Editing John Dewey (section)

===1894 Pullman Strike===
While Dewey was at the [[University of Chicago]], his letters to his wife Alice and his colleague [[Jane Addams]] reveal that he closely followed the 1894 [[Pullman Strike]], in which the employees of the Pullman Palace Car Factory in Chicago decided to go on strike after industrialist [[George Pullman]] refused to lower rents in his company town after cutting his workers' wages by nearly 30 percent. On May 11, 1894, the strike became official, later gaining the support of the members of the [[American Railway Union]], whose leader [[Eugene V. Debs]] called for a nationwide boycott of all trains including Pullman sleeping cars.<ref name="Louis Menand 2001">Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club, (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 285–333.</ref>

Considering most trains had Pullman cars, the main 24 lines out of Chicago were halted and the mail was stopped as the workers destroyed trains all over the United States. President [[Grover Cleveland]] used the mail as a justification to send in the National Guard, and ARU leader Eugene Debs was arrested.<ref name="Louis Menand 2001"/>

Dewey wrote to Alice: "The only wonder is that when the 'higher classes' – damn them – take such views there aren't more downright socialists. [...] [T]hat a representative journal of the upper classes – damn them again – can take the attitude of that harper's weekly", referring to headlines such as "Monopoly" and "Repress the Rebellion", which claimed, in Dewey's words, to support the sensational belief that Debs was a "criminal" inspiring hate and violence in the equally "criminal" working classes. He concluded: "It shows what it is to be a higher class. And I fear Chicago Univ. is a capitalistic institution – that is, it too belongs to the higher classes."<ref name="Louis Menand 2001"/>