Reconstruction, Expansion, and the Triumph of Industrial Capitalism 47Pullman scrip [“money” that could only be used at Pullman businesses] rath-
er than regular money. All of this forced the employees to funnel their wages
back to the company. By 1894, a national depression decreased the demand
for luxury railroad cars. In response, Pullman fired a third of workers and
lowered pay by 25 percent. Eugene Debs, the head of the American Railway
Union (ARU), called for a strike of industrial workers, like they had in 1877,
in May 1894. Because the ARU was an industry-wide union, the strike spread
across the nation and workers over the country refused to work on trains
pulling Pullman cars. But Gompers and the AFL refused to support the
national strike. Gompers’s conservative view of unionism, his belief that work-
ers should simply worry about getting better wages and not worry about
other issues, led him to fear that the government, as it always did, would crush
the unions. President Grover Cleveland ordered troops in to break up dem-
onstrations. In Chicago, the center of national activities, violence broke out
between strikers and soldiers. By the end of July 1894, 34 people had died.
Debs was arrested for contempt of court. Pullman workers gradually went
back to work for the factory. The national railway strike and the ARU were
broken. By the mid-1890s, labor was unable to gain much public support and
actually lost ground in some areas, losing the 8-hour day in some industries
for example. The first great challenge to industrial capitalism had been
crushed.
Butch cassidy and the sundance kid, and the fiGht
aGainst industRialization
Industrial workers and farmers across the country knew that Industrial
Capitalism [and the exploitation of labor] was here to stay. Accordingly, they
looked to outlaws who stole from the banks and railroad tycoons as heroes,
common men in the struggle against Capitalists. Butch Cassidy and the
Sundance Kid became influential bandits who robbed trains, banks, and mines
across the industrializing West at the turn of the century. Cassidy was born
Robert Leroy Parker in 1866 to a devout Mormon family living in Utah.
Cassidy’s father, a poor rancher, had to work additional jobs away from home,
sometimes leaving his family of thirteen children and a wife for months at a
time. As the oldest son, Robert Parker often acted as the head of the family
while his dad was gone. At the age of 13 he took a job at a nearby ranch to