CHAPTER 18Brand Albert
Albert Pullman marketed two products: luxury travel and Albert Pullman. Fronting excursions, building networks, and distributing copy propelled him to the forefront of Chicago's business world. Traveling across the United States and then through Europe taught Albert the power of what we would today call branding. Most important for his future, he learned how to talk with and learn from journalists and editors, becoming in the process a perfect candidate for celebrity status in the potent world of railroading and in Chicago's expanding upper echelons.
Fame advanced with technological change. Developments in photography and printing combined to create new opportunities for public prominence. Albert took advantage of these by having an engraving made for newspaper use and a photograph taken for family and friends.1 He was moving with the times in this respect. Improvements in the clarity of reproduction, of cameras, and of chemical developing led to mass markets for images and intensified interest in celebrities. Fame in the Gilded Age could be disseminated through the distribution of small photographs—cartes de visite—purchased for display in homes and often pasted into albums.2 These cards contributed to the democratization of photography, creating what one scholar calls a kind of Victorian social media.3 Though not literally used as visiting cards, they did inaugurate a new era of uniform self-representation.
Originating in France in 1859, the mass production of cartes de visite took hold in America following the Civil War and quickly filtered into daily life. Ordinary Americans learned how to present themselves in formulaic, conventional images. Carefully scrubbed for the occasion, dressed in their best clothes, and pictured in settings redolent of classical fancy or domestic idylls, they participated in the collective self-representation of urban America's emerging middle class.4 The consumers at the heart of a growing consumer society put themselves on display.
Newspaper mentions were a first step toward creating brand Albert. His name appeared in the press frequently in connection with Pullman excursions because he invited journalists, regaled them with stories, and showered them with information on the runs. Using Pullman Palace Cars as a source of publicity, he became a regular in the city's newspapers, Republican—like the Tribune—and Democrat, such as the Times—alike. Albert positioned himself as a leading businessman. He was one of only eleven people to receive souvenirs commemorating completion of the first transcontinental railroad in May 1869, small medals made from the head of the golden spike driven into the last tie at Promontory. George got one, as did President Ulysses S. Grant, former Secretary of State William H. Seward, railroad champion and first mayor of Chicago William Ogden, and directors of the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads.5 Albert's inclusion in such company suggests he was becoming synonymous with railroad advances, as did his collaboration with Chicago-area railroad leaders on a petition calling for the Common Council to adopt Standard Railroad Time.6 In this case, Albert and his colleagues were fourteen years ahead of the rest of the country, which did not embrace uniform time zones until 1883.
Planting and cultivating press coverage did not hurt: the publisher's column of Art Review praised Albert as “indefatigable in his efforts to promote the comfort of all those who do themselves a favor by patronizing the Palace Cars.”7 The publisher of this periodical was Edwin H. Trafton, the journalist with whom Albert shared cocktails in London. As stories like that accumulated, Albert garnered a national reputation. The credibility and prominence he gained by placing his name in the press helped bring him into contact with investors. Cultivating publicity contributed to his ability to attract fellow entrepreneurs and diversify into banking, insurance, manufacturing, and other fields. Such relationships, based in Albert's case on the provision of passes for complimentary travel, advertising contracts, and free copy, were commonplace after the Civil War.8 Everyone loved a quid pro quo.
Philanthropic activities also guaranteed press coverage. The plight of impoverished children consumed much of Chicago's charitable energies, and Albert contributed time and Pullman cars to a few causes. The Newsboys and Bootblacks Home, a shelter for children orphaned, abandoned, or fleeing unsafe domestic situations, opened in 1867. The thirty beds at its facility, known locally as Briggs House, had immediately filled and the organization launched an appeal for clothing and bedding.9 Briggs House managers gave their charges a healthy outing at least once a year by taking them into the countryside. Albert arranged transportation to an annual picnic in a park beyond the city limits, helped to choose the games, and hired the city band.10 The charity connected his name with a good cause in the public mind and brought him into the company of ever-useful newspaper publishers.
Newspaper reports of charitable events listed benefactors, often including Albert. Sometimes he followed George's lead. He tagged along when George joined with Amos Rood, an acquaintance from Grand Rapids, Michigan, to help victims of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.11 The Pullmans had known Rood in Michigan and reconnected when the latter's Chicago Sand and Gravel Company supplied foundation stones during their building-lifting era. Both Pullmans also became members of the Citizens’ Reception Committee for the Chicago Jubilee, helping plan concerts to celebrate a half-century of European settlement at the foot of Lake Michigan.12 Partly because of his civic action, Albert's reputation survived the collapse of the Great Western Insurance Company (GWIC) and the National Bank of Commerce (NBC), and he would continue to be invited to invest in Chicago-area businesses.
