Let's Talk About The Pullman Strike, Knob-Gobblers

because relatively I'm usually bad. But I think it's I'm a better bad than usual. You know that makes sense? I don't know. Yeah, yeah, I know. It's always good to be a better bad than usual. And it's really gloomy in l A, and that makes me thrive. I love Yeah, I love it when LA feels like the Pacific Northwest. Briefly, Yes, exactly. It doesn't happen it often, you get me. Yeah, So, Sharine, how do you feel about trains? Uh? So they're fun. That's a way to introduce.

I love to travel. Okay, how do you feel about so? You like? You like comfortable trains? Right? Like? You know trains with cabin sleeper cars, all that sort of stuff. The trains you can sit on and enjoy. I like all trains. I think they're very impressive. And uh yeah, if you do you really think about it, there a feat that man made, you know what I mean? They pretty cool. Now, how do you feel about workers being gunned down because they are trying to get paid fairly

for helping to make trains bad? I feel bad about you feel bad about that? Oh okay, so this might not be a super happy episode. Well that's the episode. Like that. It's it's great, it's great. I'm very good at my job. The working title I have for this this episode sharene is. Let's talk about the Pullman strike Comma Cocksuckers And I don't know why I was so aggressive when I was writing the title to this um but but I never edited it and now it's it's in there, So if you can we make this the

title of the episode. We put Cocksuckers in Spotify. I don't know. There's certain apps that reject these really yeah, or and it makes and it makes it like like it blocks it for searching things. But in my heart, that's the title. Yeah, I feel like, if Cometown is fine, oh, let's talk about the Pullman Strike. Cocksuckers is also okay. I mean, I'm willing to give it a shot if it would make you happy. Yeah, I think I would

like to give it a shot. On the episode that I guessed on it might it might be gone forever, Well, it might be Yeah, Well we'll change the title up on a couple of an artifact, we can change the title to let's talk about the Pullman Strike knob gobblers. Okay, they're not gonna catch that's great, that's great. So today, Serene Lonnie unis, today we're gonna learn about George Pullman, a guy who sucked so bad that workers who didn't even work for him quit working to protest how shitty

a boss he was. Like, that's the level of bad. Like other people who had nothing to do with this guy quit working to protest how much he sucked. Now, like most great labor stories, the story of the Pullman Strike has a sad ending and a lot more racism than you'd hope. But that's no excuse not to talk about this huge piece of ship, George Mortimer Pullman. He was born in eighteen thirty one and Brockton, New York.

His dad, James Lewis known as Louis, was a farmer who became a carpenter because the money was much better. The family seems to have been upwardly mobile for the time, but firmly working class. George was expected to labor from a young age. Now Brockton had a general store owned by his mom's uncle, and after he finished fourth grade, it was to did that he would drop out and work there for about forty dollars a month, which is a pretty good salary for the time. Again, his family

is comfortable. That same year, his parents left him and his two brothers behind to move to Albion, New Jersey, so his dad could work on widening the eerie canal. Uh And yeah, yeah, this was this was like a whole big deal here in George's fourteen when the effort starts. We have fewer of his early recollections that night, I prefer so it's hard to say how this affected him,

but the move was great for his father's career. Louis Pullman developed a method of moving the building off of its old foundations and onto a new one because they had to to widen This canal. There was like stuff built up against the canal that they had to lift up and move so that they could widen the canal. It was like this whole they're doing this and like the eighteen late eighteen forties, I think is kind of

when the effort gets really underway. Um. See, he can be impressive sometimes it's really cool because like again people are they don't have techno apology, then like everything sucks. Uh to innovative, they have to be innovative. Yeah, So the system that Louis Pullman develops to move buildings uses like Screwjack's and this special machine that he's invented in

it's this whole wild deal. Um. And so since a lot of buildings needed to be moved to expand the Erie Canal, this was a major boon for family finances. In eighteen forty eight, three years after three years of working at his family store, George was seventeen and he was missing his parents who were still off building the Erie Canal. So he joins moves to Albion, New York, joins his family, and he gets a job at what is now the family business, moving buildings so that a

canal can be wider. The next five years were peacefully lucrative for both him and his family, before his father died in eighteen fifty three, leaving George Pullman the heir to the business at age twenty two. He had brothers, but they started another business, and George had been working with his dad, so he was the obvious choice. His first big contract is from the state of New York. They wanted twenty buildings, most most of which were warehouses,

moved out of the way of the widening canal. UH. This made a decent amount of money, but it was not the kind of thing that could last forever. In New York only had so many additional buildings that were in the way of where the canal was getting expanded to, and eventually there was going to be no more money in that UH. The economy hit a major recession in the mid eighteen fifties and George was forced to look

outside of New York for revenue. He founded in Chicago, a city that by eighteen fifty seven was starting to reap the consequences of trying to make too much Chicago, way too fast. There was a period of time in which we had a Chicago and everybody was so excited about it. They were like, we gotta keep making more Chicago. And then they built way too much Chicago and like

they couldn't. They couldn't, Like so Chicago is built on a swamp like a lot of places, um and it was, uh like they didn't they didn't build like they did. They had no real infrastructure, um like, because this thing just like blew up so quickly. Um back at the time and like the mid eighteen hundreds, it's kind of a cluster of buildings about four ft above Lake Michigan. Um that nobody really planned out all that well. So as it gets bigger, it's flooding constantly, suage just like

washing into houses and streets all the time. Um Like. It was just there never should have been large numbers of people there. It was kind of like a fucking swamp. And they just they made too much Chicago too fast. You know. It's a classic story. Were they making Chicago because they were like really excited about it, or because they had to and the people it was like the population thing, I think, yeah, right, I think there's a couple of different things, but yeah, it was just it

was the place to be for a while. You know. The westward expansion is like really in full swing at this period of time. Chicago's uh, you know, kind of in the mid middle of the country. Um, and it yeah that they just coming to a city. I guess it's becoming a central city. Yeah, and it's a problem. And to kind of illustrate what a problem it was, I want to quote from a passage from the hilarious named website Enjoy Illinois. Quote. The streets turned to mud,

stranding horses, carriages, and humans alike. Pools of standing water formed all over the city. The environment caused hygiene and health problems, including an eighteen fifty four collar outbreak which killed one in twenty residents. The marsh on which the city was built was trying to claim back its territory. After a number of failed attempts to fix the problem, including planking the streets with wood, the city decided that only that the only long term solution was to install

a sewer and stormwater system. But in Chicago that was no easy feat. Sewers need to go underground and they drained down. Chicago was barely above the water table, and underground sewers couldn't work at that level. So they got this issue. They they've suddenly built a lot of Chicago ships, literal ships flooding everywhere, and they need to build sewers, but Chicago is barely above the water. You know, it just sounds like nature spicing back. We were never meant

to be there. We were never meant to have a Chicago. You know, I think that's fair, you know, like it's just doesn't want us there. Nature's fighting back, and it was. Yeah, there's there's a category of cities in the United States, and not just in the United States, but specifically in the United States. There's a category of cities that like

our direct affronts to God. Phoenix is another direct affront to God, Like if we we built Phoenix, Arizona to spit in the eye of the Almighty, it never people were never supposed to live there in any kind of quantity um. And it's the same thing with Chicago. I see, That's how I feel back Chicago Phoenix. Yeah, I don't

know how they're all of Florida. I don't know what the fun is thinking with that ship, Like, uh, Dan, so Chicago's you know, they're trying to figure out how to get a sewer built in a city that is like almost uniquely unsuited to having traditional sewers, and rather than admit that the present location of Chicago wasn't affront to God, they opted to raise every single go building in street in town by an average height of six ft.

They decided, we can't ships flooding everywhere, we can't build a normal underground sewer here, so instead of moving, let's lift the entire city up by six ft. That is so bonkers. It's amazing. What I uh, the last thing I ever thought you would say. I thought they were going to just build them above ground and then make Chicago worse. But that'sn't. That'sn't. That's intense to just lived a city. We really do think we're God. It's it's amazing.

I weirdly enough like that. One of the things that reminds me of as a story from the Roman Empire of one of Caesar's conquests. He was laying siege to this Galic city called Alesia, and the way the Romans would siege the city is they would build a wall around the entire city so they could basically like shoot down into the town and like starve it out essentially.

