More than one hundred American railroads failed in 1893, as did five thousand U.S. banks and ten thousand other companies. Unemployment reached double-digit figures and kept rising. The devastation was evenly distributed between the cities and the countryside.
As Americans wondered why this was happening to their country, a relatively obscure academic paper was published in the Proceedings of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin. Prepared for the World Columbian Exhibition by historian Frederick Jackson Turner, the paper examined the role of the frontier in U.S. history. Turner boldly suggested that frontier spirit—and the drive farther and farther west for free land—was what defined America and Americans. And he dared to wonder aloud what would become of the United States now that there was no more frontier, nowhere else to expand.
It is “to the frontier the American intellect owes its striking characteristics,” wrote Turner:
That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom—these are traits of the frontier … Since the days when the fleet of Columbus sailed into the waters of the New World, America has been another name for opportunity, and the people of the United States have taken their tone from the incessant expansion which has not only been open but has even been forced upon them. He would be a rash prophet who should assert that the expansive character of American life has now entirely ceased … the American energy will continually demand a wider field for its exercise. But never again will such gifts of free land offer themselves … What the Mediterranean Sea was to the Greeks, breaking the bond of custom, offering new experiences, calling out new institutions and activities, that, and more, the ever retreating frontier has been to the United States directly, and to the nations of Europe more remotely. And now, four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.
While the validity of Turner’s “frontier thesis” would be discussed for decades to come, there was no question that the year it was published, at the height of the worst depression in American history, it was a scary prognosis.
MUCH TO FRED, FORD, AND DAVE’S AMAZEMENT, the Panic of 1893, while destroying businesses all over the country, probably saved their company. It was clear before the stock market collapsed and the railroads went bankrupt that the Santa Fe was planning to dump Fred Harvey as its eating house concessionaire when the contract ran out in mid-1894. Fred probably would have retired with his substantial savings, and Ford and Dave would have looked for new jobs. Instead, the Santa Fe’s receivers welcomed Fred back with open arms. They were dealing with engineers, brakemen, conductors, and switchmen who had not been paid in months, so Fred’s arrangement, which didn’t cost the railroad any cash, was the least of their concerns. Instead of firing him, the receivers were thrilled to extend his contract indefinitely—or at least until the reorganization was complete.
Yet business remained challenging. In addition to the financial crisis, 1894 turned out to be a year of freak occurrences. The weather went biblical. The winter storms were among the worst in recorded history. A massive belt of snow and sleet buried so much of the country that there were actually snowball fights on the streets of Tucson, Arizona. Fred lost many head of cattle to the unrelenting cold.
After the freeze came a big spring thaw, heavy rains, and massive flooding, especially near the Rocky Mountains. AT&SF railroadmen working in Pueblo, Colorado, watched in disbelief as the Arkansas River—which flowed past the depot—kept rising and rising until it flooded its banks, carrying in its torrent everything from the carcasses of horses, sheep, cows, and dogs to hundreds of homes torn from their foundations.
And then, just as the western rivers were receding, the workers in George Pullman’s plant went on strike in May 1894. Within weeks, they triggered a monumental national work stoppage—and turned Pullman into the most hated man in working-class America.
Pullman had created a “company town” not far from Chicago where his employees built customized cars for his many American and European railroad clients. But the residents of tiny Pullman, Illinois, were outraged when their wages were cut in response to the depression. Their wildcat strike closed Pullman’s plant, but he refused to negotiate with his workers. Then the new American Railway Union, over 100,000 members strong, held its long-planned first annual convention in Chicago. The union’s president, Eugene V. Debs, convinced his members to call for a boycott of all trains carrying Pullman cars until Pullman himself agreed to negotiate with his employees. Within a week, the front-page headline of the New York Times proclaimed the work stoppage the “Greatest Strike in History.”
While Chicago was the epicenter of the strike, the hardest-hit railroad was the Santa Fe. Union protesters halted trains in every station between Illinois and California. When local law enforcement proved ineffectual, U.S. marshals were sent to ride the trains and protect the depots. On Independence Day 1894, President Cleveland ordered troops into the stations.
Just weeks before, a group of wealthy businessmen from Michigan and California had met at Fred Harvey’s eating house in Williams, Arizona, for a banquet to kick off their hunting and camping trip to the Grand Canyon. They dined on diamondback terrapin soup, frogs’ legs, brook trout, spring chicken cutlets with asparagus, tenderloin of beef, orange fritters à la crème, meringue pies, sabayón custard, and bottle after bottle of champagne and claret.
Now that same Williams depot was a war zone. Strikers had removed some tracks near the station, causing one of the engines to run aground. In nearby Winslow, a company from the army’s Whipple Barracks was camped on the railroad right-of-way near the Harvey House, with sentinels posted all around the depot.
