The Dark Side of Corporate Utopia: Pullman vs. Hershey

Let's say a company gave you a very good salary, a very high pay, but on the condition that it got to determine your diet. Left of your own devices, you'd probably go eat a double cheeseburger or something, too many cars. Gum up your arteries with cholesterol, get chubby. The company is gonna take care of all that. It's gonna take care of your meals, and they will be healthy and they will be high quality. But they will be salads, quinoa, beef.

And it's not just that this is food available for you in the office canteen. It's when you're at home, it's your breakfast, and it's obligatory. How many benefits would the company need to provide to you for you to surrender your choice over your own diet? How much money would it take for you to let your boss Be your dad. There's one other element we need to consider before we meet today's characters. If your boss is employer and parental figure,

What responsibilities do they then have beyond paychecks? Because a dad is in charge of his children and an employer is in charge of his employees, but a father can't fire his kid. Likewise, if your company is not is a literal community. not just where people work, but where people live, and go to theater, and take their kids to school. If the company is that community, does that more expansive relationship mean that the corporation has duties beyond

Paychecks, work rotas, and money, the rise and fall of corporate utopia, and the dark side of paternalism. Brought to you by two very different outcomes that started from similar starting points. Today, right here on the political orphanage.

Now I love trains. They are my favorite form of travel outside of bumping around the country in my thirteen foot fiberglass camper that I'm recording in right now. But I really like trains. I sometimes book trips. Around sleeper trains. I f I figure out a sleeper train I want to go on, and then I figure out where I want to go on that sleeper train. I enjoy them that much. But sleeper trains today, or even regular commuter trains like Amtrak, are a different species. And poorly heated.

Which if you think about it.

If they were lucky, they could maybe grab a row and awkwardly try to sprawl out, but even then, they'd either rattle off from the ceaseless vibrating of the train, or they'd get flung to the floor during one of the night's many locomotive convulsions. There were some early attempts at sleeper cars, but they were scarcely better. Uncomfortable fold down bunks, all in the same open floor plan of a jittery car with no separate rooms or privacy.

People commonly describe that experience as camping indoors while being rattled violently. And back then a trip from New York to Chicago might take five full days, with minimal or dangerous heating and no form of air control.

In short, trains were horrible, and George Pullman aimed to fix that. He designed his cars with heavier builds than ordinary passenger coaches. Normal cars were light, flimsy, and rattled constantly, whereas Pullman cars were had stronger, heavier frames, better suspensions, and improved wheel trucks. They didn't rattle, they glided.

He emphasized airflow to minimize the smoke and soot and sweat which pervaded train travel, added thick carpets, curtains, and wood paneling to absorb sound, upholstered the seats to reduce vibration, and most importantly, Those upholstered seats turned into comfortable berths at night. Not only could you lay flat out in a proper bed, curtains separated you from strangers so that you could undress and relax in privacy. A Pullman car was a rolling luxury hotel hallway.

Not a cattle car for humans, but a palace on wheels, plush carpeting, polished wood, brass fixtures, velvet curtains, chandeliers, decorative lamps. Of course, All these luxuries added up. A Pullman car cost five times as much as a normal, unventilated, jittery, bunkless box on wheels. Railroad executives thought he was insane. They still thought of long distance travel as utilitarian, rough and tumble.

But building a mansion on wheels back then? Today that would be like trying to install a boutique, luxury hotel in a bathroom of a truck stop. Fortunately for Pullman, Lincoln died. Following Lincoln's assassination, the fallen president was transported by rail from Washington to Springfield in a sad inversion of the route he had taken to his inauguration.

Millions of Americans came out to pay their respects at Lincoln's funeral train as it passed through. Thousands of people dressed in black standing silently at rail stations. Farmers standing hat in hands as the Lincoln train mournfully slid past them across cornfields. And one of the cars, in that baleful funeral procession, was a Pullman.

His new crazy luxury train car was in the greatest ad product placement imaginable, on display to the entire nation at the exact moment Americans were emotionally transfigured. This was in the days before mass advertising, but the effects were the same. People associated that fancy new Pullman car with the dead president, and that meant they associated a Pullman with America, with patriotism, with elite quality befitting the president of the United States.

Following the Civil War, railroads became tied up in the idea of national unity, the linking of the East and the West, of progress, of modernity. And Pullman expertly positioned himself in the center of this optimistic, patriotic narrative.

Even so, railroad executives were hesitant to buy expensive Pullman cars, so Pullman came up with an idea. Fine, don't buy'em. We will operate them ourselves. We will pay you, the railroad company, to tug our cars, but we will own them and we will manage them and we will max Our luxury craftsmanship with elite white gloved servants.

George Pullman intentionally hired former house slaves from the plantation south as his train porters. They were courtly. Between the pay and the prestige of travel, Pullman porters were well-respected jobs in the black community. Two years after Lincoln's demise, Pullman unveiled the President sleeper car in his honor. The president didn't just have bunks and curtains. It was attached to a kitchen and a dining car with good food, grub that rivaled the best New York hotel.

