George Mortimer Pullman

• Born: March 3, 1831
• Birthplace: Brocton, New York
• Died: October 19, 1897
• Place of death: Chicago, Illinois

American inventor and industrialist

Pullman, the inventor of the railroad sleeping car, changed the nature of railroad travel. He initially was admired for his employee policies, but his relationship with his workers quickly deteriorated after an economic downturn in 1893 resulted in an ugly strike at his company the following year.

Sources of wealth: Patents; railroads

Bequeathal of wealth: Spouse; children; educational institution

Early Life

George Mortimer Pullman was born into the world of his blue-collar father. Young Pullman was reared in the shadow of the Universalist Church, in which two of his brothers would become pastors. However, Pullman always preferred to emphasize good decisions, self-control, and honesty over overt Christian orthodoxy. Therefore, although he attended church throughout his life, the lessons he learned were always applied in a manner that coincided with his innate convictions about decency and character. Pullman attended school until age fourteen, when he traded formal studies for a job at a general store in Westfield, New York. Three years later, in 1848, he became a cabinetmaker, and he later joined his father in the business of moving buildings.

First Ventures

He and his father were fortunate to be living near the Erie Canal when the decision was made to widen it, because this project required that many homes be moved away from the waterway, thus providing ample work for the Pullmans. Five years later, in 1853, Pullman’s father became ill and died. This left Pullman to finish moving the homes without his father’s guidance, a job he successfully completed in 1855.

Pullman then opened an office in Chicago and began elevating buildings, as well as moving them. In the mid-1850’s, many of the buildings and streets in Chicago were only a few feet above Lake Michigan’s water level, and flooding and poor drainage were common problems facing Chicagoans. In 1858, Pullman secured a contract to raise the Tremont Hotel so it would safely rest above the threat of Lake Michigan’s waters. Pullman successfully raised the hotel, and he went on to elevate other historically significant buildings.

With the arrival of winter and the subsequent freeze that halted work on construction projects, Pullman boarded a train to return to New York. His arduous trip led Pullman to design a more comfortable means of travel for passengers taking long journeys by train. Just as his move to Chicago had been well timed for a man in the business of moving buildings, his decision to design a luxurious railcar proved equally fortuitous.

Mature Wealth

In order to build his cars, Pullman found two normal railcars suitable for a makeover and available for purchase. He converted these cars into facilities with sleeping accommodations. Although this conversion cost $2,000, a hefty sum at this time, Pullman staunchly believed that people would pay more money for a higher-quality rail trip. To this end, he made sure that the inside of his cars looked exquisite, from their fine, interior wood paneling to their toilets and linen closets.

By the time the Civil War began, Pullman had sufficiently expanded his rail line to provide travel between a greater number of cities. By 1862, he had developed an even smoother-riding vehicle by building a car with sixteen instead of eight wheels. However, when the Union began using cars to transport troops during the Civil War, Pullman’s ambitions were put on hold for a few years.

In August, 1865, just months after the end of the Civil War, Pullman was able to persuade Union commander Ulysses S. Grant to travel aboard one of his sleeping cars. The car provided for Grant was far more advanced than those constructed three years earlier, and Grant’s use of it was an advertising boon for Pullman, who quickly discovered that the public readily approved of almost everything the Union leader endorsed.

As 1866 came to a close, Pullman had nearly fifty sleeping cars in operation, and in February, 1867, the Illinois legislature granted a charter to Pullman’s Palace Car Company. With the charter in hand, Pullman resolutely began the work of making passengers’ rides not only more comfortable but also less burdensome. Pullman recalled how the unpleasantness of his travels between Chicago and New York in the winter of 1858 was multiplied by the aggravation of having to drag baggage from one car to another as he changed lines at various train stations during the thirteen-hundred-mile journey. He worked on ways to ensure that his passengers would not have to change cars or move their luggage during a trip.

