{"id":10042,"date":"2015-09-07T18:16:36","date_gmt":"2015-09-07T22:16:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/?p=10042"},"modified":"2015-09-07T18:16:36","modified_gmt":"2015-09-07T22:16:36","slug":"how-a-bloody-railroad-strike-paved-the-way-for-labor-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/how-a-bloody-railroad-strike-paved-the-way-for-labor-day\/","title":{"rendered":"How a Bloody Railroad Strike Paved the Way for Labor Day"},"content":{"rendered":"
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How a Bloody Railroad Strike Paved the Way for Labor Day<\/h2>\n

(from Time.com<\/a><\/span> )<\/p>\n

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\"Pullman
A group of men stand on abandoned railway cars during the Pullman strike in Chicago, July 1984.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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First Monday of September, 1894: Labor Day is first observed as a national holiday<\/h2>\n<\/blockquote>\n
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It\u2019s little more than a day off for shopping now, but when Labor Day was first observed, it wasn\u2019t all fun and back-to-school sales. Its passage as a federal holiday, in 1894, was a sort of peace offering from President Grover Cleveland<\/a>\u00a0for the killing of a dozen or more striking railway workers.<\/p>\n

The strike began as unrest in the Illinois town founded by George Pullman, creator of the railroad sleeping car. The town, just outside Chicago, had been built as a utopian home for Pullman\u2019s workers, but the utopia was designed to serve Pullman above all others, according to PBS<\/a>. \u201cIts residents all worked for the Pullman company,\u201d PBS notes, \u201ctheir paychecks drawn from Pullman bank, and their rent, set by Pullman, deducted automatically from their weekly paychecks.\u201d<\/p>\n

From 1880 to 1893, all seemed well in Pullman (the town), until an economic depression prompted Pullman (the man) to cut employees\u2019 wages \u2014 even though their rents remained the same. The workers walked out. In solidarity, members of the American Railway Union (founded, per TIME<\/a>, by \u201cfiery Socialist Eugene Debs\u201d) took up the cause, and its 150,000 members refused to work on trains carrying Pullman cars, prompting a nationwide transportation nightmare.<\/p>\n

It was, according to The Atlantic<\/em><\/a>, <\/em>America\u2019s first true nationwide strike \u2014 and a major milestone for the labor movement. But it didn\u2019t end well, for anyone. President Cleveland, under pressure from the railroad industry and the U.S. Postal Service, whose mail trains had ground to a halt, declared the strike a federal crime and sent troops to break it. David Ray Papke, the author of The Pullman Case<\/em><\/a>, describes the rioting and arson that ensued, and was suppressed; while death counts vary by source, TIME called it \u201cone of the bloodiest strikes in U.S. history.\u201d …<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Read the rest of this interesting article at Time.com<\/a><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How a Bloody Railroad Strike Paved the Way for Labor Day (from Time.com ) A group of men stand on abandoned railway cars during the Pullman strike in Chicago, July 1984. First Monday of September, 1894: Labor Day is first observed as a national holiday It\u2019s little more than a day off for shopping now, but when Labor\u2026 Read More »<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10042"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10042"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10042\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10043,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10042\/revisions\/10043"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10042"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10042"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10042"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}