1869, Ep. 172 with Simon Cordery, author of Gilded Age Entrepreneur

Cornell University Press29min

Jonathan Hall

00:09

Welcome to 1869, the Cornell University Press Podcast. I'm Jonathan Hall. In this episode, we speak with Simon Cordery, author of the new book, Gilded Age Entrepreneur: The Curious Life of American Financier Albert Benton Pullman. Simon Cordery is professor and chair in the history department at Iowa State University. Simon's research ranges across the modern Atlantic and is the author of three other books: The Iron Road in the Prairie State, Mother Jones, and British Friendly Societies. 1750 to 1914. We spoke to Simon about George Pullman's older brother Albert Benton Pullman and his many contributions to the extraordinary success of the Pullman sleeping car, why Albert's history was overshadowed and in many cases rewritten by his younger brother George, and the many things we can learn about the Gilded Age by studying how ordinary investors and entrepreneurs like Albert operated during that time. Hello, Simon, welcome to the podcast.

Simon Cordery

01:17

Thanks, Jonathan. It's great to be here.

Jonathan Hall

01:19

It's great to have you on so I'm excited to talk to you about your new book, Gilded Age Entrepreneur: The Curious Life of American Financier Albert Benton Pullman. Tell us the backstory to this book. How did it

Simon Cordery

01:33

come to be I was doing some research for a book on the history of railroading in Illinois and using the Pullman Company papers in the newbie library in Chicago, one of the world's great humanities libraries, and I thought there might be a history there, charting the construction of Pullman cars, looking at the way the Pullman factory both developed and also operated. And I wanted to do this before the Pullman strike of 1894 that was the great strike that everyone knows about and associates with the name Pullman, a strike that completely destroyed George Pullman, the patriarch of the company's reputation, the president of the corporation. And so I thought, well, perhaps something along the lines of the great American anthropologist Anthony f c Wallace's rockerdale, a book he published in 1978 a book about a small factory town in Pennsylvania. And I was hoping to be able to write something like that. Unfortunately, the main set of documents, a set of documents called the Pullman car works records, had not been cataloged. They'd been transferred to the Newberry probably around the year 2000 and the Newberry is just a massive, sprawling collection of papers and people and books, and they simply didn't have the time or the resources to catalog the Pullman car works records. So that really would have made my job impossible. But as I was digging into the sources, I kept encountering the name AB Pullman, Albert, Benton Pullman, and I thought, well, who is this guy? He became most interesting in association with the Pullman mutual benefit Association. The PMBA was kind of an insurance company for Pullman workers. Albert was the president of that company. I have a long time scholarly interest in what are called friendly societies, or mutual aid societies. And I thought, well, maybe there's a story here. And then, as I was looking at records for 1893 I found that George Pullman had closed the Pullman offices in honor of Albert Pullman's death. And so I thought, well, that's worthy of further investigation. I mean, George is the president of the company. Albert was his older brother, but why close the company offices in honor of his brother? So slowly but surely, Albert Benton Pullman came into focus, and a B was everywhere in lots of newspaper articles, in railroad journals, sometimes, but not always associated with the Pullman Company. But he's someone about whom I knew, and I reckon that most people knew almost nothing, yet here he was front and center for the first 20 or so years of the Pullman Company. So that's when I decided he was definitely worth a biography.

Jonathan Hall

04:23

That's great. That's great. Yeah, it's exciting to learn about this older brother that most people haven't heard. Most people have heard of George Pullman, as as you said in the famous Pullman railroad sleeping cars, but not much is known about Albert or as AB as he as he was called in your book. You said they were very different. Albert was approachable and fun. George gruff and solemn and but you state that Albert put Pullman on the map before George pulled the rug out from beneath him, tell us the kind of broad brush strokes Albert's story and set the historical record straight on some things that Albert. We think George did, but in fact, Albert did.

