CHAPTER 19
AFTER FRED TURNED HIS PROXY OVER TO FORD, HE BEGAN TO finalize his will. And if he needed any lessons on how not to handle his estate, he had only to consider the example of George Pullman. In the years since the strike of 1894, Pullman’s company had done well for investors, and he had been personally charitable. But in the public consciousness, the growing labor movement had successfully painted him as perhaps the worst boss in American history.
Pullman was never forgiven for allowing the entire country to be closed for business, and for letting so many be killed and hurt during the protests, simply because he didn’t want to negotiate with his workers. His ideas about controlling life in his company town, long seen as “un-American,” were eventually found to be illegal. While his workers may not have fully agreed with the characterization—especially the sleeping-car porters, who still had some of the best jobs available to black men—Pullman had become the prototype of the corporate businessman more concerned about his stockholders than his employees.
In fact, Pullman’s reputation was so tainted that he decided to leave one last great invention as his legacy: a tomb impervious to desecration by his enemies. After he died in the fall of 1897, at the age of sixty-six, his body was placed in a mahogany casket lined with lead. After the funeral at Chicago’s Graceland Cemetery, his coffin was wrapped in tar paper and then lowered into a pit thirteen feet long, nine feet wide, and eight feet deep, with eighteen inches of steel-reinforced concrete at the bottom. Once the coffin was precisely in place—it had to be equidistant from each wall within a fraction of an inch—it was encased in a one-inch layer of quick-hardening asphalt. Then the concrete floor, which was already set and cold, was warmed up so it would mesh better with the fresh concrete poured all around the encased coffin—which created a rim a half inch above the asphalt layer. Next, eight steel rails were laid across the casket and bolted together with two long iron rods. More tar paper was used to create a small space below the rails to prevent settling that might crush the casket, and then enough concrete was poured to cover the rails. Once this set, another entire day was spent pouring layer after layer of concrete, reinforced with metal sheeting. Finally, dirt and sod were placed on top of the concrete and myrtle planted in it so the grave would better fit in with the others around it.
But none of these fortifications could protect Pullman’s family from the bombshell of his will. He disinherited his twin sons, one of them his namesake (whose fiancée immediately broke off their engagement). The bulk of his personal fortune—estimated at $7.6 million ($203 million)—went to his daughters, his wife, and a fund to build a retraining school for his employees. Leadership of his company was turned over to Robert Todd Lincoln, the late president’s son, a lawyer who had been one of Pullman’s right-hand men for years.
Pullman’s sons didn’t sue the estate, but others did, including his personal barber, who claimed unsuccessfully that he deserved one of the $500 ($13,389) bequests left to household servants because he had shaved the master every morning and acted as his “gazette,” telling him the news of the day and “sundry funny anecdotes.” Pullman’s wife eventually decided to give her sons some of her money, but the entire affair was a front-page family fiasco.
Fred Harvey would have none of that. While he had admired Pullman as a young man, he had deliberately built his business to be the opposite of the Pullman Palace Car Company. He wanted Fred Harvey to remain a closely held, privately owned company with employees who felt as if they were part of an ever-growing extended family. He would leave his wife and children more than enough to live comfortably, but not in a way that might jeopardize his reputation as an exemplary boss forever devoted to maintaining the standard.
AS FORD’S NEW ROLE in the family business became clear, his sister Minnie decided she would like to be more involved. Minnie was now a cosmopolitan twenty-seven-year-old who had been living in New York on and off since attending boarding school there. Smart, direct, and sometimes stunningly opinionated—a “tsk” always at the ready—she was a no-nonsense woman except when it came to her hats and her little dogs, which she fussed over like spoiled children. She had strong, handsome features and thick brown hair, which she usually wore pulled back, and both of her parents could see themselves in her face: She had her father’s aquiline nose, her mother’s cherubic cheeks. Unlike Ford, she had managed to escape from Leavenworth and develop a more independent relationship with her parents. Her father had always managed to spend quality time with her when he was in New York, and she would return home periodically to be with her mother, with whom she also sometimes traveled. As her parents grew further apart, she was sometimes their only point of contact.
Minnie had recently married a New Yorker, John Huckel. A tall, fit man with a closely trimmed beard, an eternally arched eyebrow, and a penchant for playful confrontation, Huckel grew up in a well-known Episcopalian clergy family—his father was the longtime rector at St. Ann’s in Brooklyn. But, after graduating from Williams College, he chose publishing over the pulpit. He spent several years at Harper & Brothers, the nation’s leading publisher of books and magazines (including Harper’s Weekly and what was then called Harper’s New Monthly Magazine), before becoming assistant publisher of the New York Evening Post.
When Minnie married John Huckel in the fall of 1896, it appeared they would live the charmed lives of New York socialites, “at home” on 91st Street and Columbus Avenue, with summers spent at the seaside resort of Spring Lake, New Jersey, or in Europe. But Minnie grew homesick, in part because of a health crisis that was kept hush-hush. Not long after marrying, she became pregnant with twins, but had an especially difficult miscarriage that left her unable to bear more children. Besides wanting to be closer to her family—especially Ford’s children, Kitty and Freddy, whom she adored as her own—she had also acquired the Harvey fascination with the West. With Ford taking control of their father’s company, she saw an opportunity to relocate closer to home, become involved with the business, and travel as well.
