Let's Talk About The Pullman Strike, Knob-Gobblers

Robert is joined by Shereen Lani Younes to discuss the Pullman Strike.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hi, everybody, Um, is there something I should look at her?
Are you just gonna You're gonna tell me things? Right? Geez?
We already watched this introduction coal between you and me, Sharine?
We really, we really that was unfortunately Robert's, host of
Behind the Bastard's podcasting a weird voice. I'm someone else,

(00:27):
don't I don't know. I'm talking to Sharine? Is who
I am? And I'm Sharine? I am Sharene. I'm I'm
well to be honest, but I feel guilty saying that, um,
because relatively I'm usually bad. But I think it's I'm
a better bad than usual. You know that makes sense?
I don't know. Yeah, yeah, I know. It's always good

(00:48):
to be a better bad than usual. And it's really
gloomy in l A, and that makes me thrive. I
love Yeah, I love it when LA feels like the
Pacific Northwest. Briefly, Yes, exactly. It doesn't happen it often,
you get me. Yeah, So, Sharine, how do you feel
about trains? Uh? So they're fun. That's a way to introduce.

(01:17):
I love to travel. Okay, how do you feel about so?
You like? You like comfortable trains? Right? Like? You know
trains with cabin sleeper cars, all that sort of stuff.
The trains you can sit on and enjoy. I like
all trains. I think they're very impressive. And uh yeah,
if you do you really think about it, there a

(01:38):
feat that man made, you know what I mean? They
pretty cool. Now, how do you feel about workers being
gunned down because they are trying to get paid fairly
for helping to make trains bad? I feel bad about
you feel bad about that? Oh okay, so this might
not be a super happy episode. Well that's the episode.

(01:59):
Like that. It's it's great, it's great. I'm very good
at my job. The working title I have for this
this episode sharene is. Let's talk about the Pullman strike
Comma Cocksuckers And I don't know why I was so
aggressive when I was writing the title to this um
but but I never edited it and now it's it's
in there, So if you can we make this the

(02:19):
title of the episode. We put Cocksuckers in Spotify. I
don't know. There's certain apps that reject these really yeah,
or and it makes and it makes it like like
it blocks it for searching things. But in my heart,
that's the title. Yeah, I feel like, if Cometown is fine, oh,
let's talk about the Pullman Strike. Cocksuckers is also okay.

(02:39):
I mean, I'm willing to give it a shot if
it would make you happy. Yeah, I think I would
like to give it a shot. On the episode that
I guessed on it might it might be gone forever, Well,
it might be Yeah, Well we'll change the title up
on a couple of an artifact, we can change the
title to let's talk about the Pullman Strike knob gobblers. Okay,

(02:59):
they're not gonna catch that's great, that's great. So today,
Serene Lonnie unis, today we're gonna learn about George Pullman,
a guy who sucked so bad that workers who didn't
even work for him quit working to protest how shitty
a boss he was. Like, that's the level of bad.
Like other people who had nothing to do with this

(03:21):
guy quit working to protest how much he sucked. Now,
like most great labor stories, the story of the Pullman
Strike has a sad ending and a lot more racism
than you'd hope. But that's no excuse not to talk
about this huge piece of ship, George Mortimer Pullman. He
was born in eighteen thirty one and Brockton, New York.
His dad, James Lewis known as Louis, was a farmer

(03:43):
who became a carpenter because the money was much better.
The family seems to have been upwardly mobile for the time,
but firmly working class. George was expected to labor from
a young age. Now Brockton had a general store owned
by his mom's uncle, and after he finished fourth grade,
it was to did that he would drop out and
work there for about forty dollars a month, which is

(04:05):
a pretty good salary for the time. Again, his family
is comfortable. That same year, his parents left him and
his two brothers behind to move to Albion, New Jersey,
so his dad could work on widening the eerie canal.
Uh And yeah, yeah, this was this was like a
whole big deal here in George's fourteen when the effort starts.
We have fewer of his early recollections that night, I

(04:26):
prefer so it's hard to say how this affected him,
but the move was great for his father's career. Louis
Pullman developed a method of moving the building off of
its old foundations and onto a new one because they
had to to widen This canal. There was like stuff
built up against the canal that they had to lift
up and move so that they could widen the canal.
It was like this whole they're doing this and like

(04:48):
the eighteen late eighteen forties, I think is kind of
when the effort gets really underway. Um. See, he can
be impressive sometimes it's really cool because like again people
are they don't have techno apology, then like everything sucks.
Uh to innovative, they have to be innovative. Yeah, So
the system that Louis Pullman develops to move buildings uses

(05:10):
like Screwjack's and this special machine that he's invented in
it's this whole wild deal. Um. And so since a
lot of buildings needed to be moved to expand the
Erie Canal, this was a major boon for family finances.
In eighteen forty eight, three years after three years of
working at his family store, George was seventeen and he
was missing his parents who were still off building the

(05:31):
Erie Canal. So he joins moves to Albion, New York,
joins his family, and he gets a job at what
is now the family business, moving buildings so that a
canal can be wider. The next five years were peacefully
lucrative for both him and his family, before his father
died in eighteen fifty three, leaving George Pullman the heir
to the business at age twenty two. He had brothers,

(05:51):
but they started another business, and George had been working
with his dad, so he was the obvious choice. His
first big contract is from the state of New York.
They wanted twenty buildings, most most of which were warehouses,
moved out of the way of the widening canal. UH.
This made a decent amount of money, but it was
not the kind of thing that could last forever. In
New York only had so many additional buildings that were

(06:12):
in the way of where the canal was getting expanded to,
and eventually there was going to be no more money
in that UH. The economy hit a major recession in
the mid eighteen fifties and George was forced to look
outside of New York for revenue. He founded in Chicago,
a city that by eighteen fifty seven was starting to
reap the consequences of trying to make too much Chicago,
way too fast. There was a period of time in

(06:33):
which we had a Chicago and everybody was so excited
about it. They were like, we gotta keep making more Chicago.
And then they built way too much Chicago and like
they couldn't. They couldn't, Like so Chicago is built on
a swamp like a lot of places, um and it was,
uh like they didn't they didn't build like they did.

(06:53):
They had no real infrastructure, um like, because this thing
just like blew up so quickly. Um back at the
time and like the mid eighteen hundreds, it's kind of
a cluster of buildings about four ft above Lake Michigan.
Um that nobody really planned out all that well. So
as it gets bigger, it's flooding constantly, suage just like
washing into houses and streets all the time. Um Like.

(07:15):
It was just there never should have been large numbers
of people there. It was kind of like a fucking swamp.
And they just they made too much Chicago too fast.
You know. It's a classic story. Were they making Chicago
because they were like really excited about it, or because
they had to and the people it was like the
population thing, I think, yeah, right, I think there's a

(07:36):
couple of different things, but yeah, it was just it
was the place to be for a while. You know.
The westward expansion is like really in full swing at
this period of time. Chicago's uh, you know, kind of
in the mid middle of the country. Um, and it
yeah that they just coming to a city. I guess
it's becoming a central city. Yeah, and it's a problem.
And to kind of illustrate what a problem it was,

(07:57):
I want to quote from a passage from the hilarious
named website Enjoy Illinois. Quote. The streets turned to mud,
stranding horses, carriages, and humans alike. Pools of standing water
formed all over the city. The environment caused hygiene and
health problems, including an eighteen fifty four collar outbreak which
killed one in twenty residents. The marsh on which the

(08:17):
city was built was trying to claim back its territory.
After a number of failed attempts to fix the problem,
including planking the streets with wood, the city decided that
only that the only long term solution was to install
a sewer and stormwater system. But in Chicago that was
no easy feat. Sewers need to go underground and they
drained down. Chicago was barely above the water table, and
underground sewers couldn't work at that level. So they got

(08:41):
this issue. They they've suddenly built a lot of Chicago ships,
literal ships flooding everywhere, and they need to build sewers,
but Chicago is barely above the water. You know, it
just sounds like nature spicing back. We were never meant
to be there. We were never meant to have a Chicago.
You know, I think that's fair, you know, like it's
just doesn't want us there. Nature's fighting back, and it was. Yeah,

(09:04):
there's there's a category of cities in the United States,
and not just in the United States, but specifically in
the United States. There's a category of cities that like
our direct affronts to God. Phoenix is another direct affront
to God, Like if we we built Phoenix, Arizona to
spit in the eye of the Almighty, it never people
were never supposed to live there in any kind of

(09:25):
quantity um. And it's the same thing with Chicago. I see,
That's how I feel back Chicago Phoenix. Yeah, I don't
know how they're all of Florida. I don't know what
the fun is thinking with that ship, Like, uh, Dan,
so Chicago's you know, they're trying to figure out how

(09:46):
to get a sewer built in a city that is
like almost uniquely unsuited to having traditional sewers, and rather
than admit that the present location of Chicago wasn't affront
to God, they opted to raise every single go building
in street in town by an average height of six ft.
They decided, we can't ships flooding everywhere, we can't build

(10:09):
a normal underground sewer here, so instead of moving, let's
lift the entire city up by six ft. That is
so bonkers. It's amazing. What I uh, the last thing
I ever thought you would say. I thought they were
going to just build them above ground and then make
Chicago worse. But that'sn't. That'sn't. That's intense to just lived

(10:31):
a city. We really do think we're God. It's it's amazing.
I weirdly enough like that. One of the things that
reminds me of as a story from the Roman Empire
of one of Caesar's conquests. He was laying siege to
this Galic city called Alesia, and the way the Romans
would siege the city is they would build a wall
around the entire city so they could basically like shoot
down into the town and like starve it out essentially.

