America's Obsessives: The Compulsive Energy That Built a Nation

by Joshua Kendall

  While Heinz ended up losing the benzoate battle, he won the war. By 1911, his company’s share of the ketchup market would top 50 percent, and except for a few brief dips—such as in the 1960s, when Hunt and Del Monte ramped up their advertising campaigns—there it has remained for the last century.

  Heinz’s competitors soon stopped using sodium benzoate, but not before they made a last-ditch effort to out-Heinz Heinz. In the spring of 1909, right after Theodore Roosevelt authorized the use of sodium benzoate, the Curtice Brothers, makers of Blue Label Ketchup, a national brand that had once held 10 percent of the market, placed an ad in the New York Times stating that its product was “Pure and Unadulterated Containing only those ingredients Recognized and Endorsed by the U.S. Government” and that its tomatoes were “fresh from the fields—carefully washed, skins, seeds and cores removed.” It was too little too late. Heinz’s “Seventh Important Idea” was that government regulation would help the food-processing industry grow; and he was not disappointed when the big guys—such as the H. J. Heinz Company—received the bulk of the benefits.

  Purity was not a just concept that Heinz stumbled upon to drive firms like the Curtice Brothers out of the ketchup biz. In an ad placed in the catalog for the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, which talked up a dozen other Heinz varieties, he was already describing his company as a “Celebrated Pure Food Establishment.” Like Steve Jobs, this germaphobe, who on a visit to Algiers lamented that “but one trip thru these dirty narrow Arab quarters will suffice for a lifetime,” also worshipped at the altar of cleanliness.

  This core value ran rampant throughout his North Side plant, which he began constructing in 1890 and which quickly earned the moniker “A clean spot in Pittsburgh.” (This was no mean feat. “There the night is made lurid,” wrote Pittsburgh Dispatch reporter Theodore Dreiser in 1894, “and the very atmosphere of the day darkened by the flames and the smoke.”) For his headquarters, Heinz selected a vitrified brick that could withstand frequent washings; thus he could keep the building spotless inside and out. By 1910, the firm’s fifty-acre campus on the banks of the Allegheny River consisted of seventeen buildings, including a three-story equine palace. Even Heinz’s stables, widely considered the best commercial operation in the country, were kept spick-and-span. A series of machines fed, watered, and brushed the fleet of two hundred black draft horses, which had to be inspected by the founder himself (or Mueller, in his absence). Uniformity in measurement was of paramount importance; the horses, Heinz insisted, all had to be the same size and weight. The entrepreneur, who drew few distinctions between bipeds and quadrupeds—“A young man ought first to be a clean, wholesome animal” was another motto plastered on the office walls—treated his beloved equine charges just like his children; he would both coddle and punish. While his ailing horses could enjoy the benefits of a glass-enclosed Turkish bath, those who kicked were banished to a specially designed “jail.” The stables were just as “perfectly ventilated” as the five-story Administration Building.

  With cleanliness a synonym for his brand, Heinz was eager to show off his supersanitary workplace. In contrast to the benzoate users, who manufactured “the kind of food you would not care to eat if you could see it made,” the H. J. Heinz Company, as its ads insisted, had nothing to hide: “Our doors are always open. The public is free to come and go at all hours.” For decades, “the cleanest, largest and best-equipped Food Product establishment in the world” offered factory tours. The guides who escorted the twenty thousand visitors a year around the “Heinz Pickle Works” followed a prescribed route, using a prepared script. The stellar stables were the first stop. Then came the printing department and box factory, followed by the can factory, where, amid a loud din, workers sterilized and soldered the vessels of various Heinz varieties at breakneck speed. The tour then went from the bright and cheery “Girls’ Dining Room”—60 percent of the workers were female, most of whom were Polish or Italian immigrants between the ages of fifteen and twenty-one—to the Baked Bean Building, where cans were filled at the rate of 150 per minute. And before picking up their going-away present, a Heinz pickle pin, curious onlookers got to inspect the Pickle Bottling Department, where hundreds of “Heinz girls,” decked out in freshly laundered blue uniforms and spotless white hats, labeled and capped the pickle jars.

