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on twitter. touringyear, c-span is cities around the country. visit to green bay, wisconsin. you are watching american history tv all weekend on c-span 3. ♪ >> the joke was that with every pullman sleeping car, one of the standard pieces of equipment was the pullman porter. he was the person on the car to serve the passengers. he greeted you when you came on board. he took care of your luggage. the ladies usually would be wearing a hat. he would offer them a hat bag in

the time when that was fashionable. he was your alarm clock. he was the person who made sure you got off at the right station. he was there to serve your every need as a passenger, along your trip. mr. pullman made sure every car did have one. it really became a fixture in american railroading. it was the sign and symbol of consistent pullman service, there in a human being. >> ♪ those pullman porters on parade ♪ >> the civil war ends in our country, and the next five decades see massive railroad expansion. we begin traveling by train. going from big city to big city, usually would end up in a very nice hotel. the trip to that destination was not always the most pleasant experience that a traveler could have. sleeping cars at the time were very rudimentary.

the beds were no more than boards laid across the seats. men would be known to get right into bed with their boots and clothing on. there were spitunes around the car for the man to take care of their tobacco. and george pullman came onto the scene and said, you know what? we are traveling in what should be a nice fashion. we are staying in nice hotels. but the experience on the railroads is horrific. he came up with the idea of perfecting the sleeping car. a lot of folks think george pullman invented the sleeping car. he did not. he turned it into what we remember from the glory days of passenger travel in our country. his first cars were called

palace cars, and they were elaborate. beautiful woodwork. exquisite fabrics. nice, soft couches to sit on during the day. they were converted into great beds in the evening. people loved this idea. you couple that with having a pullman porter to take care of you -- pullman had a winner. he not only built the cars, but lease the operation to the railroads, to provide that service. no matter where you went in the country, if you were traveling by pullman, it was going to be consistent service. it was going to be first-class. it was a sign and distinction of society to be traveling by

pullman. what it said about you as a person was that you were probably at least middle if not upper class. you were somebody who was important in your societal station. you were somebody who aspired to be seen, and to have the better things in life, if you could afford them. the significance of the pullman porters, not only for their service standpoint -- but here is where we start to get into the labor relations aspects, and the race aspects of the pullman porters. at pullman's peak, he had over 12,500 porters. over 90% were african americans. george pullman, crafting the idea of a porter, wanted someone who was used to servitude, could follow rules, and would appear demure to the public. when you think about the later part of the 1860's, where in the united states are you going to find somebody like that? pullman went literally to the south. the south was being

reconstructed. approached freed slaves and said, i have a job for you. come be a pullman porter. you are going to travel the country. you are going to get a uniform which will be a sign of respect in your society. we are going to give you a decent wage. what he did not tell the porters that went along with that was exactly what they were going to be doing, as far as being a pullman porter was concerned. you need to look at the actual job from two perspectives. george pullman wanted to provide consistent service. he wanted everybody's experience on a pullman car to be exactly the same, no matter what railroad you were on, no matter what part of the country you were in, no matter when you were traveling. he used pullman porters as the instrument, along with the cars, to make that happen. from the side of the pullman porters, it was a job, a job better than a lot of other folks in their class or race had.

the idea of having the uniform was a big deal. a man in uniform, at the time, was important. pullman, to provide that consistent service, saddled the porters with a rulebook that had over 200 rules in it. for pullman, the porters were almost like equipment. there were cases where they would work 36, 48 hours at a stretch. a porter working 400 hours a month was not unusual at the start. they had to purchase their own uniforms. one of the services they provided on board was shining shoes. they had to provide their own a shoe shine equipment, based on company specifications. in the pullman rulebook, there was 12 pages just on how to make a bed. then you had the other usual rules about fraternizing with passengers, and how to treat women on the train, even if an advance is made toward you. and then pullman, on top of all

this, had a department within his company that literally -- today, they would call it quality control. then, it was more a group of spies that pullman would plant on the trains, just to see if he could trip up the porters, to make sure they were doing their jobs. there were some times when, at the end of a run, a porter would be called into the superintendent's office am summarily dismissed, just like that. it was a job, and it was rising above where they had been, but the job itself became an incredibly difficult thing, and an incredibly arduous adventure, to get them to earn a living. the treatment of pullman porters on the trains ran the entire length of the spectrum. you had people like john d rockefeller, who would literally disrespect porters to the point that when he got off the train,

