Last updated: April 24, 2023
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Pullman During the World Wars
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by Joe Parziale
The iconic strike and boycott of Pullman by the American Railway Union (ARU) in 1894 have captivated the imaginations of workers everywhere for more than 125 years—understandably so. But the long arc of labor history at the company goes far beyond 1894. Workers asserted their agency in fights for dignity and liberation many times over—and, unlike in 1894, actually won their struggles. Most stories of the World Wars tend to swirl around tales of sacrifice, bravery, and heroism in combat, but they also tell a story about broad changes to workers’ rights and labor’s relationship to both employers and the government. For the Pullman company, World Wars I and II demonstrate the company’s complex—indeed, at times, paradoxical—relationship with the U.S. administrative state.
War contracts proved lucrative for the company, especially during World War II, which arrived just as long-distance passenger rail service was beginning a long decline. Of course, labor shortages and the need for continuous production during wartime meant workers were better disposed to organize unions and seek higher wages. Pullman workers would have to wait for the late 1930s and the World War II era to achieve broad, sustained organizing gains. Nevertheless, the Great War transformed industrial relations at the company, emboldening workers all along the occupational hierarchy and laying the groundwork for future organizing waves.
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World War I: Government Control Over Railroads Presents New Opportunities
Among the most extraordinary developments in the economic mobilization for U.S. entry into World War I was the government takeover of the railroads. This would have surely disappointed the progressive anti-monopoly advocates (Knights of Labor, the Farmers’ Alliance, the Populists) that had listed government ownership of the roads among their key demands.[1] Still, the takeover created a vehicle for railroad workers to redress grievances, supplementing the National War Labor Board (NWLB), which had jurisdiction over workers in all war-related industries.[2] When the U.S. declared war against Germany in April 1917, the nation’s rail network was effectively paralyzed—caused by bickering over rates, a lack of coordination among the various roads, poorly maintained infrastructure, and finally, a threatened strike by the railroad brotherhoods. The Wilson administration assumed wartime control of the railroads and formed the United States Railroad Administration (USRA) to manage the network. To mollify skeptical railroad company executives, the agency director William McAdoo guaranteed pre-war profits, and in March 1918, Congress mandated that the control period would last no longer than twenty months after cessation of hostilities.[3]
At first, the Pullman company seemed to have it both ways. After lamenting a dip in earnings because the war had curtailed civilian passenger service, the company took advantage of McAdoo’s promises, but still managed to retain operational control of the service and manufacturing arms of the company. In addition, the company won contracts from the War Department to procure 8,000 freight cars, as well as artillery shells. But on July 3, 1918, the USRA announced it had assumed control of Pullman service and mandated raises for employees servicing Pullman-built cars. By September, the wage order was extended to the shops, although the manufacturing arm never came under state control.[4]
The USRA period proved a triumphant moment for workers. Even the workers in the lowest-paid occupations—maids, seamstresses, red caps, porters, messengers—received instantaneous raises of up to 75 percent, as well as considerable wage hikes in 1919. Membership in the Railway Men’s International Benevolent Industrial Association (RMIBIA), which had testified to the Railroad Wage Commission on behalf of non-union (and predominantly African American) Pullman workers and sought to organize across occupational lines, climbed from a few hundred in early 1918 to 15,000 by 1920. A nascent union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and Dining Car Employees Protective Union, was active mainly in New York and attracted several thousand prospective members to mass meetings in 1919 and 1920.[5]
These early organizing efforts were short-lived, victims of encroachment from several directions. The Bolshevik consolidation of power in Russia, as well as a massive strike wave and a series of anarchist bombings at home generated a period of postwar labor repression. By the early 1920s, when labor had few friends remaining in power, Pullman had regained its dominance over labor. The company surveilled and dismissed organizers, and they developed “employee representation plans”— a widely popular management tactic during the 1920s that preempted union organizing by giving workers a formal (company-controlled) channel to express grievances, but one with no real power.[6] Affiliation with the American Federation of Labor (AFL) might have afforded a fledgling union the resources and legitimacy needed to survive the repression, but the federation, unwilling to charter an all-Black union and jealously guarding craft union prerogatives, rejected a request for affiliation by RMIBIA leader Robert L. Mays. Meanwhile, the RMIBIA and the Brotherhood failed to cooperate, choosing instead to compete for recognition by the Pullman company.
