CHAPTER 10Network Building

Capital in the Gilded Age moved along channels created by interpersonal interactions. Meeting and impressing people to share knowledge, pool resources, and form partnerships were vital endeavors for everyday entrepreneurs like Albert Pullman. For him, network building radiated out from family members to local contacts. Managing the Pullman office in Chicago's Central Business District, a condensed area of intense commercial activity, brought Albert into regular contact with possible partners. His role as a salaried employee of Pullman's Palace Car Company (PPCC) and his reputation as a genial host gave him access to business circles in Chicago and beyond. He used his surname, family contacts, business associates, excursion acquaintances, and philanthropic connections to build a variety of networks in very different types of enterprises.

Business historians define networks as webs for “asset pooling or resource provision” in which two or more people or organizations seek to benefit economically by “deriving value from the exchange.”¹ Scholars position networks as deliberately designed to build personal connections for collective gain or pathways along which social capital travels for profit. As Albert's career demonstrated, however, this positive view of networks is at best partial, ignoring incompetence, negligence, and criminality. Despite sometimes calamitous and occasionally illegal activities, brother George and the Pullman name helped Albert escape from investment catastrophes, rescue his reputation, and enter new networks.

Networking is a form of marketing, of convincing others of your own worth, something Albert became very good at doing. He developed a proficiency for meeting, engaging, and befriending influential people, creating what the historian Pamela Walker Laird called “chains and webs of contacts and communication channels.”² Albert's “chains and webs” consisted of several contiguous but rarely overlapping networks. Nineteenth-century Chicago contained multiple intermeshed entrepreneurial links. Hemmed in by railroad facilities and the lakefront, the Central Business District was fertile ground for Albert's amiable if sometimes aimless network building. Few in the city's business world could afford to be solely bankers or railroad executives. Investors engaged in multiple business sectors, purchasing shares in companies they believed would return a profit or forming partnerships to carry their interests into new arenas. Where most wage workers only had the time and energy for selling their labor power—hardly a path to capital accumulation—middle-class people could save money, build reputations, and interact with and be convinced by friends, colleagues, and acquaintances to invest their savings. Hence the importance of networks, through which rumors, news, opportunities, and financing circulated. And thus the significance of excursions for Albert, bringing him into contact with people and projects with whom and into which he could invest.

Albert created both formal and informal networks. He met people; they exchanged ideas; sometimes they invested together. Some of his ventures failed of their own accord, others because of poor management or underinvestment, a few because they were fraudulent. But Albert's networks occasionally collapsed because of Albert. He lost track of, neglected, or violated the trust of acquaintances. He could prove an inattentive business associate for whom the next partnership seemed to be more interesting than the current project. His regular travels, his willingness to pursue new opportunities, his obvious distaste for writing letters, and his persistent negligence undermined far too many of his investments. Luckily for him, his reputation always rebounded.

Family members provided Albert with early business opportunities, beginning when the oldest brother, Royal Henry, made Albert a partner in the Salem Cross Roads, New York, woodworking shop. Albert's wife Emily then convinced him to move to Grand Rapids, Michigan, to open a furniture-making concern near her relatives, and, of course, George took him to Chicago. Other relatives provided a fertile second circle of contacts, including James Y. Sanger, George's father-in-law. Sanger introduced Albert to Hart L. Stewart, a retired militia commander and Chicago-area landowner.³ Stewart took Albert into a railroad freight-car company and an insurance business, both of which failed. Albert repaid the favor by taking Sanger's son, James McKissack Sanger, into a banking investment, another disastrous initiative.⁴ Family served as Albert's initial source of patronage and his entrée to the nepotism-driven world of nineteenth-century business.

