Rising from the Rails: Pullman Porters and the Making of the Black Middle Class

ISBN-13: 9780805078503

Media Type: Paperback(First Edition)

Publisher: Holt Henry & Company Inc.

Publication Date: 06-01-2005

Pages: 352

Product Dimensions: 5.50(w) x 8.26(h) x 0.94(d)

LARRY TYE has been an award-winning journalist at The Boston Globe and a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. He now runs a Boston-based training program for medical journalists. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller Satchel, as well as Bobby Kennedy, Superman, The Father of Spin, Home Lands, Rising from the Rails, and co-author, with Kitty Dukakis, of Shock. He lives in Massachusetts.

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RISING FROM THE RAILS

1
Out of Bondage, All Aboard

HE WAS A black man in a white jacket and sable hat. Having stepped out of the cotton fields barely two years before, he now was stepping onto one of the locomotives that had long symbolized freedom to slavehands across America. He lit candles that illuminated the passenger carriage, stoked the pot-bellied Baker Heater, and turned down hinged berths that magically transformed the day coach into an overnight compartment. He was part chambermaid, part valet, shining shoes, nursing hangovers, tempering tempers, and performing other tasks that won tips and made him indispensable to the wealthy white travelers who snapped their fingers in the air when they needed him. It was the only real traveling he would ever do.
That much is known about the first porter to work on George Mortimer Pullman's railroad sleeping cars. What is not known is his name, age, birthplace, date of employment, or just about anything else about him. Historians will say the reason is that a fire in Chicago destroyed the early archives of the Pullman Company. But, curiously, it didn't destroy the names of those first two primitive Pullman cars back in 1859, remodeled day coaches 9 and 19 of the Chicago, Alton & St. Louis Railroad, or the provenance of the first three paying passengers, all from Bloomington, Illinois. Or even the name of the original conductor, Jonathan L. Barnes, who like all conductors was white and whose narrative is preserved in telling detail.
The pioneering porter, in fact, was not expected to have human proportions at all, certainly none worthy of documenting. He was aphantom assistant who did not merit the dignity of a name or identity of any sort. That is precisely why George Pullman hired him. He was an ex-slave who embodied servility more than humanity, an ever-obliging manservant with an ever-present smile who was there when a jacket needed dusting or a child tending or a beverage refreshing. Few inquired where he came from or wanted to hear about his struggle. In his very anonymity lay his value.
And so it was that the polished passengers who rode the plush velvet-appointed night coaches over the first half century of Pullman Palace Car service summoned him with a simple "porter." The less polite hailed him with "boy" or, more often, "George." The latter appellation was born in the practice of slaves being named after slavemasters, in this case porters being seen as servants of George Pullman. It stuck because it was repeated instinctively by successive generations of passengers, especially those below the Mason-Dixon Line, and by caricaturists, comedians, and newspaper columnists. If the more socially conscious among riders perceived the grim irony of the moniker, they did not say so publicly. They certainly did not object. The only ones who protested, at first, were white men named George. They were sufficiently annoyed by the slight, or more probably amused, that they founded the Society for the Prevention of Calling Sleeping Car Porters George, SPCSCPG for short, which eventually claimed thirty-one thousand members, including England's King George V, George Herman "Babe" Ruth, George M. Cohan, and Georges Clemenceau of France.1
Whether George Pullman knew his passengers were calling his porters "George" is unclear. That he would not have cared is certain. It was not that he was mean, or more coldhearted to black employees than to white. He believed he owed workers nothing more than a job, and when business slackened, even that was not ironclad. He hired more Negroes than any businessman in America, giving them a monopoly on the profession of Pullman porter and a chance to enter the cherished middle class. He did it not out of sentimentality, of which he had none, but because it made business sense. They came cheap, and men used to slave labor could becompelled to do whatever work they were asked, for as many hours as told.
There was another reason George hired only Negroes, one that had to do with the social separation he thought was vital for porters to safely interact with white passengers in such close quarters. Women, after all, were disrobing on the other side of a thin curtain. Riders were stumbling into bed drunk, slinking into compartments of someone other than their spouse, tumbling out of upper berths. Such compromised postures called for a porter whom passengers could regard as part of the furnishings rather than a mortal with likes, dislikes, and a memory. It had to be someone they knew they would never encounter outside the closed capsule of the sleeping car, someone who inhabited a different reality. It must be a Negro.
Recruiters started signing them up shortly after George launched his fleet of sleeping cars. The Pullman Company built the sleepers and rented them to the railroads, complete with everything from fine linen and sweet-smelling soap to a service staff whose centerpiece was the porter. George's first choice for that job was Negroes from the old slave states. The blacker the better, passengers told him. If some riders were rude in return, so be it. That was outside his control and concern.
All of which was okay with most porters, at least at the beginning. They were, as George suspected, grateful for a steady salary, for being out of shackles and able to hurtle across the landscape in his luxurious sleeping carriages. They cherished the job and stayed a lifetime, with many passing it down to sons and grandsons. Work on the train was rigid and hierarchical, but they were accustomed to structure. No hierarchy could be more confining or cruel than that of slave and slavemaster. Little by little, however, some porters asked for more. They wanted the human dimension that slavery had taken away and without which they could not feel fully free. They needed a heritage and ancestors worth knowing. If the Pullman Company could not or would not tell them who their patriarch was, that first porter, they would frame their own gilded image.
They called him Daddy Joe. He was a Bunyanesque figure tallenough to pull down upper berths on either side of the aisle at the same time, agile enough to prepare uppers and lowers simultaneously, and so appreciated by riders that his pockets were weighed down with silver and gold. Once, when marauding redskins besieged his Central Pacific train at a water stop, Joe climbed atop the sleeper and spoke to the Indians in their own idiom, charming the chiefs into accepting a pile of Pullman blankets in place of passenger scalps. Another time he convinced passengers panicked by a rising river to stay seated 'til floodwaters subsided. Daddy Joe may or may not have been real, but the way porters told and retold his stories it was clear he reflected their aspirations as well as their need to know whence they came.2

