Speaker 1: Hi, everybody, Um, is there something I should look at her?
Speaker 1: Are you just gonna You're gonna tell me things? Right? Geez?
Speaker 1: We already watched this introduction coal between you and me, Sharine?
Speaker 1: We really, we really that was unfortunately Robert's, host of
Speaker 1: Behind the Bastard's podcasting a weird voice. I'm someone else,
Speaker 1: don't I don't know. I'm talking to Sharine? Is who
Speaker 1: I am? And I'm Sharine? I am Sharene. I'm I'm
Speaker 1: well to be honest, but I feel guilty saying that, um,
Speaker 1: because relatively I'm usually bad. But I think it's I'm
Speaker 1: a better bad than usual. You know that makes sense?
Speaker 1: I don't know. Yeah, yeah, I know. It's always good
Speaker 1: to be a better bad than usual. And it's really
Speaker 1: gloomy in l A, and that makes me thrive. I
Speaker 1: love Yeah, I love it when LA feels like the
Speaker 1: Pacific Northwest. Briefly, Yes, exactly. It doesn't happen it often,
Speaker 1: you get me. Yeah, So, Sharine, how do you feel
Speaker 1: about trains? Uh? So they're fun. That's a way to introduce.
Speaker 1: I love to travel. Okay, how do you feel about so?
Speaker 1: You like? You like comfortable trains? Right? Like? You know
Speaker 1: trains with cabin sleeper cars, all that sort of stuff.
Speaker 1: The trains you can sit on and enjoy. I like
Speaker 1: all trains. I think they're very impressive. And uh yeah,
Speaker 1: if you do you really think about it, there a
Speaker 1: feat that man made, you know what I mean? They
Speaker 1: pretty cool. Now, how do you feel about workers being
Speaker 1: gunned down because they are trying to get paid fairly
Speaker 1: for helping to make trains bad? I feel bad about
Speaker 1: you feel bad about that? Oh okay, so this might
Speaker 1: not be a super happy episode. Well that's the episode.
Speaker 1: Like that. It's it's great, it's great. I'm very good
Speaker 1: at my job. The working title I have for this
Speaker 1: this episode sharene is. Let's talk about the Pullman strike
Speaker 1: Comma Cocksuckers And I don't know why I was so
Speaker 1: aggressive when I was writing the title to this um
Speaker 1: but but I never edited it and now it's it's
Speaker 1: in there, So if you can we make this the
Speaker 1: title of the episode. We put Cocksuckers in Spotify. I
Speaker 1: don't know. There's certain apps that reject these really yeah,
Speaker 1: or and it makes and it makes it like like
Speaker 1: it blocks it for searching things. But in my heart,
Speaker 1: that's the title. Yeah, I feel like, if Cometown is fine, oh,
Speaker 1: let's talk about the Pullman Strike. Cocksuckers is also okay.
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm willing to give it a shot if
Speaker 1: it would make you happy. Yeah, I think I would
Speaker 1: like to give it a shot. On the episode that
Speaker 1: I guessed on it might it might be gone forever, Well,
Speaker 1: it might be Yeah, Well we'll change the title up
Speaker 1: on a couple of an artifact, we can change the
Speaker 1: title to let's talk about the Pullman Strike knob gobblers. Okay,
Speaker 1: they're not gonna catch that's great, that's great. So today,
Speaker 1: Serene Lonnie unis, today we're gonna learn about George Pullman,
Speaker 1: a guy who sucked so bad that workers who didn't
Speaker 1: even work for him quit working to protest how shitty
Speaker 1: a boss he was. Like, that's the level of bad.
Speaker 1: Like other people who had nothing to do with this
Speaker 1: guy quit working to protest how much he sucked. Now,
Speaker 1: like most great labor stories, the story of the Pullman
Speaker 1: Strike has a sad ending and a lot more racism
Speaker 1: than you'd hope. But that's no excuse not to talk
Speaker 1: about this huge piece of ship, George Mortimer Pullman. He
Speaker 1: was born in eighteen thirty one and Brockton, New York.
Speaker 1: His dad, James Lewis known as Louis, was a farmer
Speaker 1: who became a carpenter because the money was much better.
Speaker 1: The family seems to have been upwardly mobile for the time,
Speaker 1: but firmly working class. George was expected to labor from
Speaker 1: a young age. Now Brockton had a general store owned
Speaker 1: by his mom's uncle, and after he finished fourth grade,
Speaker 1: it was to did that he would drop out and
Speaker 1: work there for about forty dollars a month, which is
Speaker 1: a pretty good salary for the time. Again, his family
Speaker 1: is comfortable. That same year, his parents left him and
Speaker 1: his two brothers behind to move to Albion, New Jersey,
Speaker 1: so his dad could work on widening the eerie canal.
Speaker 1: Uh And yeah, yeah, this was this was like a
Speaker 1: whole big deal here in George's fourteen when the effort starts.
Speaker 1: We have fewer of his early recollections that night, I
Speaker 1: prefer so it's hard to say how this affected him,
Speaker 1: but the move was great for his father's career. Louis
Speaker 1: Pullman developed a method of moving the building off of
Speaker 1: its old foundations and onto a new one because they
Speaker 1: had to to widen This canal. There was like stuff
Speaker 1: built up against the canal that they had to lift
Speaker 1: up and move so that they could widen the canal.
Speaker 1: It was like this whole they're doing this and like
Speaker 1: the eighteen late eighteen forties, I think is kind of
Speaker 1: when the effort gets really underway. Um. See, he can
Speaker 1: be impressive sometimes it's really cool because like again people
Speaker 1: are they don't have techno apology, then like everything sucks.
Speaker 1: Uh to innovative, they have to be innovative. Yeah, So
Speaker 1: the system that Louis Pullman develops to move buildings uses
Speaker 1: like Screwjack's and this special machine that he's invented in
Speaker 1: it's this whole wild deal. Um. And so since a
Speaker 1: lot of buildings needed to be moved to expand the
Speaker 1: Erie Canal, this was a major boon for family finances.
Speaker 1: In eighteen forty eight, three years after three years of
Speaker 1: working at his family store, George was seventeen and he
Speaker 1: was missing his parents who were still off building the
Speaker 1: Erie Canal. So he joins moves to Albion, New York,
Speaker 1: joins his family, and he gets a job at what
Speaker 1: is now the family business, moving buildings so that a
Speaker 1: canal can be wider. The next five years were peacefully
Speaker 1: lucrative for both him and his family, before his father
Speaker 1: died in eighteen fifty three, leaving George Pullman the heir
Speaker 1: to the business at age twenty two. He had brothers,
Speaker 1: but they started another business, and George had been working
Speaker 1: with his dad, so he was the obvious choice. His
Speaker 1: first big contract is from the state of New York.
Speaker 1: They wanted twenty buildings, most most of which were warehouses,
Speaker 1: moved out of the way of the widening canal. UH.
Speaker 1: This made a decent amount of money, but it was
Speaker 1: not the kind of thing that could last forever. In
Speaker 1: New York only had so many additional buildings that were
Speaker 1: in the way of where the canal was getting expanded to,
Speaker 1: and eventually there was going to be no more money
Speaker 1: in that UH. The economy hit a major recession in
Speaker 1: the mid eighteen fifties and George was forced to look
Speaker 1: outside of New York for revenue. He founded in Chicago,
Speaker 1: a city that by eighteen fifty seven was starting to
Speaker 1: reap the consequences of trying to make too much Chicago,
Speaker 1: way too fast. There was a period of time in
Speaker 1: which we had a Chicago and everybody was so excited
Speaker 1: about it. They were like, we gotta keep making more Chicago.
Speaker 1: And then they built way too much Chicago and like
Speaker 1: they couldn't. They couldn't, Like so Chicago is built on
Speaker 1: a swamp like a lot of places, um and it was,
Speaker 1: uh like they didn't they didn't build like they did.
Speaker 1: They had no real infrastructure, um like, because this thing
Speaker 1: just like blew up so quickly. Um back at the
Speaker 1: time and like the mid eighteen hundreds, it's kind of
Speaker 1: a cluster of buildings about four ft above Lake Michigan.
Speaker 1: Um that nobody really planned out all that well. So
Speaker 1: as it gets bigger, it's flooding constantly, suage just like
Speaker 1: washing into houses and streets all the time. Um Like.
Speaker 1: It was just there never should have been large numbers
Speaker 1: of people there. It was kind of like a fucking swamp.
Speaker 1: And they just they made too much Chicago too fast.
Speaker 1: You know. It's a classic story. Were they making Chicago
Speaker 1: because they were like really excited about it, or because
Speaker 1: they had to and the people it was like the
Speaker 1: population thing, I think, yeah, right, I think there's a
Speaker 1: couple of different things, but yeah, it was just it
Speaker 1: was the place to be for a while. You know.
Speaker 1: The westward expansion is like really in full swing at
Speaker 1: this period of time. Chicago's uh, you know, kind of
Speaker 1: in the mid middle of the country. Um, and it
Speaker 1: yeah that they just coming to a city. I guess
Speaker 1: it's becoming a central city. Yeah, and it's a problem.
Speaker 1: And to kind of illustrate what a problem it was,
Speaker 1: I want to quote from a passage from the hilarious
Speaker 1: named website Enjoy Illinois. Quote. The streets turned to mud,
Speaker 1: stranding horses, carriages, and humans alike. Pools of standing water
Speaker 1: formed all over the city. The environment caused hygiene and
Speaker 1: health problems, including an eighteen fifty four collar outbreak which
Speaker 1: killed one in twenty residents. The marsh on which the
Speaker 1: city was built was trying to claim back its territory.
Speaker 1: After a number of failed attempts to fix the problem,
Speaker 1: including planking the streets with wood, the city decided that
Speaker 1: only that the only long term solution was to install
Speaker 1: a sewer and stormwater system. But in Chicago that was
Speaker 1: no easy feat. Sewers need to go underground and they
Speaker 1: drained down. Chicago was barely above the water table, and
Speaker 1: underground sewers couldn't work at that level. So they got
Speaker 1: this issue. They they've suddenly built a lot of Chicago ships,
Speaker 1: literal ships flooding everywhere, and they need to build sewers,
Speaker 1: but Chicago is barely above the water. You know, it
Speaker 1: just sounds like nature spicing back. We were never meant
Speaker 1: to be there. We were never meant to have a Chicago.
Speaker 1: You know, I think that's fair, you know, like it's
Speaker 1: just doesn't want us there. Nature's fighting back, and it was. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's there's a category of cities in the United States,
Speaker 1: and not just in the United States, but specifically in
Speaker 1: the United States. There's a category of cities that like
Speaker 1: our direct affronts to God. Phoenix is another direct affront
Speaker 1: to God, Like if we we built Phoenix, Arizona to
Speaker 1: spit in the eye of the Almighty, it never people
Speaker 1: were never supposed to live there in any kind of
Speaker 1: quantity um. And it's the same thing with Chicago. I see,
Speaker 1: That's how I feel back Chicago Phoenix. Yeah, I don't
Speaker 1: know how they're all of Florida. I don't know what
Speaker 1: the fun is thinking with that ship, Like, uh, Dan,
Speaker 1: so Chicago's you know, they're trying to figure out how
Speaker 1: to get a sewer built in a city that is
Speaker 1: like almost uniquely unsuited to having traditional sewers, and rather
Speaker 1: than admit that the present location of Chicago wasn't affront
Speaker 1: to God, they opted to raise every single go building
Speaker 1: in street in town by an average height of six ft.
Speaker 1: They decided, we can't ships flooding everywhere, we can't build
Speaker 1: a normal underground sewer here, so instead of moving, let's
Speaker 1: lift the entire city up by six ft. That is
Speaker 1: so bonkers. It's amazing. What I uh, the last thing
Speaker 1: I ever thought you would say. I thought they were
Speaker 1: going to just build them above ground and then make
Speaker 1: Chicago worse. But that'sn't. That'sn't. That's intense to just lived
Speaker 1: a city. We really do think we're God. It's it's amazing.
