What Are The Pullman Communities Work Together

Bryanna Shay O’Reilly

April 21, 2015

Mrs. Sarah Lenz

BSP English 1102

With Unity We Can Overcome All

George Mortimer Pullman was the creator of multiple projects that include the Pullman Community and the Pullman Car Company. He was born in 1831 and was the third oldest of ten children. Pullman had great thoughts and ideas that inspired him to complete his fair share of duties and do great things in the future. Pullman formed the Pullman Car Company in 1867 and founded a community named after him in Chicago Illinois in 1881 (Lemmon). The Pullman Community was created in hopes of being a perfect community. In many ways it was a capitalist utopia formed with the help of investors with the vision of creating a better life for the future of many

She believed that the only good outcome of George Pullman’s utopia was it make workers more likely to take action against unfair treatment towards them. She stated that the Pullman community was “a social experiment that failed on a grand scale, as the model ton became the site of a major labor action in 1894” (Baxter 651). She syas the Pullman community was created in confidence so that it would help improve the Pullman Palace Car Company by increasing productivity and giving the workers a more comfortable place to live. Baxter saw the Pullman community as a failure and disagreed with Harding because she did not see the four successes that Harding spoke about. She viewed Pullman’s failure at creating a utopia as four main downfalls. The first downfall being that “it alienated working class people from individuals and communities who shared their systems of values and identities. Secondly it geographically isolated people form broader community networks and other opportunities for employment. Next if offered a constant basis for comparison between their own values and preferences and those of the upper and middle classes in a way that constantly suggested theirs were undesirable and inferior and lastly it offered workers a way to envision themselves collectively against the dominant culture in and out of the workplace” (Baxter 665). She felt all four of these things views left the workers of the Pullman community behind and disconnected

The start of success led to a sense of arrogance that lead to a battle of survival amongst the workers striving for that better life. To lack the vision of providing life’s necessities lead to the failures of George Pullmans’ ideal utopia of the American dream. You get what you give. In many aspects of today’s society, we have not learned from the failures that resulted in the collapse of this community. Capitalism still gears toward the success of investors at the expense of the working community. As cost of living increases, along with life’s necessities, the amount of wages offered stay the same. Society needs to unite together in order for today to be a better