In all, over 25 percent of the company’s male employees had enlisted. Their hero, of course, was the founder’s valiant grandson, Lieutenant Frederick Harvey.
Ford’s influence in the war effort increased in December 1917 when President Wilson announced that the federal government would be taking over all the railroads. The secretary of the Treasury, William McAdoo—who was also President Wilson’s son-in-law—was given the militarized title of “Director-General” of the new U.S. Railroad Administration.
While Santa Fe president Ed Ripley wanted nothing to do with the government takeover, his well-run railroad was clearly the model that McAdoo had in mind when building his team. The Director-General selected several Santa Fe men to help run the nation’s trains during wartime: McAdoo’s second-in-command was the former chairman of the Santa Fe’s board Walker Hines, and one of Ripley’s vice presidents was given the top position directing the nation’s train traffic.
Ford was summoned to Washington to head the advisory board on how to feed America’s troops and train passengers during wartime. After all, until the war started, Fred Harvey had been among the country’s largest bulk purchasers of foodstuffs, and probably fed more people every day than any other entity in the nation.
Under Ford’s leadership, all of the nation’s dining cars were changed over from kitchens offering elaborate à la carte meals to simpler table d’hôte menus that could be used for private passengers or soldiers. There would be no more bluepoint oysters served on America’s trains until the Germans were defeated.
AS A YOUNG COUNTRY that had never before been unified and mobilized coast-to-coast for war, the United States had never nationalized an industry before and didn’t know exactly how to go about it. The takeover began congenially enough, with the Railroad Administration working with executives to make sure that military needs always superseded those of private passengers and freight haulers. When the railroads questioned how they would be reimbursed for all this military transport, a bill was passed that basically said, “Don’t worry, we’ll pay you back.”
It was soon clear, however, that the hundreds of railroads needed more than government guidance and reassurance. Years of competition and federal regulation had created a system that was too unwieldy to operate smoothly. While western and Midwestern railroads like the Santa Fe were in pretty good shape and ran fairly efficiently, the trains in the East were not ready for the sheer volume of men and supplies that had to be moved quickly en route to Europe. The eastern tracks and cars required more repairs and upgrades than the railroads could afford, so backups in certain cities became endemic: The Pennsylvania Railroad was in particularly poor shape, and trains were forever being held up in its strongholds of Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.
Director-General McAdoo finally had to admit that Ed Ripley had been right during all those years: Government regulation was a big reason why the railroads hadn’t been able to keep investing in new cars and better tracks. The Interstate Commerce Commission had forced them to keep passenger fares and freight rates absurdly low, and even with the recently mandated eight-hour workday, wages had not risen enough to keep those workers who hadn’t enlisted from repeatedly threatening to strike.
Yet while McAdoo knew the government had helped cause these problems, he grew impatient when the railroads couldn’t fix them. He was tired of arguing with executives about the best way to carry out his orders. So in May 1918, he took a drastic and entirely unprecedented step.
He announced that the U.S. government was summarily firing the president of every railroad in the country.
The presidents would be replaced with “federal managers” who worked for the government. Technically, all the executives were being “retired,” although their companies could still pay them and rehire them after the war. Some were even appointed federal managers at a fraction of their normal peacetime salaries. However, in most cases, younger, more ambitious, and more cooperative executives—from within a company or, occasionally, from its competitors—were put in charge.
At the Santa Fe, Ed Ripley was hugely supportive of the war effort, but he had no interest this late in his career in starting to work for the government. One of his most able vice presidents, William Storey, was named federal manager, which also made him Ripley’s heir apparent.
The new federal managers were forced to quickly standardize their railroads—doing away with competition, duplicate services, and individual corporate idiosyncrasies in all aspects of their operations. New standards were created for railcars, and the government ordered thousands of new ones. Ticket offices in railway stations were consolidated.
In order to avoid any labor unrest, the Railroad Administration gave railroad employees large across-the-board raises. For the first time ever, the government even mandated that female employees receive wages equal to men. To pay for the increases, the federal managers raised all passenger fares and freight charges. So, while the government was still promising that after the war, the railroads would get all their trains back in exactly the condition they had left them, this was already impossible. The entire economics of “working on the railroad” had been changed forever.
Most Americans today are more familiar with the changes and compromises made during World War II, because it lasted longer and is fresher in memory, than with the actions the government took during the first World War. But in many ways, what happened in 1917 and 1918 is far more significant and shocking. This was the first time major industries were impounded in the world’s largest democracy. And quite a few individual freedoms were seriously curtailed as well.
The Temperance Movement used the war as a way to convince the government to pass a temporary “Wartime Prohibition Act,” which laid the groundwork for national prohibition. The 1918 law was sold as a way to help conserve grain and keep it from brewers—many of whom were German immigrants. If it kept the country’s soldiers sober, and perhaps halted drinking in America altogether, that was just an added benefit.
