When the president arrived at the Grand Canyon Railway the next day, a saddled white stallion awaited him. He charged up the hill through the tall, straight juniper pines, seeing nothing ahead but blue sky until he was almost upon it. When he beheld the Divine Abyss at last, he was, perhaps for the first time in his life, speechless.
“The only word I can use for it,” he said finally, his voice dropping reverently to a whisper, “is awful … awe such as I have never before known. It is beyond comparison. It is beyond description.”
High in the saddle, the president took a rousing twelve-mile ride along the South Rim with his old friend Charles Lummis and a group of local Rough Riders, all of whom had been recruited by the late Bucky O’Neill, an Arizona businessman who had been Roosevelt’s most trusted officer in the Spanish-American War, before being killed by sniper fire. The O’Neills had a cabin on the South Rim, and Roosevelt never forgot how Bucky talked about his beloved Grand Canyon.
After the ride, the president spoke from the balcony of the Bright Angel Hotel, a two-story wooden building that looked like an old farmhouse a tornado had dropped ten feet from the edge of the canyon. Slatted wooden fences had been put up behind the hotel so guests didn’t accidentally step off the back porch and fall to certain death. The audience of over eight hundred people was the largest group ever assembled at the South Rim. There were local politicians and New York newspapermen in suits, miners in dusty work clothes, Indians in full regalia, frontier wives, farmers, lumberjacks, hotel clerks, tourists, campers, and trail guides.
“I have come here to see the Grand Canyon,” Roosevelt began, “a natural wonder which, so far as I know, is absolutely unparalleled in the world. I shall not attempt to describe it because I cannot. But I want to ask you to do one thing in connection with it—in your own interest and in the interest of the country. Keep this great wonder of Nature as it now is!” There was thunderous applause.
“I was delighted,” he continued, “to hear of the wisdom of the Santa Fe railroad people in deciding not to build their hotel on the brink of the canyon.” In fact, Roosevelt, Lummis, and others remained concerned that just the opposite was true, that the railroad still hoped to place its huge Fred Harvey hotel right out over the edge. The canyon was not yet a national park—it had been staked out and claimed by private individuals and companies like any other piece of federal land, and there was no easy way to stop the railroad from building where it wanted. So Roosevelt had to resort to the growing power of his own presence and the presidency:
I hope you will not have a building of any kind—not a summer cottage, a hotel or anything else—mar the wonder of its grandeur, its sublimity, the great loneliness and beauty of the canyon. Leave it as it is. You cannot improve on it, not a bit. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it. What you can do is keep it for your children and your children’s children and for all who come after you, as one of the great sights which every American, if he can travel at all, should see.
And then, what had begun as a warning shot to the Santa Fe and Fred Harvey became one of Roosevelt’s first major environmental addresses:
We have gotten past the stage, my fellow citizens, when we are to be pardoned if we simply treat any part of our country as something to be skinned for two or three years for the use of the present generation. Whether it is the forest, the water, the scenery, whatever it is … make it of benefit not to the speculator who hopes to get profit out of it for two or three years, but handle it so it will be of use to the homemaker, to the man who comes to live here, and his children after him. Preserve them but use them, so they will not be squandered, they will not be wasted, and they will be of benefit to the Arizonans of 1953 as well as the Arizonans of 1903.
The president was supposed to make only brief remarks before accepting a gift from the governor of Arizona and handing out diplomas to the graduating class of Flagstaff High School. But he was caught up in the moment, moved not only by the canyon but by the largest turnout of Indians he had ever seen:
I want to say a word of welcome to the Indians here. In my regiment, I had a good many Indians. They were good enough to fight and to die, and they are good enough to have me treat them exactly as square as any white man.
There are a good many problems in connection with them. You have got to save them from corruption, save them from brutality. And I regret to say that at times we have to save them from the unregulated Eastern philanthropist. Because, in everything, we have to remember that although the worst quality [to have] is hardness of heart, I do not know that it does as much damage as softness of head.
