The Commercial Value of Beauty
George Pullman grew up breathing the air of the fading frontier on a farm south of Lake Erie in western New York State. Like Eugene Debs, he quit school at fourteen and learned the value of a dollar clerking in a retail store. But while Debs did not take to the work, Pullman was said to have had an uncanny knack for calculating costs and turning a profit.
After his family moved to the Erie Canal town of Albion, New York, George became the chief troubleshooter in a business his father, Lewis, operated to lift and move buildings. Although fastidious about his clothing, George did not hesitate to scramble into the mud beneath a raised structure to adjust rollers and yell: “Check ’er” or “Go ahead.” In 1853, when George was twenty-two, he took over the business following his father’s death. He began moving warehouses and other buildings to facilitate an enlargement of the canal. He soon employed a dozen men. After work he often “promenaded in all his glory, with high top hat and longtailed coat.”
In 1859, Pullman learned of a project in Chicago to raise buildings. The city’s swampy location was cramping its growth, and its open sewers were breeding cholera, tuberculosis, and other diseases. Officials had decided that they needed to build up the perpetually mud-clogged streets and install proper sewers and drains. That meant that every downtown building would have to be lifted at least six feet.
Pullman hurried to the city to investigate. He won a contract to elevate the Matteson House on West Randolph Street, one of Chicago’s premier hotels. It would be the largest building yet raised. He hired men to break into the foundation and position hundreds of screw jacks beneath the building. They eased the wooden structure upward, levitating it inch by inch until it reached its new elevation.
Settling permanently in Chicago, Pullman soon became one of the leading players in the business. He acquired a partner, bought out a rival firm, and called on his older brother Albert to help him manage the operation. Within a year, he joined two other moving firms to raise an entire city block on Lake Street, between Clark and LaSalle. So deft was the operation that “not a pane of glass has been broken nor a crack in masonry appeared,” the Chicago Daily Press and Tribune reported.
Pullman knew that his business in Chicago would decline as fewer buildings remained to be raised. He continued to be on the alert for new opportunities, and he naturally turned his attention to the booming railroad business.
But the lessons he had learned in his early trade were not lost on the young entrepreneur.
When young Pullman had a five-story hotel perched on screw jacks, he commanded his workers to act in unison with short blasts from a whistle. The man in charge of maneuvering such a massive burden needed imagination, an eye for detail, a commanding presence, and steady nerves. These qualities would serve Pullman throughout his career. More than anything, a building mover needed to be in control. A miscalculation, a moment of confusion, or a slip of discipline invited disaster. For Pullman, remaining in control of himself and his work became an obsession.
The young entrepreneur could be a martinet in the office, but he was never frivolous, never timid, never soft, never uncertain. Notably short-tempered and often irritable, he was never dishonest or slapdash. As he gained success, he acquired a hauteur that made some roll their eyes, but he was no buffoon. He never cut corners or dealt in shoddy merchandise.
* * *
Early in his career, George Pullman had dealings with a man his own age who shared his ambition. Andrew Carnegie had started his career as a telegraph operator with the Pennsylvania Railroad and quickly worked his way up. He discovered that Pullman was interested in taking control of the Central Transportation Company, the sleeping-car operation that serviced the Pennsylvania system. Carnegie suggested a deal that would benefit both parties.
It was an exciting meeting of minds. Each man saw that the other intuitively understood the delicate balance of caution and daring needed to master the age. Carnegie acted as midwife for Pullman’s takeover of his rival. He said of Pullman: “He was one of those rare characters who can see the drift of things, and was always to be found, so to speak, swimming in the main current where movement was the fastest.” The men became lifelong friends.
Pullman’s nostrils were always open to the scent of a deal. During the early 1860s he already had enough money to hire a substitute to take his place in the Union Army. Unlike the class of men who would later man the railroads, Pullman avoided the lessons about duty and brotherhood taught in the crucible of war. Instead, he followed the gold rush to Colorado—not to prospect for the yellow metal but to pursue a surer path to profit by providing services to miners. Reaching that remote region from the most western railhead at St. Joseph, Missouri, entailed a jolting stagecoach journey of nearly six hundred miles. On arrival, he set up a lucrative crushing mill, charging a fee to extract gold from hard rock.
Colorado served as Pullman’s business school. He soon employed fifteen men. He started a general store, a saloon, another mill. He raised cattle, speculated in real estate, and set up a quasi bank that dealt in gold dust. He displayed the keen memory and grasp of detail that were invaluable assets for a man of affairs. He had a knack for taking risks. He wrote his mother that he had “pitched in pretty deep” in his Colorado ventures. After three years of sharp dealing, he had accumulated a hefty chunk of capital. It was time for him to focus on the sleeping-car business that would make him famous.
What he really invested in was quality. The principle that guided all his dealings, Pullman said, “is that the people are always willing to pay for the best.” His strategy was to “improve upon the best.”
