Simon Cordery’s new biography, Gilded Age Entrepreneur, seeks to rescue Albert Pulman from “the ever lengthening shadow of his younger brother George” (1). The Pullman brothers made a fortune in the late nineteenth century by building sleeping cars and dining cars and then renting them to railroad companies. Before the Pullmans established Pullman’s Palace Car Company (PPCC) in 1867, long-distance train travel was exhausting and uncomfortable. The PPCC later built a company town, Pullman, Illinois, though the company is probably best remembered today for the bitter and violent strike of 1894. George Pullman managed the company and directed its finances, but Albert played a vital role in designing and building Pullman’s luxury train cars and in promoting those cars to the public. In particular, Albert pioneered press junkets in which newspaper editors and reporters would be invited to travel free of charge. Champagne flowed “like water” and glowing publicity followed (48). Albert further exploited these excursions by making connections with prominent politicians and businessmen who later proved useful as investors and fixers.

Although Albert was great at glad-handing, he lacked George’s financial abilities and mind for business details. Cordery sees Albert as “a relic of a bygone era when managers and employees knew each other personally” (232). He flourished on the workshop floor and at intimate press events but struggled to insert himself in corporate governance as the Pullman business grew in size and bureaucratic complexity. While Albert gallivanted around the country as the brash public face of the Pullman Company, George stayed at headquarters in Illinois, quietly and efficiently cementing his control over the business.

Cordery situates the Pullman brothers’ saga within the turbulent world of late Victorian capitalism, where George “thrived in the chaos,” but Albert did not (95). Cordery especially emphasizes how “the volatility and uncertainty at the heart of entrepreneurship encouraged Albert Pullman and others like him to create, neglect, dissolve, and destroy firms, sometimes willfully and occasionally fraudulently” (3). However, Albert’s attempts at company promotion mostly fell flat, resulting in a string of failed investments, bankruptcies, and lawsuits. Gilded Age Entrepreneur carefully documents several of Albert’s shaky business ventures, including his disastrous involvements with the Great Western Insurance Company, the American Homestead Company, and the Chicago Hansom Cab Company. George grew tired of bailing Albert out, eventually firing him from the family firm in 1886. George later erased Albert from Pullman Company history.

Cordery argues that Albert’s messy business career is more representative of the volatile nature of nineteenth-century capitalism than George’s steady ascent to wealth and fame. Indeed, Cordery hopes that this biography will inspire more historians to research the lives of other less successful and less well-known businesspeople so that the history of American capitalism will cease to be based so heavily on the lives of “a few outsized individuals” (270). The stories of washouts like Albert Pullman are important because they “give nuance and depth to our understanding of the development of corporate capitalism” (271).

Gilded Age Entrepreneur is well written and scrupulously researched, utilizing the Pullman Company archives, family papers, and extensive newspaper stories. The book is organized into twenty-nine short, thematic chapters, which makes for easy reading. Cordery favors a digressive style, with numerous diversions into side topics such as homeopathy, industrial patents, and world’s fairs. While these digressions are interesting and informative, they also take the focus away from Albert. In fact, there are many places in the book, as in the chapters on the construction and operation of George Pullman’s company town, where Albert disappears altogether. While Cordery has done a fine job of excavating the available information about Albert, he does not entirely succeed in rescuing him from George’s long shadow.

Cordery’s provocative biography is a welcome counterpoint to the endless volumes devoted to the better-known robber barons and industrialists of Gilded Age America, but it also illustrates the difficulties of going against the grain of triumphalism. The lives of seeming winners are almost always better documented than those of the losers, and more of that documentary material survives. Much of the American public also admires the wealthy and powerful and likes to read about their accomplishments. Publishers are certainly happy to issue yet another biography of Thomas Edison or Henry Ford or Andrew Carnegie rather than trying to promote a book about a proverbial also-ran. Simon Cordery and Cornell University Press deserve credit for bucking this trend.