The strike would perhaps have been successful had it not been that the entire powers of the National Government, and those of most of the States affected, were used roughshod to crush this mighty labor uprising. The whole newspaper press, with rare exceptions, spread the most glaring falsehoods about the strike and its management. Debs was personally and venomously assailed in vituperation that has had little equal. To put the strikers in the attitude of sowing violence, the railroad corporations deliberately instigated the burning or destruction of their own cars (they were cheap, worn-out freight cars), and everywhere had thugs and roughs as its emissaries to preach, and provoke, violence.3 The object was threefold: to throw the onus upon the strikers of being a lawless body; to give the newspapers an opportunity of inveighing with terrific effect against the strikers, and to call upon the Government for armed troops to shoot down, overawe, or in other ways thwart, the strikers.
Government was, in reality, directed by the railroad and other corporations. United States judges, at the