LABOR DAY Chapter One

 

Grains of sand showered upon the smooth iron rails, as the 30 ton hissing beast desperately sought purchase. 

 Like a magician of old, with his gloved hands an engineer coxed the 7,000 horses of the Rodgers  locomotive, forward.  As the sand was crushed beneath the 6 foot drive wheels, the metal and wood millipede jerked at it's couplings, and laboriously began to move. 

Thirteen stories above, the tower clock read 9:30pm, Tuesday, 26 June 1894. When the number seven train pulled out of the Illinois Central Terminal (above) at Michigan Avenue and 12^th Street, Chicago, Illinois, it was already half an hour late.

Behind the coal filled tender the locomotive pulled two dark green Pullman cars, each 48 feet 4 inches long and 9 feet 3 inches wide, carrying 64 passengers, bound via the Main Line for St. Louis, Missouri, 260 miles and 6 hours away. 

But on this night, the number seven train would achieve only seven miles, getting only as far as the Grand Crossing, at 75^th street in South Chicago. What would stop this iron age dragon was not magic, but the collision of one massive ego and  the dreams of common working men being crushed like those grains of sand.

The ego belonged to 63 year old George Mortimer Pullman, "The Sleeping Car King".  He was, says Brandon Weber,  “...the kind of capitalist hated by his employees, his staff, and even some fellow capitalist and government officials."  But, by 1880,  his name was synonymous with luxury rail travel. His company was worth $30 million, and regularly paid stock dividends of 9 ½ %. 

His hand made chandler graced Pullman Palace cars “floated” on “paper wheels”, offering a ride so smooth the passengers slept soundly in their fold down berths (below) while traveling at 40 miles an hour. 

 In 1880 George Pullman consolidated his monopoly, building a new huge factory 12 miles south of Chicago. And he built a 100 acre town to house his 5,000 workers.

But it was a pantomime. The “paper wheels” were compressed for 3 hours under a 650 ton press, then dried for 6 to 8 weeks. Bolted between iron plates these cushions produced, at best, a marginal improvement. 

But George Pullman's advertising convinced the public to willingly pay a premium for not only his ubiquitous sleepers, but regular passenger and freight cars as well, even intercity trolleys – all emblazoned with the proud name of Pullman.

The 20,000 men, women and children of Mr. Pullman's town lived in attractive cottages, in neat repetitive rows, with a town hall, grocery stores, a library, even churches, all just across the railroad tracks from the Pullman factory.

But the “town” was another capitalist shadow play. It was built to make a profit.  There was no city hall, only an Arcade building (above), filled only with Pullman approved shops that paid rent to Mr. Pullman. There were no elected officials, only Pullman managers.  There was only one bar, for visitors and Pullman managers only. To the workers, beer was available only from street vendors. At a premium price, of course.

Workers were required to rent the cottages (above), at premium prices, well above rents charged in surrounding cities.  

Amenities, such as window blinds, were extra. Pullman even made $21,000 a year by overcharging for tap water and natural gas. Pullman inspectors could terminate an employee if the wife's housekeeping did not meet Pullman standards. The offenders were evicted and fired with 10 days notice. 

The village had no independent newspapers. Groceries offered credit, but at usury rates. The library (above) did not loan books, it rented them. 

And as one critic pointed out, George Pullman, "...wasn't a man to let you pray for free" - the churches rented only to Protestants for $60 a month - mostly stood empty. 

As one worker explained, “We are born in a Pullman house, fed from a Pullman shop, taught in a Pullman school (above), catechized in a Pullman church, and when we die we shall be buried in a Pullman cemetery and go the Pullman hell.”

And then in 1893 the Argentinian wheat crop failed, which set off a cascade of English banks calling in loans, including operating loans made to American companies like Pullman. Pullman Vice President Thomas H. Wickes announced 3,000 layoffs, and the income for Pullman carpenters was cut from $13 to just $7 a week. 

However, the rent for a Pullman cottage remained the same. The price for Pullman water and gas lighting stayed the same. 

Worker Thomas Healthcoate swore under oath that “...the average (pay after deductions)...was only 8 cents over the rent, and a man would have to keep his family for two weeks on it.” Finally, on 11 May, 1894, some 2,500  workers in the  Pullman plant peacefully walked away from their tools (above),   As another desperate worker explained, “We struck at Pullman because we were without hope.”