  While the elegant factory incarnated efficiency, it was not quite the workers’ paradise that the self-absorbed industrialist believed it to be. As with his horses, Heinz gave his “little helpers” a few choice goodies, including free manicures and noontime carriage rides. But in what mattered most, he was stingy. Piecework was common, and the majority of his “girls” made less than $6 a day at a time when $7 a day was the poverty level. “Excellent building construction, thorough cleanliness, dressing rooms, rest rooms, natatoria…Whenever they are at the service of the employees,” wrote sociologist Elizabeth Beardsley Butler about the H. J. Heinz Company in 1909, “we have reason to be glad.… [But] their service is of little effect if it serves merely to obscure facts of low wages.… Pleasant surroundings compensate neither for excessive work, nor a fundamental deficit in the financial basis of self-respect.” (In contrast, as Butler also noted in her landmark study of Pittsburgh’s working women, the men at the Heinz company did “all the responsible work” and received much more generous compensation.) Three decades before Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times dramatized how screwing nuts on an assembly line could lead to nuttiness, numerous “Heinz girls” had already lost their minds by placing countless cans onto labeling machines (six to eight workers were needed to keep the cans humming along in succession) or by sticking slices of pork onto rapidly moving baked beans. “Speed pressure and a low rate of pay,” concluded Butler, “destroy nervous vitality, and keep the standard of life near the margin of degradation.” After just two years, the typical “Heinz girl” was no longer seduced by the free ketchup and relish—the long tables in the “Girls’ Dining Room” were dotted with fresh bottles that had failed inspection because of a loose cap—and had moved on.

  In early 1915, the seventy-year-old Heinz, accompanied by his son Clifford, took the SS Great Northern to San Francisco. En route, they sailed through the recently opened Panama Canal. The City by the Bay was hosting the Panama-Pacific International Exposition—running from February 20 to December 4, this World’s Fair would attract nineteen million visitors—and the semiretired founder was eager to oversee the Heinz exhibit set up by the firm’s expo manager, Mr. Foster.

  Heinz’s youngest child was now a thirty-one-year-old junior member of the company’s board of directors with solid credentials as an equestrian—he had inherited his father’s love of horses—and a playboy. Eight years earlier, Heinz had dashed up to New London, Connecticut, to wrest the recent college graduate away from a nurse with whom he had eloped. (The marriage was soon annulled.) AGED FATHER IS GRIEVED, ran the headline of the New York Times account of Clifford’s escapade. Despite ongoing conflicts—in his diary, Heinz would express regret about the age difference between Clifford and his flings—Heinz showed more restraint with his favorite traveling companion than with other family members. And as father and son settled into their hotel on the fairgrounds, Heinz’s pique toward Clifford’s older brother Howard, then running the company back in Pittsburgh, was mounting, and the man who still held the title of CEO felt he had no choice but to speak his mind.

  It wasn’t anything about the fair that upset the founder; he was proud of the sensational Heinz tower that stood in the central crossway of the elaborate three-hundred-thousand-square-foot Palace of Food Products (originally called the Pure Food Building, it was later dubbed “Palace of the Nibbling Arts,” as visitors got to taste samples as they strolled). The curio collector who headed the Pittsburgh Egyptology Association had designed a pyramid of fifty-seven canned and bottled condiments, which rose up to the heavens. “Need we say,” Frank Morton Todd, the official historian of the fair, would later write of these unique building blocks, “they rep
resent the product of Mr. Heinz of Pittsburgh, Purveyor to his Majesty the American Citizen?” And underneath this Babel-like structure, spectators could view a moving picture of Heinz workers planting tomatoes and bottling ketchup. Of these images that also displayed the latest in both farm and factory machinery, Todd would add, “Cleanliness and wholesomeness were apparent in every stage of that progress.”

