Chicago, 1865–1894: A Timeline of Business, Labor and Newcomers

Hub of the Rails

1By the 1880s, more railroad lines met in Chicago than in any other American city. Trains brought cattle and hogs from the West to the Union Stock Yards, where huge packing companies turned them into meat. Around 1880, packers began shipping chilled meat east in refrigerated railroad cars. Steel mills, farm-machine factories and rail-car shops each hired thousands of workers. Between 1870 and 1890, the city's population more than tripled, passing one million.

2After the fire of 1871, rebuilding the city created thousands of jobs. Newcomers arrived from Germany, Ireland, Sweden, Poland and Bohemia, and later from Italy and from the Russian Empire, many of them Jewish families escaping violent attacks. Most came for wages higher than they could earn at home, and many followed relatives who sent letters and even steamship tickets. By 1890, about four in ten Chicagoans had been born in another country.

3Many workers labored ten hours or more a day, six days a week. On May 1, 1886, tens of thousands of Chicago workers joined strikes across the nation for an eight-hour day. On May 4, at a rally in Haymarket Square, someone threw a bomb at police officers, and several officers and other people died in the explosion and the shooting that followed. Eight anarchists, most of them German immigrants, were convicted, though no evidence showed that any of them threw the bomb. Afterward, many newspapers blamed unions and immigrants for the violence, and the Knights of Labor, the largest union, began to lose members.

4In 1889, Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr opened Hull House among immigrant neighborhoods on the city's West Side. It offered English classes, a kindergarten, clubs and a public bath, and its workers studied conditions in nearby tenements and workshops.

5South of the city, George Pullman built a company town for the workers who made his railroad sleeping cars. Its brick houses had gas and running water, and it had parks and a library, but workers could only rent, not buy, and the company set the rents. When the depression of 1893 cut orders for new cars, the company cut wages by about a quarter but did not lower rents, which it took straight out of paychecks.

6In May 1894, Pullman workers went on strike. The American Railway Union, led by Eugene V. Debs, then asked its members not to handle trains carrying Pullman cars, and rail traffic across much of the country slowed or stopped. Railroad companies asked the federal government for help. A federal court, using the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 among other laws, ordered the union to stop the boycott. President Grover Cleveland sent federal troops to Chicago, and by late July the strike had collapsed.