Appetite for America

by Stephen Fried

  Among the critics of the Fred Harvey jacket rule, the Washington Post called it “discrimination,” and the Chicago Tribune said it exemplified the double standard of fashion between the sexes: “Women do as they please … [while] American men are the most conventionalized and most timid wearers of clothes in the world … [but] a man has not lost any of his citizenship rights if he has removed his coat.” One Oklahoma paper went so far as to call the rule a conspiracy of “snobbery from England [against] the low brows of Oklahoma” and a “‘Jim Crow law’… aimed at whites only.”

  But many papers lambasted Campbell Russell for his “ruthless warfare” against the very “conventions of society.” As one small-town editor said, it was only a matter of time before men would demand to dine without shoes and want to “take all the dogs and oxen in, too.”

  More amazing than the national outcry was just how long Ford Harvey had to fight in court over the jacket rule. The case dragged on for three years in the Oklahoma legal system, eventually ending up on the docket of the exasperated state supreme court. During the same week that a judge in Chicago was making legal history by deciding the sentences for Leopold and Loeb—whose lawyer, Clarence Darrow, had turned their sensationalized murder trial into a popular referendum on capital punishment—Oklahoma’s chief justice, Neil McNeill, and his colleagues were stuck wrestling with the issue of whether men should wear coats in the dining room.

  In a unanimous decision, the supreme court supported the Fred Harvey jacket rule:

  Unlike the lower animals, we all demand the maintenance of some style and fashion in the dining-room. Civilized society has developed the masculine attire from the breech-clout to the coat and trousers. Always a part of the masculine garb … [the jacket] is worn as an adornment to satisfy the conventions of society rather than for bodily comfort and protection … these conventions of society cannot be entirely ignored, without disastrous results … Man’s coat is usually the cleanest of his garments, and the fact that he is required to wear a coat serves notice that decorum is expected and creates a wholesome psychological effect.

  ACTUALLY, THE OKLAHOMA jacket battle was the least of Ford Harvey’s problems with government regulation. Like everyone else in the restaurant and hotel business, he was searching for a way to replace the profits lost to Prohibition. Fred Harvey was not quite as dependent on liquor sales as other establishments. The company had started in Kansas—which had long been one of the drier states in the country, an epicenter in the national temperance movement, and the home of anti-liquor crusader Carry Nation—and had operated under earlier statewide Prohibition laws in Kansas and Oklahoma for years. In fact, Fred Harvey had always been positioned as a more family-friendly alternative to saloons.

  Nonetheless, most of the Fred Harvey hotels and eating houses had featured extensive wine selections, as well as private-label Scotch imported from Ainslie & Heilbron and a private-label whiskey made by Old Forester in Louisville—all high-profit items. And nobody had expected Prohibition to remain in place for so long, or to be prosecuted so vigorously all across the country. Regular raids in major cities had led to the closing of some of the nation’s most famous restaurants and hotels, especially when enforcement picked up on New Year’s Eve 1923. Within the next six months, New Yorkers watched in shock as dozens of popular eateries were forced out of business, including Shanley’s, Murray’s Roman Gardens, and the Knickerbocker Grill. Eventually, even historic Delmonico’s closed, after nearly a century as New York’s best-known restaurant.

  Many restaurants and hotels around the country tried to remain quietly “wet,” by sneaking wine or spirits to customers. The most famous—and successful—was probably “21” in New York, which maintained not only a hidden wine cellar but an entire underground lounge for drinking. But Fred Harvey could not afford to take such risks.

  Even before Prohibition, Fred Harvey was the only food-service company in the country being regulated by the federal government. It was under the constant scrutiny of federal regulators at the Interstate Commerce Commission, and Fred Harvey contracts at the Grand Canyon were entirely dependent on the good graces of the Department of the Interior. The company’s considerable stock of wine and spirits had to be locked away or sold off. While hotel patrons surely overtipped bellmen to have them find liquor they might enjoy in the privacy of their rooms, Fred Harvey establishments could never have secret basement lounges. There was too much at stake.