His minister, the Reverend W. H. Ryder, also inspired Albert's philanthropy. The son of a mariner, Ryder was born in 1822 in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and educated at the Pembroke Academy in New Hampshire and the Liberal Institute in Clinton, New York, the school Albert's sisters supposedly attended. After ordination, he preached in New Hampshire before studying in Berlin, traveling around Europe, and visiting Jerusalem. He served as pastor to the Universalist congregation in Roxbury, Massachusetts, before moving to Chicago in 1860 and taking up his post at St. Paul's.
A staunch abolitionist radicalized by the revolutionary fervor he encountered in Europe, Ryder mobilized his new congregation to open a school for Black children shortly after the Civil War, stressing the importance of universal education. Following the destruction of St. Paul's by the Great Chicago Fire, he toured New England, raising $40,000 toward erecting a replacement. He and Albert remained close throughout Ryder's twenty-two years at St. Paul's. Albert no doubt admired Ryder's investment capacity, which enabled him to retire on the income from his shares in Chicago gas companies—of which he was a director—and street railways. After his death, Ryder's estate, worth $750,000, was bequeathed primarily to educational institutions, including Tufts College Divinity School in Medford, Massachusetts, and Lombard College in Galesburg, Illinois, which named its seminary in his honor.13
Inspired by Ryder and the abolitionist teachings of the Universalist Church, Albert was instrumental in securing an education for the formerly enslaved Thomas L. Johnson. Cooperating with Robert T. Lincoln, a regular on Pullman excursions, Albert furthered Johnson's interest in becoming a Christian missionary. Born into slavery, Johnson traveled from Virginia to Chicago after emancipation, working as a dishwasher and then a waiter at Herbert M. Kinsley's restaurant in Crosby's Opera House.14 He transferred to Kinsley's lunch counter at the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy (CB&Q) Railroad depot, a position from which he helped to prepare the food for Pullman trips. In 1875, impressed by Johnson's intelligence and ambition, Albert and Lincoln funded his education at Pastor's College, an evangelical seminary for nontraditional students in south London. Informally known as Spurgeon's College after its founder, this institution equipped Johnson for a career as a missionary. He traveled to Africa, where he was captured but ransomed and released, after which he returned to London to continue preaching. He thought of Albert and George Pullman as “very kind friends” and acknowledged the former's role in his career in his autobiography.15
Assisting Johnson showed Albert doing the good work expected of the upwardly mobile and reinforced the perception that he belonged in the local elite. Fundraising and family involvement went hand in hand. His wife and daughters also contributed to Chicago's philanthropic scene, helping to elevate the family name and reputation. In 1872, Emily and fellow members of the Ladies of the Good Samaritan Society traveled to Ohio to investigate charges that the Cincinnati Soup House provided poor-quality food, did not adequately screen applicants, and was being victimized by fraudulent claims for assistance. The Chicago deputation journeyed south in a car Albert provided. Meeting with the superintendent of the institution and inspecting the premises, they published a report exonerating the soup kitchen of all charges.16
Nellie Pullman, Emily and Albert's eldest daughter, hosted gatherings for friends from St. Paul's at their house on Ashland Avenue. These occasions became a regular feature of Pullman life, along with dances at the Mineola Club and invitations to society weddings. Mother and daughters also took up a Pullman family cause when they contributed time and talent to Chicago's homeopathic hospital, organizing a benefit performance of the operetta Little Red Riding Hood to raise funds for it.17 Nellie served as a helper for functions at Martine's South Side Academy, a nationally famous dance school.18 Emily often took a leading role in St. Paul's events, presiding over cake contests at the annual bazaar, for example.19 Albert and Emily's Universalist faith infused their social outlook and informed their duty-driven desire to help others.
Albert and Emily entered fully into Chicago's social season. The usual round of theatre nights, concerts, and parties were augmented by unusual occurrences bringing Chicago international publicity. The highlight of the winter of 1880–1881 was the visit of French actor and singer Sarah Bernhardt. On a six-month tour of the United States, Bernhardt arrived in the city in December 1880 and later rhapsodized about her two weeks in Chicago as the most enjoyable of her American sojourn. In her memoir, she wrote positively of “the vitality of the city in which men pass each other without ever stopping, with knitted brows, with one thought in mind, ‘the end to attain.’” Her enjoyment—of ambition personified, of the chilled lake, of enthusiastic audiences—stretched to everything except the stockyards, the sights and smells of which she found repellent when she joined the crowds of tourists, as many as ten thousand a day, visiting the extensive abattoir.20 Despite an antipollution ordinance and the construction of rendering tanks to contain the stench, the smell of the river and the slaughterhouse was barely tolerable and seeped out into the neighborhood.21
As with much of her tour, Bernhardt received a mixed reception in Chicago. Framing the city as her favorite certainly played to local vanity, but the reality appears to have been quite different. Her memory seems in this case to have been somewhat selective. In Chicago, she encountered what one scholar characterized as an “intolerant, narrow-minded, and insensitive” upper class along with “lukewarm audiences and captious critics.”22 Perhaps she neither noticed nor cared; or perhaps what the critics wrote did not reflect how people greeted and celebrated her in person. Her fascination with Chicago may have been generated by the sheer velocity of life in the business district and among its business leaders, which had already generated much comment in the European press.