George Pullman, being an autocrat, then locked out the remaining 3,100 "loyal" workers who had stayed on the job. 

The irony is that the 39 year old founder of the American Railroad Union, Eugene Victor “Gene” Debs (above), disliked strikes, “...except as a last resort...”. He warned his members, “...if you are looking for a Moses to lead you out of this capitalist wilderness, you will stay right where you are...You must use your heads as well as your hands, and get yourself out of your present condition..” 

So in the spring of 1894, when George Pullman refused to submit the worker's complaints to arbitration, Debs still counseled compromise.  But on 21 June, a majority of union members voted to issue an ultimatum. Unless Pullman agreed to arbitration in five days all ARU men were to respect the strike by Pullman workers - even though barely a third of Pullman workers were ARU members. 

Early on the afternoon of that Tuesday, 26 June, five members of the The Switchmen Mutual Aid Union,  walked into the red brick and terra-cotta Ashland Block (above), at the corner of North Clark and West Randolph streets in Chicago. 

Sitting as it did, catty-cornered from the Cook County Court House, the Ashland Block was filled with lawyers (including Clarence Darrow) and corporations, including railroad offices. The ground floor Illinois Central ticket office faced Randolph Street (above right), the Pennsylvania Railroad ticket office was in the Mezzanine, and the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul railroad ticket office faced Clark Street (above, left). The five switchmen, all employed by the I.C. rode the elevator to the 4^th floor and entered suite 21, headquarters of the American Railway Union.

They had come to ask the union officers just what they were authorized to do when ordered to switch a train carrying a Pullman Car. The Switch Men were willing to support the Pullman factory workers and their starving families. But if they were fired – as they surely would be – would the American Railway Union support the members of the smaller Switchmen Mutual Aid Union,  with "strike pay" ? 

The elected officers of the ARU , including Eugene Debs (above, right), gathered in conference. It was, as the saying goes, “Crunch Time”. The ARU had to now put their money and the future of their union on the line - to pledge their lives, their fortunes and sacred honor, to paraphrase the Declaration of Independence – to support their  fellow workers, even if they were not members of their union. Were they willing to do that?

The answer, when it came, was a thunderclap. Yes. If ordered to allow any train including Pullman Cars, to cross any switch point, ARU members nationwide were to refuse. ARU engineers were not operate any locomotives pulling Pullman cars, until the Pullman Company ended the lockout and  agreed to submit worker complaints to arbitration. Although Union President Eugene Debs might be opposed to direct confrontation with railroad management, the union he had created just a year ago, was now committed to it. And it would happen first on the Illinois Central Railroad.

The I.C. was crucial because it leased it's tracks to Cornelius Vanderbilt's New York Central Railroads as well as his Michigan and his St. Louis lines. These 4 pairs of tracks ran south along the edge of Lake Michigan, before, at 53^rd street,  angling westward. Then, less than a mile after the Woodlawn Street station at 63^rd street, boom barriers required all trains to halt before the Grand Crossing at 75^th street.

The Grand Crossing had come into existence in 1850 after The Michigan Southern Railroad merged with the Northern Indiana and Chicago Railroad. The  purpose of this corporate merger, and the completion of the new line's terminal at South LaSalle Street Station (above), was to block the expanding Central Illinois from reaching downtown Chicago. 

But the Construction Chief for the I.C. was a 53 year old bull headed man named Roswell B. Mason. (above)  Mason kept his crews laying track until, in April of 1852, they were within a hundred yards of the four parallel Michigan Southern tracks at 75^th Street and Woodlawn Avenue.  The M.S refused to negotiate with the I.C. for a right-of-way.

So, after the sun set one night, thugs kidnapped the sole guard posted along the Michigan Southern right of way. And when the first Michigan Southern train arrived the next morning they discovered the Illinois Central tracks now passed right through the Michigan rails, on junctions called frogs.

They called what followed a frog war, but it was really a year long game of Russian roulette played with other people's lives. As soon as the I.C. had built it's new station (above) both railroads began to run trains through the 90 degree crossing at speed, with no warning between the companies.

Then on the Monday evening of 25 April, 1853, the game ran out when two passenger trains collided at the Grand Crossing, killing 18 out right and injuring another 40 souls. 

The political reaction was regulations which required  wooden gates - "boom barriers"-  blocking access to the crossing from all four directions. All trains were now had to stop short of the Grand Crossing and wait until switchmen - hired by both railroads -  could verify the crossing was clear before lifting the barriers and allowing each train to safely continue.

