There is Power in a Union

by Philip Dray

  Pullman shrewdly saw opportunity in the westward expansion of railroads. Transcontinental rail travel, a reality after 1869, required trains that could serve as self-contained communities, offering amenities for sleeping, eating, and leisure. In addition to his sleepers, Pullman introduced the first successful rail dining car, the “Delmonico,” as well as the first parlor car, which was touted as “a hotel lobby on wheels.” Because Pullman retained ownership of and operated the sleeping cars that were leased by the railroads, he was able to maintain his own high standards for quality and cleanliness. The Pullman Palace Car Company quickly became the gold standard for railroad car construction, while George Pullman was hailed as a rising star of engineering and industry, a levelheaded young corporate visionary who “refers his speech to his mind before he utters it.”42

  He also soon displayed a social conscience. Like many, Pullman had been stunned by the upheaval of the 1877 railroad strikes, and perceived the poverty and deprivation of city slums to be not only a blot on America, but a potential breeding ground for anarchists and other unwanted influences. On a transatlantic voyage, he had read and been impressed by a novel titled Put Yourself in His Place by Charles Reade, in which a skilled inventor applies scientific thought to the problems of production, increasing profits while simultaneously bettering working conditions and hours. The idea of humane reforms acting in tandem with sound business principles appealed to him, and he became intrigued by the possibility of allaying labor strife by improving the workingman’s environment. He was about to open new car shops south of Chicago and began making plans to build a factory town for the workers who would be drawn there. “Seeing nothing wrong in a society oriented toward the profit motive,” writes historian Steven Buder, “his intention was only to apply principles of business efficiency to meet the needs of his own workers. These ideas were promoted with the same verve as earlier had been lavished on the sleeping car.”43

  Pullman had also taken an interest in what was known as the Model Tenement Movement, championed by Alfred T. White, an affluent Brook-lynite who in 1879 published a pamphlet entitled Improved Dwellings for the Laboring Classes: The Need, and the Way to Meet It on Strict Commercial Principles. White, who erected two model housing compounds, was convinced that many of the social hardships afflicting urban workers could be alleviated by freeing them from predatory landlords. Clean, well-ventilated, affordable housing would help stabilize workers’ lives and inculcate virtues of thrift, for a key aspect of White’s movement, and one that appealed greatly to the conservative Pullman, was that all hint of charity was avoided; tenants were expected to keep their apartments in good condition and pay a reasonable but not discounted rent, on which the landlord realized a 7 to 10 percent income.

  To create the model town and a new site for his car works, Pullman purchased four thousand acres of former marshland along the shores of Lake Calumet, about twelve miles south of the Chicago business district. The town, completed in 1889, offered in addition to worker housing numerous amenities such as schools, a theater, a shopping arcade, and a man-made lake. To honor the community’s place in the vanguard of industrial development and provide power for his factories, Pullman purchased the huge Corliss engine, which had been exhibited at the Philadelphia exhibition of 1876. He mounted the great machine in a glass case, where workers and visitors could admire its muscular churning.

  Rents in the company town were no bargain—they were slightly higher than what was charged for comparable housing outside the community—and many of the residents were forced to share WCs and bathtubs. Pullman also charged for conveniences such as use of the town library, to which he donated his own collection of five thousand books. But his “workers’ city,” with its parklike atmosphere, its planned streets bearing the names of great inventors—Fulton, Stephenson, Watt, and Pullman himself—became a popular side attraction for the crowds drawn to the Columbian Exposition, the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893. After a day viewing the fair’s futuristic exhibits, the curious could take a fifteen-minute interurban ride to what must have seemed like the future itself—a functioning corporate town, with neatly trimmed hedges, a village square, and seemingly contented residents. Nearly thirteen thousand people lived in Pullman, roughly five thousand workers and their dependents.