And while they're doing this, this huge gallic army that outnumbers them like five ten to one up and attacks the Roman army, and rather than like break off and retreat, they just build a second wall around themselves, and so they have one big wall around them and one big wall around the city. It's just this like, yeah, no, we we can. We can just solve all of our problems by by engineering, by building huge things like never never, It's amazing. I it's it's it's but that's how they

got to the problem. It is how they got to the problem. But in this case is not working, you know what I mean? Why didn't I just well, the thing is, though it did work for the Romans. Caesar won that battle, and it worked in Chicago because they did lift every goddamn building in the city up by six Some were raised by as much as fourteen feet. Okay,

how does how is that literally physically possible? They've got this like Screwjack Winch kind of thing system that just sort of like lifts shut up and yeah, I don't know, it's it's it's it's a whole thing. You can find there's like it's very well documented. You know, this was in the mid eight hundreds, so they had people did like talk about how they were doing it. It's not a mystery. Um. And it also provided the fact that they're lifting the entire city up six ft by the

height of a dude basically. Um. That that gives the city an opportunity to rebrand because it again had kind of been like this frontier ramshackle town, and the people who were in charge of things at the time were able to use this to move buildings that didn't look nice to the edges of the city and kind of reorganized Chicagos that when everything was lifted, it looked the way they wanted to, like a nice red light. But yeah, yeah,

I mean kind of was yeah, it was yeah. Um. And of course the instead of moving the lines are moving the actual buildings. Yeah, you could just like move all the buildings around. Um. Now, George's firm was not the only one involved in raising the city. He was actually one of a handful of firms all technically competing with each other, but they all kind of agreed to work together to determine who got which bids and to

maximize their profitability. It was like price fixing. I don't know if that was illegal at the time, I think it kind of is now. But they they all these different firms, including George, is operating a cartel in order to get as much money to lift the ship city of Chicago up as they possibly can. And George is not a small player in this, but he's not a particularly large one either. Um. He had dreams of more. Um.

You know, this is a successful business. He's making a comfortable living, but that was not enough for George pullman um. And kind of after this, he winds up on a train ride from Buffalo to Westfield, or during this, he winds up on a train ride from Buffalo to Westfield, York to negotiate. Yeah, well yeah that this is where the trains come in. So he's on a train ride for a business meeting and it's train rides sucked back then. Like that's kind of something that I didn't wasn't really

aware of before this. They were they didn't have trains that were meant to be like in any way comfortable, like you could get on one, but there was no like that kind of romantic vision of like the fans and the beautiful pointed train car with the bar and none of that existed yet. It was awful, and to illustrate how awful it was, I want to quote from a write up by Richard Schneiro from Indiana State University

for the Northern Illinois University Digital Library. Quote. As railroad mileages tripled between eighteen fifty and eighteen sixty, the uncomfortable conditions passengers and dirt on trips longer than a few hours became intolerable. Passenger cars were not built to cushion jolts, windows constantly rattled. In the winter, wood burning stoves could fill the cars with smoke and caused accidents, and in

the summer writers sweltered. It took three and a half days to travel from Chicago to New York, and a typical traveler resorted to hotels at night. The need for a sleeping car was widely understood, but at the time none were satisfactory. In eighteen fifty eight, Pollman began renovating existing sleeping cars for the Chicago and Alton Railroad. Eventually, he established a small crew and began building cars from scratch.

In eighteen sixty four, his crew built the classic sleeping car he called the Pioneer, with brocaded fabrics, handcrafted window and door frames, plush red carpets, and richly ornamented paneling. The Pioneer was a study in luxury. It was also the turning point and Pullman's rise to success. Pullman's luxurious sleeping car appealed to America's fast growing wealthy class hungry for status, and a new middle class that aspired to

the same outward markers of social standing. Pullman shrewdly took advantage of this in his marketing strategy, which relied on quality of service and prestige rather than low prices. So he offers for the first time, really not even just like first class, but just a train ride that wouldn't make you want to die. Um, and it's hugely successful. Trains are blowing up at this point, and he's the first guy to figure out how to make you want to be on a train, you know. Yeah, very innovative

again like his father, I guess, also innovative. It's in yeah, smart mat Yeah, he gets he understands, you know that this is an unfilled need, and he fills it ably. I think also, like, if you don't maybe this is a hot take. I don't know, I don't care. I think if he don't come from money money, Uh, you understand more what the people need and want. It's the same reason you guys like Bezos and and Bill Gates.

I know there are people who would like consider them rich, but they're their upper middle class and so it's it's not enough money that they never had to do anything, like they were going to need to find out something to do, but it's enough money that they are able to like pursue their dreams from an early age. Like George's right, like he's he's where he's he's paid well to work at this family shop at seventeen, he's able to very easily go follow his dad and you know,

get involved in this new business. It's, uh, yeah, he's working class enough money that yeah. Yeah, he's in his early twenties right now, mid de late twenties I think by now, um, and this is a big hit. So he has his his his trained business is successful, but it's not as big as as George wants to be. Like he's he's doing very well. He's probably what you'd call wealthy, but he's not like a massive industrial magnate.

Um and he's he's he feels uncertain, like he he doesn't really believe that his business can expand all that much. He kind of feels like, well, I found a profitable niche, but that's all it's going to be, So he starts looking for other ways to make money. By the late eighteen fifties, the Pike's Peak gold rush was well underway in Chicago or Colorado or Chicago. George decided to travel there and see if he might be able to short cut the route to wealth and power by striking it rich.

The Pullman Museum writes that in short order, quote Pullman realized that the real money in a gold rush is made by supplying other fortune hunters. So he decides very quickly, it's fucking not worth it to go panning for gold. But I can sell ship to the people panning for gold. And he forms a company to do this, moving freight and crushing ore. And when that did well, he bought sixteen hundred acres near Central City, Colorado, and they turned it.

He turns this into a truck stop, basically like the Gilded Age equivalent of a truck stop. He knows a ton of people are passing in and out of this specific area, um they're going to a place that's that's real primitive, no amenities whatsoever. Um, So they're gonna want something that they can head to on their way in and out in order to like get drunk and eat

good food and sleep in a comfortable bed. So he builds he builds this big truck stop, and for a while he's kind of on this path of, you know, getting forming little businesses here and there as he sees needs. UM and I don't. It doesn't look initially like his train business is going to be huge. But the good news is that from you know, if your job is making trains more comfortable, then the eighteen fifties is a little bit early for that to be a big business.

But the eighteen sixties that's the fucking like, you know, that's where you're gonna make money. Um. You said to stick around long enough for yeah. Yeah. And the Civil War does a lot for this, right. Trains are a huge part of why the Union wins, um. And the Civil War is furthermore helpful to his business because on April fift eighteen sixty five, a dude shot Abraham Lincoln right in his head. Now, this was widely seen as terrible for honest Abe, and in the wake of a

devastating war. Like people needed a proper sendoff for a wartime president, right, Like this beloved president gets killed. Everybody's real fucking sad. There's just been a big war. Trains are more famous and like prominent than ever. And George looks at the president's death and sees opportunity. Um, so let's capitalize on this tragedy. Absolutely. Yeah. So he's got some friends in high places and he starts talking to them and being like, hey, you gotta move that president's

dead ass body. I got these real fancy sleeping cars. You can't just stick his corpse and like a shitty car. You gotta put him in something nice. Right, has a point, He has a point, right exactly. People don't when you see like like you open it and it's like what you'd stick like a bunch of logs into or something. There's just a sliding around, exactly. And even if they didn't want to, if someone presented that and then they said, no,

that's pretty shipped, I guess that's an asshole move. You know, if you're presucted with a nicer option to the just Abraham Lincoln in a oven, Yeah, it's very Yeah, it's very smart of him to just be like, yeah, when I'll give him one of my one of my one of my nice cars to drive the president's dead ass body around in um. And this actually posed a significant logistical hurdle because a lot of train stations and platforms and bridges weren't white enough to to take the car

that he had. It can only travel on some tracks, and so they get like the government widens a bunch of like station platforms and bridges, which actually makes his business even more profitable because now his cars can go more places parallel. The canal widening from this, well, George pull him a man made great by widening. It's always cyclical. Life is cyclical. It's light, flat circle whatever, you know what I mean. It all comes back to a flat circle,

pretty wide, and it's pretty wide, pretty wide. You know what else is pretty wide? Sharine, Uh, I know you're gonna say, Raytheon or some ship. The variety of products Raytheon makes very wide. If you need a missile guidance chip for a hellfire missile, Raytheon's got you. If you need a software to help target for an Assassin drone, Raytheon's got you. If you need to not have any kind of targeting whatsoever, because you're just going to carpet

bombing area. Raytheon can make the detonators for that carpet bombing. Whatever you need from Raytheon, as long as it involves killing people from the sky, Raytheon can do. I'm so happy I was such a long plug. Yeah. Well, all right, let's go to the ads that paid us. Okay, we're back, and the Lincoln's Corpse Engine train would go down in history is one of the most popular trains of all time.