(10:54):
And while they're doing this, this huge gallic army that
outnumbers them like five ten to one up and attacks
the Roman army, and rather than like break off and retreat,
they just build a second wall around themselves, and so
they have one big wall around them and one big
wall around the city. It's just this like, yeah, no,
we we can. We can just solve all of our

(11:15):
problems by by engineering, by building huge things like never never,
It's amazing. I it's it's it's but that's how they
got to the problem. It is how they got to
the problem. But in this case is not working, you
know what I mean? Why didn't I just well, the
thing is, though it did work for the Romans. Caesar
won that battle, and it worked in Chicago because they

(11:35):
did lift every goddamn building in the city up by
six Some were raised by as much as fourteen feet. Okay,
how does how is that literally physically possible? They've got
this like Screwjack Winch kind of thing system that just
sort of like lifts shut up and yeah, I don't know,
it's it's it's it's a whole thing. You can find
there's like it's very well documented. You know, this was

(11:57):
in the mid eight hundreds, so they had people did
like talk about how they were doing it. It's not
a mystery. Um. And it also provided the fact that
they're lifting the entire city up six ft by the
height of a dude basically. Um. That that gives the
city an opportunity to rebrand because it again had kind
of been like this frontier ramshackle town, and the people

(12:21):
who were in charge of things at the time were
able to use this to move buildings that didn't look
nice to the edges of the city and kind of
reorganized Chicagos that when everything was lifted, it looked the
way they wanted to, like a nice red light. But yeah, yeah,
I mean kind of was yeah, it was yeah. Um.
And of course the instead of moving the lines are

(12:43):
moving the actual buildings. Yeah, you could just like move
all the buildings around. Um. Now, George's firm was not
the only one involved in raising the city. He was
actually one of a handful of firms all technically competing
with each other, but they all kind of agreed to
work together to determine who got which bids and to
maximize their profitability. It was like price fixing. I don't
know if that was illegal at the time, I think

(13:03):
it kind of is now. But they they all these
different firms, including George, is operating a cartel in order
to get as much money to lift the ship city
of Chicago up as they possibly can. And George is
not a small player in this, but he's not a
particularly large one either. Um. He had dreams of more. Um.
You know, this is a successful business. He's making a
comfortable living, but that was not enough for George pullman um.

(13:26):
And kind of after this, he winds up on a
train ride from Buffalo to Westfield, or during this, he
winds up on a train ride from Buffalo to Westfield,
York to negotiate. Yeah, well yeah that this is where
the trains come in. So he's on a train ride
for a business meeting and it's train rides sucked back then.
Like that's kind of something that I didn't wasn't really

(13:47):
aware of before this. They were they didn't have trains
that were meant to be like in any way comfortable,
like you could get on one, but there was no
like that kind of romantic vision of like the fans
and the beautiful pointed train car with the bar and
none of that existed yet. It was awful, and to
illustrate how awful it was, I want to quote from
a write up by Richard Schneiro from Indiana State University

(14:10):
for the Northern Illinois University Digital Library. Quote. As railroad
mileages tripled between eighteen fifty and eighteen sixty, the uncomfortable
conditions passengers and dirt on trips longer than a few
hours became intolerable. Passenger cars were not built to cushion jolts,
windows constantly rattled. In the winter, wood burning stoves could
fill the cars with smoke and caused accidents, and in

(14:31):
the summer writers sweltered. It took three and a half
days to travel from Chicago to New York, and a
typical traveler resorted to hotels at night. The need for
a sleeping car was widely understood, but at the time
none were satisfactory. In eighteen fifty eight, Pollman began renovating
existing sleeping cars for the Chicago and Alton Railroad. Eventually,
he established a small crew and began building cars from scratch.

(14:54):
In eighteen sixty four, his crew built the classic sleeping
car he called the Pioneer, with brocaded fabrics, handcrafted window
and door frames, plush red carpets, and richly ornamented paneling.
The Pioneer was a study in luxury. It was also
the turning point and Pullman's rise to success. Pullman's luxurious
sleeping car appealed to America's fast growing wealthy class hungry

(15:14):
for status, and a new middle class that aspired to
the same outward markers of social standing. Pullman shrewdly took
advantage of this in his marketing strategy, which relied on
quality of service and prestige rather than low prices. So
he offers for the first time, really not even just
like first class, but just a train ride that wouldn't
make you want to die. Um, and it's hugely successful.

(15:36):
Trains are blowing up at this point, and he's the
first guy to figure out how to make you want
to be on a train, you know. Yeah, very innovative
again like his father, I guess, also innovative. It's in yeah,
smart mat Yeah, he gets he understands, you know that
this is an unfilled need, and he fills it ably.
I think also, like, if you don't maybe this is

(15:56):
a hot take. I don't know, I don't care. I
think if he don't come from money money, Uh, you
understand more what the people need and want. It's the
same reason you guys like Bezos and and Bill Gates.
I know there are people who would like consider them rich,
but they're their upper middle class and so it's it's
not enough money that they never had to do anything,
like they were going to need to find out something

(16:17):
to do, but it's enough money that they are able
to like pursue their dreams from an early age. Like
George's right, like he's he's where he's he's paid well
to work at this family shop at seventeen, he's able
to very easily go follow his dad and you know,
get involved in this new business. It's, uh, yeah, he's
working class enough money that yeah. Yeah, he's in his

(16:38):
early twenties right now, mid de late twenties I think
by now, um, and this is a big hit. So
he has his his his trained business is successful, but
it's not as big as as George wants to be.
Like he's he's doing very well. He's probably what you'd
call wealthy, but he's not like a massive industrial magnate.
Um and he's he's he feels uncertain, like he he

(17:01):
doesn't really believe that his business can expand all that much.
He kind of feels like, well, I found a profitable niche,
but that's all it's going to be, So he starts
looking for other ways to make money. By the late
eighteen fifties, the Pike's Peak gold rush was well underway
in Chicago or Colorado or Chicago. George decided to travel
there and see if he might be able to short
cut the route to wealth and power by striking it rich.

(17:22):
The Pullman Museum writes that in short order, quote Pullman
realized that the real money in a gold rush is
made by supplying other fortune hunters. So he decides very quickly,
it's fucking not worth it to go panning for gold.
But I can sell ship to the people panning for gold.
And he forms a company to do this, moving freight
and crushing ore. And when that did well, he bought

(17:43):
sixteen hundred acres near Central City, Colorado, and they turned it.
He turns this into a truck stop, basically like the
Gilded Age equivalent of a truck stop. He knows a
ton of people are passing in and out of this
specific area, um they're going to a place that's that's
real primitive, no amenities whatsoever. Um, So they're gonna want
something that they can head to on their way in

(18:03):
and out in order to like get drunk and eat
good food and sleep in a comfortable bed. So he
builds he builds this big truck stop, and for a
while he's kind of on this path of, you know,
getting forming little businesses here and there as he sees needs.
UM and I don't. It doesn't look initially like his
train business is going to be huge. But the good

(18:25):
news is that from you know, if your job is
making trains more comfortable, then the eighteen fifties is a
little bit early for that to be a big business.
But the eighteen sixties that's the fucking like, you know,
that's where you're gonna make money. Um. You said to
stick around long enough for yeah. Yeah. And the Civil

(18:45):
War does a lot for this, right. Trains are a
huge part of why the Union wins, um. And the
Civil War is furthermore helpful to his business because on
April fift eighteen sixty five, a dude shot Abraham Lincoln
right in his head. Now, this was widely seen as
terrible for honest Abe, and in the wake of a
devastating war. Like people needed a proper sendoff for a

(19:06):
wartime president, right, Like this beloved president gets killed. Everybody's
real fucking sad. There's just been a big war. Trains
are more famous and like prominent than ever. And George
looks at the president's death and sees opportunity. Um, so
let's capitalize on this tragedy. Absolutely. Yeah. So he's got
some friends in high places and he starts talking to

(19:28):
them and being like, hey, you gotta move that president's
dead ass body. I got these real fancy sleeping cars.
You can't just stick his corpse and like a shitty car.
You gotta put him in something nice. Right, has a point,
He has a point, right exactly. People don't when you
see like like you open it and it's like what
you'd stick like a bunch of logs into or something.
There's just a sliding around, exactly. And even if they

(19:52):
didn't want to, if someone presented that and then they said, no,
that's pretty shipped, I guess that's an asshole move. You know,
if you're presucted with a nicer option to the just
Abraham Lincoln in a oven, Yeah, it's very Yeah, it's
very smart of him to just be like, yeah, when
I'll give him one of my one of my one
of my nice cars to drive the president's dead ass
body around in um. And this actually posed a significant

(20:15):
logistical hurdle because a lot of train stations and platforms
and bridges weren't white enough to to take the car
that he had. It can only travel on some tracks,
and so they get like the government widens a bunch
of like station platforms and bridges, which actually makes his
business even more profitable because now his cars can go
more places parallel. The canal widening from this, well, George

(20:37):
pull him a man made great by widening. It's always cyclical.
Life is cyclical. It's light, flat circle whatever, you know
what I mean. It all comes back to a flat circle,
pretty wide, and it's pretty wide, pretty wide. You know
what else is pretty wide? Sharine, Uh, I know you're
gonna say, Raytheon or some ship. The variety of products

(21:00):
Raytheon makes very wide. If you need a missile guidance
chip for a hellfire missile, Raytheon's got you. If you
need a software to help target for an Assassin drone,
Raytheon's got you. If you need to not have any
kind of targeting whatsoever, because you're just going to carpet
bombing area. Raytheon can make the detonators for that carpet bombing.