GEORGE PULLMAN KNEW his own roots enough to know they did not matter. Like most true believing entrepreneurs in the making, he saw history as mere curiosity, preordaining nothing. He was determined to become a player in the new financial and political orders, an age defined by the iron horse, shrinking frontiers, and the war brewing between the states. Industry was eclipsing the old land-based economy. Men who grasped those trends, men like George Pullman, were free to shape their future and, when needed, reshape their past. They were self-made.
The third of ten children, George set out in 1859 from the village of Albion in upstate New York to seek his fortune in Chicago, a city, like him, about to bloom. He was nearly twenty-nine, which was old for a pioneer and for a bachelor. Standing just over six feet, he had dusky hair he hoped would stay thick and glossy through regular application of a hair invigorator. His beard then had none of the fullness, or gray, that would become his trademarks, and in the style of the day it did not include a mustache. Just as he was not quite handsome, so his three decades in New York testified more to what he could not do than could. He was less drawn to God than two brothers who became Universalist ministers, less capable a craftsman than his father and other brothers despite having grown upwith a carving knife and wood block by his side. He served long enough as apprentice in his father's cabinetmaking and building-moving businesses to learn both, and know he loved neither. That might explain why, after calling himself a cabinetmaker in the 1850 U.S. Census, in 1855 he told New York census takers that his occupation was "gentleman." Gentleman or not, when his father died two years earlier George, just twenty-two, had taken over as breadwinner for his mother and youngest siblings, a role he dutifully performed for seven years.
It felt liberating leaving Albion, a town of three thousand known for its snap beans and sandstone. He took with him more than he realized. Having experienced the grind of manual labor at his uncle's general store, then the family furniture shop, George decided he preferred the hours afterward when he could scrub clean, then promenade in high top hat and long-tailed coat. He had watched the newly widened Erie Canal fuel commerce in shorefront communities like his, but realized that the more agile railroad was displacing inland waterways as the preferred mode for carrying cargo and people. Most of all, he had learned that while making a sound product was important, even more critical to the riches he sought was a proficiency in peddling that product.
He already had cashed in on that understanding by convincing the owners of Chicago's Matteson House that, though he may have been from upcountry New York, he was the man most qualified to lift their hotel the eight feet needed to install a sewer system. George had learned a novel technique for moving buildings from Lewis Pullman, his father, who nearly twenty years before had patented a device to roll huge edifices away from the banks of the Erie so the canal could be broadened to handle bigger barges. In Chicago's case the commercial district had been built on poorly drained lowlands. The challenge was to elevate downtown buildings above the level of Lake Michigan, letting workers fill in muddy streets and flooded cellars with sand and concrete, then add sewers and lay gas and water pipes.
George and his minions were glad to oblige. They began with the Matteson House, which stood on the priciest section of downtownand was the largest building ever raised in Chicago. Next they lifted an entire block of clothing stores and print shops, banks and bookbinderies. The process was artful: workmen dug underneath the existing foundations to insert timbers and blocks, set in place six thousand jackscrews, then, at the sound of George's whistle, each of six hundred laborers gave their screws a quarter turn. Pilings under the buildings were reinforced daily to fill the widening gap; within five days, thirty-five thousand tons of buildings had been lifted nearly five feet, all without breaking a pane of glass, interrupting a shopper, or tipping a teacup. Chicago, which thirty years earlier had been a stinking swamp of wild onions, was getting the solid foundation a world-class city required. And George was proving to himself and anyone watching that he could bring off what seemed like the most fanciful of public works projects--levitating, then reconstructing, a major slice of downtown Chicago.3
