{"id":130,"date":"2021-03-14T20:00:07","date_gmt":"2021-03-15T03:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/history.wsu.edu\/past-as-prologue\/?page_id=130"},"modified":"2025-09-25T08:54:18","modified_gmt":"2025-09-25T15:54:18","slug":"phoenix","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/history.wsu.edu\/past-as-prologue\/episodes\/phoenix\/","title":{"rendered":"Phoenix George Pullman and the Condition of his Workers"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"wsu-decorator  wsu-overflow--hidden wsu-decorator--style-lines-gray\" style=\"top:0;right:0;height:100%;width:20%\"><\/div>\n\n<header class=\"wsu-article-header \">\r\n\t<h1 class=\"wsu-article-header__title\">\r\n\t\tHow The Namesake Of Pullman Tried To Improve Worker\u2019s Lives, But Failed\t<\/h1>\r\n\t\t<\/header>\r\n\n\n<div class=\"wsu-row wsu-row--sidebar-right\" >\r\n    \n<div class=\"wsu-column\"  style=\"\">\r\n\t\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/upload.wikimedia.org\/wikipedia\/commons\/2\/27\/Pullman_strikers_outside_Arcade_Building.jpg\" alt=\"\"\/><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Pullman strikers face off against the Illinois National Guard, 1894. Wikipedia<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>In the late 1800s, as income inequality grew rapidly during the &#8220;Gilded Age,&#8221; some industrialists attempted to help their workers by creating towns for them, such as George Pullman&#8217;s town of Pullman, IL (south of Chicago). While these had modern conveniences, they were also sites of strict control and supervision, where management intruded into worker&#8217;s personal lives. And, they could prove how fundamentally out-of-touch corporate leaders were with the needs of their workers, such as when the Pullman railroad car company cut wages in 1884, but failed to cut rent in the town of Pullman, IL. The consequences were disastrous&#8211;34 people died and George Pullman&#8217;s reputation as being concerned for his workers never recovered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Audio Recording:<\/h2>\n\n\n<!--[if lt IE 9]><script>document.createElement('audio');<\/script><![endif]-->\n<audio class=\"wp-audio-shortcode\" id=\"audio-130-1\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio\/mpeg\" src=\"https:\/\/wpcdn.web.wsu.edu\/wp-cas\/uploads\/sites\/2629\/2021\/03\/Phoenix-Pullman-IL-1.mp3?_=1\" \/><a href=\"https:\/\/wpcdn.web.wsu.edu\/wp-cas\/uploads\/sites\/2629\/2021\/03\/Phoenix-Pullman-IL-1.mp3\">https:\/\/wpcdn.web.wsu.edu\/wp-cas\/uploads\/sites\/2629\/2021\/03\/Phoenix-Pullman-IL-1.mp3<\/a><\/audio>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading wsu-spacing-after--default wsu-spacing-before--large\">Transcription of Audio:<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Sueann Ramella: <\/strong>You may have heard that billionaire philanthropist Mackenzie Scott donated millions to charitable organizations. Or, that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation helped to fight hunger and poverty. There are many wealthy people trying to help others and improve the world, but their efforts aren\u2019t always\u00a0successful, especially when they don\u2019t\u00a0take into account\u00a0the needs of those they\u2019re wishing to help.\u00a0WSU History professor Karen Phoenix gives\u00a0an\u00a0example from the Gilded Age in\u00a0today&#8217;s\u00a0Past as Prologue, an occasional series from NWPB\u00a0and WSU\u2019s History Department.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Karen Phoenix: <\/strong>Household incomes have only grown modestly\u00a0in the last century. Household wealth has not returned to pre-recession levels, and the gap between the wealthy and poor\u00a0continues to widen. That\u2019s according to the Pew Research Center. While some ultra-rich are philanthropic, and try to improve the lives of people, it doesn\u2019t always work out that way.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Take the industrialists of the late 1800s. They also saw income inequality&nbsp;and&nbsp;attempted&nbsp;improve&nbsp;living&nbsp;conditions&nbsp;for&nbsp;their workers,&nbsp;but not always so&nbsp;successfully.&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Take&nbsp;George Pullman, the inventor of&nbsp;the railroad sleeping car.&nbsp;&nbsp;Fun fact,&nbsp;Pullman, Washington is named after him, though it\u2019s not&nbsp;really&nbsp;clear&nbsp;why.&nbsp;Pullman&nbsp;was concerned about&nbsp;the&nbsp;living conditions&nbsp;for&nbsp;his&nbsp;workers&nbsp;so&nbsp;when he built his factory&nbsp;south of Chicago in the&nbsp;1880s,&nbsp;he also built a town next to it for&nbsp;his&nbsp;workers. The housing&nbsp;was spacious (by the standards of the day) and&nbsp;included the latest technology&nbsp;&#8211;&nbsp;indoor plumbing and sewers!&nbsp;There were stores,&nbsp;a&nbsp;church, and a fancy hotel.&nbsp;But the town was&nbsp;tightly controlled by&nbsp;Pullman&nbsp;who did&nbsp;random inspections&nbsp;and fired people for drinking on their days off.&nbsp;But hey,&nbsp;indoor plumbing, right?&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Then,&nbsp;came a&nbsp;nation-wide economic&nbsp;downturn.&nbsp;In 1893,&nbsp;Pullman reduced wages&nbsp;by 30%, but&nbsp;kept rent the same.&nbsp;Workers&nbsp;went on strike.&nbsp;Pullman refused to negotiate with the strikers, and left town.&nbsp;President&nbsp;Grover Cleveland&nbsp;sent&nbsp;the&nbsp;National Guard,&nbsp;who fired&nbsp;upon&nbsp;the&nbsp;strikers.&nbsp;&nbsp;Thirty-four&nbsp;people were killed, and the strike&nbsp;failed.&nbsp;Eight years later,&nbsp;the Supreme Court of Illinois forced Pullman to sell&nbsp;the town and&nbsp;it&nbsp;was annexed by Chicago.