The Company Town

by Hardy Green

  The town has recovered somewhat in recent decades, with the slow population decline reversing. In the early 1970s, local government and business labored to transform the former mill district—or at least what remained of it after some demolition—into what became the first urban national park in 1978. Hundreds of thousands of visitors tour the site each year. Moreover, the local branch of the University of Massachusetts has tried to attract high-technology enterprise. But that sector has shown itself to be as vulnerable as any other: Computer maker Wang Laboratories expanded into Lowell in the 1970s, but by 1990, that company was extinct.

  A very great deal has been written on Lowell, much of it emphasizing the specialness and impermanence of the town’s early years. For example, historian John Coolidge has written, “Nothing of Francis Cabot Lowell’s utopia has stood the test of time.” He asserts that the textile cities of central New England, including Lawrence and Manchester, were “sports in the general line of American industrial evolution, transitory as ideal communities, unimportant as models.”30

  Coolidge is one of the most insightful of Lowell’s chroniclers, and his Mill and Mansion stands as a model of architectural history and social and economic analysis. But these statements are not altogether accurate. Certainly, further Lowell-like major industrial hubs arose later, including Gary, Indiana, founded by U.S. Steel in 1906 on Lake Michigan swampland, and Ford Motor Co.’s giant River Rouge facility in Dearborn, Michigan.

  If Coolidge has in mind simply the use of workers drawn from the countryside and housed in dormitories, where they became the object of a watchful paternalism, he is largely right: That part of the Lowell experience was driven by a labor shortage that became less pressing after 1850, when waves of immigrant laborers started coming to the United States. Still, neither corporate paternalism nor the capitalist utopian impulse disappeared. These would remain themes throughout following decades and even into the twenty-first century.

  One thing is certain, though. There can be no such utopias without prosperity. Once the New England textile industry entered a period of decline, and its corporate masters began seeking ways of squeezing the labor force, they abandoned utopian ideals. It would not be long before they resurfaced elsewhere.

  CHAPTER 2

  Utopia

  At my feet lay a great city. Miles of broad streets, shaded by trees and lined with fine buildings. . . . Public buildings of a colossal size and architectural grandeur unparalleled in my day raised their stately piles on every side. Surely I had never seen this city nor one comparable to it before.

  —EDWARD BELLAMY, Looking Backward (1888)

  By the late nineteenth century, American cities were growing at a vertigo-inducing pace. In 1850, around 30,000 people lived in Chicago; by 1870, there were 300,000. New York’s 1875 population of just under 1 million made it the world’s third-largest city; over the next twenty-five years, that population would double.1 Civic activists grew concerned, not merely due to this population explosion but also because of the accompanying, very visible division of society into extremes of wealth and poverty. “The rich are richer, and the poor are poorer in the city than elsewhere,” wrote Reverend Josiah Strong in Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis, an 1885 pamphlet that sold 130,000 copies among concerned churchgoers. “Is it strange that such conditions arouse a blind and bitter hatred of our social system?” he asked. In The City: Hope of Democracy, urban reformer Frederick C. Howe observed: “The humanizing forces of to-day are almost all proceeding from the city.” Yet, he continued, “along with the gain there is . . . a terrible lost account. The city has replaced simplicity, industrial freedom, and equality of future with complexity, dependence, poverty and misery close beside a barbaric luxury like unto that of Ancient Rome.”2 The confluence of such factors might lead to the degradation of the populace, if not to social revolution.

  For many social reformers, the new class of Gilded Age capitalists was composed of prime villains. So it is a surprise to find that many industrialists shared the concerns of Strong and Howe and were themselves moved to take action.

