Appetite for America

by Stephen Fried

  Herman Schweizer had hired Hewett’s protégé Jesse Nusbaum to oversee the construction of the village—which included two completely habitable pueblos and several other dwellings. Among those hired to live and work in the exhibit was Maria Martinez, a San Ildefonso Indian from outside of Santa Fe who would later be recognized as the re-inventor of one of the most beloved styles of Indian pottery: the stunning black-on-black matte earthenware that had been all but lost until it became her signature (and is widely copied to this day). It wasn’t easy keeping the Indians on their faux-adobe reservation. Many grew homesick and existentially depressed. Maria made her black pottery, and her husband, Julian, did his best to resist taunting the white visitors who wanted him to “act Indian.” But by summer, the Indians had been living in the village for five months, and many of them were fed up, looking to get out of their contracts. While they were being paid—for adults, $10 ($221) a week—some were terribly exploited: During the Fourth of July parade, for example, seven Indians were featured on the float of the Savage Tire Company. Later in the month, Taos Indians brought in by Fred Harvey created a huge controversy when they broke into the office of the New Mexico State Building and stole films that had been taken of them back home performing the “katsina dance” for the Fiesta de San Geronimo. They had asked a newsreel crew not to film certain rites, believing it would cast an evil spell on the tribesmen, but the cameraman did it anyway. Livid that the film was being shown at the fair, they were also convinced this was the reason for the terrible drought back at their pueblo.

  Still, even with these controversies, the Indian Village exhibit at San Diego was considered a huge success, and the fair drew about four million people. While the San Francisco exposition drew five times as many visitors, the San Diego world’s fair had a much longer-lasting impact on California and the entire Southwest. It was a turning point, a sign that the area had come of age.

  THE CALIFORNIA FAIRS helped jump-start Southwest tourism—as did all the newspaper articles and books about trips to the fair that were published over the next year. One of the more interesting books was written by Emily Post, before she became the country’s etiquette doyenne; in By Motor to the Golden Gate, she spent an entire chapter describing her visit to the Alvarado in Albuquerque, where she was regaled by Herman Schweizer on native lore—including why Indians ran away from tourists wearing violet (“the color of evil,” he said). She also learned that even though the Harvey hotels, which she admired, now had many patrons who arrived by auto, rail passengers still got special treatment:

  Stopping at the various Harvey hotels of the Santa Fe system, yet not being travelers on the railroad, is very like being behind the scenes at the theater. The hotel people, curio-sellers and Indians are the actors, the travelers on the incoming trains are the audience. Other people don’t count.

  For instance, you enter a tranquilly ordered dining-room. The head waitress attentively seats you, your own waitress quickly fetches your first course, and starts toward the pantry for the second, when suddenly a clerk appears and says “Twenty-six!” With the uniformity of a trained chorus every face turns toward the clock, and the whole scene becomes a flurry of white starched dresses running back and forth. Back with empty trays and forth with buttered rolls, radishes, cups of soup, like a ballet of abundance. You wonder if any one is going to bring your second course, but you might as well try to attract the attention of a hive of bees when they are swarming. Having nothing else to do you discover the mystic words twenty-six to be twenty-six places to set. Finally you descry your own waitress dealing slices of toast to imaginary diners at a far table.

  Then you hear the rumble of the train, the door leading to the platform opens and in come the passengers. And you, having no prospect of anything further to eat, watch the way the train supper is managed. Slices of toast and soup in cups are already at the place, then in files the white aproned chorus carrying enormous platters of freshly grilled beefsteak, and such savory broiled chicken that you, who are so hungry, can scarcely wait a moment patiently for your own waitress to appear. You notice also the gigantic pots of aromatically steaming coffee, tea and chocolate being poured in everyone’s cup but your own, and ravenously you watch the pantry door for that long tarrying one who went once upon a time to get some of these delectable viands for you.

  “Will you have broiled chicken?” asks the faithless She you have been watching for, bending solicitously over a group of strange tourists at the next table. At last when the train people are quite supplied, your speeding Hebe returns to you and apologizes sweetly, “I am sorry but I had to help get train Number Seven’s supper. They’ve eaten all the broiled chicken that was cooked, but I’ll order you some more if you don’t mind waiting twenty minutes.”

