Company Town - The Pullman Lesson

The Pullman Lesson

Pullman, Chicago was a model company town founded by the Pullman Palace Car Company in the 1880s. The town operated successfully until the economic panic of 1893 when demands for the company’s products declined and employee wages had to be lowered accordingly. Despite this the company refused to lower rents in the town or the price of goods at its shops, thus resulting in the Pullman Strike of 1894. A national commission formed to investigate the causes of the strikes found that Pullman’s paternalism was partly to blame and labelled it ‘un-American’.

However, government observers maintained that Pullman’s principles were accurate, in that he provided his employees with a quality of life otherwise unattainable to them, but recognised that his excessive paternalism was inappropriate for a large-scale corporate economy and thus caused the town’s downfall. Accordingly, government observers and social reformers alike saw the need for a balance between control and well-designed towns concluding that a model company town would only succeed if independent professionals, acting as a buffer between employers and employees, took a role in conception, planning, and management of these towns.

Thus the Pullman Strike did not kill the concept of a company town but rather initiated a new chapter in their existence. Over the next thirty years the old model of paternalism was abandoned in favour of new professionally designed company towns with architects, landscape architects, and planners translating “new concepts of industrial relations and social welfare into new physical forms”. This suited capitalists of the day who were obviously keen to avoid the experiences of Pullman. The first real example of this occurred at Indian Hill-North Village, Massachusetts in 1915.