Appetite for America

by Stephen Fried

  Beard expressed some reservations about this treatment. “I doubt whether there is any medicine which is more indiscriminately used than travel,” he wrote, “especially in the form of a trip to Europe.” And some of his treatment regimens were mutually exclusive. While recommending the “rest cure” for some patients, he railed that too many others wasted their lives resting; what they needed was the “work cure,” or some combination, guided by the gut instinct of physicians. Still, his work offered a compelling scientific case that neurasthenics should flee the country.

  It is unclear if Fred actually met with Dr. Beard or was being treated by a local physician well versed in this cutting-edge, and later largely discredited, literature on American Nervousness. But he obviously decided that the only way to stop his suffering was to leave his family, his business, his friends, and his adopted country to pursue the “rest cure” in England. He was certainly not alone in seeking questionable treatments available only to the railroad rich: Financier Jay Gould had an entourage that included a personal physician, a French chef who could prepare his special dainty diet of “ladyfingers and other featherweight pastry,” and even a “traveling cow” (which rode in the baggage car) because he had been prescribed large quantities of fresh milk. Still, a medical decision this extreme was startling, especially given that the last time Fred had visited England, for several weeks in the summer of 1883, he returned feeling just as sick as when he left.

  But now he would go away for as long as it took to feel better. In the late spring of 1885, he booked passage on the newest Cunard ocean liner, the Etruria, sailing from New York City on the Fourth of July, and arranged to stay in England for at least three months.

  BEFORE FRED LEFT, there was a small party at the house to celebrate his fiftieth birthday. It was a low-key affair. Even Byron Schermerhorn’s poem—he wrote and recited one for every occasion—was sobering, almost fatalistic, ending with the stanza:

  Fred, time’s clock strikes again, Fifty years have been tolled

  The hands travel fast and our bodies grow old

  But our hearts younger grow as our faith we extend

  Toward home and reunion in world without end.

  Fred took the train to New York and found the Etruria docked at Pier 40 in lower Manhattan, where he had arrived in America over thirty years earlier. The Irish-built ship was huge, five hundred feet long, fifty-seven feet across, with two large red smokestacks and three main sails. It held 550 first-class passengers, and another 960 in intermediate and steerage, and was considered the fastest ship on the Atlantic, usually able to make the crossing in just over six days.

  Early on Independence Day 1885, the Etruria pulled away from the pier and moved slowly south past Bedloe’s Island. Fred could see wooden packing crates sitting on its shore, over two hundred of them in various sizes.

  Each crate held a piece of the Statue of Liberty. This cargo had arrived from France two weeks earlier, but couldn’t be opened because there was no place to assemble it. After nearly a decade of delays, the French had finally completed the statue and its unique internal framing, but the Americans responsible for building its pedestal had not yet raised the money for it. Publishing magnate Joseph Pulitzer had recently committed the editorial page of his paper, the World, to guilting Americans into donating the $100,000 ($2.3 million) required. In the meantime, the crates sat on the shore of Bedloe’s Island, an odd vision of packaged liberty.

  It was a lovely day for sailing. The sky was fair, and the morning temperature, which Fred complained had been unseasonably cold, rose into the comfortable mid-seventies as they headed out to sea. Sally had asked Byron Schermerhorn and the children to write letters that Fred could read once he was at sea, hoping to cheer him up.

  When he opened the note from his youngest daughter, Sybil, pressed flowers fluttered into his lap. She couldn’t think of what to say, she explained in her large, looping script, so she enclosed some flowers from a bouquet he had once given her.

  Byron Schermerhorn, never at a loss for words, sent three densely handwritten pages:

  As you read I can see the tear trickle down, salty tears, from the ocean of heart that many have fathomed.

  We shall all be with you for we are:

  Never alone awake or asleep

  For fancied forms around us creep

  While retrospective fingers sweep

  Chords sweet or sad

  Absent loved ones living or dead

  Linked to our souls by memory’s thread

  Keep by our side with noiseless tread

  Companions still

  Evoked the voice, the form, the face

  Imagined near in mental space

  Our arms are outstretched to embrace

  But no—we must wait

  Sail away, and may the water that bears you safely away from us all bring you back well and happy to our hearts.

  With warmest Love

  Captain

  As a postscript, Schermerhorn scribbled, “Don’t hesitate to telegraph for me to come at once to London if you need me.”

  SEVERAL WEEKS AFTER Fred departed, Sally and the children went to visit the new Montezuma. The architects from Chicago had completely redesigned the hotel, moving it a half mile, changing its shape to an L, and giving it a stunning five-story cupola and observatory. Inside, the main lobby had a massive Gothic Revival fireplace, Art Nouveau light fixtures, and gloriously detailed wood paneling on the walls, the vaulted ceiling, and all around the front desk.

  It was the first building in New Mexico with fully electric lighting. And this time, the architects promised, the Montezuma was “absolutely fireproof.”

  The Harvey family stayed in one of the hotel’s majestic three-room suites, and basically had the run of the place. This was in part because, as the Optic noted, “Mrs. Harvey has lots of old friends around the hot springs.” But the truth was, there weren’t many other patrons vying for the staff’s attention.

