Appetite for America

by Stephen Fried

  St. Louis was desperately in need of some good news. Like many cities along the Mississippi, it had been ravaged by the monumental flood that spring, which broke 145 levees between Missouri and Louisiana and became one of the worst natural disasters in the country’s history. More than twenty-six thousand square miles of land were flooded, killing 246 people and displacing 600,000 more, many of whom had to live in squalor in refugee camps; 41,487 buildings were destroyed, 162,017 homes flooded, and over $100 million ($1.2 billion) in crops and farm animals were lost. The Mississippi Delta needed something to boost its spirits.

  As Lindbergh and his two American rivals prepared their planes on Long Island in early May, word came from France that Nungesser and Coli were already airborne. Like all aviators, Freddy was riveted to the front-page coverage of the flight, which began gleefully but soon turned tragic when the French plane vanished. It was never heard from again, and no wreckage was ever found.

  Lindbergh, undeterred, waited only for the weather to clear, and at 7:52 on Friday morning, May 20, 1927, he took off. With nothing for company but four sandwiches and two canteens of water, he flew thirty-five hundred miles, without stopping, in just under thirty-four hours. When he touched down at Le Bourget field in Paris, more than a hundred thousand cheering people were waiting there to greet him.

  Charles Lindbergh became the biggest overnight celebrity the world had ever known. His fame literally redefined fame. Time magazine invented its “Man of the Year” cover feature just to honor him.

  To capitalize on that fame—and use it to further the cause of aviation—Lindbergh and his plane were immediately sent on a propeller-stop tour of every state in the Union, underwritten by Harry Guggenheim, the thirty-seven-year-old heir to the family mining and smelting fortune. Like Freddy, Guggenheim became obsessed with planes while flying in the war, later convincing his father to donate $3 million ($36 million) of the family’s riches to create a fund for the promotion of aeronautics. In three months, Lindbergh flew the Spirit of St. Louis to over ninety American cities. He delivered nearly 150 speeches, rode in some thirteen hundred miles of parades, and took dozens of rich and influential people on plane rides, including Henry Ford, Will Rogers, and pretty much any celebrity, businessman, or government official considered important for the future of air travel.

  Freddy Harvey was one of those influential passengers. In April 1928, Lindbergh came to Los Angeles to test a new four-seat plane that the Lockheed company had designed for delivering airmail. (Even though it was still unclear how passenger service might work in planes, the air transport business was already soaring.) Lindbergh met in California with his St. Louis friend and backer, Harry Knight, and they invited Freddy along for the test ride. Since the plane was brand-new, it was suggested that they wear parachutes just in case. The two passengers strapped on their chutes; Lindbergh had to be talked into it. They took off, ascended sharply, came down for a bouncy landing, and then took off again, buzzing the airfield before landing. Afterward, the three of them sat in the plane for a long time, talking about how it handled, before adjourning to a lunch stand where they had sandwiches with Lockheed executives and swapped aviation gossip.

  After lunch, Lindbergh flew Freddy and Harry Knight from Los Angeles to Carpinteria Air Field near Santa Barbara, where they were met by a flock of Montecito debutantes, all of whom wanted to ride with “Lucky Lindy.” He squired them, three at a time, in the new plane. “Thirty-Six Girls Bragging of Air Trips,” read one of the Los Angeles Times headlines the next day.

  For Freddy, however, the trip was both pleasure and business. Knight’s brokerage firm in St. Louis was assembling a group to start the nation’s first cross-country air passenger service. Since passenger planes couldn’t fly in the dark—they had no lights, nor did the airfields—there was only one way to use the power of flight to speed up travel from coast to coast. The planes would fly as far as they could during daytime, and the passengers would travel by train at night, to be picked up the next morning by yet another plane. This way, the trip from New York to Los Angeles could be accomplished in just two days, instead of the three required by train—but it also would require the partnership of railroads to succeed.