  So Ford tried to grow his business in different, nonalcoholic ways. He made a deal to run all the restaurants and retail spaces in the new Chicago Union Station—a handsome classical building with a stunning twenty-thousand-foot, five-story-high Beaux Arts Great Hall. When the new Chicago station opened in 1925, it featured a Fred Harvey drugstore and soda fountain, a perfumery, a toy store, a barbershop, a beauty salon, a twenty-four-hour bookstore, and no fewer than eight Fred Harvey eateries, from a huge formal dining room to a small sandwich-making operation next to the taxi stand for cabbies.

  With its successes in St. Louis, Kansas City, and Chicago, Fred Harvey was sought out by other cities planning to build union stations. And not just traditional Santa Fe railroad cities. Ford was bidding on contracts for the new station in Dallas and the one being planned in Los Angeles, and was also considering the first major Fred Harvey operation east of Chicago, in Cleveland.

  PROHIBITION ALSO FOSTERED the growth of other restaurants, which now had to innovate with food because they couldn’t make money on liquor. Much of the growth was in chains, every one of which based its business on the models created by Fred Harvey. The first generation of largely self-service eateries, which began opening in major cities at the turn of the century—especially the Childs cafeterias and the Horn & Hardart automats—were now substantial chains in many eastern cities and widely copied. Major cities also had takeout bakeries for breads and dessert items once made mostly at home—which the Fred Harvey restaurants had always done for their local customers—and even catering shops that offered prepared entrées for takeout or delivery. As early as 1902, Levy’s restaurant in Los Angeles was running this ad in the L.A. Times: “They’re coming tonight and I haven’t ordered a blessed thing for dinner. Why, of course, how absurd. I’ll just order from LEVY’S what I want. What a relief. Telephone us when your friends drop in unexpectedly. We deliver direct from kitchen to table. Try our lucky number Main 2184.”

  By the 1920s, however, Americans were seeing the first wave of sitdown fast-food shops featuring signature hamburgers and frankfurters, sodas and ice cream. The first major hamburger chain was White Castle, which began in 1921 with four locations in Wichita, Kansas—where it competed with the Harvey House—and then spread into other Fred Harvey strongholds, Kansas City and St. Louis, before expanding into Minneapolis and many other Midwestern cities. The small, extremely shiny White Castles served small tasty burgers, and were able to overcome a long-held public fear of beef—left over from the Chicago meatpacking scandals—by stressing cleanliness (the interiors looked like gleaming white tile bathrooms) and even hiring young men to dress up as doctors and sit at the counters eating enthusiastically.

  White Castle and the A&W Root Beer drive-ins (which started in Sacramento at around the same time) were among the first of the classic American fast-food franchise operations. It was a new and exciting business model that Fred Harvey had eschewed—although Ford was constantly getting offers to try it. The franchise chains expanded by selling local entrepreneurs the plans to open a look-alike facility of their own, and making them sign contracts to purchase signature foods. Some people bought multiple franchises; others used one to learn the business and then went out on their own. (The Marriott hotel chain, for example, had its origins in an A&W Root Beer stand that J. Willard Marriott and his wife started in Washington, D.C., in the 1920s, leading them to create their own drive-in company, The Hot Shoppes, and then hotels.)

  Most of these new chains did not have the same level of service or food quality as the Harvey House
s—and their owners appreciated perhaps more than anyone the ability of Ford’s restaurants to prepare and serve entire full-course meals in twenty minutes. But the burger joints and soda shops were spreading everywhere as America became a faster-food nation.

  AS THE COMPANY GREW—it now had seven thousand employees in more than eighty cities—Ford was anxious to find a project to get Freddy more involved in the family business. Ford and his brother-in-law John Huckel were now well into their fifties, and Dave Benjamin was in his sixties and starting to spend more time on family and community matters.