  A week after his family arrived in Las Vegas, Fred was sitting in a London hotel room when he received a wire from his office in Kansas City with shocking news.

  The Montezuma had burned to the ground. Again.

  The Saturday night fire was apparently triggered by an electrical short in a storage room near the observatory, which sent flames down the elevator shaft and then outward through the ceilings. It burned slowly enough to allow all the guests to be evacuated, and many of the furnishings were saved by moving them out onto the veranda—the roof of which was kept doused with water. But, reportedly, the fire hoses were not long enough to reach the main source of the flames, and it was a total loss.

  Fortunately, Sally and the children escaped unharmed. Sally’s jewelry, initially reported missing, also turned up when, according to the Optic, a young man named Gould “found a handful of diamonds and jewelry belonging to Mrs. Fred Harvey, and returned them to her.” Fred immediately cut short his health retreat and headed home on the Etruria, a voyage that shaved three and a half hours off the world’s record for crossing the Atlantic. The trip from Queenstown to Sandy Hook took only six days, five hours, and thirty-one minutes.

  Upon his arrival in Las Vegas, the Optic reported he had “regained much of his failing health by the rest and recreation abroad.” When he left four days later, headed back east to Kansas City with Ford to catch up on business, the Optic reported he was “very much better and feels youthful again.”

  Unfortunately, these assessments were overly optimistic. While Fred did return to work in the fall, by Christmas he was already planning to go back to England for his health. He sailed in February 1886 and stayed abroad for seven months, keeping in touch by telegram and mail. Dave was left in charge of the company’s unadorned offices in Kansas City Union Station—which now had ten employees—and the growing Fred Harvey eating house chain: twenty locations, each with a manager, a chef, at least a half-dozen Harvey Girls, and ten or more other employees.

  Dave was also left in charge of the unsentimental
education of young Ford Harvey, who was about to turn twenty and was still living at home, though he was spending more time in the Kansas City office. At a muscular five foot ten, he was taller and more broad shouldered than Fred, but Ford was clearly his father’s son, right down to his manner of speech. Although he had never spent a day outside of the United States, the young Harvey spoke with a clipped, slight British accent, pronouncing schedule “shed-ule,” process “proe-cess,” and been “bean.”

  Ford was a quick study, although it was sometimes hard for Dave and the other executives not to treat him like a kid—especially since their boss still did. Fred would even send Ford homework assignments from Europe.

  During his medicinal stay in London, Fred also took the Grand Tour of Europe. After buying some Italian bronzes, paintings, and photographs for the house, he wrote to Sally from the Hotel Belle Due in Munich that he wanted “Ford and the children to study up on” the historical themes of the images. “I would also like them to read up on Rome and Pompeii so that they will understand the photographs when I get home.” Sally was instructed to tell Ford to find a copy of The Last Days of Pompeii, the very popular historical novel by Edward Bulwer-Lytton (whose work is largely forgotten today, except for the aggrieved first line of his novel Paul Clifford, which begins, “It was a dark and stormy night”).

  Ford couldn’t help but roll his eyes. The same father who had made him leave college was now sending him a syllabus.

  His real education, however, was out on the rails. He would accompany Dave, Byron Schermerhorn, or Victor Vizzetti on their inspection trips, and each would try to teach him something different about the eating house business—and the world. Byron would regale him with his philosophical insights about the human condition, Dave would instruct him in matters of money and finance, and Victor was a walking culinary encyclopedia. Each of them also knew how to scare and dare the staff of an eating house—to stand in for Fred Harvey and invoke his wrath, like a mother warning, “Wait until your father comes home.”

  But while Ford was learning how to unnerve eating house employees, he was also learning how to talk to them. Most Fred Harvey employees had once been in the same position as their customers: far from home and yearning for creature comforts, friendly faces, the great big bear hug of America.

  Ford was also absorbing the culture of railroads. He was learning everything from who did what—on the train and in the depot—to why and when an engineer blew his train’s whistle. (A mile or so before any road or path crossed the tracks, there was a sign telling the engineer to sound his whistle as a warning, because by the time he could see something or someone on the tracks, it was impossible to slow down and stop without risking the lives of everyone on the train.) He was also learning how the railroad companies were organized, and where Fred Harvey fit into the Santa Fe system.

  While Dave did a creditable job explaining the train business, Ford did have another mentor: Santa Fe president William Strong, who had become one of the most powerful executives in America. Ford had known Strong since childhood, initially just as his father’s friend but later as someone who could offer advice on the kind of American higher education Fred never had. It was no coincidence that the prep school and college Ford attended in Wisconsin—before Fred summoned him home—were located not far from the Strong family estate, Partridge Farm in Beloit.

  Ford regarded Strong as something of an uncle. So, when all hell broke loose in the railroad business in 1887, he got a chance to watch Uncle Bill duke it out with the biggest names in American business, as well as the president of the United States.

  GROVER CLEVELAND WAS the first Democrat to be elected president since before the Civil War. He had run on a promise to clean up the railroads, which were so unnerved by his election that they panicked. Fearing that the bonanza of government land grants for railroad construction would soon end, the companies submitted absurd numbers of last-minute requests for additional land—and, by doing so, assured that their worst fears were realized.

