CHAPTER 21Money, Politics, and Challenging George
By 1883, Albert had moved well beyond construction. He accelerated his network building, continued to appear in the press, and made investments, good and bad, based on his access to opportunity. He began to take advantage of political connections, working to gain municipal contracts from the Democrats who had come to dominate Chicago's municipal government. Aware of the importance of politicians from the earliest excursions, Albert's appreciation of the possibilities implicit in the world of politics had deepened while watching his brother earn contracts to supply cars to the elevated railroads of New York City.
Albert Pullman was no ideologue. In an age of bitter partisan politics, he decoupled party allegiance from economic self-interest, a perfect approach in a city where issue orientation trumped organizational loyalty.1 Unlike George, who hewed closely to the Republican Party throughout his life, Albert switched to the Democrats when he found it materially convenient to do so, driven in part by the British government's treatment of Ireland. While George viewed most politicians and their efforts to regulate the railroad industry with great suspicion, Albert saw opportunities for potentially profitable municipal contracts. George truly believed that the party of their father was best for business. For Albert, the whims of change blew when economic advantage loomed. Excursions and observations taught him the efficacy of the political game, and he did so to secure contracts for companies in which he invested.
Economic forces shaped Albert's approaches to Chicago politicians. In his early years in the city, Albert had been active in Republican ward politics. His direct exposure to elected officials began when Pullman ran its first cars from Springfield to Chicago. As a shareholder, he expected to earn dividends for reinvestment and spending. Gilded Age capitalism fostered a consumer society of middle-class shoppers attracted by the widening range of products available in cities and towns across the country. The existence of this middle class papered over the growing gulf between a few rich capitalists and the vast majority of wage workers. While the Pullmans amassed substantial wealth, most Americans, especially recent immigrants, lived precariously. When the strikes of the 1870s brought capital and labor into open conflict, they shone a spotlight on the stark realities of social inequality.
Like his peers, George believed he needed to assert control over the political system to protect and further his interests. Politics and business went hand in hand in the Gilded Age. Like other corporate entities, the Pullman Company sought to take advantage of the connection between political power and economic profit. George's national view of politics led him to cultivate President Ulysses S. Grant, which was helped by Grant's association with the state of Illinois. George hired Horace Porter away from the Grant administration in 1872. Grant took Porter, who had served him as a military aide during the Civil War and attended General Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox Court House in Virginia, with him into the White House in 1869.2 Hiring Porter as first vice president gave Pullman's Palace Car Company (PPCC) a permanent presence in New York City and a conduit to the nation's capital. George rewarded Porter for deserting Grant, beset by the scandals and corruption charges threatening to sink his administration, with a small tranche of stocks. Porter also received a significant pay increase to serve as George's eyes and ears on the East Coast.3
If he was stung by Porter's departure, Grant did not show it, wishing his former aide the best and acknowledging that, with the move, “our official relations have to cease, though I am glad to believe that our personal relations will through life remain as in the past.”4 As evidence of corruption in Grant's administration mounted, George fretted that his newest hire might bring public disgrace on the company. Porter assured George there was nothing in his career “which does not reflect credit on the P. P. C. Co.”5
Having allies in positions of power could help generate revenue. Pullman cars played an important if unobtrusive role in international relations when the federal government hired them for visiting heads of state or their surrogates. Royalty rode the Pullmans when Grand Duke Alexis of Russia toured the United States in 1871 and 1872. Arriving after a visit to Great Britain, he traveled throughout New England and the mid-Atlantic states by special train, then was catapulted west to Chicago, which was still reeling from the effects of the fire of 1871, for a reception featuring, among others, George Pullman.6 Albert, George, and several railroad executives rode with the Russian nobleman and his party from Chicago to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, after which the visitors journeyed west to hunt bison and south to New Orleans before departing for Cuba. Grand Duke Alexis used a new Palace Car, the Ruby, for his American tour, paid for by the US government.7 To commemorate the visit, the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company presented customers with a lithograph of the Grand Duke when they bought tea.8
On another official occasion, King Kalākaua of Hawai’i traveled in a Pullman car at the federal government's expense. Hoping to negotiate a reduction in the tariff on Hawai’ian sugar, Kalākaua spent three months in the United States. He and his entourage traveled from San Francisco to the nation's capital, where President Grant hosted a state dinner in his honor and a joint session of Congress received him. The political negotiations resulted in a Reciprocity Treaty eliminating the import tax on Hawai’ian sugar. The Treaty further bound Hawai’i to the United States, however, and the ultimate beneficiaries were American corporations which owned the expanding sugar plantations. The monarch also visited New York City, New England, Niagara Falls, Chicago, St. Louis, and Omaha. Trips like these brought the Pullman Company a tidy profit and a large dose of publicity.9
