ABSTRACT
In 1894 the pullman Palace Car Company, like many other firms, felt the pinch of hard times caused by the economic recession that had begun the previous year. George Mortimer Pullman had come to Chicago in 1859 from upstate New York, where he had taken over and greatly expanded his father's business of physically relocating residential and business structures. Perhaps the most charismatic leader in American labor history, Eugene Victor Debs would later become the head of the Socialist Party in the United States and run for president of the United States four times. Because of the failure of other unions to participate, Debs began to think that the railroad workers needed some form of federation, so that all the brotherhoods would back a strike. A great deal of sympathy existed in Chicago and elsewhere for the Pullman workers, common men and women tyrannized by an abusive employer and landlord.
