Ripley and his fellow railroad executives considered the Hepburn Act a disaster, an artificial and unhealthy drag on the industry through which America’s economic lifeblood coursed. As the elder statesman of the American railroad business, he was outspoken about his belief that by keeping passenger and freight rates unnaturally low, the ICC would prevent the railroads from making enough money to maintain and improve train service.
The railroads “are being gradually strangled,” Ripley wrote to the editor of the Kansas City Star, “and before long the people will realize that [they are] practically extinct—then they will be sorry, too late—and there will be nothing left but to take the roads over and run them under a Government Bureau, with what results can easily be guessed when we observe how Government transacts business.”
As the deadline approached for Ford and Ripley to decide whether to make a new deal, they got yet another sign that business as they had known it might be over. One of the most important cities for the Santa Fe and Fred Harvey, and for the American economy, was nearly destroyed. On April 18, 1906, San Francisco—then the nation’s ninth-largest city behind New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Boston, Baltimore, Cleveland, and Buffalo—was hit by an earthquake registering 7.9 on the Richter scale.
Dave Benjamin was in San Francisco at the time, inspecting the Fred Harvey operation at the Ferry Building on the Embarcadero, so he was able to help direct the company’s response to the worst natural disaster in the nation’s history. He was awakened in his hotel room before daylight when the first tremor hit, and he was over at the Ferry Building—where the observation tower was left lurching to one side, its clock frozen at 5:15—assessing the damage by the time the aftershock occurred at 8:14 a.m., demolishing many of the structures already compromised.
Hundreds died instantly and thousands more over the next few days as fires raged and troops tried in vain to keep order. Droves of people huddled at the Ferry Building begging for food and shelter. The Harvey employees there did what they could to feed them with whatever was on hand, and the Santa Fe ran barge after barge of disaster victims across the bay to safety in Oakland. The U.S.S. Chicago was summoned via wireless telegraph—the first time the new technology was used in a major emergency—and helped to evacuate over twenty thousand people. The Ferry Building remained untouched by flames until the third day, when the winds picked up and the fire approached. The city’s entire firefighting force was rushed there: It was arguably the most important structure still standing in San Francisco. After hours spent battling back the flames, officials finally declared the building safe.
“This is about the only time in this fire when the puny forces of man have been able to save anything,” one Washington Post correspondent commented. “We have been the sport of the gods.”
ONLY WEEKS AFTER the earthquake, in the summer of 1906, Ford finally decided that he would go ahead and renew his relationship with the railroad—tying his fortunes to Ripley’s, and the Santa Fe’s, for another ten years. He wanted to see just how far this quirky empire that he and Dave had built on the foundation of his father’s standards could go.
Ford negotiated and signed a new ten-year contract for the eating houses, the hotels, the dining cars, and the retail business at newsstands and curio shops. And he made a separate ten-year deal for the Grand Canyon operation—which looked as though it might be a success after all.
Before the new Santa Fe contracts were executed, Ford and Dave put the finishing touches on the process of restructuring the company, incorporating it in the state of New Jersey under the name Fred Harvey. They also created another, smaller corporation, “Harvey Hotel & Restaurant Company” in Kansas City to handle extracurricular businesses like the restaurants in St. Louis Union Station and Chicago’s Dearborn Station.
Ford made himself president of both corporations. And he stopped asking himself if he should do something else professionally for the rest of his life.
This did not prevent him, however, from having a little personal midlife crisis. Several family members would later recall they heard he had a girlfriend. “He was a handsome devil,” his grandnephew recalls, “and Minnie told me many women were crazy about him. I suspect that he could have had liaisons with high society friends and maybe even a love of long standing who was married.”
Ford’s marriage had turned out to be completely the opposite of his father’s. He left town only for business while Judy traveled extensively, usually with the children: She took them all over Europe, often for long stretches. During one of their extended trips—when Ford was a “bachelor” for several months—handwritten notes marked “Personal” began arriving at his office, some by mail, others dropped off.
Ford had always received a lot of personal mail, because in his job he had to keep a lot of secrets. He was privy to a great deal of confidential business information about the railroads, the hospitality industry, and the civic affairs of Kansas City. It was impossible to run hotels catering to an affluent and celebrated clientele if you weren’t able to keep their private needs private.
Still, starting in 1907, he received an awful lot of “personal” notes from a Mrs. John G. Camp of 17 Phelps Street in Kansas City, thanking him for all kinds of extravagant gifts—flowers, wines, gourmet foodstuffs, and other kindnesses. And when these personal notes were discovered, only very recently, by family members, they were found in an old black metal strongbox of Ford’s—along with letters from his wife during the same time period.
It is unlikely Ford was having an affair with Mrs. Camp, a widow who was old enough to be his mother (and, in fact, signed her notes “Mother”). But he did seem to have an unusually close attachment to her, and sent her an awful lot of gifts—which were also enjoyed by her daughter, Rebecca, who was his contemporary. Rebecca Camp was the second wife of meatpacking heir Charles Armour, Ford’s longtime social colleague in Kansas City; the couple had no children, and Rebecca’s mother lived with them. It is curious that all these letters, written by Mrs. Camp on Rebecca Armour’s stationery, were sent to Ford personally at the office and not to him and his wife at home—especially since the Armours knew the Harveys well.
