The Pullman Strike of 1894 began as a rebellion against greedy paternalism. George M. Pullman, the railroad sleeping-car mogul, built a “model town” (named after himself) complete with a park, playgrounds, and a library for his employees. But Pullman was not acting as a philanthropist; he made a profit on his investment by deducting rents and fees from the workers’ wages. During the depression of 1893 Pullman cut wages by as much as 25 percent without lowering rents in the company town. When he fired members of the workers’ committee that asked him to either restore the wage cut or lower rents, his employees walked off their jobs.
The strikers knew that they would fail if they could not stop Pullman’s primary source of revenue, which was from railroads using his cars. As members of the American Railway Union (ARU), an industrial union recently formed by Eugene V. Debs, they appeared at the organization’s first convention begging for help. Flushed by a victory over the Great Northern Railroad, the convention delegates ignored Debs’s advice and instructed him to order a boycott if Pullman refused to negotiate. Pullman refused, and Debs in June 1894 instructed his membership to stop moving the sleeping cars.
The General Managers Association, an organization of the 24 railroads serving Chicago, used the boycott as an opportunity to destroy the militant ARU. The railroads precipitated a general strike by firing workers who refused to move Pullman cars. The managers then appealed to Washington for help. Attorney General Richard Olney, a former railroad attorney, responded by appointing another railroad lawyer, Edwin Walker, as special assistant to the federal attorney in Chicago, instructing him to use all legal means to break the strike. One legal recourse was obvious; it was against the law to obstruct the movement of the mail, which most passenger but few freight trains carried. To secure the movement of the freight trains, Walker appealed to the courts to enforce the Sherman Antitrust Act prohibiting conspiracies in restraint of trade. On July 2, 1894, the courts complied by issuing an injunction forbidding interference with any railroad activity and ordering Debs and anyone else to stop inducing workers to strike. The following day a U. S. marshall requested troops to help enforce the injunction. And on July 4 President Grover Cleveland ordered the army into Chicago and other railroad centers, much to the dismay of Illinois governor John Peter Alt-GELD, who believed the troops were not needed.
Debs appealed to other unions for financial and moral support, but the request was largely ignored. The railroad brotherhoods were happy to see the upstart ARU disappear, and the American Federation of Labor (AFL) opposed industrial unions. Realizing the strike was doomed, Debs offered to call it off if the railroads promised to rehire the strikers. Management did not respond, and the strike disintegrated. The victorious railroads blacklisted strike leaders, and the ARU collapsed. Arrested for contempt of court, Debs was sentenced to six months in prison, and in the landmark case In re Debs (1895), the Supreme Court upheld the use of the injunction against striking labor unions.
Further reading: Stanley Buder, Fullman: An Experiment in Industrial Order and Community Planning, 1880-1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967).
—Harold W. Aurand
Quay, Matthew Stanley (1833-1904) politician, lawyer
The quintessential political boss of the Gilded Age, Matthew S. Quay was born on September 30, 1833, in Dills-burg, Pennsylvania. He grew up in western Pennsylvania and graduated at 17 from Jefferson College, in Canons-burg, where he excelled in classics and literature. After reading law in a Pittsburgh law firm, he was admitted to the Beaver County bar in 1854. That same year he married Agnes Barclay; they had five children.
Quay’s political career began just as the Republican Party developed in Pennsylvania. In 1855 Secretary of the Commonwealth Andrew Gregg Curtin, who respected Quay’s father, a Presbyterian minister, recommended that Quay fill out the term of the Beaver County prothonotary (chief clerk of the court). Quay was elected and reelected to full terms in 1856 and 1859 and managed Curtin’s 1860 gubernatorial campaign in Beaver County.