  The development of the Chicago World’s Fair and the need to transport fairgoers to Chicago—27 million visitors were drawn to the fair during its six-month run—had brought an increased demand for Pullman railcars. This delayed the effect of the national economic downturn of 1893 on the Pullman works,44 but by late summer 1893 orders for sleepers had diminished. The firm let go more than three thousand workers and reduced the hours and wages of those who remained, although it managed to reemploy two thousand of those dismissed by spring 1894, albeit at lower pay.45 The wage reductions averaged 25 to 33 percent, and in some cases 50 percent; for example, a carpet-cutter’s pay-per-piece rate fell from $3.00 to $1.50; a mattress-maker’s from $2.25 to $1.40; a seat-maker’s from $1.25 to $0.79.46 This economic adjustment might have allowed Pullman and his employees to endure the downturn together, but his strong ethical views about charity led him to insist that the workers continue to pay a competitive rent for their housing. This was ruinous for the employees, as their rents were no longer near commensurate with their reduced pay. The company had all along deducted rent and the costs of utilities like water and illuminating gas from workers’ paychecks; now, because rents remained the same even as pay levels dipped, many workers were left a pittance in weekly salary. “The wages he pays out with one hand, the Pullman Palace Car Company,” stated a formal grievance issued by the employees, “[but] he takes back with the other, the Pullman Land Association.”47

  Philosophically unsympathetic to unionization, Pullman had joined other major Chicago employers in the aftermath of Haymarket to demand that the alleged perpetrators be held to the fullest account. This group, which also consisted of meatpacker Philip Armour, retailer Marshall Field, and farm equipment manufacturer Cyrus McCormick Jr., gave $100,000 to aid the families of policemen hurt or killed in the terror explosion, funds that were redirected in subsequent years to assisting local authorities to suppress radicals. Pullman’s anxiety about labor strife and his identification with the concerns of big business tended to distance him from his own rank-and-file workers, a trend that intensified as his wealth and influence grew. Increasingly he relied on foremen and department heads to deal with employees. These intermediaries, knowing of Pullman’s perfectionism and bouts of temper, often chose not to impart to him the actual difficulties experienced on the shop floor. When he did choose to intervene, the results were often harsh, as when he banned meetings by workers in his town who had joined the Knights of Labor and arranged to fire those men he considered organizers of the movement.48 He had become confident of his ability to keep the “chronic kickers,” as he called labor activists, in check.

  Pullman’s control over what types of associations might gather in the town was just one aspect of the village’s feudal character. He had imposed strict sanitary regulations, banned alcohol and prostitution, imposed a curfew, and restricted the consumption of tobacco. A legion of spies and informers kept him abreast of residents’ activities and made sure rules were obeyed. All structures including workers’ homes were subject to company-only maintenance and inspection. No one, not even a group that approached him wanting to form a church, was allowed to buy property. “Just as no man or woman of our 4,000 toilers has ever felt the friendly pressure of George M. Pullman’s hand,” the workers reported, “so no man or woman of us all has ever owned or can ever hope to own one inch of George M. Pullman’s land.”49 This controlling governance had become unwieldy, as the town increasingly was home to immigrant workers who didn’t share Pullman’s personal ideas about drinking beer or how they spent their leisure time. “We are born in a Pullman house, fed from the Pullman shop, taught in the Pullman school, catechized in the Pullman church, and when we die we shall be buried
in the Pullman cemetery and go to the Pullman hell,” one worker protested.50

  With the firm demanding rent (and back rent) from the very workers whose pay had been cut, the cruelest aspect of the town’s organization was made apparent. As work and paychecks diminished over the cold winter of 1893–1894, families suffered from want of basic necessities such as coal for heating. The desperation and lack of solutions were especially acute, as historian Ray Ginger points out, because “the town had no mechanisms for public relief,” for such would have been “contrary to the owner’s ideas of individual self-help.”51 The city of Chicago could be of little assistance, as it was facing its own crisis of homeless unemployed. Hordes had been drawn to the glittering Columbian Exposition by the possibility of work, and failing to obtain it had become something akin to a large refugee population, shuffling from church to relief agency in hope of a hot meal, sleeping in doorways, police stations, and saloons.

