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Labor Day, Chicago, and Presidential Despotism Then and Now
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.
Sep 01, 2025
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.
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'Workers Over Billionaires': It's Time to Put Heat on the Oligarchy
From the Hamptons to DC and across this nation, the working class get nothing but pain from the billionaire agenda. We’re fed up with fascist attacks and now we fight back.
Aug 30, 2025
It’s no longer hypothetical. It’s here and it’s obvious: America has been captured by an oligarchic class of about a thousand corrupt billionaires who have taken over our government for their own benefit and are actively working to impose crushing austerity and fascist rule over the rest of us.
The good news? The "rest of us” are 350 million strong and we’re fighting back harder than ever this Labor Day weekend, with hundreds of “Workers Over Billionaires” actions across the country, including on the home turf of the billionaire class in the Hamptons on Long Island, New York.
And we’ve also got our own war room of the working class: the Department of Class Solidarity, a new website that arms organizers, activists, and everyday people with the tools to expose the billionaires ransacking our democracy, with a state-by-state list of billionaires that includes details and dossiers on their devastating impact on our communities.
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The Hamptons are one of the places where right-wing billionaires have been plotting and planning in their hundred-million-dollar mansions, exploding billions of dollars into the campaigns of our corrupt president and his fully-captured, fully-fascist Republican Party, which aims to secure oligarchic control.
Hamptons habitués like Bill Ackman, Ken Griffin, Ken Langone, William Lauder, and Dan Loeb have tossed tons of cash at Trump and the Republicans, and they seem to be winning at the federal level: the billionaire-class has secured a set of trillion-dollar tax breaks and endless billions more in sweetheart government contracts and subsidy deals in return.
But in the streets, millions of Americans have marched, protested, and taken direct action to oppose the wildly unfair trillion-dollar tax breaks for the rich alongside hundreds of billions in cuts to healthcare, housing, education and transportation as well as the authoritarian kidnappings of adults and children from courts, schools, and workplaces for forced deportation by the corrupt oligarchic state.
At the local and state level, principled public servants have refused to cave in to the billionaire class and the fascist politicians they control.
In New York City, the winning campaign of Zohran Mamdani on an explicitly pro-working class, anti-austerity affordability platform has given hope to millions of New Yorkers who love their home and hate the extreme inequality that has made it so expensive.
Zohran crushed the billionaire-backed neoliberal misogynist Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary, but the billionaire class won’t take ‘no’ for an answer and have already spent another $19 million to attack Mamdani. It's just another reason we’re heading to their home turf and joining with thousands more nationwide to fight back.
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Working-class New Yorkers get nothing but pain from the billionaire agenda. And we’re fed up with fascist attacks on families and workers intended to inflame and divide working-class communities to maintain billionaire control. Hundreds of thousands of us have marched in the streets against oligarchy, and we’re ready to fight harder for each other and for leaders that have our back.
This weekend’s actions in the Hamptons and across the country mark the return of a real Worker's Labor Day and a working class ready, willing, and able to fight the class war that has been fought against us for the last 50 years. I believe that we can beat the billionaires, and I believe that we will win.
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Sorry, Trump, Slavery Was Horrific and Central to the Rise of American Capitalism
Capitalist cotton slavery was how United States seized control of the lucrative world market for cotton, emerging thereby as a rich and influential nation.
Aug 28, 2025
The malevolent racist and fascist leader Donald Trump, aka “the president of the United States,” has recently ordered a review of the national Smithsonian museums’s presentation of US history, complaining that the museums focus too much on “how bad slavery was” and on other wrongdoings in the noble American record. Trump grumbles that public exhibits on past problems like Native American genocide and Black slavery are nasty, “woke,” and “radical left” distractions from the bigger and more inspiring story of white-ruled America’s glorious rise to capitalist wealth and power. He wants mindless patriotic celebration, not factually informed criticism.
This raises two interesting and curiously related questions:
- How bad was the Black chattel slave system that reigned across the US South from the Declaration of Independence until abolition during and after the Civil War?
- What did that system have to do with America’s supposedly glorious rise to wealth and power?
