Castles in the Sky
are not rent-controlled
Financial success is the parent of grandiosity. American history is replete with examples: its masters of capitalism move confidently from accumulating riches to world-building. They may fancy themselves philosophers or even aspiring philosopher-kings. But real philosophers are thinkers—not do-ers. And rich guys are do-ers—not deep thinkers.
A large workforce meant large profits at the peak of America’s industrialization during the Gilded Age. Captains of Industry needed more bodies and more tactile methods of control. (Today’s Techno Bosses want fewer bodies, more NDAs and non-competes.) In 1880, railroad car magnate George Pullman caught the world-building bug. George’s Big Idea was to build a company town that would be as profitable as it was harmonious. It would be called, not surprisingly, Pullman.
The public was impressed with the scale of Pullman’s ambition and accomplishments. He hired renowned architects Solon Spencer Beman and Nathan Barret to transform the 4,000 acres of undeveloped prairie south of Chicago into a model American town. With its houses, shops, church, hotel, and indoor shopping mall, Pullman was the antithesis of the dirty and cramped factory towns of the Northeast. The company-owned town was designed to provide an uplifting atmosphere and strengthen the bond between the owner(s) and the workers.
The town’s streets were paved, swept, and watered daily, and the sewage from the town was converted into fertilizer and sold at a profit. These features, along with the relative spaciousness of the homes, placed Pullman’s accommodations well above the day’s standards.
How beautiful! How serene! Pullman’s employees so appreciated their founder’s largesse, that they committed to work even harder. (Oops! That sentence slipped in from the Pullman PR echo chamber. In reality . . . )
Two rooms in the cheaper apartment buildings built for the lower-income workers were rented for $4.00 a month, and the two-story rowhouses from $14.00 to $100.00 a month. Rent for dwellings was deducted from employees’ paychecks. The rent charged for the buildings was planned to ensure a six percent return on the company’s investment. [Mr. Pullman] also established behavioral standards that workers had to meet to live in the area.
“Behavioral standards” included a ban on alcohol, ethnic clubs, independent newspapers, and Catholic churches. Pullman intended for his company town to be a model of Protestant respectability. Personal and business reputations were on the line: investors were promised a 6% return on capital.
Marketed as a workers’ utopia, Pullman’s lived reality was experienced as a well-appointed prison. There was no booze, social activities were planned and monitored by the company, and behavioral codes were enforced via a system of tunnels and spies. The Founder endeavored to squeeze out the 6% profit he promised investors. He extracted at most 4.5%, despite constantly raising rents and prices at the company stores. Renter-employees could never purchase their homes and leases could be terminated at any time. Pullman residents had no say in how the town was run.
Then things got worse: the financial panic of 1893 ushered in a four-year-long economic depression. Those were desperate times, with bank runs, business failures, and railroads going into receivership. Nobody was buying Pullman parlor coaches and sleeping cars. The company laid off workers and reduced wages for those who remained. Nevertheless, Pullman’s above-market-price rents stayed fixed. George Pullman refused to negotiate with his workers, which led to the famous—and bloody—Pullman strike of 1894. Ultimately, Illinois’ governor called in federal troops to aid the National Guard in putting down the strike. Violence ensued, leaving 13 dead and 58 wounded.
George Pullman was roundly criticized for the policies that led to the strike and his refusal to negotiate with his workers. The situation for those in Pullman remained dire, and though little effort was made to evict residents or collect past due rents, poverty was widespread. George Pullman defended his model town and the decisions that led to the strike, but the damage to the company and the strikers irreparably tarnished his image. Company ownership continued under Pullman’s direction until he died in 1897. Having never recovered his public image, he left instructions that his body be encased in reinforced concrete out of fear it would be desecrated.
Funny, how the death thing looms large in the plutocratic mind. At the end, “he left instructions . . .”.
In our time, it is the Silicon Valley plutocrats who mistake their lucky breaks for innate brilliance. Profiting from technology rather than manufacturing, tech titans strive to shrink, not augment, their workforces. Like Pullman, their business success fuels world-building desires. But no company town would be optioned by today’s tech billionaires. No. Venture capitalists envision political and social engineering on a grand scale. Rich guys like Peter Thiel want to socially re-engineer American society and replace its democratic government with . . . something else.
I’ve read a bunch of articles on Thiel and his political worldview but I can’t detect a coherent ideology. Peter Thiel has been described as a libertarian, a neo-reactionary, an opportunistic populist, and a metaphysical optimist. Absent his fortune, folks would just call him a crackpot.
