Media Coverage and Public Debates
The Pullman strike and boycott were important national news, and periodicals as well as major daily newspapers devoted significant attention to the strike and boycott that spread from the Chicago area to the western half of the country. In an editorial of July 7, 1894, the influential Harper’s Weekly said the nation was “fighting for its own existence just as truly as in suppressing the great rebellion.”
| The Harper’s Weekly comparison of the Pullman disorders to the Civil War, equating the strikers and boycotters with southern rebels, was typical of the press’s negative characterization of the strikers and boycotters. Congress supported President Cleveland’s use of federal soldiers, ministers rose in their pulpits to deplore the disorder, and the press for the most part took the side of the railroads. Stopping rail traffic, the argument went, interfered with commerce, stopped the delivery of the mails, and generally harmed the nation. Harper’s Weekly’s criticism of the strikers and boycotters included not only editorials and reporting but also sketches and illustrations. Especially noteworthy were the drawings Harper’s Weekly commissioned from the famous artist Frederic Remington. Remington had made his name with dramatic renderings of heroic soldiers and mysterious Indians from the American West. In Harper’s Weekly of July 21, July 28, and August 11, 1894, he portrayed the federal troops in Chicago every bit as heroically as he had portrayed them on the frontier. And lest there be any doubt of what he meant his drawings to convey, Remington’s accompanying commentaries described the troops as halting “a malodorous crowd of anarchist foreign trash.” The citizens of Chicago, he added, were pleased to see the federal troops arrive because they could keep “social scum from rising to the top.” |
The covers of Harper’s Weekly also made clear the periodical’s pronounced hostility toward the boycotters, Eugene V. Debs, and those who would sympathize with the boycott. The cover of July 14, 1894, featured a drawing of a bigger-than-life Debs wearing a crown, casually attired, and apparently blocking interstate commerce. In the background grain elevators, factories, and terminals are closed, and trains carrying mail, flour, vegetables, and dressed beef are stopped dead on the tracks. One week later, another cover, featuring the “Vanguard of Anarchy,” again portrayed Debs wearing a crown and now seated on a throne, carried by Illinois Governor Altgeld and assorted clowns and followed by a monstrous group of men wielding guns and waving torches. Daily newspapers did not match Harper’s Weekly’s graphic excesses, but they too presented the strikers, boycotters, and Debs in a sensational and negative manner. A headline in the Washington Post of July 7, 1894, warned, “Fired by the Mob, Chicago at the Mercy of the Incendiary’s Torch.” The New York Times on July 9, 1894, condemned Debs for his purportedly excessive consumption of liquor. Using terms of the era, the newspaper said Debs suffered from “dipsomania” and urged him to seek treatment for his “liquor habit.” The half dozen daily newspapers in Chicago gave the strike and boycott extensive coverage, and the coverage in the Chicago Tribune was the most extensive and critical. The newspaper’s editorial of May 16, 1894, entitled “Wild Demands of the Pullman Men,” suggested the workers’ demands were “the work of some Populist-Socialist who has strayed here from the West or the South . . . .” A front-page article on June 30, 1894, reported, “With the coming of darkness last night Dictator Debs’ strikers threw off the mask of law and order and began the commission of acts of lawlessness and violence.” An editorial on the same date accused Debs and the other officers of the American Railway Union of wanting “to show that they could wield a colossal power over the American people and their interstate commerce and would hesitate at no measures which they do not suppose to bring the penitentiary or gallows in their train.” Between July 3 and 5, 1894, the Chicago Tribune published a series of front-page cartoons ridiculing Debs. In the first, Debs wears a lion’s suit, stands on top of a book titled “Law,” and brays rudely at Uncle Sam. In the second, Debs smokes a cigar and wears a crown, and he props his feet on a table thereby soiling the Declaration of Independence. In the third and most curious, Uncle Sam squats to light a firecracker with Debs’ face and name on it. The wand used for ignition reads “U.S. Troops,” and the caption says, “Uncle Sam Takes a Hand In It.” |
Press coverage of the legal proceedings in the Chicago courts was limited in the national publications, but the Chicago newspapers not surprisingly covered the proceedings and commented upon them in detail. Most of the coverage was supportive of the arguments of the railroads and the federal government. The Chicago Tribune, for example, ran a front-page article titled “Uncle Sam Will Use the Law Backed by Riot Guns” on July 2, 1894, the very day the federal government sought the injunction. The article praised the breadth of the injunction. The injunction, the newspaper said, will be “of so broad and sweeping a character that interference with the railroads, even of the remotest kind, will be practically impossible without incurring penalties for contempt of court.” Eagerly anticipating developments once the injunction was issued, the newspaper added, “It is said without reserve the arrest of these men [Debs and the American Railway Union officers] is inevitable . . . .” The New York Times, which had predicted confidently and accurately how the Supreme Court appeal would be decided, praised the decision in an editorial of May 28, 1895. The decision was important in several ways, the newspaper said. “It is the first instance in which the Supreme Court has been called upon to consider, first, the full scope of the powers of Congress with reference to the vast transportation system of the country by virtue of its relations to the Postal Service and inter-state commerce, and, second, the procedure by injunction and sentence for contempt in disobeying an injunction . . . .” The newspaper was especially struck that, despite sectional and party differences, the Supreme Court had achieved unanimity. “We had not ventured to think that the decision of the Supreme Court would be at once so complete and unqualified and be unanimous.” | |
| An editorial of May 28, 1895, in the Chicago Tribune said the decision did more than send Debs to jail. “It is a notice to all Anarchists and other disturbers of the public peace that the hands of the General Government are not fettered when it is dealing with questions which are under its exclusive control.” The result of the decision, the Chicago Tribune said, is that “there will be no more attempts except on the part of train robbers to stop the transportation of the mails or to tie-up inter-state commerce. There will be no more insurrections like that of last July.” The Inter Ocean, while praising the Supreme Court, took advantage of another opportunity to criticize Debs and his union. “The Debs movement was the most absurd as well as the most iniquitous that ever was devised by the unwit of man,” the newspaper said in its editorial of May 28, 1895. “Had it [the Debs movement] been legalized into a precedent no class would have been doomed to such suffering as that which would have fallen upon the wage-earners. In its last analysis, the Debs plan was that of organized anarchy . . . .” | |