Appetite for America

by Stephen Fried

  Minnie’s upbringing made her realize there would be no way for her to have an official role at Fred Harvey. She had grown up listening to Susan B. Anthony—whose namesake niece, “Susie B.,” had attended childhood birthday parties at the Harvey home—and had watched her father build an empire that made it possible for thousands of American women to have good jobs, even careers. But she knew there was a vast difference between hiring Harvey Girls and creating a place in the boardroom for a Harvey Woman.

  Instead, she did what strong, resourceful women had been doing for centuries: She became a power behind the throne. She planted the idea in the head of her husband that living in Missouri wouldn’t be so bad, and she nudged her father and brother to hire him. Eventually, she got her way. The Huckels moved to Kansas City, John went to work running the company’s fledgling newsstand and retail division, and Minnie advised him on dealing with her family, and all their business.

  IN 1898, AMERICA had a little war. It was one of those rare “short, winnable wars” that actually turn out to be both short and winnable—a few hundred Americans were killed, while the enemy lost tens of thousands of men. When the war was over, America was changed forever. Especially Fred Harvey’s America.

  Since the American frontier had now expanded all the way to the Pacific—everything between Canada and Mexico was part of the United States, with only the territories of New Mexico, Arizona, and Oklahoma awaiting statehood—there were many who felt the nation should start looking for a new frontier outside its borders. Cuba, a Spanish colony that was home to many American-owned sugar plantations, was especially tempting, and President McKinley was pressured to help Cuban revolutionaries push the Spaniards out. Most of that pressure came from the press, in particular publishers Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, both of whom were testing how far the media’s muscles could be flexed.

  In late January 1898, the U.S. battleship Maine was sent to Havana harbor. This incensed the Spanish minister to the United States, whose private letter lambasting President McKinley as “weak” and “a low politician” was leaked to the newspapers. When the Maine exploded and sank on the night of February 15, drowning more than 250 crewmen, it set off an explosion of patriotic fervor against the Spanish, who the newspapers claimed were responsible. America was pressured to declare war on Spain and soon established its first base as an imperial power—at Guantánamo Bay.

  The impact of the war on the Santa Fe and Fred Harvey was immediate—suddenly they were transporting and feeding thousands of troops. Then Theodore Roosevelt, the thirty-nine-year-old assistant secretary of the navy, resigned his post to enlist and create a “cowboy cavalry” that would bring the best riflemen and horsemen of the American frontier—cowboys and Indians alike—together to defend the country. Roosevelt’s western pedigree came from the years that he had spent at his ranch in the Badlands of North Dakota. Yet when it came time to recruit for his cavalry, he went right to the heart of Santa Fe country, choosing “dead shots” and “fearless fighters” primarily from New Mexico, Indian Territory, and Texas.

  It was a great news story, which brought attention to the unsung (or at least under-sung) virtues of the Southwest and all the “true Americans” who lived there. And then the story got even better. Roosevelt’s Ivy League polo-playing chums in the East insisted on lending their cultivated athletic and equestrian skills to the effort. Cowboys and preppies would charge side by side, led by swashbuckling Teddy Roosevelt.

  The cavalry sounded like something concocted for the wildly popular Buffalo Bill show, which had been touring the country for fifteen years reenacting cowboy and Indian dramas. Its full name was “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World,” so the newspapers nicknamed the cowboy cavalry “Roosevelt’s Rough Riders.” Americans came to know these men the way they would later know the Apollo astronauts: They were heroes before they even did anything.

  Ironically, the Rough Riders never got to ride in Cuba. The troopships had no room for their horses, so their famous attacks on Las Guásimas and San Juan Hill were actually done on foot. But they did win lopsided victories and suffered several dozen casualties.

  The Spanish-American War lasted less than four months, and when Spain surrendered in early August, the United States had not only “freed” Cuba but had won for itself Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and Guam. America also made a deal to buy the Philippines from Spain for $20 million ($536 million) in a process McKinley called “benevolent assimilation.” All in all, Spain lost over 50,000 men, and America lost only 2,446 soldiers, most of them having died from disease.