The letters from Mrs. Camp began arriving not long before Judy Harvey took an extended trip to Europe, meeting up with Kitty, who spent much of 1907 studying in Italy. Over the next few years, the Camp letters would provide an interesting counterpoint to the ones Judy sent: the long, detailed missives that always began “My Darling” and were signed “Goodnight my precious love, your Jude” or “I want you so—your own devoted, Jude.”
Judy wrote to Ford from the Waldorf-Astoria on the morning of their anniversary as she was about to leave the country: “I will be thinking of you darling as you read this and longing oh so ardently to be back in your dear arms again. God keep you safe.” Several days later another note arrived—this one from Mrs. Camp.
THE FIRST YEAR of Ford’s new contract turned out to be hugely challenging financially for the country. The stock market crashed twice in 1907, first in March and again in October. The second, more severe crash was triggered by a failed attempt by the founder of the United Copper Company to manipulate the market on his own stock, which took down with it the massive Knickerbocker Trust in New York. This instigated a run on the nation’s banks—which at that time relied only on their own reserves. Many of them simply ran out of money.
To save the U.S. economy, Roosevelt was forced, ironically, to seek help from J. P. Morgan and the very captains of industry whose trusts he had been busting for the past few years. There was money in the federal treasury to rescue the failing banks, but no easy way to get the currency to them. Morgan, who was about to leave town on vacation, set up a command post in the library of his home and, along with other top financiers, basically invented a way to help banks cooperate so those with too much cash could help those with too little (laying the groundwork for what would later become the Federal Reserve system). Within three weeks, the crisis had been averted, Morgan l
eft on his vacation, and the government went back to trust-busting.
Although the Panic of 1907 hurt the financial institutions of the East, Fred Harvey actually had its best year ever, with profits of over $243,000 ($5.7 million). But just after the banner year ended, Ford was faced with disaster. Early in the morning on Monday, January 13, 1908, an electrical fire started in the Kansas City Union Depot annex building, where the Fred Harvey offices had been located for over twenty years, growing from one tiny room with a desk for Dave to a large suite. The annex also housed the post office, all the major express-package companies, the Pullman company, and the Railway Association YMCA. That morning, they all went up in flames. By the time Ford and Dave got there, firemen had already given up on trying to save their annex building, and were instead trying to keep the fire from consuming the entire Union Depot complex.
The depot annex was a total loss. Thirty-five sacks of registered mail and thousands of packages were incinerated, and there was nothing left of the Fred Harvey corporate offices. Ford estimated the company’s loss at more than $50,000 ($1.2 million), although much of what burned was irreplaceable.
Although the fire was devastating, it was the kind of event for which anyone associated with the railroad business—especially in the West—always had to be prepared. In the world of the Santa Fe, flames were an all too frequent occurrence. The railroad’s insurance files were overflowing with fire claims: for bridges, depots, laundry facilities, sheds, Harvey Houses, hotels, anything made of wood. The Fred Harvey files, like all other business paperwork associated with the trains, were maintained in multiple copies for this reason and stored at the major Santa Fe railroad division points. This allowed easy remote access to files in the pre-fax world and also created a backup system.
Because Dave always maintained disaster contingency plans, the company was able to respond quickly after the fire and set up another office across town at the American Bank Building at 8th and Delaware, an eight-story structure with a handsome cut-stone arched entrance and a row of bowed-out windows above it. It would be Fred Harvey’s “temporary” quarters—until Kansas City built the new Union Station complex that had been promised for several years.
All across the country, cities were looking to replace the disjointed stations from the first generation of railroading with grand union stations like St. Louis Union Depot and South Station in Boston. Many of the newer union stations were being designed in the European Beaux Arts style because of a social movement called City Beautiful, which claimed that urban blight could be combated architecturally if major public buildings were all big, white, and of classical design (like those in Chicago’s White City). Washington, D.C.’s Union Station had recently opened, and New York was in the midst of building its new Pennsylvania Station. (This would be torn down in the 1960s, its facilities driven underground in order to create the new Madison Square Garden.) Every other major American city hoped to follow suit, erecting a fabulous classical station not only for the railroads but to anchor an entire new local transport system of trolley cars or even subways.
On September 27, 1908, Henry Ford’s first Model T rolled off the production line in Detroit. But it was, at the time, just one more automobile—a machine that was, for most, as unfathomable an expense as buying your own Pullman car. The United States was still a country connected by tracks, not highways. Americans rode together, in trains.
CHAPTER 26
KANSAS CITY STARS
IT WAS STILL HARD FOR FORD TO BELIEVE THAT HIS FATHER had been dead for ten years. But now, whenever he doubted it, there was a team of accountants at the Kansas City offices of Arthur Young, as well as his watchful brother and three sisters, ready to remind him that it was time to divide up Fred Harvey’s estate. Many of them were in far different situations than they had been when Father died in 1901.