(21:23):
Whatever you need from Raytheon, as long as it involves
killing people from the sky, Raytheon can do. I'm so
happy I was such a long plug. Yeah. Well, all right,
let's go to the ads that paid us. Okay, we're back,

(21:45):
and the Lincoln's Corpse Engine train would go down in
history is one of the most popular trains of all time.
Slightly underneath the Festival Express, Ulyssi Simpson Grant praised George
Pullman for giving a dead man an ice corpse box.
After the whole dead person business was concluded, the train
car was put on display so that people could gawk
at it, like it's a corpse box. Hits a corpse box.

(22:07):
It's a nice corpse box. Yeah, I guess that's the
before coffins. I mean, they've probably already had coffins, but
I'm sure corpse corpse box is a phrase I wasn't
familiar with until right now. And that's me. I'm going
to start up another like it's going to be like
one of those mattress businesses. That ship's mattresses to you,
but it'll ship cheap coffins and we'll call it corpse box.

(22:30):
You've got something going there. You've got a boxing corpses. Yeah,
you rich never know when you're gonna wind up with
a corpse Yeah, exactly. Just follow your dreams, robber, follow you. Yep,
that's gonna take me out of this filthy podcasting business. Well, honestly,
you're right though, Like if you're able to have the
luxury to do anything you want to do, you will

(22:51):
do it and find a way to make it good.
If you're like smart, like decently intelligent, you know what
I mean. I think it's all it needs like luck
and basically understand a humanity or like human instinct or
something that makes sense. Yeah, I mean it's one of
those things where, uh you you like, the people who
are most successful under our system are there's a certain
level of money that they have. But also if you

(23:13):
go above that level, I think your odds of doing
anything on your own that that change the world actually
start to drop. Like you don't tend to hear about
like Walton's or whatever, like they perpetuate systems, but it's
a guy like Jeff Bezos who who grows up very
comfortable but not with billions of dollars, who's gonna actually
anyway whatever. He has no like concept of what people

(23:39):
are going through or what they need or whatever. I mean,
I was just I mean, this is everyone talks about this,
but having enough money to like really improve the lives
of billions of people or like help with world hunger
and homelessness and everything, and still having left over and
not doing anything about it. It blows my mind. You know,
all rich people are like that pretty or the says

(24:00):
actually where the story is building a bit um, So
Lincoln's death incredible for George Pullman, and he takes all
of the great pr that comes in the wake of this,
and he approaches several wealthy businessmen with the same pitch.
I need more investment money because I want to build
enough cars to sell luxury rides everywhere, right, I want
everyone to be able to use like one of my

(24:21):
sleeper cars. Um, but I need like my business isn't
going to grow a fast enough organically in order to
get to that point, so I need investment capital. Yeah,
I mean, well that's where we're building too. But yeah,
so he's like, Okay, I I need I need a
bunch of money, and he's done. You know, well enough,
this whole Lincoln thing was big enough deal that he
gets about a million dollars of investments and and he

(24:42):
uses it to form a new company, the Pullman Palace
Car Company. Throughout the eighteen eighties, he choked out or
made deals with anyone who might be competition for his
luxury train car business, and by the eighteen nineties, George
Pullman had a monopoly. And trains are the biggest thing
in the fucking world. By the everyone's traveling places by train,

(25:02):
and he's the only guy that makes like the sleeper
cars and whatnot. If you, yeah, if you wanted to
take an actual, like comfortable train trip anywhere in the
United States, George was getting a piece of that action.
And he continued to innovate through every part of this period,
and his innovations included the field of racism. Quote from
Richard Sneiroff. In eighteen sixty seven, he rolled out the

(25:24):
del Monaco, the first dining car called a hotel car
with a kitchen at its center. It could serve two
fifty meals a day in eighteen seventy five, he built
a luxurious parlor car, which offered an upscale traveling experience. Meanwhile,
his designers continuously improved heating, ventilation, and lighting Throughout it all,
the Pullman's appeal to the public rested on meticulous service.

(25:45):
Pullman used the existing racial division of labor and hiring
white conductors, collected tickets and sold births en route to
perform menial work like carrying luggage, preparing the berths for use,
cleaning the cars, and providing personal services to passengers. He
hired African American porters, many of them recently freed slaves.
The conductors who supervised the sleeping car. Reporters received white

(26:05):
men's wages. The porters received less than one six the
wages of conductors. Low wages kept them dependent on the
tips and thus the good will of white passengers. Despite
the servant like position of porters, Pullman had a good
reputation among blacks due to the secure jobs and relatively
high income they provided. So it was in this like
mixed space if he's one of the first people to
really figure out, Okay, we've got all these newly freed people, Um,

(26:29):
how can I exploit them. Yeah, I'm going to capitalize
on I mean, obviously I'm not surprised at this point,
but I mean it's just like sounds like the real
life version in the eight hundreds of like The Help,
you know what I mean, Like that's what it is.
It is, And he's popular among at least according to
this he's popular among those. But it's also like, well,
if you were a recently freed slave, it's not hard

(26:51):
to be the best boss they've ever had. Just to
pay the money and don't own them and split their
families up for profit. Yeah, you'll be like, well, this
is this guy is pretty good boss. He's really capitalizing
on like desperation and need and like so it's like
a border it's like uh, white saviory at the same
time as being like evil master, you know what I mean. Yeah,

(27:14):
I mean it's one of those things where he is
not to give him credit as you always kind of
have to do in this period, he's never he never
uses slave labor in the period you know, before the
Civil War. Um, I don't think he was was supportive
of it. Like, so he doesn't have that going against him,
you know, and a lot of a lot of real
rich white dudes who get their start in the eighteen fifties.

(27:34):
There's some uncomfortable slavery. Only pay them one sixth, Right,
that's that's a choice you make, sure, and it's it's
a choice he makes because it's you can get away
with it. And he's not the reason that is, like
you know, he's he's but he is kind of he
is one of the very first businessman who's hiring like

(27:55):
in white businessman who's hiring in mass black labors. Right,
that is pretty new in this period because slavery, you know,
was around in l at and sixty five in the
United States, and he is helping to kind of set
this idea that like, yeah, you can you can hire
black people for jobs that you will and you know,
and pay them less than you would pay white people

(28:15):
for the same jobs. And that's that makes that makes
good business. He is one of the men establishing that, right, Yeah,
you're right, we do have to give him credit for that. Unfortunately,
I mean like he's a good person for the times,
you know what I mean. I don't know that he's
a good person for the Times. He's just not a Confederate,
Like I don't know that I want to make that'd
be the bar of good person. I mean, it only

(28:37):
takes so yeah little. He doesn't enslave people when he
has the opportunity. So good for that money over uh
like actual humanity, you know, yeah, but he does choose
money over yeah whatever, he's yeah, yeah, I'm not. I'm
not trying to praise him. Um relatively high in terms
of like the wages for black labors in Pullman's company

(28:59):
is a term that has a lot of wiggle room.
And I not everyone I've i've seen agrees with the
idea that his wages were considered high. I think this
passage from a Jacobin article gets across how humiliating this
work could be for the black porters who worked on
his railroad. And as you listen to this again, remember
that these we were considered by a lot of people
to be relatively good jobs, quote, working for tips. They

(29:21):
served passengers and plush surroundings, with heads bowed, pride suppressed,
swallowing any words of protest at being called George, the
catch all name that denoted servility to their employer, George Pullman.
So these employees, by the white people using the train
cars just call any black person George, because of their boss.
Because we're getting we're real close to slavery is still here,

(29:44):
you know. Um, it's very interesting to me. I don't yeah,
I don't know. It's it's bad. I mean, it's fucked up.
It's just not a not specifically a racist thing that
I've heard about until this. So as soon this happened elsewhere. Yeah,
I did not know that was a thing. It is
very offensive. It's pretty fucked up. Yep, yep. Now, as

(30:06):
we discussed in our Bernar mac fadden episodes, the late
eighteen hundreds were a period in which the United States
was industrializing rapidly, and the consequences of all that industrialization
we're becoming obvious. Organizations like the y m c A
were created initially in the UK to ameliorate the health
and moral consequences of modern life. George Pullman, now riches
ship and influential, volunteered his time to help run the