  A month after Freddy flew with Lindbergh, the Wall Street Journal announced the creation of Transcontinental Air Transport (TAT), which brought together many of the biggest names in transportation and finance. The plane business was represented not only by the Wright Brothers and Glenn Curtiss but by Henry Ford, since Ford Motors was now also in the aircraft-engine business. The brokers were led by Blair & Company, the Wall Street firm that handled much of the Rockefellers’ money.

  There were only two rail industry partners in the venture. One was the mighty Pennsylvania Railroad, which bought 20 percent of the company. The other was Fred Harvey—both the company and Freddy personally. While the Santa Fe agreed to be the rail line for TAT passengers in the West, its executives felt it would be a conflict of interest to invest in an alternative form of transportation. Freddy, of course, couldn’t wait to be a major player in the airline business. He wanted the first meals served in the air to be Fred Harvey meals. He wanted the first servers on planes to be Harvey Girls.

  The company raised some $5 million ($63 million) in start-up capital from its founding partners. It is unclear whether Freddy convinced his father to put up company money for this investment or used his own funds, since he had recently inherited more than $100,000 ($1.2 million) from his mother’s estate. But according to the Wall Street Journal announcement of the deal, there were only two private investors in the group that bought the original stock. One was railroad magnate William Vanderbilt. The other was Freddy Harvey.

  A few days later, Charles Lindbergh announced he had joined the company and would map out the route for the fourteen-passenger Transcontinental Air Transport planes. From that moment on, few used the company’s cumbersome moniker. They just called it “the Lindy Line.”

  “Air travel in the U.S. is soon to emerge from the spasmodic era of the thermos bottle, the cheese sandwich and the leather jacket,” Time magazine crowed, reporting that the price of the trip would be comparable with first-class rail travel: about $375 ($4,713) from coast to coast, only $40 ($503) more than the train.

  Time made special note of the safety features that would “comfort nervous passengers.” The planes wouldn’t fly at night, and the treacherous Allegheny Mountains, known as the “Hell Stretch”—the Bermuda Triangle of early aviation—would be crossed by train only in both directions.

  IT WAS A VERY good time to be Ford and Freddy Harvey. Only weeks after the announcement of Fred Harvey’s alliance with the nation’s first major airline, the GOP descended on Kansas City for its national convention. The Republicans, who had controlled the White House for most of the 1920s, came to the Midwest to praise themselves for five years of small government and “Coolidge Prosperity.” And since President Coolidge declined to run again, the GOP planned to elect his cabinet member Herbert Hoover. It was a backslapping, good-time convention, steeped in the self-congratulatory spirit of a decade well done.

  And the Harveys were Kansas City’s finest hosts. The Fred Harvey restaurants and stores in Union Station were packed. Ford entertained Republican bigwigs on the greens and fairways of the Kansas City Country Club. The Washington Post reported that the first big golf game of the convention pitted Ford and another local business leader against Campbell Slemp, the former Virginia congressman currently serving as President Coolidge’s personal secretary, and legendary protectionist senator Reed Smoot of Utah, chairman of the finance committee and a powerful friend of the National Park Service. Ford knew better than to win. He and his partner were roundly trounced.

  Freddy did his entertaining on the polo field, where his Kansas City Country Club team hosted the first-ever GOP polo tournament. Squads competed from all over the country, including a foursome from Akron’s Chagrin Valley Hunt Club that featured the sons of tire magnate Harvey Firestone, w
ho never missed a match.

  But the biggest news in the tournament was a team fielded by Will Rogers—who shared Freddy’s addictions to polo and flying. Rogers was well-known in Hollywood for having his own personal polo field, and he was the first major celebrity to completely embrace air travel, flying to engagements on mail planes if necessary, no matter how troubling the weather. To get to Kansas City that week, for example, he had flown a Western Air Express mail plane that crash-landed in Las Vegas, Nevada, breaking its right wheel on touchdown and flipping over on its back. With only a few cuts and bruises, Rogers got back on the plane after the wheel was fixed and flew through harsh winds to Cherokee, Wyoming, where he refueled. But during takeoff, the plane hit a gopher hole that snapped a strut, so he had to stop and wait for a new plane to arrive from Cheyenne before continuing to Kansas City.

