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Timeline - The 1890s
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Timeline
Detail - 1894
May 11, 1894 - A wildcat strike of three thousand Pullman Palace Car Company factory workers occurs in Illinois.
Since the beginning of American history, capitalism has been the basis of
the country’s economic system. Arguably, capitalism can be seen to be an
adversarial system between worker and employer. In the 1800s, America saw the
rise of a ruthless and well-connected railroad cartel and robber barons coupled
with an explosion of immigration into the country, thus flooding the labor market
with cheap labor and consequently sparking a race to the bottom of the wage barrel.
Low wages went hand-in-hand with squalid living conditions. No matter where on
earth a person hails from, no one can live financially squeezed and abused for
long. One of the railroad barons mentioned above is George Mortimer Pullman,
owner of the Pullman Palace Car Company. Pullman’s profit-at-all-cost attitude
was par for the day. Still, his workers had had enough of Pullman’s
authoritarianism and would walk off the job, starting The Pullman Strike of 1894.
The Panic of 1893 was the backdrop in which the strike would take place.
There were many causes of this crisis, and they occurred in a complex web of
business and financial connections. Europe began to enter an economic
contraction before the panic. Thus, the demand for American-made products
dropped. This contraction caused European shareholders to sell off American
stocks, devaluing stock prices and increasing interest rates. The rise in interest
rates caused many companies to be over-leveraged in the credit department. One
of these companies was the Reading Railroad in eastern Pennsylvania. The
Reading had nearly monopolized anthracite coal, which fueled the country. As a
result of the company’s President’s mismanagement, their debt load became
unsustainable, resulting in their financial backer, J.P. Morgan, withdrawing his
support. These factors caused the railroad to entirely collapse. Other lines also collapsed due to the over-expansion
and reckless speculation by the railroads as a whole, thus making the
profitability of these companies crater. The uncertainty in the market caused a
run on the banks. Unfortunately, there was no Federal Deposit Insurance
Corporation (FDIC) for many account holders. These are only part of the reason
for the strike; there were also issues local to Chicago.
Chicago’s political and social atmosphere was another ingredient added
to the witch’s brew of the day. The Haymarket Affair had transpired only seven
years prior, scaring the city with the resulting deaths. The Haymarket Affair
grew out of a hotbed of the labor movement where, “Before 1900 one out of every four organized workers in the United States lived
in Illinois, and few if any states have contributed more to the history of American
labor than Illinois. For various reasons, dozens of national unions — from
clothing workers to meat cutters, from miners to bookbinders, from restaurant
workers to teachers — were founded in Illinois.” (Illinois’ Forgotten Labor
History).
A percentage of these many organizations were those with an anarchist bent.
These opposing political views created fault lines throughout the country as a whole, but especially in Chicago. Into this pressurized cauldron came The
Pullman Palace Car Company with its owner, George M. Pullman. Pullman was a
railroad oligarch with a monopoly in the sleeping car market. Pullman’s business
was not just manufacturing sleeping cars; he signed agreements with the
railroads to use his trains to attract a wealthier clientele, with Pullman receiving
the upgrade fees. With these arraignments, the company had a steady stream of
revenue. It also meant that he kept ultimate control over operations and
maintenance of the Pullman Palace Cars. Businessmen were drawn to these cars due to
the luxurious amenities and convenience of waking up in the morning ready for
that day’s merger agreement. The word Palace in the company’s name was not a
gimmick. On the contrary, the company made its name as a result of Pullman’s
innovations, craftsmanship which, “… created cars that appealed to the Victorian taste for ornamentation—lush
carpeting, brocade upholstery, and chandeliers. He installed double-glazed
windows and an improved suspension for a quieter, more comfortable ride.” (Kelly)
Sleeping was not the only option available to passengers. The wealthiest
passengers could have a car to themselves. These cars were rolling five-star
hotels. Like five-star hotels anywhere around the world, the food service would
satisfy the most discerning connoisseur of the time.
