Remember Outsiders Like Jennie Curtis

In May 1893, eighteen-year-old labor organizer Jennie Curtis played a key role in one of the nation’s largest and most famous strikes. Largely unrecognized by most histories, she was one of the Discontented who remade this country in the late nineteenth century, reminding us that people who instigate significant change are often outsiders.

A resident of sleeping car manufacturer George Pullman’s model town, Curtis worked as a seamstress sewing the elaborate pillows and curtains that adorned the opulent rolling bedrooms favored by those with the wealth to afford them. A Pullman, as they were known, became as much a fixture of long-distance routes as dining cars with white tablecloths and custom china imprinted with the logo of the railroad line. As one of the first women to head a union local, the teenage seamstress had already earned her coworkers’ respect for standing up for their rights.

Jennie Curtis was 14 when she entered George Pullman’s factory. She was one of 28 who put in ten-hour days in the upholstery department repair room. They were paid by how much they could produce. Myrtle Webb sewed hems on carpets at a rate of ten cents per carpet, a task that took her a little over an hour. Annie Lynn sewed a hundred pillowcases in seven hours, for which she received 35 cents.

They toiled under the dictatorship of supervisor Mary Schub. If she liked you, you might land an easy job that paid well. If not, you sewed pillowcases with Annie Lynn. Schub was also corrupt, awarding the second highest salary to her daughter, enabling them to earn a combined income of almost $100 a month, more than double the average annual wage and far more than the women who toiled under her for pennies a day. Jennie Curtis wrote:

She seemed to delight in showing her power in hurting the girls in every possible way. At times her conduct was almost unbearable. She was so abusive to certain girls that she disliked, that they could not stand it, and would…leave… When a girl was sick and asked to go home during the day, she would tell them to their face they were not sick, the cars had to be got out, and they could not go home.

Jennie Curtis’ selection as union head suggests she was an organizer of a revolt in the upholstery repair room. Without attracting Schub’s attention, fifteen of the eighteen women working there signed a petition to have her removed. They took it first to the department head and then to Pullman Vice President Thomas Wickes. He did not even acknowledge their complaint.

Curtis Forms the “Girls Local”

Curtis and her coworkers fought their battle with Schub against the larger backdrop formed by the rapid rise of the American Railway Union (ARU), an attempt to revive the trainmen’s 1877 vision of one union for all railroad workers. George W. Howard of the railway conductors and Eugene Debs were instrumental in its founding on June 20, 1893. Debs had built the Locomotive Firemen’s Magazine into one of labor’s most respected publications.

Tycoon James J. Hill placed the ARU on the national stage. After a series of protracted negotiations, the ARU voted to strike Hill’s Great Northern Railroad on April 13, 1894. The intervention of Minnesota civic and business leaders persuaded both parties to accept arbitration.

Reminiscent of the 1877 Great Railroad Strike and the Southwest Railroad Strike, the Pullman Strike began in May of 1894. A skirmish involving freight car workers protesting wages and working conditions quickly escalated into a ferocious battle. Rebuffed, they turned to the plant grievance committee. Its discussions with management became rancorous, especially after Pullman further cut wages. On May 10, the company fired three committee members, a replay of the Charles Hall firing that started the Southwest Strike. Their comrades, including Jennie Curtis, met through the night. At five the next morning, they voted to strike.

There is little doubt Jennie Curtis was among those urging a strike. Since becoming involved in the revolt against Schub, Curtis had grown increasingly concerned about wage inequity. In her testimony to the Pullman Commission Curtis showed a single woman living alone could not have survived Pullman’s cuts which meant they “could only earn, on an average, working as hard as we possibly could, from 70 to 80 cents a day.” Even if they had worked every day of the year, the women would have earned only $292. A Pullman rent increase that came on the back of the wage cuts would have left less than $100 for food or more than $200 less than the national average. Curtis and the others knew they would have slowly starved.

After the strike decision, the women organized ARU local #269. It became known as the “girls’ local” because its umbrella covered every woman at the plant. They elected Curtis president and a member of the strike executive committee. Much of the work in distributing the union’s strike fund came from Local #269. Union women canvassed the town to decide who should receive aid and how much.

