The Peerless Leader: the great Eugene Debs. Crusading Labor Leader for Workers’ Wages in the 1890s

 

WPCNR NEWS AND COMMENT. By John F. Bailey. SEPTEMBER 6 2026. Reprinted from the CitizeNetReporter Archives:

It is Labor Day Weekend in the USA.

Look back at the history of the labor movement, workers have always had to fight, suffer and die to make progress.

It is different today, but the same management mindset prevails in the carpeted crags in the concrete canyons, their claws perched like vultures to fire, fight wage increases  cut benefits, of the struggling workers coast to coast.

Management is not fair, equitable, or humane.

They don’t care about you as a person. They use you up. Use you.

When you get hurt–too bad. It’s only business.

Our feckless Supreme Court has even killed the class action suit.

Business and government “internships” today are a nice word for slavery without whips. Exploitation and worse abuse.

Pay interns who run all sorts of exposure to unsavory treatment and stop taking advantage of them.

Workers with the disabled are paid $17 an hour  by New York State to do the toughest most demanding job in the country

Labor Day first made its appearance when low wages and long hours were protested against in the mid-nineteenth century during the American Industrial Revolution.

Management works for themselves, always. That’s what we learned in the  19th century America.

Oregon instituted the first Labor Day in the 1870s, and New York in the 1880s.

The National Labor Day Holiday came about because of national outrage over two violent strikes that were ended by armed intervention by the military brought in by President Grover Cleveland and by private detectives, the notorious “Pinkertons.”

(Just an aside–sending the military into cities to keep order resulted in shootings and killings of strikers. It is only a matter of time before this happens again and it is being done today coast-to-coast)

Let’s go back to the 1890s and learn what Labor Day is all about.

It’s not about a day off. It is a memorial day. It’s not about “good job.”

The Gay 1890s were not so gay if you were a worker for the Robber Barons, the “Captains of Industry.”

The 1890s were a time when the so-called robber barons thought nothing of bringing out private security forces to shoot and kill strikers.

Corporate pirates  lowered wages with no mercy.

Business was all about them the owners, their mansions, their fortunes, their tax-free profits. (No income tax before 1913, folks, are we headed that way again? (Just musing).

In the Homestead, Pennsylvania steel factory strike in 1892, Andrew Carnegie, the steel baron, wanted to lower wages to make the Homestead factory  more profitable.

(Instead of pulling down statues, they should change the name of the Carnegie Institute. Mr. Carnegie was no saint.)

Steelworkers in Homestead Pennsylvania, made $10 a week, worked 12 hours a day, 6 days a week as much as  84 hours a week. Mr. Carnegie was a slave driver. 

Carnegie’s Deputy Chairman Henry Frick wanted to pay them less, and attempted to bring in non-union laborers to replace them.

Two thousand union workers barricaded the plant.

Frick hired Pinkerton Detectives to disperse them.

On June 29, 1892, “Pinkertons” killed 7 union workers with gunfire, and injured “countless” others and three Pinkertons were killed.

The Governor  of Pennsylvania called in the National Guard to restore order. The armed intervention broke the Amalgamated Association union.

After this, according to “Steelworkers in America” by David Brody, wages of steelworkers at Homestead declined 20% from 1892 to 1907 and workshifts went up from 8 hours to 12 hours (96 hours a week). 

What a great fellow, Carnegie.

What a humanitarian!

That’s your robber baron. They treated their workers worse than slaves.

Mr. Carnegie would fit right in with today’s Wolves of Wall Street, Washington (both houses of Congress)and our national “leadership” wouldn’t he? He’d be in the next cabinet. In the Senate.

This union member-killing in Pennsylvania was followed by the 1894 Pullman Strike in Pullman Illinois.

George M. Pullman, the creator of the sleeper car, housed his workers in Pullman City, Illinois, and charged them rent. Slumlord.

In the depression of the early 1890s, 1893 wages at the Pullman Palace Factory fell  25%, but Pullman did not lower his rents to his workers.

The rent for workers’ housing, if not met, was deducted from worker pay.

