A. The Last Veteran--McKinley was the last veteran of the Civil War to serve as president, ending the string that began 28 years earlier with U.S. Grant
B. McKinley and the Tariff Issue--the tariff issue is one that most students today find excruciatingly boring, but animate politically active people during the 1890s. McKinley was a devote believer in the power of the tariff--so much so that although his sponsorship of legislation increasing tariffs on a number of goods cost him his Congressional seat in 1890 (a result of the so-called McKinley Tariff Act--and gerrymandering of congressional districts in Ohio), he remained committed to a high tariff when he returned to the national scene politically in 1896.
1. Business-Friendly--McKinley's committment to maintaining the tariff was business-friendly--protecting the home market for manufactured goods in the United States--but much of that was a result of his world-view--a world-view shared by many of his contemporaries. McKinley was not an advocate of free trade, because he believed that economic prosperity for the country lie in producing goods, rather than purchasing cheap goods from other countries.
2. Hard Money--the belief that by maintaining the United States on the gold standard, inflation could be kept low, and trade exporting goods would be facilitated.
C. Prosperity--for some--The confidence business men felt in McKinley because of his actions helped to facilitate an economic recover from the Depression of 1893. This depression had been so severe that some veterans of the Civil War joined with an Ohio businessman named Jacob Coxey to march on Washington to ask the government to form program to put unemployed men to work. Coxey's Army, as the group was called did make it to Washington, D.C., but then members were driven from the Capitol, and Coxey himself was arrested for trespassing when he tried to read a speech from the steps of the Capitol.
II. Leon F. Czolgosz (1873-1901)
A. The Immigrant experience--Czolgosz was born in Detroit, Michigan to Polish/Belarusian parents. The family later moved to Rogers City, and later to Alpena, where family patriarch Paul Czolgosz found work and the promise of a better life. Loading lumber (his work in Alpena) held little of this promise, however, and as the children reached the reasonable age of ten or so, they were placed in jobs to supplement the family income. This remained a pattern for the family, as it was for most immigrant families. Leon Czolgosz himself found work at the advanced age of 16 in a glass factory near Pittsburgh; he later worked at a wire factory in the Newburgh neighborhood of Cleveland, and supplied a portion of his earnings to maintain the family farm in Warrensville as well as his fathers saloon near the wire works.
B. Depression--Leon Czolgosz lost his job at the wire works in the depression of 1893. While he found other jobs, this experience led him to begin to explore the pantheon of socialist though--Bellemyites, socialists, and anarchists.
C. Czolgosz and the Anarchists--in reality, there was little connection between connection between Czolgosz and the anarchist movement, largely because his pursuit of the anarchists was so clumsy and and ill-informed about anarchist thought that many within the movement were convinced that he was an agent for the police.
D. Shooting McKinley--Czolgosz simply stood in the receiving line to shake hands with the President, the pistol he purchased hidden in a dirty handkerchief he had bound to this hand. Luckily, he was standing in front of an African American man in line, who received the lion's share of attention from the Secret Service agents. As McKinley reached out to shake his hand, Czolgosz shot him twice, before the African American man knocked him down, and others in the crowd jumped on him and started beating him.
E. McKinley's death--the first shot was nonlethal, and the second may have been if doctors had used the x-ray machine, on display at the Pan-American Exhibition that McKinley was attending in Buffalo when shot, to find the bullet. After seeming on the way to recovery, and after being declared so by a specialist brought in from New York City, McKinley took a sudden turn for the worse, and died a week after being shot.
F. "I Done My Duty"--Czolgosz made no pretense of innocence. After an extremely swift trial, he was found guilty, sent to Auburn Prison, executed by the electric chair. After a cursory autopsy, he was buried on the prison grounds (his family was told it was not safe to take the body outside of the prison, because it would be attacked by an enraged crowd), the body covered in lime to speed decompositon. After the grave was closed, a large amount of sulfuric acid was introduced to hurry things along even more
A. Ellen Gates Starr--joined Jane Adams in this venture without ever having visited Toynbee Hall--the only settlement house model in existence.
