The transition from the Pioneer to the steel sleeping car of today was not accomplished in a single step. A man does not have to be so very old or so very much traveled to recall the day when the Pullman was called a palace ear and did its enterprising best to justify that title. It was almost an apotheosis of architectural bad taste. Disfigured by all manner of moldings, cornices, grilles and dinky plush curtains—head-bumping, dust-catching, useless—it was a decorative orgy, as well as one of the very foundations of the newspaper school of humor.
Suddenly the Pullman Company awoke to the absurdity of it all. More than ten years ago it came to the decision that architecture was all right in its way, but that it was not a fundamental part of car building. It separated the two. It began to throw out the grilles and the other knickknacks, even before it had committed itself definitely to the use of the steel car.
Recently it has done much more. It has banished all but the very simplest of the moldings, and all the hangings save those that are absolutely necessary to the operation of the car. It has studied and it has experimented until it has produced in the sleeping car of to-day what is probably the most efficient railroad vehicle in the world. Our foreign cousins scoff at it and call it immodest; but we may reserve our own opinion as to the relative modesty of some of their institutions.
This, however, is not the story of the Pullman car. It is the story of that ebony autocrat who presides so genially and yet so firmly over it. It is the story of George the porter—the six thousand Georges standing to-night to greet you and the other traveling folk at the doors of the waiting cars. And George is worthy of a passing thought. He was born in the day when the negro servant was the pride of America—when the black man stood at your elbow in the dining rooms of the greatest of our hotels; when a colored butler was the joy of the finest of the homes along Fifth Avenue or round Rittenhouse Square. Transplanted, he quickly became an American institution. And there is many a man who avers that never elsewhere has there been such a servant as a good negro servant.
Fashions change, and in the transplanting of other social ideas the black man has been shoved aside. It is only in the Pullman service that he retains his old-time pride and prestige. That company to-day might almost be fairly called his salvation, despite the vexing questions of the wages and tips of the sleeping-car porters that have recently come to the fore. Yet it is almost equally true that the black man has been the salvation of the sleeping-car service. Experiments have been made in using others. One or two of the Canadian roads, which operate their own sleeping cars, have placed white men as porters; down in the Southwest the inevitable Mexicano has been placed in the familiar blue uniform. None of them has been satisfactory; and, indeed, it is not every negro who is capable of taking charge of a sleeping car.
The Pullman Company passes by the West Indians—the type so familiar to every man who has ridden many times in the elevators of the apartment houses of upper New York. It prefers to recruit its porters from certain of the states of the Old South—Georgia and the Carolinas. It almost limits its choice to certain counties within those states. It shows a decided preference for the sons of its employees; in fact, it might almost be said that to-day there are black boys growing up down there in the cotton country who have come into the world with the hope and expectation of being made Pullman car porters. The company that operates those cars prefers to discriminate—and it does discriminate.
That is its first step toward service—the careful selection of the human factor. The next step lies in the proper training of that factor; and as soon as a young man enters the service of the Pullmans he goes to school—in some one of the large railroad centers that act as hubs for that system. Sometimes the school is held in one of the division offices, but more often it goes forward in the familiar aisle of a sleeping car, sidetracked for the purpose.
Its curriculum is unusual but it is valuable. One moment it considers the best methods to "swat the fly"—to drive him from the vehicle in which he is an unwelcome passenger; the next moment the class is being shown the proper handling of the linen closet, the proper methods of folding and putting away clean linen and blankets, the correct way of stacking in the laundry bags the dirty and discarded bedding. The porter is taught that a sheet once unfolded cannot be used again. Though it may be really spotless, yet technically it is dirty; and it must make a round trip to the laundry before it can reenter the service.
All these things are taught the sophomore porters by a wrinkled veteran of the service; and they are minutely prescribed in the voluminous rule book issued by the Pullman Company, which believes that the first foundation of service is discipline. So the school and the rule book do not hesitate at details. They teach the immature porter not merely the routine of making up and taking down beds, and the proper maintenance of the car, but they go into such finer things as the calling of a passenger, for instance. Noise is tabooed, and so even a soft knocking on the top of the berth is forbidden. The porter must gently shake the curtains or the bedding from without.