All I ask is a square chance for every man—give him a fair chance. Do not let him wrong anyone, and do not let him be wronged. Help him as far as you can without hurting him in helping him, for the only way to help a man in the end is to help him help himself. Never forget that!
I believe in you. I am glad to see you. I wish you well with all my heart. And I know that your future will justify all the hopes we have.
The cheers went on for so long that the correspondent from the Los Angeles Times wondered if it was possible to have too much applause and adulation.
By late afternoon, the president was back on the train, headed to California, where he would visit Los Angeles and San Francisco for the first time and then conclude his journey with a camping trip in Yosemite with John Muir. But the impact of his thirty-six hours in New Mexico and Arizona was profound. Because of Roosevelt, the two cornerstones of Fred Harvey’s Southwest—the Indian Building in Albuquerque and the Grand Canyon—were suddenly in the consciousness of most Americans.
Before Roosevelt’s speech, people still talked about various “grand canyons” in the West. There was the Grand Canyon of Arizona, which some also called the Grand Canyon of the Colorado. And there was the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, which the Santa Fe’s rival, the Union Pacific, used to market its proximity to that natural wonder.
But after Roosevelt’s visit, America had only one Grand Canyon.
His rim-side statements were immediately tweaked so they would live on—in publicity and history—as the president proclaiming the Grand Canyon “the one great sight that every American should see.” And exactly one month after his visit, northern Arizona’s Coconino Sun reported that the Santa Fe railroad had finally approved the plans for the design and location of its fabulous new hotel. It was still going to be in the pine forest east of the current Bright Angel Hotel, as had always been envisioned. But now it would be “further back from the rim.”
CHAPTER 23
TENTH LEGION
ON A TYPICAL MORNING AT THE FRED HARVEY OFFICES IN KANSAS City, Ford met with his top executives—“the Tenth Legion,” as he jokingly called them, after Caesar’s elite fighting force. Clad in nearly identical gray suits, they sat discussing problems large and small throughout the sprawling Harvey System: anything from the specter of federal regulation of train depots, to the problem of pregnant Harvey Girls, to how it was that tiny toads found their way into all the coffee cups in Guthrie just before a seating—discovered only when scalding beverages were poured on them. Or sometimes the subject was a tiny price change in an indispensable provision—which, multiplied by several million meals a year, meant a considerable amount of money.
“Coffee has riz, two cents higher this morning—how much have we left?” Dave asked, his British accent and word placement still strong, as a rare visitor, a local reporter, listened in.
“Two cents a pound? That’s going to set us back five thousand dollars, just about,” said one of the legionnaires. “We’re using twenty-five thousand pounds a month or more.” Every year, Fred Harvey was now buying and serving some 6,480,000 eggs; 300,000 pounds of butter; 1,000,000 pounds of sugar; 2,000,000 pounds of beef; 600,000 pounds of chicken; 500,000 pounds of ham; 100,000 pounds of bacon; 150,000 pounds of lard; 100,000 pounds of turkey; and 60,000 pounds of duck. It also used seventy-five train-car loads of flour (about 3,000,000 pounds) and eighty-e
ight train-car loads of potatoes (about 2,800,000 pounds). All chased down with over 300,000 pounds of Chase & Sanborn coffee.
Another gentleman strode into the office, holding a package of dinner rolls. It was Victor Vizzetti, the company’s culinary czar. “A fellow sent these from Hutchinson,” he explained. “Says they’re better than ours.”
Ford and Dave stuck out their hands for samples while checking other reports piled in front of them.
“Here’s a letter from a man in Washington who says they serve better olives in a hotel there than we do,” Ford said. “How about it?”
“Look over there on that desk, Mr. Harvey,” Vizzetti shot back. “I wrote immediately to that hotel and procured the brand when I heard about it. It’s exactly the same olive we’ve been serving. I have one man on the West Coast who puts in all his time looking up the best olives and olive oil for us.”
