Labor Day, Chicago, and Presidential Despotism Then and Now

On June 28, 1894, President Grover Cleveland signed legislation making Labor Day a federal holiday.

Five days later, on July 3, 1894, Cleveland dispatched two thousand U.S. Army troops to Chicago, Illinois to suppress the Pullman strike, over the objections of the city’s mayor and the state’s governor.

Much separates that situation from the very situation facing Chicago, and the entire country, today in the face of Donald Trump’s threats to militarize our cities. Yet the parallels are striking. And so, this Labor Day, it is worth revisiting that earlier ignominious episode, to be reminded that conflict, violence, and repression are central features of U.S. history, and to remember that there have always been Americans willing to stand up to the repression, even at the risk of their jobs, their liberties, and their very lives.

The strike, which had begun in May 1894 as a wildcat action by workers at the Pullman Company’s Chicago factory, had within weeks snowballed into an enormous boycott, organized by the newly formed American Railway Union (ARU), that involved approximately 250,000 workers spread across over twenty states. The boycott brought interstate rail transport to a standstill. At the instigation of Attorney General Richard Olney, working in tandem with Pullman managers and allies, the federal government responded by obtaining a federal court injunction against the union and its boycott, and then mobilizing federal troops, along with thousands of other U.S. marshals and state militia, to enforce the injunction. Within weeks the strike was broken, the union offices ransacked, and upwards of a dozen people were killed and over fifty wounded by the violent escalation caused by the military deployment. In addition, six union leaders, most famously ARU President Eugene V. Debs, were arrested; convicted of violating the Sherman Antitrust Act; and sentenced to prison terms of up to six months for their role in organizing the boycott.

The suppression of the strike, a major episode in U.S. history, is inextricably linked to the history of the federal Labor Day holiday that Americans celebrate every year.

“As Americans, we have boasted of our liberties and continue to boast of them. They were once the nation’s glory, and, if some have vanished, it may be well to remember that a remnant still remains.” —Eugene V. Debs

It was also a turning point in the evolution of Debs, who emerged from prison radicalized both as a labor leader and as an increasingly vocal public figure, who went on to be a founder and unrivalled leader of the Socialist Party of America, and who eventually ran for U.S. president five times as that party’s candidate. Debs’s speech, “Liberty,” given on November 22, 1895 upon his release from Woodstock Jail, is one of the great speeches in American history. It is a speech that ought to be revisited every Labor Day, but it has a special resonance this year, in the face of Donald Trump’s very public plans to once again deploy armed federal forces on the streets of Chicago, Boston, and other cities.

Debs began his speech by invoking America’s revolutionary origins:

Manifestly the spirit of ’76 still survives. The fires of liberty and noble aspirations are not yet extinguished. I greet you tonight as lovers of liberty and as despisers of despotism. I comprehend the significance of this demonstration and appreciate the honor that makes it possible for me to be your guest on such an occasion. The vindication and glorification of American principles of government, as proclaimed to the world in the Declaration of Independence, is the high purpose of this convocation.

He then proceeded to describe the government’s suppression of the Pullman strike as a “flagrant violation of the Constitution, the total abrogation of law and the usurpation of judicial and despotic power” that stripped the ARU leadership, and by extension all strikers, of their “constitutional rights . . . [and] the most sacred prerogatives of American citizenship.” He then outlined the more general significance of the repression in ways that have clear current relevance:

. . .[T]he defeat of the American Railway Union involved questions of law, constitution and government which, all things considered, are without a parallel in court and governmental proceedings under the Constitution of the Republic. And it is this judicial and administrative usurpation of power to override the rights of states and strike down the liberties of the people that has conferred upon the incidents connected with the Pullman strike such commanding importance as to attract the attention of men of the highest attainments in constitutional law and of statesmen who, like Jefferson, view with alarm the processes by which the Republic is being wrecked and a despotism reared upon its ruins. . .

The ways that the suppression of the strike influenced Debs have been analyzed in a number of classic biographies, and they deserve sustained attention.

But here I want to shift the focus from Debs to another protagonist of the Pullman drama, the man that Debs admired and eulogized as “the Liberator”: John Peter Altgeld, the liberal Democratic Governor of Illinois who strongly opposed Grover Cleveland’s deployment of federal troops, and remained an outspoken critic of the deployment and what it represented. As Debs put it:

In the railroad strikes in 1894 he expanded to his true proportions. There he proved to be the fearless champion of the people. He stood upon the boundary line of Illinois and protested against the military usurpation of the President, and though overwhelmed, he proudly vindicated his high honor, and he, more than any other man, retired Grover Cleveland and his pirate crew from American politics.

Altgeld, to be clear, was no labor activist, as Debs well knew. In his capacity as Governor, he had on occasion deployed state troopers to quell strike-related violence, and had unabashedly justified such deployments, in circumstances that warranted them, as part of his job as Governor and chief law enforcement officer of the state. But the way that he approached his executive authority, and publicly articulated his commitment to upholding the law, made him, for Debs, “in the highest sense a statesman.”