1. Working-class background--Starr came from a working-class family, and her father's anti-capitalist beliefs undoubtedly influence her own thinking on this matter. Her lack of deference toward the "well-born" was one of the things that attracted Addams to her--but this also limited Starr's helpfulness in recruiting benefactors for the Hull House programs, and eventually this became one of the factors in severing their intimate personal relationship.
2. Starr's role--She provided the emotional support that Addams needed to break the family bond that had held her in Cedarville and as her stepmother's companion.
a. Lesbians?--Depends upon how that word is defined. If we use it to refer to women who sought the company of other women over the company of men, and developed deep romantic attachments with other women, then yes Addams and Starr were lesbians. If we define the word as referring only to women who sought genital contact with other women--that we really have no evidence of this between Addams and Starr, so we can draw no conclusions. What we do no is that none of the people they came into contact with--including other residents of Hull House--saw nothing out of the ordinary in the relationship between the two women.
3. Starr's Financial Position--Starr did not have the money that Addams did; in fact, Starr gave up her livelihood, teaching, in order to co-found Hull House with Addams, and then had to hustle jobs to make ends meet, since neither woman drew a salary.
4. Pleasing Addams--While Starr made many important contributions to the early success of Hull House, her anxiety over pleasing Addams on a personal level, and the personal drama led to a cooling of the personal relationship.
B. Helen Culver--inherited her uncle Charles Hull's home on South Halstead, along with most of the property in the block the house occupied--as well as more than 220 other lots in the city.
1. Business woman--while Culver inherited a great deal of wealth from her uncle, but her management of that wealth increased it.
2. Less-than-willing philanthropist--Addams and Starr persuaded Culver to rent half of the house to them; within four years the settlement had expanded to the rest of the house and much of the block that surrounded it--rent free.
C. Creating Female Space--Hull House was not exclusively female space, but the space created had a definite feminine touch. Much of the early attention garnered in the early was for the "feminine touches" around the house--the furnishings, the art work, etc.
II. Leading--and Learning
A. Initial Purpose--Addams and Starr both initially visualized the settlement house mainly benefiting the residents of the house, who would find uses for their lives.
B. Neighborhood--the 19th Ward was an idyllic suburb when Charles Hull built his home, but by the late 1880s it was an extremely impoverished neighborhood. It was home to a large population of recent Italian immigrants, with a smattering of other immigrants, as well.
1. "Dirty Dagoes"--these immigrants had a reputation in Chicago for being unsanitary--unwashed, smelling bad, lazy, etc. What was overlooked was the fact that most of the homes these people lived in lacked running water, so there was no place to bath or to wash.
2. "Introducing hygiene"--one of the first things that Addams and Starr did was to open their bathrooms to their neighbors for their use, and to provide the women of the neighborhood with facilities to wash clothes. Eventually, Addams convinced the city of Chicago to open a bathhouse in the neighborhood.
C. Learning from their neighbors--while Addams initially thought that the poor people of the neighborhood would learn from exposure to the residents living in the settlement house. What quickly became apparent to the women, however, was that the immigrant neighbors had much knowledge of their own to impart.
1. Immigrant aspirations--Addams and Starr quickly learned that many of their immigrant neighbors arrived in the United States with skills that they were not allowed to use (many were doctors, lawyers, and other professionals), despite popular perceptions that these people were unskilled.
A.Rough Riders--epitomized, for many Americans, what was admirable about America: multi-ethnic, but led by well-to-do whites.
1. The Rough Riders (book)--Roosevelt's own tale of the recruitment, training, and exploits of his militia.
2. Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show--hired 16 former Rough Riders to re-enact the Battle of San Juan Hill. This show not only helped shape the narrative of this event (much to Roosevelt's advantate), but also the view that many Americans had of the American West
B. Republican Political Scandal
1. Gov. Frank Black--mixed up in a scandal involving kick-backs from contractors bidding on canal dredging contracts
2. Platt Machine--Thomas C. Platt was in a quandary--he dislike reformers like Roosevelt, but he also had to dump Gov. Black, who had become a political liability. Platt's hand was forced at this juncture, since not viable candidate presented himself except Theodore Roosevelt, who promised to be a ...