Slightly underneath the Festival Express, Ulyssi Simpson Grant praised George Pullman for giving a dead man an ice corpse box. After the whole dead person business was concluded, the train car was put on display so that people could gawk at it, like it's a corpse box. Hits a corpse box. It's a nice corpse box. Yeah, I guess that's the before coffins. I mean, they've probably already had coffins, but I'm sure corpse corpse box is a phrase I wasn't

familiar with until right now. And that's me. I'm going to start up another like it's going to be like one of those mattress businesses. That ship's mattresses to you, but it'll ship cheap coffins and we'll call it corpse box. You've got something going there. You've got a boxing corpses. Yeah, you rich never know when you're gonna wind up with a corpse Yeah, exactly. Just follow your dreams, robber, follow you. Yep,

that's gonna take me out of this filthy podcasting business. Well, honestly, you're right though, Like if you're able to have the luxury to do anything you want to do, you will do it and find a way to make it good. If you're like smart, like decently intelligent, you know what I mean. I think it's all it needs like luck and basically understand a humanity or like human instinct or

something that makes sense. Yeah, I mean it's one of those things where, uh you you like, the people who are most successful under our system are there's a certain level of money that they have. But also if you go above that level, I think your odds of doing anything on your own that that change the world actually

start to drop. Like you don't tend to hear about like Walton's or whatever, like they perpetuate systems, but it's a guy like Jeff Bezos who who grows up very comfortable but not with billions of dollars, who's gonna actually anyway whatever. He has no like concept of what people

are going through or what they need or whatever. I mean, I was just I mean, this is everyone talks about this, but having enough money to like really improve the lives of billions of people or like help with world hunger and homelessness and everything, and still having left over and

not doing anything about it. It blows my mind. You know, all rich people are like that pretty or the says actually where the story is building a bit um, So Lincoln's death incredible for George Pullman, and he takes all of the great pr that comes in the wake of this, and he approaches several wealthy businessmen with the same pitch. I need more investment money because I want to build enough cars to sell luxury rides everywhere, right, I want everyone to be able to use like one of my

sleeper cars. Um, but I need like my business isn't going to grow a fast enough organically in order to get to that point, so I need investment capital. Yeah, I mean, well that's where we're building too. But yeah, so he's like, Okay, I I need I need a bunch of money, and he's done. You know, well enough, this whole Lincoln thing was big enough deal that he gets about a million dollars of investments and and he uses it to form a new company, the Pullman Palace

Car Company. Throughout the eighteen eighties, he choked out or made deals with anyone who might be competition for his luxury train car business, and by the eighteen nineties, George Pullman had a monopoly. And trains are the biggest thing in the fucking world. By the everyone's traveling places by train, and he's the only guy that makes like the sleeper

cars and whatnot. If you, yeah, if you wanted to take an actual, like comfortable train trip anywhere in the United States, George was getting a piece of that action. And he continued to innovate through every part of this period, and his innovations included the field of racism. Quote from Richard Sneiroff. In eighteen sixty seven, he rolled out the del Monaco, the first dining car called a hotel car

with a kitchen at its center. It could serve two fifty meals a day in eighteen seventy five, he built a luxurious parlor car, which offered an upscale traveling experience. Meanwhile, his designers continuously improved heating, ventilation, and lighting Throughout it all, the Pullman's appeal to the public rested on meticulous service.

Pullman used the existing racial division of labor and hiring white conductors, collected tickets and sold births en route to perform menial work like carrying luggage, preparing the berths for use, cleaning the cars, and providing personal services to passengers. He hired African American porters, many of them recently freed slaves. The conductors who supervised the sleeping car. Reporters received white men's wages. The porters received less than one six the

wages of conductors. Low wages kept them dependent on the tips and thus the good will of white passengers. Despite the servant like position of porters, Pullman had a good reputation among blacks due to the secure jobs and relatively high income they provided. So it was in this like mixed space if he's one of the first people to really figure out, Okay, we've got all these newly freed people, Um,

how can I exploit them. Yeah, I'm going to capitalize on I mean, obviously I'm not surprised at this point, but I mean it's just like sounds like the real life version in the eight hundreds of like The Help, you know what I mean, Like that's what it is. It is, And he's popular among at least according to this he's popular among those. But it's also like, well, if you were a recently freed slave, it's not hard

to be the best boss they've ever had. Just to pay the money and don't own them and split their families up for profit. Yeah, you'll be like, well, this is this guy is pretty good boss. He's really capitalizing on like desperation and need and like so it's like a border it's like uh, white saviory at the same

time as being like evil master, you know what I mean. Yeah, I mean it's one of those things where he is not to give him credit as you always kind of have to do in this period, he's never he never uses slave labor in the period you know, before the Civil War. Um, I don't think he was was supportive of it. Like, so he doesn't have that going against him, you know, and a lot of a lot of real rich white dudes who get their start in the eighteen fifties.

There's some uncomfortable slavery. Only pay them one sixth, Right, that's that's a choice you make, sure, and it's it's a choice he makes because it's you can get away with it. And he's not the reason that is, like you know, he's he's but he is kind of he is one of the very first businessman who's hiring like

in white businessman who's hiring in mass black labors. Right, that is pretty new in this period because slavery, you know, was around in l at and sixty five in the United States, and he is helping to kind of set this idea that like, yeah, you can you can hire black people for jobs that you will and you know, and pay them less than you would pay white people for the same jobs. And that's that makes that makes good business. He is one of the men establishing that, right, Yeah,

you're right, we do have to give him credit for that. Unfortunately, I mean like he's a good person for the times, you know what I mean. I don't know that he's a good person for the Times. He's just not a Confederate, Like I don't know that I want to make that'd be the bar of good person. I mean, it only takes so yeah little. He doesn't enslave people when he has the opportunity. So good for that money over uh like actual humanity, you know, yeah, but he does choose

money over yeah whatever, he's yeah, yeah, I'm not. I'm not trying to praise him. Um relatively high in terms of like the wages for black labors in Pullman's company is a term that has a lot of wiggle room. And I not everyone I've i've seen agrees with the idea that his wages were considered high. I think this passage from a Jacobin article gets across how humiliating this work could be for the black porters who worked on

his railroad. And as you listen to this again, remember that these we were considered by a lot of people to be relatively good jobs, quote, working for tips. They served passengers and plush surroundings, with heads bowed, pride suppressed, swallowing any words of protest at being called George, the catch all name that denoted servility to their employer, George Pullman. So these employees, by the white people using the train cars just call any black person George, because of their boss.