  By and by the train people leave, your chicken arrives and you finish your supper in commonplace tranquility.

  With this dramatic increase in American leisure traveling—by train and by car—when Ford went to the next National Parks Conference, he announced that visitors to the Grand Canyon had increased fivefold in the past four years. In 1915, over 150,000 people had come to the Divine Abyss, more than had visited the three largest national parks, Yellowstone, Yosemite, and Glacier, combined. But he was incredulous that all his years of lobbying for national park status—supported by everyone from Ed Ripley to Teddy Roosevelt—had so far come to nothing.

  “I have heard personally … about the fitness of the Grand Canyon … on different occasions from two Presidents of the United States, three Secretaries of the Interior, every United States Senator and Congressman I ever met who has been to the canyon, and innumerable distinguished men of letters and science and arts,” Ford lamented. “And still [it] is not a national park and, as far as I know, there is no definite step, not even a bill before Congress today, to make [it] a national park.”

  Ford’s lobbying was partly altruistic. The infrastructure of the South Rim simply could not accommodate this many visitors—it wasn’t safe anymore for the tourists or the canyon. But he also had a business motive. The Grand Canyon had surprised everyone by becoming an enormous source of revenue for Fred Harvey—in fact, it was now the single most profitable location in the entire Harvey System, and the one with the most growth potential. Yet it was also the only location the Santa Fe couldn’t guarantee Ford could keep; the railroad owned its buildings there, but it could never control the land under them.

  The only way for Ford to keep his business at the canyon was if the government made it a national park and Fred Harvey made an exclusive deal directly with the new National Park Service. That way, even if the Santa Fe lost interest in the canyon, Ford could have the contract to feed and house all South Rim visitors.

  He was lobbying everyone he knew in the government, trying to call in favors for all the free meals and comped hotel rooms that he, and his father before him, had given public officials. Ed Ripley was also working his contacts, and out of sheer frustration even tried putting a huge financial gun to the government’s head. He publicly offered to make $1 million ($20.2 million) of improvements along the South Rim if Congress passed an authorization for national park status. When the bill failed, the offer was just as publicly withdrawn.

  And as the war raged in Europe, America continued to bask in its isolationism, taking a good look at itself and liking what it was seeing. The U.S. population had just topped one hundred million, and the summer of 1916 was the best in the history of the country’s tourism.

  The editor of National Geographic magazine, Gilbert Grosvenor, declared that Americans had finally realized the treasures of the Old World were eclipsed by the splendors of the new:

  It is true that one finds more ancient culture in Europe … more splendid architecture … [and] better art. But in that architecture which is voiced in the glorious temples of the sequoia grove and in the castles of the Grand Canyon, in the art which is mirrored in American lakes, which is painted in geyser basins and frescoed upon the side walls of the mightiest can
yons, there is a majesty and an appeal that the mere handiwork of men, splendid though it may be, can never rival.

  CHAPTER 28

  DARING YOUNG FREDDY & HIS FLYING MACHINES

  FORD’S SON, FREDDY, HAD GROWN FROM A CUTE LITTLE RICH kid who wrote postcards home from Europe to see if his daddy would send him “the funny papers” into a dashing and daring young man. By the time he got to Harvard, he had a reputation for fearlessness, his life a seemingly endless game of chicken. He loved fast horses, fast boats, and fast cars: His classmates were awed by his breakneck drives between Harvard and Manhattan, a trip he regularly made in just four hours, averaging an unheard-of speed of sixty miles an hour. And he played his favorite sport, polo, as if every match were sudden death. When the family was at the Grand Canyon, he climbed where only eagles or idiots dared; in his sister’s favorite picture of him, he was hanging by his fingertips from the canyon rim. Strong and lithe, with sleepy eyes and a trim mustache that made his face look older than his body, Freddy had complete trust in his physical strength and his instincts.