The answer to the first question depends in no small part on what strikes one as bad. If you are a racist Amerikaner pig like Trump and many of his backers, you are likely to think that US slavery wasn’t bad at all because it subjected people you hate, fear, and view as inferior and unworthy to deserved oppression, control, and exploitation. You might even think, like the demented racist Dinesh D’Souza, that slavery was good for the slaves because it provided paternalistic discipline and direction to lazy, childlike savages.
If you are a decent person with a heart for humanity regardless of skin color, however, you are right to suspect that slavery was not merely bad but horrific almost beyond words—a monumental crime at the heart and soul of an imperialist and capitalist nation that remains starkly racist partly because of its failure to deal honestly and seriously with the reality and legacy of that foundational transgression.
The answer to the second question depends on whether or not you are willing to look into some cold hard facts on slavery’s centrality to the rise of the United States as a power in the world capitalist system.
What “Made the United States Powerful and Rich”
Historian Edward Baptist’s 2014 study, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, eviscerated Americans’ tendency to see slavery as a quaint and archaic “premodern institution” that had nothing really to do with the United States’ rise to wealth and power. In this tendency, slavery becomes something “outside of US history,” even an antiquated “drag” on that history.
That tendency replicates a fundamental misunderstanding curiously shared by antislavery abolitionists and slavery advocates before the Civil War. While the two sides of the slavery debate differed on the system’s morality, they both saw slavery as an inherently unprofitable and static system that was out of touch with the pace of industrialization and the profit requirements of modern capitalist business enterprise.
Nothing, Baptist shows, could have been further from the truth. Unlike what many abolitionists thought, the savagery and torture perpetrated against slaves in the South was about much more than sadism and psychopathy on the part of slave traders, owners, and drivers. Slavery, Baptist demonstrates, was an incredibly cost-efficient method for extracting surplus value from human beings, far superior in that regard to “free” (wage) labor in the onerous work of planting and harvesting cotton. It was an especially brutal form of capitalism, driven by ruthless yet economically “rational” torture along with a dehumanizing ideology of racism.
It wasn’t just the South, home to the four wealthiest US states on the eve of the Civil War, where investors profited handsomely from the forced cotton labor of Black slaves. By the 1840s, Baptist shows, the “free labor North” had “built a complex industrialized economy on the backs of enslaved people and their highly profitable cotton labor.” Cotton picked by Southern slaves provided the critical cheap raw material for early Northern industrialization and the formation of a new Northern wage-earning populace with money to purchase new and basic commodities.
At the same time, the rapidly expanding slavery frontier itself provided a major market for early Northern manufactured goods: clothes, hats, cotton collection bags, axes, shoes, and much more. Numerous infant industries, technologies, and markets spun off from the textile-based industrial revolution in the North. Along the way, shipment of cotton to England (the world’s leading industrial power) produced fortunes for Northern merchants and innovative new financial instruments and methods were developed to provide capital for, and speculate on, the slavery-based cotton boom.
All told, Baptist calculates, by 1836 nearly half the nation’s economy activity derived directly and indirectly from the roughly 1 million Black slaves (just 6% of the national population) who toiled on the nation’s Southern cotton frontier. Sectional differences aside, The Half Has Never Been Told shows that “the commodification and suffering and forced labor of African Americans is what made the United States powerful and rich” decades before the Civil War.
Capitalist cotton slavery was how United States seized control of the lucrative world market for cotton, the critical raw material for the Industrial Revolution, emerging thereby as a rich and influential nation in the world capitalist system by the second third of the 19th century.
“Crimes Which Would Disgrace a Nation of Savages”
The returns were wrung through soul-numbing exploitation overlaid with savage racist torture. Chronicling the horrifying violence and terror inflicted on millions of Black Americans who suffered in bondage over the eight decades between US national independence (1783) and the US Civil War (1861-1865), Baptist documents how the Southern slave engine of American capitalist accumulation murdered Blacks in huge numbers and “stole everything” from surviving slaves through “the massive and cruel engineering required to rip a million people from their homes, brutally drive them to new, disease-ridden places, and make them live in terror and hunger as they continually built and rebuilt a commodity-generating empire…”
Over a generation, The Half Has Never Been Told shows, the infant US South grew from a thin coastal belt of burned-out tobacco plantations into a giant continental Empire of Cotton. This remarkable expansion was rooted in regular and ferocious white violence. The brutality and bloodshed included mass-murderous Indian Removal (cotton slavery required constant Westward territorial extension), forced slave migrations, the endemic fracturing of slave families, and he ubiquitous and systematic torture of Black slaves. As Baptist observes:
In the sources that document the expansion of cotton production, you can find at one point or another almost every product sold in New Orleans stores converted into an instrument of torture [used on slaves]: carpenters’ tools, chains, cotton presses, hackles, handsaws, hoe handles, irons for branding livestock, nails, pokers, smoothing irons, singletrees, steelyards, tongs. Every modern method of torture was used at one time or another: sexual humiliation, mutilation, electric shocks, solitary confinement in “stress positions,” burning, even waterboarding… descriptions of runaways posted by enslavers were festooned with descriptions of scars, burns, mutilations, brands, and wounds.