His next fantasy was even more improbable: putting a hotel on wheels.
The notion of a railroad car comfortable enough to let passengers sleep seems unremarkable from today's perspective, but at the time it was revolutionary. The earliest version of what might be called a train hit the tracks in the middle of the sixteenth century, when English mine owners realized that horse-drawn carts could be moved more easily along wooden rails than rutted roads. The first steam locomotive was tested in Britain in 1804. In 1827, a rudimentary railway was opened in America to cart granite the four miles from a quarry in Quincy to the Boston site where workmen were erecting a monument to the Battle of Bunker Hill. It wasn't until 1825--three centuries after British miners set up their pseudorailroad--that the public there began riding trains, and it took six more years to launch the first fully equipped, steam-powered passenger service in America.
The passengers rode, but they seldom rested. "Without a proper place to stow away one's hat, with no convenience even to repose the head or back except to the ordinary height of a chair, with a current of cold air continually streaming in and rendered necessary by the sulphurous heat of the furnace, and with the constant slamming ofthe doors at either end of the car as the conductor goes in or out, or some weary passenger steps onto the platform to have a smoke, the passenger must indeed be dead beat who can sleep or even doze in a railroad car," one rider recalled of a night trip to Wheeling, West Virginia. 4 Another chronicler said the narrow, stiff-backed seats made travel so uncomfortable during the early years of steam that "it is difficult to understand how any passenger could have fallen asleep amid the horrors of the journey. Nevertheless, many travelers--fatalistic, steel-nerved, or exhausted--did indeed succumb to a sort of limp, half-conscious hibernation. Their heads lolled sideways on the wooden benches, their hats fell off, their mouths drooped open, and their eyes closed on the waking nightmare."5
That nightmare included the havoc those first locomotives left in their wake. A British traveler traversing the United States in 1840 kept a journal of his uneasy experience. Feeling a "violent jolt, accompanied by a loud crash" as his train pulled past a crossing, he asked the engineer and conductor what had happened. "'Well, it was in going over a chaise and horse,' replied one of them, very coolly. 'There was no one in the chaise?' asked I, anxiously. 'Oh, yes, there were two ladies.' 'Were they thrown out?' 'I guess they were, and pretty well smashed, too.' 'Good God! And why didn't you stop the train? Can't you send back to know what state they're in?' 'Well, mister, I reckon they're in the State of Delaware; but you'd better jump into the steamer there, or you're likely to lose your passage.'" The man caught his steamer but later read that one lady had been killed, the other badly wounded, the horse "smashed," and the chaise broken to pieces.6
Seeking to soften such bad dreams, or at least let riders sleep through them, officers of Pennsylvania's Cumberland Valley Railroad in 1838 launched regular sleeping car service for the fifty miles between Harrisburg and Chambersburg. Calling those primitive cars sleepers did not make them such. Beds typically consisted of bunks stacked three high, with cast-iron platforms and no sheets. There was no fresh air either, and about as much privacy as in an army barracks. Wooden floors creaked, windows rattled, wood-burningstoves roasted passengers who sat too close and froze those who kept their distance, and tallow candles offered up noxious fumes and little illumination. Any washing had to be done in a narrow basin at one end of the coach. Eating was on the run during station stops. A row of brass spittoons lined the wall with signs imploring, "Gentlemen Are Requested Not to Spit on the Stove," but the floors flowed with saliva and tobacco juice. Innovations over the next twenty years, from swivel couches to cane-bottomed berths, were insufficient to induce grumbling men to shed pants or even muddy boots as they bunked down for the night. Or to entice any but the bravest women to venture in at all. Most who did remained fully clothed, clutching hatpins through the night to repel wayward men.
