If the year 1892 taught the world any lesson worthy of heed, it was that the capitalist class, like a devilfish, had grasped them with its tentacles and was dragging them down to fathomless depths of degradation. To escape the prehensile clutch of these monsters, constitutes a standing challenge to organized labor for 1893.

In the midst of the economic crisis of 1893, a small group of railroad workers, including Debs, formed the American Railway Union, to unite all railway workers. Debs said:

A life purpose of mine has been the federation of railroad employees. To unify them into one great body is my object… Class enrollment fosters class prejudices and class selfishness… It has been my life's desire to unify railroad employees and to eliminate the aristocracy of labor… and organize them so all will be on an equality…

Knights of Labor people came in, virtually merging the old Knights with the American Railway Union, according to labor historian David Montgomery.

Debs wanted to include everyone, but blacks were kept out: at a convention in 1894, the provision in the constitution barring blacks was affirmed by a vote of 112 to 100. Later, Debs thought this might have had a crucial effect on the outcome of the Pullman strike, for black workers were in no mood to cooperate with the strikers.

In June 1894, workers at the Pullman Palace Car Company went on strike. One can get an idea of the kind of support they got, mostly from the immediate vicinity of Chicago, in the first months of the strike, from a list of contributions put together by the Reverend William H. Carwardine, a Methodist pastor in the company town of Pullman for three years (he was sent away after he supported the strikers):

Typographical Union #16

Painters and Decorators Union #147

Carpenters' Union No. 23

Thirty- fourth Ward Republican Club

Grand Crossing Police

Hyde Park Water Department

Picnic at Gardener's Park

Milk Dealer's Union

Hyde Park Liquor Dealers

Fourteenth Precinct Police Station

Swedish Concert

Chicago Fire Department

German Singing Society

Cheque from Anaconda, Montana

The Pullman strikers appealed to a convention of the American Railway Union for support:

Mr. President and Brothers of the American Railway Union. We struck at Pullman because we were without hope. We joined the American Railway Union because it gave us a glimmer of hope. Twenty thousand souls, men, women and little ones, have their eyes turned toward this convention today, straining eagerly through dark despondency for a glimmer of the heavensent message you alone can give us on this earth…

You all must know that the proximate cause of our strike was the discharge of two members of our grievance committee… Five reductions in wages… The last was the most severe, amounting to nearly thirty per cent, and rents had not fallen…

Water which Pullman buys from the city at 8 cents a thousand gallons he retails lo us at 500 percent advance… Gas which sells at 75 cents per thousand feet in Hyde Park, just north of us, he sells for $2.25. When we went to tell him our grievances he said we were all his "children."…

Pullman, both the man and the town, is an ulcer on the body politic. He owns the houses, the schoolhouses, and churches of God in the town he gave his once humble name…

And thus the merry war-the dance of skeletons bathed in human tears-goes on, and it will go on, brothers, forever, unless you, the American Railway Union, stop it; end it; crush it out.

The American Railway Union responded. It asked its members all over the country not to handle Pullman cars. Since virtually all passenger trains had Pullman cars, this amounted to a boycott of all trains-a nationwide strike. Soon all traffic on the twenty-four railroad lines leading out of Chicago had come to a halt. Workers derailed freight cars, blocked tracks, pulled engineers off trains if they refused to cooperate.

The General Managers Association, representing the railroad owners, agreed to pay two thousand deputies, sent in to break the strike. But the strike went on. The Attorney General of the United States, Richard Olney, a former railroad lawyer, now got a court injunction against blocking trains, on the legal ground that the federal mails were being interfered with. When the strikers ignored the injunction, President Cleveland ordered federal troops to Chicago. On July 6, hundreds of cars were burned by strikers.

The following day, the state militia moved in, and the Chicago Times reported on what followed:

Company C. Second Regiment… disciplined a mob of rioters yesterday afternoon at Forty-ninth and Loomis Streets. The police assisted and… finished the job. There is no means of knowing how many rioters were killed or wounded. The mob carried off many of its dying and injured.

A crowd of five thousand gathered. Rocks were thrown at the militia, and the command was given to fire.

… To say that the mob went wild is but a weak expression… The command to charge was given.… From that moment only bayonets were used… A dozen men in the front line of rioters received bayonet wounds.…

Tearing up cobble stones, the mob made a determined charge… the word was passed along the line for each officer to take care of himself. One by one, as occasion demanded, they fired point blank into the crowd… The police followed with their clubs. A wire fence enclosed the track. The rioters had forgotten it; when they turned to fly they were caught in a trap.

The police were not inclined to be merciful, and driving the mob against the barbed wires clubbed it unmercifully… The crowd outside the fence rallied to the assistance of the rioters… The shower of stones was incessant.…

The ground over which the fight had occurred was like a battlefield. The men shot by the troops and police lay about like logs…

In Chicago that day, thirteen people were killed, fifty-three seriously wounded, seven hundred arrested. Before the strike was over, perhaps thirty-four were dead. With fourteen thousand police, militia, troops in Chicago, the strike was crushed. Debs was arrested for contempt of court, for violating the injunction that said he could not do or say anything to carry on the strike. He told the court: "It seems to me that if it were not for resistance to degrading conditions, the tendency of our whole civilization would be downward; after a while we would reach the point where there would be no resistance, and slavery would come."

Debs, in court, denied he was a socialist. But during his six months in prison, he studied socialism and talked to fellow prisoners who were socialists. Later he wrote: "I was to be baptized in Socialism in the roar of conflict… in the gleam of every bayonet and the flash of every rifle the class struggle was revealed… This was my first practical struggle in Socialism."

Two years after he came out of prison, Debs wrote in the Railway Times:

The issue is Socialism versus Capitalism. I am for Socialism because I am for humanity. We have been cursed with the reign of gold long enough. Money constitutes no proper basis of civilization. The time has come to regenerate society-we are on the eve of a universal change.

Thus, the eighties and nineties saw bursts of labor insurrection, more organized than the spontaneous strikes of 1877. There were now revolutionary movements influencing labor struggles, the ideas of socialism affecting labor leaders. Radical literature was appearing, speaking of fundamental changes, of new possibilities for living.

In this same period, those who worked on the land-farmers, North and South, black and white-were going far beyond the scattered tenant protests of the pre-Civil War years and creating the greatest movement of agrarian rebellion the country had ever seen.