Behind the Bastards - Let's Talk About The Pullman Strike, Knob-Gobblers

Episode Date: January 6, 2022

Robert is joined by Shereen Lani Younes to discuss the Pullman Strike. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut?

That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space. With no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi everybody! I'm a podcast. Wait, is there something I should look at? You're going to tell me things, right? Uh, jeez, we already botched this introduction comprehensively. Between you and me, Shireen, we really... That was unfortunately Robert Evans, host of Behind the Bastards,

podcast we're listening to, doing a weird voice. I'm someone else. Who are you today? I don't know. I'm talking to Shireen is who I am. Hello, Shireen. Hi everyone, I'm Shireen. I'm well, to be honest, but I feel guilty saying that.

Because relatively I'm usually bad, but I think I'm a better bad than usual. Oh, that's good. Does that make sense? I don't know. Yeah, it's always good to be a better bad than usual. It's really gloomy in LA and that makes me thrive. I love gloomy weather. I love it when LA feels like the Pacific Northwest briefly. Yes, exactly.

It doesn't happen often. Yeah. So, Shireen, how do you feel about trains? They're fun. That's an interesting way to introduce yourself. I love to travel. Okay. How do you feel about...

You like comfortable trains, right? Trains with cabins, sleeper cars, all that sort of stuff, the trains you can sit on and enjoy. I like all trains. I think they're very impressive and yeah, if you really think about it, they're a feat that man made. You know what I mean? They're pretty cool.

Now, how do you feel about workers being gunned down? Oh. Because they are trying to get paid fairly for helping to make trains. Bad. I feel bad about that. You feel bad about that. Oh, okay. So, this might not be a super happy episode.

That's frustrating. It's great. It's great. I'm very good at my job. The working title I have for this episode, Shireen, is let's talk about the Pullman strike, cock suckers. And I don't know why I was so aggressive when I was writing the title to this. But I never edited it and now it's in there.

Sophie, can we make this the title of the episode? Can we put cock suckers in Spotify? I don't know. There's certain apps that reject the curse words. Really? Yeah. And it makes it like it blocks it for searching things. But in my heart, that's the title.

Yeah. I feel like if come town is fine. Oh, my God, you're right. Let's talk about the Pullman strike, cock suckers is also okay. I mean, I'm willing to give it a shot if it would make you happy. Yeah. I think I would like to. You're going to give it a shot on the episode that I guessed on.

And it might be gone forever. Well, it might be. Yeah. We'll change the title. It'll show up on a couple of hours. We can change the title to let's talk about the Pullman strike, knob goblers. Okay. They're not going to catch that.

They're not going to catch that at all. That's great. That's great. Mm-hmm. So today, Shirin, Lonnie Eunice, today, we're going to learn about George Pullman, a guy who sucked so bad that workers who didn't even work for him quit working to protest how shitty a boss he was. Like, that's the level of bad bought like other people who had nothing to do with this

guy quit working to protest how much he sucked. Now, like most great labor stories, the story of the Pullman strike has a sad ending and a lot more racism than you'd hope. But that's no excuse not to talk about this huge piece of shit, George Mortimer Pullman. He was born in 1831 in Brockton, New York. His dad, James Lewis, known as Lewis, was a farmer who became a carpenter because the money was much better. The family seems to have been upwardly mobile for the time, but firmly working class.

George was expected to labor from a young age. Now, Brockton had a general store owned by his mom's uncle. And after he finished fourth grade, it was decided that he would drop out and work there for about $40 a month, which is a pretty good salary for the time. Again, his family's comfortable. That same year, his parents left him and his two brothers behind to move to Albion, New Jersey, so his dad could work on widening the Erie Canal. Yeah, this was like a whole big deal here.

And George is 14 when the effort starts. We have fewer of his early recollections than I'd prefer, so it's hard to say how this affected him. But the move was great for his father's career. Lewis Pullman developed a method of moving a building off of its old foundations and on to a new one because they had to to widen this canal. There was stuff built up against the canal that they had to lift up and move so that they could widen the canal.

They're doing this in the late 1840s, I think, is kind of when the effort gets really underway. That's impressive. See, humans can be impressive sometimes. It's really cool because, again, people don't have technology then. Everything sucks. You have to be innovative. They have to be innovative. So the system that Lewis Pullman develops to move buildings uses like screw jacks and

this special machine that he's invented. It's this whole wild deal. And so since a lot of buildings needed to be moved to expand the Erie Canal, this was a major boon for family finances. In 1848, three years after three years of working at his family store, George was 17 and he was missing his parents who were still off building the Erie Canal. So he joins, moves to Albion, New York, joins his family, and he gets a job at what is now the family business, moving buildings so that a canal can be wider.

The next five years were peacefully lucrative for both him and his family before his father died in 1853, leaving George Pullman the heir to the business at age 22. He had brothers, but they'd started another business and George had been working with his dad, so he was the obvious choice. His first big contract is from the state of New York. They wanted 20 buildings, most of which were warehouses, moved out of the way of the widening canal. This made a decent amount of money, but it was not the kind of thing that could last forever. New York only had so many additional buildings that were in the way of where the canal was

getting expanded to and eventually there was going to be no more money in that. The economy hit a major recession in the mid 1850s and George was forced to look outside of New York for revenue. He found it in Chicago, a city that by 1857 was starting to reap the consequences of trying to make too much Chicago way too fast. There was a period of time in which we had a Chicago and everybody was so excited about it that they were like, we got to keep making more Chicago. And then they built way too much Chicago.

And like, they couldn't, like, so Chicago is built on a swamp, like a lot of places. And it was, like, they didn't build, like, they had no real infrastructure. Like, because this thing just, like, blew up so quickly. Back at the time in, like, the mid 1800s, it's kind of a cluster of buildings about four feet above Lake Michigan that nobody really planned out all that well. So as it gets bigger, it's flooding constantly, sewage is just, like, washing into houses and streets all the time. Like, it was just, there never should have been large numbers of people there. It was kind of like a fucking swamp and they just, they made too much Chicago too fast.

You know, it's a classic story. Were they making Chicago because they were, like, really excited about it or because they had to and there were people where there was, like, a population thing? Yeah, I mean, I think there's a couple of different things. But yeah, it was just, it was the place to be for a while. You know, the Westward expansion is, like, really in full swing at this period of time. Chicago's, you know, kind of in the middle of the country. It's becoming a city, I guess. It's becoming a central city.

Yeah, and it's a problem. And to kind of illustrate what a problem it was, I want to quote from a passage from the hilariously named website. Enjoy Illinois. Quote, The streets turned to mud, stranding horses, carriages and humans alike. Pools of standing water formed all over the city. The environment caused hygiene and health problems, including an 1854 cholera outbreak,

which killed one in 20 residents. The marsh on which the city was built was trying to claim back its territory. After a number of failed attempts to fix the problem, including planking the streets with wood, the city decided that the only long-term solution was to install a sewer and stormwater system. But in Chicago, that was no easy feat. Sewers need to go underground and they drained down.

Chicago was barely above the water table and underground sewers couldn't work at that level. So, they got this issue. They've suddenly built a lot of Chicago. Literal shits flooding everywhere and they need to build sewers. But, Chicago is barely above the water. It just sounds like nature is fighting back. We were never meant to be there.

We were never meant to have a Chicago, you know? I think that's fair. It's just, it doesn't want us there. Nature is fighting back. It was, yeah. There's a category of cities in the United States and not just in the United States, but specifically in the United States, that are direct affronts to God.

Phoenix is another direct affront to God. We built Phoenix, Arizona to spit in the eye of the Almighty. People were never supposed to live there in any kind of quantity. And it's the same thing with Chicago. I see. That's how I feel. I agree with you.

Phoenix, yeah. Chicago, all of Florida. I was thinking with that shit. Damn. So, Chicago's, you know, they're trying to figure out how to get a sewer built in a city that is like almost uniquely unsuited to having traditional sewers.

