“Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living things, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on Earth. I said then and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”
One hundred years ago this November, these words were spoken by one of Woodstock’s most well-known, yet most often overlooked, temporary residents. Eugene Victor Debs, labor leader and four-time Socialist Party candidate for President of the United States, was receiving his sentence for a speech he had made in June 1918, against the World War One draft. His prison sentence for sedition would be his most famous, including his fifth run for President in 1920 and a commutation the next year by his former opponent, Warren Harding. But his first – and most life changing – experience behind bars occurred right here, in Woodstock, Illinois.
This Saturday and Sunday November 3rd and 4th, Woodstock Celebrates, Inc. will hold a festival commemorating the events of 1894 and ‘95 that gave Woodstock a unique place in America’s political and labor history. Dubbed “Villains or Heroes?” in event posters around town, the Debs-Pullman Festival will be held at the Woodstock Library, the Old Courthouse, Stage Left Cafe, and Ethereal Confections, with an additional event on November 5th at the Classic Cinemas Woodstock Theater. The library will host a documentary on “The Gilded Age” and an exhibit on George Pullman from the Illinois Railway Museum, and the Courthouse will host Debs’ exhibit with materials lent by the Debs Foundation. Stage Left will feature books and information from the Debs Foundation and Illinois Labor History Society, talks by Gunnar Gitlin and Ernest Freeberg, and historical impersonations by C.J. Martello and Steve Aavang as Chicago industrialist George Pullman and Woodstock sheriff George Eckert. Ethereal Confections will offer “cocktails of the 1890s,” a walking tour of Debs sites will start at the Old Courthouse at 12:00 pm on Sunday, and at 1:00 and 7:00 pm Monday, Classic Cinemas will show the documentary “American Socialist: The Life and Times of Eugene Victor Debs.”
According to Kathleen Spaltro, the main organizer of the event, the Debs-Pullman Festival came about as a commemoration of both the Illinois Bicentennial and the upcoming centennial of the end of World War One, which Debs was imprisoned for opposing (sentenced, ironically, a week after it ended). Its goal, aside from increasing awareness of Woodstock’s part in the historic 1894 Pullman Strike, is to raise funds to renovate the Old McHenry County Jail – all events are free to attend (except for Classic Cinemas, which will donate a portion of the ticket sales), and guests are encouraged to make a tax-deductible donation which will be turned over to the City of Woodstock for the renovation.
Spaltro hopes that attendees “will come away with their preconceptions challenged and their judgments broadened,” whether they see Debs or the industrialist he was opposing as the more threatening figure. She said that while both had critics in both the 1890s and now casting them as “diabolical,” the truth for both was more complex. By including Pullman, Debs’ opponent in the 1894 strike and across the left-vs-right social divide generally, Spaltro says the event is designed to be “inclusive rather than ideological.”
Certainly, the story of George Pullman is every bit as interesting as that of Eugene Debs, and more parallel to it than either man might have wanted to admit. In his late twenties, Pullman made a name for himself as one of the key figures in the “Raising of Chicago,” an epic engineering program in the 1850s and ‘60s designed to give the city a working sewer system by raising all of its buildings several feet above street level. Pullman’s expertise gained him a fortune, which he turned to the creation of the Pullman Palace Car Company. The company created not only the first successful “sleeper car” for the massive and rapidly-growing US rail network, but an entire town – and, Pullman hoped, an entirely new way of life.
Himself something of a utopian, Pullman believed that the best work would be produced by the best workers, and that the best worker could be found not just by hiring for talent, but by raising him with the best of conditions. The town of Pullman, Illinois was built with gorgeous architecture and modern amenities, and the workers received enough in pay and services to make the locality one of the safest and healthiest in the Victorian world. But at the same time, there were no homeowners other than Pullman himself, no independent newspapers, no privacy if company inspectors wished to enter a house, and neither a saloon nor an established congregation – Pullman had a list of “approved denominations” invited to the town’s church, but none of them would pay his rent. As a resident allegedly put it, “We are born in a Pullman house, fed from the Pullman shops, taught in the Pullman school, catechized in the Pullman Church, and when we die we shall go to the Pullman Hell.”
