In California Debs brought the Southern Pacific and Santa Fe workers out on strike after the companies fired boycotting trainmen. Public support for the striking ARU members was initially high, despite some newspaper coverage—echoing the railroads’ assertions—that portrayed the strikers as violent and obstructing the U.S. mails (which was sent across country by train at that time).

In fact, the ARU had offered to keep the mail flowing, so long as Pullmans were uncoupled from the trains. Notwithstanding the press distortions—particularly by the Los Angeles Times—most people understood it was the companies’ decision to insist on running the Pullmans that was holding up their mail. One prostriker newspaper even scoffed that the lack of train service “was done in the interests of Pullman, so that by inconveniencing the public in a most distressing way sympathy may be withheld from the strikers.” Otis’s paper predictably editorialized that “This is not a dispute between a railroad company and its employees, but between the great masses of law-abiding citizens on the one hand and a small faction of lawless men on the other.”