CHAPTER 24The Costs of Utopia
George Pullman loved nothing so much as the town bearing his family's name. Known for his reticence, vanity, and aloofness, he seemed perpetually rushed and could be abrupt in his dealings with reporters and the public. That approach changed temporarily with the opening of Pullman, a subject on which he would happily expound for journalists and visitors. Success made him loquacious. He described the range of sleeping, dining, parlor, and ordinary day cars the firm manufactured. He explained how freight cars were becoming a regular part of Pullman's output. He related how he had single-handedly invented luxury travel, how his genius parlayed one expensive car into an industry, how railroad companies widened their rights of way and narrowed station platforms for his cars to fit, and how his factory town promised to reform labor relations and create a truly civil society. Albert barely featured in George's narratives despite the key roles the older brother played in the first decade of the company's existence.
Even as he was being erased from its history, Albert was central to promoting the new town. His experience with excursions on both sides of the Atlantic allowed him to fit seamlessly into civic marketing. He loved to escort dignitaries, hosting friends old and new. One of the latter was controversial railroad investor and stock speculator Jay Gould, with whom Albert traveled on a special train from Chicago to Pullman. He and George showed Gould the factories, residencies, and businesses, even taking him to see a new water tower and the sewage system. Gould reportedly called the town “a marvel” and expressed his surprise at finding “a live, bustling town built up in such a short space of time.”1
European connections also came into play. Another eminent guest, the Duke of Sutherland, brought fellow British railway executives and investors for a tour under Albert's guidance in 1881. Sutherland, whom Albert had met and admired in Britain, brought directors from the London & North Western Railway, a paternalist employer renting houses to its workers in Crewe and Wolverton. Albert took the visitors in open cars to the brick yard south of the works, where the duke made notes in a small book before the men repaired to Hotel Florence for a champagne lunch.2 The tour was designed to convince Sutherland's railway to adopt Pullman cars, but in this case, Albert's magic touched deserted him, and the London & North Western did not invite Pullman to operate behind its locomotives.3 Despite this setback, Sutherland proclaimed his satisfaction with the “vim and push for which Chicago and her people were noted.”4
FIGURE 9. Water tower and shops, Pullman, Illinois. The photo illustrates the ordered layout of the town that architect Solon Spenser Bemen and designer Nathan Barrett created for George Pullman. Library of Congress.
At first, new orders piled up faster than they could be met, which meant contracting out some jobs. The Wason Car and Foundry Company, for example, built one hundred freight cars for Pullman, a reminder of the early days when Wason built passenger cars for Albert and George. Another one-time rival, Woodruff, fulfilled repair contracts.5 Other Pullman plants continued to operate, with the Jersey City, New Jersey, factory supplying rolling stock to sections of the East Coast. The Detroit works similarly fulfilled regional contracts, including one for cars built for nearby Saginaw, Michigan.6
An expensive investment, the town required a constant flow of business to remain solvent. There was finite demand for the type of contract the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway awarded Pullman to build five six-car, all first-class trains for its California Limited Service.7 Mass production became the key to economic survival, and shortly after the plant opened, it was dispatching a daily average of two passenger vehicles and twenty-five freight cars to America's railroads.8 Large orders of ordinary passenger and freight cars kept everyone employed. For Albert, using mass production to meet volume orders repudiated the company's origins. But rapid construction paid the bills, enabling Pullman to increase the types of rolling stock on offer while also leading to customer complaints about slipping standards and poor-quality output.
Despite George's high hopes, the town of Pullman did not operate as smoothly as visitors were led to believe. Inefficiencies, uncertainty, and duplication fostered by haphazard record-keeping forced executives to develop standardized contracts. Private cars offer a case in point. The first private car, the Railway Age, proved to be a disaster because the individual for whom it was built, E. H. Talbot, could not afford the costs of owning it and returned the vehicle to the Pullman Company. All future private cars were built on demand, although that did not eliminate misunderstandings. In the case of a car constructed for Illinois coal magnate P. L. Cable, confusion reigned about everything except the price. A series of letters specified only that Cable would pay up to $12,000 for his car, called Aztec, and that his daughter would choose the designs for the linens, table settings, and upholstery. No contract was signed, though the car was eventually delivered as promised.9 Following the consternation caused by the Aztec project, standard contracts listed expected prices and specified details such as the types of woods to be used for interiors and the exact fittings to be installed.
