CHAPTER 22Utopian Domesticity

Albert Pullman worked assiduously to deliver a consistent message the public internalized: Pullman equaled luxury and the best people traveled Pullman. The enthusiastic reception of this idea made it nearly impossible for railroad companies to resist contracting with Pullman's Palace Car Company (PPCC). Part of Albert's accidental genius was making the railroads complicit in promoting Pullman cars by advertising their presence on select express trains. Operating Pullman cars added luster to a line's reputation, something railroad managers understood. As one Chicago, Burlington & Quincy (CB&Q) Railroad passenger agent wrote to his boss, “There are many people who would not patronize a sleeper yet will take a train on which a sleeper is run.” He feared that, should CB&Q management remove Pullman cars from his services, glamor by association would be lost and the competing Chicago & Rock Island Railroad would benefit.¹

Pullman luster rested on predictable routines in exclusive surroundings: a smooth, quiet, clean car; suitably deferential porters; carefully calibrated timetables; tickets priced to exclude the socially undesirable; and few reminders of stark realities outside well-sealed windows. Albert and George Pullman shared a sensibility moving them to appreciate repetition, predictability, and social segregation. Just as important, they grasped the cultural and economic benefits of catering to upper-class Americans. Discreet employees served the wealthy patrons who rode in comfort, personifying a symbolic contrast to the chaos, violence, and uncertainty of the industrializing world through which they traveled. Privately owned cars proved especially popular with the extremely rich, who thought “of them as homes away from mansions.”²

Pullman cars exacerbated the economic divisions cleaving society in the Gilded Age. Segregating passengers along class lines did not disturb the brothers, who made a name and a fortune by building cars for only a small fragment of the population. If the poor, who were poor through nobody's fault but their own, wanted to ride in luxury all they had to do was take advantage of the multitude of opportunities in front of them to get rich. Structural inequality—racial, gendered, ethnic, financial—or mere chance did not enter Pullman calculations. The brothers believed they were contributing to the greatness of the United States, evident in national economic progress and their own advancement. God was rewarding them for their application and dedication by providing the wealth they deserved. Elitism and inequality had, by the 1870s, become facts of life, if not particularly acceptable ones to many Americans.

Often compared to hotels, Pullman cars at their best provided rich Americans with home comforts. Silent and accommodating servants, running water, fine wines, excellent food, plush interiors, and fresh linens attracted elite patrons. Domesticity on the rails reflected the Pullman attitude toward houses. As a growing family in upstate New York, the Pullmans embraced the virtues of owning a family home. The commodious and much-loved house in Salem Cross Roads where they grew up presented a psychological barrier to relocating nearer to the Erie Canal when Lewis Pullman's building-moving business expanded. But move they did, to the town of Albion, because the pursuit of prosperity often demanded geographic mobility.

Home for the Pullmans represented a retreat from the world and a family realm controlled by women, as it did for many Americans. Homes formed a constant source of epistolary comment and connection among family members: their locations, their fittings, their memories. The Pullmans valued their residences because a home was a physical place and a mental space in which family members dwelled. Desiring a comfortable residence drove Albert to build in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and, when he moved to Chicago, to relocate after Emily expressed her dislike of the first houses he found for them. George was peripatetic, living in hotels while accumulating capital until he was able to build a mansion for his own family on Prairie Avenue, Chicago's “millionaire's row.” During his travels, he returned to his mother's home in Albion as often as he could.

Just as Pullman cars echoed the domestic ideal at the heart of the family's shared outlook, so factories and offices played a similar role for PPCC. During the first fifteen years of its existence the Pullman Company either rented manufacturing facilities, beginning with the Alton Road shed in Bloomington, Illinois, or purchased existing plants, such as the Detroit works. Growth required switching offices. After six years in the modest Pullman & Moore storefront on Washington Street, the company transferred into the Tremont House, but that proved too small, and in 1867, the firm moved to the Armour Building, where it occupied two floors and attached a large painted sign to the edifice's exterior proclaiming its presence. The five-story building became known informally as the Pullman Building until it was destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Afterward, the company rented offices at the northeast corner of Michigan Avenue and Adams Street, where it operated for a decade before financing a new office and apartment building on the opposite side of Adams.