* * *
Then as now, conducting business required personal contact. Pullman traveled up and down the country selling and trading. On these frequent trips he recognized the inadequacy of early sleeping cars. They were uncomfortable and dirty, noisy and poorly ventilated. “Like sleeping on a runaway horse,” one traveler complained. With transcontinental travel on the horizon, quality sleeping cars represented a ripe opportunity. Pullman formed a partnership and hired a mechanic to construct a coach car that could be converted to a sleeper.
The luxurious Palace Cars that Pullman developed during the 1860s were variation on a rapidly developing technology. Patent wars were common. Pullman was not to be outdone when it came to riders’ comfort. While most railcars rested on eight wheels, Pullman’s sleepers ran on sixteen. This made for a far smoother ride over America’s rugged rail system. Rubber-dampened springs and lighter wheels with laminated paper cores further curtailed rocking and vibrations. Double-glazed windows and doors provided a hushed interior. A modern ventilation system filtered out soot. Gas chandeliers with deflecting mirrors provided bright illumination.
Pullman extended his ideas of luxury and innovation to other cars. He introduced a dining car, which he named the Delmonico after the nation’s most famous restaurant. Trains would no longer have to make stops to allow passengers to bolt a meal at a station restaurant. The car’s compact kitchen allowed chefs to offer passengers more than eighty dishes, ranging from Saddle Rock oysters to grilled mutton kidneys, Lobster Newburg, and local game like loin of elk, golden plover, and blue-winged teal.
His hotel cars offered both buffet dining and individual staterooms. He developed a plush parlor car described as a “hotel lobby on wheels.” Pullman’s goal was to allow middle-class customers to upgrade to a far more luxurious rail experience than was available on standard coach cars. He charged them twice what a common laborer might make in a day, but he gave them value.
The ultimate in opulence and status was the custom-made car available only to the moneyed elite and to corporate executives. The elegant appointments of the so-called private varnish took a visitor’s breath away. Each featured a unique arrangement of staterooms, parlor, smoking lounge, and kitchen, as well as an open observation platform at the rear. Wealthy Americans outfitted these mansions on wheels with gold-filled plumbing, marble baths, jewel safes, and Venetian mirrors.
* * *
During the time Pullman was consolidating his company, he was also courting his future wife. Harriett Amelia Sanger, known as Hattie, was a twenty-five-year-old beauty, the daughter of a prominent Chicago railroad and canal builder. At thirty-six, Pullman was an elegant, rising businessman well on his way to a great fortune. Hattie’s parents were impressed by George’s devotion to his widowed mother. The couple married in 1867 at the bedside of Hattie’s dying father.
After a honeymoon in Niagara Falls and Canada, the Pullmans joined the social set of Chicago’s young elite couples. They both loved to entertain, and George never stinted on lavish parties or household luxuries.
The couple had four children over the next seven years. Florence, the firstborn, was always her father’s favorite. When he later objected to her marrying the man of her choice, she told her future husband to acquiesce to George’s moodiness. “He will feel his position has been maintained with dignity, and there will be nothing that he will not do to promote my happiness.”
Harriett, a year younger than her sister, found herself less in the sun of her father’s affection. Her flitting from one beau to another did not sit well with her Victorian parents. After her 1892 marriage, she settled with her husband in San Francisco.
The Pullmans’ youngest were twins George Jr. and Sanger. As did many wealthy parents of the time, the couple left the rearing of their children largely to governesses and tutors. All attended exclusive boarding schools. The boys, pampered and ignored, indulged in the high life to excess. Neither ever settled into a solid career. Self-indulgent fops, they were a heavy disappointment to their father.
The marriage of Hattie and George was marked by mutual sympathy and affection but was weakened over the years by frequent absences. George traveled continually for business. Even when the couple were staying in New York City, he often lived in his mother’s apartment, while Hattie resided at a hotel. She became a hypochondriac and took frequent sojourns to fashionable resorts in Hot Springs, Arkansas, and upstate New York. George’s irritable nature sometimes erupted in bitter scenes and recriminations with his wife and children.
* * *
In his business, Pullman pioneered many features of the modern corporation. He experimented with techniques of mass production. He aggressively built a monopoly position in his industry. He integrated the business vertically, building his own foundry, rolling mill, paint-making factory, and knitting mill. A brickworks on the site made the materials from which his factory and town were constructed. The company became an early multinational firm, with offices in Italy, France, and England.
Two forward-looking insights guided him. First, he regarded his company as a service business, not just a manufacturing operation. Rather than sell cars to the railroads, he convinced most of them to haul his sleepers as a concession and split the fee. Passengers paid the standard fare to the railroad and an extra charge of $2 to ride in a Pullman car. The Pullman Company provided linens, cleaned the cars, and employed the trained porters who converted the car from coach to sleeper mode and back.
The arrangement saved the railroads the cost of a new class of cars and meant that passengers did not have to change cars when transferring from one railroad to another. Most importantly, it allowed Pullman to retain complete control over quality. The system proved immensely profitable.