A particularly dramatic example of Pullman assembly-line manufacturing occurred in 1884, shortly after the factory had reached full capacity, when twenty-four gangs of four men assembled flatcars ordered by the Vicksburg, Shreveport & Pacific Railroad. The process began on a Saturday morning when the 855 separate pieces and 680 nails for each car were placed in formation on the erecting shop floor. The actual assembly commenced at 7:00 a.m. on Monday and continued until, by 5:00 p.m., one hundred cars had been assembled, an average of one every six minutes. This highly publicized feat may have warmed George's heart, but Albert would have been revolted, if perhaps simultaneously fascinated, by the speed with which cars could now be thrown together.10 Volume increased, and by 1892, the factories at Pullman churned out forty freight cars a day and three sleeping cars per week.11
Maintaining the quality of output for which Pullman was known proved difficult, even for the famous sleeping cars. Mass production privileged speed and marginalized skill to cut costs. Customers noticed. In 1884, Chicago, Burlington & Quincy (CB&Q) Railroad officials complained that commuter-car seats in new vehicles turned out by Pullman were incorrectly assembled and that the aisles were too narrow.12 As a Burlington shops manager grumbled to his superiors, “while the amount [of money] involved is small the principle is perhaps an important one.”13 That was the essence of the issue: cutting corners meant accumulating and accelerating marginal savings at the risk of alienating clients. The number of new-car orders combined with the volume of repairs meant even secondary shops like Wilmington, Delaware, sometimes omitted a coat of varnish or other elements in remodeling existing vehicles, something Albert would not have countenanced.14
The question of seat durability was especially important in the heavily used cars Pullman built for suburban service. Commuter trains were expected to stand up to constant use by passengers who may not have appreciated them as much as those who rode in Palace cars. When Pullman replaced duck hide with burlap, railroad officials told their Pullman counterparts that the resultant sagging would significantly reduce the life of the seats. CB&Q sent its chief inspector to Pullman to scrutinize cars being built there. He found that the mineral base of the paint Pullman was using did not meet the standards his company demanded, complaints inspectors from the Milwaukee Road and the Santa Fe echoed. Paint was the tip of the iceberg because broken nails, inoperative journal boxes, and inferior lumber led him to conclude, “It seems strange that a Company as noted as the Pullman Co. are should take every advantage of their power, as they do.” Worse, in his eyes, was the refusal of Pullman managers to allow CB&Q inspectors free access to all construction areas. This encouraged shoddy work, he charged, leading to carriage sides cracking and freight cars failing as the wood contracted in outdoor use.15
Pullman refuted the charges. Answering on behalf of George Pullman, George Brown, Pullman's Palace Car Company (PPCC) general manager, deflected the CB&Q grievances, claiming that Pullman had not received a sample seat as promised, that the sagging was slight and barely visible, and that the coaches were a year older than the CB&Q told him. He dismissed the complaints as frivolous. Though CB&Q presented Pullman with a bill for repairing the seats, Brown stuck by his assertion that Pullman had not received the sample seats and therefore could not be held liable for failing to meet CB&Q requirements.16 The use of less-expensive components and the apparent desire to ignore materials designated in contracts was driven by the unexpectedly high costs of the Pullman works. The company had capacity, but that needed to be used to its fullest to maintain the levels of profitability—and dividend payments—investors had come to expect. Freight cars and carriages for suburban use had to be produced as quickly and inexpensively as possible if the investment in factory and town was to turn a profit.
The unexpectedly high cost of building and operating the town made reducing expenses something of an obsession for George and therefore for his managers. As the historian Sanford Jacoby aptly writes, “Model towns were expensive to build and maintain.”17 Pullman sought rebates from suppliers, occasionally delayed payment to them, and sued for perceived overcharging.18 Worse, an unstable national economy and an increasingly competitive, overbuilt railroad industry squeezed everyone. New railroads like the Minneapolis & St. Louis, the Chicago Great Western, and other Granger Roads intruded on the territories and cut into the margins of established lines, which in turn prompted scrutiny of all expenditures, including the cost of running and repairing Pullman cars.
Economizing on construction was not the only consequence of financing a factory town. Despite George's fervent hopes, the new town did not eliminate worker unrest. His devotion to free-market ideology extended to the wages he paid his employees but not to the rents he charged his tenants. When business slacked off, the company reduced wages—though Pullman rarely offered pay raises when work increased—but the company maintained a hard line on rents. The result, combined with a sense of ever-present company surveillance by aggressively nosy company officials, was trouble.
