Ruth Conniff.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth
• Position: BOOKS

In our current tortured political moment, it is clarifying to read about the political upheaval that preceded the Progessive Era. It reminds us that the fundamental struggles in American history, seeking equality, justice, and community, have been going on for a very long time.

Jack Kelly's gripping book, The Edge of Anarchy: The Railroad Barons, the Gilded Age, and the Greatest Labor Uprising in America (St. Martins Press), recounts the Pullman strike that paralyzed the country in 1894. It made an icon of labor leader Eugene Debs and, Kelly writes, was "the last time workers seriously imagined overturning the industrial order and establishing a more equitable society."

Kelly's novelesque portraits of Debs and railroad baron George Pullman, the two men on opposite sides of this epic battle, give the story the texture of tragedy. Debs's immense energy, his incredible optimism, and the gains made by the bedraggled, oppressed, starving workers he led, should shame anyone out of feeling discouraged and overwhelmed about inequality and corrupt corporate power today.

Federal troops mowed down unarmed strikers and bystanders in Chicago and Hammond, Indiana, to the outrage of local officials. President Grover Cleveland effectively declared martial law.

Pullman, who paid his workers starvation wages and charged them exorbitant rents to live in his company town, refused to meet with the union, maintaining there was "nothing to arbitrate." Even when the strike was broken and the workers left destitute, the massively wealthy...