A year later he launched the Del Monaco, explicitly devoted to fine cuisine, taking its name from the famous Delmonico restaurant in New York, whose chefs prepared the train's menu.

Previously, train cars were separated boxes loosely coupled in the And if for some insane reason you tried to go from one car to another while the train was moving, you'd first have to open the door and let blasts of cold air and smoke in And then step over a dangerously exposed open gap between two shaking metal platforms into which people routinely fell to their horrible death.

George Pullman designed enclosed platforms at the end of his cars with flexible diaphragm-like connections and covered passageways, allowing you to walk from your car to the many other experiences Pullman offers. drawing rooms, smoking lounges, observation cars, barber shops, libraries, and, on his elite trains, bathtubs. By the close of the nineteenth century, Pullman trains were the closest thing to luxury hotels that an average American would ever experience.

A trip on a Pullman train was expensive, but not impossible. Middle class families could save up money to experience the grandeur and service normally reserved for plutocrats at Snooty Hotels. George Pullman had made long distance travel comfortable, and he had made luxury hotels accessible to the middle class.

So that's our man Pullman, who was by the 1870s fabulously wealthy and cranking out Pullman cars as quick as he could. He was doing all of that during a period of urban chaos in the United States. Industrial cities like Chicago, New York, and Pittsburgh were growing at a staggering pace.

Millions of immigrants and rural Americans poured into them faster than infrastructure could keep up. Horse manure and industrial waste lined the streets. Raw open sewage flowed into water systems, creating cholera outbreaks. Multiple families crammed into a single shoddy tenement apartment, making hotbeds for tuberculosis. And all these people, flung into cities in search of factory jobs, lost the thick community relationships that they'd had for generations.

And in the absence of that long organic community, alcoholism and crime skyrocket. Pullman, like many people, recoiled at the ugly urban turmoil of his era. He looked at New York and Chicago and he saw human meat grinders belching out smoke and disease. He despised the misery and squalor of slums, abhorred the drunkenness, disorder, and crime which accompanied the smoke-belching urban mayhem of the Industrial Revolution.

The disorder and poverty unleashed as workers poured into ill-equipped cities which dehumanized and brutalized them. And George Pullman thought. People deserve better than this. No one should have to wallow in the filth and tumult of unplanned industrial blight. Any further thoughts? If I could redesign the nature of train trail

Convert it into something horrible, into a luxury experience, if I could take the elite treatment once reserved for princes, and make it available to the average American? If I can engineer a better train, Why can't I engineer a better? A model city that workers will be happy to live in. A beautiful, meticulously crafted community which will ennoble the people who live within, and serve as a model for other captains of industry.

Capitalism, Pullman thought, does not have to result in dehumanizing misery, it could just as easily foster discipline, respectability, and social harmony, if properly managed by enlightened leaders. So then why can't I, George Pullman, redesign capitalism? To be kinder, to be better managed for everyone?

So in eighteen eighty, the Pullman Company purchased four thousand acres near Lake Calamat, fourteen miles south of Chicago, for the site of his new factory and town. The city of Pullman, a model town for workers, a showpiece for capitalism and industry, and a glimpse of Toby.

According to the mortality statistics of the day, Pullman ranked among the healthiest places on Earth. A beautiful hotel was constructed and named the Hotel Florence after Pullman's daughter. A handsome clock tower was erected. And in the middle of it all, Lake Vista. An artificial ornamental lake in front of the factory and administrative buildings. Not only decorative but functional. It served as a cooling reservoir for the factory's engines and served as the town's drainage and landscaping.

Beautiful but practical, just like the city of Pullman itself. Pullman, the industrial Versailles. Which also Among other things. had exotic animals. This is one of my favorite things that I learned in researching all of this, is just this random bit that I found. At one point, the general manager of the Pullman Company, a man named H.H. Sessions, went on a trip to Florida and brought back with him two alligators. But he released.

Into Lake Vista. And lest you worry, lest you worry, these were well behaved alligators. I have found no evidence. that they ever hurt anyone in Pullman or ate so much as a poodle. They were just cool exotic animals that you could see on your way to the company library, leaving your Ventilated, spacious, indoor plumbing applicable home. By 1883, Pullman's population topped 8,000 people. Most of them immigrants from Scandinavia, Germany, England, and Ireland.

It was a main attraction during the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893. It won awards, gained national attention, and George Pullman accrued accolades as a benevolent visionary. as someone who is not only embracing capitalism, but improving it for everyone's benefit. Indeed, Pullman was exactly as its eponymous founder and owner promised: a clean, safe, lovely community for his workers, a showcase of the industrial community and a broader social experiment.

An orderly, efficient society that would prove modern industry and humane living conditions could coexist.

But there was a dark sun. To the elegant boulevards and clean rows of homes. George Pullman was benevolent. But deeply paternalistic. He did want to alleviate misery, yes, but he also wanted. To improve his workers, to produce disciplined employees, and cultivate respectable middle-class behavior. His inspectors could enter homes without notice to check for cleanliness. If an employee wasn't fit to live in Pullman, their lease could be discontinued with ten days notice.