Simon Cordery

05:02

Okay, yeah. So, so Albert Benson Pullman was born in 1828, in upstate New York. He was the second of eight children George Mortimer Pullman. George Pullman was the third child, the third son of that family. The family name became world famous because of the work that George, with Albert's help, did creating these luxurious railroad sleeping cars when he was a teenager. A young teenager, Albert was apprenticed to a carpenter, and he became extremely good at woodworking, in fact, so good that you can go to the Grand Rapids Public Museum today and see some of his pieces preserved and on display in Grand Rapids. He married in 1848 he and his wife Emily, moved to Grand Rapids, which was becoming a center of the furniture industry. And though Albert was an excellent carpenter, he was frankly terrible with money. He loved to spend it. He loved to give it away. His customers reckoned that he couldn't figure out the price to charge for a piece of work so they would undercut whatever he wanted to get. And when brother George visited Grand Rapids about five years after Albert and Emily had been there, he found them living in poverty. And so George helped to straighten out their finances. He helped to get Albert back onto at least level footing financially, but still, Albert didn't manage to stay there. So George invited Albert to join him in Chicago. And Chicago's the kind of the central location of this story in Chicago at the time, and this is in the late 18, mid to late 1850s Chicago at the time, was building a sewer system and a drainage system for the streets, and so as they were putting these sewers and drains in, they were raising the levels of the streets. And so one day, you'd find yourself stepping out of your front door onto the street, and then a week later, your front door is below the level of the street. So literally, there was an industry in lifting buildings up to meet the street level. And George and Albert, who inherited this skill from their father, Lewis, were very, very good at building lifting. And so this is the first example of something that Albert did that George took the credit for, and that was supervising the lifting of a hotel called the Tremont house in Chicago. The Tremont house is famous because that's where Abraham Lincoln had his presidential head, his his presidential campaign headquarters in 1860 and Albert in 1855 actually supervised the lifting of the Tremont house. Every account published afterwards said that that George had done this, but George was in Colorado at the time, so it was physically impossible for George to have lifted this building. And that's just the first example of Albert essentially being written out of the account of the Pullman history, about 1858 George and Albert began to build railroad sleeping cars. They wanted their railroad sleeping cars to stand out from the pack, and so one of the ways to make this happen was to build incredibly luxurious cars. And the luxury was in many of the details, and especially the intricate wooden details, that's Albert's specialty. So the so it was Albert who designed and crafted the first interiors that helped to give Pullman its its its trademark, if you like, George took all the credit here as well. Perhaps the most famous element of the Pullman system, or the Pullman cars, were the Pullman porters. Pullman porters were almost all black men, and many of the first Pullman porters were former slaves. Historians have assumed that George, seeing the world through the racist lens of the 19th century, hired these former slaves because they would be obsequious, they would be deferential, they would be easily controlled. George did, in fact, later take the credit for hiring the Pullman porters, and indeed, after about 1890 people began to call every Porter George, just as a sign, kind of a sign of their recognition that George Pullman was the founder of the Pullman Company and the guy who hired them. But there is literally no historical evidence, no documentary evidence, to show us that it was George who hired the first porters. And the circumstantial evidence, which I think is pretty compelling, suggests that it was Albert who hired the first porters. And so I mean, Albert was in charge of the office in Chicago, which would have been the place where the porters were hired. Albert hired nearly all of the employees for the first five or so years of the pulling company. George was in Colorado between 1860 and 1863 he couldn't have been in the office hiring people. Albert had a black coachman working for him, so he was familiar with. Working with black people, and his Universalist faith tempered the extreme racism of the time. I'm not going to say that he wasn't racist, just that he saw human beings as human beings and so on balance, Albert almost certainly hired the first porters, another significant and distinguishing feature of the Pullman Company that George took the credit for doing, perhaps, and you use the phrase putting Pullman on the map, perhaps the most important element of Albert's putting the Pullman Company on the map was his leading excursion runs. Excursion runs were railroad journeys to show off Pullman cars. They were, at first, quite modest. They'd run a couple of cars along lines from Chicago to a suburb like Aurora or a southern suburb like Englewood, and then back into Chicago taking invited guests. They would take politicians, ticket agents, journalists, hotel owners, anyone else who might promote or ride on Pullman cars to show them off. And these excursions grew ever more ambitious, until in the summer of 1870 the Pullman Company and Albert in charge supervised the First Coast to Coast Railroad journey from Boston, Massachusetts to San Francisco, California. This was an excursion that the Boston Board of Trade wanted in order to go to California and to open business connections and business negotiations with Californians. The Pullman Company built new cars for the journey. They set off from Boston. They went through Chicago. Just outside Chicago, the train stopped George and other Chicagoans got off and returned to the Windy City. Albert stayed on board, and he supervised what turned out to be a six day journey from Well, five days from Chicago to Boston, and then two weeks in California, and then the six day journey back to Boston. There was Albert, who was in charge of that first trans Continental, literally, trans continental trip, and George, again, took all the responsibility. It was George who said that he was in charge, and George who later said that the whole thing had been his idea. So there are sort of big ways and small ways in which George eradicated Albert's role from and I guess, his place in the history of the Pullman Company. And one of the small ways is that George took the credit for hiring a man called Aaron Longstreet, who was a very, very skillful and experienced railroad car builder who was working in Milwaukee. George later said that he not only hired Longstreet, but he also supervised him, which was literally impossible because it was Albert who was the General Superintendent in charge of supervising people like Aaron Longstreet. And it was Albert who accompanied Longstreet to England to help build Pullman cars in Britain. And there are bigger ways in which, literally, Albert has been erased from the Pullman Company most of the books published about Pullman in the 1870s 80s and 90s had a large dose of Pullman propaganda in them, and nowhere will you find Albert mentioned so clearly there was, if you like, a, if not a concerted or conscious, but certainly a very clear effort To erase Albert from the Pullman story. Wow,