Pullman Town and Union Rise
George Pullman may have provided his customers with the most lavish
experiences, but this did not extend to his employees. The philosophy that he
used with his employees was that of Industrial Paternalism. A simple definition is
Pullman was the father figure, and his employees were his children. His form of
this came in the form of his company town of Pullman, Illinois, basically a suburb
of Chicago. The town had homes for the employees and their families, health care
facilities, libraries, parks, and a shopping mall. The papers sang the town’s
praises. One man of the cloth was quoted as saying Pullman was “how cities
should be built.” Like many company towns, Pullman, Illinois, had
darkness under that shiny gilded coating.
For those living in Pullman, the truth of living there had its upsides. Still,
those were canceled by the tyrannical, authoritarian way the company
administered the town. The company allowed no local town government, and no
none company owned businesses were permitted within the city limits. George
Pullman ruled with an iron fist. The company had infiltrated all aspects of town
life. Pullman achieved this with an advanced intricate web of spies he had
embedded within the community. Another facet of control was the crushing rents
employees paid, out of their starvation wages, for the housing so graciously
provided to the workers. Living under the company boot would produce
discontent among said workers. These situations of authoritarian oligarchical
employers were occurring across the country, spurring the rise of labor unions.
One of these unions was the American Railway Union (ARU) with its gifted
orator, former locomotive fireman and union President Eugene V. Debs, came into
being on 20 June 1893 as an organization representing railroad employees. Over that first year, thousands of workers became union members. The sudden growth was due, in part, to the union’s victory over
the Great Northern Pacific Railroad in 1893. By the time of the
union’s first convention in June 1894, the organization counted over 150,000
members, including a third of the workers at Pullman’s factory.
Over the past year or so, management had cut wages to starvation levels,
but Pullman refused to lower rents, which were 20-25% higher than the
surrounding areas, or to reverse the wage cuts. The workers were also
threatened with losing their jobs as their foreman advised them that all
employees who did not move permanently into Pullman would be fired. Like any
other strike in labor history, a strike does not just come out of nowhere. This
strike came about through a slow process. A wound of grievances just sits and
festers, gradually transforming into an abscess of discontent till the pressure
becomes too much and a violent rupture occurs. The Pullman strike was no
different.
The workers were not just unhappy about wages and living conditions,
but skilled workers were being slowly phased out in favor of less skilled, less
independent, cheaper workers. At this point in history, there was a push to cut
costs, impose new job protocols, and standardize rules for hiring and firing and
promotions. An example of these actions would be how, due to a
previous blip of a strike, Pullman restructured his carpenter’s department,
replacing skilled with unskilled workers.
Then, the 1893 Panic dropped into the workers’ laps. The workers’ lives
were made worse by the way companies of the time did business. Market share
was the phrase of the day. The push for market share led to speculation and
overproduction, causing a loss. Combine this loss with the fact that Pullman hid
his losses, leading to a slide in confidence in the company as a whole.
The Pullman Strike
On 12 May 1894, the workers had reached their breaking point; they
walked off the job. On 12 June, the ARU convention in Chicago voted to
implement a strike and boycott of Pullman-owned cars. The vote was not a foregone conclusion; that being said,
The ARU had signaled their willingness to organize a nationwide sympathy
boycott of Pullman cars among railroad employees generally if the company did
not negotiate. Multiple attempts at negotiating were made, but none bore any fruit. The boycott started on 26 June.
The ARU was not the only union involved. There was also the General
Managers Association (GMA). The GMA was founded in 1886 and consisted of all
the railroads with Chicago terminals. They were determined to raise the pressure
to have the governor call out the state militia in order to restore order after
violence had broken out against mostly railroad property. The governor refused,
preferring to try and de-escalate the situation. After this slight setback, they
were determined to have President Cleveland send in troops. It is easy to see that
the GMA was determined to keep wages low and to shatter the boycott.
At the heart of the boycott were the agreements Pullman had made with all
the railroads that used his cars. The boycott was simple: no union member would
handle or work on any train pulling Pullman cars. The union had an ace up its
sleeve in that its members, especially switchmen, controlled the movement of
railroads west of Chicago. At least 20 railways came to a screeching halt.
Pullman refused to back down and dug his heels in for the most part.
