The Pullman Strike and the Courts' War on Labor in 1894

George Pullman was so worried about what people might do to his body after he died that he left instructions to make sure they could not get at it. When he died in October 1897, he was buried in a Chicago cemetery in a lead-lined coffin, inside a pit lined with concrete and steel rails, covered by more concrete. The precaution tells you something about how he was remembered by the people who had worked for him. Three years earlier, Pullman had presided over one of the most famous labor disputes in American history, a strike that began in the model town he built for his workers and spread across the country's railroads. It ended not because the workers lost a fair fight with their employer, but because the federal government, through a court order and federal troops, decided it should end. The legal weapon that broke the Pullman strike would shape American labor relations for nearly four decades.

In short: In 1894 workers at the Pullman Palace Car Company struck over wage cuts, and the American Railway Union, led by Eugene Debs, refused to handle Pullman cars across much of the country. A federal court issued a sweeping injunction, President Grover Cleveland sent troops over the Illinois governor's objection, and the Supreme Court upheld Debs's imprisonment. The era of government by injunction that followed was not undone until 1932.

The model town

In the early 1880s, George Pullman, whose company built and operated luxury railroad sleeping cars, built a factory town south of Chicago and named it after himself. Pullman, Illinois, was meant to be a showpiece. It had brick houses with indoor plumbing, a library, a church, parks and a shopping arcade. Visitors came from around the world to admire it. Pullman believed that clean, orderly surroundings would produce sober, productive workers, and that the company would profit from both the factory and the rents.

The town was also tightly controlled. The company owned the houses, the stores and the utilities. Workers could not buy their homes. Rents were set by the company, and they were often higher than in neighbouring communities. Saloons were forbidden. Company inspectors could enter homes. Residents who complained found that the company's power over their jobs and their housing was the same power.

The wage cuts

The Panic of 1893 brought a severe depression. Orders for Pullman cars dropped, and the company cut wages repeatedly, by roughly a quarter or more for many workers. It did not cut rents in the town or the prices it charged for utilities. Workers saw their rent taken out of their paychecks, sometimes leaving them with very little to live on. The company also continued to pay dividends to its shareholders.

In May 1894, a committee of workers asked the company to restore wages or reduce rents. The company refused, and soon afterward several members of the committee were laid off. On May 11, 1894, most of the workforce walked out.

Many of the Pullman workers had joined the American Railway Union, a new organization founded in 1893 by Eugene V. Debs, a former locomotive fireman from Terre Haute, Indiana. The ARU was unusual for its time: it sought to organize all railroad workers in one union, regardless of their craft, rather than dividing them into separate brotherhoods for engineers, firemen, conductors and brakemen. Earlier in 1894 it had won a strike against the Great Northern Railway, and its membership had grown rapidly. One significant limitation, which historians have criticized, was that the ARU's convention voted to exclude Black workers from membership.

The boycott

In June 1894, the ARU held its convention in Chicago. Debs was cautious; he worried that the young union was not ready for a nationwide confrontation. But delegates, moved by the Pullman workers' testimony, voted to support them. When Pullman refused arbitration, the union announced a boycott: beginning June 26, its members would refuse to work on any train that included Pullman cars.

Because Pullman cars ran on most major lines, the boycott quickly spread across much of the country, especially in the West and Midwest. Tens of thousands of railroad workers joined. Traffic on many lines slowed or stopped. The railroads, organized through the General Managers' Association, a group representing the railroads serving Chicago, coordinated their response. They refused to detach Pullman cars, which meant that workers who refused to handle those cars were effectively refusing to run the trains at all. The railroads also attached Pullman cars to trains carrying the mail, making any stoppage a potential interference with the federal mails.

The injunction

The federal government entered the dispute on the railroads' side. President Grover Cleveland's attorney general, Richard Olney, had been a railroad lawyer and served on railroad boards before joining the cabinet. Olney appointed a special federal attorney in Chicago, Edwin Walker, who was himself a lawyer for one of the railroads.

On July 2, 1894, at the government's request, federal judges in Chicago issued an injunction of extraordinary scope. It ordered Debs, the union's other officers and anyone else to stop interfering with the railroads' business and the mail, and it prohibited them from urging workers to join the boycott. The legal basis was twofold: interference with interstate commerce and the mail, and the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, a law passed to restrain business monopolies, which the government now used against a union.

The injunction made ordinary union activity, such as sending telegrams urging workers to stay out, a violation of a court order. Violating an injunction is contempt of court, which a judge can punish without a jury trial. That feature was central to the injunction's power: it allowed the government to bypass juries, which in railroad towns might have sympathized with the strikers.

The troops

On July 4, 1894, Cleveland sent federal troops into Chicago. The Illinois governor, John Peter Altgeld, protested strongly. He argued that the state was capable of keeping order and had not requested federal help, and that the Constitution did not permit the president to send troops into a state over the governor's objection under these circumstances. Cleveland rejected his arguments, citing the federal government's duty to protect the mail and interstate commerce.

The arrival of troops intensified the conflict. Crowds, which included many people who were not railroad workers, attacked railroad property and burned rail cars. Soldiers, marshals and police fired on crowds. People were killed in Chicago and elsewhere before the strike collapsed in July. The violence was used to justify the government's intervention, though critics argued that the intervention itself had escalated it.

