CHAPTER 23Utopia in Brick and Steel
George Pullman had a problem. Before he could commence work on his new town he needed to clear a legal hurdle. According to the provisions of its 1867 charter, the Pullman Company could construct and operate railroad cars but had no right to build and own the housing, shops, theaters, libraries, parks, and roads George planned. He therefore created the Pullman Land Association (PLA) to purchase land and erect buildings for nonmanufacturing purposes.1 The association issued 16,286 shares, of which George owned 15,542, his friend Marshall Field 500, and the trustees 244.2 An additional stock offering quickly attracted outside investors. One of those was Ulysses S. Grant, who subscribed to 100 shares.3 The strip of land PLA purchased was about two miles long, wedged in a half-mile-wide gap between Lake Calumet and the Illinois Central Railroad. By the beginning of 1881, it controlled 3,500 acres, including a zone of undeveloped land intended to prevent urban encroachment. The Pullman Company owned 500 acres on which to build its manufacturing complex.4
To create the town of Pullman, George hired an architect and a landscape designer, an unusual combination in 1880. They were given the equally uncommon task of planning the entire settlement, another example of George's utopian approach to the project. Designer Nathan Barrett, who would become one of the founding members of the American Society of Landscape Architects, was well known around New York City for plotting carefully manicured grounds outside the homes of wealthy patrons. He championed formal gardens and pleased George with plans for his Long Branch, New Jersey, mansion.5 Barrett designed every scenic element of Pullman and brought an architect, his friend Solon Spenser Beman, to George's attention for the buildings.
Unlike the already prominent Barrett, Beman was unknown, and hiring him was a gamble. He had never designed a factory, so Albert took him to Detroit to study the Pullman works there. Then they traveled to New York to meet George, examining other plants on the way. The company president liked the young architect's rough drawings for the town and hired him to design the works and the housing. Barrett would place the buildings in the landscape and, through a combination of open grounds, a large lake, and bracing panoramas, create the kind of healthy environment George believed would improve his employees’ morale and morals. Rails linked the town to the rest of the country.6
Barrett and Beman set out to craft a tourist destination as much as they designed a factory town. They wanted a visit to Pullman—and George anticipated visitors—to be an aesthetic and didactic experience. They succeeded: Richard Ely, the clear-eyed University of Wisconsin economist who honeymooned there in 1884, wrote how “no other feature of Pullman can receive praise needing so little qualification as its architecture” and called the housing desirable and the rents reasonable.7 Planned, orderly vistas and the use of local brick for every building ensured visual uniformity. Beginning with the view from the depot, Barrett and Beman plotted uplifting scenes for visitors. Alighting from the train, they could see the main factory building, the massive clock on the administration tower, and the rather obviously named Lake Vista. Within a few minutes’ walk of the station were the elegant nine-story water tower and the Corliss Engine, famous from its work at the 1876 Centennial Celebration in Philadelphia. Visible through a glass façade, the Corliss was a powerful symbol of the Pullman ethos.
Already manufacturing freight cars to boost profits, the Pullman Company entered the lucrative and growing suburban rolling-stock market with a new train set combining engines at each end and six cars permanently coupled together. Albert organized an excursion using this new equipment in May 1880, bringing invited guests to the site of the future town “to view the location of the proposed gigantic car-shops and Allen Paper Car-Wheel Works.” The new consist used engines built by Rogers Locomotive and Machine Works in Paterson, New Jersey, manufacturer of the first locomotive to run in the state of Illinois. The passenger cars were similar in design to those built for the elevated railroad in New York City, carrying forty-six people and capped by a decorative oak ceiling. Until the new works were fully operational, they were built for Pullman by the Illinois Central Railroad, though Pullman could not have contracted to build them without the soon-to-open factory complex.8
Construction of the new town and factories took place in stages, beginning with workshops and moving onto public buildings and housing. Groundbreaking occurred in April 1880 and, by the summer, PLA employed approximately two thousand workers, many of them commuting on company-subsidized trains. In fall 1880, work began on Hotel Florence. Named after George's favorite child, it was a baroque edifice intended for overnight visitors and the first nonmanufacturing building to be erected. Beyond the hotel lay the Arcade Building, “the finest building in Pullman,” where shops and a theater sold food, souvenirs, and entertainment.9 Rows of workers’ houses made of red brick, like the rest of the town, sat barely visible behind the factories, offices, and shops. Also mostly hidden from view the less aesthetically pleasing railroad sidings and stubs, arteries of production and profit moving raw materials in and finished or repaired cars out. The first workshops opened in 1881, performing house-building tasks like painting and woodworking. House parts were built separately and then installed in a process uncommon at the time but practiced by the company for its European ventures.10
Despite the superficial appearance of being a benefactor who gave his workforce clean working conditions and decent housing in beautiful surroundings, George Pullman insisted he was not a philanthropist but a hardheaded businessman interested in turning a profit. He rejected the idea that he was in any way utopian, despite his desire to create a perfect community inculcating his ideals and values. Others saw things differently. Ely characterized the town as “social experimentation on a vast scale” and compared it with factory towns in England, France, and New England that set out to be precisely that.11
George had control over and a very real financial stake in the profitability of the town, and it clouded his judgment where actual living people were concerned. As if to demonstrate this, the PLA found itself at loggerheads with construction workers when it withdrew their transportation subsidy. Two thousand workers went on strike. The company refused to budge, conceding minor points but not reinstituting the payment. After two days, eighteen hundred of the two thousand workers returned to work, but two hundred left the company's employment.12 The strike, and Pullman intransigence, were portents of things to come.