Sources are mixed. Some newspapers say he met with the union and explained
that the company was running at a loss, while others say he turned all
negotiators away and pointed out that the then-current situation was a long time
in the making. Either way, Pullman’s inflexibility on all the workers’ demands
prolonged the strike. His actions would come back to bite him.
At the beginning of the strike, opinion was split, and the public opinion of
the day was a battleground. Some papers, such as the Evening Journal of
Wilmington, Delaware, ran an editorial from the Evening Post. This editorial
falls on the side of Pullman, stating that the strikers were “foolish” for not taking
the money offered to them and that they had “petty grievances.” On the other side was Nellie
Bly of the New York World stated, “I thought the inhabitants of the model town of Pullman hadn’t a reason on earth
to complain. With this belief, I visited the town, intending in my articles to
denounce the rioters as bloodthirsty strikers. Before I had been half a day in
Pullman, I was the most bitter striker in the town.”
The pressure the GMA was applying paid dividends via outbursts of
violence that ended with destroyed railroad property and deaths. The violence
ticked up. There were battles between city police and U.S. Marshals against large
groups of strikers. Newspapers were on the case; for instance, the 6 July edition
of the Indianapolis News reported, “Chicago, 6 July. - Freight-cars were upset in all points of the stock-yards during
the night.” Union president Debs implored the strikers to abstain from violent actions.
Even with stories circulating of the violent acts of some, there were many
more instances of peaceful protest. Unfortunately, the violent contingent had
done its damage, and it was only a matter of time before the federal government
came to town.
The end of the strike started with an injunction imposed by the U.S. Circuit
Court for the Northern District of Illinois. This strike was the first to have an
injunction issued by the courts. With the boycott, the union made one giant
mistake: they stopped the mail from being delivered, which meant the union was
halting interstate commerce. Per the constitution interstate commerce falls
under the perview of the federal government. Debs ignored the injunction,
resulting in him and other union officials being arrested in contempt of court. On
10 July, they were also charged with conspiracy and obstructing the mail. They
were released on a $10,000 bond, and Debs was sentenced to six months in jail for his actions. Debs decision would displease President Cleveland, and he had
had enough; the troops came to town.
The President ordered troops into Chicago on 3 July, but the governor
strongly opposed this decision. The arrival of these troops ignited a wave of
violence within the strikers’ ranks. The situation was made even worse by the
injunction forbade any of the union officials from communicating with the
strikers in any way. The situation would turn deadly.
On 4 July, the strikers and their supporters, enraged at the troops being
there, destroyed rail cars and started constructing fortifications. Another spasm
of violence would occur just two days later when a mob of 6,000 arrived at the
South Chicago Panhandle rail yards with the intention of destroying property.
They burned hundreds of rail cars. The thousands of federal and state forces
could not halt the violence.
The situation would turn deadly just a day later when a violent altercation
led a group of national guardsmen to open fire. The officer in charge ordered his
men to open fire after a second volley of rocks, one of which hit him in the head.
The troops volleys ripped through the crowd. After one hundred shots, casualties
were about twenty to thirty men killed or wounded. The strike was
broken, but its legacy would be far-reaching and lasting.
The consequences of the strike were on two levels. One level was the public
backlash. The public did not fully support the boycott, though they were
sympathetic to the worker’s predicament. They blamed the railroads for the
panic that preceded the strike. Pullman was blamed for the whole situation and
for stretching out the strike. Even his fellow railroad tycoons turned on him after
losing millions of dollars. Public support was on the side of the strikers. The
citizens were still furious with Pullman that after his death in 1897, at the age of
66, his family encased his grave in concrete, fearing the public would dig him
up.
The second level was on the national stage. In one part of the response in
the wake of the strike, the federal government became the arbitrator of last
resort. The Erdman Act was passed in 1898. The Act was the first in a series of
Congressional acts aimed at regulating and reforming railway labor, which laid
the foundation for national labor laws enacted in the 1930’s. The strike also
made people rethink the role of all levels of government, law enforcement, and
the military.
The state of Illinois would remove the Pullman company’s interest in the
town when, in 1898, the Illinois Supreme Court ordered them to sell all property
not used in their industry. The employees were given the chance to buy their
homes. As of 2022, the population of the Pullman area of Chicago was 6,856.