Debs and other ARU leaders were arrested for violating the injunction. They were convicted of contempt, and Debs was sentenced to six months in jail. The union was destroyed.

The Supreme Court's ruling

Debs's lawyers, including Clarence Darrow, who had left a job as a railroad lawyer to defend him, challenged the conviction. In 1895, in a case called In re Debs, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld it. The Court ruled that the federal government had broad power to protect interstate commerce and the mail, and that courts could issue injunctions to prevent obstruction of them, with violations punishable as contempt.

The decision gave employers a powerful weapon. Over the following decades, federal and state courts issued many injunctions in labor disputes, often at an employer's request and sometimes without hearing the union's side first. Injunctions prohibited picketing, boycotts, strike-related meetings and even the payment of strike benefits. Employers also used yellow-dog contracts, in which workers promised not to join a union as a condition of employment, and courts enforced them. Historians call this period the era of government by injunction.

What jail did to Eugene Debs

The six months Debs served in the McHenry County jail in Woodstock, Illinois, changed American politics in a way no one in the government foresaw. Debs read widely in jail, including socialist literature, and he emerged convinced that the problem was not one bad employer or one hostile judge but a system in which the government consistently took the side of capital. Within a few years he had become the country's best-known socialist.

He ran for president as a Socialist five times. His strongest showing came in 1912, when he won about six percent of the popular vote. His most remarkable campaign came in 1920, when he ran from a cell in the federal penitentiary in Atlanta, where he was serving a sentence under the Espionage Act for a 1918 speech opposing the First World War. He won close to a million votes. President Warren Harding commuted his sentence in 1921, and Debs died in 1926.

The government that jailed Debs in 1894 hoped to end a strike. It also created one of the most persistent critics of American capitalism, whose ideas shaped generations of labor activists. Whatever one thinks of his politics, the path from Pullman to Atlanta is a case study in how repression can radicalize the people it targets.

A curious footnote: Labor Day

On June 28, 1894, while the boycott was spreading, Cleveland signed a law making Labor Day, the first Monday in September, a federal holiday. Congress had passed the bill quickly. The timing has led to a common story that the holiday was meant to placate workers after the strike was crushed. That version is not quite right, since the law was signed before the troops were sent. But it is fair to say that a government willing to honour labor with a holiday was, in the same weeks, using its courts and its army to break a labor dispute.

How the law finally changed

Labor spent decades trying to end government by injunction. The Clayton Act of 1914 was hailed by union leaders as a charter of labor's freedom, because it declared that human labor was not a commodity and limited injunctions in labor disputes. But the courts read its protections narrowly, and injunctions continued.

The turning point came in 1932, when Congress passed the Norris-LaGuardia Act, named for Senator George Norris of Nebraska and Representative Fiorello La Guardia of New York, both independent-minded Republicans. The law barred federal courts from issuing injunctions in most nonviolent labor disputes and made yellow-dog contracts unenforceable in federal courts. It passed both chambers by lopsided margins and was signed by President Herbert Hoover. That two Republican sponsors, a bipartisan Congress and a Republican president enacted the most important limit on anti-labor injunctions is a reminder that the politics of labor have not always followed party lines. Three years later, the Wagner Act established the right to organize.

Pullman's own legacy was mixed. A federal commission that investigated the strike criticized the company's refusal to arbitrate and its management of the town. The Illinois Supreme Court later ruled that the company had to sell the town's residential property, which it did. In 2015 President Barack Obama designated the historic district as a national monument, preserving it as a site of labor history.

What the story says about the courts

Here's the argument this post makes. The Pullman story is often told as a story about a greedy employer and a heroic union leader, and there is truth in that. But its most lasting lesson is about the courts. Judges, applying laws written for other purposes, built a legal regime that made it very difficult for workers to act together. The judges were not necessarily corrupt. Many believed sincerely in property rights and freedom of contract and saw unions as threats to both. Their decisions were nonetheless choices with consequences, and those choices shaped American labor for forty years.

Defenders of the courts' role would say that judges were protecting the public from disruptions to commerce and the mail, that violence was real and that the rule of law requires enforcing court orders. Those points deserve weight. But a legal system that consistently allows one side of a dispute to call in judges and troops while forbidding the other side to organize is not neutral.

That lesson has modern echoes. Courts continue to shape labor relations through their interpretations of statutes and the Constitution, as in the 2018 Janus decision on public-sector fees and in recent cases about the independence of federal agencies, including the 2026 ruling in Trump v. Slaughter on the president's power to remove commissioners of the Federal Trade Commission. Who sits on the courts, and how they read the law, matters as much now as it did in 1894. Follow these cases on our courts topic page.

What you can do

The Pullman strike was decided in a courtroom as much as on the rails. You can watch the courts and the people who shape them.

• Follow the Supreme Court's work. The court watch page lists this term's Supreme Court opinions with the Court's own summaries, the emergency docket and Senate votes on judges.
• Pay attention to judicial confirmations. Senators decide which judges serve for life. Use the representatives tool to find your senators and ask how they evaluate nominees on workers' rights.
• Track today's labor fights. The labor page shows the newest union elections the National Labor Relations Board has counted and long-term union membership.
• Visit or support labor history. Labor history sites, museums and local historical societies keep stories like Pullman's alive. Find nonprofits working on workers' rights in your state on the organizations page, and read more on the workers and unions topic page.