Even with favorable USRA awards and the emergence of these organizations, the inequities between the top and bottom rungs of the occupational ladder remained vast, as did pay differences for men and women. The lowest paid woman in the laundry department, for example, saw her wages more than double, from 10 cents per hour from January 1918 to 22 cents at the end of 1919; by comparison, earnings of stationary engineers in the Chicago and Wilmington, Delaware, earned a base rate of 72 cents per hour by May 1919 (up from 32 cents in January 1918), and conductors took home more than $100 per month even before U.S. entry into the war. Nevertheless, the fact that the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP) emerged in 1925, at a low point for labor in the twentieth century, suggests that the seeds of worker empowerment may well have been planted in the heady wartime and early postwar atmosphere.[7]
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World War II: Union Membership Expands
World War II, like the Great War, would be a galvanizing moment for workers. The dramatically different historical context meant huge differences for labor outcomes. By the time World War II broke out, unions had won a legal guarantee protecting their right to bargain collectively with passage of the National Labor Relations (Wagner) Act. A crucial turning point for Pullman workers came in 1937—in many ways, a high-water mark of militancy by the labor movement more broadly—when the BSCP won its first contract after 10 years of battling for recognition and another two of getting the company to agree to a fair contract. But many U.S. workers’ gains remained tenuous, as employers violently resisted unionization through the late 1930s; take, for instance, the Memorial Day Massacre at the gates of Republic Steel, when Chicago police fired on a crowd of striking workers and their families, killing 10 people and wounding dozens of others.[8] No such company-sanctioned violence took place at Pullman, but even as late as 1940, company officials were collecting materials documenting the purported “radicalism” of BSCP President A. Philip Randolph.[9] Ultimately, labor’s position as a widespread, legitimate, institutional force was only secured by a deal with the government: the two major labor federations as well as most international unions agreed not to strike war-related industries so long as the government accepted crucial union security clauses.[10]
Just as in World War I, workers often had to appeal to the administrative state (here, a re-constituted War Labor Board and the National Labor Relations Board) to force employers to recognize their rights. Labor’s closeness to the wartime government, and particularly its stated commitment to industrial peace was certainly not without costs. That became painfully clear as periodic surges in wildcat strike activity—largely reflecting workers’ frustration with wage and price controls—forced union and federation leaders to police local insurgencies. On the whole, however, the trade of security for peace paid off. By the end of the war, Pullman reflected a general workforce that was thoroughly organized: laundry workers, clerical employees, ticket clerks, commissary attendants, cooks, and bus boys, as well as all manner of shop employees, all now had unions of their own.[11]
Workers undoubtedly earned what they gained. The war was known as a time of grueling speedups and long hours, and Pullman workers were hardly excepted from that pattern. Theron Brown, a porter based in Boston, remembered riding on successions of troop trains for weeks on end, often without any sense of where he was going or when he could expect to return home. “During that time, we were just like in the army ourselves, because you would leave home, and you didn’t get back home in two or three [weeks], sometimes a month,” Brown told an interviewer decades later. “You'd take a lot of clothes with you, and change, you know, and then of course if you got where you really got out of clothes, you had to buy some. And that was one way that a lot of the porters didn't go into the service, because of the fact that…these things had to move!” Another porter, James B. Johnson, said that even with all the overtime workers racked up during the war years, they would sometimes be away so long that they had to figure out ways to get their fatter pay envelopes to their families. “If I knew I was going to be gone on payday, [I] would leave a letter for my wife to go get my check so she wouldn't run out of money,” Johnson remembered. “And then I would get what they used to get what they [c]all a time check, you get a little money on [y]our time of work and that would carry me through until I could get a check.”[12]
If workers had a material stake in the war effort, the Pullman company had an even greater one. The company won lucrative contracts, not just for freight cars and shells, but parts for gun carriages and mounts, howitzers, bomber wings, landing craft, and M-3 and M-4 Sherman tanks.[13] Yet, in July 1940—well before these contracts were awarded—another arm of the administrative state was exercising its prerogative to regulate industry: the Justice Department filed suit charging the company with a litany of anticompetitive practices and demanding that its manufacturing and service arms be separated. In April 1943, a federal court ruled in the government’s favor, forcing a sale of its service branch to a group of 57 railroads that was finalized in 1947. The suit created strange bedfellows, as unions representing conductors, clerks, and repair shop workers—realizing Pullman’s competitive advantage and facing an uncertain future under new ownership—defended the company, procuring briefs that pleaded the court not to force a sale of the service arm. Still, the war years may have been a last gasp of high returns for company shareholders even if it had remained an industrial behemoth. Already competing with auto companies for market share, long-distance passenger rail service would never recover from the massive, state-backed expansion of the interstate highway system of the 1950s. The 1930s, then, were the initial phases of a long period of terminal decline for long-distance rail (and related industries, such as car service and manufacturing).[14]
During the ARU strike, the state placed its decisive weight behind crushing the walkout and boycott and jailing its leaders. During the World Wars, workers forced the state into the position of a hesitant ally, if only because the government saw it as more important to have industrial peace and constant war production than to give the owners of capital everything they wanted. That naturally made for a less romantic—even, perhaps, a less inspiring—story. But it should be remembered that it was in the latter struggles that workers won something tangible to build upon and, in the end, the only thing that really counts: better lives for themselves and their comrades.
[1] For the anti-monopolist critique of the railroads, see Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2011), especially pp. 331–355.
[2] While at least one dispute between the Pullman Company and its workers was adjudicated by the NWLB, during the federal control period most workers preferred to approach the railroad board with grievances. See Ernest Kletsch and Robert P. Reeder, ed., A Compilation of the Actions of the National War Labor Board, 1918-1919., Vol. 5, Docket No. 378 (Washington: Bureau of Applied Economics, 1919) https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/009000993. For a full treatment of the NWLB, see Joseph A. McCartin, Labor’s Great War: The Struggle for Industrial Democracy and the Origins of Modern American Labor Relations, 1912-1921 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).