Speaker 1: I weirdly enough like that. One of the things that
Speaker 1: reminds me of as a story from the Roman Empire
Speaker 1: of one of Caesar's conquests. He was laying siege to
Speaker 1: this Galic city called Alesia, and the way the Romans
Speaker 1: would siege the city is they would build a wall
Speaker 1: around the entire city so they could basically like shoot
Speaker 1: down into the town and like starve it out essentially.
Speaker 1: And while they're doing this, this huge gallic army that
Speaker 1: outnumbers them like five ten to one up and attacks
Speaker 1: the Roman army, and rather than like break off and retreat,
Speaker 1: they just build a second wall around themselves, and so
Speaker 1: they have one big wall around them and one big
Speaker 1: wall around the city. It's just this like, yeah, no,
Speaker 1: we we can. We can just solve all of our
Speaker 1: problems by by engineering, by building huge things like never never,
Speaker 1: It's amazing. I it's it's it's but that's how they
Speaker 1: got to the problem. It is how they got to
Speaker 1: the problem. But in this case is not working, you
Speaker 1: know what I mean? Why didn't I just well, the
Speaker 1: thing is, though it did work for the Romans. Caesar
Speaker 1: won that battle, and it worked in Chicago because they
Speaker 1: did lift every goddamn building in the city up by
Speaker 1: six Some were raised by as much as fourteen feet. Okay,
Speaker 1: how does how is that literally physically possible? They've got
Speaker 1: this like Screwjack Winch kind of thing system that just
Speaker 1: sort of like lifts shut up and yeah, I don't know,
Speaker 1: it's it's it's it's a whole thing. You can find
Speaker 1: there's like it's very well documented. You know, this was
Speaker 1: in the mid eight hundreds, so they had people did
Speaker 1: like talk about how they were doing it. It's not
Speaker 1: a mystery. Um. And it also provided the fact that
Speaker 1: they're lifting the entire city up six ft by the
Speaker 1: height of a dude basically. Um. That that gives the
Speaker 1: city an opportunity to rebrand because it again had kind
Speaker 1: of been like this frontier ramshackle town, and the people
Speaker 1: who were in charge of things at the time were
Speaker 1: able to use this to move buildings that didn't look
Speaker 1: nice to the edges of the city and kind of
Speaker 1: reorganized Chicagos that when everything was lifted, it looked the
Speaker 1: way they wanted to, like a nice red light. But yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean kind of was yeah, it was yeah. Um.
Speaker 1: And of course the instead of moving the lines are
Speaker 1: moving the actual buildings. Yeah, you could just like move
Speaker 1: all the buildings around. Um. Now, George's firm was not
Speaker 1: the only one involved in raising the city. He was
Speaker 1: actually one of a handful of firms all technically competing
Speaker 1: with each other, but they all kind of agreed to
Speaker 1: work together to determine who got which bids and to
Speaker 1: maximize their profitability. It was like price fixing. I don't
Speaker 1: know if that was illegal at the time, I think
Speaker 1: it kind of is now. But they they all these
Speaker 1: different firms, including George, is operating a cartel in order
Speaker 1: to get as much money to lift the ship city
Speaker 1: of Chicago up as they possibly can. And George is
Speaker 1: not a small player in this, but he's not a
Speaker 1: particularly large one either. Um. He had dreams of more. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, this is a successful business. He's making a
Speaker 1: comfortable living, but that was not enough for George pullman um.
Speaker 1: And kind of after this, he winds up on a
Speaker 1: train ride from Buffalo to Westfield, or during this, he
Speaker 1: winds up on a train ride from Buffalo to Westfield,
Speaker 1: York to negotiate. Yeah, well yeah that this is where
Speaker 1: the trains come in. So he's on a train ride
Speaker 1: for a business meeting and it's train rides sucked back then.
Speaker 1: Like that's kind of something that I didn't wasn't really
Speaker 1: aware of before this. They were they didn't have trains
Speaker 1: that were meant to be like in any way comfortable,
Speaker 1: like you could get on one, but there was no
Speaker 1: like that kind of romantic vision of like the fans
Speaker 1: and the beautiful pointed train car with the bar and
Speaker 1: none of that existed yet. It was awful, and to
Speaker 1: illustrate how awful it was, I want to quote from
Speaker 1: a write up by Richard Schneiro from Indiana State University
Speaker 1: for the Northern Illinois University Digital Library. Quote. As railroad
Speaker 1: mileages tripled between eighteen fifty and eighteen sixty, the uncomfortable
Speaker 1: conditions passengers and dirt on trips longer than a few
Speaker 1: hours became intolerable. Passenger cars were not built to cushion jolts,
Speaker 1: windows constantly rattled. In the winter, wood burning stoves could
Speaker 1: fill the cars with smoke and caused accidents, and in
Speaker 1: the summer writers sweltered. It took three and a half
Speaker 1: days to travel from Chicago to New York, and a
Speaker 1: typical traveler resorted to hotels at night. The need for
Speaker 1: a sleeping car was widely understood, but at the time
Speaker 1: none were satisfactory. In eighteen fifty eight, Pollman began renovating
Speaker 1: existing sleeping cars for the Chicago and Alton Railroad. Eventually,
Speaker 1: he established a small crew and began building cars from scratch.
Speaker 1: In eighteen sixty four, his crew built the classic sleeping
Speaker 1: car he called the Pioneer, with brocaded fabrics, handcrafted window
Speaker 1: and door frames, plush red carpets, and richly ornamented paneling.
Speaker 1: The Pioneer was a study in luxury. It was also
Speaker 1: the turning point and Pullman's rise to success. Pullman's luxurious
Speaker 1: sleeping car appealed to America's fast growing wealthy class hungry
Speaker 1: for status, and a new middle class that aspired to
Speaker 1: the same outward markers of social standing. Pullman shrewdly took
Speaker 1: advantage of this in his marketing strategy, which relied on
Speaker 1: quality of service and prestige rather than low prices. So
Speaker 1: he offers for the first time, really not even just
Speaker 1: like first class, but just a train ride that wouldn't
Speaker 1: make you want to die. Um, and it's hugely successful.
Speaker 1: Trains are blowing up at this point, and he's the
Speaker 1: first guy to figure out how to make you want
Speaker 1: to be on a train, you know. Yeah, very innovative
Speaker 1: again like his father, I guess, also innovative. It's in yeah,
Speaker 1: smart mat Yeah, he gets he understands, you know that
Speaker 1: this is an unfilled need, and he fills it ably.
Speaker 1: I think also, like, if you don't maybe this is
Speaker 1: a hot take. I don't know, I don't care. I
Speaker 1: think if he don't come from money money, Uh, you
Speaker 1: understand more what the people need and want. It's the
Speaker 1: same reason you guys like Bezos and and Bill Gates.
Speaker 1: I know there are people who would like consider them rich,
Speaker 1: but they're their upper middle class and so it's it's
Speaker 1: not enough money that they never had to do anything,
Speaker 1: like they were going to need to find out something
Speaker 1: to do, but it's enough money that they are able
Speaker 1: to like pursue their dreams from an early age. Like
Speaker 1: George's right, like he's he's where he's he's paid well
Speaker 1: to work at this family shop at seventeen, he's able
Speaker 1: to very easily go follow his dad and you know,
Speaker 1: get involved in this new business. It's, uh, yeah, he's
Speaker 1: working class enough money that yeah. Yeah, he's in his
Speaker 1: early twenties right now, mid de late twenties I think
Speaker 1: by now, um, and this is a big hit. So
Speaker 1: he has his his his trained business is successful, but
Speaker 1: it's not as big as as George wants to be.
Speaker 1: Like he's he's doing very well. He's probably what you'd
Speaker 1: call wealthy, but he's not like a massive industrial magnate.
Speaker 1: Um and he's he's he feels uncertain, like he he
Speaker 1: doesn't really believe that his business can expand all that much.
Speaker 1: He kind of feels like, well, I found a profitable niche,
Speaker 1: but that's all it's going to be, So he starts
Speaker 1: looking for other ways to make money. By the late
Speaker 1: eighteen fifties, the Pike's Peak gold rush was well underway
Speaker 1: in Chicago or Colorado or Chicago. George decided to travel
Speaker 1: there and see if he might be able to short
Speaker 1: cut the route to wealth and power by striking it rich.
Speaker 1: The Pullman Museum writes that in short order, quote Pullman
Speaker 1: realized that the real money in a gold rush is
Speaker 1: made by supplying other fortune hunters. So he decides very quickly,
Speaker 1: it's fucking not worth it to go panning for gold.
Speaker 1: But I can sell ship to the people panning for gold.
Speaker 1: And he forms a company to do this, moving freight
Speaker 1: and crushing ore. And when that did well, he bought
Speaker 1: sixteen hundred acres near Central City, Colorado, and they turned it.
Speaker 1: He turns this into a truck stop, basically like the
Speaker 1: Gilded Age equivalent of a truck stop. He knows a
Speaker 1: ton of people are passing in and out of this
Speaker 1: specific area, um they're going to a place that's that's
Speaker 1: real primitive, no amenities whatsoever. Um, So they're gonna want
Speaker 1: something that they can head to on their way in
Speaker 1: and out in order to like get drunk and eat
Speaker 1: good food and sleep in a comfortable bed. So he
Speaker 1: builds he builds this big truck stop, and for a
Speaker 1: while he's kind of on this path of, you know,
Speaker 1: getting forming little businesses here and there as he sees needs.
Speaker 1: UM and I don't. It doesn't look initially like his
Speaker 1: train business is going to be huge. But the good
Speaker 1: news is that from you know, if your job is
Speaker 1: making trains more comfortable, then the eighteen fifties is a
Speaker 1: little bit early for that to be a big business.
Speaker 1: But the eighteen sixties that's the fucking like, you know,
Speaker 1: that's where you're gonna make money. Um. You said to
Speaker 1: stick around long enough for yeah. Yeah. And the Civil
Speaker 1: War does a lot for this, right. Trains are a
Speaker 1: huge part of why the Union wins, um. And the
Speaker 1: Civil War is furthermore helpful to his business because on
Speaker 1: April fift eighteen sixty five, a dude shot Abraham Lincoln
Speaker 1: right in his head. Now, this was widely seen as
Speaker 1: terrible for honest Abe, and in the wake of a
Speaker 1: devastating war. Like people needed a proper sendoff for a
Speaker 1: wartime president, right, Like this beloved president gets killed. Everybody's
Speaker 1: real fucking sad. There's just been a big war. Trains
Speaker 1: are more famous and like prominent than ever. And George
Speaker 1: looks at the president's death and sees opportunity. Um, so
Speaker 1: let's capitalize on this tragedy. Absolutely. Yeah. So he's got
Speaker 1: some friends in high places and he starts talking to
Speaker 1: them and being like, hey, you gotta move that president's
Speaker 1: dead ass body. I got these real fancy sleeping cars.
Speaker 1: You can't just stick his corpse and like a shitty car.
Speaker 1: You gotta put him in something nice. Right, has a point,
Speaker 1: He has a point, right exactly. People don't when you
Speaker 1: see like like you open it and it's like what
Speaker 1: you'd stick like a bunch of logs into or something.
