page_title: George Pullman
section_title: Pullman sleeping car
hierarchical_section_title: George Pullman / Career / Pullman sleeping car
caption_attribution_description: English: Share of the Pullman's Palace Car Company, issued 20. April 1892, made out to George M. Pullman Deutsch: Aktie der Pullman's Palace Car Company vom 20. April 1892, ausgestellt auf George M. Pullman; Reference: Udo Hielscher - The value of America's great fortunes, Seite 56, ISBN 9789081527101
context_page_description: George Mortimer Pullman was an American engineer and industrialist. He designed and manufactured the Pullman sleeping car and founded a company town, Pullman, for the workers who manufactured it. His Pullman Company also hired African-American men to staff the Pullman cars, who became known as Pullman porters, providing elite service.
  Struggling to maintain profitability during an 1894 downturn in manufacturing demand, he halved wages and required workers to spend long hours at the plant, but did not lower prices of rents and goods in his company town. He gained presidential support by Grover Cleveland for the use of federal military troops which left 30 strikers dead in the violent suppression of workers there to end the Pullman Strike of 1894. A national commission was appointed to investigate the strike, which included assessment of operations of the company town. In 1898 the Supreme Court of Illinois ordered the Pullman Company to divest itself of the town, which became a neighborhood of the city of Chicago.
context_section_description: Pullman developed a railroad sleeping car, the Pullman sleeper or "palace car." These were designed after the packet boats that travelled the Erie Canal of his youth in Albion. The first one was finished in 1864.
  After President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, Pullman arranged to have his body carried from Washington, D.C. to Springfield on a sleeper, for which he gained national attention, as hundreds of thousands of people lined the route in homage. Lincoln's body was carried on the Presidential train car that Lincoln himself had commissioned that year. Pullman had cars in the train, notably for the President's surviving family. The pullman had a wider wheel set, requiring wider track. And as a result of the many people seeing the Palace car, it became sought after and resulted in a major change to all rail track widths. Orders for his new car began to pour into his company. The sleeping cars proved successful although each cost more than five times the price of a regular railway car. They were marketed as "luxury for the middle class."
  In 1867 Pullman introduced his first "hotel on wheels," the President, a sleeper with an attached kitchen and dining car. The food rivaled the best restaurants of the day and the service was impeccable. A year later in 1868, he launched the Delmonico, the world's first sleeping car devoted to fine cuisine. The Delmonico menu was prepared by chefs from New York's famed Delmonico's Restaurant.
  Both the President and the Delmonico and subsequent Pullman sleeping cars offered first-rate service. The company hired African-American freedmen as Pullman porters. Many of the men had been former domestic slaves in the South. Their new roles required them to act as porters, waiters, valets, and entertainers, all rolled into one person. As they were paid relatively well and got to travel the country, the position became considered prestigious, and Pullman porters were respected in the black communities.
  Pullman believed that if his sleeper cars were to be successful, he needed to provide a wide variety of services to travelers: collecting tickets, selling berths, dispatching wires, fetching sandwiches, mending torn trousers, converting day coaches into sleepers, etc. Pullman believed that former house slaves of the plantation South had the right combination of training to serve the businessmen who would patronize his "Palace Cars." Pullman became the biggest single employer of African Americans in post-Civil War America.
  In 1869 Pullman bought out the Detroit Car and Manufacturing Company. Pullman bought the patents and business of his eastern competitor, the Central Transportation Company in 1870. In the spring of 1871, Pullman, Andrew Carnegie, and others bailed out the financially troubled Union Pacific; they took positions on its board of directors. By 1875 the Pullman firm owned $100,000 worth of patents, had 700 cars in operation, and had several hundred thousand dollars in the bank.
  In 1887, Pullman designed and established the system of "vestibuled trains," with cars linked by covered gangways instead of open platforms. The vestibules were first put in service on the Pennsylvania Railroad trunk lines.
  The French social scientist Paul de Rousiers (1857–1934), who visited Chicago in 1890, wrote of Pullman's manufacturing complex, "Everything is done in order and with precision. One feels that some brain of superior intelligence, backed by a long technical experience, has thought out every possible detail."
caption: Share of the Pullman's Palace Car Company, issued 20. April 1892, made out to George M. Pullman
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