  By spring 1894 some Pullman workers and their families were meeting outside the town in order to discuss their predicament, away from the ears of company spies. Compounding their concern was the report that Pullman, while slashing workers’ pay, had not reduced his own or his top executives’ salaries, and had maintained the high level of dividends paid to the firm’s stockholders. On May 7 they sent representatives to meet with company vice president Thomas H. Wickes, who asked them to submit their grievances in writing and return for another conversation on May 9, at which George Pullman would be present. In that meeting—one of the first in years Pullman had had with his employees—Pullman explained that he had cut wages because orders were down and that he was attempting to manage the amount of work available so as to limit layoffs; he asserted that the firm had agreed to several low-bid work contracts expressly to maintain employment levels. He offered to let workers examine the company’s financial records to verify this, and vowed that there would be no reprisals against the workers’ representatives who had come forward with grievances.

  Due to an apparent misunderstanding or extremely poor timing, however, three of the men who had conferred with Pullman and Wickes were let go the very next day in what the company cited as previously ordered staff reductions. Whatever the intent behind the firings, the word among Pullman employees was that the men had been discharged for daring to lead a potential strike committee, and that George Pullman himself had gone back on his word. Two days later Pullman employees, fed up with the sleeping car magnate’s greed, obstinacy, and apparent double-dealing, set their tools down.

  THE CRISIS AT THE NATION’S LEADING sleeping car manufacturer was not the only labor-related headline of spring 1894. Only a few months earlier, an uprising had begun the likes of which had never occurred in the United States, as armies of unemployed citizens—emanating from dozens of cities, villages, mines, and lumber camps—commenced a march on Washington to demand work.

  The instigator was Jacob S. Coxey, owner of a quarry in Massillon, Ohio. For several years he had lobbied Congress to enact legislation that would assist the unemployed by creating jobs to build roads and other public infrastructure. In promoting a public works program that would put an economically depressed America back to work, Coxey was anticipating elements of the New Deal, still half a century away, but this being the 1890s, such a broad-ranging plan of direct government aid was decried as wishful, if not eccentric. Another man might have filed away the last rejection letter from Congress and let the matter rest, but Coxey, convinced that the solons in faraway Washington simply required stronger convincing, announced a plan to walk in protest from Ohio to the nation’s capital with one hundred thousand of his fellow citizens—“a petition in boots,” he called it—in order to demonstrate both the need and the available manpower for his program of federal jobs.52

  The march departed Massillon on March 25, 1894, with five hundred participants, far fewer than the tens of thousands Coxey had imagined, but raising enough dust to bring out crowds in every hamlet through which it passed. Coxey and his coleader, Carl Browne, had an innate sense of spectacle that worked in their favor. Browne resembled, and had garbed himself, like the star of a Wild West show. Coxey, a mild-looking fellow in a suit and glasses whom no one would mistake for a revolutionary, dressed his seventeen-year-old daughter, Mamie, in red, white, and blue and named her the “Goddess of Peace.” His eighteen-year-old son, Jesse, was adorned in an outfit that combined equal amounts of Confederate gray and Union blue—a sartorial expression of the sectional reconciliation that was another of Coxey’s pet aims. His two-month-old son, Legal Tender, named in honor of monetary reform, was also along for the march, and was at each stop held aloft by Coxey’s wife to cheers and applause.

  Press and public at first doubted whether such a ragtag bunch would really cover by foot the four hundred miles from Ohio to Washington, but as the little army approached the Potomac on April 30 curiosity turned to concern; authorities declared a full alert, for no one could be sure what angry, unemployed people who had trekked hundreds of miles would do. The result was decidedly anticlimactic; Coxey and his fellow leaders were arrested within hours of their arrival for trespassing on the lawn of the Capitol, but not before he had managed to give to reporters a statement he’d intended to read from the building’s portico.