Because we're getting we're real close to slavery is still here, you know. Um, it's very interesting to me. I don't yeah, I don't know. It's it's bad. I mean, it's fucked up. It's just not a not specifically a racist thing that I've heard about until this. So as soon this happened elsewhere. Yeah, I did not know that was a thing. It is

very offensive. It's pretty fucked up. Yep, yep. Now, as we discussed in our Bernar mac fadden episodes, the late eighteen hundreds were a period in which the United States was industrializing rapidly, and the consequences of all that industrialization we're becoming obvious. Organizations like the y m c A were created initially in the UK to ameliorate the health

and moral consequences of modern life. George Pullman, now riches ship and influential, volunteered his time to help run the y m c A and other organizations that he thought might help provide an answer to the labor question. This is a term that was used at the time. I found in eighteen eighties six Atlantic article with this title. Throughout the Gilded Age, um the primary issue was this organized labor had existed at some point for quite a while,

but the concept was still being worked out. I remember the eighteen eighties. The idea that like laborers would organize and form unions is not an old not a very old idea, you know. UM. So by the end of the eighteen eighties, labor had gotten in the United States, had gotten smart and effective enough to actually start putting

some major pressure on capital. The eighteen eighties eighteen nineties is kind of really when the labor movement starts coming together in a way that's actually that's able to do stuff effectively. Um. And the what's called the labor question um, which is the title of this article I found, but it is also this article from the eighteen eighties that I found. You hear this phrase the labor question a

lot in this period. And the labor question is this, should working men have a right to dictate the terms of their employment or should capital hold all of society

and unquestioned um like domination. And it's actually really interesting to read some of the critical arguments people criticizing labor um because often these people who are like, no, I don't think workers have a right to like organize, Um, are you You get the same tone with them that you get with a lot of like quote unquote unbiased, fair minded intellectual like journalism people today, like folks writing

about climate change. You're like, well, let's talk about the Americans who don't wear masks and all this nonsense because it's yeah, because because if I'm criticizing everyone equally, even if the facts aren't equal, then nobody can say that

I'm unfair. Like Bill Maher. Yeah. So this Atlantic columnists that I found writing about the labor question spends a huge chunk of his column ranting about alcohol, um and basically saying that, like, well, workers spend all of this money on alcohol and do all of these bad things under the influence of alcohol. Um, And why are they organizing to get more money when they could just stop buying alcohol? Oh? Of course, it's very funny. Today's like

today's avoca avocado toast. Yeah. It's like no, no, no, there's like that stupid saying where it's like you, uh, instead of buying coffee every day, Like that's that's why we're spending all our money, like millennials or whatever, you know what I mean. There's like this it's a coffee thing. It's always a drink. I suppose I believe that workers should have the right to buy alcohol and also still

have enough money left over for things that aren't alcohol. Yeah, of course there's yeah, yeah, fun stuff, HB two see I all the goodies. I will have to ask you about those off Mike, but yeah, yeah, they're all they can all be fun. So what because the best that was so funny? If you were on the show, I would not be able to survive. I mean, Robert's great, but I do need the validation sometimes, you know what I mean. It's okay, nobody ever appreciates my jokes. Sorry, Robert.

We were having ament I know you were. That's fine. We're very like that. We have a bond. We bonded. She's the best, I'm the best. Get each other. And you know who else is the best? This Atlantic columnists telling people complaining about workers, yeah, like being like, why why are they asking for more money from their bosses

when they could just stop drinking? It's amazing? Yeah, go ahead. Sorry, When we see on the one side a yearly waste of between four and five hundred millions of dollars and on the other side a body of men, the squanderers of this vast fund, complaining that they have not sufficient opportunities. We cannot long be at a loss to comprehend the true nature of the existing satisfaction dissatisfaction. It is clear that labor has been incited to seek from without the

relief which ought to be sought from within. The socialist theory of a paternal state system which provides everybody with work and wages is a mischievous fallacy. It simply encourages indolence and dependence. The first duty of labor is to demonstrate its capacity for self government. At this moment, it's

drink bill is an impeachment of that capacity. No man who spends half his earnings that a saloon can get on in the world, or has the least right to expect to get on, Nor can anybody of men follow the same course with better results. Well, yeah, man like rich, but none of that half a billion dollars a year I spent on alcohol as rich people, not not any of it, just poor guys. Yeah, just stop drinking and get more. If you stop drinking, you'll have more time

to work and help us. In a capitalist society, you know what I was actually pondering earlier today when it comes to medication that helps your brain, whether it's adderall or whatever, or like things to make you more active, it kind of feels like society is making us like it all ends up, like you have to for work, like it makes you work better, it makes you like

provide obviously brains needed. It really helps me. But I was thinking about it in a more like sinister capitalistic way where it's like they just want us to be better workers, you know what I mean, more efficient actually just like I don't know, does that make sense? Yeah, no it does. And you know what else makes sense? I don't know why I keep doing this. You're so early. I I my brain has been broken by capitalism, and

now all I can do is pivot to adds. I mean, the last I thought it was not bad, very good at it. So America an artist, you can capitalism off the brain. You keep needing to go to an ad.

I want to keep reading from this Atlantic article weird ad transition that I want to just talk about the author of this Atlantics article, George Frederick parsons Um, And in this next part of the article, he ties his irritation about American drunkenness, with a rant about how capitalists have a right to expect that profits increase forever, and it's just the most American paragraph I've ever read. Prosperity is the reward of persevering, temperate, ungrudging work. In these days,

there is, however, a great wind of new doctrine. We are asked to believe that it is possible to succeed in a very different ways, that the less a man works, for example, the more he ought to receive, that national prosperity can be advanced by diminishing production, and many other equally hard sayings. But it may be confidently affirmed that these new theories are destined to be short lived, and that the world will have to be managed eventually upon

pretty much the old lines. Yeah, it's it's good, very American. Now. Yeah, for the record, Um, George Parsons died in eighteen ninety three, and I found his obituary and it blamed his death on the fact that he hadn't lifted enough. It's very funny, wait lifted like, yeah, that he had worked out enough? Yeah, what the fuck? It's very funny. Damn. That is like subtweeting a death direct insults not even a stub is

just like you can't fight back. George Parsons, the author of that Atlantic article, and George Pullman, the subject of our episode today, both seem to have come at the problem of labor from the same point of view. It was foolish for workers to organize rather than seek to ascend to the upper class. That's what Parsons is saying, right, why are you organizing for more money when you should just stop spending any money on alcohol and invested all

into a business and like your own circumstances. Yeah. And the way to do this, and this is this is what George Pullman believes to Workers shouldn't organize, They should seek to improve their own individual lots so they can raise up to the middle class and the upper class. And the way you do this is you scrimp and save and you work yourself to the bone. You don't drink, you don't have fun, you don't hang out with see

your family, you don't spend any time for you. You do nothing but work and sock away money so that you can join the middle class or get to to revelent to our current times. And how people talk about like homelessness and unhoused. It's a disease that's existed in the United States for a very long time, and we need to it needs to not happen. It's bad. Um. I think the that view of how life should be, uh is something that should be opposed with force if necessary.

Of course, it's it's a sin to the miracle of life. Yeah, it is, and it's I find it very unsettling. And this happens all the time when like you hear like a terrible quote like that, you read something and it looks exactly like today. It just proves that, like do we ever actually change? Are we always the same? Just like a different like vessel or like a different like trimmings on this world, you know, like humane doesn't actually change. We always just like keeps doing these terrible things. I

don't know, it's just it's kind of sad. And yeah, it's great. No, it's good, it's good. Everything's fine. So George was of the opinion that if his workers had nicer lives and lived in more comfortable surroundings, ones that

at least mimicked middle class life, they wouldn't complain. So he was like, well, if I can, just if I can build a place for my workers to live that looks like an ideal middle class town, then they won't need to organize for anything, because that's all anyone could ever want is a comfortable, clean, middle class American town. Um And he figures, if I can build a town for them, I can make it so that they can't drink because I just won't allow them to be bars there.