Minnie’s upbringing made her realize there would be no way for her to have an official role at Fred Harvey. She had grown up listening to Susan B. Anthony—whose namesake niece, “Susie B.,” had attended childhood birthday parties at the Harvey home—and had watched her father build an empire that made it possible for thousands of American women to have good jobs, even careers. But she knew there was a vast difference between hiring Harvey Girls and creating a place in the boardroom for a Harvey Woman.
Instead, she did what strong, resourceful women had been doing for centuries: She became a power behind the throne. She planted the idea in the head of her husband that living in Missouri wouldn’t be so bad, and she nudged her father and brother to hire him. Eventually, she got her way. The Huckels moved to Kansas City, John went to work running the company’s fledgling newsstand and retail division, and Minnie advised him on dealing with her family, and all their business.
IN 1898, AMERICA had a little war. It was one of those rare “short, winnable wars” that actually turn out to be both short and winnable—a few hundred Americans were killed, while the enemy lost tens of thousands of men. When the war was over, America was changed forever. Especially Fred Harvey’s America.
Since the American frontier had now expanded all the way to the Pacific—everything between Canada and Mexico was part of the United States, with only the territories of New Mexico, Arizona, and Oklahoma awaiting statehood—there were many who felt the nation should start looking for a new frontier outside its borders. Cuba, a Spanish colony that was home to many American-owned sugar plantations, was especially tempting, and President McKinley was pressured to help Cuban revolutionaries push the Spaniards out. Most of that pressure came from the press, in particular publishers Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, both of whom were testing how far the media’s muscles could be flexed.
In late January 1898, the U.S. battleship Maine was sent to Havana harbor. This incensed the Spanish minister to the United States, whose private letter lambasting President McKinley as “weak” and “a low politician” was leaked to the newspapers. When the Maine exploded and sank on the night of February 15, drowning more than 250 crewmen, it set off an explosion of patriotic fervor against the Spanish, who the newspapers claimed were responsible. America was pressured to declare war on Spain and soon established its first base as an imperial power—at Guantánamo Bay.
The impact of the war on the Santa Fe and Fred Harvey was immediate—suddenly they were transporting and feeding thousands of troops. Then Theodore Roosevelt, the thirty-nine-year-old assistant secretary of the navy, resigned his post to enlist and create a “cowboy cavalry” that would bring the best riflemen and horsemen of the American frontier—cowboys and Indians alike—together to defend the country. Roosevelt’s western pedigree came from the years that he had spent at his ranch in the Badlands of North Dakota. Yet when it came time to recruit for his cavalry, he went right to the heart of Santa Fe country, choosing “dead shots” and “fearless fighters” primarily from New Mexico, Indian Territory, and Texas.
It was a great news story, which brought attention to the unsung (or at least under-sung) virtues of the Southwest and all the “true Americans” who lived there. And then the story got even better. Roosevelt’s Ivy League polo-playing chums in the East insisted on lending their cultivated athletic and equestrian skills to the effort. Cowboys and preppies would charge side by side, led by swashbuckling Teddy Roosevelt.
The cavalry sounded like something concocted for the wildly popular Buffalo Bill show, which had been touring the country for fifteen years reenacting cowboy and Indian dramas. Its full name was “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World,” so the newspapers nicknamed the cowboy cavalry “Roosevelt’s Rough Riders.” Americans came to know these men the way they would later know the Apollo astronauts: They were heroes before they even did anything.
Ironically, the Rough Riders never got to ride in Cuba. The troopships had no room for their horses, so their famous attacks on Las Guásimas and San Juan Hill were actually done on foot. But they did win lopsided victories and suffered several dozen casualties.
The Spanish-American War lasted less than four months, and when Spain surrendered in early August, the United States had not only “freed” Cuba but had won for itself Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and Guam. America also made a deal to buy the Philippines from Spain for $20 million ($536 million) in a process McKinley called “benevolent assimilation.” All in all, Spain lost over 50,000 men, and America lost only 2,446 soldiers, most of them having died from disease.
“A splendid little war” is how John Hay, then U.S. ambassador to England, described the conflict; one sailor on the U.S.S. Oregon reportedly saw it more as “a turkey shoot.” Both would agree, however, that it served as an excellent debut for America as a world power.
Domestically, the war had a very different effect. Besides jump-starting the economy, it further united the United States. The experience of facing a common enemy—even a fairly weak one—was profound. It fostered a patriotism that was genuinely national and felt inextricably linked to and inspired by that “frontier spirit” of the Old West. It was a renewed version of the idealistic spark that historian Frederick Jackson Turner—whose work was still obscure, but was known to Roosevelt—wondered if the country might have lost forever.
The war also seemed to trigger the first of many cycles of Americans looking within—within the country, within themselves—to recapture that spirit of the frontier, that authentic “real America,” as a way of counterbalancing the forces of modernity and urbanization. This translated into a postwar wave of interest in cowboys, Indians, and the Great Southwest.