  The first whiff of social revolution came in 1877, as a massive railroad walk-out turned into a national conflict. When the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad cut wages for the second time in a year, a strike of company workers broke out in West Virginia and, after federal troops intervened, the insurrection spread. Within days, crowds of workers were fighting state militias in the cities of Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, with at least forty-five people killed in Pittsburgh. Soon 100,000 men from numerous industries were on strike as far away as Chicago; St. Louis; Kansas City; Galveston, Texas; and San Francisco. It took federal troops armed with Gatling guns two weeks to quell the uprising. The upper classes were deeply alarmed. “Any hour the mob chooses it can destroy any city in the country—that is the simple truth,” wrote Assistant Secretary of State John Hay to his father-in-law.3

  Chicago newspapers reported events in articles headlined “Horrid Social Convulsion” and “Red War.” Department store mogul Marshall Field suggested that the danger of further riots required a large standing army to be permanently on guard. Field and his friend, railroad sleeping-car magnate George Pullman, felt the squalor that underlay the working-class uprising was due to workers’ own profligacy and intemperance.4 Within a few years, Pullman would take steps to change things.

  Pullman was a prototypically American self-made man. Born on a farm in western New York state in 1831, he took his first job, in a country store, at age fourteen. By seventeen, he was a cabinetmaker’s apprentice, and it was there he gained an appreciation for elaborately carved wood and woven fabric. Three years later, he was helping to move buildings out of the path of the expanding Erie Canal. These house-moving skills would prove essential to his first business success as an adult, when in the late 1850s he led the way in showing how Chicago buildings might be raised above the water level and thus avoid having their cellars flooded with Lake Michigan water. Of average height and possessed of a youthful appearance accentuated by his round face and bright eyes, Pullman was simultaneously bold and cautious in business matters—striking the perfect balance of capitalist instincts.5

  In 1853, a punishing overnight train trip between Buffalo and West-field, New York, made clear to Pullman that there was much room for improvement. He determined to enhance sleeping cars by installing actual beds in them. And by the 1860s, the project of transforming cross-country train travel from a dirty, jolting misery into a pleasurable, middle-class outing had made him a rich man. Both ornate and comfortable, the Pullman Palace Car Co.’s sleeping cars contained plush carpet, brocaded fabrics, carved and polished wood, and hinged berths that could be folded away during daylight hours. The “Pioneer,” first built in 1864, came with shock-absorbing coiled springs and cost five times the price of an ordinary railcar.

  Many railroads resisted what seemed like an extravagance. They also resented that Pullman refused to sell the cars to the railroads. Instead, he leased them, providing them with separate crews and maintenance, while collecting 50 cents from every fare. In a brilliant if cynical marketing flourish, Pullman arranged for his car’s debut to occur on the last leg of Abraham Lincoln’s funeral-train procession, which was met by crowds everywhere as it made its way from Washington, D.C., to Springfield, Illinois.6 Test runs on the Michigan Central Railroad proved hugely successful as passengers jammed the Pullman cars on every trip. Generous profits followed, allowing the Pullman Co. to pay its shareholders a dividend of 8 percent from its first year of operation.

  The sleeping cars weren’t Pullman’s only product. He also constructed dining, passenger, freight, and refrigerator cars, along with streetcars, but the company was primarily identified with the opulent sleepers. Pullman believed that not only would his luxurious vehicles command higher fares from the public, but also that their beauty would have a civilizing influence upon even the roughest of customers. And as experience seemed to bear this out, he came to believe that civilize
d surroundings would also have an “ennobling and refining” effect on his workers.7

  To that end—and because land prices within Chicago were becoming prohibitive—in 1880, Pullman decided to build a model factory town fourteen miles out of the city in an area free of “all baneful influences.” He began secretly buying up 4,000 acres along Lake Calumet’s west bank. In four years’ time, he transformed the swampland into the site of a giant production works with a population of 8,000, about half of them employees. Working with architect Solon Spencer Beman and landscape designer Nathan F. Barrett, he designed an “all-brick city” that would become a showpiece for the company and a must-see curiosity for visitors to the area. The company’s office and production facilities—including a foundry, wood shop, engine room, lumber storehouses, and more—sprawled over thirty acres and were able to turn out forty Pullman cars per day.