Once he had found his feet, Albert moved beyond family connections. Several prominent individuals, including John B. Drake, brought him into Chicago business circles. Co-owner of Tremont House, the well-known hotel whose lifting Albert had coordinated, Drake was a fixture in Chicago society. He welcomed travelers to the establishment, providing meeting rooms and hosting annual game dinners for as many as five hundred guests. Celebrated for serving “a veritable zoo of animals,” among them boar and buffalo, Drake held his first feast in 1855, and by the 1880s his game dinners had become “the most famous culinary events in the United States.”⁵ By then, Drake had moved from the Tremont to the Grand Pacific Hotel where, as one astonished visitor noted, meals were served at a fixed price of $4 or $5 and lax attention to security meant “anyone might walk into the dining room, have dinner, and return to the street, without anybody being the wiser.”⁶ Another visitor, the publisher Miriam Leslie, called it “light, bright, and marvelous in frescoing and gilding,” a perfect counterpart to a Pullman car. Of the food, she wrote, “a week of such sumptuous fare would be enough to derange one's digestion for life.”⁷ Albert, a game dinner regular, used Drake's hotels to feed and house Pullman clients and to hold business meetings, deranging his own digestion and exacerbating his lifelong stomach problems.⁸ Drake integrated Albert into the world of civic engagement, another powerful networking medium.⁹ And, of course, Albert invited Drake to travel on Pullman excursions.¹⁰

Local charities and philanthropies proved productive territory for entering and expanding business networks. Albert and his wife Emily connected together and separately across Chicago society. Facilitating this process was the comfortable house on the West Side they bought and renovated. At this home on Ashland Avenue, they raised daughters Nellie, Emma, and Allie; employed three servants; and insinuated themselves into the city's social world.¹¹ Emily became a leading member of the Ladies of the Good Samaritan Society, a regular participant in the activities of St. Paul's Universalist Church, and a directress of the Protestant Orphan Asylum.¹² Her work for the last of these generated business for the Pullman Company when she needed railroad cars to take her fellow directresses on day trips outside the city.¹³

Engaging in charitable work brought Emily Pullman into the informal public sphere where women's private philanthropy promoted the common good, a form of civic engagement bringing the duties of the domestic sphere into the community.¹⁴ Emily also donated money to causes she championed. Her regular financial contributions, often $100 or more, helped open a school at the orphanage. She provided a turkey every Thanksgiving, joining with many others to ensure that the inmates had a full week of fowl feasts.¹⁵ Because it was important to be seen, she waltzed at social clubs with her daughters and attended society weddings with Albert.¹⁶ As Laird writes in her history of influence, “The business world has always been intensely social,” and Albert and Emily had an advantage over the introverted George and his reclusive wife Hattie on that score.¹⁷

Albert's role as PPCC general superintendent included assigning Pullman contracts. One early task involved finding a laundry for the piles of dirty linens and bedclothes Pullman journeys produced. In 1869, Albert awarded the contract for Pullman cleaning to the Chicago Steam Laundry and Dye Works, owned by Ebenezer Jennings.¹⁸ The connection between Jennings and Pullman was a breakthrough in Albert's networking. Jennings became a close business partner, one of a few lasting relationships in the constellation of networks Albert created.

Born in New York City in 1829, Jennings served as postmaster in tiny Freehold, New York, before moving to Chicago in 1865, where he patented a type of suspender for trousers.¹⁹ His enterprise, sometimes referred to as the Oriental Soap Works, quickly became known informally as the Pullman Laundry, a nickname Jennings abhorred. But Albert had been looking for investment opportunities and this was a safe and mutually beneficial one because there was no shortage of dirty laundry from Pullman cars. He raised capital to invest with Jennings by selling “Five thousand dollars Stock … in one of the best paying manufacturing companies in the city of Chicago.”²⁰ Albert joined as a principal partner in the Chicago Steam Laundry, which became Jennings & Company in 1871 and branched out to make uniforms for Pullman porters and conductors. Thus equipped, the laundry also manufactured hotel and restaurant liveries “on short notice” for its Chicago clientele.²¹

A fire destroyed the first Jennings laundry building and $5,000 worth of Pullman goods in 1874. Insurance covered most of the partners’ losses and rebuilding enabled them to create more spacious premises.²² Albert's contract with Jennings proved lucrative and lasting. The laundry earned $15,936.09 from Pullman—over half the company's total laundry expenses—in the last six months of 1881.²³ The company contracted with other laundries (see tables 10.1 and 10.2), but none was as important as Jennings & Company, which conveniently sat at the end of the many Pullman runs terminating in Chicago.

