Like the Petrified Forest National Park, the national monument that President Barack Obama will dedicate Thursday in Chicago is a place of arresting beauty. The back story of Pullman isn’t pretty.
The Far South Side neighborhood looks like a movie set for a period piece. But it wasn’t cobbled together by stagehands and gaffers. What you see is what you get: block after block of row houses built in the1880s. The centerpiece is a grand Victorian-era hotel. All it would take to complete the illusion of stepping back into a gentler, more gracious age would be National Park Service rangers outfitted in crinoline skirts and stovepipe hats.
Yet the Rev. William Carwardine, long-ago pastor of the district’s Gothic revival church, warned visitors not to be fooled by the architecture of railroad mogul George Pullman’s company town. “Like the stage, there is something behind the scenes, and that which is behind the scenes does not harmonize with the effect before the curtain,” he wrote in 1894. “Let us take a short trip around the town.”
Contemporaries who took his advice would have seen scenes out of “Les Miserables”: inhabitants of these row houses, out of work and half-starved, barely surviving on handouts at soup kitchens organized by charitable Chicagoans, as well as the tents of an occupying army and soldiers with fixed bayonets.
That tragic landscape was the unintended consequence of the philosophy that inspired Pullman to bring his factories and workers to a site isolated from Chicago by miles of open prairie. Convinced that ordinary people don’t know what’s best for them, Pullman was determined to make decisions about where and how his employees would live. He considered unions to be the working people’s nemesis because they challenged the power of entrepreneurs to whose vision they owed their jobs. Pullman named the streets of his town for fellow captains of industry — George Stephenson, the railroad pioneer; Robert Fulton, the steamboat’s developer; Samuel Morse, the telegraph’s inventor.
When Obama visits Pullman he will, no doubt, salute the efforts of residents who have campaigned for a national monument designation. They worked long and hard to keep their neighborhood afloat when other areas fell victim to urban blight. February being Black History Month, Obama may well note that Pullman’s sleeping cars employed black porters, jobs that allowed them to escape the plantations of the Jim Crow South.
But will the president dwell on the ugly chapters of Pullman’s history? Obama will be here a few days before his former chief of staff, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, is up for re-election. Campaign-season ribbon-cuttings traditionally are accompanied by happy talk of an incumbent’s accomplishments and upbeat forecasts of a rosy future.
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Yet if the moral of the Pullman story ever needed underlining, it is now. Unions are under attack by several governors, including Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner. Big businessmen style themselves “job creators,” as if the assertion entitles them to exemption from government regulations protecting workers and consumers.
Conservatives have no monopoly on this revival of Pullman’s I-know-what’s-best-for-you attitude. It’s bipartisan, as Obama hinted during his recent State of the Union address. Calling for new trade deals with other countries, he added: “I’m the first to admit past trade deals haven’t always lived up to the hype.”
Indeed, all he need do is look out the windows of the presidential limousine on his way in from the airport. He’ll see striking evidence of the difference between Washington hype and the average American’s reality. Block after block of Chicago factories stand empty, the jobs they provided having vanished overseas in the wake of the “past deals” he decried.
Yet what guarantee is there that Obama’s deals will be any different — except for an implicit promise of knowing what’s best for us? When he sets foot in Pullman, he’ll stand on ground where similar assurances were given when the Pullman town was founded in 1880. George Pullman allowed no taverns in his town, saying: “Our people soon forget all about drink, they find they are better off without it.”
Every residence in town belonged to Pullman, as did the stores.
“If I had sold the sites to my workmen,” he explained, “I should have run the risk of seeing families settle who are not sufficiently accustomed to the habits I wish to develop in the inhabitants of Pullman city.”
He expected his real estate to turn a profit, even in lean times. During a depression in 1893 and 1894, he cut wages but held workers strictly to their rents and grocery bills. When workers sent a delegation to Pullman, he refused to negotiate, albeit in a fatherly manner. “When we went to tell him our grievances,” the delegates reported, “he said we were all his ‘children.’ ”
Pushed to the wall, Pullman workers struck in May, and got the support of the railroad workers union, which refused to service Pullman’s sleeping cars. The railroad companies backed Pullman, and got a court injunction against the strikers that was enforced by federal troops. By summer, the workers’ situation was so desperate that the Cook County Board sent free supplies of flour and rice. Their strike broken, those not blackballed went back to the factories. But Pullman’s paternalistic vision was also a casualty. The Illinois Supreme Court ordered his company town sold off in 1898 and it became part of Chicago.
So maybe the question is not what the president should say in dedicating Pullman, but what lesson he, or any politician, could take away from a visit. Upon Pullman’s death three years after the strike, the Chicago Times-Herald noted that Pullman, by insisting on being his workers’ landlord, overlooked the ordinary person’s desire to control his own life.
“The twenty-five-foot lot with the little one-story cottage stands for his share in the Republic,” the paper wrote. “It is his ‘stake’ in the country. Mr. Pullman ignored this sentiment.”
Ron Grossman is a Tribune writer and former history professor.