In the autumn of 1884, economist Richard Ely, combining business with pleasure, spent his honeymoon in the town of Pullman. The thirty-year-old scholar had been hired to write an article about the town. With his bride, he checked into the elegant Hotel Florence in the center of town.
Named for George Pullman’s eldest daughter, the rambling building resembled a “large gingerbread country villa.” Standing on the hotel’s porch, Ely could see, immediately to the north, the ornate clock tower of Pullman’s huge factory. The town itself stretched to the south in a neat grid of streets named for inventors like George Stephenson, the “Father of Railways”; Robert Fulton, of steamboat fame; and, of course, George Pullman himself.
Along those streets, Ely heard a variety of languages spoken. A majority of the employees at the Pullman factory were immigrants—Scandinavian, German, and Dutch workers were predominant. Although the town was a well-established community of more than eight thousand residents when Ely arrived, it still had a new feel. The shade trees, whose leaves were beginning to show splashes of yellow and orange, were saplings. The brick buildings seemed to be standing at attention.
As Ely strolled through the town, he encountered parks and squares bright green with mown grass. The houses were mostly attached two-story bungalows interspersed with small apartment buildings and multifamily homes. Although built in the country, the town had an urban look. A variety of designs prevented visual monotony.
The housing mirrored the company hierarchy. Attached cottages for workers, freestanding houses overlooking the main square for company foremen, elegant homes to accommodate executives. Tenement buildings offered housing for the lowly workers at the company’s brickworks. Mrs. Duane Doty, the wife of the town’s manager, wrote in a brochure: “We have never had any patience with the oft repeated dream of Rousseau, that ‘All men are created equal, etc.’ … The first great law of nature is in the inequality of man.”
Ely found in the town an “all pervading air of thrift and providence … of general well-being.” He noted that the company allowed housewives to choose low-cost wallpaper and then hung it for them without charge. This small act marked for many of the women the first time that they were able to “exercise taste and consider the beautiful.”
The scholar toured the block-long Arcade, the Middle West’s first shopping mall. The dry goods purveyors, barbershops, and other businesses were leased by independent merchants. George Pullman emphasized that he ran no “company store,” a notorious device by which employers fleeced their workers.
“What is seen in a walk or a drive through the streets,” Ely observed, “is so pleasing to the eye that a woman’s first exclamation is certain to be, ‘Perfectly lovely!’”
Ely mounted the stairs of the Arcade to examine the town library, which embodied George Pullman’s faith in learning—he had personally donated five thousand books. The journalist walked over to Lake Calumet to inspect the athletic facilities along its shore—playing fields, a tennis court, boating facilities, and, in winter, an ice rink. An annual fifteen-mile cycling race from downtown Chicago to Pullman attracted thousands of spectators in that age of bicycle mania.
The town’s ornate theater was said to be the finest showplace west of the Hudson River. The public school was exemplary, the kindergarten free. Immigrants could study English and take classes in art and music appreciation. Human waste was processed and pumped a few miles away to fertilize a company vegetable farm, the produce sold in the town market.
“High honor is due Mr. George M. Pullman,” Ely wrote. Another reporter speculated that George Pullman “might be the Messiah of a new age.”
As much as he sought favorable publicity, Pullman was reticent to put himself forth as a man of vision. Interviewed a year earlier, he had said that he saw the town “simply as a matter of business. I have little of the sentimental in my nature.”
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In February 1885, Richard Ely’s article appeared in Harper’s Weekly, one of the most popular periodicals of the day. As he began to read, George Pullman was gratified by the professor’s glowing description of the model town. But Ely was not finished.
The author’s tone changed when he referred to “a needless air of secrecy” that pervaded the town. Residents were strangely reluctant to talk to him. When he was able to strike up a conversation, he found that townspeople were worried about company “spotters.”
A substantial town “where not one single resident dare speak out openly” gave Ely an eerie feeling. In spite of the tidy streets, parks, and flower beds, “one feels that one is mingling with a dependent, servile people.”
