Tacoma felt labor pains that birthed Labor Day

I’ll never forget sitting around the campfire on Labor Day Eve, the crickets and the tree frogs warming up for their evening concerts, the orange sun setting over the lake, as my dad recited one of his ”Origins of Labor Day ” stories.

I’m kidding. While my dad loved history, he loathed camping. He never told us about this holiday, so I never knew why we celebrate it. Our tradition was to eat meat and fret about going back to school.

It turns out the federal holiday went through some painful “labor” in its birthing.

A year before Congress finally embraced a celebration many cities and states already had, there came the Panic of 1893. Folks worldwide made a run on the banks, fearful that the U.S. had insufficient gold to back its currency (a quaint notion in these days of Bitcoin).

Times were tough everywhere. Some historians argue that Tacoma suffered worse than most. Seventeen of 21 banks folded. Jobs plummeted. Suicides climbed. Parents couldn’t afford to send kids to school. Worse, some abandoned them.

Work on a tourist hotel went unfinished. Hungry residents combed beaches for food. One lawyer at the time quipped that Tacomans ate so many clams, their stomachs rose and fell with the tides.

Making things worse was that expectations for Tacoma had been so dang high. The City of Destiny went from boom town to gloom town. Optimism died.

Meanwhile in Illinois, rail coach builder George Pullman was determined to sidetrack panic and maintain the dividends he had been giving his investors for years.

Pullman was a brilliant ergonomic engineer. His railroad sleepers, lounges and dining cars were luxurious.

He was a pretty good social engineer, too; he was the largest single employer of African Americans in the post-slavery era.

He built a model town and a factory just south of Chicago named Pullman. It had worker housing with all the fixings (parks, stores, theaters, indoor plumbing, etc.). Sure, residents sacrificed liberties to live there, but it was still swell. Tourists came to see it.

After the Panic hit, Pullman laid off many workers and increased hours while lowering wages for the remainder. But he kept prices inflated for rents and necessities in Pullman.

This strategy kept his investors happy but did not sit well with the workers. In May 1894, they walked out. A subsequent boycott of Pullman trains affected more than a quarter million workers nationwide.

Pullman refused to talk to the strikers and instead asked President Grover Cleveland to get involved because the mail was clogged up. Cleveland sent federal troops.

There were riots. Thirty strikers died, dozens were injured and hundreds were jailed.

To appease workers, Congress quickly established Labor Day to be celebrated the first Monday each September. The strike was broken.

Poor George Pullman went from revered to reviled in short order. He got death threats. To avoid desecration of his grave, he engineered his future interment. He was to be buried at night beneath layers of lead, concrete and iron rails nine feet under.

Upon his death in 1897, the family complied. The next year, his model town was declared illegal and was annexed to Chicago.

Pullman, Illinois was gone. The only town still named for him sits in the Palouse of Eastern Washington.

Four years after the Panic, the discovery of Klondike gold lifted Seattle. Tacoma shrank. The humiliation left a scar that still torments.

Now I understand why dad never told us this story. Economic downturns are…well… depressing.

On the bright side, we get a day off and that abandoned hotel became Stadium High School.

You may also find comfort in Newton’s third law of motion: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Grover Cleveland was toast. Within a few years, union membership doubled. Laws to protect workers were passed.

It makes you wonder if George Pullman, who excelled at enhancing small spaces, left himself enough room to roll over.

This story was originally published August 31, 2018 at 1:42 PM.