And that is how the Grand Crossing became the flash point in the Pullman Strike of 1894.

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GREED

 

I cannot conceive of a worse possible moment for the young man to deliver his lie. Two weeks before, the 3 day battle of the Wilderness had killed 2,246 men and wounded some 12,000 more.  Three days ago,  in the Shenandoah Valley, yet another Federal Army had been ambushed at the Battle of New Market, where 96 federal soldiers were killed, 520 were wounded and 225 were captured - 13% of the Federal troops committed on that field.

And this very morning, 18 May, 1864, General Grant was leading his weary army once again into battle at Spotsylvania Courthouse, which would kill 2,725 men, including legendary General John Sedgwick,  and wound another 13,400 men. It seemed as if everything the Federal government attempted in this third spring of Civil War, was producing only more blood. And, at 3:30am that morning, a young man had arrived with a missive, to seemingly drop the other shoe. 

It purported to be a bulletin from the Associated Press, which had been in business since 1848, and contained the text of a White House Proclamation. The operative passage began in the third paragraph. 

“In view...of the situation in Virginia...and the general state of the country, I, Abraham Lincoln (above)...by virtue of the power vested in me by the Constitution...call forth the citizens of the United States, between the ages of eighteen and forty-five years, to the aggregate number of four hundred thousand, in order to suppress the existing rebellious combinations...”

The reaction to news of a new half million man draft, in the city which the year before had produced three days of rioting (above) in response to Lincoln's first call for a draft, was expected to be even more violence. One hundred twenty had died in the summer of 1863, at least eleven African-Americans had been lynched, untold numbers beaten, and fifty large buildings had been burned down. Many on Wall Street took this as a sign the Federal government was losing the war, and they expected investors  to dump their stocks for gold.

At first glance the notice seemed legitimate. It was written on the same cheap oily tissue paper used by the Associated Press. But it had not arrived in the usual fashion. Several editors were suspicious, but with only moments before the deadline to start the presses, and fearing hesitation would mean their papers would be scooped by the competition,  three Democratic leaning papers rushed the story into the print – The World, the Journal of Commerce, and the Brooklyn Eagle. 

But the night editor of the New York Times, a Republican paper, did not recognize the handwriting, and found it had not been delivered in an AP envelope. The editor held his own presses while he dispatched a messenger for confirmation from the Associated Press. The AP editor promptly replied , “The 'Proclamation' is false as hell and not promulgated through this office. The handwriting is not familiar.”

By 9:00am Wall Street was in an uproar, with investors and brokers crowding all the newspaper offices (above), demanding an answer. Was the proclamation real or not? When the markets opened, the price of gold rose about 10%, but quickly fell back after Secretary of State William Seward, and Secretary-of-War Edward Stanton,  both telegraphed to all the New York papers that the report was  “an absolute forgery.” 

And if the Lincoln administration had stopped there everything would have been all right. But Lincoln himself ordered the Military commander in New York City,  General John Adams Dix (above), to seize the offices of the Journal of Commerce and the New York World, and to ”arrest and imprison...the Editors, proprietors, and publishers.” It seemed the bloody mess in Virginia was making everybody a little jumpy.

The Journal of Commerce was a small anti-slavery newspaper founded by Arthur Tappan and Samuel Morse, inventor of the telegraph, and founder of the anti-Catholic "Know Nothing" party. That paper opposed using force to put down the rebellion. So the Postmaster General had refused to deliver the JOC via the mail, crippling the paper outside New York City, where most of its 35,000 readers lived. 

William Cowper Prime (above), a lawyer, an artist and author and "near east enthusiast" as well as business manager of the JOC, wrote to his wife that afternoon, “Found on coming down town that we, in common with the World...had been hoaxed by a most ingenious scoundrel.” That evening Federal soldiers arrived to close down the paper and arrest the guiltless Mr. Prime.

Considerably less innocent was the two cent per copy, “New York World”. The paper was owned by the Democratic National Committee, and directed by the DNC chairman, August Belmont. In its pages anything with a whiff of Lincoln or Republicanism about it was opposed. Every day the paper was filled with articles warning of the threat of the ballooning war debt, and criticism of the administration's military strategy. Its editorials called for repeal of the emancipation proclamation, and a negotiated peace with the Confederacy. It was the platform of the Democratic Party in 1864. But these were not  the position of the World's editor, Mr. Manton Malone Marble.