(30:28):
y m c A and other organizations that he thought
might help provide an answer to the labor question. This
is a term that was used at the time. I
found in eighteen eighties six Atlantic article with this title.
Throughout the Gilded Age, um the primary issue was this
organized labor had existed at some point for quite a while,
but the concept was still being worked out. I remember
the eighteen eighties. The idea that like laborers would organize

(30:52):
and form unions is not an old not a very
old idea, you know. UM. So by the end of
the eighteen eighties, labor had gotten in the United States,
had gotten smart and effective enough to actually start putting
some major pressure on capital. The eighteen eighties eighteen nineties
is kind of really when the labor movement starts coming
together in a way that's actually that's able to do

(31:13):
stuff effectively. Um. And the what's called the labor question um,
which is the title of this article I found, but
it is also this article from the eighteen eighties that
I found. You hear this phrase the labor question a
lot in this period. And the labor question is this,
should working men have a right to dictate the terms
of their employment or should capital hold all of society

(31:34):
and unquestioned um like domination. And it's actually really interesting
to read some of the critical arguments people criticizing labor
um because often these people who are like, no, I
don't think workers have a right to like organize, Um,
are you You get the same tone with them that
you get with a lot of like quote unquote unbiased,

(31:54):
fair minded intellectual like journalism people today, like folks writing
about climate change. You're like, well, let's talk about the
Americans who don't wear masks and all this nonsense because
it's yeah, because because if I'm criticizing everyone equally, even
if the facts aren't equal, then nobody can say that
I'm unfair. Like Bill Maher. Yeah. So this Atlantic columnists

(32:17):
that I found writing about the labor question spends a
huge chunk of his column ranting about alcohol, um and
basically saying that, like, well, workers spend all of this
money on alcohol and do all of these bad things
under the influence of alcohol. Um, And why are they
organizing to get more money when they could just stop
buying alcohol? Oh? Of course, it's very funny. Today's like

(32:42):
today's avoca avocado toast. Yeah. It's like no, no, no,
there's like that stupid saying where it's like you, uh,
instead of buying coffee every day, Like that's that's why
we're spending all our money, like millennials or whatever, you
know what I mean. There's like this it's a coffee thing.
It's always a drink. I suppose I believe that workers
should have the right to buy alcohol and also still
have enough money left over for things that aren't alcohol. Yeah,

(33:05):
of course there's yeah, yeah, fun stuff, HB two see
I all the goodies. I will have to ask you
about those off Mike, but yeah, yeah, they're all they
can all be fun. So what because the best that

(33:26):
was so funny? If you were on the show, I
would not be able to survive. I mean, Robert's great,
but I do need the validation sometimes, you know what
I mean. It's okay, nobody ever appreciates my jokes. Sorry, Robert.
We were having ament I know you were. That's fine.
We're very like that. We have a bond. We bonded.

(33:49):
She's the best, I'm the best. Get each other. And
you know who else is the best? This Atlantic columnists
telling people complaining about workers, yeah, like being like, why
why are they asking for more money from their bosses
when they could just stop drinking? It's amazing? Yeah, go ahead. Sorry,
When we see on the one side a yearly waste

(34:11):
of between four and five hundred millions of dollars and
on the other side a body of men, the squanderers
of this vast fund, complaining that they have not sufficient opportunities.
We cannot long be at a loss to comprehend the
true nature of the existing satisfaction dissatisfaction. It is clear
that labor has been incited to seek from without the
relief which ought to be sought from within. The socialist

(34:34):
theory of a paternal state system which provides everybody with
work and wages is a mischievous fallacy. It simply encourages
indolence and dependence. The first duty of labor is to
demonstrate its capacity for self government. At this moment, it's
drink bill is an impeachment of that capacity. No man
who spends half his earnings that a saloon can get
on in the world, or has the least right to

(34:56):
expect to get on, Nor can anybody of men follow
the same course with better results. Well, yeah, man like rich,
but none of that half a billion dollars a year
I spent on alcohol as rich people, not not any
of it, just poor guys. Yeah, just stop drinking and
get more. If you stop drinking, you'll have more time
to work and help us. In a capitalist society, you
know what I was actually pondering earlier today when it

(35:20):
comes to medication that helps your brain, whether it's adderall
or whatever, or like things to make you more active,
it kind of feels like society is making us like
it all ends up, like you have to for work,
like it makes you work better, it makes you like
provide obviously brains needed. It really helps me. But I
was thinking about it in a more like sinister capitalistic

(35:40):
way where it's like they just want us to be
better workers, you know what I mean, more efficient actually
just like I don't know, does that make sense? Yeah,
no it does. And you know what else makes sense?
I don't know why I keep doing this. You're so early.
I I my brain has been broken by capitalism, and
now all I can do is pivot to adds. I mean,

(36:02):
the last I thought it was not bad, very good
at it. So America an artist, you can capitalism off
the brain. You keep needing to go to an ad.
I want to keep reading from this Atlantic article weird
ad transition that I want to just talk about the
author of this Atlantics article, George Frederick parsons Um, And

(36:25):
in this next part of the article, he ties his
irritation about American drunkenness, with a rant about how capitalists
have a right to expect that profits increase forever, and
it's just the most American paragraph I've ever read. Prosperity
is the reward of persevering, temperate, ungrudging work. In these days,
there is, however, a great wind of new doctrine. We

(36:45):
are asked to believe that it is possible to succeed
in a very different ways, that the less a man works,
for example, the more he ought to receive, that national
prosperity can be advanced by diminishing production, and many other
equally hard sayings. But it may be confidently affirmed that
these new theories are destined to be short lived, and
that the world will have to be managed eventually upon

(37:06):
pretty much the old lines. Yeah, it's it's good, very American. Now. Yeah,
for the record, Um, George Parsons died in eighteen ninety three,
and I found his obituary and it blamed his death
on the fact that he hadn't lifted enough. It's very funny,
wait lifted like, yeah, that he had worked out enough? Yeah,

(37:30):
what the fuck? It's very funny. Damn. That is like
subtweeting a death direct insults not even a stub is
just like you can't fight back. George Parsons, the author
of that Atlantic article, and George Pullman, the subject of
our episode today, both seem to have come at the
problem of labor from the same point of view. It

(37:50):
was foolish for workers to organize rather than seek to
ascend to the upper class. That's what Parsons is saying, right,
why are you organizing for more money when you should
just stop spending any money on alcohol and invested all
into a business and like your own circumstances. Yeah. And
the way to do this, and this is this is
what George Pullman believes to Workers shouldn't organize, They should
seek to improve their own individual lots so they can

(38:12):
raise up to the middle class and the upper class.
And the way you do this is you scrimp and
save and you work yourself to the bone. You don't drink,
you don't have fun, you don't hang out with see
your family, you don't spend any time for you. You
do nothing but work and sock away money so that
you can join the middle class or get to to
revelent to our current times. And how people talk about

(38:35):
like homelessness and unhoused. It's a disease that's existed in
the United States for a very long time, and we
need to it needs to not happen. It's bad. Um.
I think the that view of how life should be,
uh is something that should be opposed with force if necessary.

(38:58):
Of course, it's it's a sin to the miracle of life. Yeah,
it is, and it's I find it very unsettling. And
this happens all the time when like you hear like
a terrible quote like that, you read something and it
looks exactly like today. It just proves that, like do
we ever actually change? Are we always the same? Just
like a different like vessel or like a different like

(39:19):
trimmings on this world, you know, like humane doesn't actually change.
We always just like keeps doing these terrible things. I
don't know, it's just it's kind of sad. And yeah,
it's great. No, it's good, it's good. Everything's fine. So
George was of the opinion that if his workers had
nicer lives and lived in more comfortable surroundings, ones that
at least mimicked middle class life, they wouldn't complain. So

(39:41):
he was like, well, if I can, just if I
can build a place for my workers to live that
looks like an ideal middle class town, then they won't
need to organize for anything, because that's all anyone could
ever want is a comfortable, clean, middle class American town.
Um And he figures, if I can build a town
for them, I can make it so that they can't

(40:02):
drink because I just won't allow them to be bars there.
So like I can control them and make sure they
don't do any of the things because the only reason
workers are unhappy is that they do things that make
them unhappy and waste their money. I don't need to
pay them anymore. I don't need to treat them better.
All I need to do is make a place that
I make a place for them to live where they

(40:23):
won't be able to do any of the things that
they're going to do otherwise because they're just they're just
not as smart as I am. They can't stop themselves
from from doing bad things. So if I can build
a place for them to live, then they won't ruin
their own lives. Dude, sounds like a bad time to me. Yeah,
it's just like how I don't know every rich man

(40:44):
I feel like has a called complex and this is
a very firm example of that. Yeah, yeah, I mean
I think you could probably, I think probably if you
were to get Elon Musk to talk honestly about how
he'd want life organized in his Mars colony, you would
some similar vibes. Of course. Yeah, he already feels that way.
He's like, I've given all these sheeap cars to drive,

(41:07):
I've changed the world. It's like that may be true,
but you're still I am. Yeah, not a lot of
anyway whatever. Um so to to kind of put George
Pullman and his attitudes towards his workers, this kind of
paternalist attitude that he has towards building a place for
them and moderating their behavior, to put that in context,
and want a quote again from Richard Schneirov. By the

