The Society for the Prevention of Calling Sleeping Car Porters "George" (SPCSCPG) was founded as a joke by lumber baron George W. Dulany in 1914. Membership was open to all those whose first or last name was George. Its early members included Admiral George Dewey, who served as the group's first president, and writer George Ade. Dulany's secretary filled out and mailed more than 45,000 membership cards to people named "George" throughout the world, before Dulany retired from public life.
At the time, railway sleeping car porters in the United States were commonly referred to by the name "George" regardless of their actual name. The appellation may have stemmed from the name of George Pullman of the Pullman Company, which at one time manufactured and operated a large proportion of all the sleeping cars in North America. Porters were almost exclusively Black, and the practice presumably derived from the old custom of naming slaves after their masters, in this case porters being regarded as servants of George Pullman. [1]
Although founded as a joke, it nevertheless had some effects for all porters. In 1926, the SPCSCPG persuaded the Pullman Company to install small racks in each car, displaying a card with the given name of the porter on duty. Of the 12,000 porters and waiters then working for Pullman, only 362 turned out to be named George. [1]
At its peak, the society claimed to have 31,000 members, including King George V of the United Kingdom, American baseball player George Herman "Babe" Ruth, Georgia Senator Walter F. George and French politician Georges Clemenceau. [2] [3] : 51 [4]
George Mortimer Pullman was an American engineer and industrialist. He designed and manufactured the Pullman sleeping car and founded a company town in Chicago for the workers who manufactured it. This ultimately led to the Pullman Strike due to the high rent prices charged for company housing and low wages paid by the Pullman Company. His Pullman Company also hired black men to staff the Pullman cars, known as Pullman porters, who provided elite service and were compensated only in tips.
The sleeping car or sleeper is a railway passenger car that can accommodate all passengers in beds of one kind or another, for the purpose of sleeping. George Pullman was the American innovator of the sleeper car.
The Pullman Company, founded by George Pullman, was a manufacturer of railroad cars in the mid-to-late 19th century through the first half of the 20th century, during the boom of railroads in the United States. Through rapid late-19th century development of mass production and takeover of rivals, the company developed a virtual monopoly on production and ownership of sleeper cars.
Founded in 1925, The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and Maids, commonly referred to as the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP), was the first labor organization led by African Americans to receive a charter in the American Federation of Labor (AFL). The BSCP gathered a membership of 18,000 passenger railway workers across Canada, Mexico, and the United States.
Pullman porters were men hired to work for the railroads as porters on sleeping cars. Starting shortly after the American Civil War, George Pullman sought out former slaves to work on his sleeper cars. Their job was to carry passengers’ baggage, shine shoes, set up and maintain the sleeping berths, and serve passengers. Pullman porters served American railroads from the late 1860s until the Pullman Company ceased its United States operations on December 31, 1968, though some sleeping-car porters continued working on cars operated by the railroads themselves and, beginning in 1971, Amtrak. The Pullman Company also operated sleeping cars in Mexico from the 1880s until November 13, 1970. The term "porter" has been superseded in modern American usage by "sleeping car attendant", with the former term being considered "somewhat derogatory".
Stanley George Sinclair Grizzle CM, O.Ont was a Canadian citizenship judge, soldier, political candidate and civil rights and labour union activist. He died in November 2016 at the age of 97.
The George Washington was a named passenger train of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway running between Cincinnati, Ohio and Washington, D.C. that operated from 1932, the 200th anniversary of the birth of George Washington, to 1974. A section divided from the main train at Gordonsville, Virginia and operated through Richmond to Phoebus, Virginia. From the west, a section originated in Louisville and joined at Ashland.
A porter is a railway employee. The role of a porter is to assist passengers at railway stations, and to handle the loading, unloading, and distribution of luggage and parcels. In the United States the term was formerly used for employees who attended to passengers aboard sleeping cars, a usage unknown to British or Commonwealth English where such staff are known as attendants or stewards, terms which are also common in translation in non-English speaking European train travel.
A Pain in the Pullman is a 1936 short subject directed by Preston Black starring American slapstick comedy team The Three Stooges. It is the 16th entry in the series released by Columbia Pictures starring the comedians, who released 190 shorts for the studio between 1934 and 1959.
Pullman National Historical Park is a historic district located in Chicago, Illinois, United States, which in the 19th century was the first model, planned industrial community in the United States. The district had its origins in the manufacturing plans and organization of the Pullman Company and became one of the most well-known company towns in the United States, as well as the scene of the violent 1894 Pullman strike. It was built for George Pullman as a place to produce the Pullman railroad-sleeping cars.
A vestibuled train is a passenger train whose cars have enclosed vestibules at their ends, in contrast to the open platforms on early cars. Typically, a vestibule has doorways on either side to allow passenger entry and exit at stations, a door into the body of the car, and, at the car end, a doorway to allow access to the next car through a flexible gangway connection.
A sleeping berth is a bed or sleeping accommodation on vehicles. Space accommodations have contributed to certain common design elements of berths.
Larry Tye is an American non-fiction author and journalist known for his biographies of notable Americans including Edward Bernays (1999) Satchel Paige (2009), Robert F. Kennedy (2016) and Joseph McCarthy (2020).
The Order of Sleeping Car Conductors (OSCC) was a labor union that represented white sleeping car conductors in the United States and Canada between 1918 and 1942, when it merged with the Order of Railway Conductors.
The Sun Lounges were a fleet of three streamlined sleeper-lounge cars built by Pullman-Standard for the Seaboard Air Line Railroad (SAL) in 1956. The cars featured a distinctive glazed roof area meant to capture the ambience of a dome car in a lower profile, as tunnels on the East Coast of the United States prevented the use of dome cars there. The Seaboard employed all three Sun Lounges on its flagship Silver Meteor between New York City and Miami, Florida. The cars later saw service with the Seaboard Coast Line Railroad (SCL) and Amtrak. Two of the three survive in private ownership.
10,000 Black Men Named George is a 2002 Showtime TV movie about A. Philip Randolph and his coworkers Milton Webster and Ashley Totten. The title refers to the custom of the time when Pullman porters, all of whom were black, were addressed as "George"; a sobriquet for George Pullman, who owned the company that built the sleeping cars and the industry.
Milton Price Webster was an American trade unionist, best remembered as the first vice president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and leader of its Chicago division. As the union's lead negotiator, Webster was influential in securing a collective bargaining agreement with the Pullman Company – the first national contract won by any black-led American trade union.
Young’s Book Exchange is known as the first African-American bookstore. It was located at 135 West 135th Street in New York City. It was founded in 1915 by George Young, who was a Pullman porter during the 1900s, and became a bibliophile of African-American literature. His bookstore was known as the "Mecca of Literature" for African-American citizens. This bookstore housed approximately 8,000–10,000 volumes.
The Sleeping Car Porter is a novel by Canadian writer Suzette Mayr, published in August 2022 by Coach House Books. Set in the 1920s, the novel centres on Baxter, a Black Canadian and closeted gay immigrant from the Caribbean who is working as a railway porter to save money to fund his dream of getting educated as a dentist.
The Pullman porter affair was a sex scandal involving the United States Under-Secretary of State Sumner Welles in September 1940. Welles — who was a closeted bisexual — was traveling with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt from Huntsville, Alabama to Washington, D.C., when he solicited sex from two male African-American Pullman porters. The resulting scandal resulted in Welles' resignation from the Department of State.