Bernhardt's status as a famous artist of dubious moral standing challenged the ethics of Chicago's Protestant elite. She presented a dilemma to people like the Pullmans: being seen at one of her performances was a social necessity, but being seen with her in person risked social disapprobation. Her morals were assumed to have been corrupted by the stage, a perception reinforced by her openly acknowledging the illegitimate son with whom she traveled. An exhibition of her paintings and sculptures that accompanied her around the country added to the interest in her visit. Despite being ridiculed by art critics, all her works were sold to New York and Boston collectors before she returned to Europe.23 In Chicago her art was displayed at O’Brien's Gallery. Albert and Emily received a letter inviting them to a “private showing,” which turned out to be less exclusive than the solicitation suggested: O’Brien's had contacted over five hundred of Chicago's leading families.24 Emily Pullman and the other society matrons, who no doubt condemned Bernhardt's morals, flocked to view her works and to be seen “dividing their attention between the fair artist and her art.”25 Curiosity, as so often happens, overcame disapproval.
Fame opened opportunities for Albert to support causes about which he was passionate. A lifelong music lover, he showed a keen and constant determination to underwrite Chicago bands and orchestras. His earliest engagements with music came in the Universalist churches in which the family worshipped and sang, one of the few cultural continuities in his life. In Chicago, he participated in a testimonial for the manager of the “handsome and well-appointed” Crosby's Opera House, an institution he helped to subsidize.26 Crosby's, location of the 1868 Republican National Convention that nominated Grant for the presidency, gave the city, and Albert, a nationally recognized center for music performances until the Great Fire of 1871 destroyed it.27
Early in its life, the Pullman Company installed small organs in some of its palace cars and, given George's general apathy toward music, it is hard to avoid concluding that this was Albert's touch.28 The father-daughter team of Albert and Nellie occasionally entertained guests on excursion trains.29 Other family members joined him for the music at church, including George and sister Emma whenever possible.30 Albert also helped organize a benefit for one of the leading actors in the McVicker's Theatre Company.31 Parties, fundraisers, and wedding receptions at the Pullman residence frequently involved hiring musical groups such as Johnny Hand's Orchestra.32
Albert used his position as an officer of the Pullman Company to engage musicians whenever possible, employing the Great Western Light Guard Band to entertain guests on more than one occasion.33 When the Occidental Hall was converted into the West End Opera House in 1877, Albert, along with several of his cronies, organized the grand opening.34 Albert also sponsored a summer concert series featuring Hand's Orchestra, held on an island in Lincoln Park's South Pond. Performing music “of the usual excellent popular style,” the ensemble ran through a repertoire of works by composers long forgotten (Breitsprack, Leutner, Vogt) and well-remembered (Mendelssohn, Verdi), concluding with a piece by John Hand himself.35 Albert's tastes ran to contemporary classical and sacred music. He showed no interest in the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's predecessors, though George did because of the high-profile business leaders it attracted.36 In 1880, Albert cosigned an advertisement calling for a Public Park Concert Association to hold Sunday afternoon musicals in the city's parks.37 In the same year, he planned “a musical and terpsichorean fete” in conjunction with a Masonic reception in the Exposition Building.38
Perhaps Albert's signal contribution to Chicago music was his service as president of the Philharmonic Vocal Society. This organization, part of a vibrant choral-music scene in the city and descendant of two previous philharmonics from the antebellum period, met weekly in the chapel of St. Paul's Reformed Episcopal Church, where Emily occasionally worshipped.39 The church hired Clarence Eddy, touted by local boosters as “the foremost organist of America,” as its musical director.40 Albert's election as president was greeted with optimism because he apparently proposed “to lend his personal assistance towards the building-up of a first-class musical society for the West Side, and with such a start the future of the Philharmonic seems bright.” The philharmonic promised to open its rehearsals to the public and play “only the light class of music” in its concerts.41 Uninterested in wielding music as a weapon to shape society in his own image, Albert supported it whenever he could out of sheer enjoyment.42
Both Albert and George were listed as Steinway piano owners in recital programs and newspaper advertisements, but it is instructive that Albert's name appeared first.43 George did not especially enjoy music. For the younger brother, sponsoring musical festivals and orchestras was a means to making connections and displaying his public prominence, not ends in themselves.44 George did allow the captivating socialite and leading patron of classical music Jeanette Thurber to recruit him to the board of the New York–based American Opera Company, but that may have been as much for the company he would keep—Andrew Carnegie was president and August Belmont a fellow director—as for the sake of the music.45 Likewise, George was a charter member of the Chicago Musical Festival Association, where he rubbed shoulders with renowned conductor Theodore Thomas and other leaders in the musical scene.46 These activities created business-networking opportunities but did nothing to kindle a love of music in the younger brother.