(41:30):
eighteen eighties, many reformers had shifted from personal reform through revivalism, education,
and public exhortation to an environmental emphasis. They believe that
by changing the social environment in which the worker lived
and worked, they could induce habits of respectability, uplift workers character,
and change social attitudes. In eighteen seventy nine, Pullman followed
closely the movement in New York to create model tenements

(41:52):
that would offer working class families clean and ventilated room,
to reduce sickness and disease, and promote good morals by
inducing men to stay at home rather than escape to saloons.
In return, investors would receive a reasonable seven return. So
this is his his ideas I'm going to build. He's
looking at these kind of like model tenements going up

(42:12):
New York and he's like, well, I'm gonna build a
town of my own, and not only will it be
clean and keep workers away from vices like drinking, but
it'll be profitable. Right, I'm gonna get it. I'm gonna
get a positive return on this as an investment to
I have to benefit and like all dudes like him,
when he wrote about this, Pullman phrased that as if

(42:33):
it was like a rule of the universe. Quote, capital
will not invest in sentiment, nor for sentimental considerations for
the laboring classes. But let it once be proved that
enterprises of this kind are safe and profitable, and we
shall see great manufacturing corporations developing similar enterprises, and thus
a new era will be introduced into the history of labor.
It's like, literally, I won't do anything if I don't

(42:55):
make money off of it. Yeah, I will open the
door for you if you Capitalists of course won't don't care.
Like capitalists have no interest in workers living comfortably or cleanly. Um,
But if you show them it's a profitable business, then
then everyone's on board. Yeah. So it's like very sinister
because on the surface, if you don't take any deeper,
it's kind of nice, you know what I mean. Fine,

(43:15):
he's low key helping them and like it's clean and whatever.
But it's just so it's just so insiduous I think,
And that's unsettling if you're if you're starting position, is
that the only reason you would help your workers and
and and give them and build a nice place for
them to live is that it would profit you. Well,
then as soon as it's not profitable, what are you
going to do? Very good point. So, today, the town

(43:42):
of Pullman, Illinois is a neighborhood on Chicago South Side,
which I am very reliably informed is the baddest part
of town. But in the early eighteen eighties it was
a one and fifty acre town to the south of
the Pullman car work so it's not part of Chicago yet,
like it's a separate town in and of itself. UM
right outside of the big factory where the Pullman cars
are built. UM. The factory took up nine buildings on

(44:05):
thirty acres and Pullman the town was exhaustively planned around
it to be as modern as possible. Sewer and gas
lines were at it first, so that every home would
enjoy heating and water. This had the benefit of the
ensuring the city itself would not flood like Chicago had.
Most descriptions of the Pullman Town will acknowledge that it
was a much nicer place to live than many of

(44:25):
the tenements working people had endured at the time. It's
unclear how accurate this is, and it seems in some
parts to be a measure of opinion. Pullman the town
was organized hierarchically, and the people with higher paying and
more prestigious jobs lived at the center of town, close
to the hotel, the school, the libraries, and the parks
and nice spacious modern houses, but low paid grunt laborers.

(44:49):
The actual rank and file workers still lived in claustrophobic
tenement blocks. These were they just had a nice outside.
They were done up, so on the outside it looked
like a nice block of houses, but it was tenements
on the inside, and they were newer and cleaner tenements
with more amenities than a lot of stuff in the
city itself, but they were still cramped in not high
quality dwellings. This passage from a rite up by the

(45:11):
University of Virginia lays out the conditions inside. Quote the
workers houses humble and appearance both inside and out, were monotonous,
and he gave the impression of soldiers barracks. They were
said to be clean, with an abundance of air. Most
were two stories with five rooms. In addition to sellers,
pantries and closets. There was indeed water from a faucet
used by five families, often located in one of the

(45:31):
small closets. There were no yards, and for those families
living upstairs, no front door. Most of the buildings were
constructed with brick made in the Pullman brickyards. These same
brickyards contained the eyesore of the town, four rows of
little sixteen by twenty foot wooden shanties that had a
sitting room, two bedrooms, and a kitchen and a lean.
To compare all of this to the arcade and library.

(45:52):
Despite Mr Pullman's intentions and his desirability for the commercial
value of beauty, his model town was not a real
home for workers who lived there. One woman compared it
to living in a great hotel. We call it camping out,
So it's not really all that great. I think that
the most casual descriptions will say, like, well it was,
you know, there were problems with it, but it was
nicer than other It's like, no, maybe it was cleaner

(46:16):
a bit, but it was not like a lot of
the people who lived there were not living in great conditions.
It just sounds like slavery two point oh, where it's like, well,
that's kind of where we're building too. So yeah, it was.
It looked nice on the outside that a movie set,
you know, And that's that's what a lot of people

(46:37):
say about it, is like it's not a home. It's
a place you can sleep. There's things about it that
are nice, but it's not really a home. Um and
I found it right up from the Pullman Museum. That
makes it very clear why people might not have been
happy to live in Pullman quote. In eighteen eighty, Pullman
bought four thousand acres near Lake Calumet, some fourteen miles

(46:57):
south of Chicago on the Illinois Central Railroad, for eight
hundred thousand dollars. He hired Soland Spencer Beaman to design
his new plant there, and in an effort to solve
the issue of labor unrest and poverty, he also built
a town adjacent to his factory, with the Jone housing
shopping theaters, shopping areas, churches, theaters, parks, hotel, and library.
The thirteen hundred original structures were entirely designed by Beaman.

(47:18):
The centerpiece of the complex was the administration building and
its man made lake. The hotel Florence, named for Pullman's
favorite daughter, was built nearby. Pullman believed that the country
air and fine facilities, without agitator saloons and city vice districts,
would result in a happy, loyal workplace. The model planned
community became a leading attraction during the World's Columbian Exposition
of eighteen ninety three and caused a national sensation. Pullman

(47:41):
was praised by the national press for his benevolence and vision.
As pleasant as this community may have been, Pullman expected
the town to make money by eight the community profitable
in its own right was valued at over five million dollars.
Pullman ruled the town like a feudal baron. He prohibited
independent newspapers, public speeches, town meetings, or open discussion. His
inspectors regularly entered at homes to inspect for cleanliness, and

(48:03):
could terminate leases on ten days notice. The church stood empty,
since no approved denomination would pay rent and no other
congregation was allowed. Private charitable organizations were prohibited. Pullman employees declared,
we are born in a Pullman house, fed from the
Pullman shops, taught in the Pullman school, catechized in the
Pullman church, and when we die, we shall go to

(48:23):
Pullman hell. Wow. Yeah, that's an ending to a sentence.
First of all. Uh, but it's isn't it ironic? Because
you said he didn't necessarily support slavery when it actually
was happening, you know what I mean? So I feel
like he found a loop, Like in my head, he
doesn't think it's a slavery, right, of course, I mean,
it's not slavery. It is not like there are aspects

(48:46):
of it that do eventually kind of verge on slavery,
parallel to exploiting people and like acting like their master
and all that stuff. Yeah, and there's some of the
some of the white people who protest latter will compare
themselves to slaves. I want to I don't want to
do that because I don't think that's fair. Um And
in part I think why the white people at the

(49:07):
time we're doing that, is that, like they're pretty fucking racist.
Of course it's not that bad. Yeah, no, I mean yeah,
white white victimization. It's tales all those time. He's more
of a he's more of a he's more of a
of a dictator than he is a slave owner, right Like,
that's more of the attitude. Is that, like they live
here and they could technically leave most of them. Um,

(49:29):
but if they live here, Uh, then he's going to
control every aspect of their life that he can. Right Like.
There's no discussion on it. I know what's best for you,
and I'm going to ensure you do it. Um. Do
we actually sorry, did we take an ad break or
did we just talk about taking it out? We took
one ad break, We didn't take a second dead way?