  In 1923, Dave’s two brothers died within six months of each other. Harry, with whom he had been working at Fred Harvey every day for over thirty years, suffered a sudden fatal heart attack. Then Dave lost his brother Alfred, who had become one of the most widely admired men in Kansas City, the selfless leader of the city’s first major Jewish philanthropic organization, United Jewish Charities, and a bridge between the fund-raising efforts of other religions. (Judy Harvey was often on the Catholic side of that bridge.) A rabbi and a Catholic priest presided at Alfred’s funeral, and outside Temple B’nai Jehudah a mourner was overheard saying, “I would rather be Alfred Benjamin than anyone I know.” Dave felt it was his responsibility to try to take Alfred’s place in the philanthropic community, so he was devoting more time to good works.

  Now approaching thirty, Freddy remained a young, restless soul, still too distractible and reckless for his father’s comfort. When Ford got off the train in a Harvey town, he always went to the eating house first, just as his father had before him. But not Freddy: When his train pulled in, he was more likely to head off to the local airfield, hoping there might be a plane available for him to fly. He claimed he could get a better feel for a city by seeing it from the air. But his father knew there was only one way to get a feel for a city: You inspected the Fred Harvey kitchen, the dining room, the hotel lobby, you talked to the managers, the Harvey Girls, the maids. Flying, polo, fishing, hiking, all of Freddy’s passions—these were the things you did to relax only after business had been conducted.

  It was time for Freddy to grow up already. Ford loved his younger brother, Byron, who had matured into a charming and temperate husband, father, and socialite and was doing perfectly well in Chicago overseeing the dining car business. He even appreciated his brother’s somewhat quixotic desire to design his own dining cars: Byron had received a patent for a diner car with the kitchen all the way at one end, instead of in the middle, which improved efficiency, but allowed passengers to enter only from one end. When the car debuted, it was heralded as the first new patent in dining car design since George Pullman’s in 1865. Byron had a scale model of it made for his desk.

  But, patent or no patent, Ford had no intention of ever letting his brother, Byron, run or own a controlling interest in the company. He was determined that his son, Freddy, would be the next Fred Harvey.

  CHAPTER 31

  SANTA FATED

  IF FREDDY WAS EVER GOING TO SUCCEED IN THE FAMILY BUSINESS, he needed his own Grand Canyon. It had to be a venture that meant as much to him as flying, with as much potential for the future of the company as El Tovar. And there was really only one place in the Southwest so magnetic and full of possibilities, yet largely unexplored and unexploited by Fred Harvey and the AT&SF. That was Santa Fe itself, which the railroad had left for dead in the 1880s when it replaced the old Santa Fe Trail but was still, to many, the most vibrant and inspiring town in the West.

  Santa Fe had been the Harvey family’s favorite place in the Southwest for decades, ever since Sally first took Ford and Minnie there as children. While the Grand Canyon was a glorious place to visit and gape, Santa Fe was a heavenly municipality where people lived and worked amid the grandeur of the big sky and the endless desert, the Indian and Mexican cultures and commerce infusing everyday existence. The oldest colonized city in North America, settled several years before the Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth Rock, Santa Fe had been a major commercial center for centuries, the hub for trade between Mexico and America. When the railroad bypassed it in 1880, Santa Fe was forced to do what so many American cities would attempt a century later after losing their manufacturing base—it reinvented itself as a place to visit, a getaway, an escape. It was becoming a haven for health seekers, artists, writers, archaeology buffs, nonpracticing cowboys and cowgirls, and, of course, tourists. Some saw it as a little Paris, a place where the light was also “just different”—but in a distinctly American way. In fact, as a response to the City Beautiful movement that was sweeping America’s urban areas, Santa Fe created its own nickname: “The City Different.”

  Santa Fe, more than any other place in the Southwest, already offered what the Grand Canyon had lacked: “something conventional,” in Ford’s words, for tourists to do. It had wonderful shopping, restaurants, and galleries in its small, soulful adobe downtown—which was kept soulful and adobe by a 1912 city plan urging architects to employ the Pueblo Revival and Territorial styles exclusively, so the city would always appear unified and in-scale. And every September the city celebrated Santa Fe Fiesta, which dated back to the 1700s and almost petered out in the late 1800s, but was reinvigorated after the world war—largely at the instigation of archaeologist Edgar Hewett, who had learned a few things about ethnological showmanship while working with Herman Schweizer, Mary Colter, and John Huckel at the San Diego world’s fair in 1915. Hewett helped reinvent the Fiesta as a three-day celebration, centered around each of the major ethnic groups in New Mexico, with parades, street fairs, concerts, and art shows.