3. Good Republican Soldier--Roosevelt was aware of Platt's disdain toward reformers like himself, but he promised to be on his best behavior, while only requesting on his behalf that a foreign policy plank of the party platform (!?!), and for the party endorsement of his candidacy.
C. The Campaign
1. Appeals to militaristic patriotism--Roosevelt was not shy about about exploiting his image as a war hero; campaign rallies regularly were started by a Rough Rider blowing a bugle from the back of the campaign train to assemble a crowd.
2. William Randolph Hearst--felt that Roosevelt stole his idea of forming his own militia unit (and actually getting to carry it out because of his connections to the Republican Party power structure), Hearst remained a political enemy for the rest of their lives. When Hearst could not persuade the New York state Democratic Party to nominate him to run for governor, he nonetheless unleashed to cartoon and editorial dogs upon candidate Roosevelt.
3. Lack of universal acclaim--not everyone thought bring a war hero was enough to vote for Roosevelt; blacks remembered his disparaging (and false) comments about black soldiers in the war, while white ethnics remembered his efforts to close saloons.
4. Winning the election--by a slim 17,000+ vote margin over the non-entity chosen by the Democratic Party--but this was Roosevelt's first electoral victory since being elected to the New York State Legislature.
II. The Governing Governor
A. Keeping the Platt Promise--although still determined to implement reforms in state government, Roosevelt did consult with Boss Platt on political appointments.
1. Business $$--Plat expected that the heavy contributions that businesses made to his campaign would impel Roosevelt to run a "business government," meaning a state government friendly toward business.
B. Reforming State Government--Roosevelt was instead more interested in limiting the direct influence business had upon government, and returning more control to the people.
1. Eight-Hour-Day legislation--Roosevelt worked with the United Garment Workers to implement an eight-hour-day law for all workers employed on jobs involving government contracts; this legislation was later extended to all government workers (but would not have effected workers in private industry not involved in government contracts).
2. Costello Anit-Sweatshop Act--regulated tenements as work places ("sweatshops")
3. Various Pure Food and Drug acts--Roosevelt pushed for the enactment of a variety of acts calling for inspection of food and drugs to ensure their purity, but because these acts had no penalties attached for violations, they were largely ineffectual.
C. Too Much Reform for Boss Platt--even the limited--and largely ineffectual--reforms pushed by Roosevelt proved to be too much for party boss Thomas Platt, who sought a way to rid his state of the Roosevelt curse. The death of Vice-Preesident Garret Hobart in 1899 of a heart attack provided Platt with just such an opportunity.
A. Riis and Roosevelt--Roosevelt's exposure to multi-cultural New York proved to be valuable experience for him, and was part of his inspiration when he began to organize the Rough Riders.
B. Police Commissioner setbacks--although Roosevelt implemented a number of reforms during his time on the Police Commission Board, his frustrations with the reforms that he was not able to implement led him to seek greener pastures back in Washington, D.C.
1. Reforms
a. Weapons training--the NYPD opened a pistol range, and required officers to be trained in the use of the weapon they were issued.
b. Civil service exams for positions, rather than relying upon political cronyism; this aided in his drive to get bigger, stronger, better educated police in uniform.
2. Failed attempts at reform
a. Closing saloons on Sunday--Roosevelt was responding to the middle class Protestant concerns of establishing a bourgeois culture in the city. Closing saloons on Sundays would mean limiting the time that their working-class customers could patronize these establishments, since Sunday's were often their lone day of leisure.
b. Hoped to undermine the support that Tammany Hall gained from colluding with the liquor lobby, but the opposition this position engendered with the Platt Machine--the Republican Party machine that controlled New York state politics in Albany--meant that legislation was passed loosening the definition of a hotel, and meant that most saloons in the city could legally sell alcohol on Sundays.
II. Back to Washington Politics
A. On the Stump for McKinley--whole Theodore Roosevelt has a well-deserved reputation as a reformer, he was first and foremost a Republican Party partisan, and willingly went out on the stump to prove it.