Speaker 1: There's just a sliding around, exactly. And even if they
Speaker 1: didn't want to, if someone presented that and then they said, no,
Speaker 1: that's pretty shipped, I guess that's an asshole move. You know,
Speaker 1: if you're presucted with a nicer option to the just
Speaker 1: Abraham Lincoln in a oven, Yeah, it's very Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: very smart of him to just be like, yeah, when
Speaker 1: I'll give him one of my one of my one
Speaker 1: of my nice cars to drive the president's dead ass
Speaker 1: body around in um. And this actually posed a significant
Speaker 1: logistical hurdle because a lot of train stations and platforms
Speaker 1: and bridges weren't white enough to to take the car
Speaker 1: that he had. It can only travel on some tracks,
Speaker 1: and so they get like the government widens a bunch
Speaker 1: of like station platforms and bridges, which actually makes his
Speaker 1: business even more profitable because now his cars can go
Speaker 1: more places parallel. The canal widening from this, well, George
Speaker 1: pull him a man made great by widening. It's always cyclical.
Speaker 1: Life is cyclical. It's light, flat circle whatever, you know
Speaker 1: what I mean. It all comes back to a flat circle,
Speaker 1: pretty wide, and it's pretty wide, pretty wide. You know
Speaker 1: what else is pretty wide? Sharine, Uh, I know you're
Speaker 1: gonna say, Raytheon or some ship. The variety of products
Speaker 1: Raytheon makes very wide. If you need a missile guidance
Speaker 1: chip for a hellfire missile, Raytheon's got you. If you
Speaker 1: need a software to help target for an Assassin drone,
Speaker 1: Raytheon's got you. If you need to not have any
Speaker 1: kind of targeting whatsoever, because you're just going to carpet
Speaker 1: bombing area. Raytheon can make the detonators for that carpet bombing.
Speaker 1: Whatever you need from Raytheon, as long as it involves
Speaker 1: killing people from the sky, Raytheon can do. I'm so
Speaker 1: happy I was such a long plug. Yeah. Well, all right,
Speaker 1: let's go to the ads that paid us. Okay, we're back,
Speaker 1: and the Lincoln's Corpse Engine train would go down in
Speaker 1: history is one of the most popular trains of all time.
Speaker 1: Slightly underneath the Festival Express, Ulyssi Simpson Grant praised George
Speaker 1: Pullman for giving a dead man an ice corpse box.
Speaker 1: After the whole dead person business was concluded, the train
Speaker 1: car was put on display so that people could gawk
Speaker 1: at it, like it's a corpse box. Hits a corpse box.
Speaker 1: It's a nice corpse box. Yeah, I guess that's the
Speaker 1: before coffins. I mean, they've probably already had coffins, but
Speaker 1: I'm sure corpse corpse box is a phrase I wasn't
Speaker 1: familiar with until right now. And that's me. I'm going
Speaker 1: to start up another like it's going to be like
Speaker 1: one of those mattress businesses. That ship's mattresses to you,
Speaker 1: but it'll ship cheap coffins and we'll call it corpse box.
Speaker 1: You've got something going there. You've got a boxing corpses. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you rich never know when you're gonna wind up with
Speaker 1: a corpse Yeah, exactly. Just follow your dreams, robber, follow you. Yep,
Speaker 1: that's gonna take me out of this filthy podcasting business. Well, honestly,
Speaker 1: you're right though, Like if you're able to have the
Speaker 1: luxury to do anything you want to do, you will
Speaker 1: do it and find a way to make it good.
Speaker 1: If you're like smart, like decently intelligent, you know what
Speaker 1: I mean. I think it's all it needs like luck
Speaker 1: and basically understand a humanity or like human instinct or
Speaker 1: something that makes sense. Yeah, I mean it's one of
Speaker 1: those things where, uh you you like, the people who
Speaker 1: are most successful under our system are there's a certain
Speaker 1: level of money that they have. But also if you
Speaker 1: go above that level, I think your odds of doing
Speaker 1: anything on your own that that change the world actually
Speaker 1: start to drop. Like you don't tend to hear about
Speaker 1: like Walton's or whatever, like they perpetuate systems, but it's
Speaker 1: a guy like Jeff Bezos who who grows up very
Speaker 1: comfortable but not with billions of dollars, who's gonna actually
Speaker 1: anyway whatever. He has no like concept of what people
Speaker 1: are going through or what they need or whatever. I mean,
Speaker 1: I was just I mean, this is everyone talks about this,
Speaker 1: but having enough money to like really improve the lives
Speaker 1: of billions of people or like help with world hunger
Speaker 1: and homelessness and everything, and still having left over and
Speaker 1: not doing anything about it. It blows my mind. You know,
Speaker 1: all rich people are like that pretty or the says
Speaker 1: actually where the story is building a bit um, So
Speaker 1: Lincoln's death incredible for George Pullman, and he takes all
Speaker 1: of the great pr that comes in the wake of this,
Speaker 1: and he approaches several wealthy businessmen with the same pitch.
Speaker 1: I need more investment money because I want to build
Speaker 1: enough cars to sell luxury rides everywhere, right, I want
Speaker 1: everyone to be able to use like one of my
Speaker 1: sleeper cars. Um, but I need like my business isn't
Speaker 1: going to grow a fast enough organically in order to
Speaker 1: get to that point, so I need investment capital. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, well that's where we're building too. But yeah,
Speaker 1: so he's like, Okay, I I need I need a
Speaker 1: bunch of money, and he's done. You know, well enough,
Speaker 1: this whole Lincoln thing was big enough deal that he
Speaker 1: gets about a million dollars of investments and and he
Speaker 1: uses it to form a new company, the Pullman Palace
Speaker 1: Car Company. Throughout the eighteen eighties, he choked out or
Speaker 1: made deals with anyone who might be competition for his
Speaker 1: luxury train car business, and by the eighteen nineties, George
Speaker 1: Pullman had a monopoly. And trains are the biggest thing
Speaker 1: in the fucking world. By the everyone's traveling places by train,
Speaker 1: and he's the only guy that makes like the sleeper
Speaker 1: cars and whatnot. If you, yeah, if you wanted to
Speaker 1: take an actual, like comfortable train trip anywhere in the
Speaker 1: United States, George was getting a piece of that action.
Speaker 1: And he continued to innovate through every part of this period,
Speaker 1: and his innovations included the field of racism. Quote from
Speaker 1: Richard Sneiroff. In eighteen sixty seven, he rolled out the
Speaker 1: del Monaco, the first dining car called a hotel car
Speaker 1: with a kitchen at its center. It could serve two
Speaker 1: fifty meals a day in eighteen seventy five, he built
Speaker 1: a luxurious parlor car, which offered an upscale traveling experience. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: his designers continuously improved heating, ventilation, and lighting Throughout it all,
Speaker 1: the Pullman's appeal to the public rested on meticulous service.
Speaker 1: Pullman used the existing racial division of labor and hiring
Speaker 1: white conductors, collected tickets and sold births en route to
Speaker 1: perform menial work like carrying luggage, preparing the berths for use,
Speaker 1: cleaning the cars, and providing personal services to passengers. He
Speaker 1: hired African American porters, many of them recently freed slaves.
Speaker 1: The conductors who supervised the sleeping car. Reporters received white
Speaker 1: men's wages. The porters received less than one six the
Speaker 1: wages of conductors. Low wages kept them dependent on the
Speaker 1: tips and thus the good will of white passengers. Despite
Speaker 1: the servant like position of porters, Pullman had a good
Speaker 1: reputation among blacks due to the secure jobs and relatively
Speaker 1: high income they provided. So it was in this like
Speaker 1: mixed space if he's one of the first people to
Speaker 1: really figure out, Okay, we've got all these newly freed people, Um,
Speaker 1: how can I exploit them. Yeah, I'm going to capitalize
Speaker 1: on I mean, obviously I'm not surprised at this point,
Speaker 1: but I mean it's just like sounds like the real
Speaker 1: life version in the eight hundreds of like The Help,
Speaker 1: you know what I mean, Like that's what it is.
Speaker 1: It is, And he's popular among at least according to
Speaker 1: this he's popular among those. But it's also like, well,
Speaker 1: if you were a recently freed slave, it's not hard
Speaker 1: to be the best boss they've ever had. Just to
Speaker 1: pay the money and don't own them and split their
Speaker 1: families up for profit. Yeah, you'll be like, well, this
Speaker 1: is this guy is pretty good boss. He's really capitalizing
Speaker 1: on like desperation and need and like so it's like
Speaker 1: a border it's like uh, white saviory at the same
Speaker 1: time as being like evil master, you know what I mean. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it's one of those things where he is
Speaker 1: not to give him credit as you always kind of
Speaker 1: have to do in this period, he's never he never
Speaker 1: uses slave labor in the period you know, before the
Speaker 1: Civil War. Um, I don't think he was was supportive
Speaker 1: of it. Like, so he doesn't have that going against him,
Speaker 1: you know, and a lot of a lot of real
Speaker 1: rich white dudes who get their start in the eighteen fifties.
Speaker 1: There's some uncomfortable slavery. Only pay them one sixth, Right,
Speaker 1: that's that's a choice you make, sure, and it's it's
Speaker 1: a choice he makes because it's you can get away
Speaker 1: with it. And he's not the reason that is, like
Speaker 1: you know, he's he's but he is kind of he
Speaker 1: is one of the very first businessman who's hiring like
Speaker 1: in white businessman who's hiring in mass black labors. Right,
Speaker 1: that is pretty new in this period because slavery, you know,
Speaker 1: was around in l at and sixty five in the
Speaker 1: United States, and he is helping to kind of set
Speaker 1: this idea that like, yeah, you can you can hire
Speaker 1: black people for jobs that you will and you know,
Speaker 1: and pay them less than you would pay white people
Speaker 1: for the same jobs. And that's that makes that makes
Speaker 1: good business. He is one of the men establishing that, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: you're right, we do have to give him credit for that. Unfortunately,
Speaker 1: I mean like he's a good person for the times,
Speaker 1: you know what I mean. I don't know that he's
Speaker 1: a good person for the Times. He's just not a Confederate,
Speaker 1: Like I don't know that I want to make that'd
Speaker 1: be the bar of good person. I mean, it only
Speaker 1: takes so yeah little. He doesn't enslave people when he
Speaker 1: has the opportunity. So good for that money over uh
Speaker 1: like actual humanity, you know, yeah, but he does choose
Speaker 1: money over yeah whatever, he's yeah, yeah, I'm not. I'm
Speaker 1: not trying to praise him. Um relatively high in terms
Speaker 1: of like the wages for black labors in Pullman's company
Speaker 1: is a term that has a lot of wiggle room.
Speaker 1: And I not everyone I've i've seen agrees with the
Speaker 1: idea that his wages were considered high. I think this
Speaker 1: passage from a Jacobin article gets across how humiliating this
Speaker 1: work could be for the black porters who worked on
Speaker 1: his railroad. And as you listen to this again, remember
Speaker 1: that these we were considered by a lot of people
Speaker 1: to be relatively good jobs, quote, working for tips. They
Speaker 1: served passengers and plush surroundings, with heads bowed, pride suppressed,
Speaker 1: swallowing any words of protest at being called George, the
Speaker 1: catch all name that denoted servility to their employer, George Pullman.
Speaker 1: So these employees, by the white people using the train
Speaker 1: cars just call any black person George, because of their boss.
Speaker 1: Because we're getting we're real close to slavery is still here,
Speaker 1: you know. Um, it's very interesting to me. I don't yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know. It's it's bad. I mean, it's fucked up.
Speaker 1: It's just not a not specifically a racist thing that
Speaker 1: I've heard about until this. So as soon this happened elsewhere. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I did not know that was a thing. It is
Speaker 1: very offensive. It's pretty fucked up. Yep, yep. Now, as
Speaker 1: we discussed in our Bernar mac fadden episodes, the late
Speaker 1: eighteen hundreds were a period in which the United States
Speaker 1: was industrializing rapidly, and the consequences of all that industrialization
Speaker 1: we're becoming obvious. Organizations like the y m c A
Speaker 1: were created initially in the UK to ameliorate the health
Speaker 1: and moral consequences of modern life. George Pullman, now riches
Speaker 1: ship and influential, volunteered his time to help run the
Speaker 1: y m c A and other organizations that he thought
Speaker 1: might help provide an answer to the labor question. This
Speaker 1: is a term that was used at the time. I
Speaker 1: found in eighteen eighties six Atlantic article with this title.