(49:50):
Oh sorry, No, No, we talked about it. I just
want to make sure. I don't know, because we usually
it's great h you know what else is producing? I'm sorry, no, no, no,
continue go for it, uh RAI theon is making new
things to kill people that they are yep, that's every day. Yeah,

(50:12):
so stay tuned to find out what those are. Very
proud of you, Sharine, Thank you Rob for sorry that.
I just like thought we just talked about. I just
want I wanted to make sure sorry, I was being
I was being a producer at that moment. We crushed it.
All right, here's ads. All right, we're back. So Pullman

(50:37):
builds this town, moves a bunch of people in, and
I should note the only people allowed to live in
the Pullman town are white people. Um you you you
cannot live there. He has black workers. They are not
allowed to live in his town because again it's his
idealized version of society, which does not have any black people.
The town eventually had a population of about twelve Pullman workers,

(50:57):
and things chugged along well enough until teen three, when
the entire Gilded Age collectively shat its pants. The basic
problem was this international capital got addicted to gambling on
the I p o s of countries like Argentina. A
bunch of these bets went badly in the early eighteen nineties.
This spooked European investors, and those investors started hoarding gold
from the U. S. Treasury. This coincided with the collapse

(51:20):
of a massive railway company and a general contraction for
the whole railway industry, which had been flooded with far
more money than it could ever hope to absorb and
been grossly overbuilt. Um Grover Cleveland, who started office in
eighteen nine three, responded to all this by fucking around
with silver, which didn't do much to allay people's currency fears.
As more Americans lost their jobs, others panicked and withdrew

(51:41):
their money in moss from banks. The economies of the
Western world, such as they existed back then, fell apart.
George Pullman had to fire a quarter of his workforce.
Those who remained faced dwindling hours. This might have been
a situation where Pullman's scheme to reduce worker unrest by
building them an ice place to live could have come
in handy if he had example set. For example, said hey, guys,

(52:01):
I'm gonna have to cut everybody's hours, but you know what,
I'm canceling rent while this economic crisis goes on or
something um or it could have at least pro rated
or whatever. He would have had options that he probably
would have been more popular than ever, and his workers
would have been like, well, ship, this is the benefit
of letting a guy like Pullman be your boss and
run your life is when times are hired, he takes
care of you, you know. But George Pullman could not

(52:23):
stand the thought that one of his endeavors might not
turn a profit, and so he kept rent in utilities
at the same rates they've been before the depression. While
he was cutting everybody's pay. Now he actually parallel that
happen that's happening now. Well, and here's the thing that's
sucked up. I guess you could argue, if you were
looking at this from a pro capitalist standpoint, like, well,

(52:44):
he couldn't stop their rent because he couldn't afford to.
He had like this, this was a business, and like
he he can't pay for everybody's rent forever. It costs
some money to upkeep the town. But he was actually
willing to lose money, just not that way. So he
wasn't willing to cancel people's rent. But he did take
on contracts that at a loss, so that he took

(53:05):
on contracts, and he charged so little that the company
lost money on the contracts in order to get workers
back into the office working, so he wouldn't lower their
renter bills, but he would actually lose money in order
to make sure that people were still working for him.
That's twisted, right, Yeah, it's more about the ego than
about the money and that in that in that sense,

(53:26):
you know what I want to Yeah, it's it's not
I want to take care of my workers. It's I
want my workers to still be working, you know, me
for me, you know that's it's yeah, it's very interesting
and uh sociopathic. Pullman hid this fact, the fact that
he was taking on contracts at a loss from his
labor force. His employees did not know that the company
was losing money to employ them um, but by eight

(53:49):
ninety four it had become fairly popular knowledge due to
some leaks, and this led to a burst of additional
unrest from Pullman employees. They were also angry that Pullman
had increasingly made them pay substantial premium for things like
water and gas and the Pullman Town um which water
and gas. The local government provided those to Pullman like
it was a town. They should have just been available

(54:12):
for a pretty low fee to the people living there.
But the Pullman company charged employees for a thing that
was being provided by the government, that those employees are
paying taxes for. And that come again, I have no
response to that. I'm not going to pretend to be funny.

(54:33):
I have no It's dope. So that was not the
end of the grift, as prospect dot Org rights, His
one giant church was too expensive for most congregations to
afford its rent, and his ill conceived attempt to convince
all the local denominations to merge into one generic mega
church failed. His library charged to membership fee. To foster
his notion of personal responsibility. Workers avoided the hotel bar

(54:56):
and the ever watchful eye of off duty supervisors, limiting
their public rousing to a neighboring village colloquially known as
bum Town. The housing, too, was for rent only. His
aim was to ensure that housing remain in good repair
and attractive, and he charged higher rents to maintain them.
Here Pullman applied his usual belief that the public would
pay more for a higher quality, ignoring the fact that

(55:16):
this particular public his employees had little choice when his
was the only housing in town. So touch, he's out
of touch at that point, you know. I mean it's
a it's a smart it's a smart grift. But he is,
like he is grifting them, you know, he's robbing them basically. Um,
they're paying more, vastly more than they need to. And

(55:38):
because they're living in this Pullman town, they can't go
out and find other work, right yeah, like they're they're
out in the Pullman town. Yeah. Yeah, very twisted and
just yeah, so he cud of strange way he cuts
wages while maintaining rent and continuing to charge people additionally
for water and gas. He cuts wages by an average

(55:59):
of twenty eight per cent across the board, which means
employees all start to fall behind on their rent. Now
you can go in debt to the company, right, Um,
and if you're in debt to the company, h And
you can also get go in debt to the company
if like there's a building code violation, which you know
how landlords work, right, everything's a building code violation and
those things are taken automatically out of the worker's paycheck,

(56:22):
as are things that they go in debt to the company.
For food, so workers would go negative to the company,
which means they can't quit without need suddenly owing all
that money. Right, like the bill immediately comes due if
you stop working for Pullman soever tied to. It's not
quite slavery, but it is not as far away from slavery. Yeah,

(56:42):
it's not as far away from slavery as it ought
to be. You know. That's that's a grit when you
start having employees in debt to the company and unable
to quit because then they would you know, potentially get
into legal trouble for that. Then you're in a real
uncomfortable territory, you know, like you're making a problem that

(57:02):
only you can solve, and you're consciously making that problem,
you know what I mean, Like it's they he controls
too much and there's no way. I don't know, it's
just it's kind of like almost backwards the way he's
doing in my head, but don't you know what I mean,
Like he's making a problem only he can solve it,

(57:22):
and he knows that and probably they know that too,
and just just like a I'm gonna stop God complex. Yeah,
it's fun, it's all good. Everything's fine. So for a look,
at how bleak this situation could be for the workers.
I want to read a quote from a Pullman worker
named Jenny Curtis, and this is her telling her story

(57:43):
of working for Pullman. My father worked for the Pullman
Company for ten years. Last summer he was sick for
three months and in September he died. At the time
of his death, we owed the Pullman Company about sixty
dollars for rent. I was working at the time, and
they told me I would have to pay that rent
good that I could every payday until it was heid.
I did not say I would not pay, but thought,
rather than be thrown out of work, I would pay it.

(58:05):
Many a time, I have drawn nine and ten dollars
for two weeks work, paid seven dollars for my board,
and given the company my remaining two or three dollars
on the rents, and I still loathe them fifteen dollars.
Sometimes when I could not possibly give them anything because
her wage was cut from ninety cents to twenty cents
per section of carpet, I would receive slurs and insults
from the clerks in the bank because Mr Pullman would
not give me enough and return for my hard labor

(58:27):
to pay the rent for one of his houses and
live so like employees, it's often a family business. You're
all living in town. If your dad dies with debts,
you take on those debts in addition to like what
you have to pay to key. It's yeah, well that's
fucked up. That is fucked up. It's like forever branding
people again two points out with like being like like

(58:51):
at your mercy in a way. So in May of
eighteen ninety four, the Pullman workers decided to strike for
a better deal. They were not yet unionized, so they
set their sights on a man who at the time
embodied the hope for the power of labor. And this
brings us to a dude I've really like, Eugene Victor
Deb's more commonly just called Eugene V. Debs. He was

(59:12):
born in Tara Houte, Indiana, in eighteen fifty five. He
was the son of a fairly well off family. Um
they owned a couple of small businesses, might have even
had a little bit more money than uh than Pullman's family.
Like Pullman, Deb's dropped out of school, although he made
it to fourteen, and he got a job cleaning train
cars for fifty cents a day. It's worth noting that

(59:32):
Pullman quit school even earlier than Deb's, in the fourth
grade and got a job paying forty dollars a month,
which is about twenty five dollars a month more than
what young Deb's could expect to earn um. So that's
interesting to me. Like from the beginning, I don't know,
I guess Pullman's family probably had more money because yeah, Deb's, Yeah,
Deb's is making like fifteen bucks a month something like that. Uh,

(59:54):
and Pullman's making forty bucks a month in their in
their first gigs out the door, which I guess you know,
Pullman's hired by his family, so that does help. Yeah,
Deb's eventually quit doing this job and he returned home
to work as an accountant for his father's business. Again,
neither of these are like poor kids. By age nineteen,
Eugene had joined his first union for locomotive firefighters. He

(01:00:17):
was the secretary and he also edited their magazine, which
he used as a platform to urge sobriety and patriotic citizenship.
He was not a radical at this stage, and his
trade union membership did not cause him to identify as
a socialist. He did get increasingly political and was elected
a city clerk in eighteen seventy nine and state representative
in eighteen eighty four. Debs was a Democrat and he
urged modest reforms from a broadly pro worker platform. So

(01:00:41):
Debs was a Democrat and he urged modest reforms from
a broadly pro worker platform. And I'm gonna quote from
Jacobin for this next part here. By the late eighteen eighties,
Debs had started his trek away from conservative unionism. A
railroad walkout in eighteen eighty eight convinced to Debs, who
served as strike leader, that a harmonious relationship with massive
corporations was impossible with out the counterweight of organized workers.

