Cordery applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Gilded Age Entrepreneur: The Curious Life of American Financier Albert Benton Pullman, and reported the following:
On page 99 of Gilded Age Entrepreneur we find Albert Benton Pullman (1828-1893), the subject of this biography, working as a railroad executive. He is travelling to Indianapolis and Detroit on business in 1870 for his employer, Pullman’s Palace Car Company. Founded by his brother George Mortimer Pullman, this corporation made luxury railroad passenger carriages, beginning with sleeping cars. In Indianapolis he exercised his persuasive charm to smooth the ruffled feathers of a fellow railroad executive and then in Detroit he confirmed that the company wanted to buy a factory to make its vehicles. Sending Albert to inspect a plant Pullman wanted to purchase indicated how important he was as a marketing expert who also knew all about building cars to the company in its early years. This page demonstrates how Albert’s role working with the men and women who built the cars was coming to an end. His mutual approach to labor relations, the idea that all had a shared interest in the profitability of the firm, was impractical in a company where manufacturing would now occur in plants hundreds of miles apart. His ideal of working with directly with, and getting to know, employees was obsolete. Read on its own, page 99 goes a long way to toward identifying many of the talents that made him so useful to his brother George Pullman.Learn more about Gilded Age Entrepreneur at the Cornell University Press website.
Readers would find several important themes on display on page 99, though ultimately they would get only a partial view of Albert Pullman’s life. His mutualism and his central role in the early years of the Pullman Company are evident, but his family and his entrepreneurship are absent. Albert was a skillful marketer of Pullman products, taking potential clients on trial rail journeys to show off the luxurious cars and convince them to use Pullmans. Particularly important to the trajectory of the biography are the ways in which Albert Pullman built, used, neglected, and destroyed interpersonal networks to find and develop investment opportunities. Those are obscured from view on page 99. His early use of his position in the Pullman Company to place a lucrative cleaning contract with a laundry into which he invested is a key foundation for his financial efforts. Despite this insider access, Albert suffered from poor timing, such as doubling the value of his holdings in a fire insurance company days before the Great Chicago Fire bankrupted it, for example, and a willingness to engage in dubious financial practices, including creating a fraudulent land company and a sham mining concern.
The material on page 99 also hints at Albert Pullman’s mechanical skills. His career started as a carpenter, in which role he helped to create Pullman’s distinctive and elaborate car designs. He learned about the railroad industry by watching and listening, eventually being seen as an expert whose opinion other railroaders sought. He played a key role in the creation of the town of Pullman, where the Company housed many of the workers it employed, and toward the end of his life invested with little success in hansom cabs, telephones, automobiles, and electricity. Newspapers across the country covered his death, but by then George Pullman had been systematically erasing Albert from the story of the family business—but to know why he did that, readers would need to jump into the whole book!
--Marshal Zeringue
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