What has been your reward for your splendid courage and manifold
sacrifices? Our enemies say they are summed up in the one word “defeat.”
They point to the battlefield and say: “Here is where the host of the
American Railway Union went down before the confederated enemy of
labor.” They point to the spot where Miles’ serried soldiery stood with
drawn swords, tramping steeds and shotted guns to kill innocent men
whose only crime was devotion to wretched men and women, the victims of
Pullman’s greed. They designate the places where the minions of a
despotic judge, the thieves and thugs, taken from Chicago slums,
transformed into deputy marshals and armed with clubs and pistols, went
forth to murder indiscriminately and to arouse the vengeance of the
people by incendiary fires, and they point to the General Managers’
Association, the Nero of the occasion, whose pitiless enmity of labor
would have glorified in widespread conflagration rather than permitted a
strike in the interest of famishing men, women and children, to have
succeeded; and such disasters, say the enemies of labor, are the rewards
of the courage of the A. R. U. men, a courage as invincible as was ever
displayed by Spartans, and which makes Pullman’s Labor Thermopylæ to
live in history as long as the right has a defender in the ranks of
American workingmen.
Brothers of the American Railway Union, even in defeat our rewards are
grand beyond expression, rewards which come only to brave men, the
consciousness of noble deeds performed in the holy cause of labor’s
emancipation. Cowards, the fawning, sycophantic poltroons of power,
never knew the thrills of joy that reward the heroes of battles fought
in the interest of the oppressed.
“Once to ev’ry man and nation comes a moment to decide,
In the strife of Truth and Falsehood, for the good or evil side.”
The American Railway Union did decide. It espoused the cause of justice.
It furrowed the land deeper with its plows of Truth and Courage than had
fallen to the lot of any other labor organization since time began, and
the seeds of emancipation which it sowed broadcast are germinating and a
new era is destined to dawn upon labor.