Volume paid handsomely. Pullman porters changed sheets daily, uncommon even for luxury trains at the time. A hotel car, on which meals were served, carried 1,000 napkins, 200 tablecloths, and 400 towels along with bedsheets and other linens.²⁴ One week-long trip could use as many as 3,000 napkins, 675 tablecloths, 1,700 sheets and pillowcases, and 2,450 towels, plus 200 coats and 300 aprons worn by waiters, all of which had to be cleaned when a train returned to Chicago. PPCC spent $9,000 to $10,000 a month by 1879 to launder sheets, pillow slips, hand towels, roller towels, and blankets, much of it in Chicago.²⁵ This was a nice opportunity to distribute largesse, and Albert took full advantage of his power to choose the laundry at which the bedclothes and linens should be cleaned, creating what Laird calls “authority networks”: nonfamily members cultivated for the sake of mutual financial advantage.²⁶

Jennings moved into men's clothing and advertised his exclusive “Oriental Shirt” in Chicago newspapers, promising “a perfect fit in every case.”²⁷ He married Cornelia Frisbie in 1877, appointing her secretary of his laundry business.²⁸ By 1884, the oriental nomenclature was being downplayed and E. Jennings & Co. sold ties, handkerchiefs, socks, and other menswear.²⁹ Despite changing its name and diversifying beyond laundry, the business remained firmly tied to Pullman in the popular imagination, leading Jennings to complain in 1885 that people knew “E. Jennings & Co.” as “the Pullman laundry” despite the fact that “Mr. Jennings, its founder and present head,” had worked for many years building the business.³⁰ But the label stuck and even in his obituary Jennings was credited with organizing “The Pullman Laundry Car Company.”³¹ Such was the power of the Pullman name.

In his role as PPCC general superintendent, Albert met and learned from experts in railroad construction and operations, becoming particularly close to Aaron Longstreet. Another Pullman Company connection to the Jennings Laundry, Longstreet was an acquaintance from Grand Rapids who worked as Pullman Company mechanical superintendent.³² Longstreet helped Albert supervise car construction in Chicago and later in Europe, joining Albert's business networks when he invested in the Jennings Laundry. Longstreet, Pullman, and Jennings patented a new type of shirt, although, like so many inventions, it did not generate sales.³³

The Jennings Laundry was not the only example of Albert connecting the Pullman Company with a supplier. Albert became friends with Richard Allen, founder of Allen's Paper Wheel Company. It is unclear how they met, but it was most likely on a Pullman excursion. Allen began his manufacturing career in Vermont, following the paper-mill trail to New York's Hudson River valley. He patented and manufactured a wheel using compressed paper inside a steel rim. By absorbing vibrations otherwise transmitted through the wheels into carriages, paper provided a relatively quiet and smooth ride. Allen was not alone in doing this, but Pullman Company patronage gave him a competitive edge. The Pullman Company began purchasing Allen's wheels around 1870, when Albert championed their use. His belief in their efficacy never wavered and he defended them when detractors worried the paper would break down under the strain of constant usage and increasing car weights.³⁴

Railroad-related investments peppered Albert's portfolio. He bought into a railroad-car manufacturing company when General Hart L. Stewart brought him onto the board of Street's Palace Stock Car Company in July 1871.³⁵ Created as the J. W. Street & Company Cattle Express Co. a year earlier by another of the many everyday entrepreneurs Albert met, John W. Street of Salem, Ohio, the firm moved its operations from Ohio to Chicago, where it incorporated and changed its name.³⁶ Street gained a patent for his cattle car and promised investors a bright, profit-filled future.³⁷ As the center of the meatpacking industry and a crucial transshipment point for cattle moving from west to east, Chicago was an ideal location for Street's concern. The famous Union Stockyards consolidated the transportation of cows, hogs, and sheep to and from Chicago at the end of the Civil War, holding up to 120,000 animals at any one time and employing over 25,000 workers at its height. When the first packinghouse opened nearby in 1868, the meat industry embraced mass production and bulk railroad transportation, both of which Chicago was well placed to provide.³⁸

