Pullman: America's Model Company Town and the Strike That Changed Labor Forever

George Pullman built more than a factory on Chicago's far south side in the eighteen eighties. He built a whole world, and then he lost control of it.

Beginning in eighteen eighty, the Pullman Palace Car Company constructed an entire planned community on roughly half a square mile of lakefront prairie. Architect Solon Beman and landscape designer Nathan Barrett laid out brick rowhouses, parks, a church, a library, an arcade of shops, and a grand Hotel Florence named for Pullman's daughter. Workers at the sleeping-car factory could live, shop, worship, and read books, all on company property, at company-set rents. Contemporary observers called it the most perfect town in the world. Critics called it paternalism in brick and mortar.

The experiment collapsed in the depression of eighteen ninety-three. Pullman cut wages by roughly twenty-five percent but held rents steady. When a workers' delegation attempted to present their grievances, Pullman refused to meet them and fired the delegates the same afternoon. On May eleventh, eighteen ninety-four, workers walked off the job.

Eugene V. Debs and the American Railway Union brought the strike national. Union members across the country refused to handle Pullman cars, paralyzing most rail traffic west of Detroit. President Grover Cleveland sent federal troops to Chicago over the objection of Governor Altgeld. By late July, dozens of workers were dead nationwide, millions in railroad property had been destroyed, and Debs sat in a jail cell. The strike was broken, the experiment declared a failure.

But the story did not end there. In nineteen twenty-five, A. Philip Randolph organized the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters at the same Pullman Company, building the first successful Black-led labor union in American history. After twelve years of resistance, Pullman signed a contract with the Brotherhood in April of nineteen thirty-seven, a landmark in both labor and civil rights history.

President Barack Obama designated Pullman a National Monument in twenty fifteen. The Clock Tower Building and Hotel Florence still stand, preserved anchors of a neighborhood that shaped the American labor movement twice over.