In the panic year of 1893 the Pullman Company reduced wages one-fourth, yet the cost of rent, water, gas--of nearly all other fundamental necessities--remained the same. As the average yearly pay of at least 4,497 of the company's wage workers was little more than $600--or, to be exact, $613.86--this reduction, in a large number of cases, was equivalent to forcing these workers to yield up their labors for substantially nothing. Numerous witnesses testified before the special commission appointed later by President Cleveland, that at times their bi-weekly checks ran variously from four cents to one dollar. The company could not produce evidence to disprove this. These sums represented the company's indebtedness to them for their labor, after the company had deducted rent and other charges. Such manifold robberies aroused the bitterest resentment among the company's employees, since especially it was a matter of authentic knowledge, disclosed by the company's own reports, that the Pullman factories were making enormous profits. At this time, the Pullman workers were $70,000 in arrears to the company for rent alone. THE PULLMAN EMPLOYEES STRIKE. Finally plucking up courage--for it required a high degree of moral bravery to subject themselves and their families to the further want inevitably ensuing from a strike--the workers of the Pullman Company demanded a restoration of the old scale of wages. An arrogant refusal led to the declaration of a strike on May 11, 1894. This strike, and the greater strike following, were termed by Carroll D. Wright, for a time United States Commissioner of Labor, as "probably the most expensive and far-reaching labor controversy which can properly be classed among the historic controversies of this generation."[180] The American Railway Union, composed of the various grades of workers on a large number of railroads, declared a general sympathetic strike under the delegated leadership of Eugene V. Debs. 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.[181] 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.