(01:01:02):
He also began to criticize the craft unionism that dominated
the labor movement. Rather than self balkanized according to job tasks,
federationists like Deb's insisted that workers, whether conductor or fireman,
engineer or brakeman, organized under one common fold, as Deb's
explained in May eighteen nine three. That same year, he
co founded the American Railway Union, putting his vision of

(01:01:23):
a fighting industrial unionism into practice. So the early unions
are like, we're all of the guys who do breaking
for the train. We're all of the conductors, and like,
you don't have as much power when you're that kind
of atomized, you know, unless you're able to work together
to some extent. And Deb's is one of the people
who's really pushing no, everyone who works for the railroad
should be in the same union and we all fight together,
you know, well, Um, And the a r U was

(01:01:45):
kind of his his attempt to do that. So larger
workers organizations had existed before. Deb isn't the first person
to do this. The American Federation of Labor was founded
in eighteen eighty six, the Nights of Labor back in
eighteen sixty nine, UM, but the idea that workers within
a specific industry would organize based on that industry rather
than job type was pretty novel. Um. Debs was convinced

(01:02:07):
that bosses were playing different specialties off of one another,
trying to get workers to kind of compete with each
other rather than working together UM and that this artificial
competition was to stop workers from actually organizing together for
their shared interests. When he resigned from his job working
for the Brotherhood of Locomotive Fireman, Deb's wrote quote it
has been my life's desire to unify railroad employees and

(01:02:28):
to eliminate the aristocracy of labor which unfortunately exists, and
organize them so all will be on an equality. Now.
The a r U was founded for him to strike
back at what was effectively a union of railroad managers,
which had organized to set standard job classifications and wages
between different railroad companies, as well as to build a
common pool of strike breakers and even an inter industry

(01:02:50):
strike fund of sorts to help railroads outlast an the
union strikes. So deb sees that like workers are splitting
themselves up too much, while the actual railroad companies are
all organizing together, they effectively have a union um In
eight nine three, immediately after he founds the a r U,
he wins a substantial victory over the Great Northern Pacific
Railroad during like a real landmark strike. And this is

(01:03:13):
the first time something like this happens, that like this,
this broad cross section of railroad workers organized and win
a fight against a major railroad. This brings new members
and dues flooding into the a r U. He's the
He's the talk of kind of the union movement. After
this By June of eighteen ninety four, just weeks after
Pullman workers made their decision to strike, the a r

(01:03:34):
U had reached its greatest extent, a hundred and fifty
thousand members, now roughly a third of George Pullman's employees.
Where are you members? And when the union held its
first convention, George Pullman's employees, like the subset of the
air you that worked for Pullman, came to the union
gathering with a plan. The Pullman workers asked the entire
a RU to join their boycott, stopping all trains from

(01:03:55):
carrying Pullman cars across parts of the nation represented by
the a r U. So these these workers for Pullman
who are in the air, you are like, hey, we're
going on strike. But that's not going to be enough. Like,
we want you to go on strike too. We want
you to refuse to service Pullman cars anywhere in the country. Um,
even if you're not an Impullman employee, because that's going
to put more yea solidarity, He's gonna put a lot

(01:04:18):
more stress on the bosses. Hell yeah, I like where
this is going. I want to read from a quote
from their plea to the a r U. Pullman both
the man and the town is an ulcer on the
body politic. He owns the houses, the schoolhouses, the churches
of God, and the town he gave his once humble name.
And thus the merry war, the dance of skeletons bathed

(01:04:38):
in human tears goes on, and it will go on, brothers, forever,
unless you the American Railway Union stop it ended, crush
it out. People used to write more colorfully back then. Yeah. So,
after visiting with workers and hearing their stories of privation,
Debs decided that not only did they deserve the air

(01:04:59):
use solidarity, but that this could be a chance to
start to pull together the kind of national labor coalition
that he thought was necessary to push back against the
forces of capital. Still, he attempted to negotiate first. George Pullman, however,
was not a negotiator. He believed he was defending his
and everyone else's inherent right to private property. Workers had

(01:05:19):
no right to demand better conditions from him, as the
factories and train cards they labored and were his personal property.
Local civic institutions in Chicago jumped in to try and
urge some kind of accord, but compromise proved impossible, Eugene V.
Debs and the delegates of the A Air You decided
to strike. Debs declared that all shall march together and
fight together until working men shall receive and enjoy the

(01:05:41):
fruits of their toil. Strike leader Thomas Heathcote explained to
the position of the pullman men, thus, lee, we do
not know what the outcome will be, and in fact
we do not care much. We do know that we
are working for less wages than will maintain ourselves and
our families and the necessities of life. And on that
one proposition we absolutely refused to work any long her.
The A r U Sympathy strike was the largest declaration

(01:06:04):
of labor solidarity up to that point. It still is
one of the largest examples of anything like this ever
happening UM, and it's completely unprecedented. But there were, however,
like you, limits to the kind of solidarity these people
were willing to express, and those limits mostly landed on
racial lines. So Deb's, for his part, begged strikers to

(01:06:28):
accept black workers as part of their sympathy boycott. He
was like, if if we don't take these people into
and represent them to UM, then they're going They're going
to be used as scabs, And why why wouldn't they
be scabs if we won't let them, if we won't
like link arms with them, why wouldn't they go work
for money somewhere else, Like we're not going to help
them do anything. Um, that was gonna be my next

(01:06:50):
question about like, yeah, if so the union at this
point it's all white, Oh yes, yes, and Deb's is
Deb's is kind of pushing and there's a lot of
argument about whether how already really pushes. But he's kind
of pushing for that to maybe be opened up. But
they the union does not agree to do that. So
it's the same thing. Like you can criticize Pullman for

(01:07:11):
saying like black employees aren't allowed to live in my
Pullman town, but you know, it's worth noting also that
the white Pullman unionized employees were not willing to let
black people join their union. Like it's basically, well, it's
you know, of course they're racist, of course, I mean,
but every I mean, what's his face? Debs sounds like

(01:07:32):
like he's trying to improve society, but it's not possible
at that point. He's he's trying, Um, he does, he
does a lot over the course of his life. Um,
So Debs puts forward a motion to include two thousand
black Pullman workers in the strike. It was voted on
at a union meeting, but the majority of those present
voted against it. So again in his credit he does
he does try. Um, the motion fails and the strikes.

(01:07:56):
So the strikes only going to consist of white workers.
This is deeply unfortunate and also kind of ironic because workers,
when talked to by the press, kept saying things like
this quote. The only difference between slavery at Pullman and
what it was down south before the war is that
there the owners took care of their slaves when they
were sick, and here they don't, which God, I don't.
I think it is entirely fair. Um, But yeah, you know,

(01:08:20):
think slavery there, it's like you're not gonna find it.
You're not gonna find a large mass of white dudes
who are not problematic in eighteen ninety four today. So initially,
the Pullman strikers enjoyed enormous support from the University of Illinois.
After being elected mayor in December eighteen ninety three, Hopkins
made the cause of the Pullman workers his own, allowed

(01:08:41):
Chicago police to collect charity for them, and kept police
from interfering in the strike while it remained peaceful. Indeed,
support for the strikers was widespread in the city. Jane Adams,
founder of the Whole House, remembered returning to Chicago one
July nine to find almost everyone on a Halstead Street
wearing a white ribbon, the emblem of the striker's side. Now,
the strike also benefited from the neutrality of Illinois Governor

(01:09:03):
John Peter Altgeld, who would have been elected in eighteen
ninety two with strong labor support. Alt Guild had pardoned
three Haymarket anarchists four others had been hanged in eighteen seven,
and issued an accompanying message in which he declared the
trial in which they had been convicted in an injustice.
During the early part of the strike, All Guild refused
to send militia into Chicago. So the strikers have a
lot of benefits, including the fact that a lot of

(01:09:25):
local elected leaders are on their side and in some
one case at least pretty radical themselves, which helps. I think.
Also because it's all white that helps. It's it's all
they're all white. Yeah. By the end of June, more
than a hundred and fifty thousand railroad workers in twenty
seven states had joined the sympathy strike, refusing to service

(01:09:45):
any trains with a Pullman car, which was most strains.
So the whole American railroad system grinds to a halt.
As the Chicago Times wrote, quote, some roads are absolutely
and utterly blockaded. Others only feel the embargo slightly, but
it grows in strength with every hour. So this raises
panic to a fever pitch among national elites, with a

(01:10:06):
writer at the Nation declaring the boycott an attempt to
starve out society. So the Pullman strike had grown to
be the sort of thing that actually did put the
whole system at risk. Bosses, grasping for a way to
destroy this threat to their supremacy, landed on a tactic
that is familiar to all of us today, hyping up
acts of violence from protesting workers. From a write up

(01:10:27):
in Lapham's Quarterly quote, the effects of the strike were
felt most intensely in Chicago itself, particularly as public transportation
came to a halt. After street car workers joined the strike,
violence broke out. As Presidents Cleveland later wrote, almost in
a night, it grew to full proportions of malevolence and anger.
Rioting and violence were his early accompaniments, and it spread
so swiftly that within a few days it had reached

(01:10:49):
nearly the entire western and southwestern sections of our country.
He wasn't wrong. Freight cars were derailed, engineers were assaulted,
tracks were blocked, and train cars and buildings were set
on fire. Now, the worst thing that happened during this
riot was that a mail truck was damaged, which gave
President Cleveland the excuse he'd been looking forward to intervene.
The President claimed interference with the Post was a federal issue,

(01:11:12):
which it is, and used that to justify deploying fourteen
thousand soldiers to crack heads, which is more legally questionable.
But this is the justification, right, they're fucking with the mail,
now I'm gonna send in troops. Yeah. And this is
in the fact that, as a general rule, the strikers
would actually let mail trucks buy um because they didn't
want to stop people from getting their past. Because it

(01:11:33):
just like ship gets heated, right, people are fighting in
the street like as a mail truck gets damaged. You know,
the national media Obviously, as soon as there's violence, goes
all culture warry on the strike, calling it deb's is
rebellion and framing it as an attack on civilization itself. Now,
the strike had gotten off to a strong start, but
from this point it gets hampered from a number of factors.