It is essential to point out that the word “workers” or “workmen” within
the ARU refers to white men. The ARU missed a golden opportunity to extend the
strike’s reach, especially in the South. The union did not accept black workers.
This decision was the members’ decision against Debs’ advice. The porters were
the lynchpin in Pullman’s whole operation.
Pullman needed men to wait on the passengers, and lucky for him, there
was a giant pool of freed slaves who Pullman believed that as former slaves, would be compliant workers whom he
could grossly underpay, since they had few employment options outside of
sharecropping. Pullman soon became the largest employer of African Americans
in the country.
These men had to deal with passengers who considered them second-class
citizens. The Civil War was still a fresh memory. Pullman’s Porters and Maids founded the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car
Porters (BSCP) in 1925. The BSCP’s leader, Asa Philip Randolph, did his part to
win better pay and working conditions. Randolph would also pressure two
presidents, Roosevelt and Truman, to outlaw race discrimination in U.S. defense
industries and the military. The BSCP would go on to play their part in the civil
rights movement by showing that people are stronger together and by
fundraising for Rosa Parks legal defense. Their influence has helped shape the world we live in
today.
Along the path of the river, that is time, history is continuously being
created. As American society moves forward, historical repeating patterns of
actions spurred on by poverty, pain, and exploitation of a group of people have
produced similar violent convulsions and the strikes that resulted. The Pullman
strike was a rung on the ladder to better labor protections and laws today.
Pullman National Historical Park
President Barack Obama designated Pullman National Monument on February 19, 2015 to protect the Pullman Palace Car Company buildings as well as tell the story of Pullman Town and the Strike of 1894. It has now been upgraded to a National Historical Park by legislation signed into law in 2022 by President Biden. There are tours of the town, a Visitor Center in the Administration - Clock Tower Building, other historic buildings such as the Greenstone Church, Market Hall, and the National A. Philip Randolph Pullman Porter Museum.
Photo above: Pullman rail strikers on the south side of the Pullman Arcade Building versus Illinois National Guard troops, 1894, Pullman Company Staff. Courtesy Wikipedia Commons via Pullman Museum. Below: Political cartoon from the Chicago Labor newspaper from July 7, 1894 about labor at the Pullman Company, 1894, Chicago Labor Newspaper. Courtesy Wikipedia Commons. Source: Urofsky, Melvin. “Pullman Strike, Causes, Summary, & Significance.” Encyclopædia Britannica, 2019; “George Pullman, Lemelson-MIT Program.” Mit.edu, 2020; “Historical Dictionary of the Gilded Age (2009).” Scribd, 2022; Curtis, Joshua. “Arnesen, Eric (Edited By) - U.S. Labor and Working-Class History, Encyclopedia of (Volume 1, A-F Index).” Scribd, 2025; “The Richest Chicagoans of All Time.” 2006, Chicago Magazine. “The Pullman History Site: George Mortimer Pullman.” Whitten, David. EliScholar - A Digital Platform
for Scholarly Publishing at Yale Scholarly, "The Depression of 1893; “Business Downturn, Banking Crisis of 1893, the William Steinway Diary: 1861-1896, Smithsonian Institution.”; Brunk, David. “The Reading Railroad 1892-1893: Combination to Collapse.” Scholar Bank, University Of Oregon; Duignan, Brian. “Haymarket Affair, History, Aftermath, & Influence." Encyclopædia Britannica, 2020; “Illinois’ Forgotten Labor History.” Niu.edu, 1984; Kelly, Jack. “The Rise and Fall of the Sleeping Car King.” Smithsonian, 2019; Khederian, Robert. “Before Private Jets, There Were Luxurious Private Train Cars.” Curbed, 2018; “Eugene v. Debs, Biography & Facts, Britannica; Schneirov, Richard . “The Pullman Strike," 2016, Northern Illinois University Digital Library; “Jane Addams and the 1894 Pullman Strike.” Social Welfare History Project, 2015; “Pullman Strike, Causes and Effects" Britannica. “Image 1 of Evening Journal (Wilmington, Del.), 1894, The Library of Congress. “Image 3 of the Evening Herald (Shenandoah, Pa.), May 22, 1894, The Library of Congress; “Image 2 of the Citizen (Chicago, Ill.), June 30, 1894.” The Library of Congress; “Image 4 of Chicago Eagle (Chicago, Ill.), June 2, 1894.” The Library of Congress; "The Pullman Strike: The Story of a Unique Experiment and of a Great Labor Upheaval: Lindsey, Almont, 1906-1993; Archive.org; “Image 4 of the Abbeville Press and Banner (Abbeville, S.C.), July 11, 1894.” The Library of Congress; “125th Anniversary of the Pullman Strike.” 2019, chipublib.org; ““Nellie Bly in Pullman” Nellie Bly, New York World; “Indianapolis News 6 July 1894 — Hoosier State Chronicles: Indiana’s Digital Historic Newspaper Program;” Schneirov, Richard, et al. "The Pullman Strike and the Crisis of the 1890’S", Cornell University; “The Pullman Boycott. A Complete History of the Great R. R. Strike," Northern Illinois University Digital Library.”; Clark, Justin. “Pullman Strike" – Hoosier State Chronicles: Indiana’s Digital Newspaper Program.” Hoosier State Chronicles: Indiana’s