  Howard had recently taken over as the head of the company’s board of directors, and Heinz, fearing that he was becoming irrelevant, was suddenly convinced that his successor could do no right. In a six-page screed, written on March 9, 1915, from San Francisco, the founder berated Howard for not doing enough to call attention to “our splendid display” at the fair. “Our opportunity in California,” he stressed, “is now.” While the company had erected a thirty-foot electric sign that flashed “57” across the bay, Heinz demanded an additional $25,000 be spent on print advertising. “If my methods of advertising,” Heinz railed, “have been a failure, the world at large would have made the discovery. I now insist that we act. Other men who have not the means for advertising are advertising their products.… I urged this before I left home but cannot find a single advertisement in the magazines. Are you asleep?”

  With his own skirt-chasing days behind him, the nearly forty-year-old Howard had evolved into a happily married father of two young sons, H. John (known as Jack) and Rust.2 And in contrast to his brothers, the industrious industrialist had developed a knack for micromanaging both the business and his tempestuous father. Since the Great War prevented Howard from shipping Heinz back to Germany for his annual “cure,” he had begun encouraging his father to make more sales trips within the United States (such as the several-month-long sojourn in San Francisco). Howard had also learned how to tune out Heinz’s outbursts, a tactic that further enraged his father. “You will probably feel that I am nervous,” Heinz protested in the middle of his nastygram from California. “No, I am feeling better today. The sun is shining.” Addicted to control, Heinz, like other aging obsessives, was unable to pass the reins to the next generation without making a fuss.

  Heinz concluded his diatribe by accusing Howard of being too domineering with his fellow board members and of spending too much time in his office. “You know you enjoy better health not at the desk,” Heinz advised, “you accomplish more, the results are greater away from the desk, and yet you are determined to stay at the desk.…You are working too hard at the desk.” Unable to appreciate individual differences, Heinz couldn’t understand why everyone did not behave exactly as he did. But in contrast to his father, who was most productive when in motion, the Yale-educated chemist had a deliberative, scientific bent. (Years later, on a visit to the Steel City, Albert Einstein would pronounce Howard Heinz “one of the two most informed and entertaining men” whom he had ever met.) While Howard appreciated the founder’s seat-of-the-pants creativity, the son would implement the father’s “great vision” by more technocratic means. Howard’s investments in chemical testing, for example, would produce one of the first quality-control departments run by an American corporation.

  After Heinz’s death four years later, company officials were surprised at what they found in his big desk, located directly across from Howard’s, on the fourth floor of the Administrative Building. Inside its main drawers were various mementos along with several steel tape measures and some measurements, which no one was able to decipher.

  Part Two

  Secret Sex Maniacs

  Dewey (front row, holding his hat) at the annual American Library Association (ALA) conference in 1899 when he was forty-seven. While Dewey irked traditionalists by supporting female advancement in the library profession, he was not a consistent champion of the feminist cause; in 1906, he was forced to resign from the ALA due to repeated instances of sexual harassment.

  (Photo source: Attendees, including Melvil Dewey (front center, holding hat), American Library Association Twenty-First Annual Conference, Atlanta, Georgia, May 8–13, 1899. Photographed by Moore and Stephenson, Atlanta. Gift of Mrs. William C. Lane, Cambridge, to Harvard College Library, 1931. Portrait Collection, Fine Arts Library, Harvard University.)

  3.

  Information Technology: Melvil Dewey

  The Librarian Who Worshipped Perfect Tens

  I like 10 [hours of sleep a night]. Perhaps because I believe so firmly in decimals, of which I have been a life-long advocate and active missionary. I was born December 10, 1851, the anniversary of the deposit of the prototype meter in the Palace of the Archives in Paris. In 1872 I devised my decimal classification.…I am so loyal to decimals as our great labor saver that I even like to sleep decimally.

  —Melvil Dewey, 1926

  On the morning of Wednesday, January 5, 1887, Columbia College’s new library school was set to open. But the trustees of the college, then an all-male bastion located in midtown Manhattan, wanted to shut it down before its founder, the thirty-five-year-old Melvil Dewey, Columbia’s Librarian-in-Chief for the past four years, ever met the first class. As the handsome six-footer with the jet-black hair and bushy beard later recalled, he was suddenly immersed in “one of the sharpest battles of my life, for what I knew to be right.”

