Never a City So Real - Alex Kotlowitz [12]
In 1894, Sadlowski tells his students, the Pullman workers finally walked out on strike. Soon after, Eugene Debs’s Railway Union honored the walkout, refusing to work on any train that carried a Pullman car, which was virtually every train in the country. It was a defining moment for American labor—an industrial union bringing together these otherwise fragmented crafts, undergirding the notion that an injury to one is an injury to all. Clarence Darrow, a young lawyer at the time for the Northwestern Railroad, stopped off in Pullman to see what all the fuss was about, and he became so moved by the plight of the immigrant workers there that he quit his job and offered his services to Debs and the union. (Each year on March 13, the anniversary of Darrow’s death in 1938, Sadlowski gathers with others at the Jackson Park Lagoon in Hyde Park, where Darrow’s ashes were scattered; they read from his speeches and ruminate on matters of the day, as Darrow would have liked.)
Many lives were lost, and the strike was eventually smothered. When Pullman died, four years later, he was buried in the dead of night, in a hole the size of a large room. He had become so despised that he feared his grave would be desecrated, so he left instructions that his mahogany casket was to be buried in cement overlaid with bolted-down railroad ties. “He just got it into his head that someone would desecrate his body, maybe cut his penis off and stick it in his nose,” Sadlowski tells me, making me wonder just how much he’d thought about this. Pullman is buried at the Graceland Cemetery, which, as Sadlowski says, “is as good a book as any on Chicago, and on the rich and how they thought of themselves.” Marshall Field is buried there. So is Louis Sullivan, who died penniless and has a rather modest tombstone, although an elaborate monument was later built by friends.
As we’re leaving the Pullman church, Gilmak, one of the students, admires the restoration work on the building’s green limestone and thanks Sadlowski for the tour. Gilmak’s grandfather worked at South Works, his dad at Republic, and his uncle at Wisconsin Steel. “Sadlowski,” he told me later, “gave me more respect for those guys.”
Sadlowski’s neighborhood, once largely Eastern European, is now mostly Mexican-American, a change that not all of the community’s longtime members are happy about. Not long ago, when Sadlowski went to get a haircut, he told his longtime barber that he had just returned from visiting Tucson, Arizona.
“Yeah, they found a truckload of them spics in the desert there dead,” the barber said. “Should’ve been fifty of the sonofabitches. We wouldn’t have to bother with ’em then.”
Sadlowski rose from his chair. “I come in here to get a haircut and I got to be subjected to that shit and pay for it? That’s the same kind of crap they said about my grandfather a hundred years ago.”
“It’s nothing personal,” the barber said.
“It’s very personal to me.” Sadlowski replied, and left without the haircut.
This, in the end, is what it’s all about for Sadlowski: recognizing that, indeed, the past is present. It’s easy to come down here and think to yourself, “This is a dying community,” but it isn’t. It’s a changing one, now lined with establishments such as Armando’s Tire Repair, D’Madera Furniture, Ruiz Funeral Homes, and Las Delicias Grocery. Like the carpenters and millwrights in Sadlowski’s class, the neighborhood is picking itself up, brushing off the sulfur, and becoming something new.
Once while I was visiting his home, Sadlowski showed me the rock garden he had created alongside his bungalow. It’s a collection of stones and waste from the mills. There’s a basketball-size mass