![]() Members of the National Guard killed anywhere from four to 30 strikers in the clash. Debs, who was no longer legally allowed to communicate with his members, could do nothing to calm tensions. President Cleveland deployed troops to Chicago to quell the ongoing demonstrations, but on July 7, the conflicts turned violent. One political cartoon in the Chicago Tribune portrayed “Dictator Debs” as a cigar-chomping would-be king who liked to rest his feet on the U.S. The press at the time turned on Debs, too, claiming the strike he organized around the Pullman situation was a power grab. In early July, Attorney General Richard Olney issued an injunction against Debs and other ARU leaders that forbid them from communicating with their union members. mail system affected by the strike, and vital rail service crippled, President Grover Cleveland now considered the unruliness to be a federal matter. By day's end, buildings had been burned to the ground and a locomotive with a mail train attached to it lay topped over. ![]() After Debs made a speech to workers on June 29 in Blue Island, Illinois, some in the crowd broke off and began a riot. The workers' defiance soon turned to anger. ![]() A nation that thrived on cross-country train commerce was now being stopped in its tracks. In response, Debs and the ARU organized a massive sympathy boycott of any trains and railroads using Pullman cars, and by June, 125,000 ARU workers had joined the cause. In May 1894, after suffering a series of salary cuts, workers at the Pullman Palace Car Company walked off the job. Historica Graphica Collection/Heritage Images/Getty Images The Pullman Strikes: Eugene Debs's First Arrestįor a brief moment, the American Railway Union was the most powerful labor union in the country. The union was soon one of the country’s largest, with 125 local chapters nationwide at one point, enrollments hit 2000 a day. On June 20, 1893, Debs's ambitions grew when he founded the American Railway Union (ARU) to protect all workers throughout the railroad industry, not just firemen. Seeing the dangers firemen faced firsthand, Debs said his brotherhood would fight to “provide for the widows and orphans who are daily left penniless and at the mercy of public charity by the death of a brother.” His growing interest in social and economic issues also led to a two-term stint as Terre Haute City Clerk from 1879 to 1883, and a term serving as a Democrat in the Indiana General Assembly in 1884. In 1875, Debs was elected secretary of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and was an editor for the organization’s monthly magazine. This was at a time when workers toiled for 16 hours a day, six days a week. He soon moved up to become a railroad fireman, shoveling piles of coal into the locomotive’s firebox for more than $1 each night. At age 14, Eugene took a job as a paint scraper at Vandalia Railroad, where he earned just $.50 a day. in 1849 and worked in the grocery business. Who was Eugene Debs?Įugene Victor Debs was born on November 5, 1855, in Terre Haute, Indiana, to Marguerite Bettrich and Jean Daniel Debs, two immigrants from Alsace, France. They came to the U.S. Debs was indeed an imprisoned man-who also happened to be running for President of the United States from his cell. The first two viewpoints depend solely on a person's political leanings, but the third was an indisputable fact. And to the employees at the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, he was inmate number 9653. To others, he was a dangerous traitor who sought to discredit the nation’s war effort and undo the tremendous progress the country’s economy had made in the beginning of the 20th century. For some, he was a visionary union leader and politician who rose to the national stage to unite American workers under the banner of socialism. ![]() By 1920, the name Eugene Debs represented different things to different groups.
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