And rather than admit that the present location of Chicago wasn't affront to God, they opted to raise every single building and street in town by an average height of six feet. They decided we can't... Excuse me? Shit's flooding everywhere. We can't build a normal underground sewer here.

So, instead of moving, let's lift the entire city up by six feet. That is so bonkers. It's fucking amazing. What? I... The last thing I ever thought you would say, I thought they were going to just build them above ground and then make Chicago worse.

But that's intense. To just lift a city, we really do think we're God. It's amazing. Weirdly enough, one of the things this reminds me of is a story from the Roman Empire of one of Caesar's conquests. He was laying siege to this Gallic city called Elysia,

and the way the Romans would siege a city is they would build a wall around the entire city. So, they could basically shoot down into the town and starve it out, essentially. And while they're doing this, this huge Gallic army that outnumbers them like 5, 10 to 1, comes up and attacks the Roman army,

and rather than break off and retreat, they just build a second wall around themselves. And so, they have one big wall around them and one big wall around the city. It's just this like, yeah, no, we can just solve all of our problems by engineering, by building huge things. It's amazing.

It's... But that's how they got to the problem. It is how they got to the problem, but in this case... Building things is not working. You know what I mean? Well, the thing is, though, the Romans, Caesar won that battle. And it worked in Chicago because they did lift

every goddamn building in the city up by six. Some were raised by as much as 14 feet. Okay, maybe I'm dumb. How is that literally physically possible? They've got this like, screw jack, winch kind of thing system that just sort of like lifts shit up and... Wow.

Yeah, I don't know. It's a whole thing. You can find... It's very well documented. You know, this was in the mid-1800s, so they had... People did, like, talk about how they were doing it. It's not a mystery. And it also provided the fact that they're lifting the entire city

up six feet by the height of a dude, basically. That gives the city an opportunity to rebrand, because it, again, had kind of been like this frontier ramshackle town, and the people who were in charge of things at the time were able to

use this to move buildings that didn't look nice to the edges of the city and kind of reorganize Chicago so that when everything was lifted, it looked the way they wanted to, like a nice city. So it was like redlining, but not... Yeah, I mean, kind of was.

Yeah. Instead of moving the lines, they're moving the actual buildings. Yeah, you could just, like, move all the buildings around. Now, George's firm was not the only one involved in raising the city. He was actually one of a handful of firms all technically competing with each other, but they all kind of agreed

to work together to determine who got which bids and to maximize their profitability. It was like price-fixing. I don't know if that was illegal at the time. I think it kind of is now, but all these different firms, including George's, operate in a cartel in order to get as much money to lift the city of Chicago up

as they possibly can. And George is not a small player in this, but he's not a particularly large one either. He had dreams of more. You know, this is a successful business. He's making a comfortable living, not enough for George Pullman. And kind of after this,

he winds up on a train ride from Buffalo to Westfield, or during this, he winds up on a train ride from Buffalo to Westfield to New York to negotiate. Yeah, well, this is where the trains come in. So he's on a train ride for a business meeting, and train rides sucked back then. Like, that's kind of something that

I wasn't really aware of before this. They didn't have trains that were meant to be, like, in any way comfortable. Like, you could get on one, but there was no, like, that kind of romantic vision of, like, the fancy, the beautiful, pointed train car with a bar,

and none of that existed yet. It was awful. And to illustrate how awful it was, I want to quote from a write-up by Richard Schnirov from Indiana State University for the Northern Illinois University Digital Library. Quote, As railroad milages tripled between 1850 and 1860,

the uncomfortable conditions passengers endured a few hours became intolerable. Passenger cars were not built to cushion jolts. Windows constantly rattled. In the winter, wood-burning stoves could fill the cars with smoke and caused accidents. And in the summer, riders sweltered. It took three and a half days

to travel from Chicago to New York. And a typical traveler resorted to hotels at night. The need for a sleeping car was widely understood, but at the time, none were satisfactory. In 1858, Pullman began renovating existing sleeping cars in Chicago and Alton Railroad.

Eventually, he established a small crew and began building cars from scratch. In 1864, his crew built the classic sleeping car he called the Pioneer. With brocaded fabrics, hand-crafted window and door frames, plush red carpets, and richly ornamented paneling, the Pioneer was a study in luxury.

It was also the turning point in Pullman's rise to success. Pullman's luxurious sleeping car appealed to America's fast-growing wealthy class, hungry for status, and a new middle class that aspired to the same outward markers of social standing. Pullman shrewdly took advantage of this

in his marketing strategy, which relied on quality of service and prestige rather than low prices. So he offers, for the first time, really not even just like first class, but just a train ride that wouldn't make you want to die. And it's hugely successful. Trains are blowing up at this point,

and he's the first guy to figure out how to make you want to be on a train. Yeah, very innovative. It's in something in the water. Yeah, he gets... He understands, you know, that this is an unfilled need, and he fills it ably.

I think also, like, if you don't... Maybe this is a hot take. I don't know, I don't care. I think if you don't come for money, money, you understand more what the people need and want. It's the same reason guys like Bezos and Bill Gates. I know there are people who would consider them rich,

but they're upper middle class, and it's not enough money that they never had to do anything. They were going to need to find out something to do, but it's enough money that they are able to, like, pursue their dreams from an early age. Like George's, right?

He's paid well to work at this family shop. It's 17. He's able to very easily go follow his dad and get involved in this new business. Yeah, he's working class with enough money that... Yeah, he's in his early 20s right now, mid to late 20s I think right now.

Very impressive, very impressive. And this is a big hit. His train business is successful, but it's not as big as George wants to be. He's doing very well. He's probably what you'd call wealthy, but he's not like a massive industrial magnate.

And he feels uncertain like he doesn't really believe that his business can expand all that much. He kind of feels like, well, I found a profitable niche, but that's all it's going to be. So he starts looking for other ways to make money. By the late 1850s, the Pikes Peak Gold Rush was well underway

in Chicago, or Colorado, not Chicago. George decided to travel there and see if he might be able to shortcut the route to wealth and power by striking it rich. The Pullman Museum writes that in short order, quote, Pullman realized that the real money in a gold rush is made by supplying other fortune hunters.

So he decides very quickly, it's fucking not worth it to go panning for gold, but sell shit to the people panning for gold. And he forms a company to do this, moving freight and crushing ore. And when that did well, he bought 1600 acres near Central City, Colorado.

And he turns this into a truck stop, basically, like the Gilded Age equivalent of a truck stop. He knows a ton of people are passing in and out of this specific area. They're going to a place that's real primitive, no amenities whatsoever. So they're going to want something

that they can head to on their way in and out in order to get drunk and eat good food and sleep in a comfortable bed. So he builds this big truck stop. And for a while, he's kind of on this path of getting, forming little businesses here and there

as he sees needs. And it doesn't look initially like his train business is going to be huge, but the good news is that if your job is making trains more comfortable, then the 1850s is a little bit early for that to be a big business.

But the 1860s, that's the fucking like, you know, that's where you're going to make money. You just have to stick around long and effort to make sense. Yeah. And the Civil War does a lot for this, right? Trains are a huge part of why the Union wins.

And the Civil War is further more helpful to his business because on April 15th, 1865, a dude shot Abraham Lincoln right in his head. Now, this was widely seen as terrible for Honest Abe. And in the wake of a devastating war, like, people needed a proper

send-off for a wartime president, right? Like, this beloved president gets killed, everybody's real fucking sad, there's just been a big war. Trains are more famous and like prominent than ever. And George looks at the president's death and sees opportunity.

Of course he does. Let's capitalize on this tragedy. Absolutely. Yeah. So he's got some friends in high places and he starts talking to them and being like, hey, you got to move that president's dead ass body. I got these real fancy sleeping cars. You can't just stick his corpse in like a shitty car. You got to put him

in something nice, right? He has a point. He has a point. Right. Exactly. People don't want to see you like you open it and it's like what you'd stick like a bunch of logs into or something. There's just a fucking coffin sliding around. Exactly. And even if they didn't want to, if someone presented

that and then they said, no, that's pretty shit. That's an asshole move. If you're presented with a nicer option, you just put Abraham Lincoln in an oven. Yeah, it's very smart of him to just be like, yeah, I'll give him one of my nice cars to drive

the president's dead ass body around in. And this actually posed a significant logistical hurdle because a lot of train stations and platforms and bridges weren't wide enough to take the car that he had. It can only travel on some tracks. And so they get like

the government widens a bunch of like station platforms and bridges, which actually makes his business even more profitable because now his cars can go more places. The parallel of the canal widening in this white, wow. George Pullman, a man made great by widening. It's always cyclical.

Life is cyclical. It's a flat circle, whatever. You know what I mean? It all comes back to. And a flat circle. Pretty wide. It is pretty wide. Pretty wide. You know what it is. Pretty wide. I know you're going to say Raytheon or some shit. I just don't know

the variety of products Raytheon makes very wide. You need a missile guidance chip for a Hellfire missile. Raytheon's got you. If you need a software to help target for an assassin drone, Raytheon's

got you. If you need to not have any kind of targeting whatsoever, because you're just going to bomb an area, Raytheon can make the detonators for that carpet bombing. Whatever you need from Raytheon, as long as it involves killing people from the sky, Raytheon can do.

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cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good badass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen.

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you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991

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Okay, we're back. And the Lincoln's corpse engine train would go down in history as one of the most popular trains of all time, slightly underneath the Festival Express. Ulysses Simpson Grant praised George Pullman for giving a dead man an ice corpse box.

After the whole dead person business was concluded, the entire car was put on display so that people could gawk at it. Like you said, it's a corpse box. It is a corpse box. It's a nice corpse box. I guess that's before coffins. I mean, they probably already had coffins.

I'm sure he was in a coffin. Corpse box is a phrase I wasn't familiar with until right now. I'm going to start up another... It's going to be one of those mattress businesses that ships mattresses to you, but it'll ship cheap coffins and you've got something going there.

You've got to have a box for corpses. You never know when you're going to wind up with a corpse. Yeah, exactly. Follow your dreams, Robert. That's going to take me out of this filthy podcasting business. Honestly, you're right though. If you're able to have the luxury

to do anything you want to do, you will do it and find a way to make it good if you're smart, decently intelligent. I think that's all it needs. And basic understanding of humanity or like human instinct or something. Does that make sense?

Yeah, I mean, it's one of those things where the people who are most successful under our system there's a certain level of money that they have, but also if you go above that level, I think your odds of doing anything on your own that change the world

actually start to drop. You don't tend to hear about Waltons or whatever. I mean, it's not just about systems, but it's a guy like Jeff Bezos who grows up very comfortable but not with billions of dollars who's going to actually,

anyway, whatever. He has no like concept of what people are going through or what they need or whatever. I mean, I was just, I mean, this is, everyone talks about this, but having enough money to like really improve the lives of billions of people

or like help with world hunger and not doing anything about it blows my mind, you know. All rich people are like that, or billionaires pretty much. This is actually where the story is building a bit. Great, great. So Lincoln's death incredible for George Pullman

and he takes all of the great PR that comes in the wake of this and he approaches several wealthy businessmen with the same pitch. I need more investment money because I want to build enough cars to sell luxury rides everywhere, right? I want everyone to be able to use like one of my sleeper cars but I need, like

my business isn't going to grow fast enough organically in order to get to that point, so I need investment capital. I need to kill people. Yeah, I mean, well, that's where we're building to, but yeah, so he's like, okay, I need a bunch of money and he's done, you know, well enough, this whole Lincoln thing was a big enough deal that he gets

about a million dollars of investments and he uses it to form a new company, the Pullman Palace Car Company. Throughout the 1880s he choked out or made deals with anyone who might be competition for his luxury train car business and by the 1890s George Pullman had a monopoly

and trains are the biggest thing in the fucking world by the, everyone's traveling places by train and he's the only guy that makes like the sleeper cars and whatnot. He got in there, he got in there. Yeah, if you wanted to take an actual like comfortable train trip anywhere

in the United States, George was getting a piece of that action and he continued to innovate through every part of this period and his innovations included the field of racism. Quote from Richard Sniroff. In 1867 he rolled out the Del Monaco, the first dining car, called a hotel car

with a kitchen at its center. It could serve 250 meals a day. In 1875 he built a luxurious parlor car which offered an upscale traveling experience. Meanwhile his designers continuously improved heating, ventilation and lighting. Throughout at all, the Pullman's appeal to the public

rested on meticulous service. He used the existing racial division of labor and hiring. White conductors collected tickets and sold births in route to perform menial work like carrying luggage preparing the births for use, cleaning the cars and providing personal services to passengers. He hired African American porters.

Many of them recently freed slaves. The conductors who supervised the sleeping car porters received white men's wages. The porters received less than one sixth the wages of conductors. Low wages kept them dependent on the tips and thus the goodwill of white porters. Despite the servant-like position

of porters, Pullman had a good reputation among blacks due to the secure jobs and relatively high income they provided. He's in this mixed space. If he's one of the first people to really figure out okay, we've got all these newly freed people how can I exploit them?

How can I capitalize on? Obviously I'm not surprised at this point but it just sounds like the real-life version in the 1800s of the help. It is. He's popular among or at least according to this, he's popular among those

but it's also like, well, if you were a recently freed slave, it's not hard to be the best boss they've ever had. Just pay the money and don't own them and split their families up for profit. Well, this guy's a pretty good boss. He's really capitalizing on

desperation and need and like... It's like a theory at the same time as being evil master. It's one of those things where he is not to give him credit as you always have to in this period.

He never uses slave labor in the period before the Civil War. I don't think he was supportive of it. He doesn't have that going against him and a lot of real rich white dudes who get their start in the 1850s. There's some uncomfortable

slavery stuff going on there. You only pay them one sixth. That's a choice you make. It's a choice he makes because you can get away with it. He's not the reason that is... But he is kind of...

He is one of the very first businessmen who's hiring... White businessmen who's hiring in mass black laborers. That is pretty new in this period because slavery was around until 1865 in the United States and he is helping to kind of

set this idea that you can hire black people for jobs and pay them less than you would pay white people for the same jobs. That makes good business. He is one of the men establishing that. We do have to give him credit for that,

unfortunately. He's a good person for the times. I don't know that he's a good person for the times. He's just not a confederate. That'd be the bar of good person. He doesn't enslave people

when he has the opportunity. He chooses money over actual humanity. He does choose money over humanity. Whatever. I'm not trying to praise him. Relatively high

in terms of the wages for black laborers in Pullman's company is a term that has a lot of wiggle room. It's one I've seen agrees with the idea that his wages were considered high. I think this passage from a Jacobin article gets across how humiliating this work could be

for the black porters who worked on his railroad. As you listen to this, remember that these were considered by a lot of people to be relatively good jobs. Working for tips, they served passengers in plush surroundings with heads bowed, pride suppressed, swallowing any words of protest

at being called George. It's a service to their employer, George Pullman. These employees, by the white people using the train cars, just call any black person George because of their boss. We're real close to slavery

still here. That's very interesting to me. I don't know. It's bad. It's fucked up. It's not specifically a racist thing that I'd heard about until this. I don't know.

I didn't know that was a thing. It is very offensive. It's pretty fucked up. As we discussed in our Bernard McFadden episodes, the late 1800s were a period in which the United States was industrializing rapidly, and the consequences of all that industrialization

were becoming obvious. Organizations like the YMCA were created initially in the UK to ameliorate the health and moral consequences of modern life. George Pullman, now rich and influential, volunteered his time to help run the YMCA and other organizations that he thought might help provide an answer

to the labor question. This is a term that was used at the time. I found an 1886 Atlantic article with this title throughout the Gilded Age. The primary issue was this. Organized labor had existed at some point for quite a while, but the concept was still being worked out.

Remember in the 1880s, the idea that laborers would organize and form unions is not a very old idea. So, by the end of the 1880s, labor had gotten, in the United States, had gotten smart and effective enough

to actually start putting some major pressure on capital. The 1880s, 1890s, is kind of really when the labor movement starts coming together in a way that's able to do stuff effectively. And what's called the labor question, which is the title of this article I found,

but this article from the 1880s that I found, you hear this phrase, the labor question a lot in this period. And the labor question is this. Should working men have a right to dictate the terms of their employment? Or should capital hold all of society in unquestioned,

like, domination? And it's actually really interesting to read some of the critical arguments, people criticizing labor, because often these people who are like, no, I don't think workers have a right to organize, are... They get the same tone with them

that you get with a lot of, quote, unquote, unbiased, fair-minded, intellectual, like, journalism people today, like, folks writing about climate change, or like, well, let's talk about the Americans who don't wear masks and all this nonsense. It's definitely that advocate because it's my job. And because if I'm criticizing

everyone equally, even if the facts aren't equal, then nobody can say that I'm unfair. It smells like Bill Maher. Yeah. So this Atlantic columnist writing about the labor question spends a huge chunk of his column ranting about alcohol,

and basically saying that, like, well, workers spend all of this money on alcohol and do all of these bad things under the influence of alcohol. And why are they organizing to get more money when they could just stop buying alcohol? Oh, of course. Yeah, it's very funny.

It's today's coffee? It's today's avocado toast. Yeah. There's like that stupid saying where it's like, you, instead of buying coffee every day, like, that's why we're spending all our money, like, millennials or whatever. You know what I mean? There's like this,

it's a coffee thing. It's always a drink, I suppose. I believe that workers should have the right to buy alcohol and also still have enough money left over for things that aren't alcohol. Yeah, of course. They're shifting the blame. Yeah, heroin. Fun stuff.

GHB, 2CI, all the goodies. I will have to ask you about those off-mic. But yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, they're all, they can all be fun. So, what? Thank you so much. It's the best, that's what. That was so funny.

Dude, if you were on the show, I would not be able to survive. I mean, Robert's great, but I do need the validation sometimes. You know what I mean? It's okay, nobody ever appreciates my jokes. Sorry, Robert. We were having a moment. I know you were. That's fine.

We're so funny. We have a bond. We bonded. She's the best. I'm the best. We get each other. And you know who else is the best? This Atlantic columnist telling people complaining about workers. Yeah, like being like,

why are they asking for more money from their bosses when they could just stop drinking? It's amazing. Yeah, go ahead. On the one side, a yearly waste of between four and five hundred millions of dollars, and on the other side, a body of men, the squanderers

of this vast fund, complaining that they have not sufficient opportunities. We cannot long be at a loss to comprehend the true nature of the existing dissatisfaction. It is clear that labor has been incited to seek from without the relief which ought to be sought from within.

The socialist theory of a paternal state system which provides everybody with work and wages is a mischievous fallacy. It simply encourages indolence and dependence. The first duty of labor is to demonstrate its capacity for self-government. At this moment, its drink bill

is an impeachment of that capacity. No man who spends half his earnings at a saloon can get on in the world or has the least right to expect to get on. Nor can any body of men follow the same course with better results. Wow. None of that half a billion dollars a year

spent on alcohol is rich people. Not any of it. Just poor guys. Yeah. Just stop drinking and get more. If you stop drinking, you'll have more time to work and help us in a capitalist society. You know what I was actually pondering earlier today? When it comes to medication that

helps your brain, whether it's Adderall or whatever, or things to make you more active, it kind of feels like society is making us... It all ends up like you have to for work. It makes you work better. It makes you provide. Obviously, brains need it. It really helps me.

But I was thinking about it in a more sinister, capitalistic way where it's like they just want us to be better workers. You know what I mean? More efficient, actually just like... I don't know. Does that make sense? Yeah. No. It does. And you know what else makes sense?

I don't know why I keep doing this this episode. You're so early. My brain's been broken by capitalism and now all I can do is pivot to ads. I mean, the last segue I thought was not bad to me. Thank you. I'm very good at it. I'm an expert. That was like so America of you. An artist.

You can't get capitalism off the brain. You keep needing to go to an ad. I want to keep reading from this Atlantic article because it's very funny. Do you or do you want to do another weird ad transition that we're not having? No, I want to just talk about the author of this Atlantic's article, George Frederick Parsons.

And in this next part of the article, he ties his irritation about American drunkenness with a rant about how capitalists have a right to expect that profits increase forever. And it's just the most American paragraph I've ever read. Prosperity is the reward of persevering, temperate, ungrudging work.

In these days, there is, however, a great wind of new doctrine. We are asked to believe that it is possible to succeed in a very different way that the lesser man works, for example, the more he ought to receive that national prosperity can be advanced by diminishing production and many other

equally hard sayings. But it may be confidently affirmed that these new theories are destined to be short-lived and that the world will have to be managed eventually upon pretty much the old lines. Yeah. It's good. Very American,

honestly. For the record, George Parsons died in 1893 and I found his obituary and it blamed his death on the fact that he hadn't lifted enough. It was very funny. He hadn't worked out enough.

What the fuck? It's very funny. Damn, that is like sub-tweeting a death. I know. Fuck you. Direct insult, not even a sub. You can't fight back. George Parsons, the author of that Atlantic article and George Pullman,

the subject of our episode today, both seem to have come at the problem of labor from the same point of view. It was foolish for workers to organize and send to the upper class. That's what Parsons is saying, right? Why are you organizing for more money when you should just stop spending any money

on alcohol and invest it all into a business and improve your own circumstances? Boots traps, yeah. The way to do this, and this is what George Pullman believes too, workers shouldn't organize. They should seek to improve their own individual lots so they can raise up to the middle class

and the upper class. The way you do this is you scrimp and save to see your family. You do nothing but work and sock away money so that you can join the middle class. That just sounds too revelant to our current times

and how people talk about homelessness and are unhoused. It's a disease that's existed in the United States for a very long time and we need to it needs to not happen. It's bad.

That view of how life should be is something that should be opposed with force if necessary. Of course. It's a sin to the miracle of life. Yeah, it is. I find it very unsettling and this happens all the time

when you hear a terrible quote like that or you read something and it looks exactly like today. It just proves that do we ever actually change? Are we always the same? Just like a different or like a different like trimmings on this world, you know?

Humane doesn't actually change for always just like keeps doing these terrible things. I don't know. It's just it's kind of sad. It's great. No, it's good. It's good. Everything's fine. George was of the opinion that if his workers had nicer lives and lived in more comfortable surroundings,

ones that at least mimicked middle class life, they wouldn't complain. He was like, well, if I can build a place for my workers to live that looks like an ideal middle class town, then they won't need to organize for anything because that's all anyone could ever want

is a comfortable, clean, middle class American town. And he figures if I can build a town for them, I can make it so that they can't drink because I just won't allow there to be bars there. So like I can control them and make sure they don't do any of the things because the only reason workers are unhappy

is that they do things that make them unhappy and waste their money. I don't need to pay them anymore. I don't need to treat them better. All I need to do is make a place for them to live where they won't be able to do any of the things

that they're going to do otherwise because they're just not as smart as I am. They can't stop themselves from doing bad things. So if I can build a place for them to live, then they won't ruin their own lives. Dude, sounds like a bad time to me. Yeah.

I don't know. Every rich man I feel like has a God complex and this is a very firm example of that. Oh, yes. Yeah, I mean, I think you could probably I think probably if you were to get Elon Musk to talk honestly about how he'd want life organized

in his Mars colony, you would get some similar vibes. Yeah, of course. I feel like he already feels that way. He's like, I've given all these sheep cars to drive. I've changed the world. It's like, that may be true, but you're still a fuckhead. Not yet, man.

Anyway, whatever. So to kind of put George Pullman and his attitudes towards his workers, this kind of paternalist attitude that he has towards building a place for them and moderating their behavior, to put that in context and want to quote again from Richard Schnirov.

By the 1880s, many reformers had shifted from personal reform through revivalism, education, and public exhortation to an environmental emphasis. They believed that by changing the social environment in which the worker lived and worked, they could induce habits of respectability, uplift workers' character,

and change social attitudes. In 1879, Pullman followed closely the movement in New York to create model tenements that would offer working-class families clean and ventilated room to reduce sickness and disease and promote good morals by inducing men to stay at home rather than escape to saloons.

In return, investors would receive a reasonable 7% return. So, this is his idea. He's looking at these kind of like model tenements going up in New York and he's like, well, I'm going to build a town of my own. And not only will it be clean and keep

workers away from vices like drinking, but it'll be profitable, right? I'm going to get a positive return on this as an investment. It has to be good for me too. I have to benefit in some way. And like all dudes like him when he wrote about this, Pullman phrased that as if it was like

the rule of the universe. Capital will not invest in sentiment nor for sentimental considerations for the labouring classes, but let it once be proved that enterprises of this kind are safe and profitable and we shall see great manufacturing corporations developing similar enterprises and thus a new era

will be introduced into the history of labour. It's like, literally, I won't do anything if I don't make money off of it. I will open the door for you if you don't give me... Capitalists, of course, won't care. Capitalists have no interest in workers living comfortably or cleanly. No.

But if you show them it's a profitable business then everyone's on board. It's very sinister because on the surface if you don't dig any deeper, it's kind of nice, you know what I mean? He's low-key helping them and it's clean and whatever, but it's just so insidious,

I think, and that's unsettling. If you're starting a position is that the only reason you would help your workers and build a nice place for them to live is that it would profit you well then as soon as it's not profitable what are you going to do? Very good point.

I see where this is going. So, today the town of Pullman, Illinois is a neighborhood on Chicago's south side which I am very reliably informed is the baddest part of town. But in the early 1880s it was a 150-acre town to the south

of the Pullman car work so it's not part of Chicago yet like it's a separate town in and of itself. Right outside of the big factory where the Pullman cars are built. The factory took up nine buildings on 30 acres and Pullman the town was exhaustively planned around it

to be as modern as possible. Sewer and gas lines were added first so that every home would enjoy heating and water. This had the benefit of ensuring the city itself would not flood like Chicago had. Most descriptions of the Pullman town will acknowledge that it was a much nicer place to live than many of the tenements

working people had endured at the time. It's unclear how accurate this is and it seems in some parts to be a measure of opinion. Pullman the town was organized hierarchically and the people with higher paying and more prestigious jobs lived at the center of town

close to the hotel, the school, the libraries and the parks in nice spacious modern houses. But low-paid grunt laborers, the actual rank and file workers still lived in claustrophobic tenement blocks. They had a nice outside, they were done up so on the outside it looked like a nice

block of houses but it was tenements on the inside and they were newer and cleaner tenements with more amenities than a lot of stuff in the city itself but they were still cramped in not high quality dwellings. This passage from a write-up by the University of Virginia lays out the conditions

inside. The workers' houses, humble in appearance, both inside and out, were monotonous and gave the impression of soldiers' barracks. They were mostly cleaned with an abundance of air. Most were two stories with five rooms in addition to cellars, pantries and closets. There was indeed water from a faucet used by

five families, often located in one of the small closets. There were no yards and for those families living upstairs no front door. Most of the buildings were constructed with brick made in the Pullman Brickyards. These same brickyards contained the eyesore of the town. Four rows of little

16 by 20 foot wooden shanties that had a sitting room, two bedrooms compared all of this to the arcade and library. Despite Mr. Pullman's intentions and his desirability for the commercial value of beauty, his model town was not a real home for workers who lived there. One woman compared it to

living in a great hotel. We call it camping out. So it's not really all that great. I think the most casual descriptions will say, well, there were problems with it but it was nicer than other. Maybe it was cleaner a bit but it was not like a lot of

the people who lived there were not living in great conditions. It just sounds like slavery 2.0 where it's like... Well, that's kind of where we're building to. So, yeah. It looked nice on the outside. It's like a movie set.

Yeah. And that's what a lot of people say about it. It's not a home. It's a place you can sleep. There's things about it that are nice but it's not really a home. It's kind of right up from the Pullman Museum that makes it very clear why people might

not have been happy to live in Pullman. Quote, In 1880, Pullman bought 4,000 acres near Lake Calamette, some 14 miles south of Chicago on the Illinois Central Railroad for $800,000. He hired Solon Spencer Beeman to design his new plant there and in an effort

to solve the issue of labor unrest and poverty he also built a town adjacent to his factory with a Joan housing, shopping theaters, shopping areas, churches, theaters, parks, all in library. The 1300 original structures were entirely designed by Beeman. The centerpiece of the complex was the administration building and its man-made

lake. The Hotel Florence, named for Pullman's favorite daughter, was built nearby. Pullman believed that the country air and fine facilities without agitators, saloons, and city vice districts would result in a happy, loyal workplace. The model-planned community became a leading attraction during the world's Columbian

Exposition of 1893 and caused a national sensation. Pullman was praised by the national press for his benevolence and vision. As pleasant as this community may have been, Pullman expected the town to make money. By 1892, the community, profitable in its own right, was valued at over $5 million. Pullman ruled

the town like a feudal baron. He prohibited independent newspapers, public speeches, town meetings, or open discussion. His inspectors regularly entered homes to inspect for cleanliness and could terminate leases on ten days' notice. The church stood empty since no approved denomination would pay rent and no other

congregation was allowed. Private charitable organizations were prohibited. Pullman employees declared, we are born in a Pullman house, fed from the Pullman shops, taught in the Pullman school, catatized in the Pullman church, and when we die, we shall go to Pullman hell. Wow.

Yeah. That's an ending to a sentence, first of all. But isn't it ironic, because you said he didn't necessarily support slavery when it actually was happening, you know what I mean? Yeah. I feel like he found a loop, like in my head, he doesn't think it's a slavery,

right? No, of course not. I mean, it's not slavery. It is not, like, there are aspects of it that do eventually kind of verge on slavery. It's parallel to exploiting people and, like, acting like their master and all that stuff. Yeah, and there's some of the white people who protest

later will compare themselves to slaves. I want to... I don't want to do that, because I don't think that's fair. And in part, I think the white people at the time were doing that is that, like, they're pretty fucking racist. Of course. It's not that bad. Yeah. No, I mean, yeah.

White victimization, it's a tale as old as time. He's more of a dictator than he is a slave owner, right? Like, that's more of the attitude, is that, like, they live here and they could technically leave most of them.

But if they live here, then he's going to control every aspect of their life that he can, right? Like, there's no discussion on it. I know what's best for you and I'm going to ensure you do it. Um... Did we actually... Sorry, did we take an ad break

or did we just talk about taking an ad break? No, we took one ad break. We didn't take a second, did we? Oh, sorry. No, no, we talked about it. I just want to make sure... I don't know. Because we usually do, like, 20... It's great. You know what else is producing? I'm just... Sorry. No, no, no.

Continue. Go for it. Uh, Raytheon is making new things to kill people. They are. Yep. That's what's producing. Everyday. Yeah. So, stay tuned to find out what those are. I'm very proud of you, Shireen. Thank you, Robert. Sorry that I just, like,

thought we just talked about it. I just wanted to make sure... Sorry, I was being a producer in that moment. We crushed it. Alright, here's ads. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what?

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that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth,

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that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Alright, we're back. So, Pullman builds this town,

and I should note, the only people allowed to live in the Pullman town are white people. You cannot live there. He has black workers. They are not allowed to live in his town. Because again, it's his idealized version of society, which does not have any black people.