Fear of regulation also fueled George's interest in politics. Worried about a Pullman monopoly, a Senate subcommittee contacted George Pullman for information about Pullman operations. Defending the company's practice of running cars on multiple lines, he explained in written testimony that only a unified company could overcome the complexities of designing, building, and operating sleeping cars across vast distances. He explained the philosophy behind Pullman contracts and reported that the same system was in use in Europe. He justified Pullman's market dominance by claiming the system of broken journeys and regular changes of train was simply unacceptable to the traveling public. Monopoly, for George, was the only rational means of operating sleeping cars in the United States and, because of its superior product, his company should do the operating. Concerned about corruption, the Senate subcommittee proposed banning railroad executives from serving on multiple boards of directors. To George's relief, nothing came of this recommendation.10
Undaunted by federal concerns and interested in diversifying the Pullman range, George found in municipal politics a source of lucrative contracts, allowing Albert to learn firsthand from his brother about the intersection of politics and money. This opportunity came in New York City because local politicians sought to alleviate congestion on the streets of Manhattan. Weighing several alternatives, they authorized construction of rail lines along and above some of the busiest streets, including a project called the Gilbert Elevated Railroad. Originally proposed as an air-driven tube railway by Dr. Rufus Gilbert, it would become a more conventional elevated steam railroad when the council awarded him a franchise in 1872. The line was to run down Sixth Avenue and promised to earn him a considerable income, but Gilbert shared Albert's terrible sense of timing and the capital he needed proved impossible to raise during the Panic of 1873. Facing bankruptcy, Gilbert lost control of his creation.
In 1875, a new rapid transit commission approved construction and appointed a board of directors that included, as one Chicago-based reporter wrote, “that selfish but able character, George M. Pullman.” By then a major stockholder in the reorganized Gilbert Elevated Railroad, Pullman convinced the commissioners to hire PPCC vice president Horace Porter as its secretary.11 Pullman and Porter proved a formidable team, convincing the commission to pay PPCC to supply cars to the “viaduct railroad.” George then secured funding for construction of the line in his role as president of the New York Loan and Improvement Company.12 Albert and George traveled to New York to finalize the contracts in 1877, earning the right to build luxurious but lightweight cars.13 Gilbert's name remained attached to the project until the Rapid Transit Commission merged the Gilbert Elevated into rival New York Elevated to form a single Manhattan Railway Company.14
Prize in hand, Porter and Pullman sent the specifications to Detroit, where the cars were to be built and then shipped by water to Manhattan. Albert supervised preparations for the trial runs.15 He rode on the first train to test the right-of-way, sitting with the new line's superintendent, Martin Van Brocklin. He and Van Brocklin evidently hit it off, and Albert convinced the latter to experiment with paper wheels on the new carriages.16 The elevated also tested paper brake shoes at Albert's insistence. Manufactured by Richard Allen's paper-wheel company, the brakes consisted of cast-iron shells filled with compressed paper, but they failed to solve the problem of rust forming on wheels and rails and were replaced by conventional iron brake shoes.17 This did not stop Albert from telling journalists all about his crucial role in planning and preparing the cars for service, which included testing the height of the benches and recommending seasonally appropriate seating material (cloth in the winter and rattan in the summer). The Pullman touches, such as framed mirrors and a smooth ride, would, he insisted, allow women “to inspect their toilets and adjust their bonnets” as the train ran at twenty miles per hour above Manhattan streets.18 The elevated was, as one wag wrote, “the second idea Pullman has got at second-hand and improved into grand utility.”19
Albert led several Gilbert Elevated Railroad excursions for journalists, one of whom told him the cars were “too nice for the general mob.” Unfazed, he responded, “There's nothing too nice for the people…. People behave themselves better when they enter a car like this. It is suggestive to them of refinement and elegance. It has an educating effect, I believe, a refining influence, as has everything elegant or beautiful.”20 This sentiment reflected the environmentalist philosophy of the Pullman Company: create beautiful surroundings and you will generate decent behavior, a form of control to stem the tide of unrest and uncertainty seemingly endemic to industrial society. The Pullmans believed a genteel, refined atmosphere would, as the historian Amy Richter recorded, feminize railroad travel, control male urges, and create “a public home on rails as an agent of civilization.”21 Albert understood that message and deployed it in defense of the transit cars.