Power relations reside at the heart of domesticity. Floor plans and spatial designs graphically illustrate those relations at work.³ As founder and principal shareholder, George Pullman was undisputed king of the company and Albert, second in the chain of command, had the office next to his. As the company grew, however, Albert's influence waned. The geography of power shifted to reflect the mutating hierarchy. On Washington Street, Albert had presented a very public presence in the Central Business District. In the Armour Building, Albert's third-floor room sat next to George's and the two interacted frequently.⁴ But Albert's role within the Pullman Company was changing at the time of the Great Fire. Afterward, the company searched for a new location until, in April 1873, George signed a four-year lease for office space at Michigan and Adams.⁵ In George's immediate vicinity were vice president Horace Porter (who in reality spent most of his time in New York City) and D. N. Welch, the general superintendent. Albert had been kicked upstairs, closer to the principals in the manufacturing department, men like Adolph Rapp, the production foreman, and Aaron Longstreet, the mechanical superintendent who invested in the Jennings laundry. Albert no longer supervised car building directly and had limited access to the people who made financial decisions. If proximity is power, the successive reordering of Pullman offices demonstrated Albert's diminishing influence.⁶

Its postfire quarters at the corner of Adams Street and Michigan Avenue allowed the Pullman Company to bring some functions in-house. The basement served as a workspace for sewing upholstery and for finishing window treatments and seat covers manufactured off-site. The idea of consolidating production appealed to Albert, who could supervise car construction more readily in one location than in several far-flung facilities. The interior sections of the building's first floor housed storerooms, and its windows displayed enticing Pullman car interiors to the public walking along Michigan Avenue, one of the city's main thoroughfares. This was an excellent location for reminding would-be passengers of the pleasures of a trip in a Pullman car.⁷

In 1872, George and other company officers announced plans for a new multistory headquarters building to centralize company administration and provide meals and relaxation areas for conductors and porters.⁸ It would “cultivate a society, as it were, among the employees which shall be productive of harmony and good feeling.” The epicenter of this mutual machine was the fourth floor, where a restaurant with a kitchen and two dining rooms—one for managers and a slightly smaller one for clerks, conductors, and porters—would be located. Mutualism in this model transcended (or at least muted) the effects of race, for dining would be segregated not along racial but along class lines: conductors and porters would eat in the same room. There was also a library and a “sitting or family room” to “draw in employees from the streets and [protect them against] demoralizing influences.”⁹ Such rhetoric echoed George's unlikely claim that he trained the earliest employees “to regard the highest art of workmanship as the highest economy” and to understand “that beauty is utility, utility is harmony, harmony is permanence, and permanence is success.”¹⁰ Here was the mutualist ideal in bricks and mortar, though when the building opened in 1884, only conductors had a designated room; the porters were left to fend for themselves.¹¹

In George's mind, the best way to perpetuate the mutualist ideal was by building a factory town where employees lived in company-owned housing and walked to work. The idea of building a dedicated factory town was hardly new.¹² Before steam power became standard in the mid-nineteenth century, the fast-flowing water needed to operate machines often meant locating in isolated rural areas and therefore building residencies for workers. With factories came frightening new mechanical beasts, dangerous social conditions, and regular moral panics. Men and women lived together in squalid, unhealthy housing thrown up to accommodate them in rural villages. Generating immense and conspicuous wealth, workers demanded a share of the spoils. British social reformers like Titus Salt and Robert Owen used their power in factory towns to experiment with education, humane treatment, and decent living quarters, hoping to set examples others would follow. Few did, but reading about and visiting company towns in Britain motivated George, who fretted over what he saw as the depravity and dangers of urban America.¹³

Influencing George's desire to build a factory town was his casual interest in social reform. He may have been inspired by reading British author Charles Reade's 1870 novel, Put Yourself in His Place, a fictional call for cooperation between labor and management and an attack on unions and strikes.¹⁴ Animosity between wealthy Americans and the growing numbers of wage-earning workers concerned George, as did polyglot and multicultural American cities. Worse, labor unions had successfully organized railroaders in the 1860s. Though the first of the brotherhoods claimed wage-earning employees were the equals of managers and supervisors, the industry's intense hierarchy and uneven power relations soon shattered that illusion. The strike of 1877 had highlighted the very different needs and preoccupations of wage earners and their bosses; in its wake, George sought to control his workforce while teaching workers and their families his values. To do this, the Pullman Company would build its own town.

