ConclusionThe End of an Era

Less than a year after Albert's death, a nationwide strike against the Pullman Company irreparably tarnished George's already battered reputation. When Pullman's Palace Car Company (PPCC) flourished as it had in the 1880s, journalists cited his “absolute control of its affairs” as a positive factor, but his iron rule proved disastrous in a crisis.¹ That crisis arrived when the Panic of 1893 ended a decade of growth. With new orders drying up, the company laid off or shortened the workweek for employees. The mood around Pullman darkened. Taking home less, residents in company housing understandably requested an equivalent reduction in rent.

George refused. Becoming ever-more entrenched in his outlook and rigid in his business practices, he could not imagine being wrong. This attitude had been evident when he removed Albert from the company, the older brother's politics, business practices, and associates sullying the Pullman brand in George's eyes. George came to see himself as the successful son, indeed as the only truly competent one, as paterfamilias to his siblings and as guardian of the family name. Where some people mellow and become forgiving as they age, George grew increasingly intolerant. Having protected and supported Albert for so long, George had had enough. Angry with Albert's failure to meet his own high expectations, George set his heart like flint against the brother who helped him succeed so spectacularly.

This hard-hearted outlook informed George's decisions in 1894. The Pullman residencies, he continued to believe, should and could pay for themselves. In his mind, there was no connection between what happened in the factories and what his tenants paid in rent. Fortifying his reputation as an autocrat, George ignored the advice of subordinates who suggested tempering his adherence to the free market. This massive miscalculation, made partly out of a need to continue repaying loans and partly from an inflexible adherence to economic orthodoxy, guaranteed that George would be remembered less for the phenomenally successful company he cofounded or for the brave and expensive social experiment he undertook than for the strike that almost destroyed both.

The Pullman strike began in May 1894 after employees lost patience with George's steadfast refusal to lower rents and apparent delaying tactics with regard to their complaints about pay cuts and harsh treatment in the shops. When the recently organized American Railway Union launched a nationwide boycott of Pullman cars a month later, it immobilized the railroad network and led to violence, destruction, and bloodshed in Chicago and elsewhere. Roundly blamed for the confrontations caused by his intransigence, George Pullman's reputation was shattered. Critics framed his inhumane paternalism as antiquated and condemned his refusal to bargain with unions. That became his legacy.

How Albert might have responded to his brother's inhumanity is an open question. Liston Leyendecker, in his biography of George Pullman, speculates that, had Albert lived, he might have acted as a countervailing force to George and that “perhaps his sibling's name might not have been as badly besmirched” by the strike.² That seems unlikely. The relationship between the two brothers was broken long before Albert's death a year before the strike. George's perception of Albert as a liability and his willingness to erase him from the company's past indicate anger, frustration, and even a pinch of malevolence. It is unlikely George would have reached out to Albert for guidance. It is certainly tempting to imagine that, had George and Albert remained on good terms, Albert might have moderated his younger brother's dogmatic pursuit of profit. Albert certainly took a far more conciliatory, mutualist approach to labor relations than George. But so strong was George's self-belief that he would have rebuffed Albert's efforts.

President Grover Cleveland appointed a commission to investigate the Pullman strike. In its report, the commission censured George Pullman for refusing to negotiate with his workforce, and the Illinois attorney general sought to revoke the charter of the Pullman Company.³ His name in tatters and his business under attack, George died of a heart attack at age sixty-six in October 1897 and was buried in Graceland Cemetery. Fearing for the sanctity of his body, the family ordered that his coffin be embalmed in concrete and protected by iron bars to thwart would-be grave robbers.

Despite the reputational damage done by the strike, George Pullman remains a significant Gilded Age figure while Albert has disappeared. Albert's contributions to the continuous circulation of capital remain overshadowed by famous business leaders. George expunged Albert's efforts from official accounts of the origins of the Pullman Company. As early as 1872, when interviewed about the infant corporation, George reported how in 1859 he “first constructed a sleeping car.” He made no mention of Albert's contributions. George's desire to protect the Pullman name and his embarrassment at Albert's recurring financial difficulties caused George to delete the older brother from the Pullman story as it was being written.