Digital Newspaper Program, 2017; Hannon, Michael. "The Pullman Strike of 1894," 2010; "George M. Pullman," National Park Service; “Honoring Labor: Remembering the Pullman Strike and Boycott – Illinois
Highlights.” Illinois.edu, 2019; “Pullman Porters: A Legacy of Resilience, Resistance, and Progress.” The Cooper Union, cooper.edu.
History
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An immigrant family on Ellis Island, March 1917. Courtesy Library of Congress.
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Frederick Douglass. Courtesy National Archives.
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Pullman Town and Union Rise
George Pullman may have provided his customers with the most lavish
experiences, but this did not extend to his employees. The philosophy that he
used with his employees was that of Industrial Paternalism. A simple definition is
Pullman was the father figure, and his employees were his children. His form of
this came in the form of his company town of Pullman, Illinois, basically a suburb
of Chicago. The town had homes for the employees and their families, health care
facilities, libraries, parks, and a shopping mall. The papers sang the town’s
praises. One man of the cloth was quoted as saying Pullman was “how cities
should be built.” Like many company towns, Pullman, Illinois, had
darkness under that shiny gilded coating.
For those living in Pullman, the truth of living there had its upsides. Still,
those were canceled by the tyrannical, authoritarian way the company
administered the town. The company allowed no local town government, and no
none company owned businesses were permitted within the city limits. George
Pullman ruled with an iron fist. The company had infiltrated all aspects of town
life. Pullman achieved this with an advanced intricate web of spies he had
embedded within the community. Another facet of control was the crushing rents
employees paid, out of their starvation wages, for the housing so graciously
provided to the workers. Living under the company boot would produce
discontent among said workers. These situations of authoritarian oligarchical
employers were occurring across the country, spurring the rise of labor unions.
One of these unions was the American Railway Union (ARU) with its gifted
orator, former locomotive fireman and union President Eugene V. Debs, came into
being on 20 June 1893 as an organization representing railroad employees. Over that first year, thousands of workers became union members. The sudden growth was due, in part, to the union’s victory over
the Great Northern Pacific Railroad in 1893. By the time of the
union’s first convention in June 1894, the organization counted over 150,000
members, including a third of the workers at Pullman’s factory.
Over the past year or so, management had cut wages to starvation levels,
but Pullman refused to lower rents, which were 20-25% higher than the
surrounding areas, or to reverse the wage cuts. The workers were also
threatened with losing their jobs as their foreman advised them that all
employees who did not move permanently into Pullman would be fired. Like any
other strike in labor history, a strike does not just come out of nowhere. This
strike came about through a slow process. A wound of grievances just sits and
festers, gradually transforming into an abscess of discontent till the pressure
becomes too much and a violent rupture occurs. The Pullman strike was no
different.
The workers were not just unhappy about wages and living conditions,
but skilled workers were being slowly phased out in favor of less skilled, less
independent, cheaper workers. At this point in history, there was a push to cut
costs, impose new job protocols, and standardize rules for hiring and firing and
promotions. An example of these actions would be how, due to a
previous blip of a strike, Pullman restructured his carpenter’s department,
replacing skilled with unskilled workers.