The city of Chicago had long been home to workers’ protests, especially early demands for a maximum eight-hour working day. In 1867, the Illinois Assembly passed eight-hour day legislation, but employers responded by paying workers by the hour instead of the day, reducing their take-home pay. On “May Day” (May 1), 1867, Chicago union members marched along the lakefront in support of the new law, leading to three days of strikes and riots. The threat of force and employer intransigence broke worker resolve, and mass support for direct action to institute the eight-hour day disappeared until the 1880s.19
Agitation and conflict characterized that decade, and Pullman was not immune. The first strike in the new works occurred in 1884 when a group of freight-car department employees walked out following a wage cut. The company refused to meet their demands, and they returned to work, but the sense of grievance simmered. A year later, another strike flared up. Notified of a pay reduction by their supervisors, twenty-four workers complained to the Wood Machine Workers’ Union, which responded by holding organizational meetings in Kensington, the town adjacent to Pullman. Rumors of a strike across the works followed and the company quietly hired Pinkerton detectives to spy on its workforce and report the names of union leaders to the managers.
The 1885 strike escalated when the wood workers claimed that supervisors transferred in from the Detroit shops were “discriminating against the men” at Pullman to force them to quit and to replace them with Detroit workers. The unions active at Pullman called for a general meeting, but protest fizzled when the company threatened to fire and evict leaders of the strike and most workers proved “ill prepared to go out on strike against a powerful corporation which owns their homes.”20 Contemporary accounts suggested that the 1885 strike demonstrated for workers the futility of expecting fair treatment from monopolistic capitalists who avoided paying taxes, extorted consumers by charging high prices, and made “unreasonable profits” for themselves.21 Working Americans, the labor press implored, needed to organize because “looking to millionaire legislators for protection” amounted to nothing more than “folly.”22
George personified the political system that labor leaders deplored. In March 1886, the general manager of the Grand Trunk Railroad asked for “a personal favor” from Canadian prime minister Sir John MacDonald, himself a railroad promoter. Pullman was taking a group of Chicago business leaders to Ottawa to meet with the Canadian minister of fisheries and wanted a bass fishing permit for early summer, before the season formally opened. His Pullman car would be pulled free of charge from Chicago to Fort Gratiot, Michigan, where the train would be handed over to the Canadian side of the Grand Trunk Railroad. Even as his workers were organizing and preparing to strike for a shorter working day, an act calculated to undermine the very premise of the town of Pullman, George was planning a lengthy vacation at little cost to himself and facilitated by favors from politicians.23
Union organizers confronted multiple obstacles. Company managers, keen to instill George Pullman's expectation of “quiet gratitude” from his workforce, aggressively kept them out of town.24 Language barriers in the ethnically diverse workforce and specialized unions organizing single trades limited the possibilities for unity. To combat the problems of a polyglot workforce and multiple unions preparing to fight different battles at different times, Knights of Labor organizers struggled to convince workers and small business owners to make common cause in a single, overarching organization. The Knights of Labor, founded in 1869 and by 1880 the largest union in the country, wanted to humanize capitalism and, against fierce company opposition, made inroads into the Pullman workforce. Seeking support for a proposed May Day strike in 1886, organizers requested permission from the company to hold meetings at Pullman. Denied the right to assemble there, they met with workers in Kensington. Even then, workers hesitated, and one Chicago labor leader likened the town of Pullman to a “slave pen” after failing to galvanize Pullman shop workers.25 The company divided the workforce by implementing wage cuts unevenly so that some units experienced reductions while others did not. Managers hoped this would eliminate mass grievances and stymie strikes.
Organizing efforts proved partly successful despite company opposition. When the national strike for an eight-hour day began on May Day 1886, only a handful of Pullman workers walked out. Police killed six striking workers outside the McCormick factory on Chicago's west side. Violence raged downtown when police suppressed an anarchist protest meeting at what became known as the Haymarket affair. Pullman workers seemed destined to remain on the sidelines, but they were marching to the beat of their own drum. After five days without a response from the company, the entire workforce went on strike. Meeting on Pullman playing fields, the striking workers organized to protect Pullman property and their livelihoods from the expected violence as fears of radical agitators gripped the nation.26
Despite their conciliatory gesture, George Pullman adamantly refused to accede to his employees’ demands and threatened to close the works completely for sixty days. As the action against PPCC entered its fourth week, the strikers held a mass meeting to discuss the situation. It was clear the company would not agree to a shorter workweek and, their funds running out, the organizers ended the strike.27 Across the country, similar scenarios played out and the Knights of Labor backed down, calling on members to return to work. At Pullman, workers resumed their ten- and eleven-hour workdays aware now of the potential for organizing and of their collective strength. The 1886 strike was a watershed in the history of the American labor movement and was probably the largest strike in US history to that point.
