Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned by John A. Farrell

By 1893, some twelve thousand people lived in the tidy little city of Pullman. They could walk from work on safe, tree-shaded streets, past lawns and public parks, a library and theater and other civic amenities, to modern homes and tenements. But there were snakes in Pullman’s Eden. Rents and utility bills were high, to pay Pullman’s hefty stock dividends. Workers faced eleven-hour days. Immigrant religions were discouraged. The village church, police, newspaper, and elections were controlled by thecompany. Gardening, decorating, and music making were regulated. The residents knew that company “spotters” mingled among them, reporting undesirable behavior, and that their leases gave the company the power to evict troublemakers. There was no hospital, for this was a town for productive workers, not the sickly. Pullman was “un-American,” the sociologistRichard Ely concluded. “It is benevolent well-wishing feudalism.”
    Pullman’s workers rebelled during the Panic, when the company slashed wages—but not rents. “Great destitution and suffering prevails,” the Times reported, “but the house rent to the Pullman company must be paid.” Debs recognized the fragility of his young union and opposed hasty action, but his members voted to boycott trains bearing Pullman cars. Civic delegations and union officials trekked to Pullman, seeking to forestall a confrontation. “We have nothing to arbitrate,” the company declared.
    George Pullman later told the strike commission that the money he would have lost in arbitration was not what moved him. “The amount … would not cut any figure,” he said. “It was the principle involved.” So what remedies, the commission asked, did the workingman have? A firm “could work a great deal of injustice to the men; no doubt about that,” Pullman vice presidentThomas Wickes conceded. “But then it is a man’s privilege to go to work somewhere else.”
    The ARU launched its boycott on June 26, 1894. Freight and passenger travel came to a halt from Pennsylvania to California. Some 150,000 men walked off the job, and tens of thousands of working-class Americans wore white ribbons as an act of solidarity. It was “The Greatest Strike in History,” the New York Times announced, and coming as it did against a background of the Commonweal marches and violent strikes by miners and textile and iron workers, it thoroughly spooked the wealthy. “The struggle with the Pullman company has developed into a contest between the producing classes and the money power of the country,” Debs said. The GMA officials agreed; they set up a war room, and looked to the White House for help. 3
    A S THE RAILWAY workers cheered their success, Grover Cleveland met with his advisers. The president was a Democrat from New York, with broad support on Wall Street, whose most notable accomplishments were the deals he made with J. P. Morgan and other financiers to stabilize the currency. “I do not believe that the power and duty of the General Government ought to be extended to the relief of individual suffering,” Cleveland said, when vetoing an emergency farm bill. “Federal aid in such cases encourages the expectation of paternal care on the part of the Government and weakens the sturdiness of our national character.” 4
    Cleveland turned toRichard Olney, the attorney general, to handle the railway strike. Skilled and ruthless, Olney had left a job as counsel for one railroad and director of two others to join the cabinet. His sentiments can be gauged by a letter he wrote advising a railroad executive not to oppose the creation of theInterstate Commerce Commission. “The Commission … can be made of great use to the railroads,” Olney noted. “It satisfies the popular clamor for a government supervision of railroads, at the same time that supervision is almost entirely nominal. Further, the older such a commission gets to be, the more inclined it will be found to take the business and