Frontier Jews of the Fred Harvey West
While searching the history of culinary hero Harvey and the Santa Fe Railroad, I met a surprising number of fascinating fellow Jews
By Stephen Fried
Growing up in the east — the product of suburban shuls and summer camp — you don’t hear a lot of stories about bubbies and zaydes on horseback herding cattle, or great uncles at rail depots fighting off dusty desperados in cowboy America.
So I was deeply and pleasantly surprised to meet so many colorful and fascinating frontier Jews while writing my latest book, Appetite for America, a historical biography of revolutionary businessman Fred Harvey. He was the founding father of the American hospitality industry, whose multigenerational family business, running a chain of trackside restaurants and hotels along the Santa Fe railroad from Chicago to LA starting in the 1870s, was said to have civilized the wild west.
I chose the Harvey saga in part because it seemed so completely removed — in time and space — from the contemporary world of synagogues, spirituality and the retail business of religion I had spent years covering, not without controversy, in The New Rabbi. But one of the many lessons I needed to learn about American history is just how much more diverse and multicultural this country was far earlier than many of us have been taught.
My education came through two largely unknown frontier Jews, whose stories became highlights of the book and the presentations I’m doing across the country at historical museums, Jewish book events (with kosher Fred Harvey food!), colleges, even at the Grand Canyon (where the historic Fred Harvey hotels — crucial to the development of the canyon as a tourist attraction, and the national park system — are still in operation.) I tell the story of Fred Harvey, his dutiful son Ford (who ran the company, in his father’s name, longer than Fred did), their legendary waitresses the “Harvey Girls” and how they changed the way we eat, drink, travel, spend our leisure time — even the way we see our country. I explain how Fred Harvey pioneered more equal-opportunity employment, since the company not only had the nation’s first core of working, independent women as waitresses, but some of its first female executives (including design guru Mary Colter) and high-level African-American employees, Iron Chefs from all over Europe, and partnerships with Native American artisans all over the Southwest.
It is a saga of American business and culture that most easterners — like me — are hearing for the first time, and most westerners have never before heard in depth. And the most surprising part of the story involves Dave Benjamin and Herman Schweizer, two Jewish immigrants to the wild west who provided a big part of the company’s heart, soul and smarts.
Benjamin, a cherubic, serious-minded Brit with wire-rim glasses and a trim moustache, went from being Fred Harvey’s favorite young bank teller in Leavenworth, Kansas to running the day-to-day operations of his Kansas City-based hospitality empire, as it grew to include over sixty trackside dining rooms and lunchrooms, twenty-five hotels, a huge cattle ranch, three large dairy and poultry farms, and a beverage facility that had the only license in the nation to bottle its own Coca-Cola. To manage a staff that grew to 7,000 employees in 80 different locations before widespread use of telephones, ingenious, exacting systems had to be put into place: while Fred inspired them, Dave had to detail, execute and maintain them.
To keep employees sharp and focused, Fred made surprise inspections — which often ended with him smashing a chipped plate or dirty glass on the floor, or yanking the cloth from an imperfectly set table. While he became famous for these incidents — there was even a telegraph code to warn he was due to arrive — the truth is he became ill not long after his company’s great success, and spent a good part of the year in England for his health. So it was Dave Benjamin who often rode the trains between Chicago and Los Angeles doing the inspections in his place, checking up on the Harvey cattle ranch, and also helping teach Fred’s son Ford the business.
Over the years, Dave also developed a Forrest Gumpian way of being present at, and surviving, more than his share of major historical disasters. Dave was in Galveston at the Fred Harvey depot restaurant the day of the deadly hurricane in 1900 and for two days was presumed to be one of the five thousand killed; he was in San Francisco during the earthquake in 1906 (Fred Harvey had a lunchroom in the Ferry Building, but its main restaurants were on the ferries crossing the bay); and in the summer of 1914, he and his family were vacationing in Europe, and found themselves among the thousands of America tourists trapped when WWI broke out.
Schweizer, on the other hand, was like a bold character out of Blazing Saddles — a short, stocky, prematurely balding, cigar-chomping German immigrant who rose from selling oranges on Santa Fe trains in California to managing the Harvey eating house in Gallup, New Mexico (a job he got after winning a fight with a tough freight train crew that refused to pay — crowning one with a Fred Harvey signature sugar bowl and pulling an unloaded antique gun on the other.) His hobby was riding by horseback to nearby Navajo trading posts and villages to acquire blankets, pottery and jewelry. While he had an eye for the most artful work, Schweizer also knew that tourists wanted lighter, less expensive pieces — so he brought the craftsman smaller pieces of turquoise and thinner silver, and commissioned the more Navajo Lite style of jewelry that most people, today, associate with the Southwest. When the company decided to create the nation’s best Indian art museum at the Albuquerque Santa Fe station — to entertain tourists during the thirty-minute meal stop — Schweizer began buying every collection he could find (many belonging to Jewish merchant families in New Mexico.)
He was the driving force behind the powerful Harvey Indian art business which fueled the growing public fascination with native culture, servicing all the major museums and private collectors, especially publisher William Randolph Hearst. (Schweizer and Hearst had an epic business correspondence, carried on over decades of arguing over prices and unpaid bills — Hearst once offered to pay his tab with a gushy article about the Harvey operation at the Grand Canyon in his papers — and access to the most special pieces hidden away in the company vault.) Schweizer represented Fred Harvey as a major player in the relationship between Native Americans and the U.S. Government.
What were these Harvey men like as Jews? Dave and his four siblings — especially his bachelor brother Alfred, who lived with he and his family and ran a large furniture company — were considered “the embodiment of the Jewish ideal of citizenship … the highest type of the loyal and true American[s],” responsible for “in large degree, the increasing respect and understanding that the non-Jewish community maintained for the Jew,” according to Jewish press reports at the time (quoted in Frank Baker’s Roots in a Moving Stream: The Centennial History of Congregation B’nai Jehudah of Kansas City, Missouri, 1870–1970.) Alfred ran United Jewish Charities (UJC) in Kansas City for 18 years, and was known to give up to half his salary to charity. Dave worked with his brother at UJC — which often partnered with the local Catholic Charities where Ford Harvey and his wife Judy were leaders — but was also active in the nascent YM-YWHA movement, which led to the creation of Jewish Community Centers, which he saw as havens “for those who can’t afford the more expensive form of Jewish clubs.” The Benjamin brothers (there was another, Harry, who also worked at Fred Harvey) helped their sister Fannie found one of the country’s first Jewish summer camps for needy immigrant children, starting in 1907, which came to be known as “Bittersweet Camp.” Dave was also very involved in making sure Jewish charities helped all who were in need.
“I try to follow the teachings of Judaism,” he said, “by helping my brother, and I don’t think that help should be limited to my Jