IntroductionThe Pullman Era

Albert Benton Pullman was an entrepreneur, but he was not particularly entrepreneurial. AB, as he was known, invested widely with varying degrees of success and calamity. His business skills centered on networking, on following family, friends, and acquaintances into manufacturing, banking, insurance, and speculation. His talents lay primarily in the direction of emulation: he copied others. He did have a creative side; like many nineteenth-century Americans, he patented copiously, but his patents were advances on existing ideas—a new type of freight door here, a compact railroad toilet there—rather than novel concepts or innovative technologies. He helped design luxury railroad cars and he marketed them, but mostly he worked in the ever lengthening shadow of his younger brother George.

George Mortimer Pullman had a good idea and made the most of it. In a large country with an expanding railroad industry and ever longer journeys, George believed wealthy people would pay a premium to travel in pampered luxury. He did not invent comfortable overnight travel, and he did not sell what he made. Instead, he established a corporation to build and operate railroad cars, generating recurring revenues by renting them to railroad companies while inadvertently codifying class divisions for his material benefit.¹ Pullman's Palace Car Company (PPCC) constructed ornate and smooth-running sleeping, dining, and club cars for America's newly gilded rich. This made the name Pullman synonymous with palatial comfort and George Pullman into one of America's wealthiest men. He was, until the Pullman strike of 1894, a Gilded Age success story.

Histories of the Pullman Company place George center stage in the drama of sleeping-car development and attribute the company's success to his “grand vision, marketing prowess, financial maneuvering, obsessive control, and self-promotion.”² The book you are reading widens the lens to include Albert, who was as important in the early growth of PPCC as George. Albert was the recognized artisan of the family, possessing the skill to design and carve intricate details and the knowledge to procure sumptuous materials for car interiors. He supervised construction of the initial vehicles and hired the first African American porters—perhaps the best-known element of the Pullman experience. As the company expanded and when his talents became obsolete, he transitioned into a public relations specialist hosting high-profile excursion trips, marketing images of the future to wealthy clients, and jumping into many an adventurous investment through the connections he made.

Albert Pullman's business career is at the heart of this biography. He was a representative figure in the stratum of everyday entrepreneurs whose persistent, evanescent, frantic, and often unproductive investments undergirded Gilded Age economic activity. In an age of expansive corporate growth, these individuals dealt in small stakes at high risk. Tapping into networks of like-minded people, they frequently skirted the fluid line between legal and fraudulent business practices. This contradicts a powerful stream of recent scholarly literature presenting an almost frictionless picture of economic advances in which entrepreneurs invented opportunities by imagining new services and goods, disrupting the status quo to foment change, and keeping capitalism in a perpetual state of turbulence, uncertainty, and progress.³ As the life of Albert Pullman demonstrates, however, conventional interpretations neglect the frequent mismatch between aspiration and achievement, ignoring the view of individual encounters with capitalism, of “ground-level evidence of a system in operation.”⁴ Hence the need for this biography.

Albert practiced many standard entrepreneurial activities, but he experienced something historians have only recently begun to associate with entrepreneurs: failure. He failed regularly, spectacularly, and publicly.⁵ His capacity for failure was hardly unique, although his ability to recover was aided by his place in the Pullman Company, his brother's fortune, and the family name. The volatility and uncertainty at the heart of entrepreneurship encouraged Albert Pullman and others like him to create, neglect, dissolve, and destroy firms, sometimes willfully and occasionally fraudulently. In his case, the sheer scope and size of the railroad industry permitted manipulation, waste, and self-aggrandizement.

George Pullman took full advantage of emerging financial techniques to get rich. He became a giant who obscured many investors, including his own brother.⁶ Albert watched and worked to emulate him, but his networks contained more than a few weak links. Albert was less selective and thus less profitable than George in the relationships he forged. He made some terrible blunders, one of which dragged him before the US Supreme Court. He created and promoted companies of doubtful virtue and uncertain value, flirted with bankruptcy, and found himself accused by a federal bank inspector of negligence. George, despairing after years of observing his older sibling's mistakes, bailed him out of one last disastrous investment, fired him, and erased him from the Pullman story.⁷

The contrast between the brothers could hardly have been greater. Albert was approachable and fun, George gruff and solemn. Unafraid of a fine cocktail and a decent cigar, Albert could, by all accounts, be great company in the male-dominated worlds of business, politics, philanthropy, and social clubs. His efforts and energies did not flag in the face of disaster and disappointment: he continued to incorporate partnerships, file patents, and exploit connections. George preferred talking business with bankers and financiers to mixing with the employees, journalists, politicians, railroaders, and others vital to the success of the Pullman Company. He trusted Albert to court them and generate positive publicity. As the impresario of excursions, Albert enhanced the Pullman brand. Even the artisans who built the first Pullman cars liked him because Albert appreciated their craftsmanship and leisurely pace of work. His genial outlook allied with his skill as a carpenter and his ability to play the expert attracted people from all walks of life.