To capitalize on this, the Santa Fe and Fred Harvey jumped at the opportunity to host the signature national event of the new frontiersmen: the Rough Riders’ reunion. In the late winter of 1899, cities all over the country were jockeying for the right to host the reunion. Every state that had a resident Rough Rider wanted the event, and each one was convinced it could lure the key guest: Teddy Roosevelt, who had since been elected governor of New York. Civic leaders in Chicago, Kansas City, Oklahoma City, El Paso, Santa Fe, and Albuquerque were most vocal about getting the reunion, which was expected to draw huge crowds and the entire national press corps. Fund-raising and lobbying were well under way in all these cities when suddenly word spread that the Rough Riders had agreed to hold their reunion in … Las Vegas, New Mexico. And it just so happened that the Santa Fe had recently finished building a new kind of hotel there.
The Castañeda in Las Vegas was the prototype of the innovative, glamorous trackside resorts that Ed Ripley planned to build—for Fred Harvey to run—all along his new and improved Santa Fe. The hotel was a spectacular U-shaped Mission Revival–style mansion with lush gardens and a main entrance that faced the tracks, not the town, so passengers would feel more welcome, more at home, the moment they got off the train. And Teddy Roosevelt, his Rough Riders, and all the national press would be staying there. In one of the first instances of corporate sponsorship in history, the Santa Fe appears to have made a discreet deal to pay for all transportation and lodging if the event was held in its new signature Fred Harvey hotel.
That deal was most likely brokered by the railroad’s first vice president, Paul Morton—a Roosevelt family friend from Nebraska whose father, J. Sterling Morton, had been Grover Cleveland’s secretary of agriculture (and invented Arbor Day). Roosevelt, who was already thinking about the presidency, got an all-expenses-paid whistle-stop tour on the Santa Fe, commandeering Morton’s plush private Pullman car—and Morton got a chance to shadow the newly minted American hero.
As the Rough Riders’ train approached New Mexico, so did a huge thunderstorm, causing local flooding that washed out half a mile of Santa Fe track. But that could be repaired. The bunting catastrophe that befell downtown Las Vegas, however, could not. Every building in the city had been decorated with brightly colored streamers and ribbons, all of which were either blown away or soaked until the colors ran, leaving the houses and storefronts dripping red, white, and blue.
The tempest did not quash the enthusiasm of Las Vegans, however. When Roosevelt arrived at their depot, thousands were there to greet him, and he was “almost lifted bodily from his feet by the press of persons anxious to grasp his hand,” according to the Los Angeles Times. The crowds followed him down the train platform as he and other Rough Riders kept serially saluting all the way along the main courtyard of the Castañeda hotel. There Roosevelt stood on the veranda, along with New Mexico’s governor, Miguel Otero, and an entourage of Rough Riders, until he could salute and shake hands no more and headed into the hotel for some Harvey hospitality.
The restaurant at the Castañeda featured a large number of native southwestern dishes among the Fred Harvey favorites, including albondigas soup with beef and veal meatballs and enchiladas stuffed with chopped chicken, chilies, and olives, along with comforting classics like Fried Chicken Castañeda with fresh tomato sauce and French peas. For the Rough Riders’ visit, the Harvey Girls wore special outfits. Angelica, the St. Louis firm that was now making all of Fred Harvey’s uniforms, created a western version with long denim cowboy skirts and matching vests.
The next day there was a huge parade led by Roosevelt on horseback. As it began, he was handed the original regimental flag, which was badly torn and covered with powder burns.
“Boys, it doesn’t seem much to look at now, does it?” he said, as a tear rolled down his cheek. “But it was worth a good deal to us on San Juan Hill.”
Roosevelt departed early the next morning in his private railroad car, leaving his compatriots to enjoy a day of bronco busting, horse racing, roping, and games of the new national pastime—baseball. And as many of the Rough Riders were basking in their glory, with no further military plans except to attend future reunions, others talked about reenlisting. They wanted to finish the job they had started.
THE U.S. PURCHASE of the Philippines had not gone exactly as planned, and the two countries were now at war—America’s first sustained imperialist war outside its own hemisphere. Over forty thousand American troops were already there, with no end in sight.
Not long after the Rough Riders’ reunion, a small detachment from the U.S. 33rd Voluntary Infantry entered the remote Philippine town of Cabaranan on the island of Pangasinan. In one of the Nepa huts, Lieutenant Hugh Williams was surprised to discover a worn piece of silverware that immediately conjured images of home.
It was a spoon etched with the name “Fred Harvey.”
Williams was utterly baffled as to how the spoon had gotten there, since his men were supposedly the first American regiment to set foot in Cabaranan. His best guess was that it had been picked up by one of the many soldiers who rode the Santa Fe to California, where they were shipped off to the Philippines. It had probably been taken from him in Manila by a rebel soldier who then fled to the remote island.
Williams sent the spoon back to the States. He thought Mr. Fred Harvey might like to have it. When it arrived, Sally Harvey had a leather case made for it, and displayed it in the dining room with the rest of her growing collection of silverware.