Pullman: The Company Town That Sparked Labor Day

In eighteen eighty, George Pullman, whose luxury sleeping cars were remaking long-distance rail travel in America, decided he needed a better class of worker, and that to get one he would have to build a better class of town. He purchased four thousand acres on the southern edge of Chicago and hired an architect to design an entire community from scratch: brick row houses with gas and running water, parks, a hotel, a library, a theater, a church, shops, a school. Workers who built Pullman sleeping cars would live in Pullman housing, shop at Pullman stores, and worship in a church whose rent Pullman collected.

The town impressed reformers and industrialists alike for its cleanliness and order. But the people who lived there understood what it actually was. You could not own property. The company newspaper ran only approved news. Labor meetings were banned. Company inspectors, residents complained, watched the blocks. The rents, set by Pullman, were deliberately higher than what similar housing cost nearby.

When the depression of eighteen ninety-three hit, Pullman cut wages by roughly twenty-five percent but did not reduce rents or store prices. Workers asked to negotiate. Pullman refused. In May of eighteen ninety-four, four thousand workers walked off the job. The American Railway Union, led by Eugene V. Debs, declared a sympathy boycott of all trains pulling Pullman cars. Within weeks, rail traffic across twenty-seven states was paralyzed. President Grover Cleveland sent federal troops to Chicago over the objection of the Illinois governor. Thirty workers died in the violence. Debs went to prison.

The strike failed. Pullman won in the short term. But Congress, hoping to placate labor, passed a bill making the first Monday of September a federal holiday. Cleveland signed it into law just days before the troops arrived. Labor Day exists because of what happened here.