The Town Where the Boss Owned the Houses

In 1880, on a piece of swampy farmland fifteen kilometers south of central Chicago, a railroad-car industrialist named George Mortimer Pullman began building a town for the exclusive use of his employees. The town — eventually named Pullman, after its proprietor — would contain over a thousand brick houses, a hotel, a church, a library, an opera house, schools, parks, a water-pumping station, a sewage farm, and a single industrial facility: the manufacturing works for Pullman Palace Cars, the railroad sleeping carriages that had made Pullman one of the wealthiest men in the United States. The town was designed by the architect Solon Spencer Beman and the landscape designer Nathan F. Barrett. It was, by every contemporary measure, the most ambitious privately-built planned community in nineteenth-century America.

Pullman owned everything. He owned the land. He owned every house. He owned the rental contracts. He owned the church (which was rented to whichever Protestant denomination paid the rent that year). He owned the library. He owned the bank. The workers paid rent to him for their houses, bought their food from the company store he owned, sent their children to schools he funded, were paid in wages that he set, and were subject to a code of behavior — no alcohol on the premises, no political organizing, no labor unions, certain church attendance — that he enforced through the foremen and the rental contracts. A worker who lost his job at the Pullman works also lost his lease. Eviction followed.

Pullman called this welfare capitalism. He believed — and stated publicly on multiple occasions — that the experiment was the future model of American industrial relations. Cleanly designed worker housing under benevolent industrial proprietorship would, he argued, eliminate the social pathologies (drunkenness, labor agitation, family breakdown, urban crime) that had been associated with the older European factory system. Pullman, Illinois, was supposed to be the proof.

It was the proof of something else, but not what Pullman thought.

What the town looked like

The town was constructed between 1880 and 1885 on approximately 4,000 acres of land that Pullman had purchased from local farmers for substantially below market value. The site sat on the western shore of Lake Calumet, a tidal lake connected to Lake Michigan, which gave Pullman both fresh water and a convenient route for industrial sewage disposal. The street grid was rectangular and tree-lined. The brick houses were arranged by employee rank — supervisors and skilled workers in the larger detached houses on the more prestigious streets, semi-skilled workers in the row houses on side streets, unskilled workers in the multi-family tenements at the south end of town. The architecture was a careful mid-Victorian eclecticism, with substantial decorative variation house by house to avoid the impression of a uniform industrial settlement.

The Hotel Florence — named after Pullman’s daughter — sat at the center of town as the only place of public lodging and dining. It served as the social center for visiting officials and the occasional foreign dignitary. The Greenstone Church, built of locally quarried green serpentine, was the only religious building in the original town plan. The library was endowed with twenty thousand volumes by Pullman personally and was the only library in the surrounding region for the first decade of the town’s existence.

The population reached approximately eight thousand by 1885 and twelve thousand by 1893. Most workers were skilled European immigrants — Germans, Swedes, Norwegians, Poles, Italians — recruited specifically for the Pullman works. The town was, by ethnic composition, indistinguishable from the surrounding industrial-Chicago immigrant communities. What was distinctive was the proprietorship.

Visitors — and there were many; the town was a famous tourism destination throughout the 1880s — described Pullman as the cleanest, most beautiful American working-class community they had ever seen. The European press in particular wrote enthusiastically about it. Pullman received the gold medal at the 1896 International Hygiene Exposition in Prague specifically for the town’s sanitary conditions. The annual visitor count reached approximately one hundred thousand by the early 1890s.

What the visitors did not generally see was the rental structure.

How the rents were set

The Pullman works paid wages set by the company at rates that varied by skill class. The rents on Pullman houses were set by the company at rates calibrated to extract approximately one-third of each worker’s monthly wages. The wages were paid in cash; the rents were deducted before the wages were paid. The remaining two-thirds of the wage went toward food (purchased from the company store at company prices) and the small discretionary expenses of working-class American life — newspapers, occasional alcohol (purchased from establishments outside the town’s bounds), clothing for the children.

The system was stable as long as wages were stable. It was vulnerable to any squeeze in which wages fell but rents did not.

The squeeze came in the autumn of 1893. The Panic of 1893 — the United States’ most severe nineteenth-century financial crisis — sharply reduced demand for railroad sleeping cars. Pullman’s orders fell by roughly two-thirds between September 1893 and February 1894. Pullman responded by cutting his workforce by approximately one-third and cutting the remaining workers’ wages by an average of 25 percent. He did not cut the rents on the houses.