There were no saloons or dance halls in Pullman, no locations which might lead to iniquities or vice. George Pullman built a beautiful theater so that his workers could attend plays, provided the productions adhered to the strict moral standards of mister George Pullman. And it wasn't just that Pullman wanted a tidy city with sober, upright denizens, he ran it like a feudal baron.

He forbade independent newspapers to operate in city limits, prohibited public speeches or town meetings. There could be no private charitable organizations. There was a church. But any denomination wishing to use it must first be approved by George Pullman. His deal was if you want to leave If you can find a better job somewhere else, good luck to you. If you can find spacious housing with indoor plumbing and high wages,

And well-behaved alligators in sooty old Chicago, then terrific. You do you. But if you decide to stay here, You comply with my rules. That's the deal. Take it or leave it. George Pullman was not interested in your input and how to run his company or how to manage his town. And he did not tolerate any form of opposing power. You can leave, but you can never argue. The relationship between Pullman and his workers of the

was then deeper than that of a mere employer and employees that stopped every day at five PM or whenever the whistle blew. Pullman was a stern but benevolent father of a family. Father knows best, and children don't vote. In 1888, the Chicago Tribune wrote: There are variety and freedom on the outside. There are monotony and surveillance on the inside. None of these superior or scientific advantages of the model city will compensate for the restrictions on the freedom of the workmen.

The denial of opportunities of ownership, you could never own a home, you just rented it. the heedless and vexatious parade of authority and the sense of injustice arising from the well-founded belief that the charges of the company for rent, heat, gas, water, etc., are excessive, if not extortionist. Pullman may appear all glitter and glow, all gladness and glory to the casual visitor, but there is the deep, dark background of discontent, which it would be idle to deny.

End quote. While he provided company housing, it wasn't free. George believed that that which we acquire cheaply we esteem lightly, so he charged employees rent to live there, ensuring a six percent annual return on his housing investment. Now you didn't have to have this arrangement. You weren't required to live in Pullman and pay rent to your boss. Employees could and did live in Chicago or elsewhere. But there was an unstated premise that if you weren't a real team player,

You wanted to commute in from the outside world with its saloons and its dance halls. Well, you could work here, but you're probably not going to get that promote. And if job cuts ever came, wouldn't Pullman as the father of this community have an obligation to let outsiders go before cutting the jobs of the people that were a part of it? Even the church. Built and designed by the brilliant Solon Spencer Beaman, charged rent.

To any congregations which wanted to use it, and for that reason it stood empty, since no approved denomination would agree to do so. In Pullman, even God paid rent. One employee is alleged to have said 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 the Pullman Hell. End quote.

Folks did not like the lack of input and control in their lives, but they were willing to put up with it so long as it worked. But in eighteen ninety three the United States entered a recession and demand for Pullman cars suddenly fell off a cliff. Pullman responded by lowering employee wages by thirty percent and increasing hours, but he didn't lower the price of rent in town.

A workman earning nine dollars over two weeks would get his paycheck with eight dollars ninety three cents already deducted for rent. One worker testified, I have seen men with families of eight or nine children crying because they only got three or four cents after paying their rent. End quote.

And Pullman's position was we had to get investors to get the capital to build your lovely homes, and we contractually owe those investors six percent. But the very human perspective of his employees was If you control the town. And the price of the gas and the water and the food And the factory, why aren't you adjusting all of these? If you're adjusting our wages and you're adjusting our hours, why aren't you adjusting the cost of rent to reflect that?

Workers had hitherto chafed under Pullman's paternalism, but they had complied. Now, when times were tough, Where was the fatherly benevolence in that paternalism? If Pullman wasn't a company with housing investments, but a social community with jobs, why were all of the sacrifices flowing downhill? Faced with starvation wages, the factory workers went on strike. On may eleventh, eighteen ninety four, three thousand Pullman workers walked off the job. In what's called a wildcat strike.

A wildcat strike meant they didn't have a union, to form one in Pullman would have been impossible, and they didn't have a plan. They just refused to work in general under the situation, just left. And Pullman was furious. Because George Pullman did not see himself as a robber baron. He saw himself as an enlightened capitalist that was uplifting his ward.

Didn't they have nicer houses than all the unemployed people in Chicago who just lost their jobs during the recession? Did they not have running water, orderly, safe, clean streets? All designed and managed to benefit them. Striking against George Pullman to him constituted an act of unfathomable ingratitude. Pullman was a Victorian industrial patriarch. He believed that order produced virtue, hierarchy produced stability.

Those at the top of that hierarchy had a duty to better society, but those at the bottom had an obligation to obey their better society. So the strike wasn't just economics for either party. The people of Pullman thought that the paternalism was only going one way. And George Pullman felt that the strike was a personal betrayal, which upended the order of the universe itself.

