Cheyenne Savoie
April 11, 2013
HIST 203
The Pullman Strike

The Pullman Strike started on May 11, 1894. It was a conflict that was going on all across the nation. It included the American Railroad Union (ARU) and other railroads that occurred in America at that time. Beginning in a town called Pullman Illinois, with over four thousand employees that worked for the Pullman Palace Car Company. The strike started because the employees were upset with their current changes in reducing their pay. George Pullman was the president of the Pullman Palace Car Company. He designed the passenger railroad car, which included comfortable seats as well as sleeping cars for people to travel. He also takes credit for creating the “model” community of Pullman, Illinois. In 1894 there was a depression that led to the Pullman Palace Car Company cutting wages to almost forty percent, and lay off tons of workers. As the workers got more and more angry as bad things kept happening in this depression, they decided to join the ARU and start a strike against George Pullman as he decided to not increase his wages. Throughout the strike there were two major newspapers that kept up with the recent gossip and incidents that were occurring. The Chicago Times supported the union, and the Chicago Tribune opposed the ARU boycott. During the time of the strike both newspapers differed in regards to the violence that was happening, while the Chicago Tribune was focusing on the violence of the strikers themselves, the Chicago Times focused more on government and Mr. Pullman himself. The Chicago Tribune did not support the mobs and they did a clear job of portraying that in their daily newspapers. For example on July 1, 1894 they published an article in their paper called “Men Who Attempt to Work Are Terrorized and Beaten”. Right there in the title you can already know what the article contains. The Chicago Tribune does a good job at making sure they inform the readers and the people involved with the Pullman Strike about what the mob was doing. Another example of how the newspaper revealed the mobs actions was in another article they published on July 7, 1894 with the headline as “Yards Fire Swept”. Since the Chicago Tribune was against the mob, their articles focused on the violence that the mobs are apart of. In the article it says, “between 600 and 700 freight cars have been destroyed, many of them loaded. Miles and miles of costly track are in a snarled tangle of heat-twisted rails.” The paper is informing the people about the violence that the mob or strikers are doing on a daily basis. They don’t care about the workers wage cuts or any of the other things that are happening in the strike, they just care about what is happening to the railroads and their towns. The Chicago Times on the other hand had been on complete opposite sides then the Chicago Tribune. While the Chicago Tribune took their paper to a more violent approach, the times supported the strikers and wanted Pullman to change the wage cuts. For example in one of their articles they published the headline was “Nearly 4,000 Throw Down Their Tools and Quit.” In the article they inform the readers about the new strike that was happening. The article continues on to say “almost the entire force of men employed in the Pullman shops went out on strike yesterday… The immediate cause of the strike was the discharge or laying off of three men in the iron machine shop.” As you can see most all of the articles that the Chicago Times published were supporting the strikers themselves and what they had been doing to change their working conditions. Even though both newspapers differed in ways, the Chicago Times supporting the ARU boycott and the Chicago Tribune opposed it, they were similar in a way that they were trying to get people to see what was going on in their country. The Chicago Tribune wanted them to see the violent side of the boycott and the Chicago Times wanted them to see what the workers had to go through and how they were trying to fix it.