The first railroad stock cars carrying animals from railhead to slaughterhouse were little more than boxes with open slats for air circulation. Animals lost weight or died en route, even though trains stopped periodically to let them off for watering and feeding. Street claimed his cars provided an economically sound and theologically acceptable alternative to conventional cars, giving shippers a means to protect their investments while avoiding “the sin of cruelty to animals.”³⁹ His cattle cars had separate compartments adjustable to the size of the animal with a feeding box and a water pipe for each head, allowing cattle to stand or lie down. Eliminating stops saved time in transit. One enthusiastic early endorsement called it “a first-class stable on wheels” because animals had room to turn around, were not bruised or injured on route, and lost little or no weight on their travels. In short, according to this witness, the cars offered “great saving to the shipper[,] and humanity to the stock.”⁴⁰

As a Pullman, Albert lent credence to the use of the word “palace” in the young firm's name and it displayed his moniker in its advertisements.⁴¹ Also serving as director with Albert and Stewart was the lawyer H. S. Monroe, who would later work as a solicitor for the Pullman Company and help Albert disengage from some of his legal entanglements. Two weeks after Albert joined the board of Street's Palace Stock Car Company, an investor by the name of John Corning sued the firm to recover share certificates he claimed were being illegally withheld.⁴² Momentum slowed, the company suffered from “much confusion in its business affairs,” and Albert jumped ship.⁴³ For once, he displayed impeccable timing. Shortly after he sold his interest, an agent sued for the return of an advance payment on shares, claiming Street's Palace Stock Car Company was a scam and that the directors were “removing and fraudulently concealing its property to defeat and hinder its creditors.”⁴⁴ In 1874, Street sued his own company in an unsuccessful attempt to recover his initial $5,000 investment. The company collapsed, though Street would revive it as Street's Western Stable Car Line of Chicago in 1886. By that time, however, Alonzo C. Mather had cornered the market by applying Street's ideas to his Humane Stock Transportation Company.⁴⁵

Fraternal orders offered another important arena for business networking.⁴⁶ The Pullman brothers were invited into Chicago Freemasonry because their father Lewis had been a Mason in New York, though their local prominence doubtless helped. The prestigious La Fayette Chapter No. 2, Royal Arch Masons, the oldest branch in the city, initiated Albert along with transportation entrepreneur Frank Parmelee, with whom he would do business and later become a competitor.⁴⁷ As he did with many other organizations, Albert provided excursion trains for Masonic journeys. The Apollo Commandery, a unit of the elite Masonic Knights Templar, traveled by Pullman from Chicago to St. Louis for their 1868 meeting.⁴⁸ The order thanked Albert specifically for making the trip comfortable and enjoyable by allowing them to use the vehicles. They subsequently inaugurated Albert into the Grand Commandery of Illinois, in which he regularly encountered other Masons.⁴⁹

Excursion runs provided almost endless network-building opportunities. A prime example of this came on a trip from Chicago to Fort Hayes, Kansas, in 1870. Albert deepened his connection with Cyrus Pratt on this excursion, organized by the National Land Company for the Kansas Pacific Railroad. Pratt (with Ebenezer Jennings the other lasting node on Albert's networks) labored on boats out of St. Louis, Missouri, before becoming a ticket agent for Mississippi River steamboat services. He worked for a while as a passenger agent for the Missouri & Pacific Railroad, traveling in that capacity on the 1867 trip to Niagara Falls for a conference of general ticket agents, and later held a similar position for the Chicago, Alton & St. Louis Railroad and for the National Land Company.⁵⁰ Pratt met Albert in the Pullman office and wrote letters of introduction to New York railroad agents for George Pullman.⁵¹

Pratt assisted Albert in organizing the Kansas trip, which began with a delegation of Chicago business leaders traveling in ten new Pullman cars to Kansas City, Missouri, and from there to Denver, Colorado. Pratt's job was to sell land grant tracts adjacent to the Kansas Pacific Railroad, itself financed by selling public lands granted to the company by the federal government.⁵² The train had been commissioned by John S. Loomis, president of the National Land Company, to show off the territory to potential buyers. The Euro-American settlement of Kansas had begun in the 1850s but accelerated after the Civil War with the building of the railroad. After a two-year hiatus, during which the company ran out of money and the stagnant line sat unfinished, it began pushing west once more into land appropriated from Indigenous peoples.⁵³ Impressed by Pullman service and rolling stock, the Kansas Pacific Railroad contracted with PPCC for regular trains between Kansas City and Denver.⁵⁴