The town eventually had a population of about 1200 Pullman workers and things chugged along well enough until 1893, when the entire gilded age collectively shat its pants. The town started to gambling on the IPOs of countries, like Argentina.

A bunch of these bets went badly in the early 1890s. This spooked European investors, and those investors started hoarding gold from the US Treasury. This coincided with the collapse of a massive railway company, and a general contraction for the whole railway industry, which had been flooded with far more money than it could ever hope to absorb,

and grossly overbuilt. Grover Cleveland, who started office in 1893, responded to all this by fucking around with silver, which didn't do much to allay people's currency fears. As more Americans lost their jobs, others panicked and withdrew their money in moss from banks. The economies of the western world,

such as they existed back then, fell apart. George Pullman had to fire a quarter of his workforce. Those who remained faced dwindling hours. This might have been a situation where Pullman's scheme, to reduce worker unrest by building them a nice place to live, could have come in handy.

If he had for example said, hey guys, I'm going to have to cut everybody's hours, you know what, I'm canceling rent while this economic crisis goes on or something. Or it could have at least pro-rated or whatever. He would have had options that he probably would have been more popular than ever. His workers would have been like,

well shit, this is the benefit of letting a guy like Pullman be your boss and run your life, as when times are hard, he takes care of you. But George Pullman could not stand the thought that one of his endeavors might not turn a profit. And so he kept rent in utilities at the same rates they'd been before the Depression.

While he was cutting everybody's pay. Now, he actually- Every thing is parallel. That's happening now. Well, and here's the thing that's fucked up. I guess you could argue, if you were looking at this from a pro-capitalist standpoint, like, well he couldn't stop their rent

because he couldn't afford to. This was a business and he can't pay for everybody's rent forever. It costs him money to upkeep the town. But he was actually willing to lose money, just not that way. He didn't cancel people's rent, but he did take on contracts

at a loss, so that he took on contracts and he charged so little that the company lost money on the contracts in order to get workers back into the office working. So he wouldn't lower their renter bills, but he would actually lose money in order to make sure that people were still working for him.

That's twisted. Yeah, it's fucked up, right? It's more about the ego than about the money in that sense. Yeah, it's not I want to take care of my workers. It's I want my workers to still be working. For me. For me.

It's very interesting and sociopathic. Pullman hid this fact. The fact that he was taking on contracts at a loss from his labor force. His employees did not know that the company was losing money to employ them. But by 1894, it had become fairly popular knowledge

due to some leaks, and this led to a burst of additional unrest from Pullman employees. They were also angry that Pullman had increasingly made them pay a substantial premium for things like water and gas in the Pullman town. Which water and gas the local government provided

those to Pullman. It was a town. They should have just been available for a pretty low fee to the people living there. But the Pullman company charged employees for a thing that was being provided by the government that those employees were paying taxes for.

Hmm. Didn't that come again? It's that's a... I have no response to that. I'm not going to pretend to be funny. I have no great power at this point. It's dope. So that was not the end of the grift.

As Prospect.org writes, his one giant church was too expensive for most congregations to afford its rent, and his ill-conceived attempt to convince all the local denominations to merge into one generic megachurch failed. He charged a membership fee to foster his notion of personal responsibility.

Workers avoided the hotel bar and the ever-watchful eye of off-duty supervisors, limiting their public carousing to a neighboring village colloquially known as Bumtown. The housing, too, was for rent only. His aim was to ensure that housing remained a good repair and attractive, and he charged higher rents to maintain them.

Here, Pullman applied his usual belief that the public would pay more for a higher quality, ignoring the fact that this particular public, his employees, had little choice when his was the only housing in town. He's out of touch at that point. It's a smart grift, but he is grifting them.

He's robbing them, basically. They're paying vastly more than they need to. And because they're living in this Pullman town, they can't go out and find other work, right? Yeah. They're out in the Pullman town. Yeah, very twisted. Just, yeah.

Narcissistic in a strange way. He cuts wages while maintaining rent and continuing to charge people additionally for water and gas. He cuts wages by an average of 28% across the board, which means employees all start to fall behind on their rent.

Now, you can go in debt to the company, right? Oh, no! Robert, no! And you can also go in debt to the company if there's a building code violation, and Lord's work, right? Everything's a building code violation. And those things are taken out

automatically out of the worker's paycheck, as are things if they go in debt to the company for food. So workers would go negative to the company, which means they can't quit without suddenly owing all that money, right? Like the bill immediately comes due if you stop working for Pullman. You're forever tied to that name forever.

It's not quite slavery. But it is not as far away from slavery. Yeah, it's not as far away from slavery as it ought to be, you know? Yeah. That's a grift. When you start having employees in debt to the company and unable to quit

because then they would, you know, potentially get in legal trouble for that, then you're in a real uncomfortable territory, you know? You're making a problem that only you can solve, and you're consciously making that problem. You know what I mean? He controls too much.

And there's no way... I don't know. It's kind of like almost backwards the way he's doing it in my head. But, you know what I mean? Like, he's making a problem, only he can solve it, and he knows that. And probably they know that too.

And just like, I'm going to stop. Got complex. Yeah, it's fun. It's all good. Everything's fine. So, for a look at how bleak this situation could be for the workers, I want to read a quote from a Pullman worker named Ginny Curtis.

And this is her telling her story of working for Pullman. Wow. So, like, employees, it's often a family business. You're all living in town. If your dad dies with debts, you take on those debts in addition to, like,

what you have to pay to keep... That is fucked up. It's like forever branding people, again, 2.0, with, like, being, like, at your mercy, in a way. So, in May of 1894,

the Pullman workers decided to strike for a better deal. They were not yet unionized, so they set their sights on a man who at the time embodied the hope for the power of labor. And this brings us to a dude I really like, Eugene Victor Debs. More commonly, just called Eugene V. Debs.

He was born in Tera Hout, Indiana, in 1855. He was the son of a fairly well-off family. They owned a couple of small businesses. Might have even had a little bit more money than Pullman's family. Like Pullman, Debs dropped out of school, although he made it to 14.

And he got a job cleaning train cars for 50 cents a day. It's worth noting that Pullman quit school even earlier than Debs in the fourth grade and got a job paying $40 a month, which is about $25 a month more than what young Debs could expect to earn. So that's interesting to me.

Like from the beginning, I don't know. I guess Pullman's family probably had more money, because yeah, Debs is... Yeah, Debs is making like 15 bucks a month, something like that. And Pullman's making 40 bucks a month in their first gigs out the door, which I guess, you know, Pullman's hired

by his family, so that does help. That makes sense, actually. But that's the answer. Yeah. Debs eventually quit doing this job, and he returned home to work as an accountant for his father's business. Again, neither of these are like poor kids. By age 19, Eugene had joined his first union

for locomotive firefighters. He was the secretary, and he also edited their magazine, which he used as a platform to urge sobriety and patriotic citizenship. He was not a radical at this stage, and his trade union membership did not cause him to identify as a socialist. He did get increasingly political,

and was elected a city clerk in 1879 as state representative in 1884. Debs was a Democrat, and he urged modest reforms from a broadly pro-worker platform. So Debs was a Democrat, and he urged modest reforms from a broadly pro-worker platform. And I'm going to quote from Jacobin for this next part here.

By the late 1880s, Debs had started his trek away from conservative unionism. A railroad walkout in 1888 convinced Debs, who served as strike leader, that a harmonious relationship with massive corporations was impossible without the counterweight of organized workers. He also began to criticize the craft unionism

that dominated the labor movement, rather than self-balkanize according to job tasks. Federationists, like Debs, insisted that workers, whether conductor or fireman, engineer or breakman, organize under one common fold, as Debs explained in May 1893. That same year, he co-founded

the American Railway Union, putting his vision of a fighting industrial unionism into practice. So the early unions are like, we're all of the guys who do breaking for the train. We're all of the conductors. And you don't have as much power when you're that kind of atomized,

unless you're able to work together to some extent. And Debs is one of the people who's really pushing, no, everyone who works for the railroad should be in the same union, and we all fight together. And the ARU was kind of his attempt to do that. So larger workers' organizations had existed before.

