1.7 Dining with “George”
Railroads enabled adventurous women to venture West as Harvey Girls. They also helped mobilize African Americans, many of whom sought to flee the Jim Crow South. Railroads enabled African American men to crisscross the nation and, in so doing, to create powerful networks, forging lives of promise within a violently racist world. Railroads provided many African American men with the income needed to attend college, to open their own restaurants, or to become professional railroad workers earning enough money to rise from working to middle class.
One man revolutionized the comfort of transcontinental travel—George Pullman. The first sleeper car was introduced in the 1830s, but lacking adequate suspension, it shook and battered its occupants. Hardly a luxury experience. It would take until 1864 before Pullman created a comfortable sleeping option, also known as the “palace car.” Larger, heavier, and loaded with more wheels and springs, Pullman’s sleeper car cost five times more to manufacture than a regular car. A consummate businessman, Pullman offered to use a sleeper car to ship President Abraham Lincoln home to Springfield, Illinois, after he was assassinated in 1865. U.S. citizens lined the train tracks to pay their respects, and soon America’s wealthiest men were purchasing their own palace cars.
In 1867 Pullman introduced the first “hotel on wheels,” “The President,” with a kitchen and dining room attached to the sleeper car.s Pullman’s luxury cars were used by such illustrious Americans as J.P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, and President Roosevelt. In order to ensure the best service available for his train cars, Pullman hired newly emancipated African American men to staff them. By the 1920s, over 10,500 African American Pullman porters rode the rails. Pullman hired Southern Black men because many had been trained in service positions and were well versed in service etiquette—namely, how to simultaneously “disappear” while catering to each passenger’s whim and need. Work aboard Pullman dining and sleeper cars required that the server act variously as chambermaid, butler, and waiter for demanding, at times, inebriated passengers.
By 1868, Pullman had designed and built the designated dining car, which revolutionized train travel. Dining cars not only enabled passengers to remain onboard during their entire journey, but they also drew and kept new customers with excellent meals and service. A journalist from London exclaimed that meals eaten aboard Pullman dining cars had the power to banish a trio of ills that plagued the railroad traveler—namely dyspepsia, discontent, and ennui (Porterfield, 1993, p. 45). Staffing needs and luxurious meals kept the expenses high. A steward, four cooks, and six waiters were needed to prepare and serve dinner for 36 people in one seating. The sheer cost of food procurement likewise added to the high cost of running a dining car. In 1890, for example, the Union Pacific served steaks that weighed 2¾-pounds each. The food served aboard dining cars became so luxurious and required so many men to prepare and serve that the cars would always operate at a loss—a fact that eventually led Pullman to hand dining operations over to the railroads.
By the end of the century, dining cars had become an essential luxury, one railroads needed to keep passengers returning. While European-trained chefs created each railroad’s signature menus and dishes, dining car stewards kept careful track of supplies. If an ingredient ran low, the steward wired ahead to have it replenished at the next stop. Eventually, railroads established commissaries, which served as the logistical hub where food, dinnerware, and linens were stocked. Commissaries eased the onboard work of chefs by portioning meats and fish, although all rolls, biscuits, and pies were still baked on board. The Bureau of Railway Economics reported that 50 million meals were served aboard trains in 1924 alone. This included 800 million pounds of beef from 70,000 cattle.
Railroad employees agreed that dining car work was among the most difficult. Stewards were typically European immigrants with extensive experience in restaurant management. To serve as a dining car chef, an individual had to be able to prepare all the dishes offered by the railroad and be skilled enough to do so in a six-by-four-foot space that could easily reach 135 degrees. The chef was typically assisted by three cooks. According to a poll conducted in 1921, over three-quarters of dining car cooks were African Americans. White cooks tended to be hired by Western railroads. Rule manuals were memorized by every worker. The manuals covered everything from how to handle a difficult passenger to food safety regulations. Two complaints against a dining crew member, and he was out of a job.
Because of the demands of dining car service, many men were hired who had experience working in men’s clubs or hotels. In the words of Chef George Fulton of the B & O,
you had to be an acrobat to work in the dining-car kitchen. Your legs would go one way and your stomach the other from the movement of the car, but you had to maintain your concentration. Quite often you’d be working on fifteen to thirty dinner or breakfast orders at one time, and you had to hold onto your wits. (Porterfield, 1993, p. 122)
Dining crew not only needed to be dexterous and nimble, but also needed the stamina to cover shifts that often extended from 6 a.m. to midnight. In 1926, dining crew worked upwards of 340 hours a month, or 85 hours a week. Many subsisted on three hours sleep a night. Given the danger of working with flames and hot liquids aboard a moving train, surprisingly few injuries were recorded, which speaks to the professionalism of dining car crews. One report investigating railroad work hazards concluded that within the dining car, “the chief hazard was the exposure to extreme heat…. as marked as that for furnacemen or mill hands employed in an iron or steel works” (Porterfield, 1993, p. 132).
