George Pullman's Town at Center of Labor, African American History
Chicago Tribune
Ron Grossman
Pullman's company town was about controlling every aspect of his rail car business, down to the employees.
Pivotal chapters in American history were written on property owned by Chicago railroad tycoon George Pullman along 111th Street at Cottage Grove Avenue.
North of the intersection was the factory that built the sleeping cars Pullman staffed with African-American porters, jobs that gave blacks an alternative to plantation labor in the Jim Crow South.
To the south of 111th Street were homes, schools and stores for Pullman's employees. The factory town was internationally hailed as an ideal alternative to the crowded tenements where industrial workers generally lived at the time his development opened in 1882.
Next week, midway through Black History Month, President Barack Obama plans to personally dedicate the Pullman district as a national monument. The ceremony will take place five days before his former chief of staff, Mayor Rahm Emanuel, is up for re-election in a city that maintains a residual sense of its working-class past.
Pullman himself hardly aimed at lending his name to the cause of racial or social justice. He was a control freak, dedicated to being the absolute master of every element of his enterprise, human no less than mechanical.
When his plans were derailed by a bitter strike in 1894, Pullman told a federal investigating commission: "The object in building Pullman was the establishment of a great manufacturing business on the most substantial basis possible, recognizing that the working people are the most important element which enters into the successful operation of any manufacturing enterprise."
One embittered striker reportedly put the matter more directly:
"We are born in a Pullman house, fed from the Pullman shops, taught in the Pullman school, catechized in the Pullman Church, and when we die we shall go to the Pullman Hell."
George Pullman gave bricks-and-mortar expression to his sense of the immutability of the social order that is still visible in the Pullman district. Every level of his workforce had a corresponding architectural form. Executives lived in detached homes; foremen in substantial row houses; skilled workers in smaller quarters; and unskilled workers in apartments, some having only two rooms.
As built in the 1880s, there was to be only one church in Pullman's community, which he expected all denominations to share. He reasoned that his factory used interchangeable parts, so why couldn't religion operate similarly?
And everything was owned by Pullman, who operated his town as an independent political entity, about 8 miles south of what was then Chicago's border.
Early in his career, Pullman tipped his hand to the way he intended to run his business: Instead of selling his sleeping cars — which transformed overnight travel from an ordeal to a luxurious experience — he operated them in conjunction with the railroads they ran on. A passenger bought two tickets — one from the railroad, another for the privilege of traveling in one of Pullman's cars.
Logically, the next step was to move his plant out of Chicago, where workers found housing and recreation for themselves. Pullman abhorred the idea of factory hands tippling after work, and he would allow no taverns in his town. His hotel for visiting businessmen had a bar, which was off-limits to Pullman's workers.
By building his town on 4,000 acres of open prairie, he intended to isolate it from the union organizers who made Chicago a center of the labor movement and radical politics.
Yet geography couldn't insulate his workers from resentments born of the vagaries of the business cycle.
In 1894, a depression took a toll on Pullman's revenues, leading him to trim his payroll. But he refused to lower rents or prices in his stores. Trapped between lower wages and increasing debt, his half-starved workers went on strike, and sympathetic railroad workers took up their cause. Violence broke out and federal troops were brought in. The strike was broken, and Pullman's employees had to return to work.
For Pullman, it was a Pyrrhic victory.
The Illinois Supreme Court ruled in 1898 that a company town was illegal, forcing Pullman Co. to sell off the homes, which were subsequently incorporated into Chicago.
Pullman had died the previous year and was buried in Graceland Cemetery in Chicago under 18 inches of reinforced concrete for fear that labor sympathizers would dig up his grave.
Pullman's cars continued to run, playing a critical role in the Great Migration, the mass movement of blacks from the rural South to northern cities. When the Chicago Defender called for African-Americans to leave Jim Crow behind them, Pullman porters carried bundles of the paper to stops along the Illinois Central Railroad's southern run in the era of World War I. They contained a promise that Southern plantation owners and sheriffs couldn't suppress, for all they tried.
George Pullman wouldn't have subscribed to it, either, and the reality has yet to be fully realized. But there it was, passed from hand to hand in churches and barbershops: a message that in Chicago, ordinary people could chose whom they wanted to work for.
rgrossman@tribune.com
Ron Grossman
Pullman's company town was about controlling every aspect of his rail car business, down to the employees.