Beman's lack of industrial design experience gave Albert an opportunity to play a role in planning Pullman. Initial reports claimed he was to supervise the buildings and organize the departments devoted to car construction, though these stories appear to have been exaggerated, perhaps even of his own creation.13 Traveling with Beman to study the logistics and principles of factory design, he doubtless shared his ideas about the ideal railroad workshop. But the documentation indicates that Albert quickly withdrew from planning activities. He had no architectural training and found the idea of mass-producing railroad cars unappealing. He advised Beman on the basics of building Pullman rolling stock and led factory tours, but he disappeared from the building records after his early work as Beman's guide.14
Albert may have been responsible, however, for selecting the Corliss steam engine for the three miles of driveshafts powering workshop machinery. He and George had witnessed the Corliss operating at the 1876 Centennial Exposition, where its sheer size and brute power created for Americans what the historian Albert Churella called “a commingled sense of awe and self-satisfied pride at their nation's prowess.”15 It was for sale, but no buyer came forward and, following the exposition, the machine had to be dismantled and stored in Rhode Island. Purchased by the Pullman Company in 1880 for its new town, it was shipped in thirty-five railroad cars to Illinois. At Pullman, a specially built, glass-fronted building, visible from the Illinois Central Railroad and accommodating visitors along its wide aisles, awaited it. Following reassembly and testing, dignitaries arrived in a series of special trains to witness its festive inauguration in April 1881. Albert traveled with other Pullman officials to witness the beginning of the magnificent machine's new life when George's daughter Florence pushed the start button to get the Corliss up and running.16
The new town allowed Pullman to bring most construction and much repair work into a single location. The Detroit plant remained open, specializing in freight cars, as did facilities in Elmira, New York, St. Louis, Missouri, and Wilmington, Delaware.17 George appointed Albert's friend and ally, Adolph Rapp, manager of the new works at Pullman, reward for years of faithful service on both sides of the Atlantic.18 The brick factory was stylistically in harmony with the residences and was punctuated by large windows, part of the Pullman quest to invigorate healthy workers. The office building was similarly designed. When complete, nearly five thousand people found employment in the town. The clock tower rising above the skyline unceasingly inculcated George's lessons about punctuality to first-generation laborers, for whom industrial discipline may have been a new experience.19 It symbolized the triumph of capitalism, its every chime tolling the measured factory day and defeating unregulated agrarian sensibilities.
Barrett and Beman's design proved so compelling and the town itself so attractive that Pullman became a compulsory stop for visitors to Chicago.20 Regular advertisements and stories in the press brought it national attention, as George had anticipated. Albert's contacts in Chicago newspapers, along with his genial outlook and desire to be helpful, further highlighted Pullman as a destination. Successfully positioning the factory town as a tourist attraction proved an obstacle to efficient production, however, and the incessant flow of visitors wandering curiously and unpredictably through the buildings delayed manufacturing often enough that in 1882 the company banned nonworkers from the factory buildings.21
Though a desirable place to visit and a generally productive factory complex, life for Pullman residents came with some notable inconveniences. The company controlled everything within its boundaries except the public school, leading Ely to call it “full of spies” inhibiting freedom of speech and to compare George Pullman's authority with that of German chancellor Otto von Bismarck.22 Working families experienced the town as a combination of strict rules, company surveillance, and social stratification fixed in the architecture and street layout. George believed that alcohol lay at the bottom of many social ills so he made it available only at the hotel. Ely noted an “air of thrift and providence,” of an enforced morality caged inside well-maintained houses lacking the usual broken windows or crumbling doorsteps.23 Inspectors hired by the company walked regularly through the town and reported any deviation from architectural or landscaping specifications. Because residents rented their homes, company representatives could enter the houses with little or no notice to examine domestic cleanliness and even the color of the paint on a wall. Privacy was almost impossible to maintain and criticisms of the company dangerous to air. The sewage farm supervisor tracked down a laborer who stole an American flag by asking around at his allotment and a Baptist minister who championed an evicted family found his congregation melting away.24
FIGURE 7. A row of workers’ houses, Pullman, Illinois, illustrating the difficulty of finding privacy in the town. Library of Congress.