"We all 'retired' at ten o'clock, with a fair allowance of open windows and virtuous resolutions," Horace Greeley, America's most celebrated journalist, recalled in a memoir of his trip on an Erie Line sleeper in the summer of 1859. "But the rain poured, the night was chill and damp; and soon every orifice for the admission of external air, save the two or three humbug ventilators overhead, was shut, and a mephitic atmosphere produced ... . After gasping a while, like a netted fish on a hot sandbank, I rose to enter my solemn protest against all sleeping-cars not provided with abundant and indefeasible means of ventilation." Not easily deterred, Greeley tried another sleeper two nights later, this one on the Michigan Southern. The air grew "absolutely poisonous" after just twenty minutes, he reported. "The builders of cars have no right to be ignorant of the laws of life with which they tamper; and two or three presentments by Grand Juries of the makers of unventilated cars, especially sleeping-cars, as guilty of manslaughter, would exert a most salutary influence. I commend this public duty to the immediate consideration of jurors and prosecutors."7
Greeley was not the only one horrified by the insufficiency of ventilation, space, or anything else likely to induce sleep on early trains. George Pullman rode often enough in and around New York in the mid-1850s to become conversant in the discomforts. One trip in particular stuck in his mind, and his company's lore. It spannedjust fifty-eight miles, between Buffalo and Westfield, where his mother's family lived, and the train included one of the new sleepers. Pullman paid the extra dollar for a berth, intending merely to examine the accommodations, not test them. What he found when he did were ceilings so low a long-legged man like him had to stoop, ventilation so lacking it was difficult to draw a breath, and bedding so uninviting he felt obliged to keep on his pants and shoes. As for his triple-tiered bunk, he slept not a wink.
While the trip to Westfield might have left fellow passengers cranky and tired, George took it as a challenge, dreaming of a sleeping car where passengers actually could sleep. The fact that others shared that vision, but had not seen it through, he took as his opportunity as he headed to Chicago in the spring of 1859. He already had discussed railroad sleeping cars with his friend and neighbor in Albion, the state senator Benjamin C. Field. Once in Chicago, George found his building-moving business neither reliable enough to ensure his prosperity nor entrepreneurial enough to engage his energies.
Pullman and Field soon convinced the Chicago, Alton & St. Louis Railroad to let them convert two old passenger carriages into sleepers, known simply as Numbers 9 and 19. The cars, which cost two thousand dollars to remake and went into service the night of September 1, 1859, became part of railroad history partly because they were George's first. They also introduced a magnificently clever upper berth whose sleight-of-hand construction allowed it to be closed and lifted to the ceiling during daylight, when it stored the mattress and blanket, then dropped halfway to the floor at night. Heat came from box stoves, light from candles, and small toilet rooms with tin washbasins were situated at either end of the car. There were no sheets to start with. The nightly fare was fifty cents for the upper berth, one dollar for the lower, and passengers had to be instructed to remove their boots and spurs before climbing into bed. One early rider--a lanky lawyer with whiskers from Springfield named Abraham Lincoln--was intrigued by the conveyance and, after quizzing George on its features, curled himself into an upper berth for the night.
George was captivated by the sleeping car business that would define his career and life, and transform the industry, but these crude cars serving frontier settlements represented more a dipping of toes than diving in full body. Sleeping car titans like Theodore T. Woodruff and Webster T. Wagner had tied up the profitable eastern routes, not to mention patents on innovations. George was feeling the burden of supporting his mother back in New York, along with younger sisters and brothers. So he set out again in the summer of 1860, this time to the goldfields of Colorado for about three years. It was long enough to earn a small fortune by supplying miners with provisions, wagons to carry them, and other merchandise. That money, along with new expertise in marketing, let him return to Chicago and resume his passion to revolutionize overnight train travel.
