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.
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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The Democratic convention in Buffalo, New York ended on July 11th 1884, after having nominated hometown hero, “Honest” Grover “The Good” Cleveland. Just ten days later the “Buffalo Evening Telegraph” reported “A Terrible Tale”; that in 1874 Cleveland had an affair with a young widow from New Jersey, naamed Maria Helpin. In September Mrs. Helpin had given birth to a son she named Oscar Folsom Cleveland (Folsom was Cleveland’s law partner). According to the “Telegraph”, Maria ended up in an asylum and the poor innocent boy had ended up in an orphanage. The Republican faithful began the chant, “Ma, Ma, where’s my Pa? Gone to the White House, ha, ha, ha.”
It was a great story, and parts of it were true. But Cleveland refused to panic and instructed his followers to “Just tell the truth”, which is easy to say at those rare times when the truth actually helps you. The truth was that Mrs. Helpin had affairs with several men (something that probably happened a lot more often than anyone in 1884 was willing to publicly admit), and there were several men who might have been the father. Cleveland never admitted parentage. But he had supported the infant after Maria started drinking. Later, when it became clear Maria was not going to get sober anytime soon, Cleveland had paid her $500 to give up Oscar, and the boy was adopted by friends of Cleveland’s, and eventually ended up graduating from medical school; so the initial Blaine attack had resulted in Cleveland sounding more honest than before. The second Blaine attack backfired even worse.
There were two “third parties” in 1884; the Greenback Party and the Prohibition Party. The Greenback Party seemed likely to hurt the Democrats most, so Blaine’s supporters actually gave them money. “The Dry’s” had nominated John St. John, three time governor of Kansas. Blaine’s people were worried that St. John would siphon off Republican votes in upstate New York. They urged St. John to drop out of the race, and when he refused they spread the story that St. John had abandoned a battered wife and child in California. Again, the smear was true, sort of. After his parents had died when St. John was 15, he had joined the ‘49ers, looking for his fortune in the gold fields. He didn’t find gold but at the age of 19 he had found a wife and fathered a child. And at his wife’s request he had “granted” her, to use the old phrase, a divorce, before returning, broke back to Ilinois.
Like most smears this one hurt St. John the most amongst his most fervent supporters. Prohibitionists have always been a priggish bunch of humorless unforgiving bores, and they abandoned St. John as if they had just discovered the sacramental wine was actual wine. But St. John had that other trait you often find in prohibitionists; he considered revenge a matter of principle. Knowing he now stood no chance of even winning Kansas, St. John concentrated his efforts in upstate New York, just the spot the Republicans were the most worried about.
Meanwhile, James Blaine, the Republican candidate, had his own problems, with the “Mugwumps”. This was yet another group of holier than thou Victorian prigs, but these prigs were Republicans, and they had a hard time deciding whether or not to support Blaine because he was so…well, crooked. They took their name from a supposed Algonquin word for “big leader”, but it was "New York Sun" columnist Charles Dana who defined them as Republicans who had their “mugs” on one side of the fence and their “wumps” on the other. Republican commentators went so far as to imply that the Mugwumps were “effete”, or to use the vernacular, “Man millners”, i.e. homosexuals. Stories like this one are what make me smile when I read that in 2004 Karl Rove dragged politics to a new low, or that in 2008 Barak Obama has decided to raise the level of the debate. As a nation we gain an advantage when history books actually try to tell the unvarnished truth about the past; its called perspective.
Mean while, the Democrats were throwing everything they could think of at "James Blaine, the Continental Liar From the State of Maine", like calling him "Slippery Jim". They dragged up the old charge of “Burn this letter after reading”. 
In the end it was difficult to say precisely why Cleveland won and Blaine lost. The popular vote cast on Election Day, November 4, 1884, was four million eight hundred seventy-four thousand for Cleveland (48.5%) and four million eight hundred forty-eight thousand (48.2%) for Blaine. But as we all know the popular vote is meaningless. What counted was the Electoral College, and there Cleveland won two hundred nineteen votes to one hundred eighty-two for Blaine, giving Cleveland a 37 vote electoral victory. .jpg)