So like I can control them and make sure they don't do any of the things because the only reason workers are unhappy is that they do things that make them unhappy and waste their money. I don't need to pay them anymore. I don't need to treat them better. All I need to do is make a place that I make a place for them to live where they won't be able to do any of the things that they're going to do otherwise because they're just they're just not as smart as I am. They can't stop themselves

from from doing bad things. So if I can build a place for them to live, then they won't ruin their own lives. Dude, sounds like a bad time to me. Yeah, it's just like how I don't know every rich man I feel like has a called complex and this is a very firm example of that. Yeah, yeah, I mean I think you could probably, I think probably if you were to get Elon Musk to talk honestly about how he'd want life organized in his Mars colony, you would

some similar vibes. Of course. Yeah, he already feels that way. He's like, I've given all these sheeap cars to drive, I've changed the world. It's like that may be true, but you're still I am. Yeah, not a lot of anyway whatever. Um so to to kind of put George Pullman and his attitudes towards his workers, this kind of paternalist attitude that he has towards building a place for them and moderating their behavior, to put that in context,

and want a quote again from Richard Schneirov. By the eighteen eighties, many reformers had shifted from personal reform through revivalism, education, and public exhortation to an environmental emphasis. They believe that by changing the social environment in which the worker lived and worked, they could induce habits of respectability, uplift workers character,

and change social attitudes. In eighteen seventy nine, Pullman followed closely the movement in New York to create model tenements that would offer working class families clean and ventilated room, to reduce sickness and disease, and promote good morals by inducing men to stay at home rather than escape to saloons. In return, investors would receive a reasonable seven return. So

this is his his ideas I'm going to build. He's looking at these kind of like model tenements going up New York and he's like, well, I'm gonna build a town of my own, and not only will it be clean and keep workers away from vices like drinking, but it'll be profitable. Right, I'm gonna get it. I'm gonna get a positive return on this as an investment to I have to benefit and like all dudes like him, when he wrote about this, Pullman phrased that as if

it was like a rule of the universe. Quote, capital will not invest in sentiment, nor for sentimental considerations for the laboring classes. But let it once be proved that enterprises of this kind are safe and profitable, and we shall see great manufacturing corporations developing similar enterprises, and thus a new era will be introduced into the history of labor. It's like, literally, I won't do anything if I don't

make money off of it. Yeah, I will open the door for you if you Capitalists of course won't don't care. Like capitalists have no interest in workers living comfortably or cleanly. Um, But if you show them it's a profitable business, then then everyone's on board. Yeah. So it's like very sinister because on the surface, if you don't take any deeper, it's kind of nice, you know what I mean. Fine, he's low key helping them and like it's clean and whatever.

But it's just so it's just so insiduous I think, And that's unsettling if you're if you're starting position, is that the only reason you would help your workers and and and give them and build a nice place for them to live is that it would profit you. Well, then as soon as it's not profitable, what are you going to do? Very good point. So, today, the town of Pullman, Illinois is a neighborhood on Chicago South Side, which I am very reliably informed is the baddest part

of town. But in the early eighteen eighties it was a one and fifty acre town to the south of the Pullman car work so it's not part of Chicago yet, like it's a separate town in and of itself. UM right outside of the big factory where the Pullman cars are built. UM. The factory took up nine buildings on thirty acres and Pullman the town was exhaustively planned around it to be as modern as possible. Sewer and gas lines were at it first, so that every home would

enjoy heating and water. This had the benefit of the ensuring the city itself would not flood like Chicago had. Most descriptions of the Pullman Town will acknowledge that it was a much nicer place to live than many of the tenements working people had endured at the time. It's unclear how accurate this is, and it seems in some

parts to be a measure of opinion. Pullman the town was organized hierarchically, and the people with higher paying and more prestigious jobs lived at the center of town, close to the hotel, the school, the libraries, and the parks and nice spacious modern houses, but low paid grunt laborers. The actual rank and file workers still lived in claustrophobic tenement blocks. These were they just had a nice outside.

They were done up, so on the outside it looked like a nice block of houses, but it was tenements on the inside, and they were newer and cleaner tenements with more amenities than a lot of stuff in the city itself, but they were still cramped in not high quality dwellings. This passage from a rite up by the University of Virginia lays out the conditions inside. Quote the workers houses humble and appearance both inside and out, were monotonous,

and he gave the impression of soldiers barracks. They were said to be clean, with an abundance of air. Most were two stories with five rooms. In addition to sellers, pantries and closets. There was indeed water from a faucet used by five families, often located in one of the small closets. There were no yards, and for those families living upstairs, no front door. Most of the buildings were

constructed with brick made in the Pullman brickyards. These same brickyards contained the eyesore of the town, four rows of little sixteen by twenty foot wooden shanties that had a sitting room, two bedrooms, and a kitchen and a lean. To compare all of this to the arcade and library. Despite Mr Pullman's intentions and his desirability for the commercial value of beauty, his model town was not a real home for workers who lived there. One woman compared it

to living in a great hotel. We call it camping out, So it's not really all that great. I think that the most casual descriptions will say, like, well it was, you know, there were problems with it, but it was nicer than other It's like, no, maybe it was cleaner a bit, but it was not like a lot of the people who lived there were not living in great conditions. It just sounds like slavery two point oh, where it's like, well, that's kind of where we're building too. So yeah, it was.

It looked nice on the outside that a movie set, you know, And that's that's what a lot of people say about it, is like it's not a home. It's a place you can sleep. There's things about it that are nice, but it's not really a home. Um and I found it right up from the Pullman Museum. That makes it very clear why people might not have been

happy to live in Pullman quote. In eighteen eighty, Pullman bought four thousand acres near Lake Calumet, some fourteen miles south of Chicago on the Illinois Central Railroad, for eight hundred thousand dollars. He hired Soland Spencer Beaman to design his new plant there, and in an effort to solve the issue of labor unrest and poverty, he also built a town adjacent to his factory, with the Jone housing shopping theaters, shopping areas, churches, theaters, parks, hotel, and library.

The thirteen hundred original structures were entirely designed by Beaman. The centerpiece of the complex was the administration building and its man made lake. The hotel Florence, named for Pullman's favorite daughter, was built nearby. Pullman believed that the country air and fine facilities, without agitator saloons and city vice districts, would result in a happy, loyal workplace. The model planned community became a leading attraction during the World's Columbian Exposition

of eighteen ninety three and caused a national sensation. Pullman was praised by the national press for his benevolence and vision. As pleasant as this community may have been, Pullman expected the town to make money by eight the community profitable in its own right was valued at over five million dollars. Pullman ruled the town like a feudal baron. He prohibited

independent newspapers, public speeches, town meetings, or open discussion. His inspectors regularly entered at homes to inspect for cleanliness, and could terminate leases on ten days notice. The church stood empty, since no approved denomination would pay rent and no other

congregation was allowed. Private charitable organizations were prohibited. Pullman employees declared, 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 Pullman hell. Wow. Yeah, that's an ending to a sentence. First of all. Uh, but it's isn't it ironic? Because you said he didn't necessarily support slavery when it actually

was happening, you know what I mean? So I feel like he found a loop, Like in my head, he doesn't think it's a slavery, right, of course, I mean, it's not slavery. It is not like there are aspects of it that do eventually kind of verge on slavery, parallel to exploiting people and like acting like their master and all that stuff. Yeah, and there's some of the some of the white people who protest latter will compare themselves to slaves. I want to I don't want to

do that because I don't think that's fair. Um And in part I think why the white people at the time we're doing that, is that, like they're pretty fucking racist. Of course it's not that bad. Yeah, no, I mean yeah, white white victimization. It's tales all those time. He's more of a he's more of a he's more of a of a dictator than he is a slave owner, right Like, that's more of the attitude. Is that, like they live

here and they could technically leave most of them. Um, but if they live here, Uh, then he's going to control every aspect of their life that he can. Right Like. There's no discussion on it. I know what's best for you, and I'm going to ensure you do it. Um. Do we actually sorry, did we take an ad break or did we just talk about taking it out? We took one ad break, We didn't take a second dead way? Oh sorry, No, No, we talked about it. I just want to make sure. I don't know, because we usually

it's great h you know what else is producing? I'm sorry, no, no, no, continue go for it, uh RAI theon is making new things to kill people that they are yep, that's every day. Yeah, so stay tuned to find out what those are. Very proud of you, Sharine, Thank you Rob for sorry that. I just like thought we just talked about. I just want I wanted to make sure sorry, I was being I was being a producer at that moment. We crushed it.

All right, here's ads. All right, we're back. So Pullman builds this town, moves a bunch of people in, and I should note the only people allowed to live in the Pullman town are white people. Um you you you cannot live there. He has black workers. They are not allowed to live in his town because again it's his idealized version of society, which does not have any black people.