As he found more residents willing to talk, Ely began to accumulate a laundry list of complaints. Few of the inhabitants were happy with the fact that the company owned all the buildings and administered all aspects of the town. George Pullman, Ely wrote, was offering his workers a “gilded cage as a substitute for personal liberty.”
To make sure that he retained complete control, Pullman had decided to rent the houses in the model town rather than sell them to their occupants. If he had sold homes to his workmen, he later commented, he would have risked “seeing families settle who are not sufficiently accustomed to the habits I wish to develop.”
In each lease, he included the provision that the company could evict the occupants on ten days’ notice for any reason. He was worried about “baneful influences” such as brothels or gambling dens that might be established if he could not dislodge troublemakers.
“Nobody regards Pullman as a real home,” Ely noted. A resident told him: “We call it camping out.”
George Pullman set the rents at a level that would pay a return of 6 percent on the capital invested. The prices ranged from as little as $4.50 to as much as $75.00 a month, averaging about $14.00. Rents were higher than those in nearby towns, but company officials pointed out that residents’ homes were of better quality and included access to all the amenities of Pullman. There were no flower beds or tennis courts in the neighboring village of Kensington.
The town had no municipal government. Company officials made all decisions. The school board was loaded with Pullman executives. Foremen sometimes accompanied workers to the polls to make sure they voted the Pullman line.
The sole church in the model town was a magnificent structure of green limestone. George Pullman imagined that various denominations would rent the sanctuary on a shared basis. But the $300 monthly tab was more than any congregation could afford, and the church sat empty for years.
“It was not intended so much for the moral and spiritual welfare of the people,” a clergyman pointed out, “as it was for the completion of the artistic effect of the scene.”
Notices posted in residences admonished tenants to “always enter or leave the building quietly” and warned them against “boisterous conduct,” the “use of musical instruments after bed time,” and “entering the halls with muddy feet.” For a grown man who performed hard labor ten or more hours a day, such childish commandments quickly became an irritant.
Saloons were the common living rooms of working-class life, but the only bar in the model town, at the Hotel Florence, was intended only for visitors and company executives. One worker reported that he “looked at but dared not enter Pullman’s hotel.”
One of the reasons George Pullman had located his factory far from the center of Chicago was to protect his workers from the influence of labor organizers. Pullman loathed unions. He had handled the few strikes at his works by adamantly refusing to negotiate and by threatening workers with mass dismissals. Labor advocates were not allowed to speak in his model town. Employees had to schedule meetings in nearby Kensington and brave the possibility of company spies just to attend lectures by union proponents.
“It is not the American ideal,” Ely wrote. “It is benevolent, well-wishing feudalism.” His verdict: the town of Pullman was “un-American.”
A proud patriot, George Pullman was stung by this critique of his pet project. His initial reaction to Ely’s article was to order his managers to track down and punish the employees who had dared to share their grievances with the visiting professor.
* * *
Critics could carp, but the Pullman’s Palace Car Company thrived. In 1889 Pullman acquired the Mann Boudoir Car Company and the Woodruff Sleeping and Parlor Coach Company, eliminating competition and bringing even more of the industry under his control. Business soared in the years leading up to the 1893 Columbian Exposition as railroads contracted for sleepers, dining, and parlor cars to bring visitors to the fair. Pullman investors were gratified by their 8 percent annual dividend and the growing value of the company. Its three thousand shareholders included the British monarch, Queen Victoria.
But the depression that followed the May 1893 panic hit the Pullman factory hard. Orders had already dropped off. Now sales and leases plummeted. The company fired workers and reduced the wages of those remaining. Managers changed work methods to increase productivity and minimize costs.
During the first week in December 1893, steamfitters and blacksmiths at Pullman called a strike to protest a 25 percent reduction in pay. George Pullman gave them a choice: work for what the company offered or quit. What could they do? Almost all returned to their jobs. This was typical when workers’ discontent came up against George Pullman’s adamant hostility toward unions. In earlier strikes against the Pullman’s Palace Car Company, employees were routinely fired and replaced.