  Across a major boulevard from the manufacturing works lay the residential area, consisting of a dozen detached homes, block upon block of two- to five-family row houses, and ten large tenements. All houses came with natural gas and running water, and the larger homes had bathrooms. Near the residential area was a large market complex, with a public hall and stalls selling meats and vegetables. Also close by was the most spectacular of Pullman’s edifices—the Arcade Building, which housed thirty retail shops, a bank, a Moorish-style theater of 1,000 seats, and a library with 6,000 volumes donated by Pullman himself. Completing the picture were a handsome hotel—which contained the otherwise-dry town’s only bar—a school, parks, and playing fields. Altogether, there were more than 1,500 buildings in Pullman, all owned by the company, with an estimated worth of $8 million.

  What passed for government was firmly in company hands—a theme common in other company towns. The town clerk and treasurer were both officers of the Pullman company, as were most members of the board of education.8 There was no elected government and no newspaper.

  Visitors taking the 30-minute train ride out to Pullman could not resist commenting on the town’s appearance. Economist Richard T. Ely, writing in Harper’s Monthly, found “the newness of things” to be “a little distressing, as is also the mechanical regularity of the town.” Yet, with its “advanced secular gothic” public buildings and “Queen Ann-style” hotel, the development was as attractive as any “wealthy suburban town,” he concluded.9

  No one should imagine, though, that Pullman was a do-gooder where his workers were concerned. Instead, the town was “a business venture pure and simple,” as explained by a later officer of the Pullman Co.: “Stockholders would get a return, fortunate employees would work harder, and the company would be the beneficiary. Pleasant working conditions would draw out the workers’ qualities of loyalty, honesty, and perseverance.” In Pullman’s words, the employees would work out “valuable and well-rounded lives in proportion to their opportunities.”10

  In taking this approach, Pullman was echoing the business community’s prevailing wisdom that due to “natural law,” it did no good to offer men charity—that morality and business must be held separate, and that the best philanthropy was the payroll and incentives that encouraged people to help themselves. 11

  Pullman wasn’t alone in announcing that the model town was creating a new type of dependable worker. But already by the mid-1880s, there were critics. Although the living quarters were desirable, residents were unable to buy their homes, only to rent. (Rents varied from $4.50 per month for the cheapest flats to $100 per month for the largest private houses.) Every organization, including churches, was compelled to rent rather than to own its building, and any tenant could be evicted with a notice of only ten days. Others questioned the atmosphere in town, especially the use of “company inspectors,” who day and night kept an eye on Pullman resident-workers to make sure that both their opinions and their habits were acceptable. Some like Ely challenged the total control of the company and the absence of elections and representative government, concluding that the very “idea of Pullman is un-American. . . .It is benevolent, well-wishing feudalism.”12

  By 1893, the Pullman Co. had experienced years of a near-monopoly over sleeping-car transportation. With 14,000 employees across the United States, it had record earnings of $11 million. But as the country entered a serious economic depression, layoffs followed wage reductions. Within a year, the average wage at Pullman fell by 28 percent. (The average wage reduction across the country was closer to 12 percent.) Meanwhile, the company refused to lower its rents in the town, which were generally higher than rents paid by working people elsewhere. As the company told the Chicago Herald in 1894, it could not cut rents because profits on housing had already dipped under 4 percent, which was “a manifestly inadequate return upon the investment.”13 However, once rent was deducted from workers’ paychecks, some were left with only pennies.

  In the spring of 1894, Pullman workers organized. They affiliated with the American Railway Union (ARU), led by Eugene Debs, who would in time become the preeminent advocate of socialism in the United States. The company refused demands for either a return to earlier wage levels or a reduction in rents, so the workers went on strike. And when after two months the company still refused to negotiate, ARU’s national convention called for a nationwide boycott of Pullman. The action spread rapidly, as trainmen refused to work on any trains from which Pullman cars had not been detached—and the boycott turned into a great strike involving 50,000 men, with mobs barricading and sabotaging tracks and attacking trains.