As one labor leader wrote, residents lived a life regulated by “false promises and covert threats.”25 Ely encountered “an all-pervading feeling of insecurity” the company encouraged.26 Designated smoking areas, restrictions on noise, and a formal process for planting a tree or adding a flower to the small lawns outside each rented house constrained individual expression. Residents could modify neither the exteriors nor the interiors of houses without prior approval from PLA officials. In Pullman, it was nearly impossible to be unobserved. The company kept a close eye on employees and their families at home and as they walked to and from work, played or relaxed, ate or picnicked, and shopped. And when company surveillance flagged, as often as not tourists were poking around.
None of this concerned George Pullman. He believed the town would wholistically improve his workers and their families while the hierarchically arranged, company-owned housing would present an aspirational vision of social mobility, much as he had experienced in his own life. Workers rented houses from the company at a rate set to guarantee a profit of 6 percent on the original cost of building the town. Paying a dividend to live in Pullman would, in George's mind, help residents appreciate what they had while fortifying his own reputation as a shrewd business leader. The beautiful surroundings—the parks, the playing fields, the lake, the trees along wide boulevards—were not a charitable gift but an astute investment. George Pullman saw this as an arrangement for the “mutual benefit” of employer and employed by which the employer got dutiful and sober employees who, for their part, enjoyed unusually healthy and aesthetically pleasing living conditions.27
From the very beginning, resident workers and their families had to conform to George Pullman's cultural sensibilities, including his conventional gendered understanding of society. Women were expected to remain at home and employment opportunities for them were accordingly limited. In 1885, only forty-two of the almost three thousand workers at Pullman were women, and they were confined to the upholstery and window departments.28 Some of the earliest tenants left because of the perceived lack of personal freedom and the sense of being under constant surveillance. Others did not mind the need to obey company dictates, but a sense of oppression enveloped the town.
George's desire for control extended to the sounds and smells Pullman inhabitants could experience. Residents could play music only at certain hours, and housing rules required people to enter and leave buildings quietly. Sewage from the residential district, a source of noxious and off-putting smells in many urban areas, was piped three miles for use as manure on a small farm the company owned. Horses, another source of olfactory nuisance, were centrally stabled instead of being placed in barns dispersed across the town. An advantage for feeding and cleaning the animals, it was an inconvenience for the drivers and drovers who had to take them there at the end of each day and then walk home. Regular street cleaning removed animal waste while designated smoking areas confined fumes from cigarettes, cigars, and pipes, part of George Pullman's campaign to “tame the sensory values of his workers” and instill “middle class sensory standards.”29 For George, the effect would be to acculturate working people into the middle-class mores he believed would improve their lives and elevate society.
The idea of being watched hovered over the town like a panopticon. Houses stood in long rows and offered minimal privacy. Backyards had no fences, and the lawns were long, shared green spaces. The houses of supervisors and managers were built adjacent to parks and other open land, desirable locations designed to reflect and reinforce social and economic distinctions, but even there the presence of the company was palpable.30 Not all Pullman workers lived in the eponymous town and at least a third of the workforce rented houses and apartments in nearby Roseland and Kensington. In those municipalities, the strict moral codes of Pullman could not be enforced.
George, who rarely visited the town after it began operating, believed he had nurtured a healthy relationship between residents and his company. An apt illustration of the disconnect between George Pullman's aspirations for the town and his actions toward his employees can be found in the opening of the thousand-seat Arcade Theatre on the windy, snowy evening of January 9, 1883. The theater was designed to be the centerpiece of entertainment for residents. Located on the second floor of the multipurpose Arcade Building, it was adjacent to the library, the Pullman Savings Bank, and Beman's office. Albert supervised a train of six Pullmans carrying George's invited guests to the theater. Soon after leaving Central Station, the excursion halted near Prairie Avenue for George's family and friends to board his private car. The guests detrained at a temporary halt a short walk from the Arcade Building and took their seats. As the audience settled in, the curtain raised to show George on stage flanked by politicians, investors, and executives.
