The Gilded Age is important for numerous reasons, the involvement of the courts, the legality of the unions at the time, and the effect it had on labor disputes following the strike. What would also be significant is the shift in the view of the Pullman Strike. This section strives to show the hurdles, especially in the legal area, that the workers and Eugene Debs had to hurdle in order to gain legitimacy. I find the most compelling and important fact about the Pullman Railway Strike was the victory, depending on how you look at it, of the union. By 1894 “some 35 percent of the Pullman workforce joined the Union” (1). This inspired the confidence of the workers in reacting to the loss of wages, the high rents in Pullman City, the layoffs, and other disputes with the Pullman Railway Company. Though Eugene Debs attempted to keep violence to a minimum and urged his union to remain calm, the Pullman Strike erupted into a strike of a frightening magnitude that the United States had never seen and would never see again. At the height of the Pullman Strike “and estimated quarter of a million workers in twenty-seven states were on strike, disrupting rail traffic, or rioting” (2).
The strike solidified its importance by becoming the event most reported in the print media through the use of pictures, drawings, and one-sided political cartoons (3). The media bashed Debs repeatedly through political cartoons, which one could take a signifying the threat that the Pullman Strike posed not only to the average individual but also powerful individuals. The Pullman Strike represented more than the strikes that preceeded it during the Gilded Age, it came to represent the entire labor organization versus the entire railroad industry. The significance of this cannot be lost, even over a century later. It set a legal precedent that could not and can not be ignored. What followed the Pullman Strike was a trial that showed the extreme bias of the legal system of Chicago at the time.
The appointment of people “who had the right moral and political principles” made the bias painfully clear, even during the time (4). United States Attorney General Richard Olney handpicked his assistant, Edwin Walker, and these two would the engineers of getting an injunction, which Eugene Debs would resist. At this time, any representative of the government almost always represented the interest of the railway companies first (5). These officials spread the fear that labor unions, should they get larger and join together, would become tyranny. The severity of the Pullman Strike and the fact that it resulted in the first Supreme Court decision supporting labor injunctions makes it extremely important to modern history. These injunctions caused people to believe that judges were exceeding the proper functions of a court's purpose and that this was a violation of rights. At this time even the idea of an injunction was unprecedented.
The legal system made it seem that it would be completely for injunctions despite the personal rights this system violated. And despite the feeling surrounding the fairness of the injunctions, Eugene Debs would still be imprisoned for violating an injunction. Which, from a historical standpoint is upsetting because, despite him “violating the injunction”, Debs was a huge advocate for keeping the calm and not letting the situation escalate into useless violence that would make the organization look bad. Clarence Darrow, who would defend Eugene Debs, claimed that individuals were “puppets in the hands of the great railroad corporations and that it was persecution not prosecution” (Papke 55). Even though they lost, the defense made a few issues poignantly clear to the general population that would affect the history of labor disputes.
Another remarkable thing about the strike was the magnitude. The workers of Pullman were strong, confident, and organized. Precedent would point to their failure, would point to them embarking on what could only been seen as an uphill battle destined for disaster. The Pullman Railway Strike was one of the most far-reaching, greatest strikes of all time. The significance of that historically cannot and should not be neglected. Both legally and socially the strike carried great importance to the labor movement both of the time and continuing on until the modern day. The Pullman Railway Strike pitted the people against the federal government, which was also important to the time. The Pullman Strike never should have been seen as scary or threatening. It worked with the past to become an event that was influential and encouraging. The labor organization learned from the mistakes past and stood up for the people within the company that they felt were being treated unfairly and were being oppressed. These ideas are what made an impact. The Pullman Strike legacy kept it from being so easy for other cities to get involved with labor disputes and get in between the parties involved.
Stephen Gregory warned in his brief about injunctions and that they “will overturn the workingmen of this country, bound hand and foot, to the mercy or corporate rapacity and greed in a time when combination rules every market and every great enterprise and dominates all activities of capital The effect will be either to break the spirit of American wageworkers until they sink to a dull level but little above that of dumb beasts; or else by continuing or restraining dynamic social forces until they gather an accumulated and resistless energy by such compression, precipitate an explosion which shall wreck the social order” (6). His defense of the American Railway Union was that they HAD to strike and that people HAD to be able to take a stand against injustices in not only the labor community, but all aspects of life.
The significance of the Pullman Strike can be seen is how corporations and workers are looked at in a modern perspective. Following the strike in the 1920s the world become one where the consumer was always right and the workers were given little leeway. The memory of this Pullman Strike, throughout time, has become less about the lawyers and the company and more about the people involved, the people who, in the Gilded Age, had no voices. The Strike was an important event depicted by the media but in the 1950s the importance shifted from the Pullman Company and to the porters and workers who unfairly had their wages lowered while rent and cost of living remained the same. Under Eugene Debs they struck, placing fear in the hearts of the country. The newspapers and legal system played on these sentiments for many, many years but thanks to historians who challenged popular history, the Pullman workers are no longer painted as the horrible people they were in the late 19th century.
(1) Papke, 17.
(2) Papke, 35.
(3) Papke, 36.
(4) Papke, 40.
(5) Papke, 38-40
(6) Papke, 63
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