Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned - By John A. Farrell Page 0,33

150,000 men walked off the job, and tens of thousands of working-class Americans wore white ribbons as an act of solidarity. It was “The Greatest Strike in History,” the New York Times announced, and coming as it did against a background of the Commonweal marches and violent strikes by miners and textile and iron workers, it thoroughly spooked the wealthy. “The struggle with the Pullman company has developed into a contest between the producing classes and the money power of the country,” Debs said. The GMA officials agreed; they set up a war room, and looked to the White House for help.3

AS THE RAILWAY workers cheered their success, Grover Cleveland met with his advisers. The president was a Democrat from New York, with broad support on Wall Street, whose most notable accomplishments were the deals he made with J. P. Morgan and other financiers to stabilize the currency. “I do not believe that the power and duty of the General Government ought to be extended to the relief of individual suffering,” Cleveland said, when vetoing an emergency farm bill. “Federal aid in such cases encourages the expectation of paternal care on the part of the Government and weakens the sturdiness of our national character.”4

Cleveland turned to Richard Olney, the attorney general, to handle the railway strike. Skilled and ruthless, Olney had left a job as counsel for one railroad and director of two others to join the cabinet. His sentiments can be gauged by a letter he wrote advising a railroad executive not to oppose the creation of the Interstate Commerce Commission. “The Commission … can be made of great use to the railroads,” Olney noted. “It satisfies the popular clamor for a government supervision of railroads, at the same time that supervision is almost entirely nominal. Further, the older such a commission gets to be, the more inclined it will be found to take the business and railroad view of things. It thus becomes a sort of barrier between the railroad corporations and the people.”

Olney named Edwin Walker, yet another railroad lawyer, as a “special counsel” for the justice department in Chicago. And Thomas Milchrist, the U.S. attorney, sat in on the meetings of the GMA, where he asked that the railroads “report any interference with mail trains.” The attorney general was itching to intervene.5 Federal judges Peter Grosscup and William Woods, abandoning any pretext of impartiality, helped the government draft a request for an injunction and swiftly approved it. They issued what came to be called the “Gatling gun on paper,” ordering all persons to “refrain from interfering” with railroad traffic and banning anyone from coercing, inciting, or even “persuading” workers to strike. Olney was nothing if not bold; he based the government’s argument on the Sherman Antitrust Act, which was enacted in 1890 to fight trusts and monopolies but now was employed to crush the union.

On the evening of July 2, U.S. marshal John Arnold informed Washington that he had gone out to the rail yards and read the injunction to the striking workmen, who “simply hoot at it.” The thousands of “deputies” he had recruited—toughs and drunks paid by the railroads—could not clear the tracks. Special counsel Walker (who privately called Arnold’s deputies “a mob … worse than useless”) informed Olney that it was “of utmost importance that soldiers should be distributed at several points within the city.” Cleveland gave his approval.

Debs had consistently appealed “to strikers everywhere to refrain from any act of violence,” the strike commission would report. Until the U.S. Army marched in, in the early morning hours of Independence Day, things were relatively peaceful. But the soldiers were a provocation. And on July 4 the striking railway men were joined by thousands of the unemployed and industrial workers celebrating Independence Day, all in a giddy and often inebriated state. As the trains tried to move within protective cordons of troops, huge crowds gathered at the crossings, blocking progress with their bodies and tipping freight cars. The first boxcars were set aflame the next day as mobs of up to fifty thousand, by some estimates, massed along the tracks. That night, someone started a fire in the deserted grounds of the White City. Whipped by warm winds, the flames consumed the Exposition’s buildings. On July 6, after a railroad employee shot two rioters, hundreds looted and burned seven hundred railcars in south Chicago. “It was pandemonium let loose, the fire leaping along for miles and the men and women dancing with frenzy,” the