During the difficult winter and spring of 1894, the grievances of the workers at Pullman grew to desperate levels. They wanted answers from company officials. Those officials occupied the imposing Pullman Building in Chicago’s business district. George Pullman showed his face in the shops only six times that winter. The company had no formal system by which the men could file grievances or communicate with upper managers. Workers who had once admired George Pullman no longer knew him.
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The Pullman workers’ complaints fell into three categories. The first was pay. Wage cuts had ranged from 20 to 35 percent. Reduced working hours cut further into compensation. The take-home pay of some skilled mechanics, among the most severely affected employees, had dropped by 60 percent.
Thomas Heathcoate, whose job was to finish the insides of cars, found himself laboring for less than half of what he had been earning a year earlier. Carpenter R. W. Coombs worked on refrigerator cars, gondolas, and cabooses. By March he was making only 68 cents a day, less than the unskilled section men on Jim Hill’s Great Northern line.
Nineteen-year-old Jennie Curtis worked as a seamstress. “We made all the carpets,” she later remembered, “and all the silk, satin, plush, and velvet drapings for the dining cars … and all such work as that.” The company had cut her pay from $2.25 for ten hours of work to 70 cents. Less experienced girls made only four cents an hour. In part, this was the result of the common—and for the company profitable—notion that women’s wages were only a supplement to those of the head of the household. Yet many women, including Curtis, were the sole providers in their homes.
During the 1890s, the Pullman Company had turned increasingly to piecework until almost all the factory employees were paid in this manner. Not only did piecework usually mean less pay for more effort, but it introduced a set of decisions for foremen and supervisors. What was a fair rate for a task? Should it be based on the performance of an expert worker or of an average one? If the rate allowed hard workers to make more than a typical wage, should it be lowered?
George Pullman called piecework an “educational tool in that it offered incentive to the worker to improve his skills.” In reality, it was demeaning, particularly for skilled craftsmen, such as wood-carvers, marquetry artisans, and car builders. They felt a continual pressure to increase their output even as they saw their take-home pay fall, often to levels below those of common laborers.
The second category of complaints revolved around rents in the town of Pullman. The employees’ income had diminished but rents remained “exorbitant.” Unable to pay what they owed, workers became debtors to the company. Those caught between slack pay and high rent were “afraid to complain for fear of dismissal.”
Steep rents forced many residents to take in boarders. The crowding counteracted the benefits of the carefully planned town. In small flats, it destroyed family privacy.
Of George Pullman, workers would later say, “The wages he pays out with one hand … he takes back with the other.” When he first opened the model town, this was literally true—the company collected rents by simply deducting them from workers’ pay. After Illinois banned that practice, Pullman began to give each worker two checks, one equal to his bimonthly rent, the other for whatever remained from his pay. The paymaster pressured the employee to endorse the former to the company to satisfy his debt. If he instead tried to cash it at the town bank, which was owned by Pullman, he was questioned and harassed.
Some men ended up, after paying rent, with little compensation left. Walter Easton had to support a family of four on the $3.56 paycheck he received for two weeks’ work. They survived on bread and water, and when he grew too weak to work, his wife borrowed fifteen cents to buy a soup bone and some liver sausage to sustain him.
Although Pullman’s church remained unoccupied, clergymen held services in spaces rented in the town’s commercial buildings. Reverend William Carwardine, who served as minister of the Methodist Episcopal congregation in Pullman, observed: “One man has a pay check in his possession of two cents after paying rent. He has never cashed it, preferring to keep it as a memento. He has it framed.”
When a man earned only a few dollars with which to feed his family for two weeks, hunger became a reality. “I have known men to drop down by the side of a car when they were working for want of food,” said Thomas Heathcoate.
Workers who considered leaving Pullman to find cheaper housing in a nearby village thought twice about the move. The company naturally wanted to keep its houses rented so that wage payments flowed back to the firm’s coffers. Although some employees did live in surrounding communities, most were convinced that moving out of the model town put their jobs at risk. There were no recorded cases of dismissal for leaving the town, but the workers’ fear of such a consequence was real.
The final area of workers’ discontent was the steady erosion of their rights in the factory and the abuse they suffered at the hands of the bosses. During George Pullman’s youth, American industrialism had followed a template laid down when most manufacturing was conducted in shops run by craftsmen. The factory at Pullman was referred to as “the shops.”
