Samuel Gompers: Editorial on the Pullman Strike

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

In response to the declining economic conditions during the Panic of 1893, the industrialist George Pullman reduced wages but failed to lower rents for the workers in his company town outside Chicago. where railway sleeping cars were produced. The wildcat strike of Pullman Palace Car Company workers that began on May 11, 1894, was supported by the American Railway Union and its leader, Eugene Debs. The ARU launched a boycott of trains containing Pullman cars, which disrupted national railroad traffic. Arguing that the boycott interfered with mail delivery, the administration of President Grover Cleveland obtained an injunction against the ARU leadership, and troops were dispatched to quash the strike. In desperation, Debs appealed to Gompers and the AFL for a general strike on behalf of the beleaguered union. But at a meeting of the AFL executive board in Chicago on July 12, 1894, Gompers refused to call for a general strike, arguing that the ARU strike was impulsive and that it was in the best interest of working people for sympathy work stoppages to be halted. Gompers also believed that it was foolhardy to involve the AFL in a doomed strike. Debs, however, perceived Gompers as betraying industrial unionism in favor of the elite interests of skilled craft unions. Debs and Gompers would continue their antagonistic relationship into the early twentieth century as Debs assumed a leadership role within the Socialist Party.

While he considered the tactics of the ARU rash, Gompers makes clear in his August 1894 editorial for the American Federationist his sympathy for the Pullman workers and his antipathy for the industrialist himself. Declaring his working-class sensibilities, Gompers describes George Pullman as “the most consummate type of avaricious wealth absorber, tyrant and hypocrite this age, of that breed, has produced.” Discrediting Pullman's brand of welfare capitalism, Gompers proclaims the purported living and health conditions of the factory company town to be a charade for media consumption. The reality of life for Pullman workers was subpar housing standards and increased exposure to disease. As for the claim by Pullman that he was forced to reduce wages because of his declining profits, Gompers concludes that the industrialist simply refused to justly arbitrate the dispute, because he was certainly financially capable of providing more equitable compensation for his workers. In a rhetorical finish to his editorial, Gompers seeks to refute Debs and others who accused him of abandoning labor's cause, asserting, “The end is not yet. Labor will not back down. It will triumph despite all the Pullmans combined; and as for Pullman, he has proven himself a public enemy.” Criticism of Gompers for his perceived indifference to the Pullman strike deprived the union leader of his AFL presidency in 1895, but he regained office the following year.