The town eventually had a population of about twelve Pullman workers, and things chugged along well enough until teen three, when the entire Gilded Age collectively shat its pants. The basic problem was this international capital got addicted to gambling on the I p o s of countries like Argentina. A bunch of these bets went badly in the early eighteen nineties. This spooked European investors, and those investors started hoarding gold

from the U. S. Treasury. This coincided with the collapse of a massive railway company and a general contraction for the whole railway industry, which had been flooded with far more money than it could ever hope to absorb and been grossly overbuilt. Um Grover Cleveland, who started office in eighteen nine three, responded to all this by fucking around with silver, which didn't do much to allay people's currency fears. As more Americans lost their jobs, others panicked and withdrew

their money in moss from banks. The economies of the Western world, such as they existed back then, fell apart. George Pullman had to fire a quarter of his workforce. Those who remained faced dwindling hours. This might have been a situation where Pullman's scheme to reduce worker unrest by building them an ice place to live could have come

in handy if he had example set. For example, said hey, guys, I'm gonna have to cut everybody's hours, but you know what, I'm canceling rent while this economic crisis goes on or something um or it could have at least pro rated or whatever. He would have had options that he probably would have been more popular than ever, and his workers would have been like, well, ship, this is the benefit of letting a guy like Pullman be your boss and run your life is when times are hired, he takes

care of you, you know. But George Pullman could not stand the thought that one of his endeavors might not turn a profit, and so he kept rent in utilities at the same rates they've been before the depression. While he was cutting everybody's pay. Now he actually parallel that happen that's happening now. Well, and here's the thing that's

sucked up. I guess you could argue, if you were looking at this from a pro capitalist standpoint, like, well, he couldn't stop their rent because he couldn't afford to. He had like this, this was a business, and like he he can't pay for everybody's rent forever. It costs some money to upkeep the town. But he was actually willing to lose money, just not that way. So he

wasn't willing to cancel people's rent. But he did take on contracts that at a loss, so that he took on contracts, and he charged so little that the company lost money on the contracts in order to get workers back into the office working, so he wouldn't lower their renter bills, but he would actually lose money in order to make sure that people were still working for him.

That's twisted, right, Yeah, it's more about the ego than about the money and that in that in that sense, you know what I want to Yeah, it's it's not I want to take care of my workers. It's I want my workers to still be working, you know, me for me, you know that's it's yeah, it's very interesting and uh sociopathic. Pullman hid this fact, the fact that he was taking on contracts at a loss from his

labor force. His employees did not know that the company was losing money to employ them um, but by eight ninety four it had become fairly popular knowledge due to some leaks, and this led to a burst of additional unrest from Pullman employees. They were also angry that Pullman had increasingly made them pay substantial premium for things like water and gas and the Pullman Town um which water and gas. The local government provided those to Pullman like

it was a town. They should have just been available for a pretty low fee to the people living there. But the Pullman company charged employees for a thing that was being provided by the government, that those employees are paying taxes for. And that come again, I have no response to that. I'm not going to pretend to be funny.

I have no It's dope. So that was not the end of the grift, as prospect dot Org rights, His one giant church was too expensive for most congregations to afford its rent, and his ill conceived attempt to convince all the local denominations to merge into one generic mega church failed. His library charged to membership fee. To foster

his notion of personal responsibility. Workers avoided the hotel bar and the ever watchful eye of off duty supervisors, limiting their public rousing to a neighboring village colloquially known as bum Town. The housing, too, was for rent only. His aim was to ensure that housing remain in good repair and attractive, and he charged higher rents to maintain them.

Here Pullman applied his usual belief that the public would pay more for a higher quality, ignoring the fact that this particular public his employees had little choice when his was the only housing in town. So touch, he's out of touch at that point, you know. I mean it's a it's a smart it's a smart grift. But he is, like he is grifting them, you know, he's robbing them basically. Um,

they're paying more, vastly more than they need to. And because they're living in this Pullman town, they can't go out and find other work, right yeah, like they're they're out in the Pullman town. Yeah. Yeah, very twisted and just yeah, so he cud of strange way he cuts wages while maintaining rent and continuing to charge people additionally for water and gas. He cuts wages by an average of twenty eight per cent across the board, which means

employees all start to fall behind on their rent. Now you can go in debt to the company, right, Um, and if you're in debt to the company, h And you can also get go in debt to the company if like there's a building code violation, which you know how landlords work, right, everything's a building code violation and those things are taken automatically out of the worker's paycheck, as are things that they go in debt to the company.

For food, so workers would go negative to the company, which means they can't quit without need suddenly owing all that money. Right, like the bill immediately comes due if you stop working for Pullman soever tied to. It's not quite slavery, but it is not as far away from slavery. Yeah, it's not as far away from slavery as it ought to be. You know. That's that's a grit when you start having employees in debt to the company and unable to quit because then they would you know, potentially get

into legal trouble for that. Then you're in a real uncomfortable territory, you know, like you're making a problem that only you can solve, and you're consciously making that problem, you know what I mean, Like it's they he controls too much and there's no way. I don't know, it's just it's kind of like almost backwards the way he's doing in my head, but don't you know what I mean, Like he's making a problem only he can solve it, and he knows that and probably they know that too,

and just just like a I'm gonna stop God complex. Yeah, it's fun, it's all good. Everything's fine. So for a look, at how bleak this situation could be for the workers. I want to read a quote from a Pullman worker named Jenny Curtis, and this is her telling her story of working for Pullman. My father worked for the Pullman Company for ten years. Last summer he was sick for three months and in September he died. At the time of his death, we owed the Pullman Company about sixty

dollars for rent. I was working at the time, and they told me I would have to pay that rent good that I could every payday until it was heid. I did not say I would not pay, but thought, rather than be thrown out of work, I would pay it. Many a time, I have drawn nine and ten dollars for two weeks work, paid seven dollars for my board, and given the company my remaining two or three dollars on the rents, and I still loathe them fifteen dollars.

Sometimes when I could not possibly give them anything because her wage was cut from ninety cents to twenty cents per section of carpet, I would receive slurs and insults from the clerks in the bank because Mr Pullman would not give me enough and return for my hard labor to pay the rent for one of his houses and live so like employees, it's often a family business. You're all living in town. If your dad dies with debts, you take on those debts in addition to like what

you have to pay to key. It's yeah, well that's fucked up. That is fucked up. It's like forever branding people again two points out with like being like like at your mercy in a way. So in May of eighteen ninety four, the Pullman workers decided to strike for a better deal. They were not yet unionized, so they set their sights on a man who at the time embodied the hope for the power of labor. And this brings us to a dude I've really like, Eugene Victor

Deb's more commonly just called Eugene V. Debs. He was born in Tara Houte, Indiana, in eighteen fifty five. He was the son of a fairly well off family. Um they owned a couple of small businesses, might have even had a little bit more money than uh than Pullman's family. Like Pullman, Deb's dropped out of school, although he made it to fourteen, and he got a job cleaning train

cars for fifty cents a day. It's worth noting that Pullman quit school even earlier than Deb's, in the fourth grade and got a job paying forty dollars a month, which is about twenty five dollars a month more than what young Deb's could expect to earn um. So that's interesting to me. Like from the beginning, I don't know, I guess Pullman's family probably had more money because yeah, Deb's, Yeah,

Deb's is making like fifteen bucks a month something like that. Uh, and Pullman's making forty bucks a month in their in their first gigs out the door, which I guess you know, Pullman's hired by his family, so that does help. Yeah, Deb's eventually quit doing this job and he returned home to work as an accountant for his father's business. Again, neither of these are like poor kids. By age nineteen,

Eugene had joined his first union for locomotive firefighters. He was the secretary and he also edited their magazine, which he used as a platform to urge sobriety and patriotic citizenship. He was not a radical at this stage, and his trade union membership did not cause him to identify as a socialist. He did get increasingly political and was elected a city clerk in eighteen seventy nine and state representative in eighteen eighty four. Debs was a Democrat and he

urged modest reforms from a broadly pro worker platform. So Debs was a Democrat and he urged modest reforms from a broadly pro worker platform. And I'm gonna quote from Jacobin for this next part here. By the late eighteen eighties,

Debs had started his trek away from conservative unionism. A railroad walkout in eighteen eighty eight convinced to Debs, who served as strike leader, that a harmonious relationship with massive corporations was impossible with out the counterweight of organized workers. He also began to criticize the craft unionism that dominated

the labor movement. Rather than self balkanized according to job tasks, federationists like Deb's insisted that workers, whether conductor or fireman, engineer or brakeman, organized under one common fold, as Deb's explained in May eighteen nine three. That same year, he co founded the American Railway Union, putting his vision of a fighting industrial unionism into practice. So the early unions are like, we're all of the guys who do breaking

for the train. We're all of the conductors, and like, you don't have as much power when you're that kind of atomized, you know, unless you're able to work together to some extent. And Deb's is one of the people who's really pushing no, everyone who works for the railroad should be in the same union and we all fight together, you know, well, Um, And the a r U was kind of his his attempt to do that. So larger workers organizations had existed before. Deb isn't the first person

to do this. The American Federation of Labor was founded in eighteen eighty six, the Nights of Labor back in eighteen sixty nine, UM, but the idea that workers within a specific industry would organize based on that industry rather

than job type was pretty novel. Um. Debs was convinced that bosses were playing different specialties off of one another, trying to get workers to kind of compete with each other rather than working together UM and that this artificial competition was to stop workers from actually organizing together for

their shared interests. When he resigned from his job working for the Brotherhood of Locomotive Fireman, Deb's wrote quote it has been my life's desire to unify railroad employees and to eliminate the aristocracy of labor which unfortunately exists, and organize them so all will be on an equality. Now.