[3] David M. Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 252–256,
[4] United States Railroad Administration, “Supplement No. 7 to General Order No. 27,” 06/01/01, Box 8, 169 Pullman Company Archives, Newberry Library, Chicago; “Two Million Rail Workers Get Big Raise,” Chicago Daily Tribune, May 27, 1918, 1; “Orders for 70,000 Additional Freight Cars Are Allotted by Railroad Administration,” Committee on Public Information Official Bulletin, Vol. 2 No. 300, May 3, 1918; “Supplements to Railroad Order No. 27,” CPI Official Bulletin, Vol. 2 No. 356, July 3, 1918 https://www.worldwar1centennial.org/index.php/educate/places/official-bulletin; Pullman Company Scrapbooks, Feb. 27, 1917 - Dec. 24, 1920, 12/00/01, Box 32, Vol. 33 Pullman Archives, Newberry. The scrapbooks are available online and freely accessible: https://archive.org/details/scrapbooks1865193334pull/page/n1/mode/2up
[5] USRA, “Wage Claims – Federal Control Period, 1920” 06/01/01, Box 8, 175 Pullman Archives, Newberry; “Pullman Car Employees Demand More Money,” Chicago Whip, July 25, 1919, 3; “Better Treatment of Pullman Porters Asked,” New York Age, November 16, 1918, 2; Eric Arnesen, Brotherhoods of Color: Black Railroad Workers and the Struggle for Equality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 58–60; “Pullman Porters' Mass Meeting,” Chicago Defender, April 17, 1920, 5.
[6] Kennedy, Over Here, 278–279, 288–289; Arnesen, Brotherhoods of Color, 60–64; Brailsford R. Brazeal, The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, Its Origin and Development (New York and London, Harper & Bros., 1946), 9–11.
[7] USRA, “Study – Wages and Working Conditions, Seamstresses, Linen, Laundry Workers – Pullman Car Lines, 1919” 06/01/01, Box 8, 170 Pullman Archives, Newberry; USRA, “Wage Claims – Federal Control Period, 1920”; United States Railroad Wage Commission Report of the Railroad Wage Commission to the Director General of Railroads, April 30, 1918 https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001896597.
[8] See Larry Tye, Rising from the Rails: Pullman Porters and the Making of the Black Middle Class (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2005), especially chapter 4. For the Memorial Day Massacre, see Donald G. Sofchalk, “The Chicago Memorial Day Incident: An Episode of Mass Action,” Labor History 6, No. 1 (January 1965): 3–43 and Michael Dennis, “Chicago and the Little Steel Strike,” Labor History 53, No. 2 (May 2012): 167–204.
[9] H.R. Lary to Champ Carry, January 5, 1940, 06/01/03, Box 17, 375, 19 Pullman Archives, Newberry; Memorandum to Champ Carry, May 2, 1940, in ibid. What is especially strange about this correspondence is that it tries to taint Randolph as a Communist sympathizer because of his leadership role in the National Negro Congress (NNC). In reality, Randolph was well known as bitterly anti-Communist, and in fact he wrote publicly about his decision to step down from leadership in the NNC because he was uncomfortable with the influence of Communist Party members within the organization. See Andrew E. Kersten and David Lucander, eds., For Jobs and Freedom: Selected Speeches and Writings of A. Philip Randolph (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2014), 186–189.
[10] On the labor federations’ compact with the government, see Nelson Lichtenstein, Labor’s War at Home: The CIO in World War II, (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2003), 70–81.
[11] At least 10 disputes at Pullman came before the NWLB. An index of the files is available among the Chicago Region records of the National Archives, Record Group 202, Entry 166, although the actual dispute case files are held by the Kansas City Region. Wartime contracts with the various unions can be found in the Newberry’s Pullman Archives in 06/01/04.
[12] Robert C. Hayden, interview with Theron Brown, circa 1988-1989; Hayden, interview with James Bert Johnson, July 9, 1989, in oral history interview transcripts, “Knights of the Rail: Boston African American Railroad Workers, 1977–1991,” Archives and Special Collections, Healey Library, University of Massachusetts at Boston https://openarchives.umb.edu/digital/collection/p15774coll11/search/searchterm/UASC-SC-0067*/field/identi/mode/all/conn/and/order/title/ad/asc
[13] United States War Production Board Alphabetical Listing of Major War Supply Contracts (Washington: WPB Statistics Division, 1943) https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/102572793; Mark Wilson, Destructive Creation: American Business and the Winning of World War II, American Business, Politics, and Society (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 146–152; Mary Watters, Illinois In The Second World War, Volume II: The Production Front (Springfield, IL: Illinois State Historical Library, 1952), 61, 95–96.
[14] United States v. The Pullman Company et al., 50 F. Supp. 123 (E.D. Pa. 1943); “Pullman Clerk, Repair Groups Join Trust Case,” Chicago Tribune, January 27, 1945, both in Pullman Archives, 06/01/03 Box 20, 462;