A Pullman Company excursion to Riverside brought a local model to George and Albert's attention.¹⁵ A planned suburb located on the Des Plaines River about twelve miles west of Chicago, the Riverside Improvement Company hired Frederick Law Olmsted to merge town and country by dedicating more than 5 percent of the land to public green space.¹⁶ Commissioned in 1868 after their successful work in New York City's Central Park, the architectural firm of Vaux and Olmsted jumped at the chance to design a town from field to final product, attracted by the promise of total control over the forested, riverine area. Stimulated by a visit to England in 1850, where he observed public parks in the Liverpool suburb of Birkenhead, Olmsted believed in the wholesome possibilities for domestic life away from urban hazards and temptations. Olmsted wanted to reverse the flow of people from countryside to city by planning and building exclusive suburbs spatially cordoned off from “undesirable” residents and marketed to the American middle class. To his mind, building in natural surroundings would counter tendencies toward selfishness and vice. Riverside's residents would need complete separation from the city, Vaux and Olmsted believed.¹⁷ In Europe, social deference preserved suburban life from moral degradation. In America, salvation could be attained only through physical isolation.¹⁸

Riverside allowed Vaux and Olmsted to put into practice their philosophy of “harmonious cooperation.” This entailed carefully incorporating buildings into their surroundings to blend nature and humanity. They proposed creating playscapes, a commons, houses set in landscaped lawns, walking paths, and a central commercial area unified by a single architectural style. They graded the land to create felicitous scenes. These ideas came through clearly in an 1869 excursion, for which ten Pullman cars carried members of the Chicago Board of Public Works, Board of Supervisors, and Common Council for an afternoon of touring and exploring the planned settlement. Central to Vaux and Olmsted's vision was a road linking Riverside with the city, and convincing politicians and investors of its utility seems to have been on their agenda for that particular trip. Olmsted led the outing, with George and Albert along for the ride. Showing off wooded areas, fertile fields, and the Des Plaines River, Olmsted lavished praise on the prospects for the community. It would, he told his captive audience, be orderly and wealthy, providing a perfect environment for families beyond the congestion, immorality, noises, and smells of the city. This must have been, even at that early date, music to George's ears.

Olmsted's relationship with the Riverside Improvement Company soured, however, and he and Vaux withdrew from the project. Nevertheless, the suburb remained attached to Olmstead's name in popular memory and the city's layout would be regularly compared with Central Park.¹⁹ The Riverside Improvement Company prospectus of 1871 proclaimed the new town would combine “all that is good in city life” with “the elegant culmination of refined tastes which cannot be gratified in the city.”²⁰ For George, the object was to leave the city behind and thus polish his workforce by creating an alcohol-free town in which self-improvement was part of the atmosphere, mutual relations governed the workplace, and rational citizens sharing his values lived in harmony. The all-encompassing nature of the Riverside project encapsulated his desire for social control.

Like Vaux and Olmsted, George Pullman believed that good housing in a salubrious environment was key to a stable, peaceful society. He wanted to provide his employees with healthy, sturdy surroundings; isolate them from the city; and create pleasing and inspiring views. As one French visitor recorded, George Pullman was “strongly imbued with the Anglo-Saxon idea, that exterior respectability aids true self-respect.”²¹ Pullman envisioned a practical aesthetic in which an attractive setting, well-maintained buildings, and a refreshing daily walk to work would uplift his employees physically and morally while cementing their loyalty to the company. He wanted to remove his workforce from what he imagined were the demoralizing influences of alcohol, prostitution, and radicalism flowing with equal force through city life.