  The disruption of U.S. mail delivery allowed an antilabor President Grover Cleveland to intercede. Attorney General Richard Olney obtained a federal injunction prohibiting strike leaders from organizing the boycott and sent in federal troops to clear the tracks. Striker casualties mounted: In a Fourth of July confrontation in Chicago, thirteen strikers died and fifty were wounded. The general strike was broken, and its leaders, including Debs, were prosecuted for civil contempt and jailed.

  By July, the strike in Pullman itself was at an end. Forced to resign from the ARU, 1,900 Pullman workers returned alongside 800 “replacements.” Many of Pullman’s prestrike workers had left the area, but 1,000 remained unemployed. 14

  The model town that had seemed to stand for progressive labor relations had become notorious, associated worldwide with industrial strife, blacklists, and managerial repression. One often-overlooked irony: Out of the failed utopian experiment of one man, George Pullman, came a very different utopian perspective—the scientific socialism of Eugene Debs. Celebrating his fortieth birthday in the Woodstock, Illinois, jail, Debs read Karl Marx’s Das Kapital and works by German socialist Karl Kautsky. He emerged from imprisonment disillusioned with the possibilities of trade unionism but hopeful about overthrowing the capitalist system via the ballot box. Debs was also now a celebrity, who would garner millions of votes in five subsequent presidential campaigns. 15

  Pullman died in 1897, and eulogists largely repudiated the idea behind his personal utopia. A year after his death, the Illinois Supreme Court ruled that the Pullman Co. charter did not permit the holding of real estate beyond what was required for its manufacturing business. The town entered a period of slow decline, with the city of Chicago assuming municipal functions in 1899 and the company gradually selling off its town properties beginning in 1904.16

  After the events at Pullman—which were widely reported and commented upon throughout the United States—one might expect that the day of industrial utopianism was done in America. But the impulse toward social perfectionism was strong in the late nineteenth century. The greatest manifestation of that urge was the reception given to a novel written by Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward: 2000-1887. Published in Boston in 1888, the book follows a Rip Van Winkle scenario: Julian West, a man of the late nineteenth century, awakens after a 113-year sleep to find society entirely transformed. That millenarian vision proved so compelling that Looking Backward sold nearly a half-million copies over the next few years, became an international best seller trans
lated into several other languages, and inspired some fifty imitative works over a few decades. Even more immediately, the book became the manifesto of a national movement, the Bellamy Clubs, which had chapters in twenty-seven states.

  Of course, Bellamy’s vision was hardly a celebration of company towns, even in their most ideal form. In fact, when the author wrote that, in industry, “feudalism still survives in its pristine vigor,” his reference point was his own hometown of Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts, a settlement filled with textile mills and plants making everything from bicycles to agricultural implements.

  Chicopee’s factory workers lived in row after row of dreary tenements, not far from the white-clapboard, middle-class house where Bellamy, the son of a Baptist minister, grew up. The young man settled on a career as a writer after attending college in New York state and traveling in Europe—and after a very brief career as a lawyer, which he termed “the dirty trade of a local pettifogger.” Among his early literary efforts were editorials penned for the newspaper of Chicopee’s neighboring town, the Springfield Union. In one of these, he inveighed against the miserable living conditions of Chicopee’s immigrant poor. Particularly worrisome, he thought, were the “ragged and meager” children who worked in the mills. “The mere sight of them; so old and worn and miserable to look at, yet so young, is proof enough that a great wrong exists somewhere among us,” he wrote in an 1873 Union editorial. “Civilization does not deserve the name in any land, if it cannot run its business enterprises of whatever kind . . . without such a sacrifice of human rights and well being.” Since the Boston Associates owned one of the Chicopee mills, Bellamy’s words read as an indictment of Francis Cabot Lowell’s own utopia gone wrong.