The a r U was founded for him to strike back at what was effectively a union of railroad managers, which had organized to set standard job classifications and wages between different railroad companies, as well as to build a common pool of strike breakers and even an inter industry strike fund of sorts to help railroads outlast an the

union strikes. So deb sees that like workers are splitting themselves up too much, while the actual railroad companies are all organizing together, they effectively have a union um In eight nine three, immediately after he founds the a r U, he wins a substantial victory over the Great Northern Pacific Railroad during like a real landmark strike. And this is the first time something like this happens, that like this, this broad cross section of railroad workers organized and win

a fight against a major railroad. This brings new members and dues flooding into the a r U. He's the He's the talk of kind of the union movement. After this By June of eighteen ninety four, just weeks after Pullman workers made their decision to strike, the a r U had reached its greatest extent, a hundred and fifty thousand members, now roughly a third of George Pullman's employees.

Where are you members? And when the union held its first convention, George Pullman's employees, like the subset of the air you that worked for Pullman, came to the union gathering with a plan. The Pullman workers asked the entire a RU to join their boycott, stopping all trains from carrying Pullman cars across parts of the nation represented by the a r U. So these these workers for Pullman who are in the air, you are like, hey, we're going on strike. But that's not going to be enough. Like,

we want you to go on strike too. We want you to refuse to service Pullman cars anywhere in the country. Um, even if you're not an Impullman employee, because that's going to put more yea solidarity, He's gonna put a lot more stress on the bosses. Hell yeah, I like where this is going. I want to read from a quote from their plea to the a r U. Pullman both the man and the town is an ulcer on the

body politic. He owns the houses, the schoolhouses, the churches of God, and the town he gave his once humble name. And thus the merry war, the dance of skeletons bathed in human tears goes on, and it will go on, brothers, forever, unless you the American Railway Union stop it ended, crush

it out. People used to write more colorfully back then. Yeah. So, after visiting with workers and hearing their stories of privation, Debs decided that not only did they deserve the air use solidarity, but that this could be a chance to start to pull together the kind of national labor coalition that he thought was necessary to push back against the forces of capital. Still, he attempted to negotiate first. George Pullman, however, was not a negotiator. He believed he was defending his

and everyone else's inherent right to private property. Workers had no right to demand better conditions from him, as the factories and train cards they labored and were his personal property. Local civic institutions in Chicago jumped in to try and urge some kind of accord, but compromise proved impossible, Eugene V. Debs and the delegates of the A Air You decided to strike. Debs declared that all shall march together and fight together until working men shall receive and enjoy the

fruits of their toil. Strike leader Thomas Heathcote explained to the position of the pullman men, thus, lee, we do not know what the outcome will be, and in fact we do not care much. We do know that we are working for less wages than will maintain ourselves and our families and the necessities of life. And on that one proposition we absolutely refused to work any long her. The A r U Sympathy strike was the largest declaration

of labor solidarity up to that point. It still is one of the largest examples of anything like this ever happening UM, and it's completely unprecedented. But there were, however, like you, limits to the kind of solidarity these people were willing to express, and those limits mostly landed on racial lines. So Deb's, for his part, begged strikers to

accept black workers as part of their sympathy boycott. He was like, if if we don't take these people into and represent them to UM, then they're going They're going to be used as scabs, And why why wouldn't they be scabs if we won't let them, if we won't like link arms with them, why wouldn't they go work for money somewhere else, Like we're not going to help

them do anything. Um, that was gonna be my next question about like, yeah, if so the union at this point it's all white, Oh yes, yes, and Deb's is Deb's is kind of pushing and there's a lot of argument about whether how already really pushes. But he's kind of pushing for that to maybe be opened up. But they the union does not agree to do that. So

it's the same thing. Like you can criticize Pullman for saying like black employees aren't allowed to live in my Pullman town, but you know, it's worth noting also that the white Pullman unionized employees were not willing to let black people join their union. Like it's basically, well, it's you know, of course they're racist, of course, I mean, but every I mean, what's his face? Debs sounds like like he's trying to improve society, but it's not possible

at that point. He's he's trying, Um, he does, he does a lot over the course of his life. Um, So Debs puts forward a motion to include two thousand black Pullman workers in the strike. It was voted on at a union meeting, but the majority of those present voted against it. So again in his credit he does he does try. Um, the motion fails and the strikes. So the strikes only going to consist of white workers.

This is deeply unfortunate and also kind of ironic because workers, when talked to by the press, kept saying things like this quote. The only difference between slavery at Pullman and what it was down south before the war is that there the owners took care of their slaves when they were sick, and here they don't, which God, I don't. I think it is entirely fair. Um, But yeah, you know, think slavery there, it's like you're not gonna find it. You're not gonna find a large mass of white dudes

who are not problematic in eighteen ninety four today. So initially, the Pullman strikers enjoyed enormous support from the University of Illinois. After being elected mayor in December eighteen ninety three, Hopkins made the cause of the Pullman workers his own, allowed Chicago police to collect charity for them, and kept police from interfering in the strike while it remained peaceful. Indeed,

support for the strikers was widespread in the city. Jane Adams, founder of the Whole House, remembered returning to Chicago one July nine to find almost everyone on a Halstead Street wearing a white ribbon, the emblem of the striker's side. Now, the strike also benefited from the neutrality of Illinois Governor John Peter Altgeld, who would have been elected in eighteen

ninety two with strong labor support. Alt Guild had pardoned three Haymarket anarchists four others had been hanged in eighteen seven, and issued an accompanying message in which he declared the trial in which they had been convicted in an injustice. During the early part of the strike, All Guild refused to send militia into Chicago. So the strikers have a lot of benefits, including the fact that a lot of local elected leaders are on their side and in some

one case at least pretty radical themselves, which helps. I think. Also because it's all white that helps. It's it's all they're all white. Yeah. By the end of June, more than a hundred and fifty thousand railroad workers in twenty seven states had joined the sympathy strike, refusing to service any trains with a Pullman car, which was most strains. So the whole American railroad system grinds to a halt. As the Chicago Times wrote, quote, some roads are absolutely

and utterly blockaded. Others only feel the embargo slightly, but it grows in strength with every hour. So this raises panic to a fever pitch among national elites, with a writer at the Nation declaring the boycott an attempt to starve out society. So the Pullman strike had grown to be the sort of thing that actually did put the whole system at risk. Bosses, grasping for a way to destroy this threat to their supremacy, landed on a tactic that is familiar to all of us today, hyping up

acts of violence from protesting workers. From a write up in Lapham's Quarterly quote, the effects of the strike were felt most intensely in Chicago itself, particularly as public transportation came to a halt. After street car workers joined the strike, violence broke out. As Presidents Cleveland later wrote, almost in a night, it grew to full proportions of malevolence and anger.

Rioting and violence were his early accompaniments, and it spread so swiftly that within a few days it had reached nearly the entire western and southwestern sections of our country. He wasn't wrong. Freight cars were derailed, engineers were assaulted, tracks were blocked, and train cars and buildings were set on fire. Now, the worst thing that happened during this riot was that a mail truck was damaged, which gave President Cleveland the excuse he'd been looking forward to intervene.

