Pullman and the Labor Movement

The Pullman National Monument is “a milestone on our journey to a more perfect Union,” said President Barack Obama, because of its role in 19th century labor struggles, and also the 20th century journey of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP) toward the Civil Rights movement.

The Far South Side Pullman neighborhood began in the early 1880s as a company town planned by George M. Pullman for workers inhis factory, which built luxury railroad sleeping cars for transcontinental travel.

Architect Solon Spencer Beman designed Queen Anne-style homes and Romanesque public buildings, such as the arcade that included shops, offices, a library, theater, general-purpose rooms, and a bank. Company officers lived in ornate houses; junior skilled workers lived in smaller, simpler row houses; single, unskilled workers lived in tenement blocks farther from public view. The Hotel Florence, named for Pullman’s oldest daughter, provided luxe accommodations for railroad CEOs on buying trips to the town. Prices in its bar – the only one allowed in Pullman – were high enough so that no workingman could afford to drink there.

“The beauty, sanitation and order George Pullman provided his workers and their families were not without cost,” Obama said in proclaiming Pullman part of the National Park Service in February 2015. “The Pullman Company owned every building and charged rents that would ensure a return on the company’s investment in building the town.”

Business was good for the Pullman Palace Car Company leading up to the World’s Fair of 1893, which drew 20 million visitors to Chicago. However, a worldwide banking crisis led to the Panic of 1893, the most severe economic depression until the 1930s: 12 out of every 100 U.S. workers were unemployed.

In order to maintain low bids on contracts for his railroad sleeping cars, George Pullman cut wages by 25 percent – but he did not lower rents, or prices in the town’s stores. He wanted a continued 6 percent profit to shareholders on the homes, according to Pullman National Monument materials.

“I have seen men with families of eight or nine children to support crying because they got only three or four cents after paying their rent,” Thomas W. Heathcoate, a skilled employee, said in an exhibit at the National Monument.

When a contingent of workers went to Pullman Company officials to complain in May 1894 about low wages, high prices, and 16-hour days, several of them were fired.

The firing of people coming to the company with a “grievance” was huge, said Victor Devinatz, PhD. “Pullman’s goal was to develop a utopian town that would take care of workers’ needs, but there was no democracy in the town. He owned the employment, the buildings they rented. That’s how you control dissidents. You fire them. And they have to leave the company town because they are not able to find employment.”

After Pullman’s refusal to collectively bargain with them, 3,000 workers walked off the job May 11, 1894, in what is known as a “wildcat strike,” where workers are unofficially on their own, i.e., unrepresented by a union, Devinatz said. A frequent StreetWise contributor, Devinatz teaches labor relations/ union management in the department of management and quantitative methods at the college of business at Illinois State University (ISU). His class is required for ISU students who plan careers in Human Resources management – formerly known as personnel.

The majority of Pullman workers were not represented by a union because the American Federation of Labor (AFL), formed in 1886, favored a “labor aristocracy” of skilled craft union members: “We’re the only ones who should be in unions because we have the skills. We don’t really care about the other workers.” The AFL held this policy until the death of its leader, Samuel Gompers, in 1924.

Meanwhile, craft union members were basically white, native-born, English-speaking, and male.

“The strength of a craft union is that it controls the labor market,” Devinatz said. “It is able to keep wages up because in order to get into the union, you have to go through an apprenticeship program, working under a journeyman member. How do you get in? Especially back then, it was through family connections: your father, your grandfather was in the union.”

About 35 percent of Pullman workers were members of the American Railway Union (ARU). Its leader, Eugene V. Debs, a locomotive fireman, held a view opposite the AFL’s. He believed that all workers in an industry – skilled, semi-skilled, or unskilled – should be organized into a union, because there was strength in numbers, Devinatz said.

Pullman members didn’t work on trains, however; they built them. Still, when George Pullman refused arbitration with the strikers, i.e., settlement by a neutral party, the ARU agreed on June 26 to boycott all trains carrying a Pullman car. The boycott involved all ARU brotherhoods necessary to run a train: locomotive firemen (who stoked coal into the engine’s firebox and managed its steam), brakemen, engineers and switchmen.

The AFL opposed this boycott because its leaders felt that being an industrial union, the ARU would take its membership, Devinatz said.

The boycott was highly effective. Within four days, it involved 125,000 workers, and at its peak, more than 250,000 workers in 27 states: most railroads west of Detroit.

But also on June 26, trying to placate the strikers, Congress passed a bill designating the first Monday in September as Labor Day, a federal holiday; President Grover Cleveland signed it the next day. Thirty-one states had already agreed to the Labor Day holiday, but the Pullman strike provided the final impetus.

However, Devinatz and Larry Spivack, president of the Illinois Labor History Society, say that the September holiday was actually a more conservative commemoration than the May 1, “International Workers’ Day” first marked in 1889 by the International Socialist Conference. The AFL particularly disliked the May 1 holiday, because it was associated with anarchy and the Haymarket Affair, which happened May 1-4, 1886, in Chicago.

Workers at the McCormick Reaper farm implement manufacturing plant had been among 200,000 people across the U.S. demonstrating for an eight-hour day on May 1, 1886. The strike turned violent May 3 and on May 4, a rally in Haymarket Square (Randolph and Desplaines Streets) ended when 180 police came to disperse the 3,000 people, according to time.com. An unknown person threw a bomb at police; 67 of them were wounded and seven died. The police response wounded 200 and killed several men.