  The previous day, the chairman of Columbia’s committee on buildings, Charles Silliman, had informed Dewey that he would not have access to any classrooms. The reason for the fracas? The entering class of twenty—Dewey’s initial hope for ten, his favorite number, had to be scrapped—included seventeen women, and the trustees, whom Silliman represented, were reluctant to allow any “petticoats” on campus. However, this champion of women’s education wasn’t going to let Silliman or anyone else come between him and his lofty goals. As Dewey later wrote, he considered himself a “Moses” who was about to “lead those particular children to the promised land.”

  Dewey had been consumed by the idea of starting a library school for more than a decade. In an essay, “Apprenticeship of Librarians,” published in 1879 in Library Journal, Dewey lamented, “Physicians, lawyers, preachers, yes even our cooks have special schools for special training.” An admirer of Dewey’s various writings on librarianship as a profession, Columbia’s president, Frederick Augustus Porter Barnard, was firmly on board. “The librarian,” Barnard wrote upon hiring Dewey in 1883, “is ceasing to be a mere jailer of the books, and is becoming an aggressive force in the community.” That same year, in a speech at the annual American Library Association (ALA) conference in Buffalo, Dewey suggested that the school’s curriculum should pivot around cataloging, bibliography, and literary methods, by which he meant classifying, arranging, and indexing. From the get-go, he envisioned training more women than men. “In much of library work,” Dewey noted, “woman’s quick mind and deft fingers do many things with a neatness and dispatch seldom equaled by her brothers.”

  In the spring of 1884, Dewey, with the help of his close friend Barnard, who dropped by his office most afternoons, got Columbia’s trustees to authorize a library school; according to the original plan, the new institution was to be up and running by the fall of 1886. The one catch was that Dewey’s training program had to be “self-sustaining,” meaning that fees would have to cover expenses. After encountering a set of bureaucratic roadblocks, Dewey was forced to postpone its opening until the beginning of 1887.

  But when Dewey publicly announced that he planned to admit women, the trustees started to push back. And as much as Dr. Barnard supported the new library school, he was losing the will to fight. In December 1886, he cautioned Dewey that Silliman’s “new phase of opposition” was likely to spell doom. On January 4, after learning of Silliman’s latest rebuke, the seventy-seven-year-old Columbia president tried to enlist several college officials to help Dewey. But late that afternoon, Barnard gave up, believing that the battle had been lost. Feeling faint, he called for his physician. Dewey, however, then immediately sprang into action. He sent for the janitors, whom he asked to fix up an unused storeroom over the chapel. They quickly sc
raped the walls and patched up the rickety furniture. Dewey also hired a truck to bring some additional chairs from his West Fifty-Sixth Street apartment.

  And so opened more or less on schedule the world’s first library school, Columbia’s School of Library Economy (thus named, Dewey later quipped, because it forced him to get “the most possible out of the appropriations not available”). Proud of his victory over “the enemies of women,” Dewey would always remember January 5, 1887, as the day that he had “kindled a fire whose light will surely be seen down through the generations.”

  That first year, the school’s twenty students, who hailed from all over America—one even came from England—paid $50 each for four months of instruction. With his limited budget, the well-connected Dewey relied heavily on the services of twenty volunteer lecturers from around the country, including Ainsworth Spofford, the Librarian of Congress, who addressed “What to Read and When to Read and How to Read.” Dewey and his assistant librarians at Columbia also taught courses for which they received no additional remuneration. Dewey emphasized technical and practical matters. In a talk entitled “Light, Heat and Ventilation,” he expressed his concern that electric lights might put “freckles” on books. “Pure air” for libraries became a personal crusade. Dewey’s wife, Annie, whom he had married a decade earlier, pitched in by lecturing on indexing. Despite the “super-annuated building” and the often dry subject matter, students listened with “the ferment of enthusiasm.” They essentially lived in the library from early in the morning until its 10 p.m. closing time, when they still could be found combing over their lecture notes. Dewey had succeeded in imparting his missionarylike zeal to a new generation. Library work, he insisted, was not just about “shoveling” dusty books; it was really about giving every American the opportunity to pursue a lifelong education. At the end of the first term, eleven of the twenty students signed up for a second academic year during which they would attend classes for a total of seven months.