The American Railway Union strike against Pullman Company in 1894 was one of the key moments in the rise of the American labor and socialist movements. The strikers confronted not only the power of their employer but, ultimately, that of the State in a widening and escalating conflict that bordered on insurrection. Eugene Debs, who would later become well known by millions of Americans as a socialist agitator, wrote that he was “baptized in socialism in the roar of conflict” as a leader of this strike.