Jonathan Hall

13:21

wow. That's that's disturbing, but I'm so glad that we, you've set the record straight. Sounds like George had some ego issues that he he took out on his brother, but, but he at the time, Pullman, you know, is seen along with the Morgans or the Rockefellers, the you know, the Jeff Bezos or Zuckerberg of the time. And it's, they're fascinating individuals, for sure, and we still look up to these, you know, mega famous, mega rich entrepreneurs. But what I think is fascinating about your book is like, no, let's look at Albert. He wasn't the the big name, but he actually we can learn more about the time period looking at business, the business world in that time by looking at Albert and his in his time there, what can we learn about the Gilded Age by looking at Albert rather than George?

Simon Cordery

14:14

I would call the strata of investors of which Albert was a part, everyday entrepreneurs, or ordinary investors and these everyday entrepreneurs were constantly searching for investment opportunities, constantly creating, tapping into using, losing, destroying networks, networks based on family, networks based on friends, on acquaintances, business associates, anyone who might Help them find a way to make, to earn profit would be useful in their business networks. Then they're taking connection, taking advantage of any connections in businesses. And I'll give you a couple of examples from Albert. So as General Superintendent of the Pullman Company, Albert was the person responsible. School for figuring out who was going to actually clean all of the Pullman laundry. The Pullman Company was distinguished from other railroad companies in that their sleeping cars had their linens changed every night. They had fine napkins. They had literally 1000s of pieces of fabric that needed to be cleaned at the end of every run. And so it was Albert who made the arrangements to have the Pullman laundry cleaned in Chicago, which was the end point for many Pullman operations. And so Albert hooked up with a guy called Ebenezer Jennings, the owner of what was at the time known as the Oriental laundry, and Ebenezer Jennings allowed Albert to buy into the business. Albert became a vice president of Jennings laundry, and Albert then sent Pullman linens to Jennings laundry, to the extent that they were making over $3,000 a month based on Pullman stuff alone. They were also manufacturing Pullman uniforms, because Albert made sure that the Pullman Company bought the porters and conductors uniforms from the from the Oriental laundry as well. And they and Albert and Ebenezer Jennings became extremely close, and they cooperated in numerous investments, and that's one of the ways in which Gilded Age capitalism operated, was it was sort of very much a face to face operation at the small scale. I mean, we think of the Gilded Age as the age of corporations, the development of massive corporations, the names that you mentioned, the Rockefellers, the Gould and so forth, and the Morgans and so on and so forth. But below those fabulously wealthy few, there is this huge group of men and women striving to make profit, striving to essentially make a living off their investments. And there's also lots of speculation. The Gilded Age was a time of incredibly precarious investments. And so, for example, in 1886 Albert joins a syndicate of investors who are trying to corner wheat futures, and on the Chicago exchange, they fail miserably, and he loses 1000s of dollars. But this is emblematic of the Gilded Age. In the Gilded Age, risk was real. In the Gilded Age, being dominated by corporations, life for the everyday investor was precarious, difficult. Genuine risk meant that you could genuinely lose your livelihood, and there's kind of this constant circulation of capital as well. Albert makes sure to remain always aware of possible investments all the way to the end of his life. At the end of his life, he's investing in telephones, in electric cars, in the kind of the technologies of tomorrow. He always backs the wrong horse, which is one of the one of the disadvantages that he confronts, but he's always, always looking for that next thing. And I think that's also the characteristic of Gilded Age capitalism. Nice,