The Pullman Strike

In the weeks that followed the strike declaration, Jennie Curtis bargained with George Pullman, danced with Chicago Mayor John Hopkins, and met Jane Addams. In a meeting between Pullman and strike leaders, this poised, articulate teenager was not grateful for his town or his job. At a union fund-raiser, Hopkins chose her as a dance partner after she presented him with the white ribbon worn by strike supporters. Probably prearranged, this was an indication of her importance.

The meeting with Addams came through the Chicago Civic Federation. Founded in 1893 by Ralph Easley of the Chicago Inter Ocean, its mission was to “serve as a medium of sympathy and acquaintance between persons and societies who pursue various and differing vocations and objects, who differ in nationality, creed and surrounding [and] who are unknown to each other.” Easley and founding member Jane Addams offered the Federation’s services to mediate the Pullman strike. As part of the effort, Addams met with union members on June 14.  Given her status as a union head and strike leader, Jennie Curtis was no doubt among them. George Pullman squelched the idea of mediation. When Addams later wrote an essay comparing Pullman to Shakespeare’s King Lear, she probably had Curtis in mind as Cordelia, the daughter who refused to flatter her father like her sisters.

When the union met in June to plot tactics, Curtis lit the match with a rousing speech.

We struck at Mr. 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 heaven-sent message which you alone can give us on this earth.

Pullman, both the man and the town, is an ulcer on the body politic. He owns the houses, the schoolhouse, and the 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. And so I say, come along with us, for decent conditions everywhere!

When Curtis finished, twenty delegates shouted for a boycott of Pullman. Debs restored calm when he proposed a delegation that included Curtis to make a final attempt to convince Pullman to arbitrate. Pullman skipped the meeting, leaving his lieutenant to tell them, “We have nothing to arbitrate.”  Delegates then approved a boycott.

The boycott played out over the next few months, with every tension-filled step taking the union closer to defeat. As the dispute spread, many feared it would become as disruptive as the 1877 Great Railroad Strike that had left the Pittsburgh railroad yard in ruins and caused multiple deaths. Fearing the worst, the Cleveland administration put its hand on the scale, siding with Pullman, much as Rutherford Hayes had done with the 1877 strike.

Attorney General and former railroad attorney Richard Olney hatched the audacious plan of using the newly approved Sherman Antitrust Act to prosecute ARU officers for conspiracy. On the Fourth of July, President Cleveland called in 12,000 federal troops commanded by the man who had captured Geronimo and was in command at Wounded Knee, Nelson A. Miles. The New York World warned, “So outrageous a stretch of federal power was not attempted during the Civil War.”

After the strike failed, Jennie Curtis became one of the most forceful voices testifying for workers as the Pullman Commission investigated the strike. Her most effective words described the authoritarian climate that governed their lives. They worked in Pullman’s factory, lived in housing supplied by Pullman, checked out books from his library, and worshipped in the stone church built by him, all the time under the eyes of company spies. When the Commission’s final report criticized a tilted playing field, its words echoed the point Curtis tried to make over and over again: “The rapid concentration of power and wealth…has greatly changed the business and industrial situation…[It] has seriously disturbed the natural working of the laws of supply and demand.” The commission could not save Curtis. She was black-balled and disappeared from history. That was not unusual since black-balled workers often took on assumed names.

The Legacy of Jennie Curtis

People like Jennie Curtis remind us of an essential law of history. We never know when someone we think of as an outsider, someone improbable, will seize the tattered threads of a frayed moment and weave them into something that bends the arc of history.

Curtis was thrust on the stage by her talents and a series of circumstances: a new union seeking leaders, a national strike, harsh working conditions, a paternalistic and dictatorial business owner, and women fed up with their lot. She did not seek to head a union. When she assumed that role, she had no plans to instigate a history-changing boycott. No one sought her out except a few dozen coworkers who recognized her uncommon leadership abilities.

We need people like Jennie Curtis more than ever.