Archaeology, company towns, and consensus history

I have many voices in my head, but the one that asks "why is 'class' a dirty word?" over and over is one of the loudest. This little article in the Chicago Tribune set that voice off.

Students search for 'Old Chicago' in Pullman neighborhood.
It is about a field school excavating the 1880s shopping arcade in the former company town of Pullman (now part of Chicago). That it is an 1880s arcade is interesting in itself (although I am not sure what the archaeology will contribute other than illustrative knick knacks), but the Pullman connection is what caught my attention.

Pullman was the company town for the workers at the Pullman Palace Car Company, who manufactured, yes, Pullman cars (on which, incidentally, one found Pullman porters). Pullman was the very model of a model company town, quite an early experiment in corporate paternalism. George Pullman was a firm and early believer that labor struggle was the result of an unpleasant environment, writing

that such advantages and surroundings made better workmen by removing from them the feeling of discontent and desire for change which so generally characterize the American workman; thus protecting the employer from loss of time and money consequent upon intemperance, labor strikes, and dissatisfaction which generally result from poverty and uncongenial home surroundings.

He apparently spared no expense--the town was formally laid out and had all the amenities, including the shopping arcade. And the Pullman company maintained iron control over their workers' lives.

The workers never forgot that, however nice the houses in Pullman were, they were not their houses--"We are born in a Pullman house, fed from the Pullman shops, taught in the Pullman school, catechized in the Pullman Church, and when we die we shall go to the Pullman Hell." In 1894, Pullman was the epicenter of the Pullman or American Railroad Union (ARU) Strike. To make a long and interesting story short and boring, Federal troops were called out, the ARU was broken, and its president, Eugene Debs, did jail time. It was this strike that launched Debs on his political career and helped make the Socialist Party a genuine, but very brief, threat in the 1912 election.

So that's Pullman--a powder keg of class antagonism, but a very nicely painted one.

None of that was even hinted at in this article.

Foundation [the Historic Pullman Foundation] President Michael Shymanski said the arcade once was a place where executives and laborers shopped together, and that equality was emblematic of the town's ideals of living in harmony.
...
"Everything was big, beautiful, ornate," Baxter said. "This was the place everyone in Pullman came, which is why it's so interesting to us."

Whoa.

Now admittedly the article is very brief and reporters do have a tendency to rephrase things they don't understand into thing they do understand. So I am not sure what was really said or intended, but these two quotes really made me wonder what was going here. Why was the company town history of Pullman not mentioned?

What are some possibilities?

1. The archaeology and the foundation are probably part of neighborhood revitalization (read gentrification). There may be marketing and image reasons not to highlight the darker aspects of Pullman's history--yuppies, like archaeologists, love ethnic, but they do NOT like unions and strikes.
2. It may just be the usual US middle-class-professional obliviousness to class--the ingrained idea that there is a natural harmony of interests between capital and labor. And here that harmony is apparently expressed through consumerism...in an early mall too, thus we are doubly, maybe even triply, blessed.
3. Another is that nobody wanted to get too controversial with the reporter, certain kinds of historical facts being inherently controversial.
4. Or, most likely, the reporter just selectively picked the happy quotes. Even then it still highlights the weird fugue state middle-class Americans go into when the "C" word comes up.