Originally, the master—a carpenter, blacksmith, or shoemaker—hired journeymen and took on apprentices who wanted to learn the trade. The system, which had roots back to the Middle Ages, fostered a sense of teamwork and offered traditional rights to workers. Hours were flexible. Masters viewed their employees as colleagues. They expected deference, but they knew the men. They wanted them to learn and improve their skills.
Elements of this older system were retained into the 1890s. Informal rules maintained workers’ prerogatives. But managers increasingly wanted a free hand. Work rules put the company “in a position subordinate to the men,” one railroad executive declared.
The various departments at Pullman were run by foremen and subforemen. These supervisors were allotted a budget for the completion of a job, such as building a batch of cars. They were given latitude in how they allocated work and how they distributed pay among their crew.
But rather than accommodate workers, the system put power in the hands of the foremen, who resorted to favoritism and petty despotism. “It was only the friends of the foreman” who would be paid by the day rather than for piecework, Thomas Heathcoate pointed out.
The harassment by foremen further impinged on the longstanding privileges of men at work to control their lives on the job. Theodore Rhodie, a painter in the shops, said the foremen would “talk to the men as though they were dogs.” Worse, when an inexperienced foreman made a mistake that required repair, the men had to “do the work for nothing or quit.” Jennie Curtis complained of “the tyrannical and abusive treatment we received from our forewoman.” This woman “seemed to delight in showing her power in hurting the girls in every possible way.” She would not let the workers take time off, even when they fell sick.
* * *
In March 1894, George Pullman, his hair snow white, had turned sixty-three, an age when birthdays start to bring intimations of mortality. A lifetime of impatient striving had taken its toll. Pullman suffered from relentless fatigue and frequent minor illnesses. He worked with dogged determination, putting in ten or eleven hours at the office most days. His older brother Henry warned him to slow down. His wife, Hattie, noted in her diary of March 9, 1894, that “George is feeling very tired and disinclined to do anything but rest.”
Pullman had a cantankerous streak, and the pressure of guiding his company through the most serious economic slump of his lifetime had taxed his nerves. Occasionally his mood grew so irritable that he lashed out at Hattie and other family members. The previous December, his brother Albert, an even-tempered man who for years served as troubleshooter for George’s business, had died. The loss removed another stone from Pullman’s emotional foundation.
News of unrest among his employees troubled Pullman. He had formed his view of his workers back when he hired gangs to raise buildings. A realtor who knew him then said “he was always quick, ready, and wanted his men to work fast.” When Pullman tooted his whistle, his employees did their job. Unions complicated the process unnecessarily.
His employees saw things differently. Pullman had not lowered his own salary in response to the hard times, nor had he reduced the pay of the company’s executives. It was well known that the Pullman’s Palace Car Company was hoarding $25 million in surplus profits and had contributed another $4 million to this fund during 1893 alone. Even in 1894, the company as a whole had turned a healthy profit, though the car-building operations were supposedly losing money. Pullman continued to pay shareholders the generous dividends to which they were accustomed.
As more and more employees signed up with the American Railway Union, the emboldened members elected a general committee of forty-one men and five women to approach the company about their grievances. In early May, the committee members called on Harvey Middleton, the plant manager, hoping for some relief. He told them that he had no authority to deal with the matter. They would have to go see Thomas H. Wickes, second vice president of the corporation.
ARU organizer George Howard had contacted Eugene Debs in Terre Haute to report his progress at Pullman. He related the employees’ discontent and said there had been liberal talk of a strike. Debs wired back that Howard should “do all in his powers” to prevent a strike. If the workers presented a united front to company managers, Pullman would likely arbitrate the dispute. Their case was solid. But to strike in the midst of a depression would involve grave danger for the employees and the union itself.
On May 7, the committee of common laborers traveled to company headquarters for a rare meeting with a top Pullman executive. They knew the odds were stacked against them. They understood that speaking out might well cost them their jobs. But desperation and determination gave them the courage to take a stand.