Beauty was no substitute for safe operations, however, and two of the elevated trains collided at slow speed on the day the line opened to the public. Fortunately, no one was hurt, no harm befell the rolling stock, and delays proved short-lived.22 Illustrations of the cars at the time of their introduction depict boxy wooden exteriors with plenty of windows. Passengers sat on padded seats along each side of carriages provided with carpets and gas lights. The clerestory provided ventilation.23 George's political connections paid off as New York elevated—and later subway—contracts earned a steady stream of income for the Pullman Company. After an initial order of 100 cars, Pullman built another 253 for use on New York mass-transit lines.24
The opening-day accident was one of only a few such collisions, but New Yorkers criticized the elevated lines for other reasons. The Gilbert Elevated took two years to complete, its construction blocking already crowded thoroughfares and drawing numerous complaints about the inconvenience caused to shoppers and office workers.25 When the line opened, noisy steam locomotives polluted adjacent buildings, while noxious fumes damaged merchandise and seeped into rooms at rail height.26 The trains operated close enough to buildings that passengers “might shake hands with the inhabitants and see what they have for dinner” as the locomotive's “green and red fiery eyes star[ed] ahead.”27
The elevated was nothing to look at aesthetically, described in contemporary reports as little more than “an iron bridge … occupying and disfiguring the finest avenues in New York City.” Subway advocates noted how sharp curves restricted car lengths and the ugly iron structures lowered the value of buildings along their routes. Shadows and smoke blocked the light, casting the streets below into perpetual night. When New York's first underground railroad opened in 1904, it was faster and more reliable than the elevated, and in 1938, the city began tearing down the overhead tracks, transferring the remaining Pullman cars onto the subway.28
Despite the criticism, George's political connections and Albert's bonhomie combined well in New York City. The elevated deal gave them valuable entrée into the region's expanding urban transit systems and set a pattern for future contracts. In 1885, the Staten Island Rapid Transit Company ordered thirty passenger and ten excursion cars from Pullman, specifying that they were to be identical to the Manhattan vehicles. This agreement contained an unusual provision that “all screw threads, bolt heads and nuts must conform to the standard adopted by the United American Car Builders Association.” It also demanded forging and casting of “the very best quality” and stipulated that “all work must be done in a thorough, substantial and workmanlike manner.”29 In the same year, the Suburban Rapid Transit Company made a similar request, without the quality control clauses, for four new cars with bodies “to be the same in all respects as the last cars built by Pullman's Palace Car Company for the Manhattan Railway Company.”30
By the time of the Staten Island contract, Albert's politics were shifting. Until then, he had trended Republican. In October 1874, Albert and other “representatives of Chicago” lunched with President Grant on his visit to the city.31 Three years later, Albert took the mayor and several Chicago aldermen on an excursion to Milwaukee to show off a train of Pullman cars of “rare workmanship and beauty.”32 At the conclusion of Grant's post presidential world tour, Albert and Emily were among the five hundred people invited to a celebratory reception at the Chicago Club.33
Albert occasionally attended Republican rallies. He was present at former Illinois attorney general Robert Ingersoll's defense of Rutherford B. Hayes following the controversial 1876 presidential election.34 Albert's final public association with the Republican Party occurred in the municipal elections of 1881, when he was listed among “prominent Republicans” present at a meeting to ratify John M. Clark as mayoral candidate.35 Following that election, however, Albert began to identify as a Democrat, exacerbating a growing rift with George. Publicly switching his allegiance from the Republican to the Democratic Party separated Albert from other family members and may have been partly to spite his brother.