Speaker 1: Throughout the Gilded Age, um the primary issue was this
Speaker 1: organized labor had existed at some point for quite a while,
Speaker 1: but the concept was still being worked out. I remember
Speaker 1: the eighteen eighties. The idea that like laborers would organize
Speaker 1: and form unions is not an old not a very
Speaker 1: old idea, you know. UM. So by the end of
Speaker 1: the eighteen eighties, labor had gotten in the United States,
Speaker 1: had gotten smart and effective enough to actually start putting
Speaker 1: some major pressure on capital. The eighteen eighties eighteen nineties
Speaker 1: is kind of really when the labor movement starts coming
Speaker 1: together in a way that's actually that's able to do
Speaker 1: stuff effectively. Um. And the what's called the labor question um,
Speaker 1: which is the title of this article I found, but
Speaker 1: it is also this article from the eighteen eighties that
Speaker 1: I found. You hear this phrase the labor question a
Speaker 1: lot in this period. And the labor question is this,
Speaker 1: should working men have a right to dictate the terms
Speaker 1: of their employment or should capital hold all of society
Speaker 1: and unquestioned um like domination. And it's actually really interesting
Speaker 1: to read some of the critical arguments people criticizing labor
Speaker 1: um because often these people who are like, no, I
Speaker 1: don't think workers have a right to like organize, Um,
Speaker 1: are you You get the same tone with them that
Speaker 1: you get with a lot of like quote unquote unbiased,
Speaker 1: fair minded intellectual like journalism people today, like folks writing
Speaker 1: about climate change. You're like, well, let's talk about the
Speaker 1: Americans who don't wear masks and all this nonsense because
Speaker 1: it's yeah, because because if I'm criticizing everyone equally, even
Speaker 1: if the facts aren't equal, then nobody can say that
Speaker 1: I'm unfair. Like Bill Maher. Yeah. So this Atlantic columnists
Speaker 1: that I found writing about the labor question spends a
Speaker 1: huge chunk of his column ranting about alcohol, um and
Speaker 1: basically saying that, like, well, workers spend all of this
Speaker 1: money on alcohol and do all of these bad things
Speaker 1: under the influence of alcohol. Um, And why are they
Speaker 1: organizing to get more money when they could just stop
Speaker 1: buying alcohol? Oh? Of course, it's very funny. Today's like
Speaker 1: today's avoca avocado toast. Yeah. It's like no, no, no,
Speaker 1: there's like that stupid saying where it's like you, uh,
Speaker 1: instead of buying coffee every day, Like that's that's why
Speaker 1: we're spending all our money, like millennials or whatever, you
Speaker 1: know what I mean. There's like this it's a coffee thing.
Speaker 1: It's always a drink. I suppose I believe that workers
Speaker 1: should have the right to buy alcohol and also still
Speaker 1: have enough money left over for things that aren't alcohol. Yeah,
Speaker 1: of course there's yeah, yeah, fun stuff, HB two see
Speaker 1: I all the goodies. I will have to ask you
Speaker 1: about those off Mike, but yeah, yeah, they're all they
Speaker 1: can all be fun. So what because the best that
Speaker 1: was so funny? If you were on the show, I
Speaker 1: would not be able to survive. I mean, Robert's great,
Speaker 1: but I do need the validation sometimes, you know what
Speaker 1: I mean. It's okay, nobody ever appreciates my jokes. Sorry, Robert.
Speaker 1: We were having ament I know you were. That's fine.
Speaker 1: We're very like that. We have a bond. We bonded.
Speaker 1: She's the best, I'm the best. Get each other. And
Speaker 1: you know who else is the best? This Atlantic columnists
Speaker 1: telling people complaining about workers, yeah, like being like, why
Speaker 1: why are they asking for more money from their bosses
Speaker 1: when they could just stop drinking? It's amazing? Yeah, go ahead. Sorry,
Speaker 1: When we see on the one side a yearly waste
Speaker 1: of between four and five hundred millions of dollars and
Speaker 1: on the other side a body of men, the squanderers
Speaker 1: of this vast fund, complaining that they have not sufficient opportunities.
Speaker 1: We cannot long be at a loss to comprehend the
Speaker 1: true nature of the existing satisfaction dissatisfaction. It is clear
Speaker 1: that labor has been incited to seek from without the
Speaker 1: relief which ought to be sought from within. The socialist
Speaker 1: theory of a paternal state system which provides everybody with
Speaker 1: work and wages is a mischievous fallacy. It simply encourages
Speaker 1: indolence and dependence. The first duty of labor is to
Speaker 1: demonstrate its capacity for self government. At this moment, it's
Speaker 1: drink bill is an impeachment of that capacity. No man
Speaker 1: who spends half his earnings that a saloon can get
Speaker 1: on in the world, or has the least right to
Speaker 1: expect to get on, Nor can anybody of men follow
Speaker 1: the same course with better results. Well, yeah, man like rich,
Speaker 1: but none of that half a billion dollars a year
Speaker 1: I spent on alcohol as rich people, not not any
Speaker 1: of it, just poor guys. Yeah, just stop drinking and
Speaker 1: get more. If you stop drinking, you'll have more time
Speaker 1: to work and help us. In a capitalist society, you
Speaker 1: know what I was actually pondering earlier today when it
Speaker 1: comes to medication that helps your brain, whether it's adderall
Speaker 1: or whatever, or like things to make you more active,
Speaker 1: it kind of feels like society is making us like
Speaker 1: it all ends up, like you have to for work,
Speaker 1: like it makes you work better, it makes you like
Speaker 1: provide obviously brains needed. It really helps me. But I
Speaker 1: was thinking about it in a more like sinister capitalistic
Speaker 1: way where it's like they just want us to be
Speaker 1: better workers, you know what I mean, more efficient actually
Speaker 1: just like I don't know, does that make sense? Yeah,
Speaker 1: no it does. And you know what else makes sense?
Speaker 1: I don't know why I keep doing this. You're so early.
Speaker 1: I I my brain has been broken by capitalism, and
Speaker 1: now all I can do is pivot to adds. I mean,
Speaker 1: the last I thought it was not bad, very good
Speaker 1: at it. So America an artist, you can capitalism off
Speaker 1: the brain. You keep needing to go to an ad.
Speaker 1: I want to keep reading from this Atlantic article weird
Speaker 1: ad transition that I want to just talk about the
Speaker 1: author of this Atlantics article, George Frederick parsons Um, And
Speaker 1: in this next part of the article, he ties his
Speaker 1: irritation about American drunkenness, with a rant about how capitalists
Speaker 1: have a right to expect that profits increase forever, and
Speaker 1: it's just the most American paragraph I've ever read. Prosperity
Speaker 1: is the reward of persevering, temperate, ungrudging work. In these days,
Speaker 1: there is, however, a great wind of new doctrine. We
Speaker 1: are asked to believe that it is possible to succeed
Speaker 1: in a very different ways, that the less a man works,
Speaker 1: for example, the more he ought to receive, that national
Speaker 1: prosperity can be advanced by diminishing production, and many other
Speaker 1: equally hard sayings. But it may be confidently affirmed that
Speaker 1: these new theories are destined to be short lived, and
Speaker 1: that the world will have to be managed eventually upon
Speaker 1: pretty much the old lines. Yeah, it's it's good, very American. Now. Yeah,
Speaker 1: for the record, Um, George Parsons died in eighteen ninety three,
Speaker 1: and I found his obituary and it blamed his death
Speaker 1: on the fact that he hadn't lifted enough. It's very funny,
Speaker 1: wait lifted like, yeah, that he had worked out enough? Yeah,
Speaker 1: what the fuck? It's very funny. Damn. That is like
Speaker 1: subtweeting a death direct insults not even a stub is
Speaker 1: just like you can't fight back. George Parsons, the author
Speaker 1: of that Atlantic article, and George Pullman, the subject of
Speaker 1: our episode today, both seem to have come at the
Speaker 1: problem of labor from the same point of view. It
Speaker 1: was foolish for workers to organize rather than seek to
Speaker 1: ascend to the upper class. That's what Parsons is saying, right,
Speaker 1: why are you organizing for more money when you should
Speaker 1: just stop spending any money on alcohol and invested all
Speaker 1: into a business and like your own circumstances. Yeah. And
Speaker 1: the way to do this, and this is this is
Speaker 1: what George Pullman believes to Workers shouldn't organize, They should
Speaker 1: seek to improve their own individual lots so they can
Speaker 1: raise up to the middle class and the upper class.
Speaker 1: And the way you do this is you scrimp and
Speaker 1: save and you work yourself to the bone. You don't drink,
Speaker 1: you don't have fun, you don't hang out with see
Speaker 1: your family, you don't spend any time for you. You
Speaker 1: do nothing but work and sock away money so that
Speaker 1: you can join the middle class or get to to
Speaker 1: revelent to our current times. And how people talk about
Speaker 1: like homelessness and unhoused. It's a disease that's existed in
Speaker 1: the United States for a very long time, and we
Speaker 1: need to it needs to not happen. It's bad. Um.
Speaker 1: I think the that view of how life should be,
Speaker 1: uh is something that should be opposed with force if necessary.
Speaker 1: Of course, it's it's a sin to the miracle of life. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it is, and it's I find it very unsettling. And
Speaker 1: this happens all the time when like you hear like
Speaker 1: a terrible quote like that, you read something and it
Speaker 1: looks exactly like today. It just proves that, like do
Speaker 1: we ever actually change? Are we always the same? Just
Speaker 1: like a different like vessel or like a different like
Speaker 1: trimmings on this world, you know, like humane doesn't actually change.
Speaker 1: We always just like keeps doing these terrible things. I
Speaker 1: don't know, it's just it's kind of sad. And yeah,
Speaker 1: it's great. No, it's good, it's good. Everything's fine. So
Speaker 1: George was of the opinion that if his workers had
Speaker 1: nicer lives and lived in more comfortable surroundings, ones that
Speaker 1: at least mimicked middle class life, they wouldn't complain. So
Speaker 1: he was like, well, if I can, just if I
Speaker 1: can build a place for my workers to live that
Speaker 1: looks like an ideal middle class town, then they won't
Speaker 1: need to organize for anything, because that's all anyone could
Speaker 1: ever want is a comfortable, clean, middle class American town.
Speaker 1: Um And he figures, if I can build a town
Speaker 1: for them, I can make it so that they can't
Speaker 1: drink because I just won't allow them to be bars there.
Speaker 1: So like I can control them and make sure they
Speaker 1: don't do any of the things because the only reason
Speaker 1: workers are unhappy is that they do things that make
Speaker 1: them unhappy and waste their money. I don't need to
Speaker 1: pay them anymore. I don't need to treat them better.
Speaker 1: All I need to do is make a place that
Speaker 1: I make a place for them to live where they
Speaker 1: won't be able to do any of the things that
Speaker 1: they're going to do otherwise because they're just they're just
Speaker 1: not as smart as I am. They can't stop themselves
Speaker 1: from from doing bad things. So if I can build
Speaker 1: a place for them to live, then they won't ruin
Speaker 1: their own lives. Dude, sounds like a bad time to me. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's just like how I don't know every rich man
Speaker 1: I feel like has a called complex and this is
Speaker 1: a very firm example of that. Yeah, yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: I think you could probably, I think probably if you
Speaker 1: were to get Elon Musk to talk honestly about how
Speaker 1: he'd want life organized in his Mars colony, you would
Speaker 1: some similar vibes. Of course. Yeah, he already feels that way.
