George Pullman Company In The Late 1800s

The Industrial Revolution brought to America new technologies to manufacture and produce goods in quantities unseen before. In the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution new companies were learning how to monopolize and take advantage of the public, these companies would eventually effect America in more ways then one. During the late 1800’s and the early 1900’s many working class individuals lived in poverty because of the formations of monopolies and trusts.

A trust is a basically another word for monopoly, which means one large business that corners a market and has no competition allowing it to raise their prices however they choose. These trusts could employ workers at a very low wage since they were the only ones producing jobs. This

Workers and families for the Pullman Palace Car Company in Illinois lived in a small town called Pullman and paid wages to the business in order to live there. The Pullman Company in 1894 cut wages but did not lower the price of living for these workers making them absolutely penniless “George M. Pullman, you know, has cut our wages from 30 to 70 percent. George M. Pullman has caused to be paid in the last year the regular quarterly dividend of 2 percent on his stock and an extra slice of 1 1/2 percent, making 9 1/2 percent on $30,000,000 of capital. George M. Pullman, you know, took three contracts on which he lost less than $5,000.” (U.S. strike commission, 1894) These workers and train car workers around the nation stopped working and started protesting all organized by a man named Eugene Debs. The U.S. military eventually intervened and Debs was arrested, this military intervention proved just how powerful a big company like this was the workers never succeeded in their strike and were fired. The Pullman Strike inspired other strikes in America and was used as a martyr for many future reforms to take place and inspired states to make antitrust laws much like

In this essay McNeill expressed his great hatred for these Corporations even to go as far as saying “Monopoly is the last full fruit of the present industrial system. It is poisonous, but it is also seedless as it is soulless. It is the antithesis of the trade union. It is and must be a despotism.”(McNeill, 1896) McNeill was one of the very first people to understand the true danger of these trusts, he realized that these companies were just as powerful as the government and how they can bend their will to make anything happen “The monopolists seek to overcome their competitors and make them servitors to their will.” (McNeill, 1896) McNeill was more of a radical speaker then his fellow peers and had this belief that the wealthy were against the poor and were the real leaders of America “the plutocracy and aristocracy of wealth shall commit the final overt act in their conspiracy against liberty.” (McNeill, 1896) The fact that this ideal was in McNeill’s mind just shows the hatred between the two groups. McNeill died in 1906 and his work was greatly appreciated by his