The People’s Store was a major Times advertiser. The unions pressured the store to withdraw its advertising from Otis. Supporters operated picket lines proclaiming a “secondary boycott” during all store hours, turning sympathizers away from patronizing the place. (A secondary boycott tries to halt commerce with another business that has trade with the original offending business.) From time to time, individuals went in to fill up shopping carts with goods. At the checkout counter they would ask the clerk, “Does this store advertise in the Times?” At that point they would exit, leaving the full shopping cart to be unloaded back on the shelves.

The store owner, his profits eroded by the secondary boycott, was persuaded to try sitting Otis down to talk with the printers. Otis could not afford to ignore one of his main sources of advertising income. He compromised, allowing a few union printers back to work—but as individuals, without a union contract. He also promised to eventually hire more union men. The printers agreed to end the strike and boycott, believing it would only be a matter of time before they could reorganize the Times completely.

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.”

Following the advice of the GMA, they prevailed upon the Los Angeles district attorney to request permission from U.S. attorney general Richard Olney to prosecute the strikers for conspiracy. Olney, a former railroad lawyer and GMA member, was pleased to grant permission. The companies then persuaded a friendly judge in Los Angeles to do two things. On June 29, he summoned a grand jury to determine whether the striking workers were guilty of conspiracy for obstructing mails and interstate commerce. And the following day he issued an injunction which directed workers to end the strike or resign.

Olney authorized sending federal troops to Los Angeles, despite the nearly complete lack of violence among the highly disciplined strikers. According to one of the soldiers, they were not enthusiastic at their assignment, “this idea of shooting down American citizens simply because they are on a strike for what they consider to be their rights. . . . All of the boys are against it from first to last, and many are in sympathy with the strikers.” The heavily armed troops were deployed to escort strikebreakers, run trains, and intimidate strikers.

Debs and several other national leaders of the ARU had been arrested and charged with conspiracy during the last days of the strike. His conviction, reduced to the single charge of contempt, put him in jail for a few months. Thus it was a shock when a half-dozen local ARU leaders in Los Angeles were found guilty of conspiracy, fined, and sentenced to eighteen months in prison—courtesy of the same judge who had issued the injunction against the strikers.

Few workers believed that the strike had represented a “conspiracy” by the ARU. Rather, it had become painfully clear that if a conspiracy existed, it was among the railroads and various branches of government, which combined powers to force the strikers to their knees. Many workers, having believed in the neutrality of the government in conflicts between labor and capital, were disillusioned. They saw that the money and organization of the employers far outweighed democratic principle in the actions of Attorney General Olney, who authorized the conspiracy arrests and trials, and President Grover Cleveland, who ordered federal troops to aid the railroads.