George Pullman had won. His car shops were open. His employees had returned to work on his terms. But the victory left a residue of bitterness in Pullman’s heart. He could not understand the ungratefulness of his workers. He could not understand the Strike Commission’s harsh verdict about his paternalism and his refusal to arbitrate. How had he, the unlucky victim of a series of circumstances, been transformed into a villain?
His friends remained cordial, although many whispered behind his back that he could have avoided the whole damn catastrophe. Mark Hanna, an Ohio businessman and politician, thought Pullman was giving capitalists and Republicans a bad name. At the height of Pullman’s intransigence, Hanna had supposedly blurted, “A man who won’t meet his men halfway is a God-damned fool.”
Bertha Palmer, the wife of retail and real estate tycoon Potter Palmer, was the doyenne of Chicago society, but she sympathized with put-upon workers and had helped organize Chicago’s seamstresses. She crossed George Pullman off her guest list.
* * *
If anything, Grover Cleveland faced an even more dismal prospect than Pullman in the autumn of 1894. Voters blamed the Democrats for the ongoing misery of the depression as well as for the months of national anxiety generated by the coal miners’ strike, the Coxey armies, and finally the disastrous Pullman crisis. With his heavy-handed actions during the strike, Cleveland had alienated working people, a key faction of his party. Congressional Democrats had stuck by him and would be the first to pay the price.
Democrats had held the House of Representatives by 94 seats when Cleveland took office. After the election of 1894, they found themselves with a 161-seat deficit. This stunning reversal, the greatest turnaround in American political history, was capped two years later by the election of Republican William McKinley. His party would hold the presidency and both houses of Congress until 1910.
* * *
In August 1896, three prospectors found a nugget of yellow metal in a stream near the Klondike River of Canada’s Yukon Territory. The news set off a gold rush of insane proportions. A hundred thousand would-be prospectors trekked north. The influx of precious metal and the frenzy of spending to find it were factors in finally getting the U.S. economy back on its feet.
At the Pullman works, orders began to creep upward and the workers even received a modest pay raise. Work became more regular. Company managers instituted a policy of surveying employees who were leaving the company to ask about any dissatisfaction. They systematically analyzed complaints.
But the town of Pullman, one resident said, “was never the same after the strike.” As late as 1900, men who had taken different sides refused to speak to each other. The company gradually withdrew support from social activities. There were no more bicycle races. The athletic clubs declined. Lake Vista, which had beautified the main entrance to the plant, was filled in. Most of the town’s parks and the playing fields were converted to industrial uses. The theater was closed, the sewage farm abandoned. Lawns went unmowed. Flowers became scarce.
In 1898, the Supreme Court of Illinois ruled that the Pullman’s Palace Car Company had exceeded its corporate charter, which did not allow the firm to operate a company town. Within a decade, the model town was sold off, its residents freed from company control. Marshall Field, for one, was relieved. He had never thought that George Pullman’s vision was anything but a mirage.
Pullman had steered his company through the worst depression in the nation’s history, fighting for each scarce contract to build cars. At sixty-five, he lacked the resilience of his earlier years. Yet he could not relinquish his intense work pace. Ever the businessman, he plunged into the high-stakes stock manipulation and deal making that accompanied the Gilded Age merger mania. He teamed up with other Chicago investors in attempts to corner the market in both crackers and matches. He was always tired, often irritable, frequently ill, and plagued by daily headaches. The memory of the strike would not leave him.
* * *
For Jane Addams, as for many Americans, the crisis had been a life-altering trauma. “During all those dark days of the Pullman Strike,” she later wrote, “the growth of class bitterness was most obvious.” The events of 1894 evoked in her, who had made such an effort to remedy the wrongs of industrialism, the “paralyzing consciousness that our best efforts were most inadequate.”
She did her best to find a meaning in the disquieting events. Unlike the Strike Commission, she did not focus on wage rates, the price of water in the model town, or the legal technicalities of the dispute. Instead, she considered what she called the social dimension of the great upheaval.
As an advocate of reform and a selfless proponent of helping others, she had much in common with Eugene Debs. She wrote of her hope for “the larger solidarity which includes labor and capital” based on a “notion of universal kinship.”
The strike forced her to see how America was split between its professed ideals and the brutal practicality of the marketplace. “Are you content that greed … shall rule your business life,” she asked the country’s upper classes, “while in your family and social life you live so differently?”