  Since the beginning of the Civil War, the government had given away almost one-tenth of all the land in the entire continental United States to the railroads to encourage construction and development. Most of these land grants were in the central and western states, where the railroads now controlled over 30 percent of the land. In the weeks before Cleveland took office in 1885, nearly 700,000 additional acres were turned over to railroad companies—even though some of those railroads existed only on paper. Outraged, Cleveland ordered a massive investigation of the land grant system, and the railroads were forced to return about 81 million acres.

  Next, the president began looking into whether the federal government—which was still relatively weak—had the power to regulate the railroad business. He found his answer in a legal dispute over $27 ($637) in train shipping charges that reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 1886 and changed American history. Wabash, St. Louis & Pacific Railroad Company v. Illinois was a case about why a company shipping thirteen tons of corn from Illinois to New York paid $27 less than a company shipping thirteen tons of “oil cake,” a residue used in feed and fertilizer. While conceding that charging different prices for the same weight was unfair, Wabash lawyers challenged the right of the State of Illinois to regulate interstate shipping rates at all. In October 1886, the Supreme Court agreed with them, ruling that states did not have jurisdiction over interstate commerce. The federal government did.

  The Act to Regulate Commerce was quickly pushed through Congress, and when President Cleveland signed it in early 1887, he basically added a fourth branch to the American system of government—the federal regulatory agency. It was a major turning point in the very concept of a truly federal government and a truly United States.

  The law would later lead to an alphabet soup of initialed entities—everything from the Food and Drug Administration to the Office of Homeland Security. But its first practical application was the creation of the Interstate Commerce Commission, which Congress established that year, urging a crackdown on the railroads that began with their pricing.

  Before Wabash, railroad fares looked a lot like airline fares today—they were lowest on routes where there was a lot of competition and, on any given train, besides freight being hauled at different prices, there were passengers who had paid different fares for identical trips. The railroads also had a controversial practice called pooling, which was a form of collusion that kept prices high but stable; the companies agreed to divvy up “pooled” receipts and traffic in areas where their services overlapped, ensuring that competition wouldn’t drive down rates.

  Under the new Interstate Commerce Commission, pooling was declared illegal, as was charging different prices for identical passenger tickets or freight shipments. But without pooling, the railroads immediately went wild trying to undercut one another, and the Santa Fe was no exception. In fact, the one-upmanship became so intense that one Sunday not long after the ICC was created, the fare from Kansas City to Los Angeles actually fell to one dollar ($23.35)—a $26 ticket with a rebate of $25. On that day, it was cheaper to ride across the country than to stop for two Fred Harvey meals along the way.

  In the chaos of this new economics of railroads, William Strong believed that only a few of the strongest would survive. He felt he was left with no choice—his Santa Fe had to get much bigger and more powerful very quickly, or it would be swallowed by Jay Gould and the other big eastern financiers who were still the power players in the industry.

  Strong formulated bold new plans to expand the Santa Fe all the way from Chicago to California—and he summoned Fred Harvey home from Europe. They needed to discuss the future.

  CHAPTER 15

  TRANSCONTINENTAL FRED

  DURING THE PREVIOUS TWO YEARS, FRED HAD BEEN OVERSEAS more than he had been home. He had taken three long trips to England and the Continent, usually returning to Leavenworth in the fall, staying through Christmas and New Year’s, and then sailing back. He occasionally had visitors in England, fr
iends or business associates, but never his wife or family. His role in their lives was reduced to whatever happened during those few months at home. His youngest son, Byron, would always remember going to a parade with his father where they played a game counting white horses (when they reached one hundred, he got a $5 half-eagle gold coin) and the advice Fred wrote to him in an album before leaving the year he was eleven: “My Dear Son Byron, I hope that you will always speak the truth—under no consideration ever tell a lie.”

  Most of the family relationships, however, were carried on by international mail; Fred wrote home often, and was never subtle in his disappointment when he did not receive individual letters from his wife and children. “Well, Ma,” he wrote during one long stay in Europe, “I hope you and the children are well … I have not heard from Minnie, May, Byron or Sybil for some time. Kiss them all for me and tell them to write. Say to them the letters I write you are intended for them as well.”

  Fred was able to spend so much time away because his business was relatively stable. It had not grown any easier to maintain the standard at twenty different eating houses; Harvey Girls were getting married at a dizzying pace; managers and chefs would leave to run their own hotels and restaurants. But the scale of such pressures had grown predictable, as had the strong cash flow and the low overhead.

  But now everything was about to change. The Santa Fe system, which for Fred basically ended in Albuquerque, was going to be extended all the way to California—immediately. Strong had once hoped to build new, wholly owned tracks to the Pacific, but President Cleveland had put an end to the land grants. So the Santa Fe consolidated two railroads it half owned: the Atlantic & Pacific, which ran from the Rio Grande at Albuquerque across northern Arizona to the California border; and the California Southern, which started where the A&P ended in Needles, California, and went all the way to San Bernardino, with connections to Los Angeles and San Diego.