His absent employees sent word to the furious George Pullman that we will not work, we will not return to work. Unless wages are restored or our rents are lowered. And moving forward, we want arbitration with management. We want input. Pullman refused to negotiate. In fact, he refused to even meet with the Grievance Committee. Instead, he shut the plant down. He would and could wait them out. Read books and drink tea and play badminton for what? A week? A month?

Until his workers realized that his job was better than no job, and that the city of Pullman, strings attached, was better than the cruel, stinking, impoverished, unplanned world of slums just over the hill. The Pullman Company had more money, stag power and political connections than the workers had. So when the workers ran out of cash, they would be forced to return to the job for mere subsistence in what was effectively an Illinois feudal stronghold. Those workers needed leverage.

They needed to escalate their disputes. And the only force large enough to provide it was organized railroad labor nationwide. In a letter to Eugene V. Debs and his union, the strikers of Pullman wrote, When we went to tell him our grievances, he said we were all his children.

Pullman, both the man and the town, is an ulcer on the body politique. He owns the houses, the schoolhouses, and churches of God in the town he gave his once humble name. The revenue he derives from these The wages he pays out with one hand, the Pullman Palace Car Company he takes back with the other, the Pullman Land Association.

He is able by this to bid under any contract car shop in this country. His competitors in business to meet this must reduce the wages of their men. This gives him the excuse to reduce outs to conform to the market. His business rivals must in turn scale down, so must he, 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. End it, crush it out.

Refusing to service trains which had a Pullman car in them was huge because that was most trains. Within four days, 125,000 workers on 29 railroads walked off the job rather than handle Pullman cars. Union members were fired in response, shutting down entire rail lines. At its peak, a quarter of a million workers joined the strike. And that boycott crippled rail traffic nationwide.

Railroads were the arteries of the American economy, and disrupting them meant slowing food shipments, coal deliveries, factory production, passenger travel, and mail service. Train companies responded by doing two things. They started hitching Pullman cars to mail trains. Let's force those unions to make a tough decision. Are you going to refuse to service the mail? Shut down the mail?

Because folks at home might be sympathetic to a labor dispute, but they're gonna lose patience when they can't get mail anymore because activists are shutting down the country. They hired scabs to replace the strikers, often African Americans, who needed the work and didn't trust unions.

Now Eugene V Debs was a fairly inclusive guy, but labor movements at this time were often segregated and overtly racist, and looking out for white people at the expense of black people that they feared would undercut wages. In fact, minimum wages started in the United States as an attempt to ice out black people who, not me, them, were regarded as subhumans that could always compete for lower than white people. So black people

Looked at the Pullman strike and thought: this is a labor fight amongst white workers who want to exclude us anyway. We'll take the jobs. I bring this up to illustrate just how tense The situation in America was getting. There's an economic recession. The trains are shut down. Folks are not getting their mail. Capital and labor are squaring off for a showdown. And now, on top of all of that, we've got a racial element.

Going on as well. America was becoming a tenderbox. And America's rail yards turned into violent political arenas. Gilded age labor disputes were almost semi paramilitary affairs. Railroad companies hired strike breakers, private security, deputized guards, and sometimes just hired local tufts and thugs to confront strikers. Meanwhile, unions sometimes blurred the lines between economic advocacy and a workers' militia.

Striking workers and sympathetic laborers clustered at picket lines, hurling insults. When a scab crossed the picket line to work for the rail company, strikers saw traders to labor solidarity helping corporations crush the working class. Meanwhile, those scabs were apt to be immigrants or blacks, tangling the labor dispute into ethnic and racial hostilities.

Someone from the Union would hurl an insult or a brick at a black guy crossing the line. Then the local goon that the rail company had hired would plunge into the fray and pistol whip a protest. Strikes and riots broke out across the country, from Omaha to Denver to Oakland. Thousands of train cars were blocked or immobilized. Debs accurately looked at the riots and thought

This is high stakes. The country's a powder keg. This thing goes sideways. If the president sends in men with guns to break the strike, people are gonna die. But If we can escalate this dispute. If we can expand the scope of the fight, not just Pullman workers against Pullman, not just railroad workers against Pullman's allies, but if we can scale this up to a fight of labor versus capital, If we can turn this into a nationwide class conflict, we might bring the tycoons to heal.

It's an uphill battle, and the odds are against us, but if we can get a unified show of force from American labor, we might subdue our enemy. But to do it, we're gonna need immense leverage. Dock workers refusing to handle goods from trains, factory workers and technicians striking in solidarity. If we can do that, then we can redefine the economy of the United States.

Debs looked towards the epicenter of the conflict, the riots of Chicago, and he decided the ARU would blow the conch for every Union and try for a general citywide strike. He contacted Samuel Gompers of the much larger and better known American Federation of Labor, asking the AFL to throw its weight behind a general labor boycott. Shut down Chicago. Just shut down the whole economy. Force the Windy City's plutocrats to deal not with piecemeal union scrap.

with the entire working class rising up against them, and by doing so, awaken the entire nation's labor to their latent size and power.