From 1867 to 1902, Pullman staffed the dining cars, which he leased or sold to the railroads. Before long, however, Pullman realized that the dining cars could never make a profit, so he turned the staffing and operations of the dining car over to the railroads. By the time Pullman ceded operations, however, Pullman cars had become inextricably associated with African American service, and railroads, by and large, continued to hire African Americans. One Harvard scholar defines African American Pullman workers as agents of change who spread ideas throughout the nation, helping create a network that ultimately powered the Civil Rights Movement. Among the many skills honed on the job, African American porters, waiters, and cooks perfected the skills needed to survive, and even succeed, within a white culture that demeaned and, even, reviled their very existence.
African American railroad workers forged networks of communication and conveyed messages of uplift and empowerment. This became especially important after the passage of Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. Prior to its passage, affluent African Americans had traveled to tourist destinations in the Northeast. But as scholar Myra Young Armstead (2005) explains:
Racial proscriptions against blacks were already spiraling after the Supreme Court’s declaration in 1883 of the unconstitutionality of the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which had sought to make hotels and other such facilities accessible to African Americans. After Plessy, these proscriptions proliferated by law and custom all over the country. Black vacationers, regardless of status, increasingly found accommodations at mainstream travel destinations closed to them. (p. 138)
With the closure of public facilities to African Americans and the ongoing violence resulting from the Jim Crow laws proliferating in the South, railroad workers cohered a web of communication throughout the nation that would eventually help empower the passage of the Civil Rights Act, which would grant African Americans the right to enter white-occupied public facilities without threat of violence or arrest.
Railroad workers distributed the Black newspaper The Chicago Defender throughout the South, helping fuel the First Great Migration (1915 to 1940), during which African Americans fled the Jim Crow South. Heeding the call of the Defender and other messengers of racial uplift, 1.5 million African Americans migrated north, where they settled in cities such as Detroit, Chicago, New York, Pittsburgh, and Indianapolis. As Southern African Americans relocated to urban centers throughout the country, they created vibrant communities. Black migrants were largely limited to jobs in factories and in the food industry, so they took service work aboard railroads and in hotels, restaurants, and private homes. As they had in the plantation-era South, many African Americans worked in service to whites. A growing number, however, began feeding and servicing Black communities. Since many migrants hungered for familiar comfort foods, Black entrepreneurs opened public eateries that served down home menus.
As migrants fled to urban neighborhoods, they brought along their vibrant music culture. Soon venues catered to folks who wanted to dine while listening to their favorite blues musicians. Many celebrated figures began their careers traveling the Chitlin’ Circuit—a series of urban venues that welcomed Black musicians and drew enthusiastic crowds from the 1930s through the 1960s. Created in response to Jim Crow segregation and named after the iconic dish chitterlings—boiled and fried pig intestines—the Circuit drew musicians who played throughout the south as well as in the urban north.
Before railcars were requisitioned for military use during World War II, African Americans musicians such as Duke Ellington traveled by private Pullman car to avoid the humiliation and danger of riding in segregated buses and railroad cars. The Jim Crow system varied from state to state, with some requiring separate rail cars for African Americans and others segregating passengers by a partition. To help travelers navigate the system, Reverend R.H. Boyd wrote a guidebook to assist train passengers in 1908. To house the millions of African Americans traveling, whether on musical tours, for railroad work or other business, or to flee the Jim Crow South, large African American hotels began to open in big cities. The Majestic in Cleveland, for example, opened in 1902 to serve African Americans, eventually opening a restaurant, followed by a jazz club. It also housed a barber shop, drug store, tailor, beauty parlor, and laundry, making it a welcoming hub for African Americans. Working on the railroad allowed many workers to afford to stay in hotels such as the Majestic.
By the early 1900s, the Pullman Company was the largest private employer of African Americans, enabling many to rise to the middle classes, fueling the development of Black hotels, restaurants, and resorts. The economic benefits and social connections that African Americans formed while working for the Pullman Company launched many brilliant careers, including that of Malcolm X, and helped educate and empower generations. So, too, working for the Harvey empire enabled 100,000 independent women to exert agency in a way not previously imaginable—to move into the middle class through hard work, determination, and grit. In opening the West and uniting the nation, the railroads created economic freedom and geographic mobility for many working class women and African American men, who eventually became part of the newly expanding middle classes. In so doing, these individuals gained the agency and voice needed to demand the right to vote and the right to sit at the very same tables they served.