Debs isn't the first person to do this. The American Federation of Labor was founded in 1886. The Knights of Labor back in 1869. But the idea that workers within a specific industry would organize based on that industry, rather than job type, was pretty novel. Debs was convinced that bosses

were playing different specialties off of one another, trying to get workers to kind of compete with each other rather than working together. And that this artificial competition was to stop workers from actually organizing together for their shared interests. When he resigned from his job working for the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen,

Debs wrote, quote, It has been my life's desire to unify railroad employees and to eliminate the aristocracy of labor, which unfortunately exists, and organize them, so all will be on inequality. Now, the ARU was founded for him to strike back at what was effectively

a union of railroad managers, which had organized to set standard job classifications and wages between different railroad companies, as well as to build a common pool of strikebreakers, and even an inter-industry strike fund of sorts to help railroads outlast any union strikes. So Debs sees that, like,

workers are splitting themselves up too much while the actual railroad companies are all organizing together. They effectively have a union. In 1893, immediately after he founds the ARU, he wins a substantial victory over the Great Northern Pacific Railroad during, like, a real landmark strike.

And this is the first time something like this happens that, like, this broad cross-section of railroad workers organize and win a fight against a major railroad. This brings new members and dues flooding into the ARU. He's the talk of kind of the union movement after this.

By June of 1894, just weeks after Pullman workers made their decision to strike, the ARU had reached its greatest extent, 150,000 members. Now, roughly a third of George Pullman's employees were ARU members. And when the union held its first convention,

George Pullman's employees, like the subset of the ARU that worked for Pullman, came to the union gathering with a plan. The Pullman workers asked the entire ARU to join their boycott, stopping all trains from carrying Pullman cars across parts of the nation represented by the ARU.

So these workers for Pullman who are in the ARU are like, hey, we're going on strike, but that's not going to be enough. Like, we want you to go on strike, too. We want you to refuse to service Pullman cars anywhere in the country, even if you're not a Pullman employee.

Because that's going to put more... Yeah, it's going to put a lot more stress on the bosses. Hell yeah. I like where this is going. I want to read from a quote from their plea to the ARU. Pullman, both the man and the town, is an ulcer on the body politic. He owns the houses,

the school houses, the churches of God, and the town he gave his once humble name. And thus the merry war, the dance of skeletons bathed in human tears, goes on. And it will go on, brothers, forever, unless you, the American railway union, stop it, end it, crush it out.

People used to write more colorfully back then. So after visiting with workers and hearing their stories of privation, Debs decided that not only did they deserve the ARU's solidarity, but that this could be a chance to start to pull together the kind of national

labor coalition that he thought was necessary to push back against the forces of capital. Still, he attempted to negotiate first. George Pullman, however, was not a negotiator. He believed he was defending his and everyone else's inherent right to private property.

Workers had no right to demand better conditions from him, as the factories and train cars they labored in were his personal property. Local civic institutions in Chicago jumped in to try and urge some kind of accord, but compromise proved impossible. Eugene V. Debs and the delegates of the ARU decided

to strike. Debs declared that all shall march together and fight together until working men shall receive and enjoy the fruits of their toil. Strike leader Thomas Heathcote explained the position of the Pullman men thusly. We do not know what the outcome will be, and in fact we do not care much.

We do know that we are working for less wages than will maintain ourselves and our families in the necessities of life, and on that one proposition we absolutely refuse to work any longer. The ARU's sympathy strike was the largest declaration of labor solidarity up to that point. It still is

one of the largest examples of anything like this ever happening, and it's completely unprecedented. But there were however like you limits to the kind of solidarity these people were willing to express, and those limits

mostly landed on racial lines. So Debs for his part begged strikers to accept black workers as part of their sympathy boycott. He was like, if we don't take these people in two and represent them two then they're going to be used to scabs, and why wouldn't they

be scabs? If we won't link arms with them, why wouldn't they go work for money somewhere else? We're not going to help them do anything. That was going to be my next question about like, so the union at this point is all white.

Oh yes, yes, and Debs is kind of pushing, and there's a lot of argument about how hard he really pushes, but he's kind of pushing for that to maybe be opened up, but they the union does not agree to do that. So it's the same thing like, you can criticize Pullman for saying

like, black employees aren't allowed to live in my Pullman town, but you know, it's worth noting also that the white Pullman unionized employees were not willing to let black people join their union. It's the, well it's 1894, you know? Of course they're racist.

Of course, I mean what's his face? Debs sounds like he's trying to improve society, but it's not possible at that point. He's trying. He does a lot over the course of his life. So Debs puts forward a motion to include

2,000 black Pullman workers in the strike. It was voted on at a union meeting, but the majority of those present voted against it. So again, in his credit he does try. The motion fails, and the strike's only going to consist of white workers. This is

deeply unfortunate and also kind of ironic because workers when talked to by the press kept saying things like this quote, the only difference between slavery at Pullman and what it was down south before the war is that there the owners took care of their slaves when they were sick and here they don't. Oh my god.

I don't think it's entirely fair, but they're co-opting slavery. You're not going to find a large mass of white dudes who are not problematic in 1894 or today. So initially the Pullman strikers enjoyed enormous

support from the University of Illinois. After being elected mayor in December 1893, Hopkins made the cause of the Pullman workers his own, allowed Chicago police to collect charity for them and kept police from interfering in the strike while it remained peaceful. Indeed support for the strikers was widespread in the city.

Jane Adams, founder of the whole house remembered returning to Chicago on July 9th to find almost everyone on Halstead Street wearing a white ribbon, the emblem of the striker's side. Now the strike also benefited from the neutrality of Illinois Governor John Peter Altgeld

who had then elected in 1892 with strong labor support. Altgeld had pardoned three Haymarket anarchists, four others had been hanged in 1887 and issued an accompanying message in which he declared the trial in which they had been convicted in an injustice. During the early part of the strike Altgeld refused to send militia into

Chicago. So the strikers have a lot of benefits including the fact that a lot of local elected leaders are on their side and in one case at least pretty radical themselves, which helps. I think also because it's all white that helps them too. Unfortunately.

By the end of June more than 150,000 railroad workers in 27 states had joined the sympathy strike refusing to service any trains with a Pullman car, which was most strains. So the whole American railroad system grinds to a halt. As the Chicago

Times wrote, quote, Some roads are absolutely and utterly blockaded others only feel the embargo slightly but it grows in strength with every hour. So this raises panic to a fever pitch among national elites with a writer at the nation declaring the boycott an attempt to starve

out society. So the Pullman strike had grown to be the sort of thing that actually did put the whole system at risk. Bosses grasping for a way to destroy this threat to their supremacy landed on a tactic that is familiar to all of us today. Hyping up acts of violence from protesting

workers. From a write up in Lafam's Quarterly, quote, The effects of the strike were felt most intensely in Chicago itself, particularly as public transportation came to a halt after streetcar workers joined the strike. Violence broke out. As presidents Cleveland later wrote, almost in a night

it grew to full proportions of malevolence and anger. Riding in violence was early accompaniments and it spread so swiftly that within a few days it had reached nearly the entire western and southwestern sections of our country. He wasn't wrong. Freight cars were derailed, engineers were assaulted, tracks were blocked, and train

cars and buildings were set on fire. Now, the worst thing that happened during this riot was that a mail truck was damaged, which gave President Cleveland the excuse he'd been looking for to intervene. The president claimed interference with the post was a federal issue, which it is,

and used that to justify deploying 14,000 soldiers to crack heads, which is more legally questionable. But this is the justification, right? They're fucking with the mail now. I'm going to send in troops. Yeah. Yeah. And this is in spite of the fact that as a general rule the strikers would actually let mail trucks buy

because they didn't want to stop people from getting more posts. Because they're also workers, right? This is just like shit gets heated, right? People are fighting in the street like a mail truck gets damaged, you know? The national media, obviously as soon as there's violence, goes all culture worry on the strike, calling it

subsist rebellion and framing it as an attack on civilization itself. Now, the strike had gotten off to a strong start, but from this point it gets hampered from a number of factors. For one thing, the AFL, the American Federation of Labor, never supported the Pullman strike. Its head,