George Pullman and his allies were running out of patience. Newspapers filled with sensational warnings about mob rule, insurrection, anarchism, and revolution. Business leaders feared the country might be sliding towards European style social upheaval. Men in three piece suits smoking good cigars and nice clubs quietly and nervously spoke of France. And George Pullman called the president, Grover Cleveland.

This was no longer a mere labor dispute. No, no, no. This was national breakdown. The economy of the entire country is collapsing. Mr. President, law and order are imploding. It's one thing for the labor unions to strike, it's another thing entirely to derail train cars, sabotage machinery, block traffic, beat up strike breakers. It's time to restore peace and order. Mr President, it is time to send in the troops.

Something like that. I made that up, but it was probably something quite like that. President Cleveland's attorney general was a man named Richard Olney, who was a train guy, a former railroad lawyer, whose professional network training, social class, and worldview were firmly rooted in the country clubs and smoking parlors of the railroad elite.

It's not that he was corrupt. He had no major stake in a particular railroad company. He wasn't making money directly off of this. It's that he thought America As a country, America had a stake in the railroad industry. It was that infrastructure that kept the entire economy moving. It was the progress bringing separate regions which in living memory had murdered each other by the thousands of

but now being brought together into an integrated whole. Trains were the arteries of American commerce. Shutting them down was flirting with a national heart attack. And who was squeezing those heart valves? Labor union. Now today in the twenty first century.

If you don't like labor unions, it's probably because you think that they hurt productivity or they restrict competition, or that the government acts less like a referee than a cheerleader for labor laws, but chances are you don't question their right to exist or to organize. Only and the men in three piece suits of the Gilded Age didn't think like that. Only thought boycotts were straight up criminal conspiracies.

To George Pulnham and Richard Olney, it was one thing for a single person to quit or go on strike. That was his right. That's you have that right as an American, you can go on strike. But to coordinate Groups of men, to coordinate entire sectors? That is a coercive conspiracy against the public. If the unions want to shut down Chicago and halt the sum of American trains, they're not just bargaining, they are holding the country hostile.

So the Attorney General made the following case to President Cleveland. The present disturbances can no longer be regarded as a mere local labor disagreement, the obstruction of the males and the The paralysis of interstate commerce and the growing inability of civil authorities to guarantee the lawful operation of the railroads constitutes a direct challenge to the authority of the United States itself.

If armed mobs and unauthorized associations may halt the movement at commerce at will, then the federal government ceases to be sovereign over its own constitutional functions. However sympathetic, one may be to the plight of labor. We all kind of understand why these folks in Pullman are mad. Their rent stayed the same, but their wages went down. We okay. All right. That being said, no republic can endure if private groups are permitted to supersede the law through intimidation and force.

The deployment of federal troops is therefore not an act in service of any one particular corporation, but a necessary measure to restore order, to protect the males, preserve commerce, and reaffirm the supremacy of lawful government. Mobs of tufts are illegally stopping the flow of trade and transport across state borders. The federal government therefore has a constitutional obligation to uphold the Interstate Commerce Clause and halt illegal activity.

Then There's the mail, mister President. Plenty of mail trains have Pullman cars attached to them and they are sitting idle while strikers refuse to touch them. By refusing to operate U.S. mail trains, they are impeding mail itself.

Now, maybe, maybe in the distant future, we'll have some kind of free, instantaneous electronic communication, and mail will just be Reduced to irritating junk mail or baffling constant letters from my bank in which my bank feverishly and with great urgency says hello.

And I just open these stupid letters and they're like, hi, we're your bank. And I'm like, the fuck did you send why am I getting all this mail? Anyway, this is 1894. And by God, if railroads are America's arteries, the mail is its nervous system.

He was a warm, cautious man interested in practical if incremental gains, minimal conflict, and limited achievable objectives. Whereas the young, charismatic Eugene V Debs represented something else entirely, not guilds, but class solidarity, industrial scale confrontation. Gompers organized associations, Debs inspired movements. And if Gompers threw the weight of the AFL behind a general strike, well, that flashy ARU might cannibalize the AFL's membership.

replaced craft unionism with this new class consciousness. And by doing so dethrone gompers. Only to march the whole of American labor off a cliff in a catastrophic showdown with the Federal Government it couldn't possibly win. So Samuel Gompers announced that. While the AFL was sympathetic to their brothers in the Pullman strike and the ARU, the American Federation of Labor would not join in a general strike or boyfriend.

Which meant that Eugene V. Debs and the Pullman workers were screwed. Labor was strong enough to provoke the state, but divided it could not possibly defeat. Debs gave a thundering speech in Blue Island, Illinois on june twenty ninth. Afterwards, crowds set fire to nearby buildings and derailed a locomotive attached to a US mail truck.

Only, the attorney general used that as a pretext to ask the courts for injunctive relief against the strike and its leaders, and the courts sided with only. Workers could go on strike as individuals. But the courts ordered Debs and the ARU to cease coordinating those strikes collectively across state lines.