Writing in Politico, Jedediah Purdy discusses Peter Thiel’s illiberalism and techno-futurism:
A Silicon Valley libertarian who got rich by developing PayPal, Thiel historically likes his capitalism undiluted by sentimentality. He . . . has been an attention-getting provocateur against establishment institutions such as his alma mater, Stanford University. (He has famously offered grants to talented students who forgo college.) He is interested in technology that overcomes familiar human limitations, including space colonization and medical research into immortality.
Donald J. Trump’s running mate, J. D. Vance, is Peter Thiel’s protege. Vance will do his utmost to give Thiel what he wants: no government oversight or regulation of his businesses, crypto, or AI. Disempower the SEC and defund the IRS. Whatever Peter wants.
Thiel made him wealthy, setting him up to invest in companies that became popular with the MAGA set. He shepherded Vance’s entry into politics, bankrolling, alongside other Silicon Valley donors, his successful bid for the U.S. Senate in 2022.
“For Peter,” said one of the people familiar with his thinking, “Vance is a generational bet.”
It looks like this bet is paying off—until Donald J. Trump changes his mind.
Peter Thiel will not have to encase his body in concrete to avoid George Pullman’s high anxiety: the potential desecration of his final resting place. Thiel won’t have a grave. He doesn’t think he should (or will) “die.”
Barton Gelman, in The Atlantic:
Should Thiel happen to die one day, best efforts notwithstanding, his arrangements with Alcor provide that a cryonics team will be standing by. The moment he is declared legally dead, medical technicians will connect him to a machine that will restore respiration and blood flow to his corpse. This step is temporary, meant to protect his brain and slow “the dying process.”
Thiel’s remains will be whisked to an operating room in Scottsdale, Arizona. A medical team will perfuse cryoprotectants through his blood vessels in an attempt to reduce the tissue damage wrought by extreme cold. Then his body will be cooled to –196 degrees Celsius, the temperature of liquid nitrogen. After slipping into a double-walled, vacuum-insulated metal coffin, alongside (so far) 222 other corpsicles, ‘the patient is now protected from deterioration for theoretically thousands of years’ . . . .
. . . All that will be left for Thiel to do, entombed in this vault, is await the emergence of some future society that has the wherewithal and inclination to revive him.
These guys. 🙄
And now, your moment of . . . bird wrapping
Writing—and reading—about serious subjects can be fairly depressing. Grounded will conclude each week with a lighter story so you may leave with a bit of joy in your heart.
Tortillas save lives!
A Texas family got wrapped up in an unforeseen animal rescue mission and saved a baby bird by cocooning it in a tortilla, earning them praise for their quick, compassionate actions. . . .’
Wildlife rescue facility where the Adlongs took the bird said ‘the bird was actually a Mississippi Kite, which is a hawk-like bird, and it was secured snugly in the warm tortilla.’
‘I wrapped my little bird in the warm tortilla and swaddled him up,’ Katie Adlong, said. ‘That’s all I had.’
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Notes:
Lauren Aratami, Rupert Murdoch goes to war with his children over his media empire
Elizabeth Dwoskin, et al., Inside the powerful Peter Thiel network that anointed JD Vance (WaPo gift link).
Barton Gellman, Peter Thiel is Taking a Break from Democracy
Brooke Gladstone, How the Media Created J.D. Vance.
Legendsofamerica.com, Pullman, Illinois – A Model Company Town
Damon Linker, What Does Peter Thiel Want?
Alexei Oreskovic, The PayPal mafia still rules Silicon Valley
Ryan Mac and Theodore Schleifer, How a Network of Tech Billionaires Helped J.D. Vance Leap Into Power (NYT gift link).
Richard Schneirov, The Pullman Strike.
Eleanor Terrett, Donald Trump and J.D. Vance create a pro-crypto presidential ticket
Peter Thiel, The Education of a Libertarian.
WTTW Chicago, Loyalty or Control? Why George Pullman Built a Company Town.
As frightening as it is disgusting! No one person should have this much money or power. It is frightening to imagine a psyche that he has developed regarding his (in his mind) superior intelligence and entitlement. We have had our share of self-declared oligarchs, but none have had quite the amount of hubris that this man exhibits. It truly makes one wonder that if, as posited in fictional(?) literature, the world is actually being controlled by a multi-national group of these billionaires.
Nice expose, Maryjane! Thanks!!