George Pullman wanted his town to be carefully planned and visually appealing. As simultaneously employer and landlord, he would instill middle-class values in its inhabitants by teaching them to be industrious, reliable, sanitary, and temperate. These virtues, he believed from his own upbringing, would elevate working people. Pullman's ideal workers would be “clean, contented, educated, sober, and happy.”²² The company town would sift out malcontents; any worker who did not like it could leave and find work elsewhere “so that conflict should be avoided and harmony and mutual profit be enjoyed.”²³ His company town would embody “the inventive genius, thorough system, liberal expenditures and excellent taste of George M. and A. B. Pullman.”²⁴ Following other utopian planners, George saw the town and its guiding philosophy as a paradigm for a complete overhaul of society.²⁵ He urged industrialists to copy it and firmly believed they would eventually understand the wisdom of his vision and build similar settlements, reforming the country as a whole.

A company town would allow Pullman to consolidate the construction and maintenance of passenger cars and the increasingly significant trade in freight cars. Luxury passenger carriages had a relatively inelastic demand and could not always provide a steady income. Quotidian vehicles built to haul commodities could. Contracts for boxcars, gondolas, and other types of vehicles for railroads and commercial customers across the country piled up after Pullman entered that line of business in 1875. Demand appeared to be limitless but, with plants scattered across the country, coordinating production was unwieldy. The PPCC board discussed how to centralize construction in a single location to minimize miscommunication and cut costs. Influenced by his visits to British factory towns, by Reade and by Riverside, and by his own inclination toward control, George had a grander vision. What began as consideration of a new plant expanded far beyond the original one-shop concept to become a full-scale town of factories, residences, shops, and public amenities. George saw the factory town as a means to improve workers’ lives while simultaneously boosting the company's bottom line.

Pullman expansion generated gossip. As early as 1872, stories began appearing in newspapers about plans to erect “the most extensive Car Building establishment in America.”²⁶ By 1873, when Pullman was building cars in Aurora, Illinois, Detroit, Michigan, and Jersey City, New Jersey, rumors swirled through the press. One story had the company purchasing President Ulysses S. Grant's farm near St. Louis, Missouri, and turning it into a factory, though that seems to have been pure fancy.²⁷ George did hint to a reporter that orders were coming in so fast, augmented by growing business in Europe, that a new manufacturing plant employing perhaps as many as 1,500 workers would have to be built.²⁸ He did not mention his vision of housing those workers and their families.

The guessing game began: where would this new factory complex be erected? For Albert and George, secrecy meant they could purchase land cheaply but publicity would encourage speculators to buy the land and sell at inflated prices. Speculation ran rampant. New Jersey occasionally made the news because George had a home in Long Branch. After a conversation with George, Pennsylvania Railroad officials believed the works would be constructed at Bergen Hill, New Jersey, and even recommended a firm of Philadelphia architects whose principals had worked with the railroad.²⁹

Albert played a key role in the Pullman Company disinformation campaign, planting stories about St. Louis, San Francisco, and other possible locations to distract observers from the actual site adjacent to Lake Calumet, near Chicago. The role of deflector-in-chief meant doing one of the things he did best: telling tall tales to reporters. For a while, St. Louis appeared to be the favorite, then Detroit. The company sent excursion trains out to scout locations and put the press off the scent. Even as Pullman secretly negotiated to purchase land in 1880, Albert told reporters that “it was definitely known that the works would not be located” near either Lake Calumet or the nearby village of Kensington. That, of course, was precisely where it would be.³⁰

Rumors about the new town ended in April 1880 when the company announced its location, near Lake Calumet, and its name, Pullman. According to one contemporary report, George personally chose the Chicago area over St. Louis, despite investors there offering free land as an inducement. Following the popular theory that climate created character, George claimed that the relatively milder Chicago summers would translate into greater productivity.³¹ It is also more than likely that he understood that building in Missouri would maintain the existing separation between plant and offices, which would remain in the new Windy City building.

The site of the new town had not been entirely unknown. A January press release from the Allen Paper Wheel Company publicizing its own move to the Calumet area tipped off close observers because of the well-known commercial ties between the two companies. In relocating to Calumet, Pullman also followed the Brown Steel and Iron Company, which established a new plant in the area in 1871. For most of the 1880s, however, the region would remain a fringe district loosely connected to Chicago, but in 1890, Standard Oil opened a new plant there, followed three years later by Inland Steel.³² The new town of Pullman acted as a magnet to attract other industries and close the physical gap with the city. With the location settled, George could begin realizing his dream of building a calm, rational, orderly factory town. He could hardly have been happier.