Another route to name recognition in the Gilded Age came through product endorsements, a marker of fame.47 The development of a national advertising industry, of rapidly expanding newspapers owned by famous “piratical entrepreneurs,” of periodicals peddling salacious gossip, and of cheap photographic reproductions brought the eminent and the notorious into American homes on a daily basis.48 Testimonials as an advertising genre began with patent-medicine makers, whose pleas for customers were ubiquitous in newspapers by the middle of the nineteenth century.49 Being personally linked to a product in the press was a vehicle for self-promotion and simultaneously a means for consumers to identify with people they did not know and had little chance of meeting. The Pullman name drew Albert squarely into America's field of vision.
The Jennings Laundry brought Albert into the world of testimonials.50 Soon after it was founded, the laundry advertised its use of Wheeler & Wilson Sewing Machines to make shirts and Pullman uniforms.51 Jennings proclaimed Duryea's Starch as giving “the finest finish” because it “is the whitest and most economical starch ever used by us.”52 The laundry was, at that point, barely three years old, so “ever” probably meant “only.” Another nontransportation commodity Albert endorsed was Gillet's Cream Yeast. Along with Chicago mayor Monroe Heath, he was one of thirty-six people who recommended this product to “all lovers of good bread.”53 This was an example of Albert's excursion work, which included ordering food, connecting him with a supplier and earning him an invitation to the opening of a new bakery in Chicago.54
Directly relevant to his work with the Pullman Company were testimonials for industrial products the firm used. Thus, a petroleum-industry guide found Albert extolling the virtues of Mineral Sperm Oil sold by the Downer Kerosene Oil Company. A petroleum-based product, Albert reported to readers that “we have been using it in many of our cars during the past two years, with entire satisfaction, and intend continuing its use” because it was unlikely to set the car on fire in the event of an accident.55 Albert first recommended this oil for lamps reportedly of his own invention in a new car, the Castalia. Built in Detroit in 1875, Albert supervised construction and its inaugural run to St. Louis for service on the Chicago & Alton Railroad.56 The oil lamps replaced candles, which Albert thought too dim and too dangerous, remembering that an early Pullman car was destroyed by fire when a candle tipped over. He praised sperm oil as a safe alternative, though he also noted the benefits of using Faure batteries to light Pullmans in England.57 He appeared in newspapers telling readers “the use of sperm-oil in the lamps insures against accident from that source.”58 Passengers found the smell unpleasant, however, and by 1883 it was being replaced by another type of oil and, slowly but surely, by electricity.59
Another example of Albert endorsing products used in Pullman cars were seat and bed springs patented and manufactured by Zenas Cobb.60 Albert attached his name to Cobb's Patent Spring Bed in its advertisements, informing readers that the Pullman Company used Cobb's “Patent Elliptic Steel Springs, exclusively … having put them in the seats of Five Hundred of our Palace Cars.” Cobb's products, Albert testified, were “the best springs now in use.”61 Cobb and Albert became business partners, investing together in electricity, and Cobb attended Pullman family weddings. Albert's endorsement appeared in Poor's Manual of the Railroads of the United States, where advertisements trumpeted the use of Cobb springs in six hundred Pullman cars.62
Albert skillfully managed his image. The practice of endorsing products was, in the Gilded Age, new enough not to appear cheap or cynical. Seeing his name in the press on a regular basis no doubt fed his vanity while simultaneously fending off feelings of insecurity in the face of George's formidable reputation. Philanthropic activities, music sponsorship, and railroad innovations publicly positioned Albert as a trustworthy Chicago business leader. Excursions carried his name around the country, and Albert became a nationally recognized figure. He also presented himself as an expert in railroad technology, especially but not exclusively related to passenger cars.