Samuel Gompers, was a very conservative man and very hostile to socialism. He believed that only skilled craft workers ought to unionize. And the fact that he and the AFL delegates didn't vote to support the ARU strike really narrowed the scope of a

sympathy strike. It's why there's a potential at the beginning, maybe other unions could get involved, other industries could get involved, like laborers all around the country could organize for railroad workers and this would be a precedent. But that's not what Gompers wants, that's not what the AFL wants and so it doesn't

happen. Now that said, well Gompers gets some blame for the strike's failure. The fact that these strikers themselves are pretty racist also gets a lot of blame because Pullman is able to bring in black workers as strike breakers and the union had already told these guys, fuck you, you're not

welcome in, why shouldn't they scab, right? Normally that's a clear moral choice in this case. What do you expect me to do? You're not organizing for me, you're not willing to do shit for me, you don't even think I'm a person, so this guy's offering me money, fuck you.

In this instance, I can't blame you for scabbing, right? Two enemies, who wronged you? What were they supposed to do? No, it's fair, very fair. Labor historian Tom Gilpin told Laugham's Quarterly Quote, it's not clear that even had

Sam Gompers weighed in on the side of the ARU that the strike could have been won, clearly a fractured labor movement will be overcome by a united business class, especially one that has the military might of the federal government behind it, which is an important lesson there. The power of the bay in it was

braced, as it always is, by the perception of profound legality. Cleveland's Attorney General got an injunction from a circuit court ruled on by two anti-union judges which prohibited ARU leaders for compelling or inducing employees from railroads to refuse to perform

their duties. Debs and other ARU heads were also forbidden from communicating with subordinates, which meant Debs could no longer send telegrams to try and calm strikers down and avoid violence, because again, that's kind of what they want in this situation is for things to go so these injunctions reduced

the ability of Debs and other folks at the ARU to actually organize things, which means it gets more chaotic and more bad shit happens. And then in early July the troops entered the field from the Encyclopedia Britannica, quote, worried that, given the terms of the injunction,

he could no longer exercise any control over the strikers. Debs at first welcomed the troops, thinking that they might maintain order and allow the strike in Boycott to proceed peacefully. But it soon became clear that the troops were not neutral peacekeepers. They were there to make sure that the trains moved, which would inevitably undermine

the Boycott. The strikers reacted with fury to the appearance of the troops. On July 4th, they and their sympathizers overturned railcars and erected barricades to prevent troops from reaching the yards. ARU leaders could do nothing, prevented by the injunction from any communication with the workers. On July 6th,

some 6,000 rioters destroyed hundreds of railcars in the South Chicago Panhandle Yards. On July 7th, National Guardsmen, after having been assaulted, fired into a mob, killing between 4 and 30 people and wounding many others. Debs then tried to call off the strike, urging that all workers

accept those convicted of crimes be rehired without prejudice. But the General Managers Association, the Federation of Railroads that had overseen the response to the strike, refused and instead began hiring non-union workers. The strike dwindled, and trains began to move with increasing frequency until normal schedules

had been restored. Federal troops were recalled on July 20th. The Pullman Company, which reopened on August 2nd, agreed to rehire the striking workers on the condition that they sign a pledge never to join a union. By the time it ended, the ordeal had cost the railroads millions of dollars in lost

revenue and eluded in damaged property, and the strikers had lost more than one million dollars in wages. So, that's... Wow. The picture won in the end. It's one of those things. Debs definitely panics, but also possibly dozens of people just got shot

dead. I can't blame him. Number one, this was all new. He was not on well-trod ground here, and I think any responsible person when a bunch of people get killed and you're the one in charge might rethink things. Whatever else

we think about, what he decided to do. I don't know. What else are you going to do? Eugene V. Debs was jailed on July 17th. He was sentenced to six months behind bars for his role in supposedly inciting illegal behavior. The time locked up was good for him.

He read Marx, and while he studied inside, outside his role in the strike was mythologized by the budding U.S. Left. When he was released in November, 1895, more than a hundred thousand people swarmed Battery Park to hear him give a speech, wherein he told them, I greet you tonight as lovers of liberty

and as despisers of despotism. Debs was not a committed socialist quite yet, but as the months passed he became convinced that the labor movement could win nothing but temporary victories until socialism unceded the barons at the very top. Two years after his release, he wrote in an essay,

the issue was socialism versus capitalism. I am for socialism because I am for humanity. We have been cursed with the reign of gold long enough. Money constitutes no proper basis of civilization. The time has come to regenerate society. We are on the eve of a universal change. Yeah, I wish that had been the case.

Yeah, I wish. A national commission was established in 1894 to determine the causes of the strike. It blamed Pullman's paternalism, his need to totally control the lives of his many employees, as being un-American. In 1898, the Illinois Supreme Court

took Pullman, the town, away from Pullman, the man, and it was incorporated into Chicago. George Pullman died of a heart attack in 1897. Funeral services were held at his mansion, and with Pullman's death coming so near to the end of the strike, it's perhaps not surprising that tempers were high.

George seems to have been aware of how much people hated him prior to his death, and as a result, extreme measures were taken to protect his corpse. And I'm going to quote one last time from the Pullman Center. Sorry, I just have a corpse box. Sorry, go ahead. That's what we're getting to. A pit the size of an average room

had been dug in the family plot. Its base and walls reinforced concrete 18 inches thick. Into this, the lead-lined mahogany casket was lowered and covered with tar paper and asphalt. The pit was filled with concrete on top of which a series of steel rails were laid at right angles to each other and bolted together.

These rails were embedded in another layer of concrete. It took two days to complete, and then sawed was put down. These precautions were taken to prevent any desecration of the body. An unfortunate price Pullman paid for his victory in the Pullman strike. Ambrose Bier said,

it is clear the family in their bereavement was making sure the son of a bitch wasn't going to get up and come back. Wow. That's just so funny to just know people hate you. You know what I mean? And just be like, okay. Look, it's not the best but it's at least some victory

that despite winning at the end of it all, George Pullman knew he had to bury his corpse in a fucking pit. Like iron and concrete box because otherwise people would fuck with it. At least there's that.

I mean, yeah. It's comical at that point to just think about the way his life ended. It all comes back to Corpse Box. But yeah, I mean, if I've learned anything from this episode, Robert, is that humans don't change.

Everything you said basically has happened in the last several years. And that makes me sad because people forget what they go through and history gets forgotten and rewritten until we do it again because we're dumb little sheep. And this always happens. Every episode of Bastards

that I'm on, I just become, my existential dread has, it becomes an endless void thanks to you. So, yeah. Excellent. We did it. We did it. Wait, is this the end? Or should I? This is the end. We're done.

Should you plug your plugables? Oh, this is the end. Okay, I got it. Sorry. So we're still going. We're rolling. Rolling into plugables. So stating more, this is how my brain works now. I'm Shereen and I'm on Twitter at Shirohero666

S-H-E-E-R-O-H-E-R-O and on Instagram it's just Shirohero. And thanks for listening. Follow along if you want to. I don't care. Well, I do. I mean, I don't know. Have fun, reddit.

I know someone will have fun with this. Yeah, have fun, reddit. Have fun, reddit. I don't know. Have a good day, everybody. Yeah. Fuck up a railroad if you have some time. Yes. Just find a railroad and just get your anger out. Just piss all over the cracks, you know?

Yeah, don't get caught. If you get caught, we don't know you. Don't know you. Yeah, you did not hear it from this. And this is not going to be just on the internet forever and ever. Nope. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside

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He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI

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