The Dark Side of Corporate Utopia: Pullman vs. Hershey

**Andrew Heaton** (0:00)
How well would your company need to treat you to improve elements of your life unassociated with work? A lot of companies in Japan make everybody start the day with calisthenics. It's good for productivity, saves money on health insurance, and it's good for employees as people. Better health, energy and mood at work and at home. That could be nice, particularly if you're paid for it while on the clock.
Let's say a company gave you a very good salary, a very high pay, but on the condition that it got to determine your diet. Left to your own devices, you'd probably go eat a double cheeseburger or something, too many carbs, gum up your arteries with cholesterol, get chubby. The company is going to take care of all that. It's going to take care of your meals, and they will be healthy and they will be high quality. But they will be salads, quinoa, beets. And it's not just that this is food available for you in the office canteen. It's when you're at home, it's your breakfast, and it's obligatory.
How many benefits would the company need to provide to you for you to surrender your choice over your own diet? How much money would it take for you to let your boss be your dad?
There's one other element we need to consider before we meet today's characters. If your boss is employer and parental figure, what responsibilities do they then have beyond paychecks? Because a dad is in charge of his children, and an employer is in charge of his employees, but a father can't fire his kids.
Likewise, if your company is a literal community, not just where people work, but where people live and go to theater and take their kids to school, if the company is that community, does that more expansive relationship mean that the corporation has duties beyond paychecks, work rotas, and money? The rise and fall of corporate utopia and the dark side of paternalism, brought to you by two very different outcomes that started from similar starting points. Today, right here on The Political Orphanage.
Hello and welcome to The Political Orphanage, a home for travelers and thinkers, saints and fiends. I'm your host, Andrew Heaton, joining you for the third installment of our limited run special on Company Towns.
George Pullman locked out when President Lincoln got shot.
Let's assume he was shocked and horrified. Probably was. A New Yorker by birth, a Chicago businessman by inclination, he was probably a very big fan of honest Abe. Lincoln's death, however, presented a wonderful PR opportunity because Pullman had a great but expensive product that he was struggling to get to market, a new kind of train car. Now I love trains. They are my favorite form of travel outside of bumping around the country on my 13-foot fiberglass camper that I'm recording in right now. But I really like trains. I sometimes book trips around sleeper trains. I figure out a sleeper train I want to go on, and then I figure out where I want to go on that sleeper train. I enjoy them that much. But sleeper trains today, or even regular commuter trains like Amtrak, are a different species than what you would be rattled across the country in back in the 1850s. Trains were obnoxiously loud, full of coal soot, and poorly heated. Some trains had wood or coal stoves in the middle of the car, which if you think about it could be dangerous because they were belching out sparks or flaming logs during derailments, which were common. I've been having some hard traveling. Prior to widespread air brakes and improved suspension systems, trains lurched constantly. Travelers compared cross-country train trips as being shaken in a box of nails. Worse, on these cross-country trips there was nowhere to sleep. Most people had to try to sleep sitting bolt upright in their seats. If they were lucky, they could maybe grab a row and awkwardly try to sprawl out. But even then, they'd either rattle off from the ceaseless vibrating of the train or they'd get flung to the floor during one of the night's many locomotive convulsions. There were some early attempts at sleeper cars, but they were scarcely better. Uncomfortable fold-down bunks all in the same open floor plan of a jittery car with no separate rooms or privacy. People commonly describe that experience as camping indoors while being rattled violently. And back then, a trip from New York to Chicago might take five full days with minimal or dangerous heating and no form of air conditioning. In short, trains were horrible, and George Pullman aimed to fix that. He designed his cars with heavier builds than ordinary passenger coaches. Normal cars were light, flimsy, and rattled constantly. Whereas Pullman cars had stronger, heavier frames, better suspensions, and improved wheel trucks, they didn't rattle, they glided. He emphasized airflow to minimize the smoke and soot and sweat which pervaded train travel, added thick carpets, curtains, and wood paneling to absorb sound, upholstered the seats to reduce vibration, and most importantly, those upholstered seats turned into comfortable berths at night. Not only could you lay flat out in a proper bed, curtains separated you from strangers so that you could undress and relax in privacy. A Pullman car was a rolling, luxury hotel hallway. Not a cattle car for humans, but a palace on wheels, plush carpeting, polished wood, brass fixtures, velvet curtains, chandeliers, decorative lamps. Of course, all these luxuries added up. A Pullman car cost five times as much as a normal, unventilated, jittery, bunkless box on wheels. Railroad executives thought he was insane. They still thought of long-distance travel as utilitarian, rough and tumble. But building a mansion on wheels back then? Today, that would be like trying to install a boutique, luxury hotel in a bathroom of a truck stop.