Jonathan Hall

18:10

nice. And within that entrepreneurial sphere, what I hear in your book is that a lot of scholarship up to this point, focusing on entrepreneurial activities haven't really focused on something that's obvious to us, perhaps now, but maybe not in the past, was that entrepreneurs failed spectacularly. And you said that Albert did do that. You just mentioned some already and publicly, in addition to those, he You said he led a quote mostly ethical life interspersed with questionable actions. He said he was sufficiently smart enough to avoid being caught for the most part, but sometimes he got his hand slapped, or even more so as he grew more frustrated with business success and comparing himself to his brother, what were some of the endeavors that he did that may have been the result of some bad judgment on his part.

Simon Cordery

19:05

Well, one was a bank. In 1869 he invested in a new bank, the National Bank of Commerce, based in Chicago. And this was a time when banking was expanding, in part because of a couple of laws passed during the Civil War, banking laws. And Albert was a director. He was one of the first directors of this new bank. Again, he is doing this because he's emulating George. He's trying, in this case, to copy what his brother does. His brother was a bank director. Albert thinks maybe I should be a bank director. So this bank was always in trouble. It was insufficiently capitalized. It had a series of very poor investments. It was very badly managed. And it probably should have been closed within a year or two of opening. And it could have been, there's a there was a government inspection system. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency sent out inspectors, bank inspectors, so. And the first bank inspector who looked at the National Bank of Commerce was a friend. He was a friend. He was part of Albert's business networks. He knew the other directors, and so he kind of looked at the books and said, This is fine. This is great. Everything is going well. A couple of years later, the Comptroller of the Currency assigns a new bank inspector. And this bank inspector, looking at exactly the same books, realizes that the bank itself is in real problems, that one of the employees has a constant overdraft. Most of their investments will never be realized. They have some valueless land. And so he says, This is ridiculous. You need to close this bank. And so for about two years, there are a series of negotiations, and eventually the bank is closed, but the assets of the bank are transferred from the National Bank of Commerce to another bank, and they're transferred at par. So this is one of those rare cases where a bad investment by Albert, and it's a bad investment in part because of his and the other directors inattention to what's going on. One of the inspectors criticisms was this bank is not being run by the directors who should be in charge of it. They're paying no attention to it whatsoever. That's why it's in trouble. So the assets are transferred. Albert loses nothing. So let me give you now an example of a risky investment that Albert made, and it's risky because of the timing of which he had no control. But nonetheless, I think it's telling of the old age capitalism in 1871 in October of 1871 Albert doubled his investment in a fire insurance company, and so he had actually put up about $2,000 to purchase $10,000 worth of stock in the Great Western insurance company. So he's on the hook for $8,000 when just a week later, the city of Chicago burns down, and the company itself, the insurance company itself, is completely bankrupt. So Albert, like the other directors, tries to hide, tries to pretend nothing happened. Eventually, the receiver catches up with him, and it takes until 1878 seven years later, for Albert to finally encounter justice, and he does so when he sues the receiver in order to try and delegitimize the process of demanding this outstanding stock value. So the case goes all the way to the US Supreme Court in 1878 Pullman versus Upton Albert loses, he is forced to pay the $8,000 that he owes to the clients of the company because, you know, the people who own the policies want to get paid the value of their policies, and he also has to pay fees. Again. That's poor timing. Bad judgment, perhaps, but certainly evidence that it was easy to invest and just as easy to lose your investment. And then let me offer a third example, a swindle, an actual Swindle. And I don't know how much, if any money Albert made from this swindle, because all I've seen are adverts in the newspapers in Chicago for the American homestead company, which claimed to have title to land in Dickinson county Kansas. The great thing in 1870 about Dickinson county Kansas is that it was not served by railroad, and so you couldn't just get on a train and go out there and inspect this land. So I did go out there to inspect the books of the Dickinson County Courthouse. And there is no evidence that the American homestead company or anyone connected with it had anything to do with the land around a place called Carlton that they claimed was the town they were building. There's no record of the American homestead company. So this was a total Swindle. Again, I have no idea how much of any money Albert made, but that's a case of caveat emptor. Right. In the Gilded Age, you could never be entirely sure, despite a growing raft of regulations, that the investments that you were making were actually on the up and up.

