“_I have broken the backbone of this strike._”
Such sublime heroism in such a holy cause, Grover Cleveland, Nelson Miles, et al., will not be forgotten nor remain unrewarded.
The _Coming Nation_, started at Greensburg, Ind., by J. A. Wayland, in 1893, was the first popular propaganda paper to be published in the interest of Socialism in this country. It reached a large circulation and the proceeds were used in founding and developing the Ruskin Co-operative colony in Tennessee. Later Mr. Wayland began the publication of the _Appeal to Reason_, and now it numbers its subscribers by the hundreds of thousands. It is not saying too much for the _Appeal_ that it has been a great factor in preparing the American soil for the seed of Socialism. Its enormous editions have been and are being spread broadcast and copies may be found in the remotest recesses and the most inaccessible regions. The propaganda thus organized by Mr. Wayland, for which he has peculiar genius, and carried forward and enlarged constantly with the aid of a corps of able comrades, has been and is a source of incalculable strength in promoting education among the workers and building up the general movement.
The periodical end weekly press, so necessary to any political movement, is now developing rapidly and there is every reason to believe that within the next few years there will be a formidable array of reviews, magazines, illustrated journals and daily and weekly papers to represent the movement and do battle for its supremacy.
The last convention of the American Railway Union was the first convention of the Social Democracy of America, and this was held at Chicago in June, 1897, the delegates voting to change the railway union into a working class political party.
The _Railway Times_, the official paper of the union, became the _Social Democrat_ and later the _Social Democratic Herald_, and is now published at Milwaukee in the interest of the Socialist party.
The Social Democracy, the evolution of unionism crushed by the weight of despotic power, was the logical extension and expansion of the American Railway Union, and the direct outgrowth of the great industrial uprising known as the Pullman strike and the brutal tyranny and relentless persecution that followed it.