Albert Pullman's career illuminates important themes in Gilded Age history. His multiple failures and occasional frauds echoed those of other entrepreneurs. The Pullman Company contributed to the racial stratification of railroad labor, and its products deepened class division in the United States. Reputation rested on the often-fragile foundation of economic success, but beneath the predictable surface of boom-and-bust cycles lay an instability in which one bad break could lead to insolvency and shame. Failure constantly stalked investors.

Albert's life story brings into relief how new forms of financing, coupled with the opening of western territories by eastern capital, gave the Pullman Company an ideal opportunity to demonstrate its luxury railroad cars, a process greatly facilitated by Albert's genial marketing. The Pullmans were lucky geographically when they settled in Chicago, gateway to the trans-Mississippi West.⁸ Fortune smiled on the brothers. Investors looking west in search of untapped markets needed transportation into “the new geography of American capitalism.” Pullman supplied it. The overwhelming preponderance of northeastern capital—New York's $157 million in circulating notes dwarfed Chicago's $9 million—gave old money a head start in new territories because the holders of that capital and their agents travelled through the Windy City. Pullman—company and man—thereby participated in what the historian Noam Maggor characterized as the “improbable undertaking” of creating a national economy.⁹

Bringing commerce to the relatively underexploited West was a challenge to which eastern money rose. Pullman provided a convenient and comfortable means of getting there, suppling vehicles for investment and transportation. Albert contrived a successful pitch for Pullman products, perfect for an emerging marketplace in luxury travel at a time of expanding advertising ballyhoo.¹⁰ Consumers came to identify the Pullman brand with a form of self-indulgence attractive to wealthy travelers, and they exerted pressure on railroads to add Pullman cars to trains. Coming as they did from shareholders, politicians, and journalists, company executives ignored such entreaties at their peril.

Hosting special runs gave Albert access to capital and opportunity. He created networks of like-minded individuals to generate wealth and profit. He practiced the same type of network building as men like J. P. Morgan, albeit with less heady ambition. Morgan used extensive connections forged through family and friends to expand his banking empire.¹¹ Albert similarly constructed networks radiating out in concentric circles from his immediate family to acquaintances encountered in the Pullman office and beyond. This was the essence of network building, a form of promotion, of convincing others of one's own worth, of meeting, engaging, and befriending influential people for opportunity and capital. Albert grew quite accomplished at all those, although he also exhibited a penchant for demolishing his networks.¹²

Both adroit network builders, Albert and George Pullman brought their very different and complementary abilities into the marketplace at a pivotal moment in American history. The convergence of multiple forces drove national expansion during the period from 1865 to 1894, a time we might call the Pullman Era in recognition of the unequal access to wealth their railroad cars symbolized. Mass immigration from Europe, deepening racial discrimination, expanding manufacturing industries, an all-absorbing consumer culture, the forcible removal of Indigenous peoples, and a seemingly limitless inventiveness combined to foster supercharged economic growth and a dangerously fracturing society. With bulk commodities fueling investments and the nouveau riche looking for ways to define itself, the Pullmans arrived at precisely the right moment. The Pullman name gained prominence just after the Civil War and remained in the public eye into the 1970s and beyond, a remarkable record of brand longevity.¹³

George Pullman joined the ranks of men like John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Andrew Carnegie, and J. P. Morgan, capitalists who dominated the Gilded Age cultural landscape. Central to their time, they were controversial icons worthy of the contradictory sobriquets “robber barons” and “captains of industry.” Etched into our collective memory as “the names history would remember the most,” they shaped politics and created monopolies for which they were praised and reviled in equal measure.¹⁴ They are useful symbols of specific industries, metaphors for growth and criminality whose work naturalized the idea that private wealth controlled by individuals would benefit all Americans.¹⁵ But the limitations of this approach to the past are legion, not least in encouraging a historical amnesia by which we neglect lesser, but no less important, figures and historical processes.

Albert embodied the entrepreneurial characteristics identified by the historian David McCullough: “nerve, persistence, dynamic energy, a talent for propaganda, a capacity for deception, imagination,” along a flair for acting and diplomacy.¹⁶ Men and women like Albert, profuse in number and forgotten today, flowed through the financial system. He and other everyday entrepreneurs helped transform Chicago from a “boisterous frontier town” into a “major regional center” during the Gilded Age.¹⁷ But then they vanished. Their erasure from our collective memory prompts us to wonder why and how we remember the past.

Why, that is, are some people embraced by historians, and how are others forgotten? There are obvious reasons to explain omissions: a lack of evidence, contemporaneous insignificance, personal dullness, trends and fashions in history writing, current political concerns. But these do not pertain to Albert Benton Pullman. His life is quite well documented. He was famous in his own time. He was a garrulous and outgoing individual with a sweeping assemblage of friends. The history of entrepreneurship is back in favor, and his incredibly interesting life illuminates multiple aspects of the development of American capitalism. Yet he remains overshadowed by the principal investors and industrialists of his age, including his brother. This book rectifies that situation by refocusing the spotlight on Albert Pullman.