Jonathan Hall

24:05

Interesting. It's a little bit of the wild west out there in business world with the banking story. It just makes me think, thank goodness for the FDIC in those days, you couldn't really trust anyone. It sounds like that's right. And so I think it must have been a fascinating journey for you to you know you came across, as you mentioned in the very beginning of our conversation, that you came across, who is this? A B character? And then through a deep dive of history, you now have fleshed out this very interesting character, and it's all I would imagine. You kind of know him in a way, like he's he's someone that he's like a friend in a way. You've written a book on him. What are some, what is one or more of your favorite stories about him? I mean, you've told us some already, but what is, What's your most memorable story of him? But

Simon Cordery

24:58

I've told a series of stories that. Haven't exactly cast Albert in a good light. That's true. So let me give you a sense of Albert as a human being who had many redeeming qualities, and the first one was his attitude towards the workers who actually did the work by 1870 Albert was something of a dinosaur. He is what I would call a mutualist. He believed in the mutual benefit that should accrue to workers and to the bosses, and so when he was the General Superintendent supervising the construction of Pullman cars, he was a regular on the factory floor as much as he could be, given his duties as the boss of the excursions, and the workers liked him. And the evidence, the evidence for that, comes when he's promoted to vice president in 1870 because the Pullman Company is now so big, they need another and dedicated construction site, so they buy a railroad factory in Detroit, and now it's impossible for Albert to personally supervise all the workers, so George promotes him to Vice President to make to give him essentially the title that he should have as the guy in charge of all those excursions. As he was leaving on his last day as General Superintendent, the workers in the factory in Chicago, presented him with a new horse and trap for his family, and they praised him, and they wanted to, by giving him this gift quote, express our appreciation of the extremely kind and considerate nature of your intercourse with us, officially and personally. And I think that's that's Albert. He was kind, he was considerate. He was terrible with money, in part because he was generous. That is not a bad characteristic to have. He was also a very good husband and father. He was devoted to his wife, Emily. She sadly contracted cancer, and he worked feverishly to try and cure it in any way possible, and spent a fair, a fair amount of money doing that. He also had, he and Emily had three daughters, Nelly, Ali and Emma, and in each case, they were married to quite well off Chicagoans. And the weddings were usually followed by large receptions in their house on Ashland Avenue. And by all accounts, Albert was devoted to his immediate family. He wasn't so fond of George, and he certainly didn't really pay too much attention to the rest of the family. The Pullman family was known for its correspondence. For the the children in particular, writing to each other. And there are regular complaints about Albert not participating in this family letter writing exercise, but his focus was very much on his wife and children. And to conclude, I think he was indeed a very kind, considerate, generous person who did the best he could under very difficult circumstances at a time of incredible change, transformation and transition.

Jonathan Hall

28:07

That's great. That's great. I like how you rounded out his character. And I would just like to say who anyone that's listening to this podcast, if you're interested in American history, if you're interested in railroad history, business history, and perhaps most importantly, biographies of very interesting and colorful historical figures. I strongly encourage you to read Simon Cordery's new book, Gilded Age Entrepreneur: The Curious Life of American Financier Albert Benton Pullman, Simon, it was a pleasure talking with you.

Simon Cordery

28:38

Thank you, Jonathan. The pleasure is all mine. Thank

Jonathan Hall

28:41

you very much. Take care. Thanks. You too. That was Simon Cordell, author of the new book Gilded Age Entrepreneur: The Curious Life of American Financier Albert Benton Pullman. Use the promo code 09POD to save 30% off his new book at our website, cornellpress.cornell.edu. If you live in the UK, use the 30% discount CSANNOUNCE and visit the website combinedacademic.co.uk Thank you for listening to 1869 the Cornell University Press podcast.

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