Pullman was a garbage person.

A nice guy, George Pullman.

He could run a bank today, couldn’t he? He could run an airline and an airliner manufacturing company couldn’t he. He’d fit right in, too

 

On May 11, 1894 workers with the American Railroad Union under the leadership of the great  Eugene V.  Debs, started a wildcat (unauthorized) strike in protest of Pullman’s policies.

On June 26, 1894, union members refused to service trains with Pullman Cars in their consist, to leave Chicago, delaying the U.S. Mail.

Twenty-four railroads in an organization called the General Managers Association announced that any switchman who refused to move rail cars would be fired.

Mr. Debs and his union stood their ground.

Debs said if any switchman was fired for not moving Pullman Cars, the union would walk off their jobs. On June 29, 50,000 union men quit.

Union supporters stopped trains on rails West of Chicago.

President Grover Cleveland was asked by the railroads to use federal troops to stop the strike.

(Does all this sound familiar? Right out of today’s political rhetoric.)

When Debs went to Blue Island to ask railroad workers there to support the strike, rioting broke out, tracks were torn up. Railroad cars were burned.

The Attorney General of the United States Richard Olney, at the urging of the railroad owners, obtained an injunction July 2 that declared the strike illegal.

When Debs’ union members did not return to work, when they did not return to work—-

President Cleveland sent federal troops into Chicago. 

 

Troops opened fire on strikers  attempting to stop a train traveling through downtown Chicago.

Debs and his union leaders were arrested for disrupting the delivery of mail.

Twenty-six civilians were killed for disrupting the mail.

i want to repeat that sentence:

Twenty-six civilians were killed for disrupting the mail.

Let that sink into your mind for a moment….

Because the mail could not be delivered. Because the mail could not be delivered…how pathetic. You shoot 26 people.

Debs, the union leader, stopped the strike.

Debs was sentenced to six months in jail and the union was disbanded.

To my knowledge no federal troops who killed civilians were prosecuted.

A number of railroad workers were blacklisted and could not get a job on a railroad in the United States.

It was the first time federal troops were used to break up a strike.

Pullman workers were forced to sign a pledge they would never strike again.

The threat of the federal government stopping strikes lead to an end of strikes for at least 8 years.

President Cleveland, though, was facing reelection in 1894.

He had to do some fast public relations repair with the shock of the union attack

That is how Labor Day became a national holiday.

Union leaders and citizens were alarmed at his handling of the strike.

As PBS put it in a documentary in 2001:

“But now, protests against President Cleveland’s harsh methods made the appeasement (italics WPCNR) of the nation’s workers a top political priority. In the immediate wake of the strike, legislation was rushed unanimously through both houses of Congress, and the bill arrived on President Cleveland’s desk just six days after his troops had broken the Pullman strike.”

1894 was an election year.

President Cleveland seized the chance at conciliation, and Labor Day was born.

William Jennings Bryant ran for the Democratic Party and the Populist Party in 1898, losing to Republican William McKinley.

Then came a sea change in the great coal strike of 1902, when another “exemplary” capitalist J. P. Morgan  the father of the corrupt banking business fought the coal workers.

It happened in the coal fields of Easton, Pennsylvania, when the United Mine Workers headed by John Mitchell struck the coal operators  pushing for an 8-hour day.

The coal operators employed private police and the Pennsylvania National Guard to protect non-union

THE TRUST-BUSTER: President Theodore Roosevelt and his family, 1907. 

President Theodore Roosevelt summoned the parties to the White House to bring settlement of the dispute by arbitration. After 6 months, the coal miners won a 9-hour day and a 10% increase in wages.

T.R.’s personal intervention lead to Selig Perlman, economist and labor historian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, saying “this was perhaps the first time in history a labor organization tied up for months a strategic industry without being condemned as a revolutionary menace.’

The 1902 leadership of the great Teddy Roosevelt resulted in elimination of private police forces long used  by management to combat workers.

Mr. Roosevelt I do  not think  would approve of troops in the streets today to restore order or deport employed workers.