Still, the town said to be in a tighter grip than Germany under Bismarck functioned well for a time, with Pullman’s promise of bettering lives by working with “economic reality” rather than against it seeming to pay off – if Columbia in the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair had a real-life counterpart, it was Pullman. But that very same year, disaster struck. The national economy entered a major depression, and demand for Pullman cars plummeted. Never compromising on his bottom line, Pullman cut wages, hitting the lowest in the company hierarchy the hardest. At the same time he refused to either reduce rents or change the policy preferring residence in the company town, forcing his employees to either quit or live as the feudal serfs that many had always suspected they were.
Onto this scene came Eugene Debs, then the politically moderate president of the American Railway Union, and a third option – the workers unionized, and when Pullman refused to negotiate, they went on strike. Like the castle-dwelling medieval lords to whom he had been compared, Pullman seemed well-prepared to wait out the siege indefinitely. But Debs’ railway union covered workers all across the United States, in every profession from car builder to coal miner, giving it a power that even Debs hesitated to use. In June 1894, ARU members launched a national boycott of the Pullman company, refusing to service any train carrying any Pullman car. The result was a grinding halt to rail traffic all across the United States, and the threat of a general strike spreading across the country.
Undeterred, and themselves long-eager for a way to end the ARU, the rail barons of the General Managers’ Association deployed their own nuclear option. By “encouraging” mail cars to be hitched to Pullman cars, the strike was now interrupting the delivery of the US mail, giving the federal government the ability to act as strikebreakers. 12,000 troops, half the army at the time, were deployed alongside 4,000 deputy marshals. The troops started their work on July 4th, and by the end of the month, 30 workers were dead, the ARU was no more, and Debs and his fellow union leaders were arrested under a federal injunction against the strike. Despite a defense by future Scopes lawyer Clarence Darrow, the Supreme Court upheld the injunction, and Debs was sentenced to a six month jail term – to be served well away from any potential sympathizers, in the small, rural town of Woodstock, Illinois.
When Debs arrived in Woodstock, he met with a poor reception – according to his own writing, the farmers of the town had gathered by the train station and were threatening to lynch him. But thanks to the dutiful protection of sheriff George Eckert, Debs and his seven compatriots served out a peaceful sentence, ultimately released to great fanfare and a crowd of hundreds of onlookers. In that time, however, Debs had transformed from a union leader willing to compromise with the system, to a thoroughly disillusioned witness of capitalism’s worst side, determined to overthrow it. His six months in the Woodstock jail were spent reading socialist material mailed to him from across the country, and eventually, meeting with Milwaukee socialist Victor L. Berger, who delivered, according to Debs, an “impassioned message” of his form of the ideology, and a copy of “Capital” by Karl Marx.
Two decades later in 1918, in the speech that would gain him his second questionably-just sentence, Debs spoke in heroic terms of “the Bolsheviki of Russia… who have, by their sacrifice… laid the foundation of the first real democracy that ever drew breath.” Two decades after that, in pursuit of the perfect and universal equality Debs idealized, famine and terror had killed Russians in the tens of millions. Outpacing another self-named form of Socialism, one that might have itself resonated with Pullman, tens of millions more in Russia, China, Cambodia, and elsewhere were still yet to come. In that sense, behind the happier story of a lifelong friendship between Debs and Eckert, the McHenry County Jail has a place in history much like the prisons of Elba, Shushenskoye, or Landsberg – Debs himself might never have become America’s Lenin, much less its Stalin, but Woodstock, Illinois was where he became an acolyte of their faith.
For more information and a full schedule of events, visit https://mchenrycountyhistory.org/villains-or-heroes-pullman-vs-debs
Willcockson Wordsmithing 