Pullman: Labor, Race, and the Urban Landscape in a Company Town: A Digital Exhibition at The Newberry

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Reviewed by: Pullman: Labor, Race, and the Urban Landscape in a Company Town: A Digital Exhibition at The Newberry Jaka Lombar It may well be that in the age of lockdowns and quarantines, the strengths and shortcomings of digital archival infrastructures and online exhibitions will come to make or break them as the apt alternatives to the physical venues that were until recently, the default assemblages for the dissemination of historical knowledge. The origin of The Newberry's exhibition on Pullman (https://publications.newberry.org/pullman/), a neighborhood on Chicago's South Side, is a series of workshops on industrial capitalism (2011), which necessitated the digitization of a number of archival documents that now form the core of the online exhibition. The documents provide a framework for a central narrative of Pullman's origins and development through the urban, race, and labor histories of the town, all of which are contextualised through the wider national narratives and movements that permeated the local dynamics of a manufacturing town. The exhibit illustrates how the expansive social vision of magnate George Pullman was put to practice in the town where his company not only owned the factories but the homes workers occupied, the bar they drank in, and even the ground on which their church stood. The all-encompassing planning and Pullman's capacity for asserting power over the local population eventually exacerbated hostilities between the Pullman company and its workers, contributing to the 1894 strike. Crucially, the historical narrative that The Newberry presents does not shy away from the White supremacy that underlay Pullman's supposedly altruistic practice of hiring Black workers exclusively for the service positions. The exposition text candidly recognizes that this reflected a mindset that was "deeply paternalistic and informed by racial presuppositions" within which the Black workers were merely permitted and expected "to serve white people.#x201D; The exhibition centers on the social strata from the macro perspective in the section entitled "In the City," to the more and more local iterations of [End Page 119] the urban spatiality in sections such as "In the Town," "In the Shops," and "In the Neighborhood." Occasionally, the exhibition texts are also hyperlinked with other similar online projects such as the online Encyclopedia of Chicago. By utilizing the virtual qualities of the exhibition format while also retaining the majority of the content on site, the narrative flow of the exhibit is both future-proofed from dead links and kept free of unnecessary clutter. Each of the sections is constructed from a handful of subsections, which in turn consist of a paragraph-long contextual introduction. Viewers can click on thumbnail images of scanned material to examine the magnified images in more detail. These artefacts are the cornerstones of the virtual exhibition, and it is through their framing that the presentation is at its strongest. Photographs, drawings, financial documents, employee service cards, music sheets, and other ephemera are most vibrant when the curators accentuate their distinctive qualities. By calling attention to oily handprints on a petition, for example, curators help viewers make a human connection to the hands of workers who had held the document. Curators also situate scanned materials within wider social dynamics by posing questions directly to the viewer: "How are working people characterized?" "What is emphasized?" "What gets overlooked?" These are some of the prompts offered in connection to illustrations of industrial relations published in the popular press. Such interventions help viewers to engage with the exhibition on their own terms, while making sure the emphasis remains on the artefacts that invite a response. The questions serve as useful devices to look beyond particular instances to the larger social and political issues of Pullman, and they are able to direct viewers' attention to artifacts and issues that may not be represented or physically present in the archive's collection. Unfortunately, the presentation of some documents in the exhibition does not meet the expectations set up by mass digitization. While single-page documents function well through enlargement that makes them legible, some of the multi-page reports, accounts, and testimonies that are marked as PDFs are, upon opening, merely the images of the first page and not the entire document. Aside...