instead of politely handing them a tip, he and his wife would begin to walk away down the platform, and rockefeller would flip a dime or a nickel back at the porter. pullman porters disliked athletes. babe ruth, if he had a bad game, guaranteed that he would take some way to wreck his accommodations on the train. of all people, jackie robinson, first african american baseball player in the big leagues, was known that if he had a bad day on the field, he took it out on his pullman accommodations. and the pullman porter was responsible for that. they ended up having to pay for that damage, having to pay for things that were taken off of the train. pullman porters and how they were treated -- a lot of times, in the south, on the plantations, a porter would be referred to by the master's name. the individual porter's name was

not recognized, and the individual slave's name was not recognized. on pullman cars, you would hear pullman porters called george. "hey, george," in reference to george pullman. part of the rules were that the porter could in no way rebuff the passenger. the porter could not correct them, even saying, my name is bob, or sam, or jeff. you had to take it as a porter. this is a time in our country when there is not wide acceptance of the races. there was a lot of racial slurs that were directed at the porters. pullman porters went through training on how to almost ignore that, and roll it off, if you will. the porters began working to form a labor union in 1925. they ultimately ended up with a union labeled "the brotherhood of sleeping car porters." there is a gentleman named

philip randolph, who in today's terms, we would name him an activist, a lobbyist. he was a real leader, an incredible leader for the causes he took up. and he started in new york city, and really looked and said, there is a lot of service people -- elevator operators, folks working on steamships, in hotels. they are here to serve us, yet we are mistreating them. they do have a certain number of rights within the workplace, within the greater society. he began to champion that. in 1925, he did take up the cause of the pullman porters, and it was a struggle, because george pullman had literally a stranglehold on his company, on his city, where the cars were actually built, at all levels. what the porters were looking for was a modicum of respect, a

fair wage, decent treatment in the workplace, decent work hours. it took them 12 years to get the brotherhood of sleeping car porters recognized, and actually have pullman literally be forced to negotiate with the union. once the union is formed, the porters -- you think it is a minor victory, but the little things they were able to do -- in each sleeping car, when they were on duty, the porter was able to place a small card in a holder at one end of the car, saying, the car today is being attended by, and have their actual name. here now, in the first time, the history of this great traveling company, this hotel on wheels, that serves thousands of people

every night -- this person who is so key to the service that everyone has come to know and love can now actually be recognized by name. because of the economic vitality that the pullman porters realized from their work, the next couple of generations after they took advantage of the family wealth, in some cases, accumulated -- we started to see children and grandchildren of porters going to school. some of them went and worked as porters themselves, and did things like worked their way through law school, on their wages from pullman porters. i reference that because we had a supreme court justice, thurgood marshall, who was a pullman porter. that is how he paid for law school and ended up on the bench of the supreme court. not only was it an economic impact that the porters have, but it was also an impact on our society, as far as what the next

generations did, because of that economic largess the earlier generations earned. the brotherhood of sleeping car porters really lasted up until the end of pullman service as we know it, about 1968. that was only a couple years short of the railroads transferring intercity passenger business over to amtrak, that we know today. the union merged into another entity. but by that time, the causes that the porters were working on -- basic labor rights and working conditions -- had really magnified itself into civil rights, the greater civil rights movement. and what you saw coming out of the 1960's really kind of transformed into a lot of the labor union activity at the time. i almost can't imagine, what would it be like to work a

sleeping car, at full capacity, 25, 30 people constantly demanding from you, 24 hours a day, and you have to be on your game every single minute. to have 200-some rules that you know, the moment you step one side of the line or the other, you could lose your job over that. to know that because of the racial situation involved, if a passenger makes a complaint about you, the passenger is probably going to get believed over your side of the story. and yet, to go home after a trip, and realize that you brought home a wage, and you brought home tips, which in some

cases are pretty good, and to be able to hang your uniform, a uniform that a lot of other folks do not have -- to hang that in the closet -- to put yourself in that place is very difficult. yet the porters became, and still are, such an icon in our country, such a symbol of not only rail travel, but human endurance, almost. the brotherhood of sleeping car porters, and what the pullman porters did in organizing, and bolstering the african-american middle class -- it led to a number of things. first, the class became a group within that race that earned a wage, and held position within society that was recognized. it also gave them the economic

power to buy homes, and to save money so they could retire decently, but also they could put their children through college if they wanted to. you see that moving across the generations, because you have the porters that have this first economic impact, and it is magnified in that next generation, and the next generation takes it even further. by the time we get a couple generations down the road, we have a class of people that, because of the work pullman porters have done, are coming out into society and doing some incredible things. ♪ ♪ >> those pullman porters on parade ♪ >> find out where c-span local content videos are going next --

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