A lifelong, unwavering Republican, George's consistent political stand was in sharp contrast to Albert. George found the moral claims and laissez-faire politics of the Republican Party congenial. He funded Republican causes, motivated by his belief in maintaining the gold standard and by his friendships with Grant and Porter. In George's view, the Republican Party operated in the best interests of business, while Albert appears to have taken a pro-labor stand. This also separated him from his in-laws, who were leading Republicans in Crawford County, Pennsylvania.36 Even their choice of social clubs divided the brothers by the 1880s: George belonged to the Union League Club, which allied with the Republican Party, while Albert and his son-in-law Graeme Stewart were members of the Iroquois Club, which recruited from among leading Democrats.37
Albert also moved away from Republican politics because of the British government's actions in Ireland and the influence of his business associates, especially John Drake. George uncritically enjoyed all things British, but Albert generally did not, his antipathy toward Great Britain marking him as a man of his time and place. Proud Americans contrasted their own striding accumulation and strident modernity with backward-looking, tradition-bound Europeans. Albert particularly criticized Britons for fetishizing custom, refusing to embrace change, and failing to appreciate the advantages of Democracy, familiar tropes in the lexicon of the New World.
Albert aired his anti-British opinions by joining the clamor for land reform in Ireland, governed at the time from London. He participated in an “Irish sympathy meeting” supporting the Irish National Land League, serving as a vice president organizing marches through Chicago and speeches by Irish and American reformers.38 The Land League was the parliamentary arm of the New Departure, a loose political and social movement combining revolutionary agitation with constitutional demands for land reform and self-rule. In the 1870s, Ireland experienced a second major potato famine in which the staple crop of many Irish peasants failed. Though not as devastating as the blight of the Hungry Forties, when at least a fifth of the population died or left the country, the new outbreak once again highlighted the unequal distribution of land and power across the British-controlled island.
The New Departure demanded Irish Home Rule and advocated subdividing large estates owned by absentee landlords, almost all of whom lived in England. Seeking to relieve hardship in the short run and ultimately to nationalize land, the league grew to prominence during years of agricultural depression in Ireland, aided in no small measure by infusions of cash from adherents in the United States and Canada. That assistance, gleaned from events like the Chicago meeting in which Albert participated, helped generate widespread popular support for the New Departure, which also advocated withdrawing Irish members from the British Parliament and seceding from the United Kingdom. The Land League's most vocal and glamorous proponent was Charles Stewart Parnell, a Protestant landlord and member of the British parliament with a family history of anti-English activism.39 Marshaling the New Departure in the United States was John Devoy, whose counterpart in Ireland was the one-armed radical Michael Davitt, founder of the Land League and a would-be insurrectionist imprisoned for planning to overthrow the British government. All three made their way to Chicago.
Albert supported Land League events by providing Pullman cars in December 1879 and February 1880. The first was a relatively minor affair, a meeting at McCormick Hall that Albert helped organize along with publisher Joseph Medill, former mayor John Wentworth, hotelier John Drake, and other prominent Chicagoans. Politicians, including both the sitting and past governors of Illinois, several judges, and retired military leaders, spoke at the gathering.40 The outcome was formation of a local arm of the Irish National Land League to collect funds for famine relief. Cooperating with local lodges of the major Irish American fraternity, the Ancient Order of Hibernians, and immigrant mutual aid societies, the Land League branch invited Parnell to visit Chicago.41
Late in 1879, leaders of the Land League across the United States began planning to host Parnell on his tour of the country. Recruiting in Catholic churches and from ethnic Irish organizations, the league gained members and a groundswell of popular support.42 The Chicago branch organized a public meeting at the Exposition Building to give Parnell a platform. Albert again supplied a Pullman car for the Irish dignitaries.43 The league appointed collectors and gathered funds from across the city, with newspapers reporting that distillers and liquor distributors were being particularly generous.44 The cultural connection of the Irish with alcohol played into a long-running stereotype, and reports generally omitted the full range of commercial supporters for the cause, which included many non-drink-related businesses.
Parnell's trip across the United States was heavily publicized by the organizers, and crowds gathered alongside the rail lines to get a glimpse of the man who would become known as “the uncrowned king of Ireland.” As the situation deteriorated at home, Parnell asked his audiences to donate to two separate funds, one for political agitation and another for famine relief.45 As Parnell crossed Michigan, crowds gathered at Jackson, Kalamazoo, and other stops where his brief appearances met with great acclaim. Blocked from access to most middle-class occupations by systemic prejudice and rampant bigotry, Irish American families saw in the plight of friends and families left behind a reflection of their own condition as an oppressed underclass. As a result, many viewed Parnell as a champion of change in the United States as well as in Ireland.46
Alighting at Chicago's Central Station, Parnell and his party rested at John Drake's Grand Pacific Hotel before joining a carefully planned march to the Exposition Building. The procession bearing Parnell through downtown Chicago and out to the lakefront featured delegations from Roman Catholic parishes and Irish American fraternal orders, their banners brightening the gathering dusk. Estimates of a crowd of fifty thousand or more in the building itself were overinflated, but the popularity of the event cannot be doubted.47 Demanding land redistribution, Parnell hinted at the need for Irish Home Rule. The meeting demonstrated a new departure for the Catholic Church in Chicago, which until this point had refused to participate in Irish political movements but now evinced a growing unity with the Irish American community.48 For Parnell and for the cause of Irish nationalism, the tour was a success. Lasting three months and carrying him across sixteen thousand miles of American soil, he raised $70,000, addressed the US House of Representatives, and met with President Rutherford B. Hayes.49 Parnell's speeches solidified relations between Irish Americans and the Emerald Isle, forging a transatlantic movement.
