Some of us have fairly hazy notions to-day as to the Pullman strike and what it was all about. It began in May, 1894. The employees of the Pullman Company, engaged in making cars at Pullman, Illinois, went on a strike because of the refusal of the Company to restore wages which had been reduced in the preceding year. The American Railway Union, which then comprised some two hundred and fifty thousand railway employees which Debs had organized and over which he was master in control, later endorsed this strike and started in actively to make it a success. The principal means by which that success was sought was by declaring a boycott on Pullman cars. In Judge Taft's opinion in the Phelan case (Thomas _vs_. Cincinnati, N. O. & T. P. Rd. Co.), he gives the plan and scope of this boycott as follows:
Pullman cars are used on a large majority of the railways of the country. The members of the American Railway Union, whose duty it was to handle Pullman cars on such railways, were to refuse to do so, with the hope that the railway companies, fearing a strike, would decline further to haul them in their trains and inflict a great pecuniary injury upon the Pullman Company. In case these railroads failed to yield to the demand, every effort was to be made to tie them up and cripple the doing of any business whatever by them, and particular attention was to be directed to the freight traffic, which it was known was the chief source of revenue. As the lodges of the American Railway Union extended from the Alleghany Mountains to the Pacific Coast, it will be seen that it was contemplated by those engaged in carrying out their plans, that in case of a refusal of the railway companies to join the Union in its attack upon the Pullman Company, there would be a paralysis of all railroad traffic of every kind throughout the vast territory traversed by the lines using Pullman cars.
Phelan came to Cincinnati to carry on this warfare against the Pullman Company by paralyzing, if he could, all the railroads centering there. He did not stop even with the railroads using Pullman cars, but ordered a strike against the Big Four, which used none of these cars. On the day Phelan called the strike in Cincinnati, Debs telegraphed to him to let the Big Four alone if it was not using Pullman cars, to which Phelan answered: "I cannot keep others out if Big Four is excepted. The rest are emphatic on all together or none. The tie-up is successful." Debs replied "About twenty-five lines are paralyzed. More following. Tremendous blockade." A few days later Debs telegraphed: "Advices from all points show our position strengthened. Baltimore & Ohio, Pan Handle, Big Four, Lake Shore, Erie, Grand Trunk, and Michigan Central are now in the fight. _Take measures to paralyze all those which enter Cincinnati._ Not a wheel turning between here and the Canadian line."