DBQ

With your previous knowledge and the five sources you were given
would you define the Pullman Experiment as a success or failure?
Source 1:
Pullman, a town of eight thousand inhabitants, some ten miles from Chicago, on the
Illinois Central Railroad, was founded less than four years ago by the Pullman Palace
Car Company, whose president and leading spirit is Mr. George M. Pullman. Its purpose
was to provide both a centre of industry and homes for the employs [sic] of the
company and such additional laborers as might be attracted to the place by other
opportunities to labor. Simply as a town, Pullman has not sufficient interest to justify a
description of it in a great magazine. Its natural beauties are not remarkable, situated as
it is on the low prairie land surrounding Chicago, and its newness makes such
romances impossible as one can associate with villages like Lenox, and Stockbridge,
and other ancient towns in New England. Like many other Western cities, its growth has
been rapid, its population having increased from four souls in January, 1881, to 2084 in
February, 1882, and to 8203 in September, 1884. A manufacturing town, it embraces
the principal works of the Pullman Palace Car Company, in addition to the Allen Paper
Car-wheel Company, the Union Foundry and Pullman Car-wheel Company, the Chicago
Steel-works, the Steel-forging Company, and numerous less important enterprises.
Source 2:
Pullman was an innovator not only in business and industry but in ameliorating the
social problems faced by the new class of capitalists of which he was a part. He was a
founder and officer in the exclusive Commercial Club and a founder and President of
the Young Men's Christian Association. He was particularly interested in "the labor
question." As the country shifted from a society of small producers composed of family
farmers and artisans, to an industrial capitalist society, the class question rose to the
fore. The grievances of workers and their propensity to join unions and engage in
strikes and violence-tinged social upheavals was becoming the central issue of the
Gilded Age. Following the 1877 railroad strike and great upheaval, Pullman
volunteered to help lead the Citizens Law and Order League, which sought to enforce
the laws on the prohibition of alcohol to minors. To Pullman and others of his class the
improvement of working-class character was key to social order. In their thinking the
ideal workingman would strive to ascend into the middle class through hard work,
refraining from alcohol and associating with the saloon fraternity, and deferring
immediate gratification in favor of saving for the future. The resultant product was to be
a worker who would struggle to leave his class, rather than unite with the rest of his
fellows to fight for better working conditions and pay.

Source 3:

The model town of Pullman was built on 4,000 acres of land on the west shore of Lake
Calumet. Mr. Pullman intended the town to serve as a center of industry and to house
the employees of his car company in a beautiful, healthy and progressive environment
that would instill "habits of respectability" in his workers--good manners, neatness,
cleanliness, and sobriety. As a social experiment and philanthropic endeavour, it
appeared successful.
Source 4:
Pullman has a number of connotations to todays generation, perhaps none of them
very strong. The images of labor strife and the Pullman strike of 1894 may be recalled.
Also remembered may be the Pullman sleeping car which altered travel in the late
1800s from the drab and endurable to the luxurious and enjoyable. Perhaps less well
remembered is the town of Pullman created as a model community for the production of
railroad cars and the housing of the workers. All connotations of Pullman are derived
ultimately from the man, George M. Pullman, post-Civil War businessman and member
of Chicages entrepreneur set of the gilded age.1 The model town of Pullman was built
overnight in the early 1880s on several thousand prairie acres fifteen miles south of
Chicago on the shores of Lake Calumet. Pullman was considered to be both an
economic and social experiment, an experiment designed to demonstrate that American
industry could create a town which would solve the social problems of the time and
thereby would solve the labor problems of the company. The social regeneration of the
worker would be accomplished by providing a model community environment which
would encourage the development of proper middle-class values. In addition, the town
was to be the company showplace where visitors might view the success of the
Pullman endeavor. Sport and recreation were important facets, if not cornerstones, of
the experiment at Pullman, and the function of these activities was consistent with the
overall objectives in creating the model town. Enlightened industrialists were beginning
to recognize by the 1880s that sport and recreation could be used to promote certain
objectives among employees. At the time of the creation of Pullman no earlier effort by
American industry had come to light which attempted to weave the two, sport and
recreation, into the fabric of an experiment in town planning and industrial order. Sport
and recreation programs at the National Cash Register Company in Dayton and the
Carnegie Steel Company at Homestead were yet to occur in the last years of the
nineteenth century and may in fact have received their genesis from Pullman.2
Source 5:
While nearly every observer agreed the town of Pullman represented an experiment in
alleviating the conflicts of industrial life, not everyone agreed with Pullmans solutions.
Indeed, from their earliest days, Pullmans factories were engulfed by many of the
conflicts the town was intended to avoid, including the Eight Hour Movement of 1886.
Workers continued sporadically to protest the companys long hours and poor wages
throughout the 1880s, but at the start of the 1890s there was a growing number of
journalists and observers who also scoffed at the Pullman experiment. The documents
collected here reflect this growing critique. All of them marvel at the Pullman experiment.
Many, however, also suggested that buried within this model town are the seeds of its
own undoing. Some decried the opulence of George Pullmans standard of living in

comparison to even the nicest Pullman home, while others criticized Pullmans attempt to
control every aspect of his workers lives. Some, including a growing number of Pullman
workers, claimed George Pullmans experiment was a quest for larger profits, not greater
harmony. Changing economic conditions would soon put many of these theories to the
test.
Source 6: