Product Description
The legendary life and entrepreneurial vision of Fred Harvey helped shape American culture and history for three generations—from the 1880s all the way through World War II—and still influence our lives today in surprising and fascinating ways. Now award-winning journalist Stephen Fried re-creates the life of this unlikely American hero, the founding father of the nation’s service industry, whose remarkable family business civilized the West and introduced Ame… More >>
#1 by Brian P. Hudson on August 8, 2010 - 12:25 pm
I did enjoy reading this book, but I can truly say that I didn’t find it memorable. Harvey’s accomplishments are … well, he invented a form of tourism, or at least a way of *marketing* tourism. In a way, he’s responsible for some of the vapid tourist traps that blight the American landscape!
The book is not poorly written, nor dull, nor incomprehensible. I just found the subject matter somewhat uncompelling.
Rating: 3 / 5
#2 by Robert N. Ashcroft on August 8, 2010 - 3:24 pm
The topic is interesting, but Fried needed a more ruthless editor.
One issue is overwrought (at at times, overly cute) prose. Here’s a taste:
“Finally, on Tuesday, August 14, the emperor surrendered. World War II, the second war to end all wars, was finally over.”
The “second war to end all wars?” — completely unnecessary, and by WWII, no one thought that wars ended war. And the use of “finally” in successive sentences, ugh.
How about “Freditor’s Notes” (playing off Fred Harvey)? How about “Acknowledgements and Outshouts”? The Brits have a word for this, and it’s “twee”. Corny tending to saccharine.
Second problem: “scene recreations”. Here’s a taste:
“His nose was stuffy, and he felt a bit feverish as he sat at his desk in the elaborately wood-paneled corner office. As he kept feeling worse, he walked over to the large brass National Regulator Company thermometer mounted on the wall to see if heat had been turned up too high.”
The end notes acknowledges this bit as the start of a “scene recreation” (Fried’s words). Elsewhere, a travelogue in the book mentions Fried saw the thermometer for himself, but so far as I can tell, there’s absolutely zero evidence that anything like the recreated scene actually happened.
It might have, it’s certainly plausible, but plausibility ain’t history. And here’s the deal: even if this did happen, exactly like Fried says it does, it’s a distraction and it doesn’t advance the ball.
Third problem: dumping in absolutely everything into the book. Fried cannot mention anyone without an aside about that person, most of which does nothing to advance your understanding of the Harveys. Instead of simply saying that a particular doctor was an eminent cardiologist, we need to know, apparently, that the doctor was the first to diagnose a myocardial infarction in a living patient, that he was a cofounder of the American Heart Association, and that he discovered sickle-cell anemia. OK, fine, but the second generation Harvey who was dying, was doing so from the flu, so why the heck is any of this on-point?
There’s a whole page (that would be pg 253) devoted to the govt’s attempts at societal control in WWI. Fried doesn’t even attempt to tie it to the Harveys in any way shape or form. So why the heck is it in this book?
Inside this 400+ page book is a good, tight, 200 pager struggling to get out. Either Fried can’t resist showing off or he doesn’t have enough confidence in the subject material and feels he needs to jazz it up. It’s unfortunate.
Rating: 3 / 5
#3 by Aaron Gutsell on August 8, 2010 - 3:52 pm
The story of Fred Harvey is integral to the shaping of America. Harvey pioneered the chain restaurant, chain hotel, was the first significant employer for both African Americans and women, and he also created the first shopping mall. A mall in Kansas City is generally credited as the first, but it was built to compete with the local train station in which every store and diner was owned by Harvey and was open 24hrs. Even the popularity of Southwestern jewelry, Indian jewelry, may be attirbuted to Fred Harvey, who first started selling it at his trackside newsstands and sparked a craze. From the 1880s through the 1930s the Harvey system was the premier food chain in America, in many ways inventing the idea of eating out, and the Harvey Girls were a kind of forerunner to the Hooters girls of today. In its decline the company followed the usual blind alleys of airline food and diners, but a system built around passenger rail travel was inevitably doomed by the automobile and the highway. In the Appendix is a neat collection of Fred Harvey recipes you could try out for yourself, and an index of locations stretching from the 1870s through to the early 1960s. Stephen Fried’s book is well researched and clearly written and has some handy tips about booking one of the legendary rooms overlooking the Grand Canyon, another pioneering Harvey idea.
Rating: 4 / 5
#4 by Lostplanet on August 8, 2010 - 4:03 pm
This book is a terrific haunting read that takes the readers to the the mesmerzing past and introduces them to the rising history of the best country in the world. After reading the book, one wonders why someone with Fred Harvey’s stature and accomplishments did not rise to the fame and recognition that he truly deserved ?
Highly recommended for the history/non-fiction lover.
Rating: 5 / 5
#5 by fredtownward on August 8, 2010 - 6:16 pm
Like most “trainiacs” I had heard of Fred Harvey and the Harvey Girls; you cannot read a history of the western railroads without seeing them at least mentioned. But I had no idea just how significant and influential Fred Harvey was: the first national restaurant chain; the first national hotel chain; the first national bookstore chain; the largest employer of women at the time; one of the driving forces behind the development of all aspects of tourism in the Great Southwest; and a man and a company whose story and methods are still studied today in graduate schools of hotel, restaurant, and personnel management, advertising, and marketing. However, thanks to this enthusiastic, slightly hagiographic labor of love, I have a much better idea of what Fred Harvey was…
and what I missed out on by being born too late.