The timing was perfect. With the Civil War entering its decisive stage, the nation was about to be stitched back together. Railroads had proved themselves during battle, moving hundreds of thousands of troops to the front, and work was beginning on a Pacific line that would be the last link in a transcontinental network. The crazy quilt of track widths on different railways was about to be replaced by a standard gauge that would let a car pass continuously from New York to Chicago, and would make trains the only sensible way of traversing the country. Passengers were demanding more comfortable accommodations. And Chicago, America's crossroads city, was the focal point of the ferment, with George having just the right contacts, finances, and know-how to cash in.
The immediate result was the Pioneer, the planet's most celebrated sleeping car. It was George's love child. He set up the workshop where it was built, hired the laborers, purchased the raw materials, and kept a father's prideful watch over the installation of every shag of Brussels carpeting, French plate mirror, ceiling mural, marble washbasin, and carefully encased upper berth. Gone were the flea-ridden, paper-thin cushions of old, replaced by mattresses stuffed with soft animal hair, sheets of silky linen, and enough plush blankets to warm the Pioneer's fifty-two passengers. Heaters were hidden under the floor. Windows in the clerestory roof ensured endless freshair. An engineer warned that his scheme was too ambitious, that "there isn't space to fit your idea." George remained resolute: "Then make space to fit my idea."8 Eking out space and implementing all those ideas cost a whopping $20, 178. 14, four times as much as a conventional sleeper. But the Pioneer was anything but conventional. It was the most opulent overnight train car ever constructed, a palace on wheels. It nullified night and blurred the separation between destinations. It marked a watershed not just in the history of railroading but in the history of travel and, thus, in the history of America.
Or so said George as he recited the tale over the next thirty years. The sleeper that emerged from his Chicago shed in the spring of 1865 was a triumph, but his crescendo of ballyhoo made it difficult to distinguish axiom from embellishment. He originally referred to his creation simply as "Car A," suggesting the modesty of his enterprise and the expectation that he would build fewer cars than there were letters of the alphabet. Its christening as Pioneer came later, when George and others were cementing its image as a trailblazer and building an empire with so many sleepers that it would have taken nearly four hundred alphabets to name them all. It was sumptuous, but so were sleeping cars built back then by Wagner and Woodruff, Eli Wheeler, Edward Collings Knight, and Colonel William D'Alton Mann. George's raised roofs and sixteen-wheel trucks were different only in degree. Ditto for his hinged upper berths, which had been used thirty years earlier in the cars that Richard Imlay designed for the Cumberland Valley Railroad. Even the Pioneer's price tag required an asterisk: it was many times what other first-class sleepers cost, but that was mainly the result of Civil War inflation that had nearly tripled the price of railroad equipment.9
The truth is that George was not the originator of the sleeping car, nor even its most inventive interpreter. What he was was sharper and shrewder than his nearly three dozen rivals, building more sleepers than they did, standardizing them, and striking lucrative deals with rail lines to lease his cars and crews. He bought out competitors who were open to wooing and busted the rest. He knew the public wanted overnight trains that were not just snug but luxurious,and gave them the first topflight dining service on a train, the first Pintsch gaslights from Europe, and the first sleepers to deliver precisely the same fluff of the pillow, fold in linen, and bouquet in wine regardless of which railroad happened to be hauling their Pullman Palace Car. When being first was not possible, George insisted on being best, and he usually was. The rich were used to being pampered, and appreciated a train with the amenities they had at home and on their yachts. The middle class loved feeling rich.