“What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?” the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass asked in 1852. “A day,” Douglass answered, “that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.” Further:
To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour… Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the old world, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.
Mein Trumpf’s Beloved Confederacy
The slave state Confederacy (1861-65) formed, seceded from the United States, and waged a Civil War against the nation’s non-slave states—an epic struggle that cost more than half a million lives—precisely to defend and preserve “the gross injustice and cruelty” of Black chattel slavery. The “cornerstone” of the Southern secessionist government, Confederacy Vice President Alexander Stephens explained on March 21, 1861, was “the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man, that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.”
The Nazi regime of the 1930s and 1940s also believed (to say the least) in the natural inferiority of certain subordinated races (as did late 20th century right-wing US academics like Charles Murray, Richard Herrnstein, and Stephen Pinker). Such was the harsh reality of the treasonous breakaway Southern government whose “beautiful monuments and statues” the deranged white supremacist and fascist thug Trump has called “ours” and considered “part of a Great American Heritage” of “Winning, Victory, and Freedom.”
This history is worth keeping in mind after Trump47 and his white nationalist Christian fascist Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have sickeningly and tellingly ordered the renaming of US military bases after Confederate Slave Power military leaders and “war heroes.” Hegseth is the member of an evangelical sect whose pastor claims that the best period in US race relations was the slave era.
Plenty of Trump’s neo-Confederate supporters would like nothing more than the restoration of Black enslavement, trust me.
A “Quintessential American Story”
Some words on Thomas Jefferson, the removal of whose statue from New York City Hall once sparked Trump’s anger… One of many wealthy white widowers who used young Black female slaves for sexual release before and after the American “revolution” (which was fought partly to ensure the survival and expansion of North American Black chattel slavery), the author of the Declaration of Independence enjoyed prominence as a “revolutionary leader” while keeping some of his own children as slaves.
Henry Wiencek’s rightly heralded volume, Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves (2012) dug into previously overlooked evidence in Jefferson’s papers and archaeological work at Jefferson’s Monticello site to paint a depressing picture of Jefferson’s stunted, penny-pinching world. As one reviewer noted:
Wiencek’s Jefferson is a man of business and public affairs who makes a success of his debt-ridden plantation thanks to what he calls the “silent profits” gained from his slaves and thanks to a skewed moral universe that he and thousands of others readily inhabited. We see Jefferson taking out a slave-equity line of credit with a Dutch bank to finance the building of Monticello and deftly creating smoke screens when visitors are dismayed by his apparent endorsement of a system they thought he’d vowed to overturn. It is not a pretty story. Slave boys are whipped to make them work in the nail factory at Monticello that pays Jefferson’s grocery bills. Parents are divided from children in his ledgers… Slaves are bought, sold, given as gifts, and used as collateral for the loan that pays for Monticello’s construction—while Jefferson composes theories that obscure the dynamics of what he himself called “the execrable commerce.” Many people saw a catastrophe coming and tried to stop it, but not Jefferson. The pursuit of happiness had become deeply corrupted, and an oligarchy was getting very rich. Is this the quintessential American story?
A quintessential American story indeed, one that is embodied very well in the history of Trump himself, son of a Klansman.
How bad was Black chattel slavery? For decent human beings it was horrific and criminal—religious humanists commonly join 19th-century abolitionists in calling it sinful—almost beyond words and moral comprehension! And this epic crime of “revolting barbarity” lay at the underlying material-historical and historical-material heart and foundation of the rise of the white supremacist American capitalism that the depraved real estate parasite and fascist leader Trump wants to see more properly celebrated in the national culture.
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