Pullman Strike of 1894: Eugene Debs, a Company Town and 12,000 Army Troops

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George Pullman built the town of Pullman, Illinois, outside Chicago, where his company owned every house, store, library, church, theater and utility, with brick homes, paved streets and indoor plumbing but no elected government. When the Panic of 1893 cut orders for sleeping cars, he slashed wages 20% to 30% without lowering rents or store prices, and rent was deducted before pay, leaving some workers with checks of a few cents. He fired the grievance committee, and on May 11, 1894, nearly 4,000 workers walked out, with seamstress union president Jennie Curtis among the leaders. Eugene V. Debs's new American Railway Union took up their cause.

On June 26 the ARU began refusing to handle any train carrying a Pullman car, and at its peak a quarter of a million workers in 27 states joined. The General Managers Association hired strikebreakers, many of them Black men barred from the whites-only ARU. Attorney General Richard Olney, still on a $10,000 railroad retainer, won a federal injunction on the grounds that strikers blocked the U.S. mail. Over Governor John Peter Altgeld's objections, President Grover Cleveland, who had just signed Labor Day into law, sent 12,000 troops under General Nelson Miles. About 70 people died nationwide, about 30 in Chicago.

• Samuel Gompers' American Federation of Labor and the railroad brotherhoods refused to back the boycott.
• Railroads attached Pullman cars to mail trains, so the boycott could not avoid blocking the Postal Service.
• Clarence Darrow defended Debs; conspiracy charges were dropped, but he served six months in Woodstock, Illinois for defying the injunction.
• Debs left jail a socialist, helped found the Socialist Party of America and ran for president five times.
• A federal commission called Pullman's town un-American, and in 1898 the Illinois Supreme Court forced the company to divest it.