Although Debs had been preaching nonviolence, a crowd became so riled after one of his peaceful rallies, June 29 in Blue Island, IL, that it derailed a locomotive carrying a U.S. Mail car. This action angered U.S. President Grover Cleveland, because the strike had now interfered with federal government business. Cleveland’s Cabinet, led by his attorney general (a former railroad attorney), urged him to send 10,000 federal troops to Pullman, over the objections of Illinois Gov. John Peter Altgeld, who had held back state militia.

The federal troops were met with violence, especially when they intervened to protect strikebreakers operating trains in defiance of the boycott. By July 5, Debs offered to call off the strike in return for arbitration, but Pullman refused.

In Chicago alone, an estimated 30 people were killed, Devinatz said. Fifty years later, a historian estimated another 40 died across the United States. Property damage exceeded $80 million. The U.S. attorney general went to federal court in Chicago and received an injunction that forbade Debs from communicating with the strikers. The attorney general cited the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, which said that the federal government had the right to prevent combinations or unreasonable restraint over interstate commerce.

It was the first time the government had used an injunction to break a strike.

Labor and its supporters were stunned that the Sherman Act had been used against them, rather than the corporate monopolies for which the Anti-trust act was intended, Spivack said. This showed the public that the government was willing to side with Gilded Age businessmen, instead of the people, he said.

More federal troops arrived July 20 and the Pullman workers went back to work under the same conditions – after signing a pledge that they would never join a union.

Meanwhile, in August 1894, the Illinois attorney general sued the Pullman Company on the grounds that its charter permitted only the corporation, not the housing. The Illinois Supreme Court agreed, and by 1907, the Pullman Company had sold most of its housing in order to comply.

Debs had naturally continued to communicate with strikers – even by telegram – so he spent six months in the McHenry County Jail in Woodstock, IL for violating the injunction. With time on his hands, he read the book, “Das Kapital” by Karl Marx, given to him by Victor Berger, the socialist mayor of Milwaukee.

Debs began to ponder socialism as an alternative to capitalism and in 1901, he formed the Social Democracy of America, which later merged with other factions to form the Socialist Party of America (SPA). The SPA was the first working class socialist party whose majority were English speaking members, a diverse body that ranged from writers Upton Sinclair and Jack London to Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters founder A. Philip Randolph.

Debs ran unsuccessfully as SPA candidate for president in 1904, 1908, 1912, (when he received 6 percent of the vote) and 1920, when he received 3.8 percent because the larger electorate included women, Devinatz said.

The Pullman Strike paved the way for industrial labor, Spivack said. However, the federal government continued to side with capital until the first 100 days of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s presidency in 1933, when the National Recovery Act (NRA) gave workers the right to organize unions, Devinatz said.

The U.S. Supreme Court called the NRA unconstitutional in 1935, which led to passage of the Wagner Act that same year, he added. The Wagner Act covered most workers in industries related to interstate commerce. It also created a National Labor Relations Board comprised of three people appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate, who would enforce employee rights rather than mediate disputes.

Meanwhile, since 1867, Pullman had been recruiting African American men to work as porters on his railroad sleeper cars. The porters shined shoes, set up and cleaned the pulldown beds, and carried luggage. Pullman was upfront about his reasons for hiring former house slaves; he figured they would know how to cater to the whims of his middle- and upper-class passengers, and that they would work long hours for cheap wages.

Working conditions for the porters were horrendous. Pullman porters often worked 400 hours a month, with little time off. They were among the worst paid of all railroad employees, with tipping built into their pay structure. As a result, they gained a reputation as grinning “Uncle Toms” who exaggerated their servitude to increase their tips, according to history.com.

The AFL had refused to organize the porters for the same reason it had disdained unskilled white workers, Devinatz said. The AFL also said that Blacks lacked “trade union consciousness,” because they had been strikebreakers. This argument is faulty, Devinatz said, because they had never been given a chance to unionize.

Led by magazine editor A. Philip Randolph and former Pullman porter Milton P. Webster, the Pullman porters organized the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP) in 1925. Due to strong opposition by the Pullman Company, Randolph and the BSCP had to fight for more than a decade before they secured their first collective bargaining agreement—the first-ever between a union of Black workers and a major U.S. company—in 1937. In addition to a big wage hike for porters, the agreement set a limit of 240 working hours a month.

Randolph and other members of the BSCP used the same skills to organize the civil rights movement, which ultimately led to passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. When Rosa Parks was arrested in Montgomery, AL for refusing to give up her seat in December 1955, Pullman porter Edgar D. Nixon was instrumental in starting the bus boycott there. Nixon, leader of the local BSCP chapter, asked the young minister Martin Luther King Jr. to work in his stead, because Nixon was often out of town working as a porter.

The Pullman porters also helped create a Black middle class beyond themselves, starting with the Great Migration during World War I, when European migration was put on hold. The Chicago Defender published stories detailing opportunities for a better life in the North. Pullman porters smuggled bundles of the newspaper onto trains and dropped them off at beauty and barber shops, so that Black southerners could read them, according to chicagodefender.com. Thousands of southern Blacks took heed.

Interacting with wealthier, white Americans, Pullman porters gained insight into the dominant culture as well, according to history.com. “Armed with this knowledge, many porters saved up money to send their children and grandchildren through college and graduate school, giving them the education and opportunities they hadn’t had themselves.”

Representing an array of different fields, Pullman porter descendants include Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, jazz pianist Oscar Peters, Olympic track star Wilma Rudolph – and Michelle Obama.