George opened proceedings by introducing Stewart L. Woodford, attorney general for the southern district of New York, who spoke about the magnificence of the new theater and of the bracing week he had spent in the town. Inaccurately labeling the occasion “the christening of a city,” he praised George's ability to demonstrate how, “in hard, practical dollars and cents it pays to love your neighbor as yourself.”31 For working people, on the other hand, the opening gala represented all that was intimidating about their new home: wealthy tycoons and elite socialites dropping in for an evening to inaugurate a theater too large for the town and whose offerings would rarely prove of interest to them. Even the play George chose for the occasion reinforced social hierarchies. The plot of Esmeralda pivoted around appeals “to representatives of wealth” by an old farmer and a young woman to help them overcome local opposition to their marriage.32 This re-creation of the relationship of lord to vassal appealed to George and reminded Pullman workers of their place in the town's hierarchy.
Located beside the new theater in the Arcade Building was the Pullman Library. The library, ostensibly for Pullman workers, held over five thousand books donated by George Pullman. Four of the five rooms resembled a gentleman's club, a place with which George and Albert were familiar. This was another example of George misunderstanding the people he employed. They seldom used the library, which they found alienating. The large armchairs, plush carpets, stained-glass windows, chandeliers, and general air of wealth could hardly have been comfortable for men fresh off the machine floor. One room was set aside specifically for factory workers, with a separate entrance, unadorned wicker chairs, and a plain interior. George hired his cousin, Bertha Ludlam, as librarian, and she slowly added engineering and science periodicals useful to self-improving artisans to the philosophy and history already in the collection. This emphasis, combined with the somewhat formidable design and a three dollar annual membership fee, also kept the number of card-carrying users down to around two hundred.33 If George Pullman had hoped the library would spark a frenzy of learning among his five thousand employees, he was sadly mistaken.
The town of Pullman was part of a Chicago renaissance in the 1880s. The city claimed pride of place when internationally known architects Daniel Burnham and Louis Sullivan designed landmark buildings. Sullivan's Auditorium Building was a downtown theater containing what city boosters claimed was the largest room in the world surrounded by shops, offices, and a hotel under a single roof. Burnham and John W. Root's Rookery combined a glass-ceilinged lobby with clever use of natural light to illuminate offices. The nine-story downtown Pullman Building, designed by Beman, reflected the style of this “First Chicago School.”34
FIGURE 8. Exterior of Pullman building, Adams and Michigan, Chicago. Not shown is the office layout, which demonstrated Albert's loss of influence. Reproduced by permission of the Chicago History Museum, ICHi-019460.
Though George could not have predicted it, erecting his own town and extending “the commercial value of beauty” from sleeping cars to a settlement protected Pullman from larger economic forces.35 The company managed to elude several trends in the industry, including consolidation into or fusion with other firms. Having attained a near monopoly in the sleeping-car market by 1880, Pullman rode out a decade in which mergers and acquisitions had become common.36 Another advantage was the ability to respond quickly to demand. When the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy (CB&Q) Railroad requested new sleeping cars for its Chicago to Denver services, for example, Pullman could deliver them by the date promised. Contracting out or having production spread across the country would have limited its ability to pivot rapidly to new products.37 But constant flux and turnover led one Pullman resident to compare life in the town to “living in a great hotel,” where daily existence was anything but joyful.38 Ely went further: he called the town “un-American” and characterized its benevolent paternalism as feudal because of George Pullman's autocratic powers.39
In a republic supposedly devoted to principles of equality and liberty, the town of Pullman was antithetical to the national origin myth. It was also symbolic of the times, of a Gilded Age in which economic inequality and concentrated power had reached new peaks. One omission that few tourists noticed was the absence of African Americans, systematically excluded from living in the town.40 The operation of and popular knowledge about Pullman cars contributed to an awareness of the gap between privileged Americans and working people: nearly every town in America with rail service (which, in the 1880s, was most towns) witnessed the luxury enjoyed by a fraction of the population when a Pullman car rolled through. To call Pullmans ubiquitous would be an exaggeration, but the cars did operate on at least three-quarters of American railroad miles.41 Albert's successful marketing highlighted the gulf between corporate leaders and their allies who benefitted from economic expansion and the workers who, according to their advocates, created the wealth but remained mired in poverty. Pullman employees put in shifts of ten or eleven hours six days a week, walking home past recreational facilities for which they had precious little time. Playing fields, public parks, a boating lake, the theater and library, and other amenities beckoned, but a limited number of leisure hours constrained their ability to use them. Worker dissatisfaction with Pullman's capitalist utopia boiled over sooner than George could have imagined.