In the name of “social hygiene,” the government also became insidiously involved in trying to quash a sexual revolution. As young men poured into military facilities across the country, the government started to arrest and detain young women for being too attracted to the soldiers. As many as fifteen thousand women were incarcerated in “camp cities” because they could be “proven in federal court to be a menace to men in training.” Many were accused of being prostitutes—and certainly some of them were. But a surprising number were detained for being “charity girls”—so enamored of men in uniform that they charitably surrendered themselves sexually to young soldiers headed off to war. Some were arrested even before they had sexual contact with fighting men. A study of the population of one Chicago detention center described “one immoral girl” who was arrested “for writing indescribably obscene letters to various soldiers with whom she was not personally acquainted,” and another woman arrested in the middle of the night en route to visit a sailor she “was crazy about.” She was diagnosed as “an ultra-emotional and excitable type, the offspring of an erratic and probably immoral mother. She had been permitted to read sensational novels and sex stories for years.”
The entire effort was portrayed as a way to stop the spread of venereal disease among enlisted men—which, with no effective treatments, was indeed a serious problem. But the truth was, social reformers had been discussing for years what to do about young women who “forfeited their claims to the respect of the virtuous.” The war was simply a welcome opportunity to enlist government support for criminalizing sexuality.
LATE ON A SUNDAY afternoon in the early summer of 1918, as thousands of passengers and soldiers in uniform rushed through the cavernous main waiting room of Kansas City Union Station, a powerful tenor voice rang out above the din.
O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain …
People stopped in their tracks and looked toward the east end of the complex, where the Red Cross booth sat below an illumi
nated scene of volunteers helping soldiers on a grave-strewn French countryside. The booth was being run by the usual flock of Red Cross volunteers—women from the Junior League, students from Westport High School, and a handful of Harvey Girls who were helping raise money during their break. Standing in front of them, however, was a middle-aged Hopi Indian chief in full tribal dress regalia.
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain …
The crowd quickly shuffled toward Chief Silvertongue, transfixed by his voice and his bearing.
America! America!
God shed his grace on thee,
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!
When he finished the verse, the entire concourse stood silent. So he began another verse. When that was done, the crowd still stood dumbfounded.
Then someone called out, “Let us all sing!”
And so they did, soldiers and Harvey Girls, adults and children, their voices soaring with almost religious exaltation:
O beautiful for heroes prov’d
In liberating strife,
Who more than self their country loved,
And mercy more than life.
America! America!
May God thy gold refine
Till all success be nobleness,
And ev’ry gain divine.
When the song ended, the throng remained in such a patriotic fervor that Chief Silvertongue led them in several others, and Red Cross volunteers found themselves deluged with contributions. Most people could afford only a dime or a quarter, but over the next several hours nearly nine thousand people made donations—including a regiment of soldiers who were passing through the station on their way to war.
It was the last day of the biggest National Red Cross campaign yet. The White House had set a goal of raising $100 million ($1.4 billion) in one week. Ford Harvey, Dave Benjamin, and John Huckel had worked furiously, sending their office employees, Harvey Girls, and family members out to canvass every train that came through the station, going window to window along the broad platforms until the stroke of midnight on Sunday. The quota set by the government for Ford’s operation in Kansas City was $800,000 ($11.4 million). When they finished the tally early Monday morning, they realized they had doubled it.
OVER THE SUMMER, as his fellow flyers were sent overseas into combat, Freddy remained stateside, training pilots and flying in government air shows. His squadron’s performance was the highlight of New York City’s “loyalty parade” for Independence Day—in which more than seventy thousand foreign-born Americans, grouped by nationality or religion, proceeded in formation down Fifth Avenue in what was called “the greatest ‘march for freedom’ the world has ever known.”
Freddy and Major Rhinehardt led a squadron of twenty-two planes that buzzed New York City, taking off from Mineola Field in Queens, hovering over Belmont Park, and then zooming across the Bronx before putting on a show just off Riverside Drive. Then they turned and flew low down Fifth Avenue, the pilots dropping leaflets with the words to “The Star-Spangled Banner.” When the planes reached Madison Square and the Flatiron Building, they separated into three squadrons and veered off to fly amazing stunts all over Manhattan. There was even a pretend near accident over East 72nd Street—which was made more ironic when, at day’s end, one of the planes did a nosedive and crashed into crowded Van Cortlandt Park, with some two thousand spectators watching. (Reportedly, no one was hurt, although police immediately confiscated all cameras, destroying all negatives at the Kingsbridge Police Station.) The New York loyalty parade show was such a success that the government sent Freddy and Rhinehardt out in August to do a fourteen-city national tour.
Freddy finally received orders to ship out for Europe in September 1918, with the war still raging. His departure was delayed only because of a medical procedure: He had his tonsils removed. The twenty-two-year-old aviator probably didn’t have tonsillitis; the operation was most likely done to prevent influenza, the deadly virus that had arrived with epidemic vengeance in the United States from the pestilent trenches of the war in Europe. Tonsillectomies and tooth extractions were among a handful of procedures believed to ward off the flu, along with inhaling chloroform and drinking Scotch whiskey. In some cities, people were being arrested for spitting or coughing.