I also understand better why Fred Harvey finally failed. To my surprise, it was neither the Great Depression nor the postwar decline in railroad passenger traffic that did Fred Harvey in, rather it was the all too common decline in entrepreneurial drive and vision in subsequent generations of this family owned business.
Jennifer Bouani, the Horatio Alger of the 21st Century, believes that entrepreneurship can be taught to children and has written the Future Business Leaders’ Series of books in order to do just that: Tyler & His Solve-a-Matic Machine and Tyler Passes the Golden Key. Let us hope that she’s right because as Mr. Fried’s book and other books chronicling the history of American business like Burton W. Fulsom’s The Myth of the Robber Barons: A New Look at the Rise of Big Business in America convincingly prove, we damn sure cannot breed it!
It is almost proverbial; a man builds a great business, and his son or his son’s son pisses it all away. Exactly why this is so prevalent is unknown, but a good guess is the difference between growing up wealthy and growing up not wealthy. Growing up rich cannot help but have an impact on the drive and ambition of all but the strongest of wills and the most sterling of characters. It is no accident IMHO that the only Harvey with the drive and ambition and vision to exceed the original Fred Harvey just happened to be the only surviving son who grew up BEFORE they got rich, Ford Harvey, and even Ford Harvey got one big thing wrong, and I don’t mean his to us moderns downright silly (though all too common for his time) notion that women should not run a business.
Ford Harvey insisted on keeping the company in the family, which ensured its demise after his untimely death. A publicly-owned Fred Harvey might have resulted in no more Harveys at Fred Harvey sooner than turned out to be the case in real life, but it might also have resulted in a company leadership energetic enough to envision and manage the transition from railroad to highway and airline travel service, which the lesser ambitioned Harveys who followed him barely attempted. (Of course if reckless Freddy had lived or energetic Kitty instead of feckless Byron had replaced him, the end might have been postponed for awhile but probably for no more than a generation.)
Defects? A few. I wish Mr. Fried had somebody helping him who had a better grasp of what’s acceptable to tell about people. Maybe it’s just because I’m old-fashioned (or maybe it’s just because I’m old), but there are some things I don’t need to know, some things I don’t even WANT to know! Frankly, I found Mr. Fried’s seeming obsession with the sex lives of the Harveys more tiresome than titillating, especially regarding rumors even the author pronounced untrue or the lives of people only vaguely related to them. Nor was it just the sex. I also didn’t see the need for details about Fred Harvey Senior’s postsurgical struggles with his bodily functions nor the need for graphic descriptions of the condition of the bodies after a couple of plane crashes. (After one of them a man reacts to a journalist taking photos by yanking the film out of his camera. Would that he had been available to yank pages out of Mr. Fried’s typewriter.)
Mr. Fried also made a couple of historical mistakes that I caught. First, it was unrestricted submarine warfare, not revolution in Russia, that in addition to the Zimmermann Telegram brought the US into WWI (though Russia’s revolution certainly increased Allied desires for us to join them), and any and all post-Nagasaki threats to nuke Japan were bluffs. We had shot our wad, using up all available (for more than a year) fissionable material in our Trinity test and Hiroshima and Nagasaki attacks. The next step if Imperial Japan had called our bluff was conventional invasion…
and what surely would have been the bloodiest battles in all of human history.
Finally, I believe Mr. Fried was out of line when he made this crack in the Prologue:
“But unlike the chains of today, the Fred Harvey system was known for dramatically RAISING standards wherever it arrived, rather than eroding them.”
Earth to Stephen Fried, the only chains that enjoyed any long term success were those that set and maintained their own high standards because that’s how the chain business works. You don’t attract loyal customers over a country as vast and mobile as ours without making (and keeping!) the promise of a high standard of service in every location. Now because of something Fred Harvey didn’t have to worry about…
competition…
most modern chains have focused on much smaller slivers of the market, but that doesn’t mean that they have lower standards,…
just narrower ones.
Still, these are minor complaints about a true masterpiece of business history, and I’m even feeling inclined to track down the famous musical The Harvey Girls and its novelization The Harvey Girls, if I can ever find it.
Finally, I come away from this book with a better understanding of something that has always puzzled me: why did American railroads so eagerly abandon the business of passenger travel and express no interest in ever resuming it?
Because attitudinally they were never in it.
No industry that made George Pullman and Fred Harvey rich doing and managing what they could have done and managed themselves can claim to have been truly interested in passenger travel. The proverbial phrase, “Freight doesn’t complain,” says it all. Since the beginning, the profit in railroading has mostly been in carrying freight; carrying passengers was merely a necessary evil until technological advance produced a better way for people to travel. It is just too bad because there is no good reason why rail passenger travel could not be made profitable today at least under certain circumstances, but I don’t think it will be a major, freight-first American railroad that figures out how.
Rating: 5 / 5