  Up these steps the lobbyists of trusts and corporations have passed unchallenged on their way to the committee rooms, access to which we, the representatives of the toiling wealth producers, have been denied. We stand here today in behalf of millions of toilers whose petitions have been buried in committee rooms, whose prayers have been un-responded to, and whose opportunities for honest, remunerative labor have been taken away from them by unjust legislation, which protects idlers, speculators and gamblers.53

  Though technically a failure, the strange pilgrimage had succeeded in garnering at least the momentary attention of elected officials. It also inspired the launching of dozens of other “armies” of the unemployed, sometimes known as “industrials,” that began walking or riding east toward the capital during the late spring and summer of 1894 from as far west as San Francisco. This sudden, mobile crusade, self-generated from countless locales, was startling in its determination. One departed from Portland, Oregon, and made it as far as Cokeville, Wyoming; a Polish American “army” stepped off from Chicago; others began in St. Louis, Boston, Omaha, Reno, Fargo, Los Angeles, and Seattle. Some Coxey loyalists in Montana hammered rafts together and floated down the Missouri River. Author Jack London joined a group out of California and traveled with it into the nation’s heartland, while fellow West Coast writer Ambrose Bierce derided the “pickpocket civilization” that America had become, a society in which the affluent few exploited the labor of the many and the kind of useful public policy Coxey advocated was throttled by the strangulating grip of laissez-faire.54

  Most alarming were the hijacked trains. In Montana, a state hard hit by a mining industry collapse that had thrown twenty thousand men out of work, as many as five hundred followers of an unemployed teamster named William Hogan seized a Northern Pacific freight train in Butte on April 24 for the journey east. Federal marshals attempted to halt the stolen train and take Hogan into custody, but Butte citizens rallied to the hijackers’ defense. Similar scenes were enacted at Bozeman, Livingston, and Columbus, as local crowds that turned out in support of the Hoganites proved too great for lawmen to overcome. At Billings on the morning of April 25 guns blazed between marshals and Hogan’s followers; one bystander was killed and several people wounded before the authorities withdrew and allowed the train to steam out of the depot under the hijackers’ control. Hogan and his comrades, having escaped Billings, the last sizable town in Montana, assumed they had cleared the last obstacle on the way to Washington. But just west of the present-day town of Forsyth in Rosebud County they found the tracks barricaded by federal troops. U.S. attorney general Richard Olney, having learned from Montana’s governor by urgent telegram of the shooting at Billings, had called out the army stationed at Fort Keo
gh to block the track. “General” Hogan and his men were forced from the train and arrested.55

  “Coxeyism teaches a bad lesson,” one newspaper concluded, “the most dangerous lesson indeed that can be taught to the American people—the lesson of dependence on the Federal government.”56 It was particularly disturbing that many “industrials” had originated in the West, the part of the country long identified with the creed of individual reward won through determination and hard work.

  The phenomenon of legions of jobless people traipsing across the land was in itself unnerving, for America had developed a particular distaste for tramps, the term used generally to refer to the wandering unemployed. Lounging in public parks, riding the rails, appearing at the outskirts of small towns, begging for work or for food, the “tramp” was the national bogeyman of the late nineteenth century, an object of both scorn and fear. Newspapers carried cautionary tales of alleged “tramp mischief,” from chicken-stealing to the snatching of pies left on windowsills.

  The actual risk tramps posed was no doubt exaggerated, but the public’s disdain—expressed in anti-vagrancy laws and vigilantism—could not have been more genuine. “War on the Tramps,” as one headline stated.57 No one wanted tramps passing through their community; no one wished them to stay. Some towns fought the affliction by giving food and shelter to passing jobless “armies” on the condition they move on; but many citizens would have concurred with the simpler solution offered by Chicago reformer Mary A. Livermore, “The sooner they are dead and buried the better for society.”58