In many ways, Ford’s two youngest sisters had never completely grown up. Sybil, the youngest, was still living at home in Leavenworth with her mother. She had never been a robust child, and even now, at thirty-one, it wasn’t clear if she was taking care of her mother or the other way around.
While May had grown up sickly as well, she became strong enough to travel and attend private school, eventually moving to New York, where she married into a well-known, if not particularly well-to-do, family. In fact, her in-laws were rather infamous. She married the only son of New York’s most tragic mayor, Abraham “Elegant Oakey” Hall, a brilliant attorney turned political patsy. Hall had been brought down by the 1870 “Boss Tweed” scandals—in which the Democratic Party machine that got him elected mayor also helped shady contractors defraud the city of over $75 million ($1.3 billion). He spent the rest of the century trying to prove he had been a dupe, not a crook.
May’s husband, Herbert Hall—who was, like his father, called “Oakey”—had lost both his parents just before he met her in the late 1890s. He was a Williams College alum just like Minnie’s husband, John Huckel, and May apparently fell into one of those “me-too” relationships that sometimes occur when a beloved older sister marries. Oakey Hall was twelve years her senior, a moderately successful commercial real estate broker and member of the elite New York Players Club. But he was haunted by his father’s legacy, and the Harveys feared he was primarily interested in May for her money. Shortly after they married in 1902, she started requesting substantial advances on her inheritance. Oakey himself even asked Ford for a personal loan from the estate of $10,000 ($252,000). Still, since May adored him, the family more or less endured him.
Byron Harvey, on the other hand, married into a much sunnier family. His wife, Helen Daggett, was a lithe and lively Southern California girl who rarely missed an opportunity to prove that she could still do a handstand whenever family photos were being taken. Byron’s father-in-law, Charles Daggett, was a prominent Kansas City lawyer who in the late 1880s had moved his family to Pasadena, where the Daggetts became one of the town’s bedrock social families and co-founders of the Tournament of Roses Parade. Charles could actually take partial credit for starting the Rose Bowl, the nation’s first postseason college football game, since the decision to inaugurate the contest was made during one of the years he was parade chairman. A powerful civic leader in Los Angeles, he devoted much of his time to the “Good Roads Movement,” which tried to force state and federal officials to create better and perhaps even paved highways for all those new automobiles. Byron’s mother-in-law, Mary Stewart Daggett, was a celebrated literary figure in Southern California. She published several well-received novels, and her fiction was sometimes serialized in the Los Angeles Times, which was owned by their society friends the Otis family.
Byron had married Helen Daggett not long after his father’s death, and moved to Chicago when Ford arranged for him to work in the Santa Fe dining car division. The couple had three sons in quick succession, brought up in a stylish home in Lake Forest. Over time, Byron grew into a competent enough executive, although it was clear he did not inherit his father’s drive or vision.
He and his family lived the good life in Chicago, although it appeared they harbored some insecurities about their social status. People always assumed that the Harveys were richer than they really were. The family business threw off an enormous amount of cash every year, but it didn’t own things—factories, real estate—that were worth a lot of money and could appreciate in value. The company’s main assets were its ethos, its quality control, its loyal, almost cultish employees, and its management contracts. Fred Harvey was like an oil well that would never gush: It constantly needed to be pumped. In Chicago and Pasadena, Byron and Helen were surrounded by people who had earned, or inherited, tens of millions.
As Ford saw it, his younger brother aspired to be one of the idle rich, but didn’t seem to understand that he would always have to be one of the working rich.
With so much money now at stake, there was a lot of tension as Ford let his siblings know how Father’s estate would be handled. With the full support of his mother, h
e ruled the company as well as the family, so none of his siblings was in a position to challenge his decisions. They were all inheriting significant sums, and when Ford announced a restructuring plan for the company stock, they realized they would be getting even more.
Fred’s will left half of his assets—plus the family home on Olive Street and two smaller properties they owned in Leavenworth—to his wife, Sally, with the other half divided evenly among his five children. A detailed report of those assets had been prepared for each of them by accountants at Arthur Young; it was on legal-size ledger paper bound with a gray cover and held together by a red string. If they turned to page one, they saw that since their father’s death, his assets had nearly quadrupled in worth. The Fred Harvey estate was now valued, very conservatively, at $2.6 million ($61 million). Each sibling inherited $261,239.76 ($6.1 million), and the rest went to their mother.
Before they got the money, however, there was the matter of the stock in the newly restructured Fred Harvey corporation. Ford had created a complex scheme to ensure that he kept complete control of the business. He also wanted to prevent his mother and sisters from having any ownership stake—because he believed strongly that women should not own stock in a company run by a man. Sally Harvey and her daughters were told they had to sell their shares.
Minnie, especially, was taken aback by this. She had been active in the business, but was also being forced to sell her shares—and to her own husband. The final indignity was that since John Huckel didn’t have that kind of cash, she actually had to lend him the money to buy her own stock from her.
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