The Greatest Uprising of Working People in American History
b'At the pinnacle of the Gilded Age, a boycott of Pullman sleeping cars by hundreds of thousands of railroad employees brought commerce to a standstill across much of the country. Famine threatened, riots broke out along the rail lines. Soon the U.S. Army was on the march and gunfire rang from the streets of major cities.\\nTwo iconic characters of the age: George Pullman, who amassed a fortune by making train travel a pleasure, thought the model town that he built for his workers would erase urban squalor.\\xa0 And Eugene Debs, founder of the nation\\u2019s first industrial union, was determined to wrench power away from the reigning plutocrats. The clash between the two men\\u2019s conflicting ideals pushed the country to what the U.S. Attorney General called \\u201cthe ragged edge of anarchy.\\u201d\\xa0 President Grover Cleveland in 1894 worried about a national insurrection as the country grapple with a deep depression.\\nGuest: Jack Kelly is a journalist, novelist, and historian, whose books include Band of Giants, which received the DAR\\u2019s History Award Medal, Heaven\\u2019s Ditch and his latest that we are in conversation about,\\xa0The Edge of Anarchy: The Railroad Barons, the Gilded Age, and the Greatest Labor Uprising in America\\n\\nThe post The Greatest Uprising of Working People in American History appeared first on KPFA.'