Note: This article appeared
originally on ExploreMidtown.org on 4 July 2011
On July 4, 1894, two companies
of Sacramento’s National Guardsmen, bayonets at the ready,
faced 3000 strikers at the passenger depot at Second and H Street,
the main entrance to the Southern Pacific Shops. The soldiers,
all Sacramento residents, stared down their rifles at neighbors,
friends, family and coworkers. The Guardsmen’s orders were
to retake the Shops from the American Railway Union strikers
– by force if necessary.
A third company of Sacramento
guardsmen had refused their orders and remained at the armory.
The strikers, unarmed, had only their bodies to stop the militiamen.
“You wouldn’t put that steel through me, would you,
Bill?” said one striker to his brother in uniform. “Go
ahead, Jack; jab your bayonet through me, and make your sister
a widow,” said another.
The Sacramento Guard commander,
Timothy Sheehan, considered the situation. Behind his unit were
San Francisco guardsmen, exhausted after an overnight trip to
Sacramento, poorly fed, and entirely unused to Sacramento’s
scorching summer heat. In front of his unit were strikers unwilling
to yield. And on July 4, any random firecracker could be misinterpreted
as a gunshot, setting off a bloodbath. The nerve of the Guardsmen
broke first. Some unloaded their weapons, or even handed their
rifles to the strikers. Another company from Stockton retreated
to nearby shade, accepting an offer by ARU strikers of iced lemonade
(the entire unit was later dishonorably discharged and imprisoned.)
General Sheehan reported the situation to his superior officer,
who turned command over to U.S. Marshal Barry Baldwin. Baldwin
dispatched the Sacramento companies to guard the bridges over
the Sacramento and American rivers, and climbed atop a locomotive
cab, hoping to persuade the strikers with force of oratory where
arms had failed, to no avail. The Shops workers cheered as the
soldiers returned to the armory, but their victory was short-lived.
The struggle at Sacramento’s
Southern Pacific Shops began on June 28, 1894, but had been spawned
by events that began weeks earlier, half a continent away in
Pullman, Illinois.
Pullman was the company-owned
home town of the Pullman Palace Car Company. Pullman’s patented
“sleeper” passenger cars were synonymous with long-distance
train travel and used on nearly every railroad. An 1893 depression
brought on by railroad bankruptcies and resulting bank failures
meant a serious drop in sales. Pullman cut their employees’
wages by 30%. These wage cuts outraged workers. The company also
refused to lower rent in their company-owned housing, and these
cuts came just as stockholders received an 8% dividend. Pullman
employees walked out on May 11, 1894. A month and a half later,
the strike was still unresolved, and on June 27 American Railway
Union president Eugene V. Debs called on all members belonging
to railroads west of Chicago to stop any train with Pullman-owned
cars— in other words, nearly all of them.
The ARU was a new union,
founded in 1893 and not officially recognized by the railroads.
Some railroad workers, including engineers, firemen and brakemen,
already had their own unions, but most unskilled workers, like
boilermakers, blacksmiths, and car builders, did not. The ARU
was open to all railroad employees, attracting thousands of workers
who built or serviced railroad equipment in cities like Pullman
and Sacramento, but lacked union representation. The Pullman
strike was the first effort by the new union to exercise its
strength, with dramatic results that stopped trains across half
the continent.
Railroaders across the
western United States joined in the boycott. The strike paralyzed
railroad traffic across California, including Los Angeles and
Oakland, and Sacramento was the hub of the California railroad
network. About 2100 of the Shops’ 2500 workers joined the
strike, part of an estimated 125,000 strikers nationwide, and
hundreds of nearby ARU members came to Sacramento to join the
strike. Its timing in deep summer – peak fruit packing season
– meant that cars full of fresh fruit rotted on freight
platforms and in stopped trains.
