CHAPTER 29Albert at the Exposition
Chicago's boosters found the last three decades of the nineteenth century gratifying. The city recovered with astonishing speed from the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 and the 1873 Panic, resuming its remarkable economic and demographic growth. By 1890, it was the sixth largest metropolitan area in the world. Like its epicenter, the Pullman empire was thriving: 2,573 Pullman cars carried 5,673,129 passengers over 204,453,796 route miles in 1892.1 As local journalists reminded their readers, Chicago was an industrial powerhouse of which Pullman was its proudest product. Rising like a phoenix from its own ashes, it challenged New York for the title of America's preeminent metropolis. Windy City elites and their eager publicists positioned the lakeside town as “belonging to the future,” a place unhindered by historical precedent or cultural convention.2
The sloughing off of history—a key characteristic of becoming modern—did not mean leaving the past behind completely. Poverty, inequality, racism, bigotry, discrimination, and hopelessness persisted and multiplied. The river stank, smoke filled the air, crime sprees unfolded, snow blocked roads, rain slicked surfaces, stockyard victims squealed, and garbage accumulated on curbs. But these problems went neither unnoticed nor neglected.
The smog and smells created by Chicago's industries could hardly be ignored. By 1890, the “mud hole in the prairie” had been cleaning up its act for thirty-five years, starting with Chesbrough's sewage system aided by the Pullman brothers’ lifting efforts. Reform occurred in fits and starts, often spurred by disaster. The fire of 1871 led to genuinely fireproofing the Central Business District, noxious fumes from factories and locomotives forced politicians to adopt a toothless but precedent-setting ordinance banning “dense smoke,” and floods and cholera caused Chicago's leading citizens to demand civic action to find a clean water supply.3 Reform reached unevenly across the municipality, however, and contrasts abounded between the physically isolated and psychically insulated mansions of wealthy people like George Pullman and Marshall Field and nearby unhealthy, dangerous, and squalid neighborhoods in which casual and hourly workers lived.4
Stark dichotomies between rich and poor and the unpleasant realities of urban life did not disillusion image makers, however. When Chicago hosted a world's fair to celebrate the four-hundred-year anniversary of Christopher Columbus's first landfall in the Americas, the city commanded global attention despite a slow start caused by squabbles among local elites and congressional foot-dragging. The exposition opened a year late and over budget, but it amazed most who ventured onto its grounds and crowds equal to one in ten of all Americans visited the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893.
A festival of commerce, culture, and consumption, it grabbed the popular imagination with a luminous and impermanent city of whitewashed buildings formed of plaster-of-Paris, water, and jute. Leading to the main entrance was a gaudy Midway crowded with anthropological curiosities, plebian amusements, and unexpected moments of classical music.5 Historical accuracy played a minor role as exposition organizers highlighted the ostentatious enormity of the republic while ignoring its foundational racism, sexism, and genocide. Triumphalism carried the day, and provincial Chicago proved itself to be anything but the parochial backwater of Eastern imaginations.
Albert contributed to the earliest planning phase. He attended the first meeting at which the Mexican physician Carlos Zaremba publicly revealed his idea for a world's fair to celebrate the Columbian arrival. Impressed by Philadelphia's 1876 Centennial Exposition, Zaremba invited six prominent Chicagoans, Albert among them, to meet with him at the Grand Pacific Hotel in November 1885. To this small group, he presented his idea for holding a Columbian celebration in Chicago.6 This gathering did not make any plans of substance but gave Zaremba impetus. He kept pushing until the idea gained support, especially after leading Chicagoans perceived it as a public relations move to embarrass New York.7 When the city council sought members for a committee charged with overseeing preparations for the exposition, it turned not to Albert but to George. Self-promotion and the erasure of the older brother were paying dividends.8
The event itself gave Chicago a platform on which to dazzle the world.9 Even though the fair opened to the public a year later than the anniversary of Christopher Columbus's first Atlantic crossing, it was, as public spectacle and municipal advertisement, massively successful. The beauty of its buildings, the sheer number of visitors, and the way people talked about it helped remake Chicago's image. No longer on the frontier or sitting in the backwoods, the city demonstrated that it had elevated itself into a thriving industrial and financial center with a smattering of the kind of art and music even New Yorkers would recognize as culture. The Columbian Exposition announced Chicago's arrival as a global city.10
George recognized the marketing potential of the proposed world's fair and pledged his company's full support. Solon S. Beman, the architect who planned the town of Pullman, designed the well-received Mines and Mining Building.11 Pullman's Palace Car Company (PPCC) exhibited a Pullman train (“the finest railway train ever constructed”) with interiors crafted for the fair by Beman.12 Pullman displayed it inside the Transportation Building, one of the most unusual structures at the fair, with a red exterior adorned by linen angels and a leaf motif.13 Outside, on a rail spur laid for the occasion, stood “day coaches, mail and express cars, and an elaborate street car exhibit.” The last of these, Charley Pullman's double-decker, garnered considerable attention.14
To marshal the crowds and relay information on the reception of the rolling-stock exhibit, Pullman Company clerk Henry Fritsch supervised the porters on duty and transmitted daily reports to George. Inconsistently supplied with stationary marked “Pullman Exhibit, World's Columbian Exposition,” Fritsch recorded how the Chicago General Street Car Railway sent a representative to examine Charley's car, asking about the specifications and requesting further information. He also informed George that Japanese commissioners spent four hours inspecting the cars and taking notes. Fritsch wrote about the use of music to attract visitors by the nearby Baltimore & Ohio Railroad exhibit, which had the unintended consequence of sending people over to the Pullman train. Fritsch thereafter added an occasional musical ensemble to the Pullman exhibit. He also asked that the wheelsets be polished to show off their details.15
FIGURE 13. Interior of La Rabida, on display at the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 and symbolic of the contrasting fortunes of Albert and George Pullman. Reproduced by permission of the Pullman Palace Car Company Photographs, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.
