Struggling to maintain profitability during an 1894 downturn in manufacturing demand, he halved wages and required workers to spend long hours at the plant, but did not lower prices of rents and goods in his company town.

He gained presidential support by Grover Cleveland for the use of federal military troops which left 30 strikers dead in the violent suppression of workers there to end the Pullman Strike of 1894.

In 1898, the Supreme Court of Illinois ordered the Pullman Company to divest itself of the town, which became a neighborhood of the city of Chicago.

Pullman attended local schools and helped his father, learning other skills that contributed to his later success.

During the 1850s, the streets in Chicago often resembled a swamp, as the city had been built to too low an elevation on the shore of Lake Michigan.

The city undertook to re-engineer its sewage system to clear the surface of the unwanted and often pathogenic standing water.

In 1859 Pullman and his fellow Albion-based business partner Charles Moore moved to Chicago to raise one such building, the Matteson House, a large brick built hotel.

[2] Pullman and Moore went on to raise several more Chicago buildings before becoming part of a consortium that raised the entire ninety-eight metre long block of four and five storey brick and stone buildings on the north side of Lake Street between Clark and La Salle Streets, a feat depicted by Edward Mendel in a large lithograph.

After President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, Pullman arranged to have his body carried from Washington, D.C., to Springfield on a sleeper, for which he gained national attention, as hundreds of thousands of people lined the route in homage.

[5] As they were paid relatively well and got to travel the country, the position became considered prestigious, and Pullman porters were respected in the black communities.

Pullman believed that if his sleeper cars were to be successful, he needed to provide a wide variety of services to travelers: collecting tickets, selling berths, dispatching wires, fetching sandwiches, mending torn trousers, converting day coaches into sleepers, etc.

Pullman believed that former house slaves of the plantation South had the right combination of training to serve the businessmen who would patronize his "Palace Cars".

In the spring of 1871, Pullman, Andrew Carnegie, and others bailed out the financially troubled Union Pacific; they took positions on its board of directors.

By 1875, the Pullman firm owned $100,000 worth of patents, had 700 cars in operation, and had several hundred thousand dollars in the bank.

In 1887, Pullman designed and established the system of "vestibuled trains," with cars linked by covered gangways instead of open platforms.

[6] The French social scientist Paul de Rousiers (1857–1934), who visited Chicago in 1890, wrote of Pullman's manufacturing complex, "Everything is done in order and with precision.

"[7] In 1880, Pullman bought 4,000 acres (16 km2), near Lake Calumet some 14 mi (23 km) south of Chicago, on the Illinois Central Railroad for $800,000.

Pullman believed that the country air and fine facilities, without agitators, saloons and city vice districts, would result in a happy, loyal workforce.

His inspectors regularly entered homes to inspect for cleanliness and could terminate workers' leases on ten days' notice.

Cleveland sent in the troops, who harshly suppressed the strike in action that caused many injuries, over the objections of the Illinois governor, John Altgeld.

This was not unusual in the age of the robber barons, but he didn't reduce the rent in Pullman, because he had guaranteed his investors a 6% return on their investments in the town.

Debs could not pacify the pent-up frustrations of the exploited workers, and violence broke out between rioters and the federal troops that were sent to protect the mail.

Fearing that some of his former employees or other labor supporters might try to dig up his body, his family arranged for his remains to be placed in a lead-lined mahogany coffin, which was then sealed inside a block of concrete.

His monument, featuring a Corinthian column flanked by curved stone benches, was designed by Solon Spencer Beman, the architect of the company town of Pullman.