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The strike\u2014and the violence that&nbsp;occurred\u2014became George Pullman\u2019s legacy,&nbsp;In&nbsp;fact, when he died, his family buried him in a lead-lined coffin&nbsp;under several yards of concrete&nbsp;because&nbsp;they were&nbsp;concerned&nbsp;about&nbsp;workers&nbsp;desecrating his body.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>There were many other bloody strikes during the&nbsp;Gilded Age,&nbsp;which impacted whole industries,&nbsp;like railroad or garment workers, and bloody strikes in mining camps&nbsp;and other factory towns.&nbsp;Communism and anarchism also grew&nbsp;during this time.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>While there are a lot of differences between our situation today and the Gilded Age,&nbsp;there are&nbsp;some&nbsp;important lessons for us,&nbsp;most especially that&nbsp;when large groups of people feel&nbsp;that&nbsp;they don\u2019t have an opportunity to rise&nbsp;economically or&nbsp;feel that there are&nbsp;fundamental failures in economic or governmental systems, they&nbsp;may&nbsp;try to overturn those systems in some way. We\u2019ve seen echoes of this (although not nearly to the degree or&nbsp;scale) in&nbsp;the Occupy Wall Street movement, among many others today.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Sueann Ramella: <\/strong>That\u2019s WSU History Professor Karen Phoenix, who is a historian of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era\u00a0in the United States. Prof. Phoenix\u2019s essay is part of <em>Past as Prologue<\/em>, a partnership between NWPB and Washington State University\u2019s History Department.\u00a0Hear this and other <em>Past as Prologue<\/em> essays at\u00a0NWPB.org.<\/p>\n\n\n<div class=\"wsu-container  wsu-position--relative\" >\r\n    \n<div class=\"wsu-decorator wsu-zindex--level-2 wsu-spacing-before--xmedium wsu-spacing-after--large wsu-position--relative wsu-decorator--style-block-gray\" style=\"top:40px;left:-100px;height:3px;width:260px\"><\/div>\n\n<div class=\"wsu-decorator  wsu-decorator--style-lines-crimson wsu-zindex--level-3 wsu-position--relative\" style=\"top:-40px;left:-40px;height:25px;width:63%\"><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">About the Author:<\/h2>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignleft size-full\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" width=\"114\" height=\"132\" src=\"https:\/\/wpcdn.web.wsu.edu\/wp-cas\/uploads\/sites\/2629\/2021\/03\/karen-phoenix_114x132.jpg\" alt=\"Karen Phoenix\" class=\"wp-image-133\"\/><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n<p>Karen Phoenix specializes in the U.S. in the World during the Progressive Era and interwar period. She has a BA and MA from Brandeis University, and completed her PhD at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in May 2010. Her doctoral work used the U.S. Young Women\u2019s Christian Association as a case study to explore U.S. attempts at cultural imperialism in India, the Philippines, Argentina, and Nigeria. She is currently adding post-WWI Poland for the book manuscript. Her article \u201cA Social Gospel for India\u201d was published in a special issue on Transnational Women\u2019s and Gender History in the&nbsp;<em>Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era<\/em>, in Spring 2014. She has presented papers at national conferences such as the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, the American Historical Association, and the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.<\/p>\n\n<\/div>\r\n\n\n<div class=\"wsu-column\"  style=\"\">\r\n\t<\/div>\r\n\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":3554,"featured_media":0,"parent":40,"menu_order":4,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"wsuwp_university_location":[],"wsuwp_university_org":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/history.wsu.edu\/past-as-prologue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/130"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/history.wsu.edu\/past-as-prologue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/history.wsu.edu\/past-as-prologue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/history.wsu.edu\/past-as-prologue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3554"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/history.wsu.edu\/past-as-prologue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=130"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/history.wsu.edu\/past-as-prologue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/130\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":635,"href":"https:\/\/history.wsu.edu\/past-as-prologue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/130\/revisions\/635"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/history.wsu.edu\/past-as-prologue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/40"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/history.wsu.edu\/past-as-prologue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=130"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/history.wsu.edu\/past-as-prologue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=130"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/history.wsu.edu\/past-as-prologue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=130"},{"taxonomy":"wsuwp_university_location","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/history.wsu.edu\/past-as-prologue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/wsuwp_university_location?post=130"},{"taxonomy":"wsuwp_university_org","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/history.wsu.edu\/past-as-prologue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/wsuwp_university_org?post=130"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}