Raise the rent, lower the wages—and when workers strike, send in the troops
This failed capitalist utopia in 1890s Chicago turned into a case study in exploitation and greed
In 1889, the Reverend William H. Carwardine was assigned to a church in Pullman, Illinois, on the South Side of Chicago. For more than a decade leading up to his assignment, the metropolis had been throttled by conflict between workers and bosses; there had been a turbulent railroad strike in 1877, and a massacre of rioters demanding an eight-hour workday in 1886. Most of Chicago’s clergy were staunchly anti-labor and pro-capital, and Carwardine was hardly any different. That is, until his congregation went on strike.
Pullman had gotten its name from George Pullman, the wealthy industrialist who chose the site for the manufacture of Pullman Palace Car Company railroad cars. The town was “meticulously planned,” writes historian Heath W. Carter, and “seemed a possible antidote to the cycle of industrial unrest. Indeed, the town of Pullman became an attraction itself during the [1893] World’s Fair, with special rail lines carrying carloads of visitors eager to see what many thought was an industrial utopia.”
Pullman was a company town. The workers who built the railroad cars lived in houses owned by the company, and they paid rent to the same corporate entity that furnished their wages. When the Panic of 1893 hit, the company reduced their pay. But it didn’t reduce rent, which meant that thousands of workers were suddenly paying a greater share of their income right back to the boss. Meanwhile, despite the company’s crisis, Pullman made sure to pay his shareholders exactly what was promised. This did not go over well with labor. Shareholders have never worked a day in our factory, the workers reasoned. So why should the cuts come from us and not them?
“I would receive slurs and insults from the clerks in the bank, because Mr. Pullman would not give me enough in return for my hard labor to pay the rent for one of his houses,” wrote one woman in a letter to Reverend Carwardine. “I have a wife and four children,” wrote a man who worked as an engineer, “and it was for them that I struck, as I think that when a man … after working two and a half years for a company, he finds himself in debt for a common living, something must be wrong.” Another letter read, “We could see plainly it was either work and starve, or strike and depend on charity until we could win.”
In May of 1894, thousands of workers went on strike without the support of a union and without a plan — what’s called a wildcat strike. The socialist unionist Eugene Debs, then the leader of the American Railway Union (ARU), took notice of the strike and backed the workers. The company refused to recognize and bargain with the ARU, so Debs called upon workers all across the country to stage a boycott of Pullman railroad cars. The strike “generated an immense show of solidarity” around the country, writes Sharon Smith in her labor movement history Subterranean Fire, “because of universal working-class hostility toward the railroad magnates — known as ‘robber barons’ in popular culture.” Around the country, hundreds of thousands of working-class people wore white ribbons to show their support for the strike. Meanwhile, at Debs’s command, railroad switchmen across the nation refused to hitch and unhitch Pullman cars at work, costing the company an enormous amount of money.
Back in Pullman itself, most of Chicago’s clergy, not surprisingly, denounced the strike. Pullman’s Reverend E. Christian Oggel declared that all strikes violated the Golden Rule and added, “I deplore this strike … If a man thinks he can better himself elsewhere, there is no law compelling him to stay here.” The resounding consensus of the clergy made it all the more surprising when, shortly thereafter, Reverend Carwardine offered a different perspective.
Carwardine had spent the past few years renting a room in a community center. Since his congregation was poor, they hadn’t been able to build a church of their own. He had come to know the working-class people of Pullman and witnessed their complete dependence on the corporation, which squeezed them for every dollar and ounce of labor and capriciously altered their standard of living based on the company’s economic prerogatives. In late May of 1894, Carwardine shocked the public by denouncing George Pullman from the pulpit. His voice wavered with anger as he enumerated the industrialist’s misdeeds:
When he reduced wages to the point of starvation, why did he not reduce the rents and water taxes? … When he was reducing salaries, why did he not reduce his own salary and the salaries of the higher officials, the town authorities, and the straw bosses? … Why did Mr. Pullman when, during the hard winter just passed, a woman’s union, which was not called a relief committee for fear of hurting Mr. Pullman’s feelings, approached him did he refuse to contribute a dollar and also send a communication to the press denying there was any destitution in Pullman? … Why did he extort such exorbitant rent from the churches? Why did he not help the YMCA? Why did he not establish an emergency hospital, which is so badly needed?
Carwardine’s sermon ended with a rousing denunciation of the capitalist pseudo-utopia that Pullman had built:
The country will soon become a slaughterhouse of anarchy if justice is not meted out to labor, and corporations do not cease to be tyrannical. The great trouble with Pullman is not what it pretends to be. There is a good deal of tinsel about it. It is a hollow mockery and a sham, an institution girdled with red tape … We have common interests and a common enemy — the company.
By the time Carwardine let loose his anger, Pullman had requested help from the U.S. government, which the state was happy to provide. U.S. Attorney General Richard Olney worked “hand in glove with Pullman management,” as Smith put it, to secure an injunction against the strike, arguing that the American Railway Union was involved in a “conspiracy ‘in restraint of trade.’” The government ruled in favor of this injunction, which meant that all the strikers both in Pullman and around the country — numbering more than 150,000 workers at the strike’s peak — were breaking the law. Within days, Pullman and greater Chicago were occupied by 6,000 state and federal troops, 3,100 police officers, and 5,000 deputy marshals united by one task: crush the strike.
Debs promised that if the union were recognized and negotiations undertaken, the strike would swiftly end, but Pullman refused. The troops and police moved on strikers assembled in the street, using bayonets to control the crowd, followed by live ammo. Though they were mostly unarmed, the strikers fought back: when trains carrying soldiers came to town, the strikers stopped them dead in their tracks and rocked the train cars back and forth to overturn them. Sympathy strikes broke out in Idaho, Wyoming, North Dakota, Colorado, Washington, and California.
Labor might have won the day if Debs had been able to pull off a full nationwide sympathy strike coordinated by the American Federation of Labor (AFL). But the leader of the AFL judged a general strike imprudent, and the Pullman strike was handily crushed. The strikers lost and went back to work with no raise in wages. It would be years before the state government would force the company to divest from residential property in the town.
Debs himself was arrested, along with several others. His American Railway Union was destroyed, as many who had participated were forced to sign a letter promising to drop out of the union. A few months later, the Supreme Court upheld the injunction decision and, as Smith writes, “added that such a preemptive action was deemed necessary because the strike amounted to a ‘malicious conspiracy’ to damage the ‘probable expectancies’ of management for its profits.”
Carwardine went on to be a lifelong advocate for workers’ rights. Recalling the Pullman strike a few years later, he wrote:
The inequalities of life as indicated in the social fabric of modern society are simply fearful. In many respects we are living in the grandest age this old world has ever seen. And yet, with our boasted progress and advancement, I realize that something is radically wrong in a condition of society that permits some to be so poor and others to be so rich. … We as a nation are dividing ourselves, like ancient Rome, into two classes, the rich and the poor, the oppressor and the oppressed. And on the side of the oppressor there is power and protection, class legislation and military support. … No country can prosper, no government long perpetuate itself and its institutions, which does not administer judgment and justice alike to all of its people.
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