The Pullman boycott

by W. F. Burns

The Knights of Labor and Trades Unions as well as business men's unions were holding meetings all over the country, denouncing the action of Cleveland and the courts and endorsing the American Railway Union in its manly fight for rights. The strike situation had not changed to any great extent with the exception of passenger service. Passenger trains were beginning to run with more regularity, but the freight business was to all practical purposes dead. The men whom the companies had succeeded in getting so far to fill the places of strikers were green men, entirely unused to that kind of work, and incompetent men who had previously been discharged for drunkenness and other causes. The yard service was a failure, and as an illustration—to show the kind of men the different roads had secured to make up trains—I was passing a certain yard and stopped to watch a switching crew, and carefully noted how they performed their work. An engine with one car backed up to couple unto some cars on a lumber track. Two of the would-be switchmen with a long stick were holding up the link, one men on either side of the coupling, but just as the link was about to enter the drawbar one of them jumped away, at the same time stumbling over a pile of lumber, and the way that fellow scrambled about in his frantic endeavor to get out of the way, would lead a person to believe he had fallen upon a hornet's nest.

After several such attempts they finally succeeded in making the coupling. This is the kind of men with which the company proposed to fill the places of the strikers.

The Grand Trunk engineers, who up to this time had refused to work with other than brotherhood firemen decided to work with scabs, and their decision was hailed with delight by the officials. They said that the strike was now settled and they could run their trains without difficulty.

The engineers and firemen on the Chicago & Alton road also decided to stand by the company. The firemen, switchmen and other employes of the Grand Trunk called a meeting, and after denouncing the action of the engineers, voted to stand by the American Railway Union to the end.

One amusing incident that occurred about this time, was the refusal of the Washington National Guards to ride on a train that was run by scabs. The entire company of sixty men refused to ride on a Northern Pacific train for this reason, and they were promptly placed under arrest, put into box cars and taken to Sprague.

General Master Workman Sovereign had at this time an order drawn up for a general walk out of members of the Knights of Labor, but it was withdrawn after a consultation with other labor leaders. Many comments were made by newspapers throughout the country on this order, of which a copy was furnished the papers under the impression that it would go into effect at once.

People who had remained passive up to this time were now aroused to the gravity of the situation. The pending crisis was near at hand, and a general uprising of the laboring people to assert their rights was imminent. The tyrannical and dogged persistency of plutocratic capital to dominate over the laboring classes with utter disregard for their constitutional rights, was nothing more or less than an open declaration of despotic supremacy, and the outcome was looked forward to with the gravest apprehension.

The following communication addressed to the chairman of the National Committee of the Peoples Party was sent to Washington, D. C.

"To the Hon. H. E. Taubeneck, chairman National Committee, Peoples Party:

"Through the gloom of civil war the enemies of human liberty laid the foundation upon which the giant monopolies of to-day have been built. On public lands, with public funds they built the railroads which they now use to plunder the producers of this nation, and with the wealth and power thus obtained they now usurp the power and functions of government to reduce the people of this country to a condition of serfdom. The workmen in the cities, the miners in their isolated communities, and the railroad men throughout the land have risen in manful protest against a threatened military government of the railroads and their associate monopolies.