To do so would be an unlawful and criminal conspiracy against interstate commerce, nor could they obstruct rail traffic, interfere with train movements, or intimidate workers. Debs tried to walk a middle path. He encouraged workers to remain lawful and nonviolent, keep the strike a labor dispute, not a revolt, but he refused to halt nationwide boycott efforts in defiance of the court. Two days later. Grover Cleveland sent federal troops into Chicago, and psychologically that changed everything.

Chicago was already on edge. Armed guards were already escorting scabs to and from the rail yards for their safety. Trains had been delayed, mail and deliveries disrupted. When soldiers arrived, workers and residents sympathetic to the Pullman strike interpreted their presence not as neutral peacekeepers come to restore order, but as the federal government openly siding with the railroad corporation.

Eugene Videb still endorsing peace and lawful action sounded increasingly radical, if not a little threatening. The New York Times quoted him on july fourth, saying The first shot fired by the regular soldiers at the mobs here will be the signal for civil war. I believe this as firmly as I believe in the ultimate success of our course. Bloodshed will follow and ninety percent of the people of the United States will be arrayed against the other ten percent.

And I would not care to be arrayed against the laboring people in this contest or find myself out of the ranks of labor when the struggle ended. I do not say this is an alarmist, but calmly and thoughtfully. End quote. We're gonna have a civil war, gang. If anybody takes a shot, you called in the troops, somebody's gonna get hotheaded and fire, and when that happens, there's gonna be a civil war. I'm not threatening. I'm just saying we're gonna have A revolution.

Huge angry crowds gathered in the rail yards of the city, and overturned cars, blocked tracks, sabotaged switching equipment, set fires, and beat the snot out of strike breaks. Cheering crowds watched flaming rail cars roll down train tracks like giant torches. And on july fourth, the Chicago skyline was illuminated not by fireworks, but fire.

And the following day that same skyline was choked with the smoke of arson. Now the federal troops weren't there to break up the strike. They weren't there to interfere with the strike. They were there to protect the mail and interstate commerce. Federal troops and marshals attempted to clear the railroad tracks and protect train movement, and crowds responded by throwing rocks, bricks, and scrap metal at them. And the army opened fire.

Federal troops entered Chicago to restore operations to the rail yards on july third. Within a week of their arrival, a dozen people lay dead and bleeding on the streets of Chicago. On july tenth, Eugene V. Debs was arrested for contempt of court. And in August, when the violence stopped and the smoke cleared, thirty people had died in the riots surrounding the Pullman Strait.

Along with eighty million dollars of damage in today's currency. In the nearby town of Pullman, the employees who had not formally unionized reluctantly returned to work. Those who had joined the ARU were fired, blacklisted, and evicted. The Pullman Palace Car Company slowly resumed operations, building America's finest luxury train cars, mobile resort hotels for the middle class and up, and Eugene V Dibbs spent six months in jail.

he would read the works of Karl Marx and become an ardent socialist. And at the time It sure looked like George Pullman et al. had won. broken the back of the ARU, restored the rightful order of the world, effectively got federal courts to say strikes aren't legal if they impede interstate commerce. But Pullman enjoyed

A temporary pyric victory. Momentarily I will explain why George Pullman won the battle but lost the war and what became of him, the company town, and the strike that shook America. But first Hey gang, I hope you're enjoying this episode. These historical deep dives are my favorite part of the program and they are also the most labor intensive. Now if I were a hack,

I would just bring on angry people to talk about whatever the day's culture war outrage is, and I wouldn't have to read a goddamn thing. I'd just have to look at the headline and then get some paychecks. Most of the time I expend a moderate amount of energy tracking down experts for you. I read their books and I interview them and serve the ideas up to you as a butler. But these monologue episodes, they involve a ton of reading.

They're very labor intensive, and I'm happy to do it. I enjoy doing it. All I ask is this if you enjoyed the episode and you found it entertaining. Give me a tuppence for it. If I get more money for these episodes, I will do more of them. That will be a market sign for me that this is what you all want. They take a lot out of me. I I will skip meals and just bleary eyed be hanging out on my Typewriter. What do I have? I have a laptop, not a typewriter, but I'll be banging on it. And

Uh more people sign up to become patrons of the show. That's a sign for me that these are worth doing and worth doing more of. I would particularly love it. If you then became a patron, go to patreon.com slash Andrew Heaton or on Substack at thepoliticalorphanage.com. I would love that if you became a regular patron because

Having steady income is the only way this job is not terrifyingly erratic. If you like company And you like labor history, there's already a bonus monologue episode waiting for you right behind this, the story of Robert Owen, another industrial patriarch who I think is kind of the anti-mark. Of a now defunct school of socialism.

As well as the founder of not just a model company town that was similar to the paternalism we're talking today, but also the founder of a utopian hippie communion that hilariously and predictably imploded. That episode is already out if you want to listen to it, if you want to keep binging. And then later this week. As a final bonus episode, we will do the story of Ford Landia. Where Henry Ford tried to build not just a company town, but a colony of Americanism in the steamy jungles of Brazil.

