Pullman Strike Begins After Company Town Wage Cuts Without Rent Reductions

Workers at George Pullman’s railroad car manufacturing company in Pullman, Illinois—a company town where Pullman owns all housing, stores, churches, and infrastructure—launch a strike protesting wage cuts averaging 25% following the Panic of 1893 while rents and prices at company-owned facilities remain unchanged. Pullman founded the town in the 1880s as a “model” paternalistic community for his 6,000 employees and their families, exercising absolute control over workers’ lives through property ownership. When the 1893 depression reduces demand, Pullman slashes wages but refuses to reduce rents or prices at the company store, driving workers into debt peonage and economic desperation that triggers the walkout.

Eugene V. Debs and the American Railway Union (ARU) support the Pullman workers by launching a nationwide boycott on June 26, 1894, refusing to handle any trains with Pullman cars attached. Within four days, approximately 125,000 railroad workers from 29 railroads across 27 states join the boycott, severely disrupting rail traffic throughout the Midwest and demonstrating unprecedented labor solidarity. The strike remains largely peaceful until President Grover Cleveland—acting on the recommendation of Attorney General Richard Olney, a former railroad attorney with ongoing financial ties to railroad companies—deploys about 2,000 federal troops to Illinois on July 3-4, 1894, ostensibly to protect mail delivery but effectively to break the strike. Violence erupts only after federal troop deployment, with protesters killed in clashes with soldiers.

On July 2, 1894, federal authorities secure a blanket injunction under the Sherman Antitrust Act forbidding all strike activities, including even attempting to persuade employees to abandon their jobs—marking the first time an injunction is used to break a strike and the first application of the Sherman Act against labor rather than corporate monopolies. Debs and three other ARU executive board members are arrested on July 11 for violating the injunction, with Debs receiving a six-month contempt sentence upheld by the Supreme Court in In re Debs (1895). The ARU officially ends the boycott on August 2, and the strike collapses by September with Pullman strikers surrendering unconditionally. A national commission investigating the strike finds Pullman’s paternalism “Un-American,” condemning his refusal to negotiate and the economic hardships imposed on workers; the Illinois Supreme Court requires Pullman to dissolve company ownership of the town in 1898. However, these reforms come too late for the workers: the strike’s defeat through federal injunction establishes a template for using antitrust laws and court orders against labor that persists until the Norris-LaGuardia Act (1932).