But George's attempt to control the contemporary narrative does not by itself account for the absence of everyday entrepreneurs like Albert from the larger historical record. Other factors contribute to our focus on a few outsized individuals. The Gilded Age economy seemed to be slowly but steadily moving away from domination by small, often family-owned firms supplying local and regional markets. Large, impersonal, international corporations wove ever-tighter monopolies and dominated the landscape. This unprecedented era of expansion put the United States at the heart of the global economy. Business leaders became metonyms for their industries: Andrew Carnegie for steel, John D. Rockefeller for oil, J. P. Morgan for banking, George Pullman for railroading. But the story of triumphant titans creating an era of corporate ascendency ignores lesser-known entrepreneurs. By highlighting Albert Benton Pullman, this book has traced how those individuals cooperated to work with, through, and around the corporations reshaping the economy.⁴ From this we get a rich picture of capitalism, of its chaos and unpredictability: nothing was either inevitable or predictable; all was contingent and often accidental.⁵

Despite their centrality to the business world, everyday entrepreneurs beneath the level of prominent families remain little known. Albert Pullman is an example of those quotidian investors, though, of course, he was buoyed in choppy economic waters by the family name and his brother's largesse. One historian has labeled Albert a “trouble-shooter for George's business,” which was true to a degree.⁶ Albert certainly polished George's rough edges and calmed troubled relationships, but Albert was also self-absorbed and preoccupied with his own business ventures and family troubles. The genial face of PPCC, he was not a fixer for his younger brother but a follower of his own interests.

Living his adult life in Chicago, Albert Pullman became one of the makers and smooth talkers who greased the wheels of capitalism, one of those getters and takers whose bravado and puffery built the city from the mud up. His career epitomizes entrepreneurs whose lives, mostly now lost to us, give nuance and depth to our understanding of the development of corporate capitalism. Men and women like Richard Allen, John Drake, Cornelia Frisbie, Ebenezer Jennings, Aaron Longstreet, Laban Major, David Myers, Cyrus Pratt, Mary Sanger, Hart L. Stewart, and A. N. Waterman networked with Albert, located investments, raised capital, and heightened each other's reputations. Such networks, in their functioning and in their breakdowns, fashioned the modern economy. Their members are legion, relatable, and critical to a complete understanding of nineteenth-century industrial and commercial growth. But they have vanished from the pages of history.

Capitalism exists only to the extent that people believe in it. Economic activity might be a structure with which we must live in order to survive, but the ways we understand and act within that structure are ideological. Economic and political forces change. Albert Pullman lived at a time when accumulating the promise of payment by delaying personal gratification and taking risks in the marketplace, or convincing others to allow you to do so with their money, dominated urban economic activity. He learned how to operate within that framework, to play by the rules but also to skirt them. Be self-confident; create, use, and neglect networks; trade on your reputation; promise to fulfill dreams: all these Albert did adequately if not always successfully. Failure was an option, and the history of capitalism is riddled with those who did not attain their goals. Until recently, however, they have been neglected by historians, unsurprising in a country where achievement is glorified and failure treated with disdain or horror, when it is treated at all.⁷

Albert had several advantages in playing this game, of course, from his family name and race to his gender and office in Chicago's Central Business District, to the excursions he hosted. He gained inside information while planting stories about himself alongside those of a thriving Pullman Company. At a later time, we might have called him a Teflon investor: his portfolio and his reputation survived multiple failures. He was smart enough to use his influence within the family firm to dispense contracts to partnerships in which he had an interest. With that power, he supplied the Pullman Company while throwing investments into the public arena to see which might catch on. His experience was typical and mere failure in a business venture was no bar to future endeavor.

Albert's marketing produced a solid foundation for Pullman growth and longevity. The brand flourished into the twentieth century and beyond, used by railroads and luxury consumer-goods companies around the world, particularly in Britain.⁸ When he claimed sole responsibility for the success of Pullman's Palace Car Company, George excised the humanity Albert embodied. George lacked the human touch and consequently undervalued it, which explains, in part, why he removed Albert's essential early work as craftsman and host from company histories. With ice water in his veins and control of the immediate family in his hands, George methodically built the Pullman financial machine from inside his sumptuous office. Conversely, champaign flowed through Albert, who had faith in the people he knew and took risks with them because of it. He was an everyday entrepreneur in large measure because he came into contact with everyday people and generally liked them. Without Albert's contributions, the Pullman story is incomplete. Though dissimilar in personality and tastes, the combined efforts of Albert and George created the Pullman Company and allow us to see capitalism at ground level.