On June 28, 1894, President Grover Cleveland signed legislation making Labor Day a federal holiday.

Five days later, on July 3, 1894, Cleveland dispatched two thousand U.S. Army troops to Chicago, Illinois to suppress the Pullman strike, over the objections of the city’s mayor and the state’s governor.

Much separates that situation from the very situation facing Chicago, and the entire country, today in the face of Donald Trump’s threats to militarize our cities. Yet the parallels are striking. And so, this Labor Day, it is worth revisiting that earlier ignominious episode, to be reminded that conflict, violence, and repression are central features of U.S. history, and to remember that there have always been Americans willing to stand up to the repression, even at the risk of their jobs, their liberties, and their very lives.

The strike, which had begun in May 1894 as a wildcat action by workers at the Pullman Company’s Chicago factory, had within weeks snowballed into an enormous boycott, organized by the newly formed American Railway Union (ARU), that involved approximately 250,000 workers spread across over twenty states. The boycott brought interstate rail transport to a standstill. At the instigation of Attorney General Richard Olney, working in tandem with Pullman managers and allies, the federal government responded by obtaining a federal court injunction against the union and its boycott, and then mobilizing federal troops, along with thousands of other U.S. marshals and state militia, to enforce the injunction. Within weeks the strike was broken, the union offices ransacked, and upwards of a dozen people were killed and over fifty wounded by the violent escalation caused by the military deployment. In addition, six union leaders, most famously ARU President Eugene V. Debs, were arrested; convicted of violating the Sherman Antitrust Act; and sentenced to prison terms of up to six months for their role in organizing the boycott.

The suppression of the strike, a major episode in U.S. history, is inextricably linked to the history of the federal Labor Day holiday that Americans celebrate every year.

“As Americans, we have boasted of our liberties and continue to boast of them. They were once the nation’s glory, and, if some have vanished, it may be well to remember that a remnant still remains.” —Eugene V. Debs

It was also a turning point in the evolution of Debs, who emerged from prison radicalized both as a labor leader and as an increasingly vocal public figure, who went on to be a founder and unrivalled leader of the Socialist Party of America, and who eventually ran for U.S. president five times as that party’s candidate. Debs’s speech, “Liberty,” given on November 22, 1895 upon his release from Woodstock Jail, is one of the great speeches in American history. It is a speech that ought to be revisited every Labor Day, but it has a special resonance this year, in the face of Donald Trump’s very public plans to once again deploy armed federal forces on the streets of Chicago, Boston, and other cities.

Debs began his speech by invoking America’s revolutionary origins:

He then proceeded to describe the government’s suppression of the Pullman strike as a “flagrant violation of the Constitution, the total abrogation of law and the usurpation of judicial and despotic power” that stripped the ARU leadership, and by extension all strikers, of their “constitutional rights . . . [and] the most sacred prerogatives of American citizenship.” He then outlined the more general significance of the repression in ways that have clear current relevance:

The ways that the suppression of the strike influenced Debs have been analyzed in a number of classic biographies, and they deserve sustained attention.

But here I want to shift the focus from Debs to another protagonist of the Pullman drama, the man that Debs admired and eulogized as “the Liberator”: John Peter Atgeld, the liberal Democratic Governor of Illinois who strongly opposed Grover Cleveland’s deployment of federal troops, and remained an outspoken critic of the deployment and what it represented. As Debs put it:

Atgeld, to be clear, was no labor activist, as Debs well knew. In his capacity as Governor, he had on occasion deployed state troopers to quell strike-related violence, and had unabashedly justified such deployments, in circumstances that warranted them, as part of his job as Governor and chief law enforcement officer of the state. But the way that he approached his executive authority, and publicly articulated his commitment to upholding the law, made him, for Debs, “in the highest sense a statesman.”

When the strike broke out, Atgeld publicly criticized the exploitative conditions at Pullman that had precipitated the strike. And as Pullman and its allies began accusing the striking workers of stopping rail traffic by force, laying the grounds for the strike’s violent suppression weeks later, Atgeld insisted that the vast majority of the strikers were law-abiding citizens; that the primary reason rail traffic was halted was an insufficient number of workers willing to cross a picket line; and that the best way for rail traffic to be restored was for the workers’ demands to be heard.

Atgeld was ignored, overridden by President Cleveland’s military deployment, and eventually defeated in his bid for re-election. But he was unbowed.

In 1896, he gave a speech at Cooper Union in New York City entitled “Federal Interference in the........

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