1. William Jennings Bryan--gained the1896 Democratic Party nomination largely on the strength of his "Cross of Gold" speech (reproduced in the YouTube clip above). Although Roosevelt was closer to Bryan's position on a number of issues than to McKinley, he played the good political soldier and went out to harrangue the crowds about the danger of class warfare that Bryan's election posed.
2. McKinley's fundraising--the fear that the specter of a Bryan election posed for the business interests in the country posed made Mark Hanna's fundraising problem easily overcome; the "businesman's tax" provided the McKinley campaign with more than $3 million, while Bryan's campaign could only raise $300,000. The election became a forgone conclusion.
B. Undersecretary of the Navy--as a political reward for his work on the McKinley campaign, Roosevelt was given the post of Undersecretary of the Navy.
1. Alfred Thayer Mahan--the leading naval theorist of his time, Mahan argued that a nation could only achieve foreign policy success by building a strong navy. To achieve this objective, the nation would also have to obtain places for its large fleet to refuel--"coaling stations"--with the reliance upon steam for locomotion. This became the one of the excuses for the aggressive imperialism that became manifested in the foreign policy of the United States in the years just before the turn of the century.
2. Imperialist foreign policy--in many ways, 1890 is a pivotal year. In that year, the Census Department determined that the frontier in the United States had ceased to exist. By 1892, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner had developed a theory that the frontier had been the determining factor in the development of democracy in the United States. That same year, Homer Plessy was arrested in New Orleans for violating the new segregated railroad car law in Louisiana; by 1896, the Supreme Court would institute the doctrine of "separate but equal," instituting legal segregation. Worries about having room to expand met racist presumptions about the ability of non-white peoples of the earth to govern themselves in this new imperialist foreign policy.
III. Cuba Libre!
A. The "Yellow" Press--the birth of the modern newspaper in the years just before the turn of the 20th century led many of the papers to promote lurid, sensationalist stories in an attempt to sell more newspapers.
1. William Randolph Hearst
B. Remember the Maine
1. The USS Maine--in response to perceived "Spanish aggression," the USS Maine was dispatched to Havana Harbor to "show the flag." On the night of February 15,1898 the Maine suffered a catastrophic explosion, which an investigating committee concluded could only have happened from a mine placed in the harbor (modern evidence points to spontaneous combustion in a coal bin). As a result, pressure to declare war on Spain grows irresistible. When McKinley asks Congress to declare war (the Constitutional method of doing so, by the way), Roosevelt resigns his position in the administration to join the Rough Riders he had been busy organizing.
1. Cuban rebels--had been fighting Spanish forces off and on for the previous thirty years, and at this point had nearly worn Spain into submission before the Americans even began their short voyage. Rebel forces, in fact, held off Spanish forces during the American invasion, which is the main reason why the American forces landed unscathed.
C. The Rough Riders--is really a manifestation of the multi-culturalism that Roosevelt learned from his association with Jacob Riis. The Rough Riders were a mixture of blue blood friends from New York (who made up much of the officer corps), with cowboys, Indians, Mexicans, and a smattering of other ethnic groups--with one important exception--who all brought the "barbarian virtues" that Roosevelt felt Anglo-Saxons had lost.
C. The Charge up Kettle Hill--this engagement, like the whole War With Spain, was a FUBAR mess. It took weeks to transport troops to Cuba, supplies were inadequate--as were preparations, medical attention, and just about everything else about the operation.
1. The Role of the10th Cavalry--under the command of General John J. Pershing, the all African American 10th Cavalry actually bore much of the brunt of the fighting for both Kettle Hill and San Juan Hill. Their bravery under fire was remarked on by a number of officers, including initially one Lt. Colonel Theodore Roosevelt. The 10th Cavalry did not have a personal war correspondent, however, so none of them were awarded a Medal of Honor
A. Police Commissioner Roosevelt--Roosevelt was asked to serve on the Board of Commissioners for the New York City Police Department after he turned down an opportunity to be a Street Cleaning Commissioner in 1894. Roosevelt had contemplated running again for mayor (reform candidate William L. Strong won the race, making Roosevelt even more rueful).
