But if only to give at the outset a translucent example of Field's method's in the management of industrial corporations, it is well to advert here to the operations of one of his many properties—the Pullman Company, otherwise called the "Palace Car Trust." This is a necessary part of the exposition in order to bring out more of the methods by which Field was enabled to fling together his vast fortune.
The artificial creation of the law called the corporation was so devised that it was comparatively easy for the men who controlled it to evade personal, moral, and often legal, responsibility for their acts. Governed as the corporation was by a body of directors, those acts became collective and not individual; if one of the directors were assailed he could plausibly take refuge in the claim that he was merely one of a number of controllers; that he could not be held specifically responsible. Thus the culpability was shifted, until it rested on the corporation, which was a bloodless thing, not a person.
FIELD'S PULLMAN WORKS.
In the case of the Pullman Co., however, much of the moral responsibility could be directly placed upon Field, inasmuch as he, although under cover, was virtually the dictator of that corporation. According to the inventory of the executors of his will, he owned 8,000 shares of Pullman stock, valued at $800,000. It was asserted (in 1901) that Field was the largest owner of Pullman stock. "In the popular mind," wrote a puffer, probably inspired by Field himself, "George M. Pullman has ever been deemed the dominant factor in that vast and profitable enterprise." This belief was declared an error, and the writer went on: "Field is, and for years has been, in almost absolute control. Pullman was little more than a figurehead. Such men as Robert T. Lincoln, the president of the company, and Norman B. Ream are but representatives of Marshall Field, whose name has never been identified with the property he so largely owns and controls." That fulsome writer, with the usual inaccuracies and turgid exaggerations of "popular writers," omitted to say that although Field was long the controlling figure in the management of the Pullman works, yet other powerful American multimillionaires, such as the Vanderbilts, had also become large stockholders.
The Pullman Company, Moody states, employed in 1904, in all departments of its various factories at different places, nearly 20,000 employees, and controlled 85 per cent of the entire industry. As at least a part of the methods of the company have been the subject of official investigation, certain facts are available.
To give a brief survey, the Pullman Company was organized in 1867 to build sleeping cars of a feasible type officially patented by Pullman. In 1880 it bought five hundred acres of land near Chicago. Upon three hundred of these it built its plant, and proceeded, with much show and advertisement of benevolence, to build what is called a model town for the benefit of its workers. Brick tenements, churches, a library, and athletic grounds were the main features, with sundry miscellaneous accessories. This project was heralded far and wide as a notable achievement, a conspicuous example of the growing altruism of business.
THE NATURE OF A MODEL TOWN.
Time soon revealed the inner nature of the enterprise. The "model town," as was the case with imitative towns, proved to be a cunning device with two barbs. It militated to hold the workers to their jobs in a state of quasi serfdom, and it gave the company additional avenues of exploiting its workers beyond the ordinary and usual limits of wages and profits. In reality, it was one of the forerunners of an incoming feudalistic sway, without the advantages to the wage worker that the lowly possessed under medieval feudalism. It was also an apparent polished improvement, but nothing more, over the processes at the coal mines in Pennsylvania, Illinois and other States where the miners were paid the most meager wages, and were compelled to return those wages to the coal companies and bear an incubus of debt besides, by being forced to buy all of their goods and merchandise at company stores at extortionate rates. But where the coal companies did the thing boldly and crudely, the Pullman Company surrounded the exploitation with deceptive embellishments.