On the 1870 Kansas excursion, Pullman observed how Pratt worked with Loomis to market the land around them. Traveling west, Albert played the organ, marshalled drinks, and orchestrated card games as the train sped across the prairies. An engaging conversationalist, he was also a keen listener. Hearing Pratt and Loomis speak, he looked out of the leaded windows and learned to see not dusty, hot, empty spaces but profitable settlements and rich farmland. Loomis and Pratt extolled the many invisible virtues of the territory through which they were traveling and especially of the region to which they had no access (because the railroad ended before they got there), giving their imaginations free rein to describe nature's bounty. As the train returned to Chicago, its passengers adopted a resolution praising the National Land Company for “developing for the benefit of the whole country the advantages and illimitable resources of the Territory, controlled and offered by them to capitalists and others seeking to become ‘Pioneers of this Western Empire.’” As was customary on these trips, the excursionists complimented Albert on his labors.⁵⁵ Following the example of Pratt and Loomis, Albert would later try to convince some of those “Pioneers” to buy land from him.

Loomis soon left Albert's orbit when the Northern Pacific Railroad appointed him its land commissioner. He moved to Minneapolis to sell land grant territory alongside that line but became entangled in the minutiae of the job, failed to complete his projects, and was fired by Northern Pacific president Frederick Billings after a few ineffectual months at the helm.⁵⁶ Contributing to Loomis's downfall was his inability to spot Scottish fraudster Lord Gordon Gordon. The Northern Pacific afforded wealthy investors preferential, even regal treatment if they seemed likely to purchase land in territory the railroad owned. Arriving in Minneapolis one step ahead of his many creditors, the kilt-wearing, gregarious Gordon Gordon convinced the business community he was a Scottish aristocrat intent on purchasing a large estate along the Northern Pacific for surplus tenants back home. He had the accent and he had the costume; none doubted he had the bona fides. Loomis, on behalf of the Northern Pacific Land Company, sent Gordon Gordon on a well-supplied expedition to inspect the Red River Valley. Out in the Dakota Territory, the fake laird vanished with somewhere between $15,000 and $45,000 of company assets.⁵⁷ The days of John Loomis, land commissioner, were numbered while those of the pseudo-aristocratic swindler had barely begun.⁵⁸

Another node on Albert's authority network was Anson Stager. Stager was one of the most influential businessmen in the United States at the time. As general manager of Western Union Telegraph, Stager had access to the latest information and to powerful individuals across the country. He also served as Western Union's liaison with the Western Associated Press, the news wire through which many Pullman stories traveled. He accompanied Albert on several trips demonstrating new cars and taught him about the business of communications. Stager began his career as a telegraph operator in upstate New York, giving the two men a common geographic origin. After working for the US Coast Survey, he joined Western Union in 1852, earning a national reputation as chief of military telegraphy during the Civil War. He remained with the corporation for the rest of his career, retiring as president.⁵⁹

Stager first encountered Albert on the 1870 Kansas excursion. While traveling through the slowly opening frontier, “Col. A. B. Pullman” hosted a banquet “in royal style” for Colorado politicians and journalists.⁶⁰ Impressed with Albert's work on the trip, Stager told Pullman secretary Charles Angell that the older brother “deserved special credit for the manner in which he engineered” the journey, a complement Angell passed on to George.⁶¹ Stager would later prove valuable to Albert by introducing him to investment opportunities in the nascent fields of electricity and telephones.

Albert occasionally did business with his brother's associates. One of these was Maine-born Hannibal I. Kimball, who presided over Pullman Southern. Kimball shared Albert's ability to charm and was by all accounts good company. With George's assistance, he planted Pullman in Atlanta, Georgia, and then launched himself into a varied entrepreneurial career. As a Northerner seemingly intent on taking advantage of Southern helplessness after the Civil War, contemporaries and historians lambasted Kimball as just another carpetbagger profiting from the building of the state capitol, a hotel, an opera house, railroads, and other projects.⁶² But Kimball seems to have been more than an opportunistic businessman using his networks and political connections to gain contracts and cash. He became an avid booster of his adopted Southern hometown and sought every opportunity to promote it.

