CHAPTER II.
THE BOYCOTT.
The American Railway Union is in every sense an American Institution, whose aims and objects as previously stated are to protect and shield its members from the grinding power of railroad corporations. Its motto is unity: "One for all and all for one."
The Pullman employes were admitted to this organization and consequently entitled to the protection guaranteed to all members, therefore when they walked out, after every honorable means to avert a strike was exhausted, the American Railway Union was in duty bound to sustain them.
The strike was ordered on the 11th day of May, after an all night session by a committee of forty-six members representing every department in the Pullman works. When the word was given four thousand employes responded to the call, and this proved to be the beginning of the most gigantic strike in the history of organized labor.
The wrongs of the Pullman people were not generally known to the public, the cruel and inhuman treatment they were subjected to, was kept strictly from the public ears.
They were reduced to a condition of slavery beneath that of the black slave of the South prior to the civil war, for while the black slave was clothed, housed and fed, the white slave of Pullman was forced to work for wages entirely inadequate to furnish a sufficient amount of food to keep body and soul together. In this condition, on the verge of starvation, with all hope of justice from the hands of George M. Pullman gone, they revolted. Whether the grievance of these men was a just one, or their resistance to further encroachments on their rights was right or wrong, after reading the report of the committee appointed to investigate and report to the American Railway Union Annual Convention, at that time in session in the city of Chicago, it will be for the reader to decide.
The report, as condensed, in one of the Chicago daily papers, copied and commented on by the St. Paul Branch of the American Railway Union, was as follows:
After showing by way of contrast, that $30,000,000 worth of Pullman stock paid its holders 9-1/2 per cent in dividends last year, the report goes statistically into a comparison of wages in the past year, with the wages received by the Pullman employees when the strike was inaugurated. A fair example of the general reduction is given in a comparison in the price of labor involved in the construction of a freight car in 1888 and 1893.
| Lot 1526. | Oct. 1888. | Nov. 1893. |
| Car carpenter | $13.00 | $7.00 |
| Truck builder | .90 | .60 |
| Truck labor | .31 | .09 |
| Hanging brakes | 1.20 | .65 |
| Delivering, forging and casting | 1.05 | .35 |
| Delivering lumber | .88 | .21 |
| Framing | .40 | .12 |
| Total | $17.74 | $9.02 |