656 ★ CHAPTER 17 Freedom’s Boundaries, at Home and Abroad
The Government and Labor
Were the Populists on the verge of replacing one of the two major parties? The
severe depression that began in 1893 led to increased conflict between capital
and labor and seemed to create an opportunity for expanding the Populist vote.
Time and again, employers brought state or federal authority to bear to protect
their own economic power or put down threats to public order. Even before the
economic downturn, in 1892, the governor of Idaho declared martial law and
sent militia units and federal troops into the mining region of Coeur d’Alene
to break a strike. In May 1894, the federal government deployed soldiers to
disperse Coxey’s Army— a band of several hundred unemployed men led by
Ohio businessman Jacob Coxey, who marched to Washington demanding eco-
nomic relief.
Also in 1894, workers in the company- owned town of Pullman, Illinois,
where railroad sleeping cars were manufactured, called a strike to protest a
reduction in wages. The American Railway Union, whose 150,000 members
included both skilled and unskilled railroad laborers, announced that its
members would refuse to handle trains with Pullman cars. When the boycott
crippled national rail service, President Grover Cleveland’s attorney general,
Richard Olney (himself on the board of several railroad companies), obtained
a federal court injunction ordering the strikers back to work. Federal troops
and U.S. marshals soon occupied railroad centers like Chicago and Sacramento.
The strike collapsed when the union’s leaders, including its charismatic
president, Eugene V. Debs, were jailed for contempt of court for violating the
judicial order. In the case of In re Debs, the Supreme Court unanimously con-
firmed the sentences and approved the use of injunctions against striking labor
unions. On his release from prison in November 1895, more than 100,000 per-
sons greeted Debs at a Chicago railroad depot.
Populism and Labor
In 1894, Populists made determined efforts to appeal to industrial workers.
Popu list senators supported the demand of Coxey’s Army for federal unem-
ployment relief, and Governor Davis Waite of Colorado, who had edited a
labor newspaper before his election, sent the militia to protect striking miners
against company police. In the state and congressional elections of that year,
as the economic depression deepened, voters by the millions abandoned the
Democratic Party of President Cleveland.
In rural areas, the Populist vote increased in 1894. But urban workers did
not rally to the Populists, whose core issues— the subtreasury plan and lower
mortgage interest rates— had little meaning for them and whose demand for
higher prices for farm goods would raise the cost of food and reduce the value