Speaker 1: He's like, I've given all these sheeap cars to drive,
Speaker 1: I've changed the world. It's like that may be true,
Speaker 1: but you're still I am. Yeah, not a lot of
Speaker 1: anyway whatever. Um so to to kind of put George
Speaker 1: Pullman and his attitudes towards his workers, this kind of
Speaker 1: paternalist attitude that he has towards building a place for
Speaker 1: them and moderating their behavior, to put that in context,
Speaker 1: and want a quote again from Richard Schneirov. By the
Speaker 1: eighteen eighties, many reformers had shifted from personal reform through revivalism, education,
Speaker 1: and public exhortation to an environmental emphasis. They believe that
Speaker 1: by changing the social environment in which the worker lived
Speaker 1: and worked, they could induce habits of respectability, uplift workers character,
Speaker 1: and change social attitudes. In eighteen seventy nine, Pullman followed
Speaker 1: closely the movement in New York to create model tenements
Speaker 1: that would offer working class families clean and ventilated room,
Speaker 1: to reduce sickness and disease, and promote good morals by
Speaker 1: inducing men to stay at home rather than escape to saloons.
Speaker 1: In return, investors would receive a reasonable seven return. So
Speaker 1: this is his his ideas I'm going to build. He's
Speaker 1: looking at these kind of like model tenements going up
Speaker 1: New York and he's like, well, I'm gonna build a
Speaker 1: town of my own, and not only will it be
Speaker 1: clean and keep workers away from vices like drinking, but
Speaker 1: it'll be profitable. Right, I'm gonna get it. I'm gonna
Speaker 1: get a positive return on this as an investment to
Speaker 1: I have to benefit and like all dudes like him,
Speaker 1: when he wrote about this, Pullman phrased that as if
Speaker 1: it was like a rule of the universe. Quote, capital
Speaker 1: will not invest in sentiment, nor for sentimental considerations for
Speaker 1: the laboring classes. But let it once be proved that
Speaker 1: enterprises of this kind are safe and profitable, and we
Speaker 1: shall see great manufacturing corporations developing similar enterprises, and thus
Speaker 1: a new era will be introduced into the history of labor.
Speaker 1: It's like, literally, I won't do anything if I don't
Speaker 1: make money off of it. Yeah, I will open the
Speaker 1: door for you if you Capitalists of course won't don't care.
Speaker 1: Like capitalists have no interest in workers living comfortably or cleanly. Um,
Speaker 1: But if you show them it's a profitable business, then
Speaker 1: then everyone's on board. Yeah. So it's like very sinister
Speaker 1: because on the surface, if you don't take any deeper,
Speaker 1: it's kind of nice, you know what I mean. Fine,
Speaker 1: he's low key helping them and like it's clean and whatever.
Speaker 1: But it's just so it's just so insiduous I think,
Speaker 1: And that's unsettling if you're if you're starting position, is
Speaker 1: that the only reason you would help your workers and
Speaker 1: and and give them and build a nice place for
Speaker 1: them to live is that it would profit you. Well,
Speaker 1: then as soon as it's not profitable, what are you
Speaker 1: going to do? Very good point. So, today, the town
Speaker 1: of Pullman, Illinois is a neighborhood on Chicago South Side,
Speaker 1: which I am very reliably informed is the baddest part
Speaker 1: of town. But in the early eighteen eighties it was
Speaker 1: a one and fifty acre town to the south of
Speaker 1: the Pullman car work so it's not part of Chicago yet,
Speaker 1: like it's a separate town in and of itself. UM
Speaker 1: right outside of the big factory where the Pullman cars
Speaker 1: are built. UM. The factory took up nine buildings on
Speaker 1: thirty acres and Pullman the town was exhaustively planned around
Speaker 1: it to be as modern as possible. Sewer and gas
Speaker 1: lines were at it first, so that every home would
Speaker 1: enjoy heating and water. This had the benefit of the
Speaker 1: ensuring the city itself would not flood like Chicago had.
Speaker 1: Most descriptions of the Pullman Town will acknowledge that it
Speaker 1: was a much nicer place to live than many of
Speaker 1: the tenements working people had endured at the time. It's
Speaker 1: unclear how accurate this is, and it seems in some
Speaker 1: parts to be a measure of opinion. Pullman the town
Speaker 1: was organized hierarchically, and the people with higher paying and
Speaker 1: more prestigious jobs lived at the center of town, close
Speaker 1: to the hotel, the school, the libraries, and the parks
Speaker 1: and nice spacious modern houses, but low paid grunt laborers.
Speaker 1: The actual rank and file workers still lived in claustrophobic
Speaker 1: tenement blocks. These were they just had a nice outside.
Speaker 1: They were done up, so on the outside it looked
Speaker 1: like a nice block of houses, but it was tenements
Speaker 1: on the inside, and they were newer and cleaner tenements
Speaker 1: with more amenities than a lot of stuff in the
Speaker 1: city itself, but they were still cramped in not high
Speaker 1: quality dwellings. This passage from a rite up by the
Speaker 1: University of Virginia lays out the conditions inside. Quote the
Speaker 1: workers houses humble and appearance both inside and out, were monotonous,
Speaker 1: and he gave the impression of soldiers barracks. They were
Speaker 1: said to be clean, with an abundance of air. Most
Speaker 1: were two stories with five rooms. In addition to sellers,
Speaker 1: pantries and closets. There was indeed water from a faucet
Speaker 1: used by five families, often located in one of the
Speaker 1: small closets. There were no yards, and for those families
Speaker 1: living upstairs, no front door. Most of the buildings were
Speaker 1: constructed with brick made in the Pullman brickyards. These same
Speaker 1: brickyards contained the eyesore of the town, four rows of
Speaker 1: little sixteen by twenty foot wooden shanties that had a
Speaker 1: sitting room, two bedrooms, and a kitchen and a lean.
Speaker 1: To compare all of this to the arcade and library.
Speaker 1: Despite Mr Pullman's intentions and his desirability for the commercial
Speaker 1: value of beauty, his model town was not a real
Speaker 1: home for workers who lived there. One woman compared it
Speaker 1: to living in a great hotel. We call it camping out,
Speaker 1: So it's not really all that great. I think that
Speaker 1: the most casual descriptions will say, like, well it was,
Speaker 1: you know, there were problems with it, but it was
Speaker 1: nicer than other It's like, no, maybe it was cleaner
Speaker 1: a bit, but it was not like a lot of
Speaker 1: the people who lived there were not living in great conditions.
Speaker 1: It just sounds like slavery two point oh, where it's like, well,
Speaker 1: that's kind of where we're building too. So yeah, it was.
Speaker 1: It looked nice on the outside that a movie set,
Speaker 1: you know, And that's that's what a lot of people
Speaker 1: say about it, is like it's not a home. It's
Speaker 1: a place you can sleep. There's things about it that
Speaker 1: are nice, but it's not really a home. Um and
Speaker 1: I found it right up from the Pullman Museum. That
Speaker 1: makes it very clear why people might not have been
Speaker 1: happy to live in Pullman quote. In eighteen eighty, Pullman
Speaker 1: bought four thousand acres near Lake Calumet, some fourteen miles
Speaker 1: south of Chicago on the Illinois Central Railroad, for eight
Speaker 1: hundred thousand dollars. He hired Soland Spencer Beaman to design
Speaker 1: his new plant there, and in an effort to solve
Speaker 1: the issue of labor unrest and poverty, he also built
Speaker 1: a town adjacent to his factory, with the Jone housing
Speaker 1: shopping theaters, shopping areas, churches, theaters, parks, hotel, and library.
Speaker 1: The thirteen hundred original structures were entirely designed by Beaman.
Speaker 1: The centerpiece of the complex was the administration building and
Speaker 1: its man made lake. The hotel Florence, named for Pullman's
Speaker 1: favorite daughter, was built nearby. Pullman believed that the country
Speaker 1: air and fine facilities, without agitator saloons and city vice districts,
Speaker 1: would result in a happy, loyal workplace. The model planned
Speaker 1: community became a leading attraction during the World's Columbian Exposition
Speaker 1: of eighteen ninety three and caused a national sensation. Pullman
Speaker 1: was praised by the national press for his benevolence and vision.
Speaker 1: As pleasant as this community may have been, Pullman expected
Speaker 1: the town to make money by eight the community profitable
Speaker 1: in its own right was valued at over five million dollars.
Speaker 1: Pullman ruled the town like a feudal baron. He prohibited
Speaker 1: independent newspapers, public speeches, town meetings, or open discussion. His
Speaker 1: inspectors regularly entered at homes to inspect for cleanliness, and
Speaker 1: could terminate leases on ten days notice. The church stood empty,
Speaker 1: since no approved denomination would pay rent and no other
Speaker 1: congregation was allowed. Private charitable organizations were prohibited. Pullman employees declared,
Speaker 1: we are born in a Pullman house, fed from the
Speaker 1: Pullman shops, taught in the Pullman school, catechized in the
Speaker 1: Pullman church, and when we die, we shall go to
Speaker 1: Pullman hell. Wow. Yeah, that's an ending to a sentence.
Speaker 1: First of all. Uh, but it's isn't it ironic? Because
Speaker 1: you said he didn't necessarily support slavery when it actually
Speaker 1: was happening, you know what I mean? So I feel
Speaker 1: like he found a loop, Like in my head, he
Speaker 1: doesn't think it's a slavery, right, of course, I mean,
Speaker 1: it's not slavery. It is not like there are aspects
Speaker 1: of it that do eventually kind of verge on slavery,
Speaker 1: parallel to exploiting people and like acting like their master
Speaker 1: and all that stuff. Yeah, and there's some of the
Speaker 1: some of the white people who protest latter will compare
Speaker 1: themselves to slaves. I want to I don't want to
Speaker 1: do that because I don't think that's fair. Um And
Speaker 1: in part I think why the white people at the
Speaker 1: time we're doing that, is that, like they're pretty fucking racist.
Speaker 1: Of course it's not that bad. Yeah, no, I mean yeah,
Speaker 1: white white victimization. It's tales all those time. He's more
Speaker 1: of a he's more of a he's more of a
Speaker 1: of a dictator than he is a slave owner, right Like,
Speaker 1: that's more of the attitude. Is that, like they live
Speaker 1: here and they could technically leave most of them. Um,
Speaker 1: but if they live here, Uh, then he's going to
Speaker 1: control every aspect of their life that he can. Right Like.
Speaker 1: There's no discussion on it. I know what's best for you,
Speaker 1: and I'm going to ensure you do it. Um. Do
Speaker 1: we actually sorry, did we take an ad break or
Speaker 1: did we just talk about taking it out? We took
Speaker 1: one ad break, We didn't take a second dead way?
Speaker 1: Oh sorry, No, No, we talked about it. I just
Speaker 1: want to make sure. I don't know, because we usually
Speaker 1: it's great h you know what else is producing? I'm sorry, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: continue go for it, uh RAI theon is making new
Speaker 1: things to kill people that they are yep, that's every day. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so stay tuned to find out what those are. Very
Speaker 1: proud of you, Sharine, Thank you Rob for sorry that.
Speaker 1: I just like thought we just talked about. I just
Speaker 1: want I wanted to make sure sorry, I was being
Speaker 1: I was being a producer at that moment. We crushed it.
Speaker 1: All right, here's ads. All right, we're back. So Pullman
Speaker 1: builds this town, moves a bunch of people in, and
Speaker 1: I should note the only people allowed to live in
Speaker 1: the Pullman town are white people. Um you you you
Speaker 1: cannot live there. He has black workers. They are not
Speaker 1: allowed to live in his town because again it's his
Speaker 1: idealized version of society, which does not have any black people.
Speaker 1: The town eventually had a population of about twelve Pullman workers,
Speaker 1: and things chugged along well enough until teen three, when
Speaker 1: the entire Gilded Age collectively shat its pants. The basic
Speaker 1: problem was this international capital got addicted to gambling on
Speaker 1: the I p o s of countries like Argentina. A
Speaker 1: bunch of these bets went badly in the early eighteen nineties.
