court order said while the owners of the railroad could act in unison, the workers must not. Reluctant to support the strike in the first place, Debs and the other leaders of the A.R.U. had sent over 4,000 telegrams urging the 125,000 strikers on 29 separate railroads  across the nation, to remain peaceful. Now they were forbidden to speak at all. That afternoon, on 4 July, when the injunction was publicly read out by Federal Marshals, the crowds at the Grand Crossing were unimpressed.

Also hearing the injunction on that Wednesday, were 2,000 members of the U.S. 15^th infantry regiment, with artillery and cavalry support, ...

...all under the command of the vain and ambitious Major General Nelson Appleton Miles. His soldiers first occupied the empty Pullman factory. 

 The soldiers had no training in policing, but that suited General Miles, who saw his mission as a war against unions in defense of western civilization.  Miles broke his men into squads and paired them with equal sized posses of railroad agents wearing badges - men the U.S. Marshal for the northern district of Illinois, John W. Arnold, called “worse than useless”.

Just before 4:00pm, Thursday, 5 July, one of Mile's joint posses approached Kennistion station again, this time aboard a Burlington and Ohio train. 

As the engine, tender and mail car approached 47th street and Loomis, they encountered an even larger crowd, angered by the morning's deaths and intent on blocking the tracks with railroad cars and a locomotive purposely derailed. Rocks were thrown, immediately, and again the “authorities” joined the violence - the soldiers firing from 2 to 6 rounds apiece while the marshals emptied their revolvers into the the crowd. Six more were killed on the spot.

According the Chicago newspapers, among the 20 or so wounded were “Henry Williams, shot in the left arm, Tony Gajewski, shot in the right arm, John Kornderg, stabbed with a bayonet and not expected to live, an unidentified woman, shot in the right hip, an unidentified man, shot through the liver and not expected to live, and an unidentified 17 year old boy shot in the stomach and expected to die.

Now that blood had been drawn, on Friday, 6 July, General Miles reformed his men into battalions and dispatched one to the 375 acre Chicago Stock yards. Their presence allowed trains, and Pullman Cars to pass. As night approached, a frustrated mob of 6,000 vented their anger instead on the smaller less protected northern extension called the Panhandle Yards. It earned it's nickname because the Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Chicago and St. Louis Railroad, which owned and operated the property, was based in the southern suburbs of Pittsburgh – in the northern panhandle of West Virginia. 

On this Chicago site hundreds of mostly empty cars were resting, guarded by just 12 policemen. The officers were shoved and bullied, but none were seriously injured, and no shots were fired. The rioters systematically set the entire rolling stock ablaze.

Two companies of the 15^th Infantry fired volley after volley and then charged into the crowd. Several blocks away, saloon owner John Kerr, was wounded while tending to his customers. That bullet had passed through four walls to strike him. Innocent spectator William Anslyn, was over a city block from the confrontation when he was shot in the back. Two days later he died. Another spectator, elderly Charles Klynenberg, was standing in front of his own home at 4847 Loomis Street when a soldier charged toward him. Klynenberg ran toward his front door but was stabbed three times in the back. He died within minutes. A young woman, standing on her roof a block away was shot and fell dead, into her brother's arms.

Validation for the worker's version of the Pullman shootings of 1894 could be found in the Presidential Commission on the 4 May, 1970 shootings at Kent State University. 

Under similar conditions, 28 members of the Ohio Nation Guard unleashed 67 rounds on about 2,000 angry, rock throwing protesters - a similar situation to the strikers of 1894.  In 1970, four were killed on the spot, another 9 were wounded. The closest wounded demonstrator to the soldiers was Joseph Lewis Jr. He was 71 feet away from the soldiers, and was, of course, unarmed and had thrown no rocks. 

The closest fatality was Jeffrey Miller, who was 265 feet away. The commission concluded, “...the indiscriminate firing of rifles into a crowd...were unnecessary, unwarranted, and inexcusable.” And the same could be said for the 1894 official murders committed in the name of protecting railroad property, and crushing workers seeking justice for fellow workers.

That night, General Miles told the press, “...the injured men are alone to blame....The firing...was strictly in accordance with orders from this office, (and) was necessary for the public welfare and justified by the circumstances. I think now that the mob knows that the troops will fire without hesitation when ordered. The trouble is nearly over.” And it was, for the railroads.

