CHAPTER 26Fractured Relationships
To friends and acquaintances Albert was jovial and genial. To his nephews and nieces, he was avuncular in the best sense of the word. George Pullman Junior wrote in 1888 to his grandmother that Uncle Albert was “second to none in every element that constitutes a true man” and noted that, “though affliction has been and is heavy upon him,” he possessed “a heart overflowing with the milk of human kindness.” Perhaps taking aim at his own father, young George labeled his uncle “one of the world's true heroes” because his work remained unacknowledged yet “true it is that your second son is the genius of the family.” In the same letter George Junior called George Senior “one of the world's greatest leaders in finance” and noted how few could ever hope to emulate him, hardly an expression of filial affection.1 Young George disappointed his father and the two had a frosty relationship, but in his uncle, the boy found a warm and sympathetic character. Albert's winning personality played well with the younger generation.
Albert enjoyed being with people, including his nephew, in a way George did not. Friendly and companionable, Albert relished the trappings of wealth but family members sometimes had a less positive view of him. Sister Emma called him a sensitive cheapskate while eldest brother Royal Henry compared him to Saturn for his phlegmatic character. Albert's lifelong failure to participate in the family letter-writing ritual caused Royal Henry to comment “that communication with him is rare and difficult.”2 On another occasion, Royal Henry called Albert “a beam, as of morning light,” though Emily's illness cast “a glow of anxious inquiry.”3 Living in the shadow of a famous brother could not have been easy, especially as that brother had employed him and paid his debts. Royal Henry was the family historian and chronicler, acknowledging George's greatness and sharing the “family pride” in his achievements and writing “how proud father would have felt, had he lived in these times.”4 Albert earned no such praise.
Shortly after Emily died, another personal but very public crisis enveloped the grief-stricken family. Emma's marriage unraveled amid accusations of infidelity and abuse. She had wed Richard W. Rathborne Jr. in 1878, but the relationship was troubled from the very beginning. Rathborne Senior refused to attend the ceremony, claiming his son was marrying beneath himself because of Emily's humble origins. The marriage produced no children. Emma and her husband managed to keep their marital discord private until, in October 1890, rumors circulated that Rathborne was preparing to sue his wife for divorce on the grounds of infidelity “and Dr. J. W. Chisholm will, it is said, be named co-respondent.” Chisholm, one of the many physicians attending Emily, lived in the Rathborne home to be close to his patient. A well-respected Chicago physician known for using innovative treatments, including electrical therapy, Chisholm had supposedly taken advantage of his proximity to the family to indulge in an affair with Emma.5
While Rathborne was publicizing the liaison and the fact that he was preparing to sue Emma, she seized the initiative and took him to court. She charged that, following a series of financial setbacks, he had become abusive and cruel, his drinking problem exacerbated by the pressure of a failing grain brokerage. Emma moved out of their house in the summer of 1890, living in Hotel Florence in Pullman before relocating to Albert's new home on Banks Street. When the suit began in October 1890, Emma alleged “habitual drunkenness, personal abuse and unfaithfulness.”6
Rathborne threatened a countersuit and the news coverage of this “scandal in high life” grew increasingly salacious. One lengthy report claimed the Pullmans had tried unsuccessfully to use their “money and power” to suppress the story. This version erroneously called Dr. Chisholm a New York surgeon and claimed he “had an ascendancy” over Emma that the neighbors noticed but the husband did not. Rathborne Senior supposedly repeated rumors of the affair to his son, who threatened to sue his father for slander on Emma's behalf. But Rathborne Junior, his suspicions aroused, hired private detectives who told him that Chisholm and Emma were “discovered together more than once” and obtained affidavits from servants attesting to the affair.7 As these lurid details swirled around, the divorce was finalized on the grounds of abuse and desertion by Rathborne in a hearing held at the end of November, an hour before the courtroom normally opened.8
Another relationship under stress was Albert's business partnership with Ebenezer Jennings. In the process of rationalizing operations to save money, the Pullman Company built its own laundry. The new facility at Pullman replaced the Jennings laundry, Albert's one reliable source of independent income.9 Lauded “as a model institution of its kind,” the new laundry cleaned between forty and fifty thousand items daily in a two-story building designed to look like the rest of the town.10 The first story consisted of the main laundry while on the second floor, employees operated the starching, ironing, and polishing machines. Dirty linens from cars terminating in Chicago arrived by rail at the east end of the building and moved along a production line until being dispatched, clean and flat, at the other end. Several carloads appeared daily from the six Chicago depots out of which Pullman operated. Using twelve washers and another dozen extractors for drying, plus tumblers to separate pieces and mangles to smooth them, the laundry represented “the acme of efficiency.” A gendered division of labor saw twenty men pushing the heavy carts of incoming laundry from track to the washers and one hundred women performing the supposedly “lighter duties” of sorting, ironing, folding, and packaging. The process ended when items were boxed up and loaded into cars at the west end of the laundry building.11
