One-hundred years ago this summer, George Pullman’s dream of a model city as perfectly engineered as his railroad cars turned into the nightmare of a bitter and bloody strike that convulsed the nation and brought the Army to Chicago.
“The Pullman strike of 1894 was a classic case of opportunity lost and unintended consequence,” said Leslie Orear, president of the Illinois Labor History Society, in an interview. “A corporate dream collapsed, and the evolution of American industrial relations was set back by several decades.”
Pullman’s dream-town concept was as old as Plato. Thomas More, the Renaissance philosopher, dubbed his Utopia: an ideal community free from the perennial conflicts of human society. Pullman built his utopian village, to which he gave his own name, on Chicago’s Far Southeast Side, where it still largely survives, preserving a brick-and-mortar outline of his vision.
Pullman was always good with bricks and mortar. A self-trained inventor, he arrived in Chicago in 1859, just as the city fathers decreed a 6-foot raising of the street level to free the city from Lake Michigan’s mud. Hearing the proprietor of the Tremont House despair for the future of his luxury hotel, Pullman proposed lifting the four-story structure to Dearborn Street’s new elevation.
“I’ll do it for you,” Pullman boasted, “and your guests will not miss a single meal or a wink of sleep.”
True to his word, he set gangs of workers to turning 5,000 jackscrews so slowly and smoothly that guests said they knew the hotel was moving only because there was an extra step to climb each day. Made famous by that feat at 28, Pullman next turned his creative energies to a problem of railroad travel. He designed a jolt-free sleeper to replace the bunkhouses on wheels then in use.
By 1880, his Pullman Palace Cars so monopolized overnight travel in America that he needed expanded production facilities, which he saw as an opportunity to put the finishing touches on the modern industrial process.
To his mind, the weak link in the system was the workman.
Often living in tenement slums dotted with taverns and gin mills, the blue-collar workers of the day seemed to Pullman ill-suited for the sophisticated machinery of his workshops. So he bought land on Lake Calumet, 9 miles south of what were then the Chicago city limits, where he established a self-contained community of 20,000 people, carefully insulated from the big city’s baleful influences.
The 600 acres of Pullman Town contained factories, homes for the workers who staffed those factories, and all the markets, shops and schools necessary to met their families’ needs. Every component fit together with the precision of a fine watch.
Homes graded by size were assigned employees according to rank: Foremen and managers got the most luxurious; unskilled workers were relegated to tiny apartments. Only one church was built. Pullman felt that if industry could use standardized, interchangable parts, why couldn’t religious denominations do similarly? No taverns were allowed.
Rave reviews
“Our people soon forget all about drink,” Pullman told the Ottawa Daily Free Press. “They find they are better off without it, and we have an assurance of our work being done with greater accuracy and skill.”
Human waste from the village’s residences was piped out to a farm, and used to fertilize fields where vegetables were grown. Trucked back to town, those crops were sold at a market inspected by Pullman’s sanitation agents.
Upon opening in 1881, Pullman Town was saluted as a picture-book example of modern city planning. When Chicago hosted the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, special trains ran out to Pullman Town so visitors from around the world could admire George Pullman’s handiwork.
“It is famous already as one of the wonders of the West,” the Chicago Inter Ocean newspaper wrote.
Still, a few critics found flies in Pullman’s ointment, noting that everything in his utopia belonged to him alone. Homes were for rent, not sale; thus residents were denied the quintessential American dream of becoming homeowners. Union organizers were forbidden in Pullman Town, where self-government was unknown, the town being run like any other department of the Pullman company.
“I preached once in the Pullman church, but by the help of God I will never preach there again,” a minister said. “I thought the organ groaned, `monopoly, monopoly’ in all its lower tones.”
Pullman’s personal bible was the ledger book. So when his business nose-dived in 1893 because of a depression, he cut costs by sharply reducing wages. But he held firm on rents, insisting that his paymasters subtract the same rents as before from his employees’ shrinking paychecks.
“I have seen men with families of eight or nine children to support crying,” Pullman employee Thomas Heathcoate testified before a federal investigating committee, “because they got only 3 or 4 cents after paying their rent.”
By May 7, 1894, the situation of Pullman’s workers had become so desperate that they elected a delegation to meet with him. He adamantly refused to restore wages or lower rents, just as he afterward rebuffed an appeal to negotiate brought him by Jane Addams on behalf of the Civic Federation, an organization of Chicago businessmen. But Pullman did express his concern for the workers.
“When we went to tell him our grievences,” their delegates reported, “he said we were all his `children.’ “
Strike begins and builds
Four days after that meeting, 3,000 Pullman workers went out on strike. A month later, their representatives appeared before the American Railroad Union, which was holding its national convention in Chicago.
