The Pullman Strike, 130th Anniversary Edition

During the heroic Pullman strike and boycott of 7894, a young Methodist minister defied the conventions of company-town self-censorship by writing this searing exposé of the dictatorial and penny-pinching regime of multimillionaire George M. Pullman.That Rev. William H. Carwardine suffered immediate exile from his Pullman church suggests how deeply threatened the giant railroad manufacturing and operating company was by his plainly written book. The Pullman Strike and Carwardine became...
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During the heroic Pullman strike and boycott of 7894, a young Methodist minister defied the conventions of company-town self-censorship by writing this searing exposé of the dictatorial and penny-pinching regime of multimillionaire George M. Pullman.That Rev. William H. Carwardine suffered immediate exile from his Pullman church suggests how deeply threatened the giant railroad manufacturing and operating company was by his plainly written book. The Pullman Strike and Carwardine became the objects of intense Pullman counterattacks before the United States Strike Commission and in the press. But the book, drafted in just four weeks, survived as a telling challenge to Pullmantown's image as a "model community" or "utopia."Equally familiar with the finances of the Pullman empire and the household budgets of Pullman's hard-pressed workers, Carwardine showed Pullman to be a machine designed to "grind men" as ham, a "hollow mockery . . . a civilized relic of European serfdom." Filled with appreciation for meaningful details of the everyday lives of diverse workers with common problems, and with a balanced admiration for the leadership of Eugene V. Debs, The Pullman Strike vividly shows how a great experiment in industrial unionism like the American Railway Union could arise. Aware of the vast power and ruthlessness of the Pullman Company, Carwardine also suggests why the union was unable to prevail.On the 130th anniversary of the Pullman Strike, Carwardine's volume--here reissued by its original publisher--remains a classic of labor journalism, industrial history, and strike-support activism.