Speaker 1: This spooked European investors, and those investors started hoarding gold
Speaker 1: from the U. S. Treasury. This coincided with the collapse
Speaker 1: of a massive railway company and a general contraction for
Speaker 1: the whole railway industry, which had been flooded with far
Speaker 1: more money than it could ever hope to absorb and
Speaker 1: been grossly overbuilt. Um Grover Cleveland, who started office in
Speaker 1: eighteen nine three, responded to all this by fucking around
Speaker 1: with silver, which didn't do much to allay people's currency fears.
Speaker 1: As more Americans lost their jobs, others panicked and withdrew
Speaker 1: their money in moss from banks. The economies of the
Speaker 1: Western world, such as they existed back then, fell apart.
Speaker 1: George Pullman had to fire a quarter of his workforce.
Speaker 1: Those who remained faced dwindling hours. This might have been
Speaker 1: a situation where Pullman's scheme to reduce worker unrest by
Speaker 1: building them an ice place to live could have come
Speaker 1: in handy if he had example set. For example, said hey, guys,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna have to cut everybody's hours, but you know what,
Speaker 1: I'm canceling rent while this economic crisis goes on or
Speaker 1: something um or it could have at least pro rated
Speaker 1: or whatever. He would have had options that he probably
Speaker 1: would have been more popular than ever, and his workers
Speaker 1: would have been like, well, ship, this is the benefit
Speaker 1: of letting a guy like Pullman be your boss and
Speaker 1: run your life is when times are hired, he takes
Speaker 1: care of you, you know. But George Pullman could not
Speaker 1: stand the thought that one of his endeavors might not
Speaker 1: turn a profit, and so he kept rent in utilities
Speaker 1: at the same rates they've been before the depression. While
Speaker 1: he was cutting everybody's pay. Now he actually parallel that
Speaker 1: happen that's happening now. Well, and here's the thing that's
Speaker 1: sucked up. I guess you could argue, if you were
Speaker 1: looking at this from a pro capitalist standpoint, like, well,
Speaker 1: he couldn't stop their rent because he couldn't afford to.
Speaker 1: He had like this, this was a business, and like
Speaker 1: he he can't pay for everybody's rent forever. It costs
Speaker 1: some money to upkeep the town. But he was actually
Speaker 1: willing to lose money, just not that way. So he
Speaker 1: wasn't willing to cancel people's rent. But he did take
Speaker 1: on contracts that at a loss, so that he took
Speaker 1: on contracts, and he charged so little that the company
Speaker 1: lost money on the contracts in order to get workers
Speaker 1: back into the office working, so he wouldn't lower their
Speaker 1: renter bills, but he would actually lose money in order
Speaker 1: to make sure that people were still working for him.
Speaker 1: That's twisted, right, Yeah, it's more about the ego than
Speaker 1: about the money and that in that in that sense,
Speaker 1: you know what I want to Yeah, it's it's not
Speaker 1: I want to take care of my workers. It's I
Speaker 1: want my workers to still be working, you know, me
Speaker 1: for me, you know that's it's yeah, it's very interesting
Speaker 1: and uh sociopathic. Pullman hid this fact, the fact that
Speaker 1: he was taking on contracts at a loss from his
Speaker 1: labor force. His employees did not know that the company
Speaker 1: was losing money to employ them um, but by eight
Speaker 1: ninety four it had become fairly popular knowledge due to
Speaker 1: some leaks, and this led to a burst of additional
Speaker 1: unrest from Pullman employees. They were also angry that Pullman
Speaker 1: had increasingly made them pay substantial premium for things like
Speaker 1: water and gas and the Pullman Town um which water
Speaker 1: and gas. The local government provided those to Pullman like
Speaker 1: it was a town. They should have just been available
Speaker 1: for a pretty low fee to the people living there.
Speaker 1: But the Pullman company charged employees for a thing that
Speaker 1: was being provided by the government, that those employees are
Speaker 1: paying taxes for. And that come again, I have no
Speaker 1: response to that. I'm not going to pretend to be funny.
Speaker 1: I have no It's dope. So that was not the
Speaker 1: end of the grift, as prospect dot Org rights, His
Speaker 1: one giant church was too expensive for most congregations to
Speaker 1: afford its rent, and his ill conceived attempt to convince
Speaker 1: all the local denominations to merge into one generic mega
Speaker 1: church failed. His library charged to membership fee. To foster
Speaker 1: his notion of personal responsibility. Workers avoided the hotel bar
Speaker 1: and the ever watchful eye of off duty supervisors, limiting
Speaker 1: their public rousing to a neighboring village colloquially known as
Speaker 1: bum Town. The housing, too, was for rent only. His
Speaker 1: aim was to ensure that housing remain in good repair
Speaker 1: and attractive, and he charged higher rents to maintain them.
Speaker 1: Here Pullman applied his usual belief that the public would
Speaker 1: pay more for a higher quality, ignoring the fact that
Speaker 1: this particular public his employees had little choice when his
Speaker 1: was the only housing in town. So touch, he's out
Speaker 1: of touch at that point, you know. I mean it's
Speaker 1: a it's a smart it's a smart grift. But he is,
Speaker 1: like he is grifting them, you know, he's robbing them basically. Um,
Speaker 1: they're paying more, vastly more than they need to. And
Speaker 1: because they're living in this Pullman town, they can't go
Speaker 1: out and find other work, right yeah, like they're they're
Speaker 1: out in the Pullman town. Yeah. Yeah, very twisted and
Speaker 1: just yeah, so he cud of strange way he cuts
Speaker 1: wages while maintaining rent and continuing to charge people additionally
Speaker 1: for water and gas. He cuts wages by an average
Speaker 1: of twenty eight per cent across the board, which means
Speaker 1: employees all start to fall behind on their rent. Now
Speaker 1: you can go in debt to the company, right, Um,
Speaker 1: and if you're in debt to the company, h And
Speaker 1: you can also get go in debt to the company
Speaker 1: if like there's a building code violation, which you know
Speaker 1: how landlords work, right, everything's a building code violation and
Speaker 1: those things are taken automatically out of the worker's paycheck,
Speaker 1: as are things that they go in debt to the company.
Speaker 1: For food, so workers would go negative to the company,
Speaker 1: which means they can't quit without need suddenly owing all
Speaker 1: that money. Right, like the bill immediately comes due if
Speaker 1: you stop working for Pullman soever tied to. It's not
Speaker 1: quite slavery, but it is not as far away from slavery. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's not as far away from slavery as it ought
Speaker 1: to be. You know. That's that's a grit when you
Speaker 1: start having employees in debt to the company and unable
Speaker 1: to quit because then they would you know, potentially get
Speaker 1: into legal trouble for that. Then you're in a real
Speaker 1: uncomfortable territory, you know, like you're making a problem that
Speaker 1: only you can solve, and you're consciously making that problem,
Speaker 1: you know what I mean, Like it's they he controls
Speaker 1: too much and there's no way. I don't know, it's
Speaker 1: just it's kind of like almost backwards the way he's
Speaker 1: doing in my head, but don't you know what I mean,
Speaker 1: Like he's making a problem only he can solve it,
Speaker 1: and he knows that and probably they know that too,
Speaker 1: and just just like a I'm gonna stop God complex. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's fun, it's all good. Everything's fine. So for a look,
Speaker 1: at how bleak this situation could be for the workers.
Speaker 1: I want to read a quote from a Pullman worker
Speaker 1: named Jenny Curtis, and this is her telling her story
Speaker 1: of working for Pullman. My father worked for the Pullman
Speaker 1: Company for ten years. Last summer he was sick for
Speaker 1: three months and in September he died. At the time
Speaker 1: of his death, we owed the Pullman Company about sixty
Speaker 1: dollars for rent. I was working at the time, and
Speaker 1: they told me I would have to pay that rent
Speaker 1: good that I could every payday until it was heid.
Speaker 1: I did not say I would not pay, but thought,
Speaker 1: rather than be thrown out of work, I would pay it.
Speaker 1: Many a time, I have drawn nine and ten dollars
Speaker 1: for two weeks work, paid seven dollars for my board,
Speaker 1: and given the company my remaining two or three dollars
Speaker 1: on the rents, and I still loathe them fifteen dollars.
Speaker 1: Sometimes when I could not possibly give them anything because
Speaker 1: her wage was cut from ninety cents to twenty cents
Speaker 1: per section of carpet, I would receive slurs and insults
Speaker 1: from the clerks in the bank because Mr Pullman would
Speaker 1: not give me enough and return for my hard labor
Speaker 1: to pay the rent for one of his houses and
Speaker 1: live so like employees, it's often a family business. You're
Speaker 1: all living in town. If your dad dies with debts,
Speaker 1: you take on those debts in addition to like what
Speaker 1: you have to pay to key. It's yeah, well that's
Speaker 1: fucked up. That is fucked up. It's like forever branding
Speaker 1: people again two points out with like being like like
Speaker 1: at your mercy in a way. So in May of
Speaker 1: eighteen ninety four, the Pullman workers decided to strike for
Speaker 1: a better deal. They were not yet unionized, so they
Speaker 1: set their sights on a man who at the time
Speaker 1: embodied the hope for the power of labor. And this
Speaker 1: brings us to a dude I've really like, Eugene Victor
Speaker 1: Deb's more commonly just called Eugene V. Debs. He was
Speaker 1: born in Tara Houte, Indiana, in eighteen fifty five. He
Speaker 1: was the son of a fairly well off family. Um
Speaker 1: they owned a couple of small businesses, might have even
Speaker 1: had a little bit more money than uh than Pullman's family.
Speaker 1: Like Pullman, Deb's dropped out of school, although he made
Speaker 1: it to fourteen, and he got a job cleaning train
Speaker 1: cars for fifty cents a day. It's worth noting that
Speaker 1: Pullman quit school even earlier than Deb's, in the fourth
Speaker 1: grade and got a job paying forty dollars a month,
Speaker 1: which is about twenty five dollars a month more than
Speaker 1: what young Deb's could expect to earn um. So that's
Speaker 1: interesting to me. Like from the beginning, I don't know,
Speaker 1: I guess Pullman's family probably had more money because yeah, Deb's, Yeah,
Speaker 1: Deb's is making like fifteen bucks a month something like that. Uh,
Speaker 1: and Pullman's making forty bucks a month in their in
Speaker 1: their first gigs out the door, which I guess you know,
Speaker 1: Pullman's hired by his family, so that does help. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Deb's eventually quit doing this job and he returned home
Speaker 1: to work as an accountant for his father's business. Again,
Speaker 1: neither of these are like poor kids. By age nineteen,
Speaker 1: Eugene had joined his first union for locomotive firefighters. He
Speaker 1: was the secretary and he also edited their magazine, which
Speaker 1: he used as a platform to urge sobriety and patriotic citizenship.
Speaker 1: He was not a radical at this stage, and his
Speaker 1: trade union membership did not cause him to identify as
Speaker 1: a socialist. He did get increasingly political and was elected
Speaker 1: a city clerk in eighteen seventy nine and state representative
Speaker 1: in eighteen eighty four. Debs was a Democrat and he
Speaker 1: urged modest reforms from a broadly pro worker platform. So
Speaker 1: Debs was a Democrat and he urged modest reforms from
Speaker 1: a broadly pro worker platform. And I'm gonna quote from
Speaker 1: Jacobin for this next part here. By the late eighteen eighties,
Speaker 1: Debs had started his trek away from conservative unionism. A
Speaker 1: railroad walkout in eighteen eighty eight convinced to Debs, who
Speaker 1: served as strike leader, that a harmonious relationship with massive
Speaker 1: corporations was impossible with out the counterweight of organized workers.