  Fred Harvey had been booking side trips to Santa Fe for railroad passengers for over forty years, through all these changes. But while Ford and Minnie and their families visited often and had friends there, Santa Fe was, in many ways, the only place in the Southwest where they were still guests. All that was now about to change.

  Ford had decided it was high time to open a hotel in Santa Fe. While it was a great opportunity for his son to have a pet project that didn’t require being airborne, he had been persuaded to expand into Santa Fe by someone else: a rising star in the company, Major R. Hunter Clarkson. One of Ford’s most flamboyant and opinionated managers in the Southwest, Hunter Clarkson was a decorated British officer—equally at home in a uniform or a kilt—who had turned his job as transportation manager at the Grand Canyon into a little empire. He was shuttling more than fifty thousand visitors a year around the canyon with military precision, but he had a dream. In his dream, there were fleets of automobiles and buses—“Harveycars” and “Harveycoaches”—taking tourists on adventures all across the Southwest. Not for a few hours like at the canyon, but for days, even weeks. They would go to the pueblos, they would watch the snake dances, they would see real Indians, not just Harvey House Indians. They would have unique American travel experiences, not unlike the one that had galvanized Ford in 1901.

  In the West, tourists were commonly referred to by locals as “dudes.” Hunter Clarkson believed that Fred Harvey could corner the entire dude market.

  He came up with a catchy name for his scheme, the “Indian Detours,” and even sought backing outside of Fred Harvey. He was married to the daughter of a Santa Fe vice president, and his plan also had the support of Santa Fe railroad advertising director Roger Birdseye, who at the time was the best-known member of the Birdseye family. (His brother Clarence had recently developed the first practical process for freezing food.) His plan was to start the auto tours in New Mexico with the hope of eventually extending them all the way across Arizona to the Grand Canyon. Santa Fe, and its scenic sister city to the north, Taos, were situated right in between the two largest Fred Harvey hotels in New Mexico—the Castañeda in Las Vegas and the Alvarado in Albuquerque—which made the “City Different” a perfect center point and staging area.

  Just as Ford had once sent Minnie and John Huckel to Gallup to brainstorm the Indian curio business, he dispatched his son to Santa Fe, where he was to shop for a suitable hotel. Fredd
y found a property just off the city’s main plaza, on the historic site of the old Exchange Hotel—the actual end of the old Santa Fe Trail. A relatively new hotel had been built on the site, but its investors had already run out of money.

  Ford arranged for the railroad to buy the hotel, and it was quickly overhauled to make it sufficiently Harvey-worthy for the 1926 tourist season: New staff was brought in from other Harvey locations, the dining rooms got new linens, silver, and stemware, every surface was repainted. The only thing they kept was the name: La Fonda.

  In addition to taking over the hotel, Fred Harvey ordered a large fleet of cars and buses that were so lavishly appointed they were referred to as “Pullmans on wheels.” Freddy and Hunter Clarkson also arranged to buy out one of Santa Fe’s leading tour operators, Erna Fergusson, the energetic docent of Indian country.

  Besides her passion and knowledge, Fergusson had the only all-female tour guide staff in town. They became the prototypes of a new kind of Harvey Girl: the “Indian Detours Courier.” The Couriers were expected to be much better educated and more “refined” than Harvey Girls—bright, attractive college students, preferably bilingual in Spanish and at least one other idiom. They were given an enormous amount of historical material to memorize, from scripts and manuals created by the company. Erna Fergusson did much of the writing (and later became a well-known author of lively travel books for Knopf), but the company brought in other writers. The aging Southwest advocate Charles Lummis wrote some of the Courier materials, repurposing old stories from his magazines. Mary Colter and Herman Schweizer also created some of the manuals, bringing the amassed knowledge of over twenty years in the Fred Harvey Indian Department.