Then, the 1893 Panic dropped into the workers’ laps. The workers’ lives
were made worse by the way companies of the time did business. Market share
was the phrase of the day. The push for market share led to speculation and
overproduction, causing a loss. Combine this loss with the fact that Pullman hid
his losses, leading to a slide in confidence in the company as a whole.
The Pullman Strike
On 12 May 1894, the workers had reached their breaking point; they
walked off the job. On 12 June, the ARU convention in Chicago voted to
implement a strike and boycott of Pullman-owned cars. The vote was not a foregone conclusion; that being said,
The ARU had signaled their willingness to organize a nationwide sympathy
boycott of Pullman cars among railroad employees generally if the company did
not negotiate. Multiple attempts at negotiating were made, but none bore any fruit. The boycott started on 26 June.
The ARU was not the only union involved. There was also the General
Managers Association (GMA). The GMA was founded in 1886 and consisted of all
the railroads with Chicago terminals. They were determined to raise the pressure
to have the governor call out the state militia in order to restore order after
violence had broken out against mostly railroad property. The governor refused,
preferring to try and de-escalate the situation. After this slight setback, they
were determined to have President Cleveland send in troops. It is easy to see that
the GMA was determined to keep wages low and to shatter the boycott.
At the heart of the boycott were the agreements Pullman had made with all
the railroads that used his cars. The boycott was simple: no union member would
handle or work on any train pulling Pullman cars. The union had an ace up its
sleeve in that its members, especially switchmen, controlled the movement of
railroads west of Chicago. At least 20 railways came to a screeching halt.
Pullman refused to back down and dug his heels in for the most part.
Sources are mixed. Some newspapers say he met with the union and explained
that the company was running at a loss, while others say he turned all
negotiators away and pointed out that the then-current situation was a long time
in the making. Either way, Pullman’s inflexibility on all the workers’ demands
prolonged the strike. His actions would come back to bite him.
At the beginning of the strike, opinion was split, and the public opinion of
the day was a battleground. Some papers, such as the Evening Journal of
Wilmington, Delaware, ran an editorial from the Evening Post. This editorial
falls on the side of Pullman, stating that the strikers were “foolish” for not taking
the money offered to them and that they had “petty grievances.” On the other side was Nellie
Bly of the New York World stated, “I thought the inhabitants of the model town of Pullman hadn’t a reason on earth
to complain. With this belief, I visited the town, intending in my articles to
denounce the rioters as bloodthirsty strikers. Before I had been half a day in
Pullman, I was the most bitter striker in the town.”
The pressure the GMA was applying paid dividends via outbursts of
violence that ended with destroyed railroad property and deaths. The violence
ticked up. There were battles between city police and U.S. Marshals against large
groups of strikers. Newspapers were on the case; for instance, the 6 July edition
of the Indianapolis News reported, “Chicago, 6 July. - Freight-cars were upset in all points of the stock-yards during
the night.” Union president Debs implored the strikers to abstain from violent actions.
Even with stories circulating of the violent acts of some, there were many
more instances of peaceful protest. Unfortunately, the violent contingent had
done its damage, and it was only a matter of time before the federal government
came to town.
The end of the strike started with an injunction imposed by the U.S. Circuit
Court for the Northern District of Illinois. This strike was the first to have an
injunction issued by the courts. With the boycott, the union made one giant
mistake: they stopped the mail from being delivered, which meant the union was
halting interstate commerce. Per the constitution interstate commerce falls
under the perview of the federal government. Debs ignored the injunction,
resulting in him and other union officials being arrested in contempt of court. On
10 July, they were also charged with conspiracy and obstructing the mail. They
were released on a $10,000 bond, and Debs was sentenced to six months in jail for his actions. Debs decision would displease President Cleveland, and he had
had enough; the troops came to town.
The President ordered troops into Chicago on 3 July, but the governor
strongly opposed this decision. The arrival of these troops ignited a wave of
violence within the strikers’ ranks. The situation was made even worse by the
injunction forbade any of the union officials from communicating with the
strikers in any way. The situation would turn deadly.
