Pullman: A Monumental Strike.

The Pullman Strike occupies a very important and monumental place in the history of railway strikes during the Gilded Age. Historians like A. P. Winston believe that the importance of the Pullman Railway Strike’s history is in the fact that it was violent and that the events go sot bad in the eyes of the general public that they feared “that the city of Chicago might become involved in general riot” (1). The Pullman Railway Strike struck fear into the hearts of the people and caused them to “question whether a decent into anarchy” could happen (2). Another aspect that historians focus on concerning the Pullman Strike is the “public history” and the history according to Pullman Railway Company. These two ideas, as Janice L. Reiff and Susan E. Hirsch write about in Pullman and Its Public: Image and Aim in Making and Interpreting History, do not always parallel each other. Since the 1950’s both “academic historians and people whose lives were bound up with the company have sought to reclaim its history” (3). For many, many years “no one but Pullman Company representatives described or defined” Pullman’s place in history (4). With the work of these historians and workers or their relatives a new dimension has been added to Pullman’s history that the company “consciously ignored” (5). They also reveal how “complicated the task of recovering the past can be when dealing with a major corporation” (6). The Pullman Strike “directly affected the lives and careers of the major participants” and would hold historical significance (7).

The conflict between the Pullman Railway Company and the American Railway Union was caused by a number of issues. There was little demand for the Pullman cars as they had over supplied themselves for the World Fair. This caused a depression in business for the Pullman Railway Company. The company attempted to balance this by reducing wages for their workers. Unfortunately in Pullman City, the workers “utopia” that George Pullman built for his workers, the rents did not decrease to accommodate the decrease in wages. On May 11, 1984 the workers stuck. The Pullman Company car account of the events leading up to the strike consciously ignored “the worker’s lives both on and off the job and their struggles with corporate management” that had spanned a couple of years before the actual strike (8).

This is where the violence occurred, which both the news and the company could use to their advantage when looking back at the Pullman Strike. Any company that refused to leave Pullman cars off of their trains were met by resistance and the railway employees in turn refused to operate those trains. This lead serious consequences; “supplies were so far cut off that the city was for days threatened with famine” (9). Trains “were stopped by mobs” and many cars “loaded or unloaded were burned” (10). The apprehensions and fear in the eyes of the public were caused by “the destruction of property, especially by fire, after the strike had begun” the violence of other kinds “which occurred during the strike, such as interference by force with the operation of trains and attacks on persons either to prevent their working or in revenge” and the workers who “sacrificed the peace of the community” by acting as they did (11). What also affected the strike and its public image was that the leadership, especially Eugene V. Debs, “warned against a strike” and told the workers should a strike happen to stay far away from the violence. The company could use this in their favor in the history of the strike and, in way, “because the Pullman company was bent on controlling the past”, the strikers “were held captive by this” (12). Reiff and Hirsch consider the difficulty in breaking from the Pullman Car Company’s company line one of the most significant aspects of the history of the Pullman Strike.

Part of the problem with George Pullman’s dedication to imagemaking was the fact that once the Pullman Strike happened; it was hard for the public to see that there was any kind of problem to begin with. Winston also questions whether this strike was so different than strikes of the past. Were these men especially violent and vicious, or should one take into account the history of strikes, where these men were from, and who was writing the most immediate historical accounts of the strike? Though the leaders were publicly against violence, a lawyer for the Pullman Railway Company, Mr. A. E. Bancroft, put out a pamphlet “showing a disposition in general to deal fairly by the strikers” and “attempted to show that the American Railway Union leaders caused their workers to commit violence” (13). This statement and the actions of the Pullman Company lawyers highlights the “Pullman imagemaking” that Reiff and Hirsch believed clouded the actual series of events so much. David Ray Papke points out the legal aspects of the Pullman Company were very much connected to the capital part, which contributed to this kind of skewed presentation.

This Pullman imagemaking also affected what views were put out in movies and books in the first decades following the strike. These movies written by white Americans seem to neglect the plight of the workers as a whole, but specifically ignore the struggles of the African American Pullman porters. According to whites and blacks of the Gilded Age, the black Pullman porters had jobs with “status” but during WWI “the porters themselves began to challenge the image the company had created of contented servants” (14). When the United States passed the 1964 Civil Rights act a policy within the act specifically named the Pullman Railway Company and their practice of only hiring blacks as porters and never giving them a chance to advance to a higher paid conductor. While this is not particular relevant to the Pullman Strike, it does lend evidence to Reiff and Hirsch’s claims that the Pullman Car Company depended on imagemaking during and after the Gilded Age to keep their public image clear. This extended past the strike and even shadowed the lives of their workers.

The images that Pullman created about its workers and the strike “did not match reality and not even Pullman could maintain the façade in the face of worker opposition, government intervention, and critical scrutiny” (15). The first time this shining image took a hit was during the actual strike but even then, the violence and danger that Pullman workers represented to the public reflected badly on the ARU, not Pullman. Beyond the reduction of wages and the high rents in Pullman City “George Pullan failed also to respect the workers’ needs for self-expression and independence” (16).

(1) Winston, A.P., “The Significance of the Pullman Strike,” The Journal of Political Economy 9, no. 4 (1901), http://www.jstor.org/stable/1819352: 540.
(2) Winston, 540.
(3) Reiff, Janice L. and Susan E. Hirsch, “Pullman and Its Public: Image and Aim in Making and Interpreting History,” The Public Historian 11, no. 4 (1989), http://www.jstor.org/stable/3378069: 99.
(4) Reiff and Hirsch, 99.
(5) Reiff and Hirsch, 100.
(6) Papke, David Ray, The Pullman Case: The Clash of Labor and Capital in Industrial America (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999), 80.
(7) Reiff, 100.
(8) Reiff, 101
(9) Winston, 541.
(10) Winston, 541.
(11) Winston, 543.
(12) Reiff, 101.
(13) Winston, 547
(14) Reiff, 104.
(15) Reiff, 103.
(16) Papke, 83.