At Las Vegas, New Mexico, a Santa Fe train from San Francisco with 250 passengers on board was taken hostage by union protesters. The travelers weren’t even allowed to cross the picket line surrounding the depot to go into town to buy food. For the first few days, there was enough in the eating house refrigerators for the cooks and Harvey Girls to feed everybody. Then, with no resolution in sight, Dave Benjamin sent a wire from Kansas City telling them to serve just two meals a day. A week passed with the train still captive, so Dave got permission from the Santa Fe to let his chefs rummage through the freight cars trapped at the depot for food. When protesters announced their intention of running the Pullman porters out of town at gunpoint, soldiers helped the train pull out of the Las Vegas station. But when it arrived at Raton, the protesters there held the train for another two days.
There were riots at train depots across the country. American troops were ordered to shoot civilians. In Chicago, seven strikers were killed and dozens more injured while hundreds of train cars were destroyed. Several of the White City buildings from the world’s fair were torched. Eugene Debs and other American Railway Union officials were arrested, charged with ignoring a federal injunction to stop striking, because the work stoppage was interfering with interstate commerce and the delivery of the U.S. mail.
After eleven harrowing days, the Pullman strike finally ended and train travel resumed. The issues raised by the strike, however, did not go away. Outraged by the actions of the government and the railroads, a young lawyer at the Chicago & North Western Railway, Clarence Darrow, quit his job to switch sides and represent Debs and the union. They lost the criminal case, and Debs spent a year in prison, but Darrow also challenged the right of the government to file an injunction and bring in troops to stop the strike—and that case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. In May 1895, the high court ruled against Debs and Darrow again, in a unanimous decision to “ensure the general welfare of the public.”
BY THE SUMMER OF 1895, the economy was starting to show signs of recovery. Fred, now back in England, was feeling well enough to entertain company at his small hotel in the Putney section of London. He even wrote to Ford that he might welcome a visit from “mamma”—his wife, Sally, who had never come to England with him.
Among Fred’s guests that summer at 23 Carlton Road was J. J. Frey, recently hired by the receivers of the Santa Fe to be general manager during the corporate reorganization. He had come all the way from Chicago to discuss a touchy subject. The railroad now wanted Fred to manage the very dining cars they had built to drive him out of business.
Fred entertained the executive lavishly—he is “having a very good time here, certainly he has received a great deal of attention,” he wrote to Ford—and they talked for the better part of two days. Frey found out that no matter how sick he had been, Fred Harvey still knew how to ask for everything. Because it was impossible to break even on dining cars—railroads ran them as loss leaders—he insisted the Santa Fe reimburse him 25¢ ($6.61) for every meal served that cost more than a quarter: prix-fixe meals at that time being 75¢ ($19.84). Fred also claimed, as his lawyers had during the lawsuit, that the addition of dining cars would render some of his eating houses superfluous, impossible to run even at an acceptable loss. So he wanted the railroad to agree, in writing, to make him whole for the value of any depot restaurants or hotels he would have to close.
J. J. Frey left England several days later to tour the Continent for three weeks before heading back to talk to his superiors. If they agreed, it would almost seem as if all the legal battles and heartaches of the past seven years had never happened. Almost.
CHAPTER 18
LET THE BOYS DO IT
IN THE LIFE OF A FAMILY BUSINESS, THERE IS NO PERIOD MORE perilous than when the specter of succession arises—and begins to haunt every major decision, every minor decision, every conversation, and, ultimately, every fleeting glance. That period can last a week, a year, a decade, or sometimes forever. But once it starts, almost anything can happen.
By the mid-1890s, Ford and Dave had to be honest with themselves. They had been acting as “Fred Harvey” almost as long as Fred Harvey himself. In the day-to-day world of the company, Fred Harvey had transcended mere mortality to become a watchful, powerful entity, equally capable of benevolence or vengeance. He had become the corporate father-figurehead, a management tool used to keep employees focused on the high aspirations of the company and the dire consequences of mediocrity. And the more often Fred was away, pulling strings from behind the curtain, the more his mystique grew, not unlike a fictional character soon to be created in Kansas: the Wizard of Oz.
On January 24, 1896, Ford and Judy Harvey had a second child, a son they named Frederick Henry Harvey—“Freddy.” As sixty-year-old Fred Harvey held his namesake in his wiry arms, it was clearer than ever that the time had come to make a decision about succession. Ford was a different kind of executive than his father—less nervously demanding and more quietly commanding, able to motivate calmly with a raised eyebrow and subtle turn of phrase rather than a smashed plate. And he was more than ready to lead. Yet, like so many sons in family businesses, he didn’t know how to broach the subject with his father without seeming disrespectful.
The new president of the Santa Fe, however, knew exactly how to do it.
Edward Payson Ripley prided himself on being blunt. He got away with it because he was extremely bright as well as exceedingly large. At fifty, Ed Ripley was still a towering presence; nobody doubted him when he boasted of having nine Mayflower-era blacksmiths in his family tree. Even his walrussy mustache was formidable. One newspaper described him as “massive of head and features, tall, broad, flat as an athlete at the abdomen; huge of chin, nose, and mouth; gray of eyes and leonine—a man, in short, as one would picture on a tremendous black horse, armor-clad, and carrying a heavy sword.” His only physical weakness was his vision, but he refused to wear spectacles. So his disarming frankness was partly attributable to the fact that he often couldn’t focus on people when speaking to them, and so couldn’t see how they were reacting.