Speaker 1: He also began to criticize the craft unionism that dominated
Speaker 1: the labor movement. Rather than self balkanized according to job tasks,
Speaker 1: federationists like Deb's insisted that workers, whether conductor or fireman,
Speaker 1: engineer or brakeman, organized under one common fold, as Deb's
Speaker 1: explained in May eighteen nine three. That same year, he
Speaker 1: co founded the American Railway Union, putting his vision of
Speaker 1: a fighting industrial unionism into practice. So the early unions
Speaker 1: are like, we're all of the guys who do breaking
Speaker 1: for the train. We're all of the conductors, and like,
Speaker 1: you don't have as much power when you're that kind
Speaker 1: of atomized, you know, unless you're able to work together
Speaker 1: to some extent. And Deb's is one of the people
Speaker 1: who's really pushing no, everyone who works for the railroad
Speaker 1: should be in the same union and we all fight together,
Speaker 1: you know, well, Um, And the a r U was
Speaker 1: kind of his his attempt to do that. So larger
Speaker 1: workers organizations had existed before. Deb isn't the first person
Speaker 1: to do this. The American Federation of Labor was founded
Speaker 1: in eighteen eighty six, the Nights of Labor back in
Speaker 1: eighteen sixty nine, UM, but the idea that workers within
Speaker 1: a specific industry would organize based on that industry rather
Speaker 1: than job type was pretty novel. Um. Debs was convinced
Speaker 1: that bosses were playing different specialties off of one another,
Speaker 1: trying to get workers to kind of compete with each
Speaker 1: other rather than working together UM and that this artificial
Speaker 1: competition was to stop workers from actually organizing together for
Speaker 1: their shared interests. When he resigned from his job working
Speaker 1: for the Brotherhood of Locomotive Fireman, Deb's wrote quote it
Speaker 1: has been my life's desire to unify railroad employees and
Speaker 1: to eliminate the aristocracy of labor which unfortunately exists, and
Speaker 1: organize them so all will be on an equality. Now.
Speaker 1: The a r U was founded for him to strike
Speaker 1: back at what was effectively a union of railroad managers,
Speaker 1: which had organized to set standard job classifications and wages
Speaker 1: between different railroad companies, as well as to build a
Speaker 1: common pool of strike breakers and even an inter industry
Speaker 1: strike fund of sorts to help railroads outlast an the
Speaker 1: union strikes. So deb sees that like workers are splitting
Speaker 1: themselves up too much, while the actual railroad companies are
Speaker 1: all organizing together, they effectively have a union um In
Speaker 1: eight nine three, immediately after he founds the a r U,
Speaker 1: he wins a substantial victory over the Great Northern Pacific
Speaker 1: Railroad during like a real landmark strike. And this is
Speaker 1: the first time something like this happens, that like this,
Speaker 1: this broad cross section of railroad workers organized and win
Speaker 1: a fight against a major railroad. This brings new members
Speaker 1: and dues flooding into the a r U. He's the
Speaker 1: He's the talk of kind of the union movement. After
Speaker 1: this By June of eighteen ninety four, just weeks after
Speaker 1: Pullman workers made their decision to strike, the a r
Speaker 1: U had reached its greatest extent, a hundred and fifty
Speaker 1: thousand members, now roughly a third of George Pullman's employees.
Speaker 1: Where are you members? And when the union held its
Speaker 1: first convention, George Pullman's employees, like the subset of the
Speaker 1: air you that worked for Pullman, came to the union
Speaker 1: gathering with a plan. The Pullman workers asked the entire
Speaker 1: a RU to join their boycott, stopping all trains from
Speaker 1: carrying Pullman cars across parts of the nation represented by
Speaker 1: the a r U. So these these workers for Pullman
Speaker 1: who are in the air, you are like, hey, we're
Speaker 1: going on strike. But that's not going to be enough. Like,
Speaker 1: we want you to go on strike too. We want
Speaker 1: you to refuse to service Pullman cars anywhere in the country. Um,
Speaker 1: even if you're not an Impullman employee, because that's going
Speaker 1: to put more yea solidarity, He's gonna put a lot
Speaker 1: more stress on the bosses. Hell yeah, I like where
Speaker 1: this is going. I want to read from a quote
Speaker 1: from their plea to the a r U. Pullman both
Speaker 1: the man and the town is an ulcer on the
Speaker 1: body politic. He owns the houses, the schoolhouses, the churches
Speaker 1: of God, and the town he gave his once humble name.
Speaker 1: And thus the merry war, the dance of skeletons bathed
Speaker 1: in human tears goes on, and it will go on, brothers, forever,
Speaker 1: unless you the American Railway Union stop it ended, crush
Speaker 1: it out. People used to write more colorfully back then. Yeah. So,
Speaker 1: after visiting with workers and hearing their stories of privation,
Speaker 1: Debs decided that not only did they deserve the air
Speaker 1: use solidarity, but that this could be a chance to
Speaker 1: start to pull together the kind of national labor coalition
Speaker 1: that he thought was necessary to push back against the
Speaker 1: forces of capital. Still, he attempted to negotiate first. George Pullman, however,
Speaker 1: was not a negotiator. He believed he was defending his
Speaker 1: and everyone else's inherent right to private property. Workers had
Speaker 1: no right to demand better conditions from him, as the
Speaker 1: factories and train cards they labored and were his personal property.
Speaker 1: Local civic institutions in Chicago jumped in to try and
Speaker 1: urge some kind of accord, but compromise proved impossible, Eugene V.
Speaker 1: Debs and the delegates of the A Air You decided
Speaker 1: to strike. Debs declared that all shall march together and
Speaker 1: fight together until working men shall receive and enjoy the
Speaker 1: fruits of their toil. Strike leader Thomas Heathcote explained to
Speaker 1: the position of the pullman men, thus, lee, we do
Speaker 1: not know what the outcome will be, and in fact
Speaker 1: we do not care much. We do know that we
Speaker 1: are working for less wages than will maintain ourselves and
Speaker 1: our families and the necessities of life. And on that
Speaker 1: one proposition we absolutely refused to work any long her.
Speaker 1: The A r U Sympathy strike was the largest declaration
Speaker 1: of labor solidarity up to that point. It still is
Speaker 1: one of the largest examples of anything like this ever
Speaker 1: happening UM, and it's completely unprecedented. But there were, however,
Speaker 1: like you, limits to the kind of solidarity these people
Speaker 1: were willing to express, and those limits mostly landed on
Speaker 1: racial lines. So Deb's, for his part, begged strikers to
Speaker 1: accept black workers as part of their sympathy boycott. He
Speaker 1: was like, if if we don't take these people into
Speaker 1: and represent them to UM, then they're going They're going
Speaker 1: to be used as scabs, And why why wouldn't they
Speaker 1: be scabs if we won't let them, if we won't
Speaker 1: like link arms with them, why wouldn't they go work
Speaker 1: for money somewhere else, Like we're not going to help
Speaker 1: them do anything. Um, that was gonna be my next
Speaker 1: question about like, yeah, if so the union at this
Speaker 1: point it's all white, Oh yes, yes, and Deb's is
Speaker 1: Deb's is kind of pushing and there's a lot of
Speaker 1: argument about whether how already really pushes. But he's kind
Speaker 1: of pushing for that to maybe be opened up. But
Speaker 1: they the union does not agree to do that. So
Speaker 1: it's the same thing. Like you can criticize Pullman for
Speaker 1: saying like black employees aren't allowed to live in my
Speaker 1: Pullman town, but you know, it's worth noting also that
Speaker 1: the white Pullman unionized employees were not willing to let
Speaker 1: black people join their union. Like it's basically, well, it's
Speaker 1: you know, of course they're racist, of course, I mean,
Speaker 1: but every I mean, what's his face? Debs sounds like
Speaker 1: like he's trying to improve society, but it's not possible
Speaker 1: at that point. He's he's trying, Um, he does, he
Speaker 1: does a lot over the course of his life. Um,
Speaker 1: So Debs puts forward a motion to include two thousand
Speaker 1: black Pullman workers in the strike. It was voted on
Speaker 1: at a union meeting, but the majority of those present
Speaker 1: voted against it. So again in his credit he does
Speaker 1: he does try. Um, the motion fails and the strikes.
Speaker 1: So the strikes only going to consist of white workers.
Speaker 1: This is deeply unfortunate and also kind of ironic because workers,
Speaker 1: when talked to by the press, kept saying things like
Speaker 1: this quote. The only difference between slavery at Pullman and
Speaker 1: what it was down south before the war is that
Speaker 1: there the owners took care of their slaves when they
Speaker 1: were sick, and here they don't, which God, I don't.
Speaker 1: I think it is entirely fair. Um, But yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: think slavery there, it's like you're not gonna find it.
Speaker 1: You're not gonna find a large mass of white dudes
Speaker 1: who are not problematic in eighteen ninety four today. So initially,
Speaker 1: the Pullman strikers enjoyed enormous support from the University of Illinois.
Speaker 1: After being elected mayor in December eighteen ninety three, Hopkins
Speaker 1: made the cause of the Pullman workers his own, allowed
Speaker 1: Chicago police to collect charity for them, and kept police
Speaker 1: from interfering in the strike while it remained peaceful. Indeed,
Speaker 1: support for the strikers was widespread in the city. Jane Adams,
Speaker 1: founder of the Whole House, remembered returning to Chicago one
Speaker 1: July nine to find almost everyone on a Halstead Street
Speaker 1: wearing a white ribbon, the emblem of the striker's side. Now,
Speaker 1: the strike also benefited from the neutrality of Illinois Governor
Speaker 1: John Peter Altgeld, who would have been elected in eighteen
Speaker 1: ninety two with strong labor support. Alt Guild had pardoned
Speaker 1: three Haymarket anarchists four others had been hanged in eighteen seven,
Speaker 1: and issued an accompanying message in which he declared the
Speaker 1: trial in which they had been convicted in an injustice.
Speaker 1: During the early part of the strike, All Guild refused
Speaker 1: to send militia into Chicago. So the strikers have a
Speaker 1: lot of benefits, including the fact that a lot of
Speaker 1: local elected leaders are on their side and in some
Speaker 1: one case at least pretty radical themselves, which helps. I think.
Speaker 1: Also because it's all white that helps. It's it's all
Speaker 1: they're all white. Yeah. By the end of June, more
Speaker 1: than a hundred and fifty thousand railroad workers in twenty
Speaker 1: seven states had joined the sympathy strike, refusing to service
Speaker 1: any trains with a Pullman car, which was most strains.
Speaker 1: So the whole American railroad system grinds to a halt.
Speaker 1: As the Chicago Times wrote, quote, some roads are absolutely
Speaker 1: and utterly blockaded. Others only feel the embargo slightly, but
Speaker 1: it grows in strength with every hour. So this raises
Speaker 1: panic to a fever pitch among national elites, with a
Speaker 1: writer at the Nation declaring the boycott an attempt to
Speaker 1: starve out society. So the Pullman strike had grown to
Speaker 1: be the sort of thing that actually did put the
Speaker 1: whole system at risk. Bosses, grasping for a way to
Speaker 1: destroy this threat to their supremacy, landed on a tactic
Speaker 1: that is familiar to all of us today, hyping up
Speaker 1: acts of violence from protesting workers. From a write up
Speaker 1: in Lapham's Quarterly quote, the effects of the strike were
Speaker 1: felt most intensely in Chicago itself, particularly as public transportation
Speaker 1: came to a halt. After street car workers joined the strike,
Speaker 1: violence broke out. As Presidents Cleveland later wrote, almost in
Speaker 1: a night, it grew to full proportions of malevolence and anger.
Speaker 1: Rioting and violence were his early accompaniments, and it spread
Speaker 1: so swiftly that within a few days it had reached
Speaker 1: nearly the entire western and southwestern sections of our country.