Pivotal chapters in American history were written on property owned by Chicago railroad tycoon George Pullman along 111th Street at Cottage Grove Avenue.
North of the intersection was the factory that built the sleeping cars Pullman staffed with African-American porters, jobs that gave blacks an alternative to plantation labor in the Jim Crow South.
To the south of 111th Street were homes, schools and stores for Pullman's employees. The factory town was internationally hailed as an ideal alternative to the crowded tenements where industrial workers generally lived at the time his development opened in 1882.
Next week, midway through Black History Month, President Barack Obama plans to personally dedicate the Pullman district as a national monument. The ceremony will take place five days before his former chief of staff, Mayor Rahm Emanuel, is up for re-election in a city that maintains a residual sense of its working-class past.
Pullman himself hardly aimed at lending his name to the cause of racial or social justice. He was a control freak, dedicated to being the absolute master of every element of his enterprise, human no less than mechanical.
When his plans were derailed by a bitter strike in 1894, Pullman told a federal investigating commission: "The object in building Pullman was the establishment of a great manufacturing business on the most substantial basis possible, recognizing that the working people are the most important element which enters into the successful operation of any manufacturing enterprise."
One embittered striker reportedly put the matter more directly:
"We are born in a Pullman house, fed from the Pullman shops, taught in the Pullman school, catechized in the Pullman Church, and when we die we shall go to the Pullman Hell."
George Pullman gave bricks-and-mortar expression to his sense of the immutability of the social order that is still visible in the Pullman district. Every level of his workforce had a corresponding architectural form. Executives lived in detached homes; foremen in substantial row houses; skilled workers in smaller quarters; and unskilled workers in apartments, some having only two rooms.
As built in the 1880s, there was to be only one church in Pullman's community, which he expected all denominations to share. He reasoned that his factory used interchangeable parts, so why couldn't religion operate similarly?
And everything was owned by Pullman, who operated his town as an independent political entity, about 8 miles south of what was then Chicago's border.
Early in his career, Pullman tipped his hand to the way he intended to run his business: Instead of selling his sleeping cars — which transformed overnight travel from an ordeal to a luxurious experience — he operated them in conjunction with the railroads they ran on. A passenger bought two tickets — one from the railroad, another for the privilege of traveling in one of Pullman's cars.
Logically, the next step was to move his plant out of Chicago, where workers found housing and recreation for themselves. Pullman abhorred the idea of factory hands tippling after work, and he would allow no taverns in his town. His hotel for visiting businessmen had a bar, which was off-limits to Pullman's workers.
By building his town on 4,000 acres of open prairie, he intended to isolate it from the union organizers who made Chicago a center of the labor movement and radical politics.
Yet geography couldn't insulate his workers from resentments born of the vagaries of the business cycle.
In 1894, a depression took a toll on Pullman's revenues, leading him to trim his payroll. But he refused to lower rents or prices in his stores. Trapped between lower wages and increasing debt, his half-starved workers went on strike, and sympathetic railroad workers took up their cause. Violence broke out and federal troops were brought in. The strike was broken, and Pullman's employees had to return to work.
For Pullman, it was a Pyrrhic victory.
The Illinois Supreme Court ruled in 1898 that a company town was illegal, forcing Pullman Co. to sell off the homes, which were subsequently incorporated into Chicago.
Pullman had died the previous year and was buried in Graceland Cemetery in Chicago under 18 inches of reinforced concrete for fear that labor sympathizers would dig up his grave.
Pullman's cars continued to run, playing a critical role in the Great Migration, the mass movement of blacks from the rural South to northern cities. When the Chicago Defender called for African-Americans to leave Jim Crow behind them, Pullman porters carried bundles of the paper to stops along the Illinois Central Railroad's southern run in the era of World War I. They contained a promise that Southern plantation owners and sheriffs couldn't suppress, for all they tried.
George Pullman wouldn't have subscribed to it, either, and the reality has yet to be fully realized. But there it was, passed from hand to hand in churches and barbershops: a message that in Chicago, ordinary people could chose whom they wanted to work for.
rgrossman@tribune.com
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