by Josh Ozersky
It’s also worth noting that the railroad era he was entering was very nearly at its end. The automobile was still a novelty, something one put on a body-length “duster” and goggles to drive. The first Model T was produced in 1908, and the culture it created would be the one that he tried, over and over again, to exploit from one or another angle. Such tireless, dynamic, amorphous energy wasn’t just a response to the jazz age but the very spirit of it.
One of the oddities but also one of Sanders’ special strengths was that while thriving in the rootless mobility of the age, he was very much a product of rooted, agrarian life. So in 1909 he married one of his first girlfriends, Josephine King, and promptly tied himself to the responsibility of raising a family with her before he had even begun to explore his newfound freedom. This is not a cynical view of his marriage; it was his own view, which was realistic and unsentimental. It seems never to have occurred to him to do otherwise. He met Josephine outside a movie theater, dated her for a few weeks, and decided to marry her. By his account, she turned out to be quiet, moody, and sexually unresponsive. It was a bad marriage all around, and the couple divorced after thirty-nine years.
Josephine bore three children but seems to have been little interested in lovemaking after that—an especially unfortunate circumstance given Sanders’ passionate and hot-blooded nature. He found his pleasures elsewhere, as his second wife’s nephew Don Ledington delicately but succinctly put it: “If [Josephine] wasn’t interested in that part of his life, obviously, he didn’t just forget about that part; he found what he needed to find in other places.”3
The immediate effect of the marriage was to force Sanders to become a provider again. He found a fireman job on the Norfolk and Western shoveling coal into the engine. It was a great job as far as Sanders was concerned, except that it kept him away from his children and his wife, who, for some reason, wasn’t answering his letters. Word got back that she had taken their babies and moved to her parents’ home in Jasper, Alabama. When he got back home, he found not only that she had moved out but that she had given away all the furniture. This was a problem. “That hurt me,” the Colonel remembered later. “I figured she didn’t have any right to take my children and give away my furniture. But I didn’t know anything to do about it.”4 Sanders set upon a plan to kidnap the children and went so far as to clamber about in his in-laws’ bushes before he had a wise change of heart. According to the only account we have of the encounter, the Colonel’s, Josephine agreed to take Sanders back with no more explanation than she gave for leaving him. He fell right back into the family man’s responsibility, a joyless one he would bear for four decades. (If ever his mother’s injunction to be responsible was put to the test, this was surely the time.)
And now Harland Sanders, the future Colonel, first raised his head from the menial jobs that had been his lot since childhood. Sanders got his first whiff of white-collar life when, in the aftermath of a train wreck, he realized that the first lawyer on the scene would be able to sue for damages on behalf of his clients, but only if he could get to the injured parties before they signed their rights away to a railroad claims adjuster for one dollar or more, “depending on how much blood was on them,” as he would later remember. Sanders started working the dazed crowd with power-of-attorney forms using the hard-sell method that would later sway so many potential franchisees. Although the claims adjuster showed up soon afterward, Sanders was able to get enough clients to sign that he made $2,500 out of the accident—a small fortune for him and the first real money he ever made. This was the moment Sanders discovered his ability to shine under the spotlight, though this tendency had gone unnoticed during his days as a railroad drone or remarked upon by either his stoical mother or bride. (His second wife, Claudia, observed that “he was a natural showman. Any time he could get out front, promote something, get all the attention, that was him.”)5
To Sanders’ credit, it was an impulse that preceded even his own self-interest. Despite having only the scantest education, his new hero became Clarence Darrow, and he enrolled in a series of correspondence courses to become a lawyer. In 1915 in Arkansas, where he and his family were then living, pretty much anyone who “read the law” could represent a client in court—at least in the courts of justices of the peace where minor matters were settled—provided he could get a client. Since a half-educated lawyer was better than none at all, there was always a market. In small-town courts, personal connections and charisma went a long way. After the railroad accident claims were settled, there followed a very brief legal career, which might have been longer had not the impulsive Sanders decided, after a few promising months working the bar, to convince the Arkansas state legislature to limit the powers of the justice of the peace.
Even the Colonel, recollecting in tranquility many decades later, said he made a big hit at the hearings, but at a price: “I knocked myself out of a job.” He alienated the very people with whom he was working in his new career. A short time later, he finished this chapter of his work life with an act considered beyond the pale even by the low professional standards of an Arkansas small-town court: he got into a fistfight with his own client while in court and directly in front of the judge. He was arrested and charged on the spot with battery, and not even his hero Darrow could have gotten Sanders out of that one.