  He was also fearless socially and sexually. With good looks and charm inherited from both of his parents, he was a well-known ladies’ man whose name struck fear in the hearts of society parents with ripe daughters. According to one of his classmates and fellow jocks at Harvard, they might also have worried for some of their sons as well. Prescott Townsend, the Boston Brahmin who grew up to be one of the nation’s earliest gay advocates, told his biographer that he lost his virginity to Freddy at Harvard.

  “I was very frightened,” Townsend recalled, but he said Freddy made him feel as if he were being welcomed into “a distinct brotherhood” so he didn’t “ever feel guilty.”

  In 1917, America finally entered the war. Among the final straws were Germany’s overtures to Mexico to join the conflict in January, and then the Russian Revolution in March, which undermined Russia’s active support for the Allies. On April 6, America declared war on Germany.

  Twenty-one-year-old Freddy Harvey dropped out of Harvard, where he was a junior, and enlisted, as did a great many of his classmates. Most signed up for the army or the navy. But Freddy was a “born flyer,” in the lingo of the nascent field of flight instruction. So he joined the fledgling American Air Service, a precursor to the air force, which was just a small division of the U.S. Army Signal Corps. Like tanks, planes had never been used in combat before this “Great War.” So while the European countries had been stocking up on planes and pilots for several years, America had barely started. When war was declared, the country had just two small airfields and 225 planes, not one of which was safe for combat. There were forty-eight officers in the air service, and only 1,330 men.

  “We lacked men of experience; we lacked aviators of mature judgment; we lacked airplanes fit to fly against the Huns; and we lacked facilities for building them … The Air Service was a genuine expression of the ‘American Idea’… splendid courage accompanied by a high degree of disorder,” said one of Freddy’s flight school colleagues, Hiram Bingham, the celebrated Yale professor who had led the expedition to the “lost” Peruvian city of Machu Picchu (and decades later helped inspire the daredevil movie archaeologist Indiana Jones). Bingham was more than twice the age of his fellow trainees, and recalled, “never in my life have I felt so old as I did during my two months of association with this brilliant group of young pilots.”

  Freddy was in the first class of volunteers trained after America joined the war—part of a group shipped off to Miami, Florida, where the government had commandeered a facility owned by America’s premier plane manufacturer, Glenn Curtiss. It was as much a laboratory and testing range as a flight school, but there were planes to fly—at least one was always in service, and sometimes even three or four. Freddy was learning how to fly just as Glenn Curtiss himself was learning how to build better military aircraft, improving on his standard plane, the JN-4, known as a Jenny. So students and instructors discovered design and manufacturing flaws in new planes the hard way: in the air. It was not uncommon for propellers to break apart or spin off the plane in flight, forcing young inexperienced pilots to improvise landings. One time a new plane was sent up with wings that didn’t exactly match. It went into a tailspin at fifteen hundred feet and slammed headfirst into the ground, its engine partially buried. Somehow, both instructor and student survived. After ten days in the hospital, they were back at the airfield hobbling around, anxiously awaiting a chance to fly again.

  Freddy was a leader among this noisy bunch of pilots. After six months of training in Florida, he was commissioned as a lieutenant and put in charge of the 27th Aero Squadron, which was sent to Toronto to train with the British Royal Flying Corps. Soon thereafter he was appointed assistant officer in charge of Scott Field, the first air-training facility in the Midwest, just outside of St. Louis in Belleville, Illinois. It was named for Colonel Frank Scott, who only weeks before Freddy transferred there had become the first American flyer to die in a plane crash.

  Just before Thanksgiving 1917, Freddy let his parents know he would be flying home for the holiday. A huge wooden cross, painted white, was placed on the polo field at the Kansas City Country Club, the site of so many of his athletic triumphs, as a landing marker. And on a blustery Friday afternoon, the Ford Harveys, along with two dozen family friends, could be seen standing alongside the polo field staring into the sky for nearly two hours. Finally, at about two o’clock, the crowd gasped and pointed as the small Curtiss biplane—painted army drab except for red, white, and blue crosses on the wings—materialized in the distance. It buzzed through the chill fall sky, touched down on the polo field, and rolled to a stop just in front of where Ford stood.