When the success of Curtin, Abraham Lincoln, and the Republican Party led to the secession of the South and civil war, Quay volunteered for military service. Curtin, however, made him his private secretary to handle his vast correspondence and also found him helpful in “meeting sudden and severe emergencies.” Craving glory, Quay got Curtin in 1862 to make him colonel of the 134th Pennsylvania Volunteers, but by the year’s end an attack of typhoid fever forced him to resign. Although relieved just prior to the December 13 Battle of Fredericksburg, Quay, though still weak, earned the Congressional Medal of Honor, while leading his men in the final, futile bloody charge on Marye’s Heights. Upon recovering his health, Quay resumed his task of answering Curtin’s mail from Pennsylvania’s troops. Grateful for the interest Quay had shown in them, veterans supported him throughout his career.
Quay was a masterful political strategist, who transferred his intraparty loyalty from Curtin to his rival, Simon Cameron. For supporting Cameron, Quay was named secretary of the commonwealth in 1873 and became
Cameron’s political manager. When Cameron, in 1877, resigned from the U. S. Senate in favor of his son Don (who proved inept at party leadership), Quay emerged by 1879 as the boss of Pennsylvania and in 1887 was elected to the U. S. Senate, where he remained until his death.
Quay used his talents to win elections rather than to originate or legislate policy. He excelled in absenteeism and shunned important committee assignments, preferring to distribute favors (usually new post offices) as chair of the Committee on Public Buildings and Grounds. His interest in the tariff ended when his constituents were protected. Issues did not interest him because he believed good organization would defeat good ideas. Since his effective organization depended on control of the thousands of election units in Pennsylvania, Quay kept card files on local politicians, listing favors they received, their strengths, weaknesses, and secrets. When faced with party revolts in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, he used the information on his cards to line up support. Money to run his machine—to provide favors—came from political assessments of both officeholders and industrialists, who contributed as long as he protected their interests.
Quay was an audacious and sagacious captain in a political campaign. As chair of the Republican National Committee in 1888, he engineered Benjamin Harrison’s victory, even though he had 100,000 fewer votes than his Democratic opponent Grover Cleveland, and secured a Republican Congress. Quay accomplished this feat by frying $400,000 of “fat” out of Pennsylvania manufacturers, using $150,000 of it to eliminate fraudulent voters in New York City by compiling a list of legitimate voters there, and dispatching well-heeled henchmen to buy voters in close congressional districts. Harrison carried New York and with it the election, and told an incredulous Quay, “Providence has given us the victory,” to which Quay later exclaimed, “Providence hadn’t a damned thing to do with it,” adding that Harrison would never know “how close” men approached “the gates of the penitentiary to make him President.”
Quay was corrupt as well as astute. To supplement political assessments and business contributions, he repeatedly used state funds. From the early 1870s until his death Quay was almost invariably state treasurer or close to the person who was treasurer. The state treasurer could deposit state money in banks without receiving interest for the state. Anxious to secure these funds, banks showered favors on state treasurers, who usually left their office wealthier than when they entered it. In 1880, with the compliance of the state treasurer, Quay, through speculation, lost $250,000 of the state’s money. When the scandal broke in 1885, he was saved from ruin by a $100,000 loan from Don Cameron. Seeking vindication, Quay audaciously ran for state treasurer in 1885, used his cards to call in political debts, and won the election. In office he proceeded to speculate with $400,000 in state funds, made a profit, paid off Don Cameron, and returned the $400,000 he had essentially embezzled. A passionate stock-market speculator, Quay in 1898 was again caught using state funds. “I don’t mind losing a governorship or a legislature now and then,” Quay quipped, “but I always need the state treasuryship.”
Quay was a man of contradictions. Although an urbane guest and gracious host, he would rather read at home or fish for marlin in Florida than attend a fashionable Washington ball. He was corrupt and cynical, yet no one was more patriotic, brave, and loyal to his troops than he was at Fredericksburg. No one excelled him in machine politics, and no politician excelled him in his love of literature and books. Before he died on May 28, 1904, one of his last requests was “to see my books once more.”
Further reading: James A. Kehl, Boss Rule in the Gilded Age: Matt Quay of Pennsylvania (Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981).
Racism See African Americans; imperialism; NATIVISM; SOCIAL DaRWINISM.
Ragtime See Music: art, folk, popular.
World History