  Will Rogers was feeling particularly fearless, because his popularity had reached heights never before imagined even in Lindbergh’s America. A cover story in the May 31, 1928, issue of Life magazine announced that he would be running for president, the candidate of the “anti-bunk” party The mock candidacy was simply an excuse for him to cover the presidential campaign for Life, but like all the best faux politicians and fake newsmen who followed, Rogers attracted more popular interest than the election.

  By night, Will Rogers filled the Shubert Theater in downtown Kansas City with his wildly popular one-man show. But by day, he played polo, leading a team of his native Oklahomans called the Will Rogers Cowboys. Freddy was a star for the hometown favorites, the Kansas City Country Club Blues, and their teams finally met on the fifth day of the tournament.

  Freddy scored the first goal, but Rogers’s team scored the next three. The match remained close until the comedian’s horse kicked in a goal, bringing a broad grin to his face. After that, Rogers went on a scoring spree, finishing with eight goals, the last one from sixty yards out.

  In between the polo and the parties, the Republicans nominated Hoover, who had served as Coolidge’s secretary of commerce for the past seven years. He was considered a safe choice. Besides being pro-business, he was a well-known humanitarian—the government’s point man during the Mississippi flood—and his wife was poised to become the first First Lady with a college degree. Hoover was fully expected to win in a landslide that fall, and to keep America’s economic motor running for years to come.

  ON A THURSDAY afternoon not long after the Republicans left town, Freddy phoned the house to see if his wife needed anything.

  “Something terrible just happened!” Betty screamed, holding the receiver in her left hand because her right was dripping with blood.

  Freddy rushed home with the police detective in Union Station, Edward Boyle. They found twenty-three-year-old Betty “prostrated from fright,” with a bloody knife wound above her wrist and several other superficial cuts.

  Betty said that not long after the servants left for the day, there was a knock at the front door. She opened it a crack—leaving the chain bolted—and saw a well-dressed young man with a Van Dyke beard, heavy eyebrows, a high forehead, and a sallow complexion that made her wonder if he might be on drugs. Before she could think, he reached in through the crack, grabbed her arm, and put a knife to her wrist, ordering her to let him in.

  She told police that when she refused, he slashed her arm. So she opened the door.

  “I want your jewel box and I want it quick,” he said.

  “I have no jewel box,” she cried.

  According to the police report, the intruder then picked her up and carried her upstairs, where he forced her to lie on her bed, but only after a struggle during which she received several more defensive cuts on her arms.

  “Now, tell me where that jewel box is or I’ll cut you to death,” he said.

  Betty gave him the two diamond rings she was wearing and told him he could have anything else, if he would just leave. He looked at the rings and threw them aside.

  “Those are nothing!” he growled. “I want the Harvey jewels!”

  Apparently, in the public’s imagination, there was a treasure chest of priceless gems—perhaps including that diamond-studded toothbrush—passed down by Fred Harvey to his heirs.

  Betty said that when she insisted all she had was the jewelry in her dresser, the thief jumped on top of her, pressing the knife to her throat. It was at that very moment, she said, that Freddy called home. The ringing phone startled the thief, who released her immediately and fled.

  Since several details of her story, as reported, sound more than a little implausible, it is unclear whether something less ominous—or more ominous—actually took place. But Freddy didn’t hush it up. He publicly demanded an investigation.

  “I am furious and aching to lay my hands on the fellow,” he told one reporter. “Of course his moustache is shaved off by now so he’ll be hard to find. But I only hope I’ll be able to get at him a few minutes some time.”

  Police never caught the intruder, and the media coverage eventually died down. But what Freddy described as “the unnerving of my wife” had a lasting impact. Doctors started making frequent house calls to 3533 Locust Street, and Betty took a long time to bounce back. Her wounds were superficial, but the trauma was not—especially since she had been obsessing about her health and her body for some time before the attack. In the six years she and Freddy had been married, she had been desperate to have a child. But it just wasn’t happening.