That was the end of the Colonel’s legal career, and his fall after that too-brief ascent was a steep one: he was back pounding steel rails as a section hand for the Pennsylvania Railroad at $1.65 a day—a wage he supplemented by unloading coal all night for $6 a shift. This was the reality that undergirded his entire existence, both then and for decades afterward: being an adult with a family to support, working the lowest menial trade. He wanted to be able to approach the higher strata of the society he lived in on equal terms. He understood that in the professional classes you weren’t just selling your labor; you were selling yourself. And he was a natural salesman. He wanted to wear a white shirt himself, a white collar; and, though he never dreamed of it yet, the time would come when he would wear an entire white suit.
Much criticism would come, in mid-century, on this aspect of American business life. C. Wright Mills, in his widely read White Collar, put it in the starkest terms:
In a society of employees dominated by the marketing mentality, it is inevitable that a personality market should arise. For in the great shift from manual skills to the art of “handling,” selling and servicing people, personal or even intimate traits of employees are drawn into the sphere of exchange and become commodities in the labor market.6
That was perfectly fine with Sanders. In fact, it overjoyed him. By the time of his apotheosis as Colonel Sanders he would have utterly completed his transformation from worker to living asset; his white suit would never be seen with a spot of dirt or grease on it. Why would it? It would be his job to represent the chicken, not to actually cook it. He himself, he came to understand, was a commodity, and while his background was dirt poor, he was endowed with a million-dollar personality. He meant to use it to claw his way back into the middle class he had briefly glimpsed as a country lawyer.
He began this quest in earnest in 1921. Having heard that there was a job available as an insurance salesman for Prudential, he went out and bought himself a gray suit and a pair of shiny black shoes and pitched himself with such energy and conviction that the company took a chance on him. He was given the worst territory in Indiana, occupied by the poorest residents and the most deadbeats. A man used to working twenty backbreaking hours a day, he was not at all discouraged and went after commissions “like a possum after persimmons.”7 Through a combination of salesmanship, craft (he would show up at a home and say he was taking a survey, one of the questions of which was, “Do you have life insurance?”), and sheer force of will, the thirty-one-year-old Sanders was able, in a little more than a year, to head up his own district. But just as with his career as a lawyer, his ungovernable truculence got the best of him.
It was exp
lained to him that he would be given his commission only after he turned in his accounts; the accounts, to his mind, were his only means to get paid, and so he refused. He was fired. Even though he desperately wanted to be in the middle class, Sanders had no real idea of how the middle class actually operated. “He wasn’t a very good businessman,” his partner John Y. Brown Jr. would later say. “He just didn’t have the background to understand some parts of the business world.”8 Happily, this was at a time when, if you were turned out of one job, you could go to the next town and get one just like it. The elaborate machinery of the professional world, with its intersecting network of recommendations, credit reports, human resource departments, and all the rest was not yet even a bad dream. Sanders crossed the river into Louisville and got another job, this one with Mutual Benefit Life of New Jersey. He joined the Young Businessman’s Club. He repeated numerous inspirational mottos. He redoubled his efforts to sell insurance as no man had sold insurance before. But it was obvious to him that he was not cut out to be a salary man. No sooner had he settled in Louisville than he decided to start a ferryboat company in order to replace Old Asthma, the ancient ferry by which the Charon of Kentucky took travelers across the river.
The ferryboat, named the Froman M. Coots, was, improbably, a success. Sanders passed it off as a lark in his memoir, saying, “Shucks, I didn’t hang around. . . long enough to participate in the activities of the ferryboat company.”9 He didn’t elaborate. But from this point forward, Harland Sanders was no longer a hardscrabble striver trying to cobble together a living; he was now an established small-town businessman, a Rotarian, a Roaring Twenties booster drumming up investments and welcoming working enterprise.
The Rotary Club, of course, is a service organization founded in 1905 by high-minded businessmen in Chicago and was one of the preeminent fraternal clubs of the twentieth century. Like-minded businessmen gloried in these organizations, which allowed a temporary respite from the tyranny of women, as they sometimes said, in addition to establishing matchless networking and deal-making opportunities. It was a friendless fellow indeed in the 1920s who was not in the Rotarians, Masons, Elks, Moose Lodge, or other such association. During the professionalization of small-town America in that period, these groups had a central importance in bringing together the middle-class consensus represented by President Calvin Coolidge.