Said Col Thomas A. Anderson, “The army is not an enemy of Labor nor a friend of Capital. It is simply an instrument of popular power.” But nobody believed that version of reality anymore.

A lot of railroad property was destroyed in those first days of July, but not all of the arson was committed by strikers. Some, perhaps even most of the fires, were set by company thugs, to justify the armed response.  And the most notorious fire of 6 July, the burning of the Columbia Exposition's "White City, made of plaster and wood..” was probably set by young boys playing with matches.

Almost from the day it opened, the Columbia fair grounds had suffered numerous fires, including one on 11, July 1893, in which 16 had died. Large sections burned again in January of 1894. Still, without any evidence, the press in July of 1894 , and most historians since, have blamed the strikers.

The quality of the deputized “Marshals” would be shown the very next day, Saturday, 7 July, when Deputy Marshal T.J. Ketcham accidentally shot and killed fellow deputy marshal Donald G. Goodwin while in the safety of their offices. But the truth did not matter much anymore.

The General Managers practice of attaching Pullman cars to even coal trains had brought rail traffic to a halt across much of the nation. Factories were closing, because of disruptions to the supply chains, putting millions out of work. Seeing public support for the Pullman workers evaporate, Eugene Debs offered a sad compromise, asking only that his A.R.U. members be rehired. Instead the G.M.A. hired scabs.

On that Saturday afternoon came yet another bloody confrontation at 49th and Loomis Streets. Hit with rocks the 2nd Regiment of the Illinois National Guard fired a hundred rounds into a mob and followed it up with another bayonet charge. When the mob finally dispersed, they left a hundred dead and wounded on the ground, with an unknown number of wounded were carried off. 

On Wednesday, 11 July, 1894, Debs and three other A.R. U. officials were jailed, charged with conspiring to “interfere with the transport of the mails, and violation of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act", which had been intended to be used against corporations, like the railroads. They were also charged with violating the injunction. The strike then quickly fell apart, and by the middle of August it was all over. The railroads lost over a million dollars in damages to equipment (all insured)  and another $80 million in lost revenue. But they smashed the A.R.U. and set worker's rights back for another half century. 

Although defended by Clarence Darrow, Debs was sentenced to 6 months in federal prison. He came out a proud socialist, calling not for strikes but revolution. 

Grover Cleveland tried to sooth enraged workers with the creation of a worker's holiday, Labor Day. But the memories of murder and betrayal ensured that Cleveland would be last Democratic President until 1912, when Theodore Roosevelt's Bull Moose party split the Republicans and let Woodrow Wilson slip into the White House. But after that brief aberration, it would take the Great Depression to break the Republican stranglehold on the Presidency,

The man who had started it all, George Pullman, died three years later, on 19 October, 1897. He was so fearful of workers seeking to insult his body that it took two days to pour the 18 inches of steel reinforced concrete which still protects his coffin,

Working conditions on railroads after the strike would be shown by the fate of Howard F. Collins, the youngest son of Grand Crossing Superintendent Thomas Collins, who had tried to talk the switchmen out of striking on 25 June, 1894.  After graduating High School in May of 1896, 12 year old Howard went to work as a conductor.  Westinghouse had patented a pneumatic braking systems back in 1869, but like many railroads, the Illinois Central refused to pay the royalties to use. So, like all conductors, young Howard was required to clamber from car to car, to turn the brake wheel on each car in turn.

And on the Saturday night of 12 September, Howard was applying brakes for a train approaching the Grand Crossing, when,  near 76th Street,  he slipped and fell between the cars. The boy was dragged 36 feet.  His right arm and collar bone were broken, his was spine severed. He died three days later, on 15 September. In gratitude for his father's sacrifice the Illinois Central carried the boy's broken body back to the family plot, in Ontario, Canada, for free. The Illinois Central did not fully use Westinghouse brakes until well into the 20th Century, when it was finally required to by law.

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LABOR DAY Chapter Three

 

Behind the heavy oak doors of the second floor club room the incessant click/clack of the telegraphs 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 had quickly spread to Missouri, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Nevada, California, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Oregon, and North Dakota. But the epicenter remained  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,  lack of 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 bulging 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 Chicago's 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 strike, 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 now 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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