The arithmetic was straightforward and visible to every employee. A worker who had previously made $2.40 per day and paid $0.72 per day in rent now made $1.80 per day and still paid $0.72 per day in rent. The rent proportion had risen from 30 percent to 40 percent of the wage. After food, the worker had less than half the discretionary income he had had six months earlier. Families that had been living modestly were now living at subsistence. Several Pullman residents committed suicide in the early spring of 1894 due to inability to meet the company store’s debts. The Hotel Florence continued to serve full-course dinners to visiting Pullman family members.

A delegation of workers requested a meeting with George Pullman on 7 May 1894 to ask for either a rent reduction or a wage restoration. Pullman refused both. Two members of the delegation were dismissed within the week. A second delegation, on 9 May, was told that Pullman would not negotiate. On 11 May 1894, approximately four thousand Pullman workers walked off the job. The Pullman works closed within a day.

What the strike became

The strike would not, by itself, have been a major American event. Pullman’s workforce was substantial but not large enough to attract national attention. What turned the local labor dispute into a national crisis was the American Railway Union (ARU) — a new industrial union of railroad workers that had been founded the previous year by Eugene V. Debs and that had spent its first eighteen months recruiting railroad workers across the United States.

The ARU, at its convention in late June 1894, voted to boycott all Pullman cars on every American railroad until Pullman would negotiate with the strikers. The boycott was effective. Within a week, freight and passenger traffic across most of the western United States was disrupted. By 1 July 1894, an estimated 250,000 railroad workers in twenty-seven states were refusing to work trains containing Pullman equipment. The Pullman strike had become the largest sympathy boycott in American labor history.

The federal response was directed by the United States Attorney General, Richard Olney — a former railroad attorney who held shares in several of the affected railroads. Olney obtained an injunction from a federal court on 2 July 1894 ordering ARU members not to interfere with the U.S. mail (which traveled on the same trains as Pullman cars). The injunction was, by every later analysis, a deliberately broad legal instrument designed to break the boycott by criminalizing it. President Grover Cleveland, on Olney’s recommendation, ordered federal troops into Chicago on 4 July 1894 to enforce the injunction. Twelve thousand soldiers were deployed.

The boycott collapsed within three weeks. Debs was arrested on contempt-of-court charges for failing to enforce the injunction within the ARU. He was sentenced to six months in a federal prison in Woodstock, Illinois. The Pullman workers returned to work in late July at the previous reduced wages. The ARU was dissolved by court order. The Illinois state government convened a commission of inquiry that produced a report broadly critical of Pullman’s labor practices; the report was filed and ignored.

George Pullman died of a heart attack at his Chicago home on 19 October 1897, at the age of sixty-six. He had been receiving anonymous death threats for the previous three years. He was buried at Graceland Cemetery in Chicago in a lead coffin set inside a steel-and-concrete vault designed to prevent later disinterment by labor activists. The vault, eight feet deep and surrounded by railroad rails as additional reinforcement, has not been disturbed.

What survived

The Illinois Supreme Court ruled in 1898 that the Pullman Company’s ownership of an entire town was a violation of the corporate charter under which the company had been incorporated, and ordered the town divested from the company. Pullman, Illinois, was incorporated into the City of Chicago in 1898 and the houses were sold off to private buyers — most of them to the workers who had been renting them. The Pullman works continued to operate, producing railroad cars and military equipment, until 1981, when the post-rail-travel collapse of American passenger railways finally made the operation unprofitable.

The Pullman town is largely intact today. Approximately ninety percent of the original 1880s housing stock is still standing and occupied. The Hotel Florence has been restored as a small museum. The Greenstone Church operates as a Methodist congregation. The original Pullman administration building, with its distinctive clock tower, was destroyed by an arson fire in 1998 but the surviving shell was preserved as a historic site. Pullman National Historical Park was designated by the federal government in 2015. Visitors can walk the original streets and visit the rented houses. The buildings look largely as they did in 1894.

The American Railway Union was the last industrial union of railroad workers in the United States to attempt a nationwide sympathy boycott. After the federal injunction precedent of 1894, the legal landscape made comparable actions impossible until the Wagner Act of 1935. Eugene V. Debs, sitting in the Woodstock prison in the autumn of 1894 reading the books his union friends sent him, converted to socialism. He would run for President of the United States five times as a Socialist candidate between 1900 and 1920. He died in 1926. His prison reading list survives in the records of the Indiana State Library.

The list includes Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, which Debs had not previously read.