When Governor Samuel Pennypacker became Governor of Pennsylvania, Pennypacker created the Pennsylvania State Police in 1903, the first in the nation to supplant the independent organizations hired by management that were little more than strong-arm boys.

The lesson of Labor Day is to remember the bravery of the union leaders who put their members first, did not make deals, did not sell out their members, (and I might add, succumb to politicians’ whining) and held out for the good against managements.

These were managements that were neither kind, humane, fair, or appreciative of their workers’ contribution to their corporate success.

The robber barons believed  their succes  was due to how smart, shrewd,and tough they were. The Robber Barons of today, entrepreneurs, of today still think that way.

Management never  acknowledges  workers’ contribution to their success. They thought nothing this year of laying off thousands of workers to make their profits grow and have also raised prices contributing to workers’ misery.

The robber barons of today always  talk a good game but it’s all talk. Look at the Covid firings. Look at the owners of Purdue Pharma, killing 500,000 with their hideous painkillers and not being jailed for it or perhaps executed. Look at the  “leaders” who built airliners that have killed nearly a thousand people because they were cheap.

So American workers should remember the struggles and the leadership of Debs and Mitchell.

The strikers and civilians who were shot down in the street for stopping delivery of mail, for God’s sake!

They introduced a new era of workers’ rights at the costs of their lives.

The battle against worker exploitation never ends.

It’s still happening today.

Let’s stop it. Let’s fight it. Let’s boycott the robber barons, and vote out the scallywags in Washington, D.C. All of them.

While it is in mind, could congress save the Voting Rights Bill? Do something to reverse the feckless prejudice of the sophist Supreme Court and the gutless, heartless support of landlords and refusal to throw out the Texas abortion vigilante legislation.

The Supreme Court now aligns itself with the pre-Civil War  court authors of the Dred Scott decision which ruled slaves were property, not people. That is what management has always thought their workers are: property, not people. They don’t care about you or your family.

The Supreme Court failed again the last few years just as it did on Dred Scott.

Now women are property. They are being thrown out of the armed forces.

The 18 soldiers killed in the Iran conflict families  and the 780 wounded families  are now being denied death benefits and wounded benefits by the administration because Congress did not declare war. What a disgrace of Congress and this government.

 

When you have self-important judges on the Supreme Court pompous and self-righteous,  embracing laws that take away freedom and condone violence, you have a kangaroo court, that hops whatever way their appointers want them to. Not “Supreme” in any way, but a “Superior” Court, ideology-driven, not “Guardians” of the people in any way.

Pass the legislation, congress.

Do something.

No more talk.

Action!

No one in congress should wear an American flag pin in their lapel again. They are nor worthy.

What would Socrates say?

What would Jesus do?

Judge Francis Nicolai said in court during the Hockley-Delgado legal proceedings 24 years ago:

Judge Nicolai pointed to his black judge’s sleave and said

“I wear these robes to right wrongs.”

The Supreme Court of today obviously does not think this way.  They are there to reinstate wrongs. Hurt people they do not like. I mean, do they think?

The judges of the Supreme Court (because they act on mass) wear their robes to enable unfairness in the name of fairness, wrongs that deny rights, and practices that take away freedom and the pursuit of happiness.

Welcome back robber barons, and your “I love myself” henchmen and women in the courts, and legal profession  and the congress.

We know what you are, what you do, and your perpetual whining about how bad it is for you.

You’re not strong you’re weak.

You’re not fair you are unfair.

You want aid and privileges and amnesty, take weeks of vacations when time is of the essence,  but are reluctant to give aid, extend privileges or forgive when you are asked to do one right thing.

To those who would protest there are good managers and good owners:

Just wait until you are an employee who wants something that would cost management  money or a penny of their precious profit.

When after a pandemic and 8% inflation, your employers (to shore up their profits), CUT workforce to run up stock prices.

See how it goes. It will suddenly dawn on you.

There are no men like Eugene Debs and John Mitchell today

Labor Day Monday is time to think about what is wrong with the marketplace today and what is wrong with the way workers who are badly needed and are prosecuted for who they are.

Just like the 1890s.