In 1894, Sacramento was
almost as much a company town as Pullman: Southern Pacific employed
about 25% of the city’s workforce. SP traditionally had
excellent labor relations, but the railroad was far less popular
with the general public and the press, who objected to SP’s
high rates and monopoly on California traffic. Strikers gained
a propaganda coup when Jane Lathrop Stanford, widow of former
Southern Pacific president Leland Stanford, was stranded in her
private railroad car in northern California and wished to return
home to San Francisco. She met with the strikers in Dunsmuir
and received direct permission from Eugene V. Debs to run her
train through during the strike. Crews decorated the train as
a giant pro-strike banner, with “SP” replaced on the
side of the engine with “ARU” spelled out in flowers.
Public opinion was swayed, though more by antipathy to the railroad
than support for the ARU.
Debs and the ARU offered
to reopen traffic to non-Pullman trains, but Southern Pacific
president Collis P. Huntington refused. Huntington saw the chance
to eliminate the union by breaking the strike, while compromise
would legitimize the ARU. SP vice-president Henry Huntington
(Collis’ nephew) urged other railroad leaders to stand firm:
“This is the first strike we have ever had here and as we
are making history, [I] think we ought not to take a step backward
and make such concession that we will hereafter regret them.”
Another motive to avoid
compromise was federal leverage. Since the trains included Railway
Post Office cars, the strike interfered with the federal mail
system. After convincing a U.S. District Court that it was impossible
to operate any trains without Pullman cars, C.P. Huntington asked
for federal help to break the strike. This support came in the
form of U.S. Marshal Barry Baldwin, who asked Governor H.H. Markham
(marooned in Los Angeles by the strike) to call up the state
militia. Troops quickly retook the railroads in Los Angeles,
but Sacramento was a more daunting task. On July 3, Baldwin and
his marshals tried breaking the strike with a group of deputies
but were stopped by strikers, as was the Guardsmen’s attempt
on July 4.
Strike leaders disavowed
violence, but behind the scenes strikers attacked scabs and skirmished
with railroad supporters and police. In addition to the guns
taken on July 4, strikers took arms from the Bersaglieri Guard,
a local Italian organization with a small armory. Some thought
that the Pullman strike might become the first wave of an armed
revolution of Populists and union laborers against the federal
government and private industry. Public support for the strike
waned as these fears mounted. On July 7, the leaders of the ARU
in Chicago were arrested, leaving the strike leaderless as federal
forces gathered strength. President Grover Cleveland authorized
regular Army troops to relieve the state militias.
On July 11, U.S. Army
troops arrived in Sacramento, including cavalry and artillery
units. Marching up Front Street from the Y Street levee, they
arrived at the passenger depot, moving through large crowds of
strikers and supporters. Upon arriving at the depot, the soldiers
discovered the ARU had abandoned the Shops the previous night,
so they secured the Shops and set up defensive positions. The
first train west left Sacramento for Oakland later that day,
but was derailed two miles from Davis. Saboteurs had removed
spikes and fishplates from the rails, causing a wreck that killed
two members of the train’s crew and three soldiers.
On the 13th, troops guarding
a train were attacked, returning fire that killed one striker
and wounded another. Popular opinion turned against the strikers
in the wake of the sabotage and violence, and by July 18, the
Southern Pacific Railroad was back in operation and the Shops
reopened. The next day, Debs telegraphed the strikers to open
negotiations with the railroad, and the strike formally ended
on July 22. After the strike, Southern Pacific quietly fired
ARU members and blackballed them from future employment. While
the strike’s failure was a serious blow for organized labor,
only steady nerves, the bonds of community, and perhaps luck
prevented a bloody massacre at the entrance to the Southern Pacific
Shops.
About the
Author:
William Burg is the author
of seven books about Sacramento history, holds a Master of Arts
in Public History from Sacramento State University, and currently
serves as the president of Preservation Sacramento and Sacramento
Heritage, Incorporated. His most recent book is Wicked Sacramento
by The History Press.
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