1. Edith Roosevelt's lackluster support--when Roosevelt discussed his candidacy with his wife, her reluctance to leave Washington, D.C. for the vagaries of New York City politics was visible, and Roosevelt withdrew his name from consideration as a candidate.
2. Temporary rift--Roosevelt gave in on this point, but immediately left to go on another western hunting trip. Upon his return, his continued brooding over this subject left his wife feeling somewhat ill at ease, but eventually Roosevelt got over this episode.
B. Jacob Riis--an immigrant from Denmark, migrated to the United States in 1870. His experience as an immigrant was an extremely difficult one, and acquainted him with the dark underside that was part of the immigrant experience. He eventually landed a job with the New York Tribune as a police reporter. His most famous bit of writing is contained in a book he produced, called How the Other Half Lives, which helped connect him with Theodore Roosevelt when Roosevelt became a police commissioner in the latter part of the 1880s.
1. Life as an Immigrant--Riis had a difficult experience as an immigrant to the United States.He arrived in the country as a skilled carpenter, but had much difficulty in finding steady work. Eventually, he had enough good fortune and hard work to return to Denmark to claim the love of his life--and then the couple returned to the United States
2. New York Tribune--After returning to the United States, Riis lived next door to one of the editors of the New York Tribune, and the paper agreed to make him their police reporter. This situation was reminiscent of his own immigrant experience, and he became determined to expose this unpleasant life to a wider public.
3. Riis takes up photography--although Riis' melodramatic way of writing effectively dramatized the conditions that he observed in the slums of New York City, Riis found that when he incorporated photography that his work had a much bigger impact.
C. Roosevelt and Riis--Riis was a great admirer of Roosevelt, and offered to take TR on guided tours of the seamy underside of the city; Roosevelt, looking to make his mark on the Board of Commissioners, readily agreed to this arrangement.
1. Traveling in disguise--both Roosevelt and Riis traveled throughout NYC in disguise, to ensure that the police were patrolling and doing the job they were hired to do. How effective these disguises were may be questioned, since to men traveled with an extensive entourage of newspaper writers to ensure that the event got the proper amount of press coverage.
2. Publicity--both men realized that the publicity these little jaunts to the seamy underworld were necessary to begin to change the conditions they encountered--nor did they do any harm to Roosevelt's political career.
a. In these little midnight escapades, Riis was able to demonstrate to Roosevelt the consequences of the rates that his rich friends derived from what they charged the working families they rented rooms in their tenements to.
b. The attendent publicity also made him a figure of some fun, with street merchants selling "Rosies"--false buck teeth to approximate his increasingly famous grin, as well as whistles to "warn" police of Roosevelt's imminent arrival. Roosevelt's ability to laugh at his own foibles was one of his most endearing personality quirks.
A.Railroads—the “engine” of economic growth by the mid-19th century, but also caused a great deal of disruption in the neighborhoods that the trains passed through, particularly in this time before the grade the railroad tracks ran on was elevated.
1.Injuries to children—in these neighborhoods, children were regularly injured or killed because they were hit by a train.
2.Injuries to railroad workers—working on a railroad was very dangerous work, and workers were regularly maimed or killed, particularly working in the rail yard, coupling and uncoupling rail cars.
3.Watered stock—in this period of rapid expansion, railroad companies often sold more stock than they had assets or profits to cover; or the board of directors might issue themselves more stock to stave off (or profit from) a merger with another company. This was known as “watering” the stock, and was a huge problem for investors not on the board of directors.
4.Depression of 1873—caused in large part by the bankruptcy of Jay Cooke & Company, a Philadelphia investment bank financing the initial construction of the Northern Pacific Railroad. This depression lasted until 1879.
5.Cost-cutting—then, like today, companies were more concerned with the bottom line than with the well-being of their workers, and immediately began cutting wages and jobs—through thousands of people out of work
B.The Great Upheaval—the continuation of the depression meant that businesses continued to cut wages and workers, particularly in the railroad industry.