On 4 July, the strikers and their supporters, enraged at the troops being
there, destroyed rail cars and started constructing fortifications. Another spasm
of violence would occur just two days later when a mob of 6,000 arrived at the
South Chicago Panhandle rail yards with the intention of destroying property.
They burned hundreds of rail cars. The thousands of federal and state forces
could not halt the violence.
The situation would turn deadly just a day later when a violent altercation
led a group of national guardsmen to open fire. The officer in charge ordered his
men to open fire after a second volley of rocks, one of which hit him in the head.
The troops volleys ripped through the crowd. After one hundred shots, casualties
were about twenty to thirty men killed or wounded. The strike was
broken, but its legacy would be far-reaching and lasting.
The consequences of the strike were on two levels. One level was the public
backlash. The public did not fully support the boycott, though they were
sympathetic to the worker’s predicament. They blamed the railroads for the
panic that preceded the strike. Pullman was blamed for the whole situation and
for stretching out the strike. Even his fellow railroad tycoons turned on him after
losing millions of dollars. Public support was on the side of the strikers. The
citizens were still furious with Pullman that after his death in 1897, at the age of
66, his family encased his grave in concrete, fearing the public would dig him
up.
The second level was on the national stage. In one part of the response in
the wake of the strike, the federal government became the arbitrator of last
resort. The Erdman Act was passed in 1898. The Act was the first in a series of
Congressional acts aimed at regulating and reforming railway labor, which laid
the foundation for national labor laws enacted in the 1930’s. The strike also
made people rethink the role of all levels of government, law enforcement, and
the military.
The state of Illinois would remove the Pullman company’s interest in the
town when, in 1898, the Illinois Supreme Court ordered them to sell all property
not used in their industry. The employees were given the chance to buy their
homes. As of 2022, the population of the Pullman area of Chicago was 6,856.
It is essential to point out that the word “workers” or “workmen” within
the ARU refers to white men. The ARU missed a golden opportunity to extend the
strike’s reach, especially in the South. The union did not accept black workers.
This decision was the members’ decision against Debs’ advice. The porters were
the lynchpin in Pullman’s whole operation.
Pullman needed men to wait on the passengers, and lucky for him, there
was a giant pool of freed slaves who Pullman believed that as former slaves, would be compliant workers whom he
could grossly underpay, since they had few employment options outside of
sharecropping. Pullman soon became the largest employer of African Americans
in the country.
These men had to deal with passengers who considered them second-class
citizens. The Civil War was still a fresh memory. Pullman’s Porters and Maids founded the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car
Porters (BSCP) in 1925. The BSCP’s leader, Asa Philip Randolph, did his part to
win better pay and working conditions. Randolph would also pressure two
presidents, Roosevelt and Truman, to outlaw race discrimination in U.S. defense
industries and the military. The BSCP would go on to play their part in the civil
rights movement by showing that people are stronger together and by
fundraising for Rosa Parks legal defense. Their influence has helped shape the world we live in
today.
Along the path of the river, that is time, history is continuously being
created. As American society moves forward, historical repeating patterns of
actions spurred on by poverty, pain, and exploitation of a group of people have
produced similar violent convulsions and the strikes that resulted. The Pullman
strike was a rung on the ladder to better labor protections and laws today.
Pullman National Historical Park
President Barack Obama designated Pullman National Monument on February 19, 2015 to protect the Pullman Palace Car Company buildings as well as tell the story of Pullman Town and the Strike of 1894. It has now been upgraded to a National Historical Park by legislation signed into law in 2022 by President Biden. There are tours of the town, a Visitor Center in the Administration - Clock Tower Building, other historic buildings such as the Greenstone Church, Market Hall, and the National A. Philip Randolph Pullman Porter Museum.