The train was part of a multipronged effort to demonstrate how the Pullman Company harnessed machinery, instilled luxury, and benefitted humanity. To this end, PPCC displayed a painted plaster-of-Paris replica of the town with models of every building and natural feature. Placed near the entrance to the Transportation Building, it attracted visitors while simultaneously satisfying birds flying over the exposition, who “put manure on the green lots,” requiring regular cleaning and repainting.16 As for the full-sized town eight miles south, the Pullman Company operated special trains for fairgoers to visit and see for themselves the powerful machines, pristine grounds, and decorous inhabitants.17 In addition to these initiatives, the firm published and gave away two books—one on the town and another about the company—to fill inquiring minds with everything the company wanted them to know. Fritsch and the porters distributed these publications at the Pullman train exhibit, and the official guide to the fair amplified the company's efforts, informing readers that they should tour the factories and see “the famous Corliss engine of 1876” at work in Pullman. Albert, needless to say, did not get a mention.18
The exposition generated additional business for the Pullman Company. Porters accumulated one-hundred-hour weeks working on trains to and from the fair.19 The company sometimes provided free transportation for visitors. When members of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir traveled from Utah to Chicago, for example, they did so in carriages provided by Pullman at no additional expense.20 Days designated for specific groups or towns boosted fair attendance and Pullman ridership. Thus, for example, September 26, 1893, was “Odd-Fellows’ Day” at the fair, with reduced entry fees and special trains bringing members of that fraternal order to Chicago. After seeing the sites, the Oddfellows attended a concert by the Iowa State Band in Festival Hall. Pullman cars played an important role in luring visitors: a luxury trip followed by a day of events in their honor proved a winning combination for fairgoers.21
Lost amid the glitzy buildings and the glare of publicity was Albert. His final public appearances occurred at the exposition, where he displayed his patented freight-car door. The A. B. Pullman Company could be found at a lonely table with a single display tucked away in a remote corner of the Transportation Building so unremarkable that no photograph of it has survived.22 Sitting at his table and showing off his door to all who wandered past, Albert traded on his reputation and the family name in an attempt to thwart the volatility and unpredictability of life as an everyday entrepreneur. When family members visited the exposition, they corresponded about the Pullman train and their lunch with George, but mentioned neither Albert's presence nor his display. At the fair's conclusion, the organizers gave the “A B Pullman company freight car door” a “Railways, railway plant and equipment” medal.23 It was consolation for his dogged determination to remain relevant.
Earning one of the many awards given out by the fair's organizers could hardly have compensated for Albert's relative obscurity, however. His previous patents—of which he held at least thirteen in the United States, three in Great Britain, and one in Canada—failed to attract any attention. The freight-car door, his final invention, was his only lasting technological contribution to the world of railroading.24 His brake system, train-coupling device, and toilet design were never monetized. He must have wondered to himself on this occasion, and many times previously, how and why his brother had become such a prominent capitalist while his endeavors, his episodes in the life of an everyday entrepreneur, had flopped by comparison.
FIGURE 14. A. B. Pullman Sliding Door for Railway Cars, No. 421,084, Patented February 11, 1890, witnessed by Clifford N. White and W. H. Dyrenforth; Inventor Albert B. Pullman, by Dyrenforth and Dyrenforth, Attorneys.
Albert could hardly have counted himself a failure in relation to the great majority of people in Gilded Age America. He was in some ways an archetype of the entrepreneur who succeeded by failing, suggesting the simple duality of failure and success is an insufficient framework for analyzing Gilded Age business. Like many of his contemporaries, Albert lived on credit not capital.25 Yes, his insurance plans had been incinerated in the Great Fire, his banking adventure dashed against the rocks of regulation, his land scheme an escapade from which he barely escaped, and his brush with hansom cabs painful in the extreme, but he lived a materially comfortable life mostly and happily in the public eye, and he managed to rehabilitate his reputation following the downturns in his business career.
