So many lines in Chicago who know?

Classic Trains General Discussion
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Wow, a couple of real swell guys.

Rich

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Lindbergh was part of the Defend America First movement prior to 12/7/1941 and spent a good part of the time after that training pilots in the Pacific and managed to shoot down a couple of Japanese planes.

I’ve been reading books on WW2 history for over 60 years, with the more I read the more I am aware of what got left out of the simple histories of the war. One example was as of May 1944, there were 130,000 fatalities in the US from industrial accidents after December 1941. Another example was that the listening posts in Guam and the Philippines were told to destroy their cryptographic gear the Wednesday before the Pearl Harbor attack.

In my earlier years, I though that anyone who was a pacifist in the late 1930’s needed to have their head examined. After reading about what happened in WW1, I can see why so many Americans wanted nothing to do with another war in Europe. As a result, the US waited for Germany to declare war on the US before the US declared war on Germany (Dec 11 versus Dec 8 for Japan).

To put things a bit on topic, one reason that the US & Allies were able to prevail in WW2 was that the railroads greatly aided with war production, along with diesel engines developed for locomotive being essential for the USN. On the other hand, the progress in aviation pretty much sealed the fate of long distance passenger trains.

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Like you, I have done considerable reading about all aspects of WWII, It lasted a full six years and more than 80 million people died. For all practical purposes, WWII began in 1919 following the Allies victory over the Central Powers in WWI. It was the most horrific of all wars before or since.

Rich

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Which highlights how Grant & Lee ended the Civil War conflict between the Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia in setting the pattern to end the Civil War.

The Allies of WW I treated Germany worse than a death sentence. The Treaty of Versailles was all about humiliation more than it was about ending and armed conflict.

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Britain wanted Germany to pay for the war.
Not that they succeeded.
The cost of the war to Britain was astronomical. The last payment of the debt owed was paid in October 2014.

David

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Countries ‘paying’ for wars is a flawed concept from the get go.

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A long but thorough and mostly even-handed article on Lindy:

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I just finished reading a book on George Pullman titled, Pullman, the Man, the Company, the Historical Park.

It is a fairly interesting read that begins with a discussion of his early life and career, his development of the Pullman Sleeping Car and his construction of the Pullman community for his workers.

For anyone already familiar with George Pullman and his Pullman Palace Car Company which began production in 1867, there isn’t much new here, but there are some interesting tidbits that I will summarize here.

Pullman never sold anything. He leased his sleeping cars to the railroads. He built residences for his workers, but he always leased the homes.

When the press interviewed some of his workers about the leased residences, their answer was always the same. It was like living in a hotel, not a home.

The Pullman residential neighborhoods had been classified as “farmlands”, keeping the community’s real estate taxes low. When a township-wide referendum was held in 1889 to be annexed to Chicago, Pullman resisted. However, 62 percent of the votes were in favor of annexation, and the entire Hyde Park township was annexed to Chicago.

When times got tough financially, Pullman cut wages but did not adjust the workers rents (lease payments). He did, however, continue to pay unreduced dividends to his shareholders.

When the famous workers strike for better wages occurred in 1893, Pullman refused to negotiate with his workers or their new-found union. He later told the U.S. Strike Commision, “It would have been unethical for him to give charity to his workers at the stockholders expense”.

His attitude was that a disgruntled employee could always just quit his job and look for employment elsewhere. However, many striking workers were fired and blacklisted making it impossible to find work elsewhere.

Perhaps George Pullman’s greatest accomplishment beyond the production of luxury sleeping cars was the use of trained black male Porters and black female Maids to see to the comforts and needs of his passengers. Their performance was overseen and supervised by Pullman Conductors all of whom were white males.

George Pullman died in October 1897. Abraham Lincoln’s son, Robert Tood Lincoln succeeded George Pullman as head of the company. The company lived on, eventually changed its name to the Pullman Company. It began closing manufacturing facilities in 1955 and ceased all operations in 1982.

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Here’s another spin on George Pullman from Theodore Kornweibel, Jr.'s

“Railroads in the African American Experience.”

“To what extent Pullman coldly calculated that ex-slaves, under the prod of economic necessity, would willingly become passengers’ servants cannot be definitively resolved. Clearly, he believed that blacks were temperamentally suited to serve others. That he was nobly inspired to offer a helping hand to a newly liberated race is doubtful. Having experimented unsuccessfully first with white conductors and women to attend to passengers, Pullman by 1867 was hiring only African Americans.” “And African Americans worked only as servants (porters, parlor car attendants, maids, valets). The job of Pullman conductor was reserved for white men.”

“George Pullman…was a paternalistic autocrat to his employees, white as well as black. The decision to hire only black porters reflected four intertwined business and racial decisions. He recognized that whites would feel that their travel was more luxurious and their status enhanced if black servants waited upon them, especially because most passengers did not have the wealth to keep servants in their homes. The Pullman Company was not just selling transportation. It was, above all, selling service. Second, as sharecropping put legions of blacks into economic bondage in the postwar South, plenty of black men were willing to trade a mule and a plow for almost any other employment. Pullman’s earliest porters received no wages at all. Their only income derived from tips and the sale of food and sundries. Third, the racial gulf between the races ensured that blacks could work in intimate proximity to whites without narrowing the caste divide or posing the possibility of later social encounters. And finally, George Pullman believed that blacks were ‘by nature adapted faithfully to perform their duties under circumstances which necessitate unfailing good nature, solicitude, and faithfulness.’ So as later generations of porters saw it, the earliest porters continued to be slaves, only now to the Pullman Company, having to act like slaves in order to earn the tips on which they depended.”

I recommend this book to anyone interested in another facet of railroad and American history.

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Excellent. Thanks for posting, NKP_guy.

Rich