“We struck because we were without hope,” the Pullman workers explained. “Pull us out of our slough of despond. Teach arrogant grinders of the faces of the poor that there is still a God in Israel, and if need be a Jehovah-a God of battles.”
The convention voted to support the Pullman strikers by instructing the union’s 150,000 members not to handle trains containing Pullman cars. The tactic hit George Pullman right in his pocketbook because he operated the sleeping cars his factories built on contract with the railroads. By July, with sympathy strikes under way in 23 states from Ohio to California, supplies of milk and produce ran short in Chicago. Livestock couldn’t reach the Union Stock Yards, the nation’s chief source of meat products.
The depression of 1893 had put many Americans out of work, and some used the Pullman strike as an opportunity to vent their frustration in acts of violence.
On July 5, a fire of mysterious origin greatly damaged the Columbian Exposition’s buildings in Jackson Park, which some editorialists proclaimed the handiwork of anarchists. The following day a reporter for the Inter Ocean witnessed rioters setting fire to 700 railroad cars in a South Chicago switching yard.
“It was pandemonium let loose, the fire leaping along for miles and men and women dancing with frenzy,” he reported. “It was a mad scene where riot became wanton and men and women became drunk on their excess.”
Railroad executives, meanwhile, rallied to Pullman’s cause, and at their request, the U.S. attorney general got a federal judge to issue an injunction declaring the strike an illegal interference with the mail. To enforce the court’s order, President Grover Cleveland instructed the Army to get trains running again, which the soldiers did, sometimes holding the workers at bayonet point.
Darrow for the defense
The day troops from Ft. Sheridan took up positions in Chicago’s blue-collar neighborhoods, the attorney for the Chicago and North Western Railway told his boss he was resigning to defend the railroad workers’ union.
“I thought men had the right to stop work when they didn’t find conditions satisfactory,” the attorney, Clarence Darrow, told North Western President Marvin Hughitt, according to Irving Stone, Darrow’s biographer. “If this is really a democracy we live under, that injunction is illegal.”
“Why give up a good position for a hopeless cause?” Hughitt replied. “Don Quixote only tilted at windmills; you’re going to run into a high-powered locomotive under full steam.”
Hughitt proved a prophet. On July 17, railroad union President Eugene Victor Debs was arrested, having been cited for contempt of court, and the strike began to collapse. Shortly afterward, Pullman’s shops opened again, but with a blacklist against workers who had taken active roles in the strike, which left much of the town jobless.
By August, the situation in Pullman Town was so grim that the Cook County Board ordered that flour and rice be distributed free to residents at public expense. Many inhabitants moved away, and life in the village and in Pullman’s factory returned to normal. It seemed as if the company had won the encounter, but the victory was short-lived.
In 1898, the Illinois Supreme Court ordered Pullman’s utopia dismantled. The justices ruled that Pullman Town had to be sold off because a company town was “incompatible with the theory and spirit of our institutions.”
The American Railroad Union’s leadership went to prison for their part in the strike, the U.S. Supreme Court rejecting Darrow’s appeal. But Debs emerged from Woodstock County Jail in 1895 to find himself a working-class hero. A crowd of 100,000 met the train bringing him to Chicago.
Radicalized by the strike, Debs later helped found the American Socialist Party, running for president on its ticket five times. But the Pullman strike permanently crippled Debs’ railroad union.
The denied dream
“The defeat of the railway union was a defeat of the concept of one big union in a single industry, which didn’t take hold in America until the advent of the Congress of Industrial Organizations some 40 years later,” said Orear of the Illinois Labor History Society. “Lost, too, was the chance to establish a modern system of industrial relations, for a senatorial commission investigating the strike urged such as a national policy, but the recommendation was ignored until the National Labor Relations Act of 1935.”
Darrow went on to become America’s most celebrated champion of lost and unpopular causes. He was to argue the right of a high-school teacher to teach evolution, in the Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925, and would defend numerous political dissenters.
Pullman died three years after the strike. Because his name had become synonymous with hostility to workers, his final resting place, like the tombs of the ancient pharaohs, was fortified against grave robbers. He lies in Chicago’s Graceland Cemetery under tons of concrete and steel.
Marking his passing, newspapers of all political persuasions observed that Pullman had built a fatal flaw into his model city: He simply had no idea how strongly the ordinary American worker wanted to own his own home.
“The twenty-five foot lot with the little one story cottage stands for his share in the edifice of the Republic,” the Chicago Times Herald noted. “It is his `stake’ in the country. Mr. Pullman overlooked this sentiment.”
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The Chicago Federation of Labor will mark the centennial of the Pullman strike with a Labor Day parade and celebration Sept. 5 at Pullman, 111th Street and Cottage Grove Avenue. Call 312-222-1000 for a schedule of events.