1.Martinsburg, WVa—a critical junction of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. Workers there decided to strike to attempt to force the company to rescind yet another wage cut in the summer of 1877. Workers prevented trains from passing through Martinsburg, despite the effort of the governor of West Virginia to mobilize the state militia. Workers also used their knowledge of and access to communication technology to workers around the rest of the country.
2.Pittsburgh—inspired by news of events in Martinsburg, and facing similar wage cuts, railroad workers in Pittsburgh went on strike against the Pennsylvania Railroad. When the militia was called up, they chose to bring troops from Philadelphia, were the Pennsylvania Railroad was headquartered. The arrival of this force of “outsiders” sparked a violent confrontation that eventually saw dozens killed, hundreds seriously injured, and much of the huge rail yard in Pittsburgh destroyed.
3.Toledo—In Toledo, agitation for an 8 hour workday for a minimum $1.50 a day wage led a number of workers, inspired by the job action of local railroad workers, to march from manufacturer to manufacturer to ask that the owner concede this demand—and to call for the workers to join the strike if the owner declined. That evening, a cache of arms stored since the abortive Fenian Uprising ten years before helped the local militia of business owners put down the rebellion.
4.St. Louis—inspired and aided by railroad workers, the workers of St. Louis actually engaged in a brief general strike, and workers for a time took over the governance of the city.
5.San Francisco—the Workingman’s Party in San Francisco was largely an instrument of anti-Chinese agitation, and the uprising there quickly degenerated into an anti-Chinese pogrom.
6.Chicago—inspired by the fiery rhetoric of Confederate veteran Albert Parsons and a number of German-American followers of direct-action anarchist Johann Most, workers in Chicago closed down railroad lines, and much else in the city, as well. Although there was not a general strike here as there was in St. Louis, workers sympathetic to the radicals in the Workingman’s Party (in Chicago, this meant the anarchist contingent) regularly struggled against employers in the city—as well as the police force that workers saw working for business interests in the city.
II.1886 and Haymarket
A.Economic climate—by early 1878, the US economy began to recover from the depression, and there was a brief period of economic growth—and labor quiescence—before the next depression hit in 1883-1884.
B.Knights of Labor (K of L)—founded by nine tailors in Philadelphia in 1869, in the organization’s early years of existence it functioned more as a fraternal organization than a labor union; it eventually emerged as the first general labor union in the United States, however, and attempted to organized all workers in the country without regard to gender or race (with one important exception).
1.Emergence—the K of L emerged in the late 1870s under the leadership of Grand Master Workman Terrence O. Powderly, a former railroad worker. The K of L organized workers into “local assemblies,” which could be based both organized by community location, or by craft.
2.Powderly’s claim—Powderly’s claim to abhor strikes was probably genuine, by the K of L was most successful in organizing workers by leading them into successful strikes.
3.1885 Southwestern Railway strike—the most successful of the Knight’s strikes, which led to unorganized workers seeking out K of L organizers to join the union.
C.Federation of Organized Trade and Labor Unions (FOTLU) – a rival group to the K of L, consisting of skilled trades workers organized by craft. To set itself apart from the K of L, FOTLU began agitating for a standard 8-hour day in all trades and industries by May 1, 1886.
1.Strike at McCormick Reaper—in late April, workers went on strike for higher wages and a standard 8-hour day at the large factory in Chicago.
2.May Day—May 1, International Workers’ Day, FOTLU called for a one day general strike. A parade of several thousand marched up Michigan Avenue; after the festivities downtown, some workers ended up at the McCormick works to show support for the strikers there. When a sizable contingent of strike supporters showed up again the next day, the police were called out to maintain order; in a confrontation, the police fired on the crowd, killing several.
3.August Spies—in reaction, the editor of the leading German language newspaper called for workers to attend a protest rally at Haymarket Square the next evening—and he advised them to come armed.