Speaker 1: He wasn't wrong. Freight cars were derailed, engineers were assaulted,
Speaker 1: tracks were blocked, and train cars and buildings were set
Speaker 1: on fire. Now, the worst thing that happened during this
Speaker 1: riot was that a mail truck was damaged, which gave
Speaker 1: President Cleveland the excuse he'd been looking forward to intervene.
Speaker 1: The President claimed interference with the Post was a federal issue,
Speaker 1: which it is, and used that to justify deploying fourteen
Speaker 1: thousand soldiers to crack heads, which is more legally questionable.
Speaker 1: But this is the justification, right, they're fucking with the mail,
Speaker 1: now I'm gonna send in troops. Yeah. And this is
Speaker 1: in the fact that, as a general rule, the strikers
Speaker 1: would actually let mail trucks buy um because they didn't
Speaker 1: want to stop people from getting their past. Because it
Speaker 1: just like ship gets heated, right, people are fighting in
Speaker 1: the street like as a mail truck gets damaged. You know,
Speaker 1: the national media Obviously, as soon as there's violence, goes
Speaker 1: all culture warry on the strike, calling it deb's is
Speaker 1: rebellion and framing it as an attack on civilization itself. Now,
Speaker 1: the strike had gotten off to a strong start, but
Speaker 1: from this point it gets hampered from a number of factors.
Speaker 1: For one thing, the a f L, the American Federation
Speaker 1: of Labor, never support the Pullman strike. It's head, Samuel Gompers,
Speaker 1: was a very conservative man and very hostile to socialism.
Speaker 1: He believed that only skilled craft workers ought to unionize.
Speaker 1: And the fact that he and the a f L
Speaker 1: delegates didn't vote to support the air you strike really
Speaker 1: not like narrowed the scope of the scope of a
Speaker 1: sympathy strike. It's why there's a potential at the beginning,
Speaker 1: maybe other unions could get involved, other industries could get involved,
Speaker 1: like laborers all around the country could organize for railroad
Speaker 1: workers and this be a precedent um. But that's not
Speaker 1: what Gompers wants, that's not what the a f L wants,
Speaker 1: and so it doesn't happen. Um. Now that said, well,
Speaker 1: Gompers get some blame for the strikes failure. The fact
Speaker 1: that these strikers themselves are pretty racist. Also gets a
Speaker 1: lot of blame because Pullman is able to bring in
Speaker 1: black workers as strike breakers, and the union had already
Speaker 1: told these guys, fuck you, you're not welcome in. Why
Speaker 1: shouldn't they scap right, normally that's a clear moral choice
Speaker 1: in this case, like what what what do you expect
Speaker 1: me to do? You're not organizing, former, you're not doing
Speaker 1: you're not willing to do ship for me. You don't
Speaker 1: even think I'm a person. So this guy's offering me money.
Speaker 1: Fuck you, Like I I can't blame in this instance.
Speaker 1: I can't blame me for scabbing, right, like two enemies, which, yeah,
Speaker 1: like yeah, what were they supposed to do? You know? Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's fair, very fair. Yeah, labor historian Tom Gilpin told
Speaker 1: Lapham's quarterly quote, it's not clear that even had Samuel
Speaker 1: Gompers weighed in on the side of the air you,
Speaker 1: that the strike could have been one. Clearly, a fractured
Speaker 1: labor movement will be overcome by a united business class,
Speaker 1: especially one that has the military mte of the federal
Speaker 1: government behind it, which is an important lesson there. The
Speaker 1: power of the bayonet was braced, as it always is,
Speaker 1: by the perception of profound legality. Cleveland's attorney general got
Speaker 1: an injunction from a circuit court ruled on by two
Speaker 1: anti union judges, which prohibited air you leaders for compelling
Speaker 1: or inducing employees from railroads to refuse to perform their duties.
Speaker 1: Debs and other air you heads were also forbidden from
Speaker 1: communicating with subordinates, which meant deb's could no longer send
Speaker 1: telegrams to try and calm strikers down and avoid violence,
Speaker 1: because again, that's kind of what they want in this situation,
Speaker 1: is for things to go so like these these injunctions
Speaker 1: reduced the ability of Debs and other folks at the
Speaker 1: a are you to actually like organize things, which means
Speaker 1: it gets more chaotic and more bad ship happens. And
Speaker 1: then in early July, the troops entered the field from
Speaker 1: the Encyclopedia Britannica Quote worried that given the terms of
Speaker 1: the injunction, he could no longer exercise any control over
Speaker 1: the strikers. Debs at first welcomed the troops, thinking that
Speaker 1: they might maintain order and allow the striking boycott to
Speaker 1: proceed peacefully, but it soon became clear that the troops
Speaker 1: were not neutral peacekeepers. They were there to make sure
Speaker 1: that the trains moved, which would inevitably undermine the boycott.
Speaker 1: The strikers reacted with fury to the appearance of the troops.
Speaker 1: On July four, they and their sympathizers overturned rail cars
Speaker 1: and erected barricades to prevent troops from reaching the yards.
Speaker 1: A are you leaders could do nothing, prevented by the
Speaker 1: injunction from any communication with the workers. On July six,
Speaker 1: some six thousand rioters destroyed hundreds of rail cars in
Speaker 1: the South Chicago Panhandle yards. On July seven, National guardsmen,
Speaker 1: after having been assaulted, fired into a mob, killing between
Speaker 1: four and thirty people and wounding many others. Debs then
Speaker 1: tried to call off the strike, urging that all workers
Speaker 1: except those convicted of crimes, be rehired without prejudice, but
Speaker 1: the General Managers Association the Federation of Railroads, that had
Speaker 1: overseen the response to the strike, refused and instead began
Speaker 1: hiring non union workers. The strike dwindled, and trains began
Speaker 1: to move with increasing frequency until normal schedules had been restored.
Speaker 1: Federal troops were recalled on July twenty. The Pullman Company,
Speaker 1: which reopened on August two, agreed to rehire the striking
Speaker 1: workers on the condition that they signed up pledged never
Speaker 1: to join a union. By the time it ended, the
Speaker 1: ordeal had cost the railroads millions of dollars in lost
Speaker 1: revenue and eluded and damaged property, and the strikers had
Speaker 1: lost more than one million dollars in wages. So yeah,
Speaker 1: it's one of those things. Deb's definitely like panics, but
Speaker 1: also a dozen, possibly dozens people just got shot at.
Speaker 1: Like I can't blame him, Like, you know, nobody that
Speaker 1: number one. This was all new. Uh, he was not
Speaker 1: on well trod ground here. And I think any responsible
Speaker 1: person when a bunch of people get killed and you're
Speaker 1: the one in charge might rethink things, you know, whatever
Speaker 1: else we think about what he decided to do, Like,
Speaker 1: I don't know what else are you gonna do. Eugene V.
Speaker 1: Debs was jailed on July. He was sentenced to six
Speaker 1: months behind bars for his role in supposedly inciting a
Speaker 1: legal behavior. The time locked up was good for him.
Speaker 1: He read marks and while he studied inside Outside his
Speaker 1: role in the strike was mythologized by the budding US left.
Speaker 1: When he was released in November, more than a hundred
Speaker 1: thousand people swarmed Battery Park to hear him give a speech,
Speaker 1: wherein he told them, I greet you tonighte as lovers
Speaker 1: of liberty and as despisers of despotism. Debs was not
Speaker 1: a committed socialist quite yet, but as the months passed
Speaker 1: he became convinced that the labor movement could win thing
Speaker 1: but temporary victories until socialism unseated the barons at the
Speaker 1: very top. Two years after his release, he wrote in
Speaker 1: an essay the issue with Socialism versus Capitalism. I am
Speaker 1: for socialism because I am for humanity. We have been
Speaker 1: cursed with the reign of gold long enough. Money constitutes
Speaker 1: no proper basis of civilization. The time has come to
Speaker 1: regenerate society. We are on the eve of a universal change. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I wish that had been the case, but you know.
Speaker 1: A national commission was established in eighteen ninety four to
Speaker 1: determine the causes of the strike. It blamed Pullman's paternalism
Speaker 1: his need to totally control the lives of his many
Speaker 1: employees as being un American. In eighteen ninety eight, the
Speaker 1: Illinois Supreme Court took Pullman the town away from Pullman
Speaker 1: the Man, and it was incorporated into Chicago. George Pullman
Speaker 1: died of a heart attack in eighteen nine seven. Funeral
Speaker 1: services were held at his mansion, and with Pullman's death
Speaker 1: coming so near to the end of the strike, it's
Speaker 1: perhaps not surprising that tempers were high. George seems to
Speaker 1: have been aware of how much people hated him prior
Speaker 1: to his death, and as a result, extreme measures were
Speaker 1: taken to protect his corpse. And I'm gonna quote one
Speaker 1: last time from the Pullman Center, A corpse box. That's
Speaker 1: what we're getting to. A pit the size of an
Speaker 1: average room had been dug in the family plot. It's
Speaker 1: basin walls reinforced concrete eighteen inches thick. Into this, the
Speaker 1: lead lined mahogany casket was lowered and covered with tar,
Speaker 1: paper and asphalt. The pit was filled with concrete, on
Speaker 1: top of which a series of steel rails were laid
Speaker 1: at right angles to each other and bolted together. These
Speaker 1: rails were embedded in another layer of concrete. It took
Speaker 1: two days to complete, and then sod was put down.
Speaker 1: These precautions were taken to prevent any desecration of the body.
Speaker 1: An unfortunate price Pullman paid for his victory in the
Speaker 1: Pullman Strike. Ambrose Beer said it is clear the family,
Speaker 1: in their bereavement was making sure the son of a
Speaker 1: bitch wasn't going to get up and come back. Well,
Speaker 1: that's just so funny to just know people hate you,
Speaker 1: you know what I mean, and just be like, Okay, look,
Speaker 1: yeah it's not the best, but it's at least some
Speaker 1: victory that despite winning, at the end of it all,
Speaker 1: George Pullman knew he had to bury his corpse in
Speaker 1: a fucking uh like iron and and concrete box because
Speaker 1: otherwise people would funk with it. At least there's that well,
Speaker 1: I mean, yeah, that's a it's comical at that point
Speaker 1: to just think about the way his life ended, is all.
Speaker 1: It all comes back to corpse box. Um. But yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, if anything, if I've learned anything from this episode, Robert,
Speaker 1: is that humans don't change everything basically has happened in
Speaker 1: the last several years. Uh, And that makes me sad
Speaker 1: because people forget what they go through, and history gets
Speaker 1: forgotten and rewritten until we do it again because we're
Speaker 1: dumb little sheep um. And it always happens every episode
Speaker 1: of Bastards and I'm on I just become my existential dread.
Speaker 1: Has it becomes an end void next to you? So excellent? Yeah,
Speaker 1: we did it? Did it? Wait? Is the end? Or
Speaker 1: should I? This is the end? We're done? Where did
Speaker 1: you plug your Oh? This is the end? Okay, I
Speaker 1: got it. Sorry, So we're still going. We're rolling, rolling,
Speaker 1: associating more. This is how my brain works. Now. I'm
Speaker 1: Sharene and I'm on Twitter at shiro hero six six
Speaker 1: six s h E r O h E r o
Speaker 1: and on Instagram is just Shira hero And thanks for
Speaker 1: listening all along if you want to. I don't care,
Speaker 1: well I do, I mean, I mean, I don't know.
Speaker 1: Have fun Reddit. I know someone will have fun with this. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I have fun Reddit, have fun Reddit. I don't know.
Speaker 1: I have a good day, everybody. Um uh, funk up
Speaker 1: a railroad. You have some time. Just find a railroad
Speaker 1: and just just get your anger out. That's all over
Speaker 1: the tracks, you know. Yeah, don't get caught. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: don't get caught. If you get caught, we don't know you.
Speaker 1: I don't know. Yeah. You did not hear from this.
Speaker 1: And this is not going to be just on the
Speaker 1: internet forever and ever. Know