The upshot of the new laundry was an end to the Pullman Company contract with Jennings, including supplying uniforms for conductors and porters. Jennings quit the clothing business and sold his clothing stock to a competitor.12 He began to dismantle his cleaning operations and converted part of the laundry premises into the “Oriental Storage Warehouse.”13 He then began to sell furniture and merchandise on commission and made short-term loans.14
Like Albert, Jennings had experienced the chaos and unpredictability of Gilded Age investing and, also like Albert, built and broke networks as his ventures thrived or failed. Something of a local grandee on Chicago's West Side, he served as treasurer of the Ada Street Methodist Episcopal Church until becoming embroiled in a dispute, or “The Scandal” as the headlines styled it, with a new pastor, W. C. Dandy. The cleric appointed Jennings and other “minions” trustees, against the wishes of the majority of the congregation. Summoned by the Illinois attorney general, Jennings testified that he had resigned when the pastor asked the trustees to engage in what he felt was financial fraud. Dandy instructed them to take out loans secured by church property in order to increase his salary.15 No legal action was taken against Jennings and he remained a figure of some stature on the West Side, serving as election clerk for the eleventh ward, while Dandy was quietly removed after just a year behind the pulpit.16
As was common among everyday entrepreneurs, Jennings and Albert copied each other's investment habits. Like Albert, Jennings dabbled in banking, serving as director of the Western Investment Bank (WIB). The powers of this institution originated in the consolidation of two German immigrant banks, but the new unified bank suspended operations in December 1877 and entered receivership. It remained in the hands of the receiver, who sued stockholders for unpaid debts totaling $4,000; creditors demanded repayment of $105,000.17 After the receiver liquidated its assets, the “powers, privileges and immunities” along with the obligations and liabilities of the German-American Bank became the property of Jennings and WIB in 1888.18
The banking episode followed on the heels of the American Homestead Company and attests to Jennings's appetite for land sales. WIB claimed to sell farm mortgages in Illinois, Kansas, and Nebraska, three states about which “for many years the officers of this Bank have had intimate personal knowledge.”19 It guaranteed a return of 6 percent and asserted in advertisements that its “corn belt” investments were conservatively assessed. Eastern Nebraska seemed a particularly fertile region for the bank's activities. WIB advertisements highlighted the network of railroad tracks and a growing demand for Nebraska corn and livestock as reasons to buy mortgages there.20 The bank also sold urban real estate and rural property for investors interested in rental income.21
Despite boasting about vast holdings and unlimited potential, WIB perched on an insecure foundation, its property portfolio negligible and its prospects dim. In 1890, the institution shifted its focus to savings accounts, interest-bearing certificates, and discounted loans, changing its name to Western Trust and Savings Bank, with Jennings promoted to vice president.22 The name changes kept coming in an ever-more desperate attempt to attract clients: a year later, it had become the City Trust and Savings Bank and then, in 1893, it turned into the state-chartered South Side State Bank.23 In common with many small banks, the WIB invariably failed to submit financial information for the state to assess property taxes on its holdings. In the absence of data, the Illinois Board of Equalization estimated that debt at $5,000.24
When the bank did not pay its property taxes and was simultaneously sued for nonpayment of interest on a mortgage, its president, William P. Kimball, illegally transferred assets from the bank's books into his own brokerage firm.25 Aaron Longstreet, the Pullman Company mechanical superintendent and Jennings & Company investor, joined the South Side State Bank as a director, connecting the network back to Albert. Like Albert, Jennings appears to have escaped repercussions of the dubious practices in which his bank engaged and bought a house in Lake Bluff, a fashionable resort north of the city, becoming president of the short-lived Central Trust Company of Chicago.26
The 1880s had been a decade of personal and business disaster for Albert, and the 1890s began tragically when Emily died. He moved out of the family's long-time Ashland Avenue home into a smaller house on Banks Street, and when Emma secured her divorce she moved in with him. He severed his lucrative connection with Ebenezer Jennings, terminating his oldest and most powerful business network. Although he suffered financial and reputational loss, Albert carried on regardless, his optimism publicly undimmed and his gregariousness intact. Unmoored from the Pullman Company, he was left completely to his own devices and decided to combine his love of horses with his knowledge of the transportation industry by investing in hansom cabs. Engineering a takeover of a relatively new Chicago cab company, Albert embarked on another calamitous journey, this time bringing him into catastrophic conflict with a wealthy and unscrupulous robber baron.