A. R. U.

DESCRIPTION: "Been on the hummer since ninety-four, Last job I had was on the Lake Shore, Lost my job in the A.R.U. And I won't get it back till nineteen-two And I'm still on the hog train flagging my meals Ridin' the brake beams close to the wheels."
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1898 (The Conductor and Brakeman)
KEYWORDS: railroading hardtimes unemployment strike labor-movement
HISTORICAL REFERENCES:
June 20, 1893 - Socialist Eugene Debs (1855-1926) organizes the A.R.U. (American Railway Union)
June 27, 1893 - A severe decline in the stock market leads to the Panic of 1893. The next year will see severe labor troubles as workers try to survive the economic contraction
May 11, 1894 - The Pullman Strike. The Pullman employees have been squeezed by the company to the point where they can no longer survive
June 26, 1894 - Eugene Debs calls the A.R.U. strike to support the Pullman workers. Roughly 60,000 workers go off the job.
July 2, 1894 - Attorney General Olney, who works with railroad interests, convinces President Cleveland to break the Pullman Strike. Cleveland orders Debs to call off the strike on the grounds that it interferes with the U.S. mail. (Pullman cars, however, do not carry mail.)
July 6, 1894 - Troops fire on the railroad strikers in Kensington, IL
July 10, 1894 - Debs is indicted for defying President Cleveland's injunction (on Dec. 14 he will be sentenced to six months in prison)
Aug 3, 1894 - The Pullman strikers give in
FOUND IN: US(So)
REFERENCES (4 citations):
Sandburg-TheAmericanSongbag, pp. 190-191, "A. R. U." (1 fragment, 1 tune)
Greenway-AmericanFolksongsOfProtest, p. 57, "A.R.U." (1 text)
Foner-AmericanLaborSongsOfTheNineteenthCentury, p. 246, "A. R. U." (1 fragment)
ADDITIONAL: (no editor listed), _The Conductor and Brakeman_, Vol. 15, No. 5 (Cedar Rapids, Iowa, May, 1898), p. 359 (available at Google Books)., "To the Trainmaster" (1 text)
Roud #29309
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "The Pullman Strike" (subject)
NOTES [688 words]: Eugene Debs (1855-1926) started as a relatively ordinary white collar worker, even being elected a city clerk as a Democrat in 1878 (Chace, p. 72), then in 1885 to the Indiana State House (DAB,Volume III, p. 183), but he had worked on a railroad before that, and gradually became more involved in railway labor issues, editing the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen's magazine and serving as organization secretary (DAB,Volume III, p. 183). At a time when the different types of railroad workers (engineers, firemen, etc.) belonged to separate unions if they joined together at all (Weir/Hanlan, p. 24), he came to dream of a union that joined them all (Chace, p. 74). Following the famous Homestead Strike, Debs was able to found the American Railway Union, or A. R. U. (Chace, p. 75). It grew amazingly quickly, eventually reaching some 150,000 members (Weir/Hanlan, p. 25).
The A. R. U.'s first opportunity for action was during the Pullman Strike, as the once-generous management of the Pullman Company put the squeeze on its employees to save costs. George Pullman had built a company town for his employees, and originally conditions had been decent -- but in 1894 he unilaterally cut pay rates by 25%, without reducing what he charged in the company stores or offering any additional benefits (Graff, p. 118). This even though the Pullman company had paid $2,880,000 in dividends in 1894! (Glad, p.89). The Pullman workers went on strike to maintain what they had had before, Debs told the members of the A. R. U. not to service Pullman cars (Chace, p. 77).
It might have worked -- had the government stayed neutral. But President Grover Cleveland, urged on by Attorney General Richard Olney (Graff, p. 119), decided to use the Sheman Anti-Trust Act -- against the union! (Chace, p. 77). "Olney, hot-tempered and wrathful, was openly sympathetic to the railroads, having served the railroad as a lawyer in private life" (Graff, p. 119).
The government obtained an injunction against the union, on the grounds that it was interfering with the mails (which it wasn't; the mail was going through, and John Peter Altgeld, the governor of Illinois, didn't want the Feds involved; Chace, p. 78) When the union remained peacefully on strike, Olney broke up the strike and arrested Debs (Graff, p. 120). Troops even assaulted a crowd using bayonets, hurting several although there were no fatalities (Chace, p. 78).
In all this, the A. F. L. refused to support the strikers (Chace, p. 79).
Debs was sentenced to six months for contempt of court, and three others were given three month terms (Chace, pp. 79-80). Debs was also tried for conspiracy, but Clarence Darrow defended him, and when a juror became ill, the judge discharged the jury and the case was never resumed (Chace, p. 80). The reading Debs did while in prison helped turn him from a Democratic labor unionist into a Socialist (DAB,Volume III, p. 184).
Debs had three times supported Grover Cleveland for President (Chace, p. 80). After this, he turned away. And the Democratic party, as it turned out, would never again win with a conservative candidate; their 1896 nominee was the agrarian populist William Jennings Bryan. They would not elect another President until Woodrow Wilson in 1912 (who was in many ways deeply conservative -- e.g. he was very racist -- but who gave the impression of being a progressive) . And the next one after that was Franklin Roosevelt in 1932.
When Debs was released from prison, he was greeted by tremendous crowds -- which was fortunate, for the A. R. U. was $30,000 in debt, and fatally weakened; the only way Debs could hope to revive the union and pay off its debts was to go on a long lecture tour (Chace, pp. 82-83). Finally, in June 1897, Debs started a group he called Social Democracy of America, a sort of socialist colony. With that, the A. R. U. was dead (Chace, p. 85).
After the A.R.U. strike of 1894, most of the strikers were blacklisted by the railroad companies. With little else to do, they rode the rods or tried to get jobs under false names -- only to be fired if they were discovered. Hence this song. - RBW
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