Samuel Gompers: Editorial on the Pullman Strike

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It is a lamentable fact that success does not always attend the right of those who struggle to achieve it. If any doubt existed as to the truth of this statement, the strike at Pullman, and the strike of the American Railway Union in support of it, has dispelled that doubt.

It is indeed difficult to conceive a cause in which right was more on the side of those who were defeated as in the one under consideration.

We present to our readers the true story of this contest, and the cause which led up to it; and we hope to add to the contumely and contempt which every earnest, honest, liberty loving man, woman and child in the country must feel for the most consummate type of avaricious wealth absorber, tyrant and hypocrite this age, of that breed, has furnished—Pullman.

In the language of the picture drawn by Pullman, the philanthropist of Pullman, the town, he says: “That it is bordered with bright beds of flowers and green velvety stretches of land, that [it] is shaded with trees and dotted with parks and pretty water vistas and glimpses here and there of artistic sweeps and landscape gardening, a town where the homes even of the most modest are bright and wholesome and filled with pure air and light, a town, in a word, from which all that is ugly, discordant and demoralizing is eliminated and all that inspires to self-respect, to thrift and to cleanliness of person and of being is generally provided.”

This description is unquestionably true so far as it refers to the view which the passer by sees upon the train; but back where the workers live and die, what a pitiful, horrible condition prevails. In whole blocks entire families have for years lived in one room in order that they might eke out an existence. In no community in the world, except possibly China, was there such a small proportion of families living in family privacy.…

In Pullman there was always an indefinable something telling the workers that their presence was not wanted where the flowers and Fountains and velvety lawns are. The houses are not healthy and the records show an unusual number of deaths by zymotic diseases.

During the terrible suffering last winter the Company insisted that there was no destitution nor suffering in the place and with much nonchalance declared that “there could be none because it was not contemplated in the theory upon which the town was founded and controlled.”

When a number of charitable ladies organized to relieve the destitution they were not permitted to carry on the work, for that would be an acknowledgment that there was need of relief.

The town of Pullman covers 350 acres estimated to be worth $10,000,000. Buildings occupied by the workers are congested as the most thickly settled residence districts of Chicago, yet Pullman pays but $15,000 on taxes. (Carnegie defrauds the government in his contracts; Pullman in taxes.)

Nor should it be imagined that the statement made by Pullman recently, that the reason he refused to arbitrate the matter in dispute with his employees was that the Company were producing cars at a loss. As a matter of fact last February, or two months before the strike commenced, the Company issued an official statement containing the following. “The day is near at hand when the $30,000,000 present capital of the Pullman Company will be covered and more than covered by the value of the 3,500 acres of land on which is built the town of Pullman.” Coupled with this was the statement that the $30,000,000 capital stock had a market value of $60,000,000.

When the fact is borne in mind that Pullman has practically a monopoly in the building of his cars, is not the claim preposterous that he could not pay fair wages? Does anyone imagine that if Pullman’s statement of his inability to pay the wage demanded was true that he would refuse to arbitrate? No arbitrator would make an award against him if he could prove his assertions; his refusal is the best evidence of his untruthfulness. In truth out of his own statements he convicts himself.

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. His name and memory are excoriated to-day and will be forever.