Stepped into rakes again and again and again until the whole thing fell apart. It's very funny. It's a very funny story in a good historical monologue. If you're already a patron, You can expect that on your feed. But if you want to go above and beyond and really make my day, feel free to tip me for today's episode. My PayPal is Andrew at Mightyheaton.com, and I am also on Venmo at Mighty Heaton.

I will include both of those means by which to give me money in today's episode description. If you think the show's fun, smart, worthwhile. Give me some money, show me some love. Alright, thanks. Now on with the conclusion of today's program. George Pullman won the battle. But he lost the war. Working class people reviled him as a tyrant, and his own class dismissed him as an idiot. Everybody else in Chicago dropped rents during the Panic of eighteen ninety three, not to be nice

Not to be nice, George, because it's better to get half the rent than no rent at all. Whereas obstinate Pullman had to screw everything up based on what? Principle? No. Ego. The man is an idiot. President Cleveland.

Who that same year signed a law making Labor Day an official federal holiday, authorized the United States Strike Commission to investigate the underlying causes and dysfunction which led to the Pullman strike and the aforementioned eighty thousand dollars worth of damage across the country. The Commission determined that Pullman was chiefly responsible for the strike.

His workers had throughout been willing to negotiate. He had not. He had consistently adopted the position that they could either accept his rule or leave. His unyielding attitude and refusal to negotiate had pushed the company, town, and eventually the entire country into a needless, avoidable conflict. Most damning, the Commission argued that the city of Pullman and his staunch paternalism were un American.

American culture, the Commission argued, is about individualism, civic independence, and property rights. Denizens of Pullman could not own their own homes. They had little say in their day to day lives because their benefactor could not tell the difference between philanthropy and domination. Yes, it was clean and safe and nice, but only as a perverse form of industrial feudalism. home to subjects, but not citizens, dependency in place of self-reliance. And America cannot abide dependency.

Americans will be poor, we will be crazy, but we cannot stand and never will be peasants.

Then they lowered that concrete block containing George Pullman's remains into the concrete hole which swallowed them and capped it off with a layer of steel rail bolts and asphalt. The burial process took two full days. And finally on top, a Corinthian column erected along with two stone benches, the design of the fabulously named Solon Spencer Beaman.

A year later, the Illinois Supreme Court revoked the city's charter, reasoning that the Pullman Palace Car Company was chartered to manufacture railroad cars, not to govern a municipality. As such, the private company, doubling as private civic infrastructure, exceeded its remit. The company was ordered to sell and divest properties unrelated to its commercial activity. Pullman ceased to be a company training. and slowly grew and merged into a suburb of Greater Chicago.

By nineteen oh three, Lake Vista, the beautiful man made lake which was once the centerpiece of that model town, became too expensive for the company to maintain and was filled in. The two alligators were already gone. One had died years earlier, had been found with its jaw stuck to a steam pipe one winter seeking warmth. The other alligator vanished, only to reappear in Lake Kalamet later, sparking delightful panic and a lot of local urban legends.

Locals eventually lassoed it and the alligator lived out his retirement in the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago. And by 1930, the now independent Hotel Florence, named after George Pullman's beloved daughter, was the most popular brothel in Chicago. So that's the story of the city of Pullman and how a meticulously engineered industrial paradise led to a national labor dispute.

And also a rogue alligator terrorizing South Chicago. But before we go, I want to offer. A happy alternate codecil and a company town that didn't wind up collapsing, but rather maturing and growing into a town in its own right and a happy one. Just two years after Illinois revoked the Pullman Company Town's charter, another company town sprouted up in rural Pennsylvania, that of Hershey. Yes, as in Hershey's chocolate.

Like Pullman, Milton Hershey got rich making luxuries available to the middle class, for which, by the way, both men should be commended. Milton Hershey's Lancaster Caramel Company achieved mass bulk exports of chocolate, making what had been an expensive treat for elites now available to the average American, for which he got rich, and deservedly so. Like Pullman, Hershey built a model town for his employees owned and operated by the Hershey Corporation.

Hershey too was run by a benevolent tycoon looking to improve his workers' lives through uplifting design. Sporting modern amenities for workers who live there, such as indoor plumbing, central heating, and now at the dawn of the twentieth century, electricity. mister Hershey built a free school to educate employees' children, he installed public transit in the form of a trolley system, and eventually, golf courses, a community center, a zoo, and an amusement park.

And not a small bit of utopia. He too had a touch of utopia. According to mister Hershey, quote, there is no provision for a police department nor for a jail. Here there will be no unhappiness. Then why any crime? End quote. Based on what we now know of the town of Pullman, you would think if another tycoon built, designed, and owned his own city, with utopian ideals like we won't have police because everybody will be happy, that the whole thing would probably implode in a year.

And yet, it never did. The city of Pullman lost its distinction and is now an absorbed suburb of Chicago, but today Hershey Still stands. It is a fun, nostalgic, touristy place. I've been there. The street lamps are shaped like Hershey's kisses. The trolleys still operate, although they do so now as historical rides that you you go on and you do sing alongs, and there's a couple of actors that do historical stuff. It's corny but charming. So how did Milton Herschel?