  “A splendid little war” is how John Hay, then U.S. ambassador to England, described the conflict; one sailor on the U.S.S. Oregon reportedly saw it more as “a turkey shoot.” Both would agree, however, that it served as an excellent debut for America as a world power.

  Domestically, the war had a very different effect. Besides jump-starting the economy, it further united the United States. The experience of facing a common enemy—even a fairly weak one—was profound. It fostered a patriotism that was genuinely national and felt inextricably linked to and inspired by that “frontier spirit” of the Old West. It was a renewed version of the idealistic spark that historian Frederick Jackson Turner—whose work was still obscure, but was known to Roosevelt—wondered if the country might have lost forever.

  The war also seemed to trigger the first of many cycles of Americans looking within—within the country, within themselves—to recapture that spirit of the frontier, that authentic “real America,” as a way of counterbalancing the forces of modernity and urbanization. This translated into a postwar wave of interest in cowboys, Indians, and the Great Southwest.

  To capitalize on this, the Santa Fe and Fred Harvey jumped at the opportunity to host the signature national event of the new frontiersmen: the Rough Riders’ reunion. In the late winter of 1899, cities all over the country were jockeying for the right to host the reunion. Every state that had a resident Rough Rider wanted the event, and each one was convinced it could lure the key guest: Teddy Roosevelt, who had since been elected governor of New York. Civic leaders in Chicago, Kansas City, Oklahoma City, El Paso, Santa Fe, and Albuquerque were most vocal about getting the reunion, which was expected to draw huge crowds and the entire national press corps. Fund-raising and lobbying were well under way in all these cities when suddenly word spread that the Rough Riders had agreed to hold their reunion in … Las Vegas, New Mexico. And it just so happened that the Santa Fe had recently finished building a new kind of hotel there.

  The Castañeda in Las Vegas was the prototype of the innovative, glamorous trackside resorts that Ed Ripley planned to build—for Fred Harvey to run—all along his new and improved Santa Fe. The hotel was a spectacular U-shaped Mission Revival–style mansion with lush gardens and a main entrance that faced the tracks, not the town, so passengers would feel more welcome, more at home, the moment they got off the train. And Teddy Roosevelt, his Rough Riders, and all the national press would be staying there. In one of the first instances of corporate sponsorship in history, the Santa Fe appears to have made a discreet deal to pay for all transportation and lodging if the event was held in its new signature Fred Harvey hotel.

  That deal was most likely brokered by the railroad’s first vice president, Paul Morton—a Roosevelt family friend from Nebraska whose father, J. Sterling Morton, had been Grover Cleveland’s secretary of agriculture (and invented Arbor Day). Roosevelt, who was already thinking about the presidency, got an all-expenses-paid whistle-stop tour on the Santa Fe, commandeering Morton’s plush private Pullman car—and Morton got a chance to shadow the newly minted American hero.

  As the Rough Riders’ train approached New Mexico, so did a huge thunderstorm, causing local flooding that washed out half a mile of Santa Fe track. But that could be repaired. The bunting catastrophe that befell downtown Las Vegas, however, could not. Every building in the city had been decorated with brightly colored streamers and ribbon
s, all of which were either blown away or soaked until the colors ran, leaving the houses and storefronts dripping red, white, and blue.

  The tempest did not quash the enthusiasm of Las Vegans, however. When Roosevelt arrived at their depot, thousands were there to greet him, and he was “almost lifted bodily from his feet by the press of persons anxious to grasp his hand,” according to the Los Angeles Times. The crowds followed him down the train platform as he and other Rough Riders kept serially saluting all the way along the main courtyard of the Castañeda hotel. There Roosevelt stood on the veranda, along with New Mexico’s governor, Miguel Otero, and an entourage of Rough Riders, until he could salute and shake hands no more and headed into the hotel for some Harvey hospitality.

