In the fight over the Wilson Bill, Cleveland affronted Eastern members of his party as he had the Western members, in 1893, over the Sherman repeal. In the summer of 1894 he offended the whole body of organized labor by intervening in a Western strike.
The panic of 1893 had unsettled labor and created a floating element among the unemployed. These drifted toward Chicago, attracted by the Columbian Exposition held there during that summer, and worried the police for many months. About Easter, 1894, an "Army of the Unemployed" marched on Washington under the command of Jacob S. Coxey. A few weeks later a strike occurred among the employees of the Pullman Palace Car Company. The American Railroad Union, under the leadership of Eugene V. Debs, established a sympathetic boycott against the Pullman cars. The Knights of Labor indorsed the strike, and railway travel was impeded over all the West. Around Chicago there was disorder and rioting which the Governor of Illinois, John P. Altgeld, did not suppress. He held the militia in readiness, but had not intervened when Cleveland sent federal troops to Chicago to remove obstructions to the carriage of the mails.
This federal intervention offended those who still adhered to the doctrine of state rights, and angered the strikers and organized labor as a whole. They believed the President was a tool of the railroads, and believed the same of the courts when a federal judge issued an injunction to Debs forbidding him to interfere in the strike. In the end the strikers lost, leaving Cleveland's conduct in maintaining the peace in sharp contrast with that of the Populist Governor of Colorado, who intervened in a great miners' strike at Cripple Creek to arrest, not the strikers who had seized control of the mines, but the sheriff and his posse who wished to dislodge them. "It is better, infinitely better," Governor Waite had declared, "that the blood should flow to the horses' bridles than that our national liberties should be destroyed." Congress made Labor Day a legal holiday in 1894, but failed to placate the unions.
By the summer of 1894 Cleveland's party was split beyond repair, and his friends were mostly among the Republicans. Consistent in his belief in sound money, tariff revision, and law and order, he had been forced by events to alienate the West, the East, and organized labor. His course had aided the Populist party by widening the belief that the Democrats had no interest in their welfare. The panic had aided it yet more, by multiplying the discontented who might be converted to the new faith. Every month the Populist party increased in strength, the East watching it with mingled fear and contempt and ignorance. The comic papers pictured as the typical Populist the raw-boned, booted, unkempt farmer, in shirt-sleeves and with flowing beard. It could not see the foundation of real reforms on which the movement stood. A satirist pictured the Populist as "The Kansas Bandit," declaiming
"The People's Party, to
Which me native instinct draws me because it
Loves the rule of mediocrity, is now on top. I
Love the rule of Ignorance."
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
F.J. Turner discussed "The Problems of the West," in the Atlantic Monthly for September, 1896, and C. Becker has interpreted a similar point of view under the title "Kansas" in the Turner Essays (1910). Wildman and McVey are valuable guides. The external facts of the Populist movement are accessible in the Annual Cyclopædia; Stanwood, History of the Presidency; Annual Reports of the Secretary of the Treasury; and Richardson, Messages and Papers of the Presidents. Standard writings on the silver problem are J.L. Laughlin, History of Bimetallism in the United States (1886, etc.), and F. W. Taussig, Silver Situation in the United States (1893). Useful details are added in the biographies of Blaine, Bland, Sherman, and Vance. W.E. Connelley, Ingalls of Kansas (1909), has included much material upon Populism, including E. Ware's satirical verses, Alonzo, or the Kansas Bandit. Light is thrown upon Governor J.P. Altgeld and his influence in the Democratic party by B. Whitlock, "Forty Years of It" (1914), and C. Lloyd, Henry Demarest Lloyd. The Memoirs of a Varied Career, William F. Draper (1908), gives a glimpse of the rigid protectionist attitude. A stimulating novel, based upon municipal politics in the nineties, is P.L. Ford's The Honorable Peter Stirling (1894).