Photo above: Pullman rail strikers on the south side of the Pullman Arcade Building versus Illinois National Guard troops, 1894, Pullman Company Staff. Courtesy Wikipedia Commons via Pullman Museum. Below: Political cartoon from the Chicago Labor newspaper from July 7, 1894 about labor at the Pullman Company, 1894, Chicago Labor Newspaper. Courtesy Wikipedia Commons. Source: Urofsky, Melvin. “Pullman Strike, Causes, Summary, & Significance.” Encyclopædia Britannica, 2019; “George Pullman, Lemelson-MIT Program.” Mit.edu, 2020; “Historical Dictionary of the Gilded Age (2009).” Scribd, 2022; Curtis, Joshua. “Arnesen, Eric (Edited By) - U.S. Labor and Working-Class History, Encyclopedia of (Volume 1, A-F Index).” Scribd, 2025; “The Richest Chicagoans of All Time.” 2006, Chicago Magazine. “The Pullman History Site: George Mortimer Pullman.” Whitten, David. EliScholar - A Digital Platform
for Scholarly Publishing at Yale Scholarly, "The Depression of 1893; “Business Downturn, Banking Crisis of 1893, the William Steinway Diary: 1861-1896, Smithsonian Institution.”; Brunk, David. “The Reading Railroad 1892-1893: Combination to Collapse.” Scholar Bank, University Of Oregon; Duignan, Brian. “Haymarket Affair, History, Aftermath, & Influence." Encyclopædia Britannica, 2020; “Illinois’ Forgotten Labor History.” Niu.edu, 1984; Kelly, Jack. “The Rise and Fall of the Sleeping Car King.” Smithsonian, 2019; Khederian, Robert. “Before Private Jets, There Were Luxurious Private Train Cars.” Curbed, 2018; “Eugene v. Debs, Biography & Facts, Britannica; Schneirov, Richard . “The Pullman Strike," 2016, Northern Illinois University Digital Library; “Jane Addams and the 1894 Pullman Strike.” Social Welfare History Project, 2015; “Pullman Strike, Causes and Effects" Britannica. “Image 1 of Evening Journal (Wilmington, Del.), 1894, The Library of Congress. “Image 3 of the Evening Herald (Shenandoah, Pa.), May 22, 1894, The Library of Congress; “Image 2 of the Citizen (Chicago, Ill.), June 30, 1894.” The Library of Congress; “Image 4 of Chicago Eagle (Chicago, Ill.), June 2, 1894.” The Library of Congress; "The Pullman Strike: The Story of a Unique Experiment and of a Great Labor Upheaval: Lindsey, Almont, 1906-1993; Archive.org; “Image 4 of the Abbeville Press and Banner (Abbeville, S.C.), July 11, 1894.” The Library of Congress; “125th Anniversary of the Pullman Strike.” 2019, chipublib.org; ““Nellie Bly in Pullman” Nellie Bly, New York World; “Indianapolis News 6 July 1894 — Hoosier State Chronicles: Indiana’s Digital Historic Newspaper Program;” Schneirov, Richard, et al. "The Pullman Strike and the Crisis of the 1890’S", Cornell University; “The Pullman Boycott. A Complete History of the Great R. R. Strike," Northern Illinois University Digital Library.”; Clark, Justin. “Pullman Strike" – Hoosier State Chronicles: Indiana’s Digital Newspaper Program.” Hoosier State Chronicles: Indiana’s
Digital Newspaper Program, 2017; Hannon, Michael. "The Pullman Strike of 1894," 2010; "George M. Pullman," National Park Service; “Honoring Labor: Remembering the Pullman Strike and Boycott – Illinois
Highlights.” Illinois.edu, 2019; “Pullman Porters: A Legacy of Resilience, Resistance, and Progress.” The Cooper Union, cooper.edu.
History Photo Bomb
An immigrant family on Ellis Island, March 1917. Courtesy Library of Congress.
Chilkoot Pass, Klondike Gold Rush. Courtesy Library of Congress.
Timeline Book
Frederick Douglass. Courtesy National Archives.
ABH Travel Tip
Don't forget the America the Beautiful Pass, at $80 for one year, the bargain of a lifetime for a family visiting the parks of the National Park Service.
World's Fair History, 1890's
Chicago 1893
San Francisco 1894
Atlanta 1895
Nashville 1897
Omaha 1898
For the history of baseball, check out our friends at Stat
Geek Baseball with unique stats from 1871 to today you can get nowhere else.