Discontent at Pullman was rarely far from the surface despite George's desire for harmony and public proclamations about the success of his town. Following the failure of the so-called Great Upheaval of 1886, ancillary works were affected by continued friction between employees and their supervisors. In the summer of 1887, Pullman brickmakers asked local Knights of Labor organizers to represent them in their struggle for a 10 percent pay raise.28 George's desire to keep costs as low as possible meant they earned less than their counterparts in Chicago despite having similar costs of living, facts of which they were not unaware. The supervisor of the brickworks offered to convert them to payment on a piece rate, which the three hundred workers believed would result in a pay decrease. They went on strike, an action company officials declared “a surprise, as it was believed that a harmonious understanding was arrived at.”29 Worsening regional unemployment reduced the chances for success, but the brickmakers stayed out until the end of the brickmaking season in September, when they customarily found alternate employment.
As the national economy slowed in 1887, the Pullman Company began selectively cutting the pay of its factory workers. In August, it reduced the wages of trimmers by 10 percent, and the Pullman Council of the Knights of Labor met to formulate a response.30 The one hundred trimmers knew that two years before, localized cuts had been followed by pay decreases in all departments. Receiving a lukewarm response from the Knights of Labor, paralyzed by the failure of previous strikes, and fearful of losing their jobs, the trimmers did nothing. While they doubted the company's statement that fewer orders for cars caused wage cuts, the trimmers threatened to stop working but did not follow through. George Pullman's firm hand, including an announcement that he would lock workers out of their employment for two months if they struck, cowed them.31
One prediction George made was closer to becoming reality by the end of the 1880s. In 1888, under pressure from competition created by the new vestibule train and seeking to combat Pullman power, Woodruff merged with Mann Boudoir into the Union Palace Company. It was a marriage of convenience, and the two firms soon recognized that even together their position remained economically untenable and, because American passengers tended to prefer Pullman's open-section sleepers to the compartments Mann offered, competitively inferior. The consolidated company survived only a few months by trying to undercut Pullman contracts while running its cars on marginal lines.32 Aware of the suicidal trajectory of Union Palace pricing policies and its own hold on most main lines, Pullman watched its competitor flail. In January 1889, PPCC purchased the nearly bankrupt Union Palace Company and added its fifteen-thousand miles of operations to the Pullman system. Only one firm, Wagner, remained, propped up by the New York Central Railroad as much out of William Vanderbilt's enduring hatred of George Pullman as by any sound economic rationale.33
Strikes disrupted the flow of production in the interlinked Pullman workshops and threatened to upset the harmony George Pullman believed was vital to efficient operation. George may have been able to rationalize the investment in a full-scale town by labeling it a sound business decision informed by higher principles, but his workers wanted to make a living, and his investors expected to receive dividends. Few of the inhabitants shared his vision. Employees renting company houses and shopping in Pullman stores faced lower wages and unchanged rents, which translated into falling standards of living and the threat of eviction. For George, workers were abstractions hired to build cars and to absorb lessons about morality and respectable behavior. As a visitor recorded after meeting with him, George Pullman “mixes very little with his men, and never concerns himself about their private affairs.”34 The contrast with Albert could hardly have been greater: where Albert acknowledged individuals, George saw only wages and output.
Despite the burden of operating a factory town and fraught contract-renewal negotiations, the Pullman Company appeared to be thriving. Demand for new passenger and freight cars expanded and the firm's sleeping cars dominated overnight travel. Cost cutting mostly remained out of public view and the occasional small strikes appeared to be little more than short-lived squalls. The firm had grown away from its origins when Albert had played a key role in its success. Operations in the town of Pullman confirmed his increasingly marginal role, and he continued to seek investment opportunities elsewhere. Albert remained silent about the destruction of mutuality, distracted by his own problems. Before he could make one final entrepreneurial push, however, family and financial troubles beset him.