(01:11:55):
For one thing, the a f L, the American Federation
of Labor, never support the Pullman strike. It's head, Samuel Gompers,
was a very conservative man and very hostile to socialism.
He believed that only skilled craft workers ought to unionize.
And the fact that he and the a f L
delegates didn't vote to support the air you strike really
not like narrowed the scope of the scope of a

(01:12:17):
sympathy strike. It's why there's a potential at the beginning,
maybe other unions could get involved, other industries could get involved,
like laborers all around the country could organize for railroad
workers and this be a precedent um. But that's not
what Gompers wants, that's not what the a f L wants,
and so it doesn't happen. Um. Now that said, well,
Gompers get some blame for the strikes failure. The fact

(01:12:38):
that these strikers themselves are pretty racist. Also gets a
lot of blame because Pullman is able to bring in
black workers as strike breakers, and the union had already
told these guys, fuck you, you're not welcome in. Why
shouldn't they scap right, normally that's a clear moral choice
in this case, like what what what do you expect
me to do? You're not organizing, former, you're not doing

(01:12:59):
you're not willing to do ship for me. You don't
even think I'm a person. So this guy's offering me money.
Fuck you, Like I I can't blame in this instance.
I can't blame me for scabbing, right, like two enemies, which, yeah,
like yeah, what were they supposed to do? You know? Yeah,
it's fair, very fair. Yeah, labor historian Tom Gilpin told

(01:13:19):
Lapham's quarterly quote, it's not clear that even had Samuel
Gompers weighed in on the side of the air you,
that the strike could have been one. Clearly, a fractured
labor movement will be overcome by a united business class,
especially one that has the military mte of the federal
government behind it, which is an important lesson there. The
power of the bayonet was braced, as it always is,

(01:13:41):
by the perception of profound legality. Cleveland's attorney general got
an injunction from a circuit court ruled on by two
anti union judges, which prohibited air you leaders for compelling
or inducing employees from railroads to refuse to perform their duties.
Debs and other air you heads were also forbidden from
communicating with subordinates, which meant deb's could no longer send

(01:14:02):
telegrams to try and calm strikers down and avoid violence,
because again, that's kind of what they want in this situation,
is for things to go so like these these injunctions
reduced the ability of Debs and other folks at the
a are you to actually like organize things, which means
it gets more chaotic and more bad ship happens. And
then in early July, the troops entered the field from

(01:14:23):
the Encyclopedia Britannica Quote worried that given the terms of
the injunction, he could no longer exercise any control over
the strikers. Debs at first welcomed the troops, thinking that
they might maintain order and allow the striking boycott to
proceed peacefully, but it soon became clear that the troops
were not neutral peacekeepers. They were there to make sure
that the trains moved, which would inevitably undermine the boycott.

(01:14:44):
The strikers reacted with fury to the appearance of the troops.
On July four, they and their sympathizers overturned rail cars
and erected barricades to prevent troops from reaching the yards.
A are you leaders could do nothing, prevented by the
injunction from any communication with the workers. On July six,
some six thousand rioters destroyed hundreds of rail cars in
the South Chicago Panhandle yards. On July seven, National guardsmen,

(01:15:06):
after having been assaulted, fired into a mob, killing between
four and thirty people and wounding many others. Debs then
tried to call off the strike, urging that all workers
except those convicted of crimes, be rehired without prejudice, but
the General Managers Association the Federation of Railroads, that had
overseen the response to the strike, refused and instead began
hiring non union workers. The strike dwindled, and trains began

(01:15:28):
to move with increasing frequency until normal schedules had been restored.
Federal troops were recalled on July twenty. The Pullman Company,
which reopened on August two, agreed to rehire the striking
workers on the condition that they signed up pledged never
to join a union. By the time it ended, the
ordeal had cost the railroads millions of dollars in lost
revenue and eluded and damaged property, and the strikers had

(01:15:50):
lost more than one million dollars in wages. So yeah,
it's one of those things. Deb's definitely like panics, but
also a dozen, possibly dozens people just got shot at.
Like I can't blame him, Like, you know, nobody that
number one. This was all new. Uh, he was not
on well trod ground here. And I think any responsible

(01:16:13):
person when a bunch of people get killed and you're
the one in charge might rethink things, you know, whatever
else we think about what he decided to do, Like,
I don't know what else are you gonna do. Eugene V.
Debs was jailed on July. He was sentenced to six
months behind bars for his role in supposedly inciting a
legal behavior. The time locked up was good for him.

(01:16:34):
He read marks and while he studied inside Outside his
role in the strike was mythologized by the budding US left.
When he was released in November, more than a hundred
thousand people swarmed Battery Park to hear him give a speech,
wherein he told them, I greet you tonighte as lovers
of liberty and as despisers of despotism. Debs was not
a committed socialist quite yet, but as the months passed

(01:16:57):
he became convinced that the labor movement could win thing
but temporary victories until socialism unseated the barons at the
very top. Two years after his release, he wrote in
an essay the issue with Socialism versus Capitalism. I am
for socialism because I am for humanity. We have been
cursed with the reign of gold long enough. Money constitutes
no proper basis of civilization. The time has come to

(01:17:18):
regenerate society. We are on the eve of a universal change. Yeah.
I wish that had been the case, but you know.
A national commission was established in eighteen ninety four to
determine the causes of the strike. It blamed Pullman's paternalism
his need to totally control the lives of his many
employees as being un American. In eighteen ninety eight, the

(01:17:40):
Illinois Supreme Court took Pullman the town away from Pullman
the Man, and it was incorporated into Chicago. George Pullman
died of a heart attack in eighteen nine seven. Funeral
services were held at his mansion, and with Pullman's death
coming so near to the end of the strike, it's
perhaps not surprising that tempers were high. George seems to
have been aware of how much people hated him prior

(01:18:01):
to his death, and as a result, extreme measures were
taken to protect his corpse. And I'm gonna quote one
last time from the Pullman Center, A corpse box. That's
what we're getting to. A pit the size of an
average room had been dug in the family plot. It's
basin walls reinforced concrete eighteen inches thick. Into this, the
lead lined mahogany casket was lowered and covered with tar,

(01:18:22):
paper and asphalt. The pit was filled with concrete, on
top of which a series of steel rails were laid
at right angles to each other and bolted together. These
rails were embedded in another layer of concrete. It took
two days to complete, and then sod was put down.
These precautions were taken to prevent any desecration of the body.
An unfortunate price Pullman paid for his victory in the

(01:18:42):
Pullman Strike. Ambrose Beer said it is clear the family,
in their bereavement was making sure the son of a
bitch wasn't going to get up and come back. Well,
that's just so funny to just know people hate you,
you know what I mean, and just be like, Okay, look,
yeah it's not the best, but it's at least some
victory that despite winning, at the end of it all,

(01:19:04):
George Pullman knew he had to bury his corpse in
a fucking uh like iron and and concrete box because
otherwise people would funk with it. At least there's that well,
I mean, yeah, that's a it's comical at that point
to just think about the way his life ended, is all.
It all comes back to corpse box. Um. But yeah,

(01:19:29):
I mean, if anything, if I've learned anything from this episode, Robert,
is that humans don't change everything basically has happened in
the last several years. Uh, And that makes me sad
because people forget what they go through, and history gets
forgotten and rewritten until we do it again because we're
dumb little sheep um. And it always happens every episode

(01:19:55):
of Bastards and I'm on I just become my existential dread.
Has it becomes an end void next to you? So excellent? Yeah,
we did it? Did it? Wait? Is the end? Or
should I? This is the end? We're done? Where did
you plug your Oh? This is the end? Okay, I
got it. Sorry, So we're still going. We're rolling, rolling,

(01:20:19):
associating more. This is how my brain works. Now. I'm
Sharene and I'm on Twitter at shiro hero six six
six s h E r O h E r o
and on Instagram is just Shira hero And thanks for
listening all along if you want to. I don't care,

(01:20:39):
well I do, I mean, I mean, I don't know.
Have fun Reddit. I know someone will have fun with this. Yeah,
I have fun Reddit, have fun Reddit. I don't know.
I have a good day, everybody. Um uh, funk up
a railroad. You have some time. Just find a railroad
and just just get your anger out. That's all over
the tracks, you know. Yeah, don't get caught. Yeah, yeah,

(01:21:01):
don't get caught. If you get caught, we don't know you.
I don't know. Yeah. You did not hear from this.
And this is not going to be just on the
internet forever and ever. Know