4.Haymarket Riot—in dismal weather, a small crowd gathered on the evening of May 3, 1886 to listen to a serious of speeches. As the evening was winding down, a contingent of Chicago police arrived on the scene to ensure the crowd left quickly and peacefully—when someone from the fringe of the crowd through a bomb that landed in the midst of the police. The combination of the bomb blast and the ensuing gun battle caused seven police officers to be killed, and a number wounded. Reliable numbers for the crowd have never been compiled.
III.1894 Pullman Strike.
A. George Pullman – made his fortune hauling Chicago out of the muck; after the Great Fire of 1871, efforts were made to raise the remaining buildings as much of the swamp that the city was built on was filled. Pullman used this money to establish a company to build sleeping cars used on long trips by railroad companies.
BTown of Pullman – as the company grew, Pullman became concerned about the effect the radicals in Chicago were having upon his workers, so several miles south of the city he built a town (housing, stores, public buildings, a hotel he named after his daughter Florence, even churches) which he rented to workers, but which he retained title.
1)“Model” town – Pullman the town was a great example of welfare capitalism—that is, subsidizing certain amenities for workers so they remain satisfied on the job.
2)Depression of 1893 – the economic depression of 1893 cut deeply into the profits of the Pullman Company, and Pullman responded by cutting wages and laying off workers, as any good capitalist would do.
(a)Pullman rents – Pullman refused to cut rents in the same manner, however, since that division of the business had to show a profit as well.
(b)Pullman workers respond by going on strike in the spring of 1894.
C)Eugene V. Debs – a former officer of the Brotherhood of Railway Firemen, Debs in early 1894 became president of an early industrial union for railway workers, the American Railway Union
1)Railway “Brotherhoods” – each specialty in the railroad industry had its own union, The Brotherhood of Railway Engineers, Brakemen, Conductors, Firemen; problems arose when railway companies settled with one of the brotherhoods, and they crossed the picket line while others were still on strike. The ARU is meant to be a solution to this problem.
2)1894 ARU convention – was held in Chicago; a delegation of workers from Pullman, who plead for the assistance of the ARU. Despite Debs opposition, convention delegates vote to assist Pullman workers, and vote to boycott all trains with Pullman cars. Despite the fact that the ARU represents a relatively small number of workers, traffic all over the country is interrupted.
3)Government response – because there was little violence accompanying the strike the federal government was hamstrung; with a sympathetic John Peter Altgeld as Illinois governor, there was little chance that federal aid would be requested.
(a)Richard Olney – the AG for the federal government was a railroad attorney, and it was he who suggested attaching Pullman cars to mail trains (interfering with the mail is, of course, a federal offense).
(b)Troops from Fort Sheridan (and the Dakotas) are called in “to keep the peace,” which allowed the strike to be broken.
(c)Debs and other union leaders were arrested and held incommunicado, which also helped break the strike; Debs spent a year in jail in Woodstock, Illinois, which he spent reading socialist tracts; he becomes the Socialist Party candidate for president in 1900, 1904, 1908, and 1912, when he polled the largest number of votes to that time in history for a third party candidate
IV. Jane Addams and the 19th Century Labor Problem
A. With Labor, But Not of Labor
1. Labor Sympathizer--from the opening of Hull House, Jane Addams opened the doors to labor union leaders, who she saw as a vital cog in organizing working-class communities--the very kind of community she had decided to settle in and assist in bringing into the democratic fold.
2. Reliance Upon Conciliation--Addams was an early proponent and member of the Civic Federation when it was formed in Chicago in 1889; upon her joining the organization she sought to join the labor committee. Within this committee there was unanimity in the belief that the conciliation process should be used to settle labor/management disputes. How this process was put into practice left much to be desired.
3. Pullman Company's Refusal to Take Part--management at the Pullman company refused to take part in the process, despite the willingness of local union officials to engage with the company on these terms.
B. King Pullman--Addams wrote an account of her experience in the Pullman Strike in which she compared Pullman to Shakespeare's King Lear--someone who had great power, but squandered it because he forgot the good he could do with it. In Addams' analysis, this analogy went further, to include Lear's two greedy daughters, who attempted to denude Lear of his entire kingdom, as filling the role that Pullman's workers and the ARU played in this tragedy.
