A Capitalist Utopia

PETER: You’re listening to BackStory, and we’ll be back in a minute. We’re back with BackStory story. I’m Peter Onuf.

ED: I’m Ed Ayers.

BRIAN: And I’m Brian Balogh. Today on the show, we’re looking at visions of utopia in American history. In the 1880s, spectators from around the world came to America to see what the London Times called the most perfect town in the world.

PETER: That was Pullman, Illinois, a factory town founded by railway industrialist George Pullman. Built on a prairie miles outside of Chicago, the town had plenty of sunlight and fresh air. Even unskilled workers enjoyed indoor plumbing, trash pickup, an all brick home and a fireplace. There were libraries with morally uplifting books picked by George Pullman himself. It was a far cry from the filthy, crowded tenements where most American workers lived.

JANE BAXTER: When the town was officially opened, one of the reverends who spoke at the opening said this is one utopia that America cannot wish to fail.

BRIAN: This is Jane Baxter, a historical archaeologist at DePaul University. She says that all these amenities were in service of a larger Utopian vision, a solution to the class conflict that royaled Gilded Age America.

JANE BAXTER: Pullman wants to see if he can make capitalism work better, so that people become content with their place in a capitalist system. So if you’re a worker, you’re happy being a worker. If you’re a manager, you’re happy being a manager. Whatever your job is and your place in the system, that you’ll find it a great place to be. And very early on, the press is quite enamored with Pullman.

A lot of stories talk about how beautiful the town is, the bucolic surroundings, the sort of happy workers. But even in 1881, there’s a very famous article in Harper’s Magazine where Richard Eli goes and spends time in Pullman, and he begins with this kind of embracing of the idea, and this positive sense about the community, and then he kind of realizes that the people just don’t seem very happy. And he goes on to say that, you know–

PETER: The objective of the whole thing.

JANE BAXTER: Yeah, exactly. The experiment isn’t can you build a bunch of houses, you know, nice houses for people, it’s does it actually transform the people who are living in them? You also notice if you look at census records and other records, which of course aren’t incredibly time sensitive, but there’s a great deal of turnover in the community. So people aren’t staying.

And there’s a very famous, and I can only paraphrase it, quote by a resident of Pullman who said, you know, we work in a Pullman factory, we sleep in a Pullman bed, we shop at a Pullman store, and when we die, we’ll go to a Pullman hell.

And they felt overwhelmed by living there, and just the ever presence of Pullman in their lives. And as a result, you don’t have this stable, content community that was hoping to be cultivated by this experiment.

BRIAN: Where did that dissatisfaction go?

JANE BAXTER: Well, this dissatisfaction that began almost as soon as the town was established continued as a low rumbling of discontent and dissatisfaction up into the strike of 1894, which is sort of the defining strike of the Pullman laborers. Most things that you would read about Pullman, and most stories that are told about the Pullman community talk about the strike really having its roots in the 1893 economic panic.

And the economic panic was a downturn that was the greatest recession prior to the Great Depression. And in that moment, George Pullman had a number of things he was trying to balance. Rail travel was down, orders for cars were down, the factory was not producing the same amount of goods, and he had workers that were living in his housing. He needed the rents paid, he needed to keep workers working, but he also had shareholders.

And he had promised his shareholders that they would always receive a 6% return. And what he decided to do was keep paying the return to shareholders, cut the wages of the factory workers, and not cut the rents for their homes.

BRIAN: And I suspect that in the heart of that great recession of the early 1890s, 6% was a pretty hefty return.

JANE BAXTER: It really was. It was another one of his ideals, that capitalism should be able to provide that well for everybody. The worker should be happy, but the shareholders should certainly be getting well enriched in the process. And so that was really the linchpin, the cause of the strike for the workers.

And it took them a while, but they kept reaching out to the American Railway Worker Union to get them to support the strike. And so the strike really gains prominence when the American Railway Workers Union agrees that they are willing to support and take collective action with the factory workers at Pullman. And what happened is they stopped putting the cars on the trains. And so–

BRIAN: So you could still ride on a Pullman car, you just couldn’t go anywhere.

JANE BAXTER: You just couldn’t go anywhere. I’m sure they were very comfortable seats, but you couldn’t get anywhere. So, yeah. Then what we have happen is Grover Cleveland sends in troops to help put down the strike. It was not a particularly violent uprising, but troops were brought in, and steps were taken to break up the strike.

BRIAN: This guy, Pullman, who left such an imprint on this town, his Utopian vision, how did he explain what obviously was a colossal disaster? How did he explain this to himself?

JANE BAXTER: You, know it’s interesting. Pullman dies in 1897, so he dies shortly after the strike, and it’s a very clear that he felt misunderstood. His early visions talk about creating a town that was free from strife, and where workers would have a better life. And I think that he really did believe that that should’ve been what happened. You know, quite famously, Pullman is buried in Graceland Cemetery under a very large tombstone.

I mean, decidedly large. And reports of what his grave are like is that it’s much deeper than you would expect a grave to be in the ground, and that it’s covered in railroad ties. He was so concerned upon his passing that his body would be exhumed and disrespected by the workers and the unions who hated him so much.

Once his wife passed away he had his home demolished, because he was afraid of sort of the legacy that was being left under the circumstances of the ending of the company town.

BRIAN: Does this story also tell us something about the gap between at least one titan of industry and the very men and women that worked with him? I mean, how could he so misunderstand the very people who he worked with?

JANE BAXTER: I think there’s an incredible parallel between, Pullman is operating his company in what was known as the Gilded Age, and we’re living in what many people call the Second Gilded Age.

I mean, if we look at the occupy movement and the idea of the 99%, and the idea that there’s such a chasm of wealth distribution, there’s a chasm of understanding of how things should be working, I think that there’s a real parallel to what was going on in Pullman’s time.

And what I find really interesting is when you look historically at the writings that are going on at the time of the first Gilded Age, this is very much a conversation about who owns the idea of America. Are the successful industrialists, who would tell you that they earned their money by working their way up, they built their businesses, they’re living the American dream, and then are doing things like George Pullman by creating a town and running his business the way he sees fit?

Is that what America is? Or is it all the workers and the immigrant workers who are coming in and actually making these factories work, so that people like Pullman can have money, right? And so I think that it’s not a dissimilar story from the types of conversations that we hear happening today.

BRIAN: Jane Baxter is a historical archaeologist at DePaul University, and lives in, you guessed it, Pullman, which is now a neighborhood in Chicago. On our website we’ve also post an excerpt from our conversation about the archaeology of utopias like Pullman.