  The restaurant at the Castañeda featured a large number of native southwestern dishes among the Fred Harvey favorites, including albondigas soup with beef and veal meatballs and enchiladas stuffed with chopped chicken, chilies, and olives, along with comforting classics like Fried Chicken Castañeda with fresh tomato sauce and French peas. For the Rough Riders’ visit, the Harvey Girls wore special outfits. Angelica, the St. Louis firm that was now making all of Fred Harvey’s uniforms, created a western version with long denim cowboy skirts and matching vests.

  The next day there was a huge parade led by Roosevelt on horseback. As it began, he was handed the original regimental flag, which was badly torn and covered with powder burns.

  “Boys, it doesn’t seem much to look at now, does it?” he said, as a tear rolled down his cheek. “But it was worth a good deal to us on San Juan Hill.”

  Roosevelt departed early the next morning in his private railroad car, leaving his compatriots to enjoy a day of bronco busting, horse racing, roping, and games of the new national pastime—baseball. And as many of the Rough Riders were basking in their glory, with no further military plans except to attend future reunions, others talked about reenlisting. They wanted to finish the job they had started.

  THE U.S. PURCHASE of the Philippines had not gone exactly as planned, and the two countries were now at war—America’s first sustained imperialist war outside its own hemisphere. Over forty thousand American troops were already there, with no end in sight.

  Not long after the Rough Riders’ reunion, a small detachment from the U.S. 33rd Voluntary Infantry entered the remote Philippine town of Cabaranan on the island of Pangasinan. In one of the Nepa huts, Lieutenant Hugh Williams was surprised to discover a worn piece of silverware that immediately conjured images of home.

  It was a spoon etched with the name “Fred Harvey.”

  Williams was utterly baffled as to how the spoon had gotten there, since his men were supposedly the first American regiment to set foot in Cabaranan. His best guess was that it had been picked up by one of the many soldiers who rode the Santa Fe to California, where they were shipped off to the Philippines. It had probably been taken from him in Manila by a rebel soldier who then fled to the remote island.

  Williams sent the spoon back to the States. He thought Mr. Fred Harvey might like to have it. When it arrived, Sally Harvey had a leather case made for it, and displayed it in the dining room with the rest of her growing collection of silverware.

  CHAPTER 20

  THE CLUTCHES OF THE GRIM MONSTER

  THE FRONT PAGE OF THE SUNDAY NEW YORK TIMES CARRIED A distressing item, datelined London, on October 15, 1899.

  “FREDERICK HARVEY ILL,” the headline read. “He has just had an operation performed, and it is not certain he will recover.”

  Through more than a decade of illness, nobody had ever been entirely sure what was wrong with Fred Harvey. In 1899, however, he became much sicker, and he finally got a solid differential diagnosis. It came from perhaps the most renowned medical authority in the world—forty-six-year-old Sir Frederick Treves, London’s master surgeon, who was revered in the medical journals for his daring procedures and well-known by the public for his treatment of Joseph Merrick, “the Elephant Man.” While Treves had written about and taught many subjects, his main area of expertise was abdominal surgery. He was best known for his ability to dissect and remove blockages in the digestive tract and for his splendid appendectomies (which were quite surgically advanced, although his theory about letting a patient writhe in acute pain for five days before removing the appendix was later shown to be ridiculous—and often deadly). Given such high demand for his services, Treves had recently resigned his long-standing staff position at the London Hospital and was now taking only wealthy private patients—who paid the outrageous price of 100 pounds ($13,014) to be operated on by the great surgeon.

  Fred came to see Treves at the doctor’s well-known consulting room at 6 Wimpole Street, and was diagnosed with colon cancer. This would be consistent with many years of untreated inflammatory bowel disease—ulcerative colitis, diverticulitis, or Crohn’s disease—any one of which would be a reasonable explanation for some of Fred’s chronic symptoms. (While an armchair diagnosis is unprovable, there is a very strong corroborative Harvey family history of colon cancer and digestive tract disease.) Treves had, in fact, written the textbook on colon cancer and its treatment, which was not wholly different than it is today—exploratory surgery leading to removal of tumors and a resection of the bowel. The difference was in the surgical production values.