Become a civic saint, whereas George Pullman is buried in a concrete safe. George Pullman was deeply paternalistic. He saw an obligation to mold his employees into upstanding, disciplined, sober people, to improve them through rules and orders. Milton Hershey wanted his workers to have a fun, good time, have a good life. But he didn't want to try to improve them. What Hershey thought was: if he built a happy, clean community, people would improve themselves.

Employees celebrated Milton Hershey, the employer as philanthropist, whereas they resented George Pullman, the boss who's your dad. And I think this is the real breakdown here. I don't fault Pullman for creating first of all, the Pullman train cars, which I think were great, nor for anybody creating a company town. I I actually I I think his actual ethical position of

If you want to leave you can, but otherwise this is my thing and I'm I I built it myself. Like I I I have a lot of latitude for that. If you wanna go right now, Elon Musk is building two company towns in Texas and that's fine. As long as he didn't take the land with eminent domain and he's funding it himself. That's cool. Live there or don't live there. I I think experimentation is great.

So I don't think that it was bad per se that Pullman had a company town. What I think was the problem, not not even a legal problem, but an ethical problem, was that he purported to have this familial relationship with his employee. But when push came to shove, that was a one way street. When the panic of eighteen ninety three happened and sales declined. Pullman's pretenses of family and community fell away. Pullman cut wages and

But he kept rent the same. I don't know if I even think that there's a legal problem with it. I kind of view this like I wouldn't outlaw adultery, but if you cheat on your wife, you're a scumbag? Pullman was a scummy in terms of the people that were were part of this community that he built. He he had an ethical obligation beyond that of a boss if he was building a community. And when times got tough,

His employees weren't his children, as he had maintained, they were his assets. And that's why he is now buried in a lead lined concrete safe.

Conversely, Milton Hershey and his employees lived through the Great Depression. And when that happened, Milton Hershey felt that preserving the welfare and dignity of his community intrinsically mattered. He used his wealth to keep the town employed. The nineteen thirties and Hershey saw a building boom. Milton financed the construction of a community theater, a hotel, a park, an arena, and a stadium, all to ensure that the town which bore his name did not descend into unemployment and on week.

And when the Great Depression wrapped up, Hershey had expanded from a factory town that makes chocolate to a national tourist destination and still is. And finally, the George Pullman wanted total control. over his town. No unapproved newspapers, plays, or meetings, no private charitable organizations which might turn to separate nodes of power. Even though it was a private endeavor and yes you could leave, it was still infused with an onerous sense of top-down authoritarianism.

Whereas Milton Hershey dispersed authority across civic institutions and charities and independent community structures. He encouraged his residents to form clubs. Create charities. He built a meeting hall and a community center for people to meet and form community in. He bought uniforms and equipment for the local sports team, patronized literary and social clubs, and supported the volunteer fire department. Private home ownership increasingly emerged and was encouraged.

Whereas it started out, where all of the houses in Hershey were owned by Milton Hershey, they started just expanding and having private neighborhoods where you could go buy your own home, and that was terrific. Workers could and did purchase their own houses. Then businesses developed around them independently of the Hershey Chocolate Company, and the town gradually evolved into a more normal civic community than a fully controlled corporate environment.

That corporation, Hershey Chocolate Company, or whatever it's called, remained economically central, but the town itself. slowly became a genuine municipality populated by homeowners, local organizations, and ordinary citizens rather than dependent tenants living under the permanent supervision of a corporate patriarch.

Not only did Hershey encourage neighborhoods, social organizations, and businesses to grow and Hershey independent of his authority, he split his own authority down the middle. Hershey and his wife Kitty had no children of their own, so instead they created the Hershey Industrial School for Orphans and Underprivileged Boys. And in his fifties, Milton transferred the majority of his personal fortune to the Milton Hershey School Trust.

including his stock in the Hershey Corporation, at which point Hershey's various charitable endeavors split off to be run by the trust. The Hershey Corporation continues to make chocolate and profits today, but the trust owned the majority of shares in the company, meaning that in Hershey, the nonprofit had partial control of the corporation rather than in Pullman, where everything was an appendage of the company.

Hershey set up institutions to operate independent of him and outlast him. Institutionalized stewardship instead of one man running everything. George Pullman didn't even live in Pullman. He lived in a mansion on Tony Prairie Avenue in Chicago, fourteen miles away, among the city's elites and financiers and industrialists. A man imposing strict moral discipline and paternal oversight on his workers while personally insulated and elevated from the very system he created.

Whereas Milton Hershey lived in Hershey. To be clear, he lived in a very nice house in Hershey on a hill overlooking the city that bore his name, but even so, he did so as a part of the community. Into his eighties, you could sometimes catch a glimpse of the white-haired Milton Hershey walking through parks or gardens, attending the odd meeting. He wasn't a man prone to speeches or oratory, but he liked to observe construction projects and count improvements, to dote on the Hershey School.

He died in his eighties in the Hershey Hospital, and today there is a statue of him in the town holding an orchard.