George Pullman

An American engineer and industrialist who founded the Pullman Palace Car Company and designed its railroad sleeping car, marketed as luxury for the middle class and staffed by porters who became a respected professional class in their own communities. His legacy is dual: the sleeping car transformed long distance rail travel, but in 1894, when demand fell, he cut factory wages by thirty percent while holding rents unchanged in his company town near Chicago, triggering the Pullman Strike; federal troops suppressed it with several deaths, a presidential commission called the company town un-American, and Illinois courts later forced Pullman to divest ownership of it.