So sure was George that the public would pay for that indulgence that he put it to the test, running his elegant cars with their two-dollar tariff side by side on a Michigan Central line with older, drabber sleepers costing just a dollar and a half. The decision came instantly. "Not only did the patrons of the road utterly refuse to look at the old cars so long as any two-dollar berths were available, but those who were crowded out of the Pullman complained so loudly at being compelled to put up with dollar-and-a-half berths, that within six weeks the cheap cars were taken off altogether," wrote the rail historian Charles Frederick Carter. "Instead of driving traffic away, the more expensive palace cars drew travel from the other roads, so that competing lines were forced to make terms with Pullman."10
George also grasped the importance of the as-yet-unnamed profession of public relations, masterfully wielding its tools of spin and puffery. He escorted visiting kings and dukes on his personal car and added "palace" to his company name, knowing royalty was the vogue in those Victorian days. He unveiled each new feature on his sleepers as a breakthrough, no matter how minor or borrowed. And never did he fret about vainglory, as he showed in 1870 while escorting Mayor Alvah Crocker and assorted nabobs out of Boston on the first chartered transcontinental trip and the first train composed entirely of Pullman cars. The baggage compartment was fitted with a printing press used to publish a dozen editions of a self-congratulatory journal. One issued a prayer for "no delay in placing the elegant and homelike [Pullman] carriages upon the principal routes in the New England States." Then there was this song from George's press agent: "Hurrah for a ride without jostle or jar! Hurrahfor a life on the iron bar! Hurrah for a ride in a Pullman car! Vive la compagnie."11
Whatever the Boston Brahmins thought, stunts like those did impress a Scottish-born immigrant who arrived in America at age thirteen and went to work as a bobbin boy in a Pennsylvania cotton mill. George Pullman "was one of those rare characters who can see the drift of things, and was always to be found, so to speak, swimming in the main current where movement was the fastest," wrote Andrew Carnegie. Carnegie saw in George not just a reflection of himself but of their Gilded Age. It was a time for speculating in stocks and erecting monopolies. Cornelius Vanderbilt, James Jerome Hill, and John Insley Blair were masters of the railroad. Carnegie was the man who mattered in steel. And in that era of the robber baron and Texas-sized tycoon, the only name history would remember when it came to overnight travel was that of the young man from Albion. So enchanted was Carnegie by the palace car prince that he went from being George's arch-competitor to his partner and the Pullman Company's biggest stockholder.12
George's greatest exercise of wile, of reshaping reality in a way that would have wowed the circus mandarin Phineas Taylor Barnum as it did Andrew Carnegie, centered once again on the Pioneer. The story, as Pullman executives told it, was that the acclaimed sleeper had been built a foot wider than any contemporary car and two and a half feet higher, which let it accommodate its hinged upper berth yet meant it could not fit onto railway bridges and under station platforms. Critics dubbed the costly colossus "The folly of the Pike's Peak lunatic," a reference to George's hiatus in Colorado, and the carriage gathered cobwebs in a Chicago storage barn. But George was not worried, so confident was he that the railroads would embrace his novel creation. Luck--along with the Lincolns--proved him right.
His good fortune began shortly after John Wilkes Booth assassinated President Lincoln in April 1865. Organizers of the Lincoln funeral train decided the Pioneer was just the vehicle worthy of bearing the president's body the last leg from Chicago to Springfield,Illinois, where he would be buried. The Chicago, Alton & St. Louis Railroad, anxious to oblige, dispatched an army of workers to widen viaducts and whittle away platforms, completing in two days a project that otherwise might have taken a year. The result: on May 2, 1865, the Pioneer and the rest of the train passed in grand procession to Springfield. The Pioneer's presence in the Lincoln funeral cortege, and the railroad's Herculean efforts to make it possible, generated nationwide publicity for the sleeper and gave a huge psychological boost to George. It also got