Fred had known Ed Ripley forever. They grew up in the business together—when Fred was general western agent for the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy, Ripley was its passenger and freight agent for the East—and they reconnected when Ripley, then a vice president at the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul, sat on the steering committee for the Chicago world’s fair. It was a pleasant surprise when Ripley was made president of the railroad—renamed the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway after emerging from receivership—as it looked toward its future. Yet, because Ripley understood the Harvey family situation so well, his ascendancy also signaled the moment of truth.
Ripley went discreetly to his board of directors to find out how much leeway he had in determining his old friend’s future. Would they consider letting him fire Fred and buy out his eating house business if Ripley decided it was in the best interests of the railroad? As he pointed out to the board, he didn’t want to lose the Fred Harvey prestige if he could help it, but “we are under no obligation, moral or legal, to continue … as he has gotten rich out of the opportunities he has had.” Ripley believed the railroad could make a handsome profit taking over the eating houses, and even suggested they could probably swipe Ford—whom he considered “an exceedingly capable man”—for a handsome salary.
But, luckily for Fred, the railroad was still reluctant to invest its own cash in the food-service business. The board told Ripley to make a new deal with the legendary restaurateur—although, this time, on terms more advantageous to the railroad. If Fred Harvey wasn’t going to pay any rent, the railroad wanted a share, at least, of his profits.
Fred, ailing again, was already in England when the time came to negotiate, so the talks began without him, with Ford and Dave representing the company. As the deal-making became intense, Fred wrote to Ripley from London, lamenting that while he wished to return and get involved, the matter would have to wait until he felt better.
Ripley, however, wanted to deal with “Fred Harvey,” the innovative American company, not Fred Harvey, the aging international health seeker. So he decided to do Ford—and ultimately Fred as well—a big favor. He took it upon himself to tell the old man it was time to retire.
Ripley initially dictated a rather formal response to Fred’s letter, saying he was sorry to hear of his illness and didn’t feel it was necessary for him to rush home, since “I do not think your interests are at all likely to suffer in the hands of your son.”
When it came time to sign the typewritten letter, however, Ripley decided it needed a more personal touch. Below his signature, he hand-wrote: “FH, Stay til you feel like coming home. You have but one life to live and you have worked hard enough. Let the boys do it now.”
And with that gesture, Ford Harvey was freed to seek his own greatness—which he chose to do, always, in the name of his father.
Over the next six months, Fred gave his son a broad power of attorney, and let him negotiate a new ten-year deal with the Santa Fe Railway to manage all its restaurants, hotels, and dining cars. The timing was perfect, because the U.S. economy was slowly starting to pull out of its rut like a creaky locomotive finally picking up steam.
While haggling with Ripley over the contract, Ford and Dave also made a subtle decision that forever changed the company’s fortunes, and would later be seen as a turning point in the history of American business. They decided to avoid any public acknowledgment of the family succession.
It would have been traditional to mark the milestone by changing the name of the company to Fred Harvey & Son. (Or Fred Harvey & Sons, since Byron, currently studying at Yale, might one day want to join the business.) Instead, they chose to do just the opposite.
The name of the company would remain “Fred Harvey.” Not “Fred Harvey Company” or “Fred Harvey, Inc.” Just “Fred Harvey.” The railroad would continue advertising its “Meals by Fred Harve
y.” At the restaurants and hotels, menus and other printed materials would make a point of noting “Your host is Fred Harvey.”
The decision, while semantically tricky, was unambiguously brilliant. For the rest of Fred Harvey’s life, and for decades afterward, patrons would feel as if they were being taken care of by Fred Harvey himself.
And, in a way, they were.
UNDER THE NEW DEAL with Ripley, Ford became the exclusive concessionaire for all depots and dining cars associated with the Santa Fe. The contract continued to give the company free rent, utilities, and transportation, but Ford now agreed to split his profits with the railroad at the end of each year—after every possible expense had been deducted. As for dining cars, Ford made the same deal his father had with the railroad’s receivers: The Santa Fe agreed to reimburse Fred Harvey twenty-five cents for each meal served.
Ford also convinced Ripley to let him take over all the depot newsstands and gift shops for the Santa Fe. So, overnight, Fred Harvey became the dominant distributor of newspapers and periodicals west of the Mississippi. Ford now controlled newsstands stretching from Chicago to Los Angeles, as well as all the “butchers” who hawked reading material, snacks, and bag lunches to passengers by roaming the aisles or pushing their carts alongside the train to pass their goods up through the open windows. This also made him a major national player in a business near and dear to his father’s heart: cigars.
These new contracts immediately doubled the number of cities with Fred Harvey eating houses—or “Harvey Houses,” as they were coming to be called—since they included all the lines the Santa Fe had partnered with during the years when the railroad and the restaurateur were feuding. The new locations were on the St. Louis & San Francisco railroad, which was nicknamed the Frisco, even though its tracks ran from St. Louis to northern Texas, and the Gulf, Colorado & Santa Fe, which continued down through the Lone Star State to the Gulf of Mexico.
Appetite for America Page 17