  Young aviator Freddy hopped out “with as much calmness and aplomb as if he was stepping out of the train coming home from school,” according to one account, and greeted his family and friends. With him was a fellow airman, Major Claude Rhinehardt.

  “It’s the greatest sport in the world,” Freddy told the assembled throng, who peppered him with questions. “Frightened? Not a bit. I’m blasé to most of the scary part now. We averaged a hundred miles an hour several times, but if it had not been for some bad air currents and a lot of clouds that persisted in bothering us, we would have arrived here sooner. Hazardous? Well, sometimes you think so and then again you feel as safe as though you were on the ground. We traveled for the most part at a height of about four thousand feet and you feel pretty safe when you’re this short distance from the ground.”

  He promised that if folks returned the next day, they would see a dazzling aerial show—a promise that appeared on the front page of the Kansas City Star. Several thousand patriotic adults and “wriggling youngsters” took him up on the offer, lining up all the way around the polo field at the country club the next afternoon. At the appropriate time, the crowd parted for Lieutenant Harvey and Major Rhinehardt, “two leather-rigged, behooded and begoggled figures,” who the Kansas City Times claimed were also wearing spurs for effect. The pilots took turns putting the plane through a series of daredevil moves, spins, and loop-de-loops that had one fan in the audience crowing, “Those chaps do a flip with no more thought about the spectacular than you would have about asking the waiter for a clean spoon.”

  At one point the engine stopped in midair and the plane began to plunge—“a dead stick!” Freddy exclaimed—but it was quickly restarted and landed safely.

  The event was big news in Kansas City society, where the Independent’s breathless columnist Betty Ann reported that Ford was bursting with pride for his “very expert bird man … fearless to a fault and as at home in his high perch as on the floor of a dance hall.” But the city’s social arbiter admitted, “If I was the mother of a son who was a bird man I would never have a happy moment; no sophistries or would-be consolations or positive assertions that there was no danger would place or impress me, and I haven’t a doubt that Mrs. Harvey feels the same way, but she is too good a sport to show it.”

 
In fact, while Ford was proud of his son for enlisting—and becoming the first Harvey to ever fight for his country—he was, if anything, even more nervous about Freddy’s flying than his wife. This was his only son, and the namesake future of Fred Harvey. Ford did his best to remain stoically optimistic, even after Freddy was appointed an officer in charge of flying at one of the most hazardous airfields in the country, the massive aviator training facility at Camp Taliaferro in Fort Worth, Texas. Over six thousand men, American and British, were trained there in just six months—and at such breakneck speed that thirty-nine men died in training.

  Freddy became a legendary instructor in Texas. Flight students reverently referred to him and two fellow captains as “The Three Bombardiers.”

  SHORT OF SACRIFICING his son, Ford was willing to do anything to help the war effort. When America joined the fighting, Woodrow Wilson chose one rich and powerful man in each major city to lead the fund-raising drive for the American Red Cross. In Kansas City, the president appointed Ford.

  Fred Harvey was also feeding tens of thousands of American soldiers a day as they traversed the country by train en route to their new training assignments. Kansas City Union Station became the primary crossroad for troops, who spent their layovers getting assistance from the famous Red Cross station in the main concourse, and enjoying discounted meals at the Harvey lunchroom across the way. Fred Harvey also had contracts to serve soldiers at many of its other locations: Ford had negotiated a rate with the War Department of sixty cents ($10.08) per meal. Sometimes the dining rooms would be reset for military feeding, all the tables lined up so as many soldiers as possible could be served. At other times the staff would prepare hundreds of hearty bag lunches to be quickly distributed through train windows. Former Harvey Girls were brought out of retirement to help serve the troops. And army officers from bases all over the Midwest and West besieged Ford to lend them Harvey chefs. Gus Burkett, the chef from the Emporia Harvey House, was now cooking for General Leonard Wood at Camp Funston, in Manhattan, Kansas, and Fredrick Sommers, a chef from the Kansas City Union Station, was cooking for the Thirteenth Engineers in Chicago.