The year 1894 was exceptional for labor disturbances.  The number of employes involved reached nearly 750,000, surpassing even the mark set in 1886.  However, in contradistinction to 1886, the movement was defensive.  It also resulted in greater failure.  The strike of the coal miners and the Pullman strike were the most important ones.  The United Mine Workers began their strike in Ohio on April 21.  The membership did not exceed 20,000, but about 125,000 struck.  At first the demand was made that wages should be restored to the level at which they were in May 1893.  But within a month the union in most regions was struggling to prevent a further reduction in wages.  By the end of July the strike was lost.

The Pullman strike marks an era in the American labor movement because it was the only attempt ever made in America of a revolutionary strike on the Continental European model.  The strikers tried to throw against the associated railways and indeed against the entire existing social order the full force of a revolutionary labor solidarity embracing the entire American wage-earning class brought to the point of exasperation by unemployment, wage reductions, and misery.  That in spite of the remarkable favorable conjuncture the dramatic appeal failed to shake the general labor movement out of its chosen groove is proof positive of the completion of the stabilization process which had been going on since the early eighties.

The Pullman strike began May 11, 1894, and grew out of a demand of certain employes in the shops of the Pullman Palace Car Company, situated at Pullman, Illinois, for a restoration of the wages paid during the previous year.  In March 1894, the Pullman employes had voted to join the American Railway Union.  The American Railway Union was an organization based on industrial lines, organized in June 1893, by Eugene V. Debs.  Debs, as secretary-treasurer of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, had watched the failure of many a strike by only one trade and resigned this office to organize all railway workers in one organization.  The American Railway Union was the result.  Between June 9 and June 26 the latter held a convention in Chicago.  The Pullman matter was publicly discussed before and after its committee reported their interviews with the Pullman Company.  On June 21, the delegates under instructions from their local unions, feeling confident after a victory over the Great Northern in April, unanimously voted that the members should stop handling Pullman cars on June 26 unless the Pullman Company would consent to arbitration.

On June 26 the railway strike began.  It was a purely sympathetic strike as no demands were made.  The union found itself pitted against the General Managers’ Association, representing twenty-four roads centering or terminating in Chicago, which were bound by contracts with the Pullman Company.  The association had been organized in 1886, its main business being to determine a common policy as to traffic