he bitterest resentment among the company's employees, since
especially it was a matter of authentic knowledge, disclosed by the
company's own reports, that the Pullman factories were making enormous
profits. At this time, the Pullman workers were $70,000 in arrears to
the company for rent alone.

THE PULLMAN EMPLOYEES STRIKE.

Finally plucking up courage--for it required a high degree of moral
bravery to subject themselves and their families to the further want
inevitably ensuing from a strike--the workers of the Pullman Company
demanded a restoration of the old scale of wages. An arrogant refusal
led to the declaration of a strike on May 11, 1894. This strike, and the
greater strike following, were termed by Carroll D. Wright, for a time
United States Commissioner of Labor, as "probably the most expensive and
far-reaching labor controversy which can properly be classed among the
historic controversies of this generation."[180] The American Railway
Union, composed of the various grades of workers on a large number of
railroads, declared a general sympathetic strike under the delegated
leadership of Eugene V. Debs.

The strike would perhaps have been successful had it not been that the
entire powers of the National Government, and those of most of the
States affected, were used roughshod to crush this mighty labor
uprising. The whole newspaper press, with rare exceptions, spread the
most glaring falsehoods about the strike and its management. Debs was
personally and venomously assailed in vituperation that has had little
equal. To put the strikers in the attitude of sowing violence, the
railroad corporations deliberately instigated the burning or
destruction of their own cars (they were cheap, worn-out freight cars),
and everywhere had thugs and roughs as its emissaries to preach, and
provoke, violence.[181] The object was threefold: to throw the onus upon
the strikers of being a lawless body; to give the newspapers an
opportunity of inveighing with terrific effect against the strikers, and
to call upon the Government for armed troops to shoot down, overawe, or
in other ways thwart, the strikers.

Government was, in reality, directed by the railroad and other
corporations. United States judges, at the behest of the railroad
companies (which had caused them to be appointed to the Bench), issued
extraordinary, unprecedented injunctions against the strikers. These
injunctions even prevented the strikers from persuadi