George Pullman

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George Mortimer Pullman (March 3, 1831 – October 19, 1897) was an American engineer and industrialist.

He designed and manufactured the Pullman sleeping car and founded a company town, Pullman, for the workers who manufactured it.

His Pullman Company also hired African-American men to staff the Pullman cars, who became known and widely respected as Pullman porters, providing elite service. Struggling to maintain profitability during an 1894 downturn in manufacturing demand, he halved wages and required workers to spend long hours at the plant, but did not lower prices of rents and goods in his company town.

He gained presidential support by Grover Cleveland for the use of federal military troops which left 30 strikers dead in the violent suppression of workers there to end the Pullman Strike of 1894.

A national commission was appointed to investigate the strike, which included assessment of operations of the company town.

In 1898 the Supreme Court of Illinois ordered the Pullman Company to divest itself of the town, which became a neighbourhood of the city of Chicago.

Early life

Pullman was born in 1831 in Brocton, New York, the son of Emily Caroline (Minton) and carpenter James Lewis Pullman. His family moved to Albion, New York, along the Erie Canal in 1845, so his father could help widen the canal. His father had invented a machine using jackscrews that could move buildings or other structures out of the way and onto new foundations and had patented it in 1841. By that time, packet boats carried people on day excursions along the canal, plus travellers and freight craft would be towed across the state along the busy canal.

Pullman attended local schools and helped his father, learning other skills that contributed to his later success. He dropped out of school. In 1855, his father died.

Personal life and death

On October 19, 1897, Pullman died of a heart attack in Chicago, Illinois. He was 66 years old. Pullman was buried at Graceland Cemetery in Chicago, Illinois. George and his wife Hattie had four children: Florence, Harriett, George Jr. and Walter Sanger Pullman.

Fearing that some of his former employees or other labor supporters might try to dig up his body, his family arranged for his remains to be placed in a lead-lined mahogany coffin, which was then sealed inside a block of concrete. At the cemetery, a large pit had been dug at the family plot. At its base and walls were 18 inches of reinforced concrete. The coffin was lowered, and covered with asphalt and tarpaper. More concrete was poured on top, followed by a layer of steel rails bolted together at right angles, and another layer of concrete. The entire burial process took two days. His monument, featuring a Corinthian column flanked by curved stone benches, was designed by Solon Spencer Beman, the architect of the company town of Pullman.

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Career

Pullman was a clerk for a country merchant. Pullman took over the family business. In 1856, Pullman won a contract with the State of New York to move 20 buildings out of the way of the widening canal.

In 1857, as a young engineer, Pullman arrived in Chicago, Illinois as the city prepared to build the nation's first comprehensive sewer system. Pullman formed a partnership known as Ely, Smith & Pullman. Chicago was built on a low-lying bog, and people described the mud in the streets as deep enough to drown a horse. The growing city needed a sewer system, and Pullman's became one of several companies hired to lift multi-story buildings four to six feet—to both allow sewers to be constructed and to improve the foundations. The project would involve effectively raising the street level 6–8 feet, first constructing the sewers at ground level, then covering them. The Ely, Smith & Pullman partnership gained favorable publicity for raising the massive Tremont House, a six-story brick hotel, while the guests remained inside.

Pullman developed a railroad sleeping car, the Pullman sleeper or "palace car". These were designed after the packet boats that travelled the Erie Canal of his youth in Albion. The first one was finished in 1864.

After President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, Pullman arranged to have his body carried from Washington, D.C. to Springfield on a sleeper, for which he gained national attention, as hundreds of thousands of people lined the route in homage. Lincoln's body was carried on the Presidential train car that Lincoln himself had commissioned that year. Pullman had cars in the train, notably for the President's surviving family. Orders for his new car began to pour into his company. The sleeping cars proved successful although each cost more than five times the price of a regular railway car. They were marketed as "luxury for the middle class".

In 1867, Pullman introduced his first "hotel on wheels," the President, a sleeper with an attached kitchen and dining car. The food rivaled the best restaurants of the day and the service was impeccable. A year later in 1868, he launched the Delmonico, the world's first sleeping car devoted to fine cuisine. The Delmonico menu was prepared by chefs from New York's famed Delmonico's Restaurant.

Both the President and the Delmonico and subsequent Pullman sleeping cars offered first-rate service. The company hired African-American freedmen as Pullman porters. Many of the men had been former domestic slaves in the South. Their new roles required them to act as porters, waiters, valets, and entertainers, all rolled into one person. As they were paid relatively well and got to travel the country, the position became considered prestigious, and Pullman porters were respected in the black communities.

Pullman believed that if his sleeper cars were to be successful, he needed to provide a wide variety of services to travelers: collecting tickets, selling berths, dispatching wires, fetching sandwiches, mending torn trousers, converting day coaches into sleepers, etc. Pullman believed that former house slaves of the plantation South had the right combination of training to serve the businessmen who would patronize his "Palace Cars". Pullman became the biggest single employer of African Americans in post-Civil War America.

In 1869, Pullman bought out the Detroit Car and Manufacturing Company. Pullman bought the patents and business of his eastern competitor, the Central Transportation Company in 1870. In the spring of 1871, Pullman, Andrew Carnegie, and others bailed out the financially troubled Union Pacific; they took positions on its board of directors. By 1875, the Pullman firm owned $100,000 worth of patents, had 700 cars in operation, and had several hundred thousand dollars in the bank.

In 1887, Pullman designed and established the system of "vestibuled trains," with cars linked by covered gangways instead of open platforms. The vestibules were first put in service on the Pennsylvania Railroad trunk lines. The French social scientist Paul de Rousiers (1857–1934), who visited Chicago in 1890, wrote of Pullman's manufacturing complex, "Everything is done in order and with precision. One feels that some brain of superior intelligence, backed by a long technical experience, has thought out every possible detail."

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