Shit From An Old Notebook

On May 11th, 1894, workers walked off the job at the Pullman Palace Car Company, of Chicago, Illinois. Having faced pay cuts on top of pay cuts for the past five years, with no end in sight, along with the rising cost of housing and feeding families in company scrip in a company town, these newly minted members of the American Railway Union struck, and asked their brothers in the ARU around the country to join them.

Within days, wildcats had closed down most of the Chicago trainyards, creating a ripple effect that spread across the country. Eugene V. Debs, president of the ARU, counseled caution at a special convention called to discuss a general strike, but ARU local leader and Pullman worker Jennie Curtis sounded the alarm:

Pullman, both the man and the town, is an ulcer on the body politic. He owns the houses, the schoolhouse, and the churches of God in the town he gave his once humble name.

And, thus, the merry war — the dance of skeletons bathed in human tears — goes on; and it will go on, brothers, forever unless you, the American Railway Union, stop it; end it; crush it out.

Debs was overruled, and the strike was on.

On July 5th of that year, over Governor Peter Altgeld's strenuous objections, President Grover Cleveland called out the National Guard. On July 7th, Debs was one of eight ARU leaders arrested by Chicago police for conspiring to halt the free flow of mail. By July 20th, 13 strikers were dead, 57 seriously injured, and the National Guard finally left the city. Eugene Debs spent six months in Woodstock Jail once convicted of conspiracy charges, maybe you should read the rest.

Minutemen - Shit From An Old Notebook
Billy Bragg - There is Power in a Union (Live at Glastonbury, 1992)
Eugene V. Debs speech