But that career always suffered in comparison with George. In the 1880s, the Pullman public relations department began sending biographical sketches of George to newspapers and magazines highlighting his primacy in creating the luxury railroad sleeping car, in some cases crediting him with inventing it. Albert was scarcely to be found in these accounts, a small and seemingly inconvenient presence on the rare occasions he was granted a brief mention. The long shadows cast by successful capitalists of his day were certainly partly responsible for Albert's disappearance from the pages of history, but so were choices made in the 1880s about who should and should not be credited with the success of PPCC. In that contest, there could be only one victor.
Symbolic of their contrasting roles in our collective memory are the respective physical positions of George and Albert at the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893. The difference could hardly have been greater. George stole the show and earned plaudits in the lavish Transportation Building with that full-size set of Pullman Palace Cars, the spur brimming with freight and passenger vehicles, and the model of his town, not to mention the real town an exciting Pullman ride away.26 The train set represented the prestige, the ubiquity, and the luxury of Pullman rolling stock while the replica town gave some indication of the grandeur of George's vision. A guide to the exposition compiled by British engineer James Dredge mentioned the “strangely autocratic” regulations and laws of the town, but like most of the coverage, Dredge focused on the “better class” of workmen who lived there and how the municipality was “commercially, a great success.”27
Attending the fair was physically as well as psychologically uncomfortable for Albert. As the summer of 1893 progressed, he suffered from poor health. He was unable to travel to his summer home on Cherry Island when the rest of the family did so in July.28 Laid low by chronic indigestion, he contracted influenza in December. Visiting his brother Charley in Evanston, Illinois, he fell ill and was sick for a week, resting and occasionally rallying sufficiently to chat with visitors but never able to rise. With daughter Emma and brother Charley at his bedside, Albert Pullman slipped away suddenly but quietly on the morning of December 18.
The funeral ceremony was held at Charley's residence, presided over by the Reverend P. S. Henson of the First Baptist Church of Chicago. Albert was buried next to Emily at Graceland Cemetery, his brothers Royal Henry and James (both Universalist ministers) leading the service there. Among the pallbearers were George's sons, William Angell, and Albert's son-in-law Graeme Stewart. Three of Albert's business partners, Ebenezer Jennings, Aaron Longstreet, and George M. Sargent, served with several Pullman Company officers as honorary pallbearers.29 George M. Pullman was not present, although he did order all Pullman offices (but not the factory) closed for the afternoon of December 21 “on account of the funeral of Mr. A. B. Pullman, formerly Second-Vice-President.”30
Albert died intestate, so it is impossible to reconstruct the financial legacies of the numerous small corporations in which he invested. At probate, his $125,000 estate was divided among the two surviving daughters and his grandson, Albert. He owned two residencies, his Banks Street home in Chicago and the summer cottage on Cherry Island, and small parcels of property dotted around the country.31 His legacy also included at least one posthumous lawsuit for payment of debt. In 1896, three years after his death, Nellie and Graeme Stewart contested a suit seeking to recover a $9,000 advance paid to Albert while he was speculating in stocks.32
Albert's contemporary reputation can be gauged by the obituaries. That he was famous cannot be doubted, even as his brother was attempting to marginalize and expunge his contributions to PPCC. Most of the obituaries understandably connected Albert with George and with the Pullman Company. Reflecting Albert's range of business interests, they variously designated him as “a wealthy iron manufacturer,” the “vice president of the Pullman car company,” or “head of the A. B. Pullman Company of Chicago.”33 The Railway Review lauded him as “an active and prominent figure in railroad business circles.”34 One widely reprinted obituary labeled him “the man who did more than any one [sic] else to perfect the modern sleeping car,” a tribute that, had George read it, would have caused him to smart.35 Another called him “the mechanical genius of the famous family” who used his cabinetmaking skills “to superintend all the details in the construction department of the great Pullman industry.”36 Few made reference to Albert's entrepreneurial career, although one remembered that he had been “well known for years in stock and grain circles … a warm friend of many of the oldest speculators, who regret his sudden demise.”37 His “jovial nature and his genial spirit” earned recognition, but no mention was made of his work on excursions.38
And that, ultimately, would be the fate of Albert Benton Pullman. Incapable of formulating the kind of lasting network he needed to enter the upper echelons of the business world, unable to catch the lucky break that would elevate him there, and unwilling to settle on a single line of business, he speculated and circulated capital and its paper promise without achieving his brother's level of success. Well known in transportation circles and the public face of the Pullman Company, he could not escape George's long shadow. He made useful political connections, turning his back on Pullman family politics by becoming a Chicago Democrat. He built and tapped into business networks across the country, taking advantage of opportunities but buffeted by the unpredictable Gilded Age economy. His place in the history books was always going to be insecure, diminished as it was by George's power, and like numerous everyday entrepreneurs, he has all but disappeared—almost. Yet, like those others, Albert Benton Pullman helped to create the capitalist economy that had become dominant by the end of the nineteenth century, an economy of individuals and small firms working with and around the growing corporations and industrial monopolies. That, writ large, is his legacy.