While researching an editorial topic a few days ago, I stumbled across an episode that sheds some light on an attitude which seems, to me anyway, deeply rooted in and distinct to Butler County. I’ll just share the story and let you decide if the proverbial shoe fits.

It involved Chicago railroad tycoon George Mortimer Pullman, the head of what eventually would become the Pullman-Standard Car Manufacturing Company with extensive holdings in Butler. But this chapter predates Butler’s inclusion in the Pullman empire.

In the late 1870s Pullman was making his luxury sleeper cars in Chicago. He got the idea to create a community for his employees — to design, build and manage every facet of a factory town.

According to the Historical Pullman Foundation in Chicago, Pullman’s intention appeared noble enough: to attract and retain the best workers by providing the best living conditions; rental housing with electricity, water, sewer and gas service, sanitation and spacious lawns maintained as part of the rent; to recruit civil and moral residents to a like-minded community — all under absolute Pullman control, and turning a profit on the company’s investment.

Pullman considered every detail — location, accessibility, materials, climate and, perhaps most important, connections to the national railroad network and shipping.

Pullman employees did all the construction, starting with a brickyard where they baked local clay and shops making component parts to be used throughout the building of the town. It was one of the first examples of mass production in large-scale housing. The town of more than 1,000 homes and public buildings began in 1880 and was completed in 1884.

It had some quirky characteristics, reflections of Pullman’s beliefs and values.

There was one church building to be shared by all denominations. If a factory can operate with interchangeable parts, he reasoned, then why shouldn’t religions work the same way?

There was one bar, located in the hotel for visiting business executives. Locals were prohibited.

The company took care of all administrative functions. The only elections were for school board.

The architecture reflected a rigid class structure: Executives lived in detached homes; foremen in row houses; skilled workers in smaller quarters; and unskilled workers in apartments, some having only two rooms.

Pullman’s contemporaries hailed his achievement. The Prague International Hygienic and Pharmaceutical Exposition of 1896 voted Pullman the world’s most perfect town. Considering the typical living standards of factory workers of the time — crowded, rickety, fire-prone tenements — it was a revolutionary alternative.

And yet the flaws in Pullman’s utopia surfaced almost immediately.

In a Harper’s Magazine essay published in 1885, economist Richard Ely observed cronyism in a system that appoints its government officials. And residents complained privately to Ely about leases that could be dissolved with 10 days’ notice for no reason.

“Nobody regards Pullman as a real home,” Ely wrote. “It can scarcely be said that there are more than temporary residents.”

A depression in 1894 prompted Pullman to cut factory wages, but he did not lower their rents or prices at the Pullman company stores. The employees went on strike. Sympathetic rail workers joined them.

Violence broke out and federal troops were summoned. They broke the strike, killing 30 workers. Pullman employees were forced back to work.

George Pullman died in 1897. He was buried in Chicago’s Graceland Cemetery under 18 inches of reinforced concrete for fear that labor sympathizers would dig up his grave.

The following year the Illinois Supreme Court ruled the company town was illegal. Pullman Palace had to sell the homes and other buildings. The village eventually annexed with Chicago.

Fast-forward to 1929, a few weeks after the stock market crash. Pullman bought the Standard Steel Car Company in Butler — a company whose co-founder “Diamond” Jim Brady was notorious for superhuman appetites, flamboyant lifestyle, a disdain for rules and a prodigious generosity. Brady had died in 1917. Co-founder John M. Hansen’s death in 1929 catalyzed SSC’s sale to Pullman.

The Great Depression, which brought rail car production to a standstill, and the Pullman-Standard merger, which took another five years to complete, must have delivered a one-two blow to the former employees and associates of Diamond Jim.

Merging companies that were founded on the philosophies of such disparate men as Brady and Pullman must have been in some ways like merging fire and ice.

It’s hard to imagine the ideological clash of those early labor contract negotiations as anything but hostile — and enduring, even to the present day.

Much has been said, written and documented about the labor-management strife in Pullman-Standard’s history. Maybe the rise and fall of the town of Pullman, Ill., offers some understanding of the animosity that took hold here and — some would say, myself included — never left.

Tom Harrison writes editorials for The Butler Eagle.