  She was also struggling with the breakup of her parents’ marriage. Several months after she was attacked, her father took one of his periodic trips to England—and never returned. To keep up appearances, her parents pretended that they were maintaining some kind of long-distance romance because he needed to be in England for business. Her father did breed horses there, specializing in mounts for big fox hunts that sometimes included the royal family, and her older brother later joined him in the business. But the Drages’ marriage had long been over.

  Unfortunately, before he left, Betty’s father had spent most of her mother’s substantial inheritance. So Lucy Drage—the proud, stylish heir to what remained of the Christie grain fortune—found herself alone and forced to do something she never dreamed would be necessary: She had to get a job. Society ladies in Kansas City had been asking her for design advice for years, so she decided to open a shop. She would help her friends redo the interiors of their mansions and redesign their gardens.

  Because she didn’t have enough money left to finance such a shop, she was forced to ask for help. Freddy co-signed a bank loan for his mother-in-law, and also lent her some start-up money himself.

  WHEN HERBERT HOOVER was elected in November, 1928 was shaping up to be what financial writers would dub “the greatest year in the history of Wall Street”—and 1929 was projected to be even better. The railroads and the nation’s manufacturing industries were at their absolute peak, and some of the newer businesses were coming on strong. With more road building, automobile sales continued to climb, and a new mobile culture was emerging. The business of mass entertainment was being revolutionized by the proliferation of radios—driven by the wide appeal of shows like Amos ’n’ Andy, which premiered on the Chicago Daily News’s radio station WMAQ in March 1928—and the technological breakthrough of “talking” motion pictures. While Al Jolson’s The Jazz Singer, which had some isolated sound sequences among the traditional title cards, had come out the year before, it wasn’t until 1928 that full-length “talkies” were released by Hollywood, starting with the Warner Brothers gangster film Lights of New York.

  It was also a heady time for Fred Harvey, because the 1920s had turned out to be the decade when Americans discovered how much they liked other people’s cooking. With women working, nightlife booming, and Prohibition still forcing innovation in prepared food (to make up for lost liquor sales), the number of restaurants in the United States had grown astronomically in the past ten years.

  Fred Harvey remained the most admired and copied restaurant and hotel
system in the country, although the Childs cafeteria chain now had more locations, with over one hundred cafeterias, primarily in New York and other eastern cities. Unlike Fred Harvey, Childs owned some of its own real estate and directly leased the rest—and given its pricey downtown locations, the rent alone on 125 leases cost the company $48 million ($603 million) annually. To pay for this overhead, the Childs brothers took the family business public, allowing the firm to raise enormous capital for expansion. Unfortunately, it also cost them their company. In the fall of 1928, the board of directors, now largely controlled by DuPont and Standard Oil money, began to expel all of the original Childs brothers from leadership positions.

  When Ford heard stories like this, they reinforced his conviction that he had been right to keep Fred Harvey private. And nobody could argue with the results of remaining family owned. By the fall of 1928, he was running twenty-five hotels, forty sitdown restaurants, fifty-four lunchrooms, and the newsstands and gift shops in eighty cities along the Santa Fe. He was also running all the restaurants, soda fountains, and retail stores in union stations in Chicago, Kansas City, St. Louis, Houston, Wichita, Galveston, and Fort Worth, as well as luxury hotel operations at the Grand Canyon and in Santa Fe. He was serving over twelve million meals a year.

  The Harvey hospitality empire had just celebrated its fiftieth anniversary and was uniquely poised for the future. By controlling the Santa Fe depots and dining cars, Ford had exclusive access not only to all the train passengers but to the drivers along the new Route 66— which still hadn’t been paved, but was already one of the most popular rides on the new federal highway system. And because Freddy had helped position the company at the forefront of the air passenger business, they could one day vie for control of restaurants and retail stores in airports.