Ford picked up the jar of olives and examined it. “I guess that chap was carried away by the flowers and shaded lights and the music,” he said with a shrug. “He just thought those olives tasted better.” Olives were no small matter at Fred Harvey; Ford had recently sparked a huge controversy by admitting to Pacific Fruit World that he believed Italian olive oil was still better than anything made in California, which was why his chefs used it exclusively.
No matter how large the company got, every day at Fred Harvey headquarters started the same way—with a meeting of Ford’s Tenth Legion. The group included Dave, John Huckel, Victor Vizzetti, Dave’s brother Harry, A. T. Hilyard, the head of procurement, and Frank Clough, the book buyer for the newsstands. All of these men had known Fred Harvey personally, and had been promoted through the ranks by Ford and Dave. All of them understood the company’s obsession with the needs of customers as well as employees, since any personal problem could quickly become a professional one.
And all of them, in the words of the reporter, knew “the multiplication table backward down to the division of a mutton chop. They juggle daily with reports and train routes and figures and maps and crop failures and markets until they can tell you the exact reason why there was a pint of sweet cream left over on a trip through the American Sahara until it soured enough to use for the salad dressing they served that terrible hot day the passengers didn’t seem to care for hot meats.”
Fred Harvey had been gone for three years, and the plan for how the company would run after his death had succeeded brilliantly. By not allowing any estate issues to slow or divert the family business, the Harvey System was riding a wave of renewed American prosperity and the rising fortunes of the Santa Fe Railway. In addition to the depot eating houses and lunchrooms in over sixty cities and towns, Ford and Dave were now running eight large, handsome trackside hotels the Santa Fe had built over the past few years—in Newton and Dodge City, Kansas; La Junta and Trinidad, Colorado; Clovis, Las Vegas, and Albuquerque, New Mexico; and Temple, Texas—and there were plans for many more. They also created large “commissaries” in Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City, and several other cities that did food prep for all the dining cars and tested out recipes and new ingredients.
To fill the seemingly endless needs for fresh ingredients, Ford had established his own dairy farms and poultry facilities at Newton, Temple, and Del Rio, Arizona, which not only produced milk and dressed chicken parts but also made fresh ice cream. These also allowed the company to set new standards for safeguarding the nation’s milk safety, following up on the suggestion of a well-known customer: “Frontier Doctor” Samuel Crumbine, a nationally known public health reformer who lived in Dodge City and had breakfast every day at the new Harvey hotel there, the El Vaquero. One morning, when Dave Benjamin was in the hotel, Crumbine pulled him aside and complained about how dangerous it was that milk was being stored in open jugs and pitchers, inviting bacteria. So Fred Harvey became one of the first companies in the nation to use only smaller milk bottles that could be sealed.
While the restaurants and hotels were his main focus, Ford was also taking care of the expanding Santa Fe dining car business, where he made a major personnel change that also helped solve the problem of where to put his twenty-six-year-old baby brother, Byron—whom he loved dearly, but generally considered to be spoiled and somewhat lazy. He sent Byron, who had been soaking up the culture in the Kansas City office, to Chicago as the family’s representative in the Santa Fe dining car business. The dining car operation was completely separate from the eating houses, and was run very differently. The chefs and supervisors, as well as the servers (who, like the train stewards, were black men—there were no Harvey Girls on wheels), were managed by the Fred Harvey dining car office in Chicago. But they were paid by the railroad. The menus, ingredients, and service were absolutely Fred Harvey quality, but the operation was more of an interactive partnership with the Santa Fe than the eating houses and hotels were. And running the dining car business was more about schmoozing railroad executives and crunching the numbers than the kind of creative, bottom-up management Ford’s people did from Kansas City. Byron, who had excellent people skills but limited executive moxie, was brought in as the “titular head of the dining car operation,” according to one of his grandsons, “but in essence he was ‘minded’ by the senior supervisors who had actually been running that division. They were instructed by Ford to ‘train’ Byron, so he could become more than a figurehead leader.”