  Not only were the cutting and suturing extremely crude, but at that time Treves still thought his friend Dr. Joseph Lister’s theories about maintaining “strict antiseptic precautions” were only for “enthusiasts” and “surgical ritualists” going to “strange and blundering extremes.” He wore no gloves during surgery and chided the surgeon who made an “exquisite ceremonial of washing” and “parad[ing] his cleanliness.” There were no drugs—such as antibiotics—to prevent infection, and Treves didn’t believe in sterile dressings. He liked to dust wounds with iodoform, a crystalline yellow antiseptic powder with a sickly sweet smell, and leave them exposed to the hospital air. “The fact that the iodoform is swarming with micro-organisms may disturb the bacterially-minded surgeon,” he said, “but it disturbs neither the wound nor the patient.”

  Not surprisingly, almost 40 percent of his patients died during colon resection surgery, and of those who lived, more than half were dead within a year. Only one patient had survived three years.

  Ever resilient, Fred managed to survive the surgery—though just barely. Ford had come to England to be at his father’s bedside and did his best to keep the family, and the newspapers, informed of the patient’s condition. Two weeks after the procedure, the Los Angeles Times was reporting that Fred was still critically ill. In fact, some newspapers even reported he had died, prompting the Santa Fe New Mexican to run a corrective headline: “Fred Harvey Not Dead.”

  In letters home, Fred spared no detail of his suffering, describing the great pain in his bowels and the excretion of blood and mucus. He was now tethered permanently to a colostomy bag, and reported it was agony to urinate “even a teaspoonful.” So his new physician, Dr. Harrison—Treves had left for South Africa to treat British soldiers fighting in the Boer War—had him catheterized with a rubber-tipped glass catheter every two hours through the night.

  When his father’s condition finally stabilized, Ford cabled to his younger brother, Byron—who had recently graduated from Yale—to come and relieve him so he could return to Kansas City and attend to business. Byron stayed for several months, but Sally did not come to visit. The correspondence between Fred and Ford suggests that Sally—who had been to the Continent the year before with Sybil and Byron—was herself too ill to travel such a long distance.

  “I think if Mamma could make the voyage—say by Byron running over to New York to meet her there—it would be a good thing for her to do,” Fred wrote. “At the same time, I would not have her come and endanger her health.” Sally suffered from rheumatism and had apparently put on a great deal of weight. Fred had sent her a bicycle, the latest craze on both sides of the Atlantic, in the hope she would exercise. He also
believed that in all their years away from each other, his wife had developed a drinking problem.

  Fred was not sure he would ever be well enough to return to America, which had slipped into the twentieth century in his absence, yet “sometimes I feel hopeful of being able to see my loved ones again,” he wrote to Ford in February 1900. In the meantime, he could hear their voices—and send them his—using the latest technological advance: Edison cylinder recordings. The cylinders, which predated flat discs as a recording medium, were made of tan wax and shaped like oversize toilet-paper rolls, about four inches high and two inches wide. The device used to record and play the cylinders looked like a sewing machine with a trumpet bell attached to it. Fred had one brought to his sickbed, and Ford got one for the family.

  Some of the Harvey family’s Edison cylinders contained mundane conversation, while others captured Fred in his worst moments. “The pain, Mother, the pain,” he was heard moaning on one of them. To make sure nobody recorded over Fred’s messages, Ford marked the boxes “Father’s Voice.”

  In the spring, as the convalescence dragged on, Byron returned home and was replaced by Minnie, who sailed over with her husband. By May, Fred felt strong enough to travel back to America, though as a precaution he hired one of his physicians, a Dr. Montgomery, to return with him and be his full-time caretaker.