The President claimed interference with the Post was a federal issue, which it is, and used that to justify deploying fourteen thousand soldiers to crack heads, which is more legally questionable. But this is the justification, right, they're fucking with the mail, now I'm gonna send in troops. Yeah. And this is in the fact that, as a general rule, the strikers would actually let mail trucks buy um because they didn't

want to stop people from getting their past. Because it just like ship gets heated, right, people are fighting in the street like as a mail truck gets damaged. You know, the national media Obviously, as soon as there's violence, goes all culture warry on the strike, calling it deb's is rebellion and framing it as an attack on civilization itself. Now, the strike had gotten off to a strong start, but from this point it gets hampered from a number of factors.

For one thing, the a f L, the American Federation of Labor, never support the Pullman strike. It's head, Samuel Gompers, was a very conservative man and very hostile to socialism. He believed that only skilled craft workers ought to unionize. And the fact that he and the a f L delegates didn't vote to support the air you strike really not like narrowed the scope of the scope of a

sympathy strike. It's why there's a potential at the beginning, maybe other unions could get involved, other industries could get involved, like laborers all around the country could organize for railroad workers and this be a precedent um. But that's not what Gompers wants, that's not what the a f L wants, and so it doesn't happen. Um. Now that said, well, Gompers get some blame for the strikes failure. The fact

that these strikers themselves are pretty racist. Also gets a lot of blame because Pullman is able to bring in black workers as strike breakers, and the union had already told these guys, fuck you, you're not welcome in. Why shouldn't they scap right, normally that's a clear moral choice in this case, like what what what do you expect me to do? You're not organizing, former, you're not doing you're not willing to do ship for me. You don't even think I'm a person. So this guy's offering me money.

Fuck you, Like I I can't blame in this instance. I can't blame me for scabbing, right, like two enemies, which, yeah, like yeah, what were they supposed to do? You know? Yeah, it's fair, very fair. Yeah, labor historian Tom Gilpin told Lapham's quarterly quote, it's not clear that even had Samuel Gompers weighed in on the side of the air you,

that the strike could have been one. Clearly, a fractured labor movement will be overcome by a united business class, especially one that has the military mte of the federal government behind it, which is an important lesson there. The power of the bayonet was braced, as it always is,

by the perception of profound legality. Cleveland's attorney general got an injunction from a circuit court ruled on by two anti union judges, which prohibited air you leaders for compelling or inducing employees from railroads to refuse to perform their duties.

Debs and other air you heads were also forbidden from communicating with subordinates, which meant deb's could no longer send telegrams to try and calm strikers down and avoid violence, because again, that's kind of what they want in this situation, is for things to go so like these these injunctions reduced the ability of Debs and other folks at the a are you to actually like organize things, which means

it gets more chaotic and more bad ship happens. And then in early July, the troops entered the field from the Encyclopedia Britannica Quote worried that given the terms of the injunction, he could no longer exercise any control over the strikers. Debs at first welcomed the troops, thinking that they might maintain order and allow the striking boycott to proceed peacefully, but it soon became clear that the troops

were not neutral peacekeepers. They were there to make sure that the trains moved, which would inevitably undermine the boycott. The strikers reacted with fury to the appearance of the troops. On July four, they and their sympathizers overturned rail cars and erected barricades to prevent troops from reaching the yards. A are you leaders could do nothing, prevented by the injunction from any communication with the workers. On July six, some six thousand rioters destroyed hundreds of rail cars in

the South Chicago Panhandle yards. On July seven, National guardsmen, after having been assaulted, fired into a mob, killing between four and thirty people and wounding many others. Debs then tried to call off the strike, urging that all workers except those convicted of crimes, be rehired without prejudice, but the General Managers Association the Federation of Railroads, that had overseen the response to the strike, refused and instead began

hiring non union workers. The strike dwindled, and trains began to move with increasing frequency until normal schedules had been restored. Federal troops were recalled on July twenty. The Pullman Company, which reopened on August two, agreed to rehire the striking workers on the condition that they signed up pledged never to join a union. By the time it ended, the ordeal had cost the railroads millions of dollars in lost revenue and eluded and damaged property, and the strikers had

lost more than one million dollars in wages. So yeah, it's one of those things. Deb's definitely like panics, but also a dozen, possibly dozens people just got shot at. Like I can't blame him, Like, you know, nobody that number one. This was all new. Uh, he was not on well trod ground here. And I think any responsible person when a bunch of people get killed and you're the one in charge might rethink things, you know, whatever else we think about what he decided to do, Like,

I don't know what else are you gonna do. Eugene V. Debs was jailed on July. He was sentenced to six months behind bars for his role in supposedly inciting a legal behavior. The time locked up was good for him. He read marks and while he studied inside Outside his role in the strike was mythologized by the budding US left. When he was released in November, more than a hundred thousand people swarmed Battery Park to hear him give a speech, wherein he told them, I greet you tonighte as lovers

of liberty and as despisers of despotism. Debs was not a committed socialist quite yet, but as the months passed he became convinced that the labor movement could win thing but temporary victories until socialism unseated the barons at the very top. Two years after his release, he wrote in an essay the issue with Socialism versus Capitalism. I am for socialism because I am for humanity. We have been cursed with the reign of gold long enough. Money constitutes

no proper basis of civilization. The time has come to regenerate society. We are on the eve of a universal change. Yeah. I wish that had been the case, but you know. A national commission was established in eighteen ninety four to determine the causes of the strike. It blamed Pullman's paternalism his need to totally control the lives of his many employees as being un American. In eighteen ninety eight, the Illinois Supreme Court took Pullman the town away from Pullman

the Man, and it was incorporated into Chicago. George Pullman died of a heart attack in eighteen nine seven. Funeral services were held at his mansion, and with Pullman's death coming so near to the end of the strike, it's perhaps not surprising that tempers were high. George seems to have been aware of how much people hated him prior to his death, and as a result, extreme measures were taken to protect his corpse. And I'm gonna quote one last time from the Pullman Center, A corpse box. That's

what we're getting to. A pit the size of an average room had been dug in the family plot. It's basin walls reinforced concrete eighteen inches thick. Into this, the lead lined mahogany casket was lowered and covered with tar, paper and asphalt. The pit was filled with concrete, on top of which a series of steel rails were laid at right angles to each other and bolted together. These rails were embedded in another layer of concrete. It took two days to complete, and then sod was put down.

These precautions were taken to prevent any desecration of the body. An unfortunate price Pullman paid for his victory in the Pullman Strike. Ambrose Beer said it is clear the family, in their bereavement was making sure the son of a

bitch wasn't going to get up and come back. Well, that's just so funny to just know people hate you, you know what I mean, and just be like, Okay, look, yeah it's not the best, but it's at least some victory that despite winning, at the end of it all, George Pullman knew he had to bury his corpse in a fucking uh like iron and and concrete box because

otherwise people would funk with it. At least there's that well, I mean, yeah, that's a it's comical at that point to just think about the way his life ended, is all. It all comes back to corpse box. Um. But yeah, I mean, if anything, if I've learned anything from this episode, Robert, is that humans don't change everything basically has happened in

the last several years. Uh, And that makes me sad because people forget what they go through, and history gets forgotten and rewritten until we do it again because we're dumb little sheep um. And it always happens every episode of Bastards and I'm on I just become my existential dread. Has it becomes an end void next to you? So excellent? Yeah, we did it? Did it? Wait? Is the end? Or should I? This is the end? We're done? Where did you plug your Oh? This is the end? Okay, I

got it. Sorry, So we're still going. We're rolling, rolling, associating more. This is how my brain works. Now. I'm Sharene and I'm on Twitter at shiro hero six six six s h E r O h E r o and on Instagram is just Shira hero And thanks for listening all along if you want to. I don't care, well I do, I mean, I mean, I don't know. Have fun Reddit. I know someone will have fun with this. Yeah, I have fun Reddit, have fun Reddit. I don't know. I have a good day, everybody. Um uh, funk up

a railroad. You have some time. Just find a railroad and just just get your anger out. That's all over the tracks, you know. Yeah, don't get caught. Yeah, yeah, don't get caught. If you get caught, we don't know you. I don't know. Yeah. You did not hear from this. And this is not going to be just on the internet forever and ever. Know