In her speeches and writings about the strike, she wondered why George Pullman, a man who had “spent a million of dollars on a swamp to make it sanitary for his employees, should refuse to speak to them for ten minutes.” She wanted to know why he “should grow hard and angry when they needed tenderness and help.”
Addams saw that Pullman was not a thoughtless plutocrat but a figure of tragedy. He was King Lear, who, after deciding to hand his realm to his daughters, demanded professions of love; who, in spite of his generosity, could not bring himself to relinquish control.
George Pullman, Addams wrote, was a man who had “heaped extraordinary benefits upon those toward whom be had no duty.” But he was a humanitarian who “loved the people without knowing them.” Only a recognition of shared humanity could bridge the great class divide that the strike and boycott had made so clear.
“We must learn to trust our democracy,” she wrote, “giant-like and threatening as it may appear in its uncouth strength and untried applications.” She hoped for a gradual but deep shift in Americans’ view of themselves and of their fellow citizens. Hoped that they could find what she called “the rhythm of the common heartbeat.”
* * *
In January 1897, two and a half years after the great strike, Hattie Pullman recorded an “unhappy scene” with George before leaving for a dinner party. “These sudden thunder storms out of a clear shine,” she told her diary, “are getting pretty hard to endure.” That June the Pullmans celebrated their thirtieth wedding anniversary. Hattie gave George a sterling silver toilet set. She received nothing in return. Not long afterward, her husband selected his burial plot in Chicago’s Graceland Cemetery.
The couple quarreled again that summer at their seaside estate. George returned to Chicago by himself in early October to attend a company board meeting. The city was blanketed by an unseasonable heat wave, which left Pullman fatigued and out of sorts. He nevertheless took the president of the Pennsylvania Railroad and some other executives on a tour of his factory. He sent Hattie a brief telegram on October 17: “Letter rec’d am entirely alone miss you very much am not very well.”
Before he went home from work on October 18, Pullman finalized the endowment of a hospital bed for indigent children. He made the bequest in the name of his new grandson and namesake, Florence’s son, George Mortimer Pullman Lowden. He completed a letter for the infant to read when he was older. The bed would be available for “any sick child whom you may choose,” he wrote. “I hope your life may be successful, and that you will always remember that good actions speak louder … than spoken words.”
Late that night, the sixty-six-year-old Pullman felt a weight on his chest. One of the buildings he had moved in his youth, a towering hotel, had slipped from its foundation. It was pressing down on him. Crushing him. He could not signal his workmen to lift the burden. He had no breath left to whistle.
* * *
Much would be made about the elaborate precautions taken in the design of George Pullman’s final resting place. Following his wishes, workmen labored into the night to prepare an underground concrete vault. Then a lead-lined coffin wrapped in tar paper and covered in hot asphaltum. Iron rails bolted across the top. More concrete.
“The body of George M. Pullman,” the Chicago Tribune noted, “will lie undisturbed for as long as time shall last.”
Solon Beman, the architect who had designed the buildings in the model town eighteen years earlier, devised a monument for the sleeping-car king: a single Corinthian column supporting nothing but sky.
After Pullman’s death, Robert Lincoln became the president of the Pullman’s Palace Car Company. He stripped away the remnants of the old-fashioned, one-man proprietorship that had remained under George Pullman and installed a modern bureaucratic management system. He also oversaw the absorption in 1899 of the Wagner Palace Car Company, the firm’s last major rival. Pullman now stood alone as a producer of sleeping cars.
The reading of George Pullman’s will added one last paradox to the reputation of this paradoxical man. His $17,500,000 estate was massive by the standards of the time. He was generous to his daughters but stinted his wife and allotted his sons only a yearly stipend. The boys, then twenty-two, had always failed to live up to their father’s expectations.
Hattie was not having it. She asserted her dower rights to carve out a larger legacy, mostly so that she could support her sons. The twins lived off her during their short, dissipated lives—both were dead within eight years of their father’s passing.
On the other hand, one of George Pullman’s largest bequests went to the town of Pullman. He left $1.25 million to underwrite the Pullman Free School of Manual Training, a vocational institute for the children of town residents and Pullman employees. The Tribune said the gift “takes rank with the most liberal and useful ever made to a Chicago institution.” The school was finally built in 1915 and taught skills to both boys and girls until 1949.
Asked about Pullman’s demise, Eugene Debs offered a simple eulogy: “He is on equality with toilers now.”