‘Social experimentation on a vast scale:’ One critic’s prescient view of Pullman
In the 1880s, the new community of Pullman, Ill., located south of Chicago, seemed to have everything.
The housing stock was in good shape. Streets were well paved. An “Arcade” – something like a 19th-century mall — housed offices, a bank and market space for residents to buy food and other necessities. A well-built school provided education for the young. Young trees lined the streets, promising to provide welcome relief from the sun as they grew. “Very gratifying is the impression of the visitor who passes hurriedly through Pullman and observes only the splendid provision for the present material comforts of its residents,” economist Richard Ely wrote in Harper’s Magazine in 1885.
Jack Kelly’s excellent account of the Pullman strike of 1894 — which he calls “the most consequential labor conflict of the nineteenth century” — puts front and center once again one of the most interesting but fatally flawed social experiments of the Gilded Age.
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Worker housing in Pullman, Ill. Library of Congress.
The Pullman strike has long interested me. Its cast of characters — industrialist George W. Pullman; labor leaders Eugene V. Debs and Samuel Gompers; and President Grover Cleveland — are among the most fascinating personalities of the era. What began as a boycott of Pullman sleeper cars organized by Debs’s American Railway Union morphed into a generalized uprising, marred by instances of mob violence, against the railroads. Cleveland called out U.S. troops, ostensibly to protect the U.S. mail but in reality put down the strike.
The story of the strike is a rich text. It raises questions about the role of government in labor disputes. It casts a harsh light on the establishment press of the day. It highlights divisions between craft unions and unskilled workers that plagued organized labor for decades. It put Debs front and center in the nation’s politics.
At the center of this epochal event in the history of the 19th century is the town of Pullman and the experiment in plutocratic paternalism that it represented.
Ely was an early – and prescient – critic.
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Hotel Florence, Pullman, Ill. Library of Congress.
Kelly writes that the Ripley, N.Y., native and European trained economist who taught at Johns Hopkins University checked into Pullman’s Florence Hotel in 1884. He arrived with his new bride to honeymoon and investigate the outwardly thriving town for the article he was writing.
Many features of Pullman pleased him. Ely praised the layout of the town for its variety and beauty. He wrote:
Unity of design and an unexpected variety charm us as we saunter through the town. Lawns always of the same width separate the houses from the street, but they are so green and neatly trimmed that one can overlook this regularity of form. Although the houses are built in groups of two or more, and even in blocks, with the exception of a few large buildings of cheap flats, they bear no resemblance to barracks; and one is not likely to make the mistake, so frequent in New York blocks of “brown-stone fronts,” of getting into the wrong house by mistake. Simple but ingenious designs secure variety, of which the most skillful is probably the treatment of the sky line. Naturally, without an appearance of effort, it assumes an immense diversity. French roofs, square roofs, dormer-windows, turrets, sharp points, blunt points, triangles, irregular quadrangles, are devices resorted to in the upper stories to avoid the appearance of unbroken uniformity.
After cataloguing Pullman’s many appealing features, Ely took note of its darker side.
There was no freely elected municipal government. While Pullman residents chose their school board, the town was poorly governed by an appointed administration dominated by Pullman corporate officials. “Change is constant in men and officers, and each new superior appears to have his own friends, whom he appoints to desirable positions,” Ely wrote. “Favoritism and nepotism, out of place as they are in an ideal society, are oft-repeated and apparently well-substantiated charges.”
Many communities were (and are) poorly governed. But they may also have newspapers to check on abuses and give vent to criticism. They might have pastors who could righteously inveigh against corruption from the pulpit. No such outlets existed in Pullman, Ely noted, and the one Baptist preacher who dared criticize the administration of Pullman was forced to leave when his congregation began to abandon him.
“Here is a population of eight thousand souls where not one single resident dare speak out openly his opinion about the town in which he lives,” Ely wrote. “One feels that one is mingling with a dependent, servile people. There is an abundance of grievances, but if there lives in Pullman one man who would give expression to them in print over his own name, diligent inquiry continued for ten days was not sufficient to find him.”
Ely identified an additional peculiar feature of the town. Every square inch of the community was owned by the Pullman companies. George Pullman expected the community to turn a profit and set rents accordingly. “With the exception of the management of the public school, every municipal act is here the act of a private corporation,” Ely observed.
Ely noted that the community was still young and offered the hope that its flaws could be remedied. Nevertheless, invoking the specter of Otto von Bismarck, he rendered a damning verdict on George Pullman’s experiment in plutocratic paternalism.
“In looking over all the facts of the case the conclusion is unavoidable that the idea of Pullman is un-American. It is a nearer approach than anything the writer has seen to what appears to be the ideal of the great German Chancellor. It is not the American ideal. It is benevolent, well wishing feudalism, which desires the happiness of the people, but in such way as shall please the authorities.”
George Pullman, Kelly writes, was furious about the piece and ordered company officials to find Ely’s sources and punish them.
Nevertheless, the feudal system worked fine as long as the money was coming in. But in 1893, a devastating Wall Street panic (coming 20 years after another panic crippled the American economy) slowed work at the Pullman Palace Car factory. Pullman cut pay — Kelly puts the range of wage cuts between 20 to 35 percent — but left rents alone. Workers, Kelly writes, were subsisting on bread and water and collapsing in the plant from hunger because they had little left to buy food after paying to keep a roof over their headThe workers turned to the American Railway Union, a new force in organized labor led by Debs. The ARU had just won a significant victory in a strike against the Great Northern. Pullman ARU workers voted to strike — and the union responded by refusing to handle trains with Pullman cars.
The boycott paralyzed railroad operations across the country and in some instances led to violence — a development Debs deplored. At this stage in his career as a labor leader he disliked strikes and abhorred violence (a feeling he would retain throughout his life). Goaded by his attorney general, Richard Olney, Cleveland dispatched U.S. troops to protect delivery of the U.S. mail. As the strike escalated, he issued another order demanding an end to any kind of support or encouragement of strikers.
“It was not a declaration of martial law — not exactly,” Kelly writes. But it gave Gen. Nelson Miles, the commander of U.S. forces deployed against the strike, “ample authority to act as he saw fit,” according to Kelly. ” ‘Whoever disobeys it,’ Miles said, ‘is a public enemy and will be treated as such.'”
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An illustration from Harper’s Weekly showing at the top (from left) portraits showing George Pullman, Cushman K. Davis, and Eugene Debs. Below, illustrations of scenes from the strike. Library of Congress.
In the end, the strike failed. The ARU never recovered from the defeat and disappeared from the scene. Debs spent six months in the McHenry County, Ill., jail. On Jan. 1, 1897, he announced that he had embraced socialism. George Pullman was ostracized by his fellow Chicago plutocrats for the inflexibility that led to the tumult. And the town of Pullman was never the same.
After the Illinois Supreme Court ruled in 1898 that the Pullman Palace Car Company violated its corporate charter by operating a company town, the town at the center of the labor dispute began a rapid decline, Kelly writes. Property was sold, corporate subsidies for social activities dried up and the aesthetic aspects of the community began to deteriorate. Pullman eventually became another neighborhood on Chicago’s sprawling South Side.
But if the beauties of Pullman did not survive, the ill-feeling caused by the strike did. “As late as 1900,” Kelly writes, “men who had taken different sides refused to speak to each other.”
The experiment was a failure.
Books by Robert B. Mitchell are available at amazon.com
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