When the strike broke out, Altgeld publicly criticized the exploitative conditions at Pullman that had precipitated the strike. And as Pullman and its allies began accusing the striking workers of stopping rail traffic by force, laying the grounds for the strike’s violent suppression weeks later, Altgeld insisted that the vast majority of the strikers were law-abiding citizens; that the primary reason rail traffic was halted was an insufficient number of workers willing to cross a picket line; and that the best way for rail traffic to be restored was for the workers’ demands to be heard.

Altgeld was ignored, overridden by President Cleveland’s military deployment, and eventually defeated in his bid for re-election. But he was unbowed.

In 1896, he gave a speech at Cooper Union in New York City entitled “Federal Interference in the Chicago Strike” (the most important primary documents related to the strike are collected in an extraordinary book edited and introduced by Colston E. Warne, entitled The Pullman Boycott of 1894: The Problem of Federal Intervention, and published in 1955 by D.C. Heath). The speech presented a withering critique of Grover Cleveland’s deployment of federal troops that centered on respect for the rule of law and the “spirit of the laws” in a democracy.

Altgeld began by observing that as Governor he had always adhered to a simple rule—if local law enforcement officers requested assistance, he would offer it, within the limits of the law. This policy had on his account proven quite successful. Until June of 1894 in Chicago, when “five days in advance of any trouble,” Olney and Cleveland “decided to reverse the policy and practice of the government and take an entirely new departure by setting a precedent of having the President interfere at pleasure and having the . . . United States government take the corporations directly under their wings . . . in order to have the American people submit to the violation of the Constitution and the laws of the land as well as of every principle of self-government. . . the trouble at Chicago was, by systematic effort and deliberate misrepresentation, so magnified as to make it seem that we were bordering on anarchy, and that consequently federal interference was necessary.”

In his speech, Altgeld quoted from his direct appeal to President Cleveland on July 5 to withdraw the troops, in which he reiterated that there was little serious disorder in Chicago, and that the state was ready and able to keep the peace, and needed no federal intervention. Altgeld observed in the appeal that “the newspaper accounts have in many cases been pure fabrications, and in others wild exaggeration,” and insisted that there was no national emergency that could possibly justify deploying the U.S. army in an American city, and that “local self-government is a fundamental principle of our Constitution.”

Altgeld’s letter to Cleveland minced no words: “As Governor of the State of Illinois, I protest against this, and ask the immediate withdrawal of the federal troops from active duty in this state.”

Cleveland rebuffed Altgeld in a terse reply, to which Altgeld then responded with a long, point by point rebuttal, reproduced in his speech. Its central argument was clearly stated. If the President:

has the legal right to order Federal troops into any community of the United States . . . whenever there is the slightest disturbance . . . without regard to the question as to whether that community is able to and ready to enforce the law itself . . at his pleasure, and can keep them [the troops] there as long as he chooses . . [then] the principle of self-government either never did exist in this country, or else has been destroyed, for no community can be said to possess local self-government, if the executive can, at his pleasure, send military forces to patrol its streets under pretense of enforcing some law. The kind of local self-government that could exist under these circumstances can be found in any of the monarchies of Europe, and it is not in harmony with the spirit of our institutions.

In short, two years after the fact, Altgeld was saying quite clearly that President Cleveland’s decision to ignore the most reliable accounts of the facts on the ground, and to supersede the explicit appeal of the Governor, represented nothing less than a tyrannical violation of the U.S. Constitution that threatened not simply the striking workers or the city of Chicago but every citizen in the entire country.

That was then, and this is now.

As this year’s “No Kings!” demonstrations emphasized, in the half-year since assuming office, President Trump has every day acted more and more like a monarch or a dictator. In recent weeks the Trump administration has federalized the National Guard, and deployed U.S. military personnel, in Los Angeles and in Washington, DC, overriding the objections of California Governor Gavin Newsom, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, and DC Mayor Muriel Bowser. Last week, Trump signed an executive order creating “specialized” National Guard units under the direct command of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, to be deployed “to deal with public order issues” in a range of American cities.

And by all accounts, Trump plans in the coming week to deploy such federal armed forces on the streets of Chicago, over the strong objections of Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, who has now signed an executive order denouncing the militarization of his city; calling on Trump to “stand down”; pledging that city police will not cooperate with the deployed federal forces; and directing all city officials to “pursue all available legal and legislative avenues to resist coordinated efforts from the federal government” that violate the rights of Chicagoans.

Last week, Trump issued a Labor Day “Proclamation” calling upon “all public officials and people of the United States to observe this day with appropriate programs, ceremonies, and activities that honor the contributions and resilience of working Americans.” He surely knows little if anything about the working class history that he invokes, just as he cares little about the public and private sector workers whose unions he seeks to weaken and destroy, including the millions of immigrant workers he seeks to harass, detain, and deport. But on the basis of what Altgeld called “pure fabrications” and “wild exaggerations,” i.e., lies, Trump is poised to commemorate Labor Day this week by reenacting on the streets of Chicago one of the most dictatorial and violent acts of federal repression in U.S. history.

In his 1895 “Liberty” speech, Debs noted that: “As Americans, we have boasted of our liberties and continue to boast of them. They were once the nation’s glory, and, if some have vanished, it may be well to remember that a remnant still remains.” That remnant, which at key moments in the 20th century seemed to expand, seems now to be shrinking by the day. Whether it will survive the next few years is an open question.