“My father didn’t know how to do anything when he went to Chicago,” one of Byron’s sons would later recall. “Some cheese company sent him a Roquefort cheese to try it out. He had somebody open it; he smelled it and told the guy to go out and bury it, it was rotten!”
Besides hospitality, Ford was moving the company more strongly into a new business—publishing. Taking the advice of his brother-in-law John Huckel—who always offered his own opinion as well as Minnie’s—Ford increased the amount of space and attention allotted to books in their newsstand business. This turned the company’s longtime book buyer, Frank Clough, a former Leavenworth neighbor of the Harveys who had started out as an eating house cashier, into something of a phenomenon in the publishing industry. Because of the company’s expanding reach and his own proven instincts, he was now one of the few book buyers in America who could predict, or create, a best-seller.
But there was more to publishing than books. Ford was also investing in the country’s hottest new communications medium: the picture postcard. He teamed with the new American powerhouse in the postcard business, the Detroit Publishing Company, which had cornered the market by securing the U.S. patent on the best new process for colorizing black-and-white photos and then partnering with America’s preeminent outdoor photographer, William Henry Jackson, so they could make all his pictures into color postcards. Then Detroit benefited from a stroke of luck: In 1898 the U.S. government lowered the postage required on a card from two cents to one, and also began loosening restrictions on what could appear on the picture side as well as what could be written on the blank side. A partnership with Ford took Detroit Publishing to the next level. Not only did the Harvey System have a powerful distribution network, but the company owned a huge stockpile of photographs and was constantly taking more—all of which could be made into postcards. The two companies made an exclusive wide-ranging contract in 1904, and pictures of “Fred Harvey Indians,” archaeological wonders, and southwestern life started appearing on postcard racks around the country. The two companies also explored other ways to profitably publish the images, everything from handsome books to sets of highly collectible gold-leaf Fred Harvey “Souvenir Playing Cards of the Great Southwest” with a different tinted photo on the face of each card.
Each time the company expanded, more businessmen around the country came to appreciate what a unique talent Ford was—how creatively he had taken what his father built and molded it into something so much larger and more complex while still maintaining the standard and, if anything, increasing the loyalty of employees and patrons. Yet there was something curious about the way Ford still
refused to put his name on anything, and labored to maintain the illusion that his father was still alive. Every menu, every piece of promotional material, still ended with “Your host is Fred Harvey.”
One Kansas City society columnist suggested Ford was “peculiarly lacking in personal ambition … Even his identity is obscure to the general public.” But actually, he was every bit as ambitious as his father, which made his willingness to remain behind the curtain, and lead by powerful presence, that much more intriguing.
A handful of eastern entrepreneurs had seen Ford’s vast operation and were trying to copy aspects of it. William and Samuel Childs had returned from a train trip west and started a small chain of “dairy lunch” cafeterias in their hometown of New York City. Two Philadelphia luncheonette owners, Joseph Horn and Frank Hardart, had taken the self-serve idea one step further and opened the first American coin-operated automat. At Horn & Hardarts, individual servings of cold foods were displayed behind rows of small chrome-plated doors, each with its own coin slot that only accepted nickels; hot foods were served at steam tables, except for wondrous hot chocolate, which flowed from a chrome-plated spout after your nickels dropped clink into the slot.
The cafeterias and automats represented the first steps toward a new kind of fast-food eating—prompted, in part, by the rising price of oysters from the polluted, overharvested waters around New York, which had finally eroded the mollusk’s status as a staple for quick, easy meals. But the food at these new cafeterias and automats was generally much simpler than Fred Harvey’s, and there was, by definition, no service. The Harvey System was the nation’s gold standard for fine, fast, dependable, comforting food in cities large and small.
Appetite for America Page 23