From The Maryland Historical Society Journal
After The Strike: A Century of Labor Struggle at Pullman. By Susan Eleanor Hirsch. (The Working Class in American History. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003. 294 pages. Appendix. notes, index. Cloth. $44.95)
Turning an eager historian loose in a warehouse full of pay stubs and payroll records often produces a dry, dreary and narrow history, especially when the corporation is so vast and enduring as the Pullman Corporation. For Susan Eleanor Hirsch, however, the Pullman records—consisting of “the correspondence, memos, and policy statements and the employee service records of hundreds of thousands of individuals”(5)-- provided material for a marvelous book, which places workplace issues, or “labor” history, into the broadest framework of “U.S.” history.
This book is great because it attempts to answer the most compelling historical questions. “Understanding Pullman workers’ struggles also entails asking what spurred them to action, how they viewed the economic and social order, and what forms of organization they chose. . . . What was the source of Pullman workers’ activism and what types of union structures and ideology attracted different groups of Pullman workers at different times?”(4)
The Pullman Corporation was the battleground for two of the most famous (or infamous, depending upon which side you support) episodes in labor history, propelling to stardom two extraordinary labor leaders: the 1894 national railroad strike by the American Railroad Union (ARU) brought both fame and jail terms (for such is labor history) to Eugene V. Debs while the long campaign by sleeping car porters to create the first enduring black union, The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, allowed president, A. Phillip Randolph to rise to a crucial role in the merged and quarreling workers rights/civil rights movement.
The Pullman Corporation offers to Ms. Hirsch a unique case history for the development both of industry in the United States after the Civil War and of “a century of labor struggle.”(207) Founding the Pullman Palace Car Company in 1867, George Pullman created a monopoly in the new sleeping car service by building the cars and leasing them, fully-staffed, to competing railroads, while maintaining a chain of car repair shops across the country. The production of the cars, in the Pullman manufacturing division, evolved from detailed wooden construction to mass-produced steel cars, carrying the workers in the car shops from craft unionism to company unionism to industrial unionism. Pullman was a nationwide corporation of industrial and service workers, exploiting divisions among these workers—race, craft superiority, gender, ethic origins, language and company sympathies—to aggressively fight unionization while also taking advantage of anti-union geographic locales like Wilmington, DE.
Pullman experimented with several devices to maintain an enduring non-union corporation. The “environmental experiment” in the town of Pullman became well known after the ARU strike of 1894, but Ms. Hirsch stresses the success as well of Pullman’s “bureaucratic labor structure . . . to create a sense of fairness as well as possibilities for upward mobility and fringe benefits.”(42) Part of this “bureaucratic structure” involved keeping detailed records for Pullman workers in all of the company’s divisions, which spanned the continent from Richmond, CA to Wilmington, even though Pullman’s major operations were located in the Chicago area.
Ms. Hirsch traces work histories—considered “careers” by some of Pullman’s most loyal workers--by skill, race, gender, ethnic background and seniority in a traditional historical procedure with statistical charts and recorded personal interviews. To the delight of a labor historian, however, the archives also included internal company documents, such a “spy reports” on unionization to illuminate the corporation’s most intimate motives and decisions.
Although the documentation of Pullman policies is exhaustive, the power of this book is its placing the particular Pullman struggles and corporation policies into a general framework of labor history for a period of more than 100 years: from the craft unionism of the 1880s, through the industrial unionism of the mid-20th century, to the fights against plant closings in the 1980s, when the Pullman Corporation finally succumbed to the destructive pressures of the global economy. Ms. Hirsch especially stresses the importance of federal intervention into labor relations, from the anti-union injunctions during the 1894 strike to the National Labor Relations Act, which finally enabled the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC) to take representation in the car shops.
Most importantly, she places these particular issues into a compelling structure: “The question for U.S. workers remains how to build a labor movement for economic and social justice.”(212)
Ultimately, this book is impossible to adequately review in such a short space because it covers many exciting areas of both history and the skills of historical writing. Ms. Hirsch covers broad topics so thoroughly, weaves them together with such skill, and supports her conclusions with such exhaustive research in primary and secondary sources, that the book stands as a remarkable achievement.
Bill Barry
Community College of BaltimoreCounty