When Pullman was ready to demonstrate that he had envisioned every possibility for making rail travel easier, he sponsored a week-and-a-half-long cross-country trip aboard a group of his sleeping cars. Departing Boston on May 23, passengers were wined and dined in the sleeping cars until they arrived in San Francisco ten days later. Pullman, ever the publicist, brought reporters along in order to have the details of the transcontinental trip relayed to the public.

Pullman began planning a town for employees of the Palace Car Company with the intention of bettering his workforce. A progressive before progressivism became fashionable in the early twentieth century, Pullman sought to build a town where the environment would make his workers more suited to education and ethical behavior than to the alcohol and debauchery that marked many other factory communities. Located by Lake Calumet, just outside Chicago, the town of Pullman, Illinois, was purposely self-contained. It sat on approximately six square miles of land and eventually housed almost twelve thousand residents. In addition to the Palace Car factory and approximately eighteen hundred homes for workers, the town also had a library, a theater, and an arcade with various shops and outlets for goods and services. There were grocery and clothing stores, as well as a club where gentlemen could gather, read, and converse. One of the most prominent buildings was the Florence Hotel, which was the only place in town where alcohol could be purchased; by design, there were no saloons in Pullman, Illinois.

During the first years of the town’s existence, Pullman enjoyed the world’s adulation. Both the town and the man were praised for the moral benefits the workers appeared to be receiving. In time, however, the novelty of the town wore off, and Pullman began to be criticized as intensely as he had been lauded. When the Panic of 1893 sent the nation into an economic downtown, Pullman came to be despised by many of the very workers who had initially liked and admired him.

The economic woes of 1893 resulted in job cuts at the Pullman factory, as demand for his cars waned. Some employees were fired, and the salaries of the remaining workers were cut, but there was no corresponding reduction in workers’ rents. Thus, the already struggling workers were forced to pay what they viewed as exorbitantly high rents during what would be the worst economic downturn in American history prior to the Great Depression. The following year, workers at the Pullman factory went on strike, which further eroded Pullman’s reputation among his workers and the public.

Legacy

Pullman died in 1897. He left his wife his Chicago estate on Prairie Avenue and $1.25 million. His two daughters received $1 million each, and his daughter Florence was bequeathed his summer home. His two sons were left little because Pullman believed they were irresponsible. He left his two brothers and two sisters $50,000 each, and he bequeathed $1.2 million to build a manual trades school in Pullman, Illinois.

Pullman’s luxurious sleeping car transformed the way the nation traveled, bringing refinement to what had been a bone-jarring experience. However, he was an inept manager of employee relations, seeming to turn a blind eye toward the plight of his workers during an economic crisis. His treatment of employees spurred the formation of workers’ unions, convincing his employees and many members of the public that Pullman valued his money more than he valued the people whom he employed. Pullman’s reputation for mistreating his workers was given greater credence after it became known that he not only refused to hear the workers’ grievances before the 1894 strike but also left Chicago and went to his East Coast home during the strike. His conduct gave fodder to the newspapers, making it easy for them to represent him as a greedy capitalist who did not want to be bothered with the struggles of common people.

Bibliography

Buder, Stanley. Pullman: An Experiment in Industrial Order and Community Planning, 1880-1890. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967. Offers a detailed, readable look at Pullman. Perhaps the best book on Pullman available.

Maiken, Peter T. Night Trains: The Pullman Systems in the Golden Years of American Rail Travel. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. An overview of the heyday of American railway travel. Central to the book’s focus is its look at the benefits travelers received from Pullman’s inventions.

Stein, Conrad R. The Pullman Strike and the Labor Movement in American History. Berkeley Heights, N.J.: Enslow, 2001. Provides an in-depth look at Pullman’s problems with labor, the formation of unions, and the emergence of collective bargaining and strikes.

Summers, Mark Wahlgren. The Gilded Age: Or, The Hazard of New Functions. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1997. Offers an overview of the pitfalls of the Gilded Age, including a look at Pullman’s problems, particularly the Pullman strike.