The small-business pietism of the Rotarians hit Harland Sanders’ sweet spot; he never saw any conflict between God and Mammon, between doing good and doing well. Like so many other optimistic entrepreneurs in America, he saw getting ahead as doing God’s work, even if, as here, it took the form of a secular sacrament. Sanders was struck by the profundity of the Rotarians’ slogans “He profits most who serves best” and “Service before self” (“That implied real service, don’cha see?”),10 and later he would go on to recommend to everyone the Rotarian commandments known as the Four Way Test: “Is it the truth? Will it be fair to all concerned? Will it build goodwill and better friendships? Will it be beneficial to all concerned?” Sanders claimed for the rest of his life to have taken the Four Way Test seriously as an ultimate predictor of business success, which is a telling point, given that the Four Way Test is so high-minded and obviously misguided. It would be closer to the truth to say that no business transaction of any scale has ever passed even a single one of its absolute conditions. But, of course, it’s the conflation of business and morality that most characterized the booster mentality. Today the 1920s booster is remembered largely from the scurrilous portraits etched in acid by urbane writers like H. L. Mencken, John Dos Passos, and Sinclair Lewis, who delighted in portraying the booster as a boob and a philistine, the very embodiment of stifling conformity.
Boosterism and the fraternal organizations that promoted it might be behind one of the most persistent myths that have survived the Colonel to this day. Starting in the 1970s, it was frequently asserted in private and later via the Internet that Colonel Sanders had been a secret member of the Ku Klux Klan and had willed part of his fortune to the “Invisible Empire.” This urban legend carried so much power that a blaxploitation movie, Darktown Strutters (1975), bought into the myth, featuring as it does a Colonel clone, Commander Cross, who houses a Klan cell in his basement. Sanders’ will is public, and therefore those allegations are easy enough to refute, but as there is no way to prove definitively that he wasn’t in the Klan—the Klan being notably secretive about its membership—a quick look at the sources of this myth might be worthwhile. It should be said here, before going any further, that Harland Sanders seems to have been utterly without racial prejudice of any kind. No one who has spoken to me for this book nor any credible source in any of the primary or secondary literature about him has even hinted at bigotry or animosity on Sanders’ part. Like all southerners of his time, he said “Negro” until informed by some well-meaning person that the term had become offensive. (It did not become so until the mid-1960s; Martin Luther King used it in his “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963.) In fact, the head of public relations for Kentucky Fried Chicken in the early 1970s was a black man named Ray Calander. Having spent a significant amount of time shuttling around with the Colonel during those years, Calander claims to be the one to have told him that he preferred to be called “black.” The Colonel replied, “Well, I wouldn’t call you nice folks black.”11
That said, it does not appear implausible that the Klan, in the form it took in the 1920s—a fraternal organization dedicated to networking and drinking as much as to the eradication of Catholics, Jews, and Negroes—would be an unthinkable fit for a young, ambitious Harland Sanders. Had he joined, it would have been entirely for business purposes; he never displayed any interest in politics at any time in his long life other than making ceremonial appearances at parades and a brief, equally ceremonial stint as “regional director” of the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce in the 1950s. The so-called Second Klan, which reached its peak in the 1920s and claimed five to six million members (with a disproportionate number of the South’s rising young businessmen), was demographically not very different from some of the other Babbittesque fraternal organizations of the time, such as the Rotary Club, Elks, Masons, and so on. The young Sanders, eager to better himself in the world and an inveterate joiner, might have signed on for some short time. If so, he never spoke of it, and there is not the slightest hint of evidence for his having done so. It seems far more likely that as the nation’s most conspicuous elderly white southerner, Harland Sanders was a slate upon which dark suspicions could be written.
A man with a family to support, grappling for a toehold in the middle class and all its totems represented a form of salvation to Harland Sanders. The society into which he was born was one in which the classes were far more amorphous and permeable than they might have been fifty years earlier or fifty years later. Just as the lack of a high school diploma hadn’t stopped him from becoming a lawyer, his brief and piecemeal experience as a twice-fired insurance salesman didn’t prevent Sanders from taking a job as secretary of the Chamber of Commerce of Columbus, Indiana. He stayed on the job for an unrewarding year, finding it impossible to promote business and Rotarian goodwill in a small city dominated by large manufacturing interests. He quit that job, too, and, thinking of the success of his riverboat venture, sank his remaining money into a scheme to manufacture acetylene lamps. He would sell these to farmers to replace the weak, dangerous kerosene lamps then common. Again, this was a project that no businessman in his right mind would ever have conceived, since farmers had no money to begin with. Harland Sanders, of all people, should have known, as the scion of a poor farm family, that farmers of the sort he was looking to sell to in southern Indiana either didn’t have money to spend on trifles or, if they did, would fall behind in payments with almost geological predictability. To make matters worse, at almost the exact time Sanders started the business, Delco introduced a small electric generator that would power lights for farms outside the reach of county power lines. The acetylen
e lamp factory went down in flames, so to speak, and Harland Sanders was, once again, wiped out.