The governor fired off a message to the White House, outraged that the president had deployed soldiers to an American city.
“I protest against this, and ask the immediate withdrawal of the Federal troops from active duty in this State,” he wrote.
It was July 1894. The governor was John Peter Altgeld of Illinois, and the president was Grover Cleveland. The two Democrats were arguing about Cleveland’s decision to send the U.S. Army into Chicago during the Pullman strike.
Illinois was “able to take care of itself,” Altgeld wrote, telling Cleveland that the deployment “insults the people of this State by imputing to them an inability to govern themselves, or an unwillingness to enforce the law.”
Their dispute has echoes today, with President Donald Trump ordering the California National Guard and U.S. Marines sent to help deal with protests in Los Angeles. This time, California Gov. Gavin Newsom has led a chorus of objections to the president’s move. In 1894, the progressive Altgeld was the loudest voice of protest.
Altgeld, who’d emigrated from Germany as a toddler, was a Cook County judge before winning election as governor in 1892. The following year, he faced harsh criticism when he pardoned three alleged anarchists for their supposed roles in the 1886 Haymarket bombing, which killed seven police officers and several civilians during a labor demonstration west of the Loop.
Altgeld said the imprisoned men were innocent, but the Tribune and other newspapers labeled him as an anarchist and apologist for murder.
At the time, Chicago was reveling in the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, but the city soon fell into an economic depression. That prompted tycoon George Pullman to slash salaries at his railcar factory, even as he continued charging workers the same rent for living in his company’s Far South Side complex.
Pullman’s desperate employees went on strike in May 1894. The conflict expanded in late June, when the American Railway Union refused to work on trains containing Pullman’s luxury sleeping cars — a boycott that paralyzed railroads across the country.
Two federal judges in Chicago, William Allen Woods and Peter S. Grosscup, issued an injunction July 2, ordering the union to stop disrupting interstate commerce and postal shipments. U.S. Marshal John W. Arnold delivered the message to a crowd of 2,000 strikers in Blue Island. Arriving on a train, he stood in the mail car’s doorway and read the injunction. “I command you in the name of the president of the United States to disperse and go to your homes,” he said.
According to the Tribune, Arnold was greeted with “howls, hooting, curses, and scornful laughter.” People shouted, “To hell with the government! To hell with the courts!” And then they “wantonly violated the court’s order” by pushing over a boxcar onto the tracks.
Arnold telegraphed U.S. Attorney General Richard Olney. “I am unable to disperse the mob, clear the tracks, or arrest the men … and believe that no force less than the regular troops of the United States can procure the passage of the mail trains, or enforce the orders of the courts,” he wrote.
Cleveland ordered soldiers from Fort Sheridan, a base in Lake County, into Chicago. He later cited a statute authorizing the president to deploy armed forces if “unlawful obstructions, combinations or assemblages of persons, or rebellion against the authority of the United States” made it “impracticable” to enforce laws through “the ordinary course of judicial proceedings.”
A crowd cheered when troops arrived in Chicago early on the morning of the Fourth of July. The Tribune reported that the soldiers were there to teach union “dictator” Eugene Debs and his followers a lesson — “that the law of the land was made to be obeyed and not violated by a rabble of anarchistic rioters.”
But Altgeld said troops weren’t needed. “Very little actual violence has been committed,” he told Cleveland. “At present some of our railroads are paralyzed, not by reason of obstructions, but because they cannot get men to operate their trains.”
Cleveland replied that he was acting “in strict accordance with the Constitution and laws of the United States.” Altgeld sent a second telegram, challenging the president’s use of the military to enforce laws. Not even “the autocrat of Russia” has that much power, Altgeld said.
Recalling his reaction to Altgeld’s missives, Cleveland later said, “I confess that my patience was somewhat strained.”
A Tribune editorial scoffed at Altgeld’s arguments: “This lying, hypocritical, demagogical, sniveling Governor of Illinois does not want the law enforced. He is a sympathizer with riot, with violence, with lawlessness, and with anarchy.”
An Army officer told the White House that Chicago’s “people seem to feel easier since arrival of troops.” But Altgeld told Cleveland that the soldiers’ presence was an “irritant” that “aroused the indignation” of many. Police Superintendent Michael Brennan reported: “The workingmen had heard of the arrival of the federal troops and were incensed.”
Mobs soon knocked over or burned hundreds of freight cars, drunkenly shouting insults at soldiers. “MOBS DEFY ALL LAW — Make Night Hideous with a Reign of Torch and Riot,” a Tribune headline declared.
In the midst of the turmoil, buildings from the 1893 World’s Fair went up in flames, attracting a huge crowd of spectators. Arson was suspected.
Most of the rioters weren’t striking railway workers, according to Brennan. Rather, they were “hoodlums, the vicious element and half-grown boys” who “were ready for mischief of any kind,” he wrote.
More federal troops arrived. And despite Altgeld’s opposition to the federal deployment, he sent 4,000 members of the Illinois National Guard to help the Chicago police establish order.
Brennan praised the way his own police handled the situation, writing: “They used their clubs freely, vigorously and effectively; there were many cracked heads and sore sports where the policeman’s club fell, but no human life was taken.”
According to Brennan, the most troublesome law enforcement officers were 5,000 men deputized by the U.S. marshal. “A large number of them were toughs, thieves and ex-convicts,” he wrote. “They were dangerous to the lives of the citizens on account of their careless use of pistols. They fired into the crowd of bystanders when there was no disturbance and no reason for shooting. Innocent men and women were killed by these shots.”
U.S. Army officials were reluctant to allow their 1,900 soldiers in Chicago to fire at rioters — or to take on the role of police officers. “Punishment belongs not to the troops, but to the courts of justice,” they wrote in an order outlining rules of engagement.
Reporting for Harper’s Weekly, artist Frederic Remington described soldiers angry at being held back from attacking “the malodorous crowd of anarchist foreign trash.” Remington called Chicago “a seething mass of smells, stale beer, and bad language.” But he noted that the city’s “decent people” welcomed the soldiers.
The strike’s deadliest episode happened July 7 at 49th and Loomis streets, where several thousand people jeered and threw rocks at the Illinois National Guard. The state troops charged with bayonets and fired several volleys, killing at least four and wounding 20. A Tribune headline called it “A DAY OF BLOOD.”
The Army focused on getting the trains to run again, with soldiers riding shotgun in trains as they carried mail and much needed shipments of food. On July 8, U.S. soldiers escorting a train fired at crowds in Hammond, killing an innocent bystander.
“I would like to know by what authority United States troops come in here and shoot our citizens without the slightest warning,” Hammond Mayor Patrick Reilley said.
By the time the strike was over in mid-July — with the union defeated and the soldiers gone — the official local death toll was 12, though some historians say more than 30 died.
Altgeld lost his bid for reelection in 1896. He died in 1902 and was buried in Graceland Cemetery, where the monument on his grave features some of his words, including a portion of his message to Grover Cleveland: “This is a government of law, and not a government by the caprice of an individual.”
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