For his part, Albert's activities with and on behalf of Irish land reform signaled a shift in his personal political attachments and a challenge to George. Indeed, one motive for participating in the anti-British movement may have been to extend his business networks by drawing closer to Chicago politics. In the wake of Land League agitation, he befriended leading members of Chicago's Democratic Party.50 This political shift began after Albert's visits to England and accelerated when he realized the potential for profitable gain from municipal contracts. He had come to understand how to tap into and use a different type of network by drawing on the knowledge of politicians gleaned on excursion runs. The Irish Land League agitation gave him an opportunity to build on that base.
Another example of Albert's falling in with local Democrats can be seen in his role at the birth of the Nameless Club on the city's West Side. The first meeting occurred at the home of leading Democrat Carter Harrison Sr. and the third at Albert's residence, both on Ashland Avenue in a comfortable neighborhood of “fine homes, ample lots, and shady streets.” On each occasion Johnny Hand's Orchestra provided music and Eckhardt Catering supplied dinner. At Albert's house, the members of the club danced “vigorously until past midnight.”51 This type of sociability generated populist criticism of “silk stocking” Democrats who, in their quest to “wear collars and clean their finger-nails,” had lost sight of working families’ needs.52 Albert was indeed part of the “kid-gloved and gold-headed cane Democracy.”53 But he cared not; his expanding network was useful in the world of government contracts, a world he wanted to enter.
The Nameless Club illustrates Albert's political pragmatism. His familiarity with individual politicians and his simple desire to make money gave him a clear-eyed view of the arena. Albert first met the Kentucky-born, Yale-educated lawyer Carter Harrison Sr. at one of John Drake's game dinners, undoubtedly finding the garrulous civic executive to his liking.54 Described by one biographer as “a Protestant but not a Puritan,” Harrison was an unabashed booster of his adopted city with a loyal following among the brewers and the taverners whose interests he protected from reforming Republicans.55 Harrison served as mayor between 1879 and 1887, returning for a fifth term in 1893. His personality and his policies endeared him to Albert.
By the 1880s, companies in which Albert invested were bidding on city contracts. To win those contracts, he needed friends in high places, and Democrats controlled the city council. Thus, for example, in 1887, an iron foundry of which Albert was president won a contract from the Harrison administration to produce municipal hydrant covers. He also successfully lobbied the municipal government for the right to build a spur across city streets to connect the Congdon Brake Shoe factory with the Pittsburg, Cincinnati, Chicago & St. Louis Railway.56 A cab company Albert headed gained a municipal license, another example of Albert's business interests strengthening his connection to city government. Unlike George, who had the luxury of being selective in his business dealings, everyday entrepreneurs like Albert chased profit wherever it could be found, and city contracts were always tempting.
After twenty years of participation in Republican Party affairs, Albert publicly embraced the Chicago Democratic machine, serving on the committee making arrangements for a visit by President Grover Cleveland and, as the presidential campaign progressed, endorsing Cleveland's calls for tariff reduction.57 Later, toward the end of his life, Albert, his son-in-law Graeme Stewart, and other Chicago businessmen signed a newspaper advertisement promoting Harrison as a candidate for mayor.58 Unlike George, Albert's political position changed. From unquestioningly accepting the family's republicanism, the older brother shifted to the Democrats. The destruction of mutual labor relations, his sympathetic understanding of the Irish situation, opposition to high tariffs, networking activities, and economic self-interest drew him away from George and the Republican Party. Politics for the younger brother was about business, but Albert encountered a wider range of people than George and his political transformation reflected that experience.