The second idea that sustained George Pullman’s success was an understanding that promotion and public relations, although intangible, were critical elements of a modern business enterprise. The identification of a person with a “brand” is a modern trope, but George Pullman was among the earliest entrepreneurs to consciously build a brand in all aspects of his business.
Pullman understood the value of being talked about. He invited reporters on elaborate, champagne-drenched sojourns to view his latest cars. He lent the fanciest ones to presidents and potentates. He featured his products at fairs and expositions—his grand display at the Columbian Exposition was typical. The standard dark-olive color and prominent Pullman name made the cars easily identifiable on any line. The Chicago Tribune noted that anything with the name Pullman was accepted “as the fashion.”
The opening of the first transcontinental railroad ignited the sleeper-car business. Coast-to-coast travel time suddenly shrank from a month to a week. But seven days on a train could be an ordeal without the provisions for comfort that Pullman’s cars provided.
In 1870, the company hauled the members of the Boston Board of Trade and their families to San Francisco aboard the first chartered train to cross the continent. The travelers were astounded by the comfort and speed of the all-Pullman train. The tour generated publicity at every stop. On returning, the members expressed the hope “that there will be no delay in placing these elegant and homelike carriages upon principal routes in the New England States.” They were not disappointed.
A prime example of a Pullman public-relations coup was the story that emerged about one of his earliest sleeper cars, the luxurious Pioneer. The car, which incorporated many of the innovations that made Pullmans rolling palaces, cost $20,000 to build—twice the cost of a locomotive and four times as much as a typical sleeper.
Pullman promoted the notion that the Pioneer had carried President Lincoln’s body from Chicago to its interment in Springfield. There could be no more valuable endorsement. Elaborations of the tale stated that Lincoln’s wife, Mary, had demanded the Pioneer be used so that she could ride in luxury to the funeral. It was said that stations and bridges along the Chicago & Alton Railroad had to be urgently enlarged to allow passage of the oversized Pioneer.
It is possible the Pioneer carried some dignitaries from Chicago to Springfield for the 1865 ceremony. The rest of the story was pure fantasy. Mary Todd Lincoln was too distraught to attend the burial and had never seen the car. Nor did the Pioneer at any time carry the martyred president’s body. The notion that Pullman had constructed a car that could not fit on standard rail lines made little sense, nor was there any evidence of hurried construction work on the Alton. Yet so skillfully managed was this bit of publicity that the story is repeated in railroad histories even today.
* * *
The enhancement of his brand was one factor that prompted Pullman to build his model town outside Chicago. Like many endeavors in Pullman’s life, it brought together practicality, idealism, self-aggrandizement, and an instinct for making money.
The idea was born when, in the late 1870s, Pullman decided to become a player in the booming market for freight and streetcars. To build all his cars, he created one of the largest production plants in the world on a tract of farm and wasteland fourteen miles south of Chicago. The town that Pullman built beside it was intended to attract carpenters, wood-carvers, and other craftsmen to the remote location. It would also prove an idea that had intrigued George Pullman.
“I have always held that people are greatly influenced by their physical surroundings,” Pullman observed. He wanted to prove “that decency, propriety and good manners are not unattainable luxuries for them.”
This notion had been reinforced by his experience with the sleeping cars themselves. Critics had predicted that passengers would ruin his cars with their muddy boots and liberal spitting of tobacco juice. Pullman held that the cars’ elegant interiors would instill decorum in riders. He was right. He likewise felt that the orderly town would yield civilized employees with efficient work habits, thus making his investment profitable.
The notion ran against the standard thinking of the day, which held that a person’s character was a fixed quality. That idea was fertile soil for prejudice, as various classes and races were assigned particular characteristics thought to dictate their proper stations in life. Industrial workers were mindless drudges, blacks naturally servile, Irishmen given to drink, Jews miserly.
Company towns had a long history. As early as 1792, Alexander Hamilton had hired Pierre Charles L’Enfant to design an industrial town on the Passaic River. Some New England mill towns were constructed from scratch according to idealistic plans. George Pullman certainly knew of planned communities like the one near the Krupp works in Essen, Germany, and Saltaire, the model town built by British wool tycoon Sir Titus Salt. Pullman’s own town would be the largest and most modern ever built.
Pullman recognized that a skilled, reliable workforce was critical to the success of a manufacturing operation. The town, “from which all that is ugly, discordant and demoralizing is eliminated,” would attract the highest class of employee. The Pullman workingmen, a company brochure declared, not only had “clearer complexions and brighter eyes,” but were “forty per cent better in evidence of thrift and refinement.”
In addition to the town’s uplifting effect on his employees, Pullman expected it to turn a neat profit. It had to. Pullman did not intend it merely as a charitable gesture. He wanted it to serve as a model for the future of industrial operations.
“Capital will not invest in sentiment,” Pullman insisted. But once other business owners observed the results at Pullman, “we shall see great manufacturing corporations developing similar enterprises, and thus a new era will be introduced in the history of labor.” Pullman was out to prove the “commercial value of beauty.”