Showdown at the Shops
Posted on July 4, 2011 – 6:16 AM | by Admin
By William Burg Photo: Western Railway Museum
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.