Ford was in Washington when Freddy, who had been promoted to captain, got his orders. Besides Ford’s Railroad Administration business, the lobbying for national park status for the Grand Canyon had reached a critical stage. He wrote to his brother, Byron, from Washington’s New Willard Hotel that Freddy was “pretty miserable” after the tonsillectomy, and everyone else in the family was upset about his going to war. His wife and daughter, Kitty, were, “of course, depressed.”
By the time Freddy sailed for France in mid-October, it was becoming clear even to the Germans that they would soon have to surrender. But the war was still on, and the risks remained high. On October 27, Freddy’s Harvard classmate Hamilton Coolidge, who had been flying in Europe for six months and had survived more than a hundred missions and eight dogfights, was killed by a direct hit from an anti-aircraft gun while flying over Chevrières. His plane exploded on impact, and his comrades watched his body free-fall to the earth.
That week was one of the deadliest in American history, but not only because of the war. In Europe, some twenty-seven hundred American soldiers died in combat; but at home, during the same period, over twenty-one thousand people died of the flu. When the end of fighting was celebrated on November 11, Armistice Day, many people stayed indoors to avoid unnecessary contact, and those who dared to venture out to celebrate wore masks. It was not uncommon in major cities to see priests on horse-drawn carts rolling down the streets calling, “Bring out your dead!”
Freddy ended up being stationed at the Third Aviation Instruction Center at Issoudun in central France. He was there for only four months, but they were months that forever changed the country he had left behind. America endured an endless stream of funerals. The worldwide death toll for the war, over four years, was about 16 million; America lost about 100,000 men. The death toll for the flu pandemic, the worst of which took place during the last few months of the war, was at least 50 million worldwide, with more than 675,000 lives lost in the United States. Together, the two calamities wiped out at least 3 percent, and perhaps as much as 6 percent, of the world’s population. The final weeks of 1918 passed like one long global wake.
Just as the New Year began, the first great hero of the new American century, Theodore Roosevelt, died in his sleep of a coronary embolism at the age of sixty. When Congress came back into session in January, it passed his final piece of pet legislation at last. The bill to make the Grand Canyon a national park was approved and sent on to President Wilson for his signature. At El Tovar on the South Rim and in the Fred Harvey offices on the second floor of Kansas City Union Station there was a mixture of jubilation and relief.
Yet the Harvey family was also rejoicing for another reason: Freddy was coming home. And true to his seemingly charmed life—or perhaps his father’s growing influence in Washington—he was unharmed. Freddy’s flight-training colleague Hiram Bingham made a curious statement about why the young flyer hadn’t seen combat. In his memoir of the air service, he claimed that Freddy “was so greatly appreciated that he was not permitted to go abroad” until the fighting had ended. It isn’t clear whether the air service or his powerful father “appreciated” him too much to let him risk his life.
When Captain Frederick Harvey’s ship pulled in to New York harbor in mid-February, America was in a state of national relief and grief. But Freddy hadn’t changed a bit. From a phone in the lobby of the Plaza Hotel, he called home and his sister answered.
“How are you?” he asked. “Where’s Father?”
“I’m fine,” she replied. “Father is in Washington.”
“And where’s Mother?”
“In New York,” she said, “at the
Plaza.”
“So am I,” he said, laughing. “Goodbye.” He hung up and dashed off to find her.
Two weeks after his discharge, the news came from Paris that President Wilson, still trying to hammer out the details of the Treaty of Versailles, had taken time out to attend to some domestic business and signed the bill creating Grand Canyon National Park. Since no other company could make a serious bid for the contract to serve all the tourists at the canyon, it was only a matter of time before Ford made a deal with the National Park Service.
If Freddy had any thoughts about returning to Harvard to finish up his degree, the National Park bill ended them. His father wanted him home in Kansas City so he could begin basic training all over again. For the next few years, he would toil as an apprentice to traveling Fred Harvey supervisors. If he was going to assume command of Fred Harvey someday, he would have to start as a private.
ALTHOUGH THE WAR was over, the federal government did not immediately relinquish control of the railroads. And while the Santa Fe waited to get its trains back, Ed Ripley announced that he was stepping down as president. His protégé William Storey, who had been running the Santa Fe as federal manager, would take over, and Ripley would become chairman of the board, charged with helping oversee what was certain to be a rocky transition back to private control.
Hailed by the New York Times as America’s “greatest living railroad man,” Ripley planned to live full-time at his winter home in Santa Barbara, on Pedregosa and Laguna streets near Mission Park. His mustache now snow-white, he wanted to play a lot of golf, spend more time with his family, finish a book he was writing about California wild birds, stay active in the Santa Barbara Chamber of Commerce, and keep a hand in his pet project, the damming of the Colorado River to provide electricity to Arizona. (This was the lobbying effort that led to the construction of the Hoover Dam.) Mostly, Ripley planned to spend long, sunny Santa Barbara afternoons giving sage advice as the emeritus professor of railroads, the conscience of American big business.
Appetite for America Page 30