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| 1892–95 |
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| Labor troubles. A strike of workers in the Homestead Plant of the Carnegie Steel Company was called by the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers (June 30, 1892) as a result of disagreement over a wage scale. The entire community—town leaders and women as well as men—rallied to the defense of the union. The use of Pinkerton detectives by the Carnegie Company led to violence, which was followed by the use of state troops to arrest workers and town leaders on charges of riot, murder, and treason. The plant was soon reopened with non-union workers, some of whom were southern blacks. Thereafter, the Amalgamated Association declined as a force in the lives of workers in the steel industry. | 1 |
| On May 11, 1894, a strike occurred in the plant of the Pullman Company, in which the American Railway Union, formed the previous year by Eugene V. Debs (1855–1926), participated. Because the strikers refused to handle Pullman cars, the company attached mail cars to the Pullmans. When the strikers refused to handle the trains, the company appealed to the government to protect the U.S. mail. The government in turn charged the strikers with interfering with the mail, got an injunction against the boycott, and called in federal troops and state militias. Upon disregarding the injunction, Debs was arrested for contempt of court and sent to jail. The U.S. Circuit Court approved the use of the injunction, sentenced Debs to prison for six months, and approved the use of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act against labor unions. The next year the Supreme Court sustained the judgment of the lower court. The use of the injunction gave capital a formidable weapon against labor. | 2 |
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| 1892 |
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| The AFL appointed a woman, Mary E. Kennedy of Chicago, to spearhead the organization of women, but denied her full status on the executive board. | 3 |
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| Feb. 22 |
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| The People's Party was organized at St. Louis. For a decade there had been a gathering discontent of the farmers, resulting from the depressed condition of agriculture. Organizations of farmers, known as the Southern Alliance (including the Colored Farmers National Alliance and Cooperative Union) and the Northwestern Alliance, had appeared and held meetings at St. Louis (Dec. 1889), Ocala, Fla. (Dec. 1890), and Cincinnati (May 1891). They now formed the People's Party, or Populist Party. In July 1892, at their Omaha convention, they nominated James B. Weaver (1833–1912), a veteran inflationist, as their candidate for the presidency and drew up a platform declaring for a national currency without the use of banking corporations, free and unlimited coinage of silver, a graduated income tax, postal savings banks, and government ownership of railways and telephone and telegraph lines. Populism brought women into the political process to an unprecedented degree. A woman, Mary Elizabeth Lease of Kansas, gave the Populist movement some of its most memorable rhetoric when she exclaimed, “What you farmers need to do is to raise less corn and more hell.” Populists also showed a willingness to work across racial lines, and this willingness was partly their undoing. Democrats were able to put down the Populist movement by charging them with courting “Negro domination.” Poor whites, embittered because of their own economic and political plight, turned their anger on African Americans. Southern legislatures soon passed laws requiring rigid segregation in most public facilities. Called Jim Crow laws, the new legislation turned the South, for the first time, into a legally segregated society. The annual number of recorded lynchings of African Americans peaked at about 161 in 1892. Thereafter lynchings declined but apparently became more sadistic. | 4 |
| Harrison was defeated for reelection by Cleveland, who received 277 electoral votes; Harrison received 145, and Weaver, the Populist candidate, 22. | 5 |
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