When Henry Grady, the influential editor of the Atlanta Constitution, championed a plan for an agricultural show, he asked Kimball to take the lead. Jumping at the chance, Kimball created an International Cotton Exposition Association to organize the 1881 event. The name International Cotton Exposition stuck, a nod to the original intention to teach plantation owners how to improve productivity by mechanizing planting and picking. Kimball and Grady used the exposition idea in a national campaign to raise awareness of Southern economic progress and to counteract the region's image as an agrarian backwater. In a moment of calculated grandiosity, Kimball called the event “the first world's fair ever held in the South,” though it lacked the official standing of its centennial-commemorating predecessor.⁶³

Aware that progressive Southerners detested the idea of a show focusing on cotton at the expense of industry and finance, Kimball and Grady tried to move beyond the purely agricultural emphasis and launched a much more ambitious project in line with their powerful New South publicity campaign. Adding the words “Products, Machinery and Manufactures” to the title of one of their prospectuses proclaimed the organizers’ intent to reach a national audience. After Kimball concluded a successful fundraising tour of New England, the organizing committee appointed him director general of the fair and gave him authority to shape and coordinate the event.⁶⁴

One of Kimball's first acts was to appoint state-level vice presidents to generate publicity. He tapped into his own networks to recruit eighteen from Illinois, including Albert Pullman. This gave Albert, who knew Kimball from the Pullman Company, an opportunity to market the exposition.⁶⁵ To do that, he met with Chicago newspaper editors and publishers, including Gilbert Pierce of the Inter Ocean, Victor F. Lawson of the Daily News, W. F. Storey of the Times, and Joseph Medill of the Tribune. He also enlisted Illinois lieutenant governor William Bross to disseminate information about the exposition.⁶⁶ Albert then organized a railroad excursion to the exposition for any vice presidents and their families who wished to attend.⁶⁷ This particular networking endeavor proved short-lived, however. Albert lost his initial enthusiasm after a few months. When organizers implored railroads to lower the fares for travel to the exposition, Pullman offered no concessions, and the event itself had no railroad displays, pushing any hint of modernity to the very last group, “machinery.”⁶⁸ The vice presidents did not appear in any official exposition publications, and the event's organizers carefully sidestepped critical questions about the future by focusing almost exclusively on cotton production and distribution.⁶⁹ The only Chicago connection in Kimball's director general report was a shameless advertisement for Chicago-based carriage manufacturer C. P. Kimball & Company.⁷⁰

Connecting with people like Stager and Kimball indicates the national reach of Albert's networks. Interpersonal connections were vital even at a time when capitalists could be physically and emotionally removed from the object of their investments. Reputation mattered. Investors still wanted to know as much about each other as possible, especially at the board level. Membership in appropriate philanthropies, elite clubs, fraternal orders, and charitable organizations was crucial in confirming reputation—at a superficial level. But the network metaphor is misleading because it suggests a smoothness and efficacy rarely found in human relationships. Albert's networks risked fragmenting and could be easily fractured, leading him into dead ends in pursuit of profit. His reputation sometimes fell afoul of legal proceedings and business failings. That he always bounced back is one example of how Gilded Age business could be forgiving.

Albert enjoyed some distinct demographic advantages in his networking, being a white, English-speaking man with access to capital. That his brother proved to be a more than capable businessman whose fame provided instant name recognition was a bonus.⁷¹ It meant people gave him the benefit of the doubt because of his proximity to a successful business leader. Albert nonetheless squandered the social capital he accumulated as his investments failed, his network maintenance faltered, and his decision making proved erratic. In this sense, he was no different from thousands of other everyday entrepreneurs for whom the market could be a fickle and dangerous place. From the inside, the world capitalism was making in the Gilded Age looked unpredictable and dangerous. It was also exhilarating and intoxicating, but not everyone thrived in the chaos.