The Pullman Company

~ the goodbye ~

In Turkish, pulman is a kind of seat. The Türk Dil Kurumu defines it as a reclining seat, or a railway car fitted with them, and most Turks who use the word are reading it off a bus ticket. It came in from English, and English got it from a surname. The earliest Turkish dictionary entry anybody has found for it is from 1961, sixty-four years after George Pullman died and fourteen years after his company had stopped owning its own cars. The word arrived in Turkish without the company ever arriving with it.

Pullman's Palace Car Company was incorporated in Illinois on 22 February 1867, a few years after George Pullman had started rebuilding day coaches into sleepers. The arrangement he settled on mattered more than any car he built. The railroads ran the trains and owned the track. Pullman owned the sleeping cars and staffed them with his own employees, and the passenger bought a second ticket for the berth. In 1900 the operating business absorbed the Wagner Palace Car Company and took the name The Pullman Company.

By its peak in 1929 the fleet could put more than 150,000 people to bed on a moving train every night. Almost every sleeping car in the United States was a Pullman car run by Pullman staff, and the company built most of them itself at the works south of Chicago. George Pullman died in 1897 leaving an estate of $7.6 million and a corporation valued at $63.5 million, and the thing kept compounding for thirty years after him.

Then two things happened in order. A federal court ordered the company split in 1944 and the operating half was sold to the railroads in 1947, and after that the overnight passenger disappeared. Air travel and the Interstate Highway System took the market through the 1950s and 1960s, and a berth was the most expensive seat on a train nobody wanted to spend two nights on. The last Pullman-staffed cars ran on 31 December 1968 and the company was dissolved the next day.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the town with his name on it ~

Construction started on 24 April 1880 on 4,000 acres fourteen miles south of Chicago. Solon Spencer Beman designed all of it, the works and the housing both. At its height about 12,000 people lived there. Pullman rented them their houses and sold them their water and gas. It was an investment. A workforce living in company housing, with company rent coming out of a company paycheck, was a workforce that could not easily leave.

In 1893 the company cut wages by about a quarter and left the rents where they were. The strike started on 11 May 1894. The American Railway Union under Eugene Debs turned it into a national boycott of any train carrying a Pullman car, and federal troops broke it by 2 August with the union's officers in jail. Four years later the Illinois Supreme Court ordered the company out of the landlord business, on the grounds that owning a town was not among the things its charter allowed. The neighborhood is still standing and is a national monument now.

~ the men in the white jackets ~

The porter was the product. Pullman recruited formerly enslaved men and then their sons, on the reasoning that they would work for tips and would register as staff rather than as people to a white passenger. By the 1920s there were 20,224 Black men working as Pullman porters and train personnel, which made a sleeping car company the largest employer of Black workers in the United States.

The wage was low and the rest of the income came from the passenger, so a porter's pay depended on being agreeable for twenty hours at a stretch. Passengers called porters George, after George Pullman, whatever their actual names were. A. Philip Randolph organized the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters on 25 August 1925, and it took twelve years and a change in federal labor law before the company signed with it in 1937. That was the first agreement a major American corporation made with a union led by Black workers.

~ the court order that split it in two ~

The Edward G. Budd Manufacturing Company filed a complaint in 1940 arguing that Pullman's two halves worked as one monopoly, because the operating company would not run cars it had not built and a railroad that wanted a Budd sleeper could not find anyone to staff it. The Justice Department took the case into federal district court at Philadelphia, and in 1944 the court agreed and ordered Pullman Incorporated to sell either the factory or the operating company. It kept the factory. On 30 June 1947 the sleeping car business went to a consortium of the railroads it had been serving for $40 million, and nobody can agree on how many railroads were in it. The June 1947 court filing said fifty-three. The Pullman museum's own timeline says fifty-nine, and fifty-seven is the number that usually gets printed. From then on the cars belonged to individual railroads and were leased back to Pullman to operate.

~ 31 december 1968 ~

Sleeping car traffic had been falling for fifteen years by the middle 1960s. The jet took the long-distance traveler and the Interstate took the medium-distance one, and the railroads that now owned the operating company were each losing money on their own passenger trains. None of them had a reason to keep paying a separate organization to make beds. The decision to wind Pullman up came from its own owners, which is a quiet way for something that size to go.

All operations ceased and every lease was terminated on 31 December 1968. On 1 January 1969 the Pullman Company was dissolved and its assets liquidated, a hundred and one years after incorporation. The manufacturing half that the 1944 order had preserved kept building railcars as Pullman-Standard until 1982. What was left of it was spun off as Pullman Technology and sold to Bombardier in 1987. Nobody makes the bed for you anymore. Amtrak took over intercity passenger service in 1971 and still runs sleeping cars, staffed by its own attendants on its own equipment.

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