On the other hand, the dialogue of Jane Addams is imagined, except where I paraphrase a few of her thoughts from her 1896 speech, The Modern Lear, which she published as an essay in 1912. She compared George Pullman to King Lear and the workers to Lear’s daughters. While Hull House did contribute to the relief effort in Pullman, and Jane Addams did participate in an early attempt at reconciliation, the two face-to-face confrontations with George Pullman are entirely fictitious.
I have to thank Tracy, wife of Centuries & Sleuths bookseller Augie Aleksy, for pointing out that the famous woman reporter, Nellie Bly, came to Chicago to investigate the strike. I consulted Brooke Kroeger’s biography Nellie Bly: Daredevil, Reporter, Feminist, and found that Nellie did indeed come to Chicago, at first skeptical about the strikers, but extremely sympathetic to their cause by the time she left.
Emily Cabot, her friends, and family are all fictional characters. The O’Malley and MacGregor families of Pullman are also entirely made up, as is the labor agitator, Raoul LeClerc. Any other Pullman employees, such as William Jennings, are also fictional. The General Managers did have a headquarters in the Rookery building, but the specific characters portrayed are fictional. A Colonel Turner was in charge of the troops, but the character as he appears in this book, along with the other soldiers, is fictionalized. Leonard Stark is also fictional. There was an incident in which a sheriff’s deputy shot a bystander. It was recorded in the article “Two Are Shot Down”, Chicago Daily Tribune, July 7, 1894, but served merely as a suggestion for the events and characters of my story. There was also a report that a plot to bomb a railroad shop was discovered, but, again, that only served as the inspiration for my fictional incident.
The events of the Pullman Strike were extremely dramatic and provided both suspense and conflict as a background for this story. As with the other volumes in the series, I hope this book will remind people of the rich history of Chicago and the people who suffered and struggled to make the world a better place for us to live in, and who are often forgotten. While the outcome of the strike was disappointing—or encouraging, depending on your point of view—it did lead to reforms that made some of the actions that the General Managers had taken illegal, and eventually forced the Pullman Company to leave the real estate business. I found the fact that the federal army occupied a part of a major American city rather an eye-opener, and I know that is not something that any of us thinks would be desirable. But it is important to remember that it did happen in the past, and could happen again.
For more information visit these websites:
Pullman State Historic Site: http://www.pullman-museum.org/
Historic Pullman Foundation: http://www.pullmanil.org/default.htm
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Frances McNamara grew up in Boston, where her father served as Police Commissioner for ten years. She has degrees from Mount Holyoke and Simmons Colleges, and now works as a librarian at the University of Chicago. She is working on the fourth book in the Emily Cabot mystery series, which will be set in Woods Hole.
Read Frances McNamara’s blog at http://fmcnamara.wordpress.com/
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If you enjoyed this book be sure to look for the first two books
in the Emily Cabot series, Death at the Fair and Death at Hull House.
Death at Pullman Page 25