Marble  (above) was a newspaperman with printer's ink in his veins. Employed as the Night Editor, he had bought the bankrupt World in 1861, dreaming of a non-partisan fact based style of journalism. But after just six months he had been forced to seek new backers, and the Democratic Party had eagerly stepped in. Marble lost friends and staff members when he signed the deal. 

The joke among journalists in the city was that Marble was now little more than a conductor for the stories August Belmont (above) wanted in the paper day in and day out. But there was still a spark of independence in Marble, and when he learned from an alert staffer, before dawn on the morning of 18 May, 1864, that his paper had published the proclamation, he ordered all copies still unsold to be withdrawn from street vendors, and even dispatched a fast ship to stop and board the steamer “Nova Scotia”, carrying bundles of the newspaper bound for England. Marble even ordered the ship's captain to buy back the free copy provided to the Nova Scotia's purser. It made no difference. Marble was arrested the evening of 18 May, and the offices of “The World” padlocked shut.

That very night the member papers of the Associated Press telegraphed the President, strongly defending Prime and Marble. The next day several of the editors, including Horace Greeley, of the Republican leaning Tribune, joined the chorus of demands that Marble and Prime be released. And it began to occur to Lincoln, that he had stepped into something unpleasant. He also had the calming influence of General Dix, who seems to have quickly suspected, along with the members of the AP, that this was not a rebel plot, nor even a Democratic one.

 

At the same time he arrested Prime and Marble, Dix also ordered the arrest of Joseph Howard, jr.,  night editor of the Brooklyn Eagle, the only other paper to actually publish and distribute the false proclamation. 

Within a day Joe Howard (above) confessed. He assumed the false proclamation would drive up the price of gold, in preparation for which he had bought gold futures “short” -  meaning on credit. As one historian has noted, “Nothing worse was ever done for the purpose of speculation.” 

Two days later, on Saturday morning, 21 May,  police detectives stopped and arrested Francis Avery Mallson, a reporter for the Eagle, who had actually authored the fake telegram.  Francis had just been drafted into the army, and he had hoped profits from the scam would provide for his family while he was away at war. The next day, Sunday 22 May, military authorities released both Prime and Marble. But the damage had been done.

Marble was in a rage. He clearly felt betrayed and laid the blame for his arrest directly on Lincoln's head - where it belonged. On Monday, 23 May he unleashed his pen, in a letter that took up several columns of "The World".  “Not until today,” Marble wrote, “has The World been free to speak. But to those who have ears to hear, its absence has been more eloquent than its columns could ever be.” 

Lincoln had acted, wrote Marble (above), “for the purpose of gratifying an ignoble partisan resentment” He wondered “would you, Sir, have suppressed the Tribune and the Times as you suppressed the World and the Journal of Commerce?” He then answered the question for Mr. Lincoln. “You know you would not... Can you, whose eyes discern equality under every complexion, be blinded by the hue of partisanship.” George Templeton Strong, a diarist and observer of politics in New York, noted, “The martyred newspaper...vomits acid bile most copious.”

Marble now became the publicist for the Democratic Party, and its champion, General McClellan (above, center). He spent the next six months retelling every lie, and even creating a few new ones, about Lincoln, charging him with wanting to force "race mixing" on the public, and ignoring the pain and sacrifices of Union soldiers on the battlefield. 

And it might have cost Lincoln the election that November,  excerpt that on 2 September, 1864,  Union General William Tecumseh Sherman captured the rail and industrial heart of the Confederacy - Atlanta, Georgia.  In that instant it was clear Lincoln was winning the war, and the Democrats were revealed as defeatists, with no answers, only protests. That November Lincoln received only 33% of the vote in New York City.  Despite that, he won the state, if barely, on his way to re-election, 55% of the popular vote, and 212 electoral votes to Democrat General George McClellan's 21

The World did not accept defeat, disparaging Lincoln's speech on the night of 13 April, 1865 - the day after Lee had surrendered - it described the President as groping “like a traveler in an unknown country, without a map.” 

The following night, 15 April, 1865,  John Wilkes Booth murdered the President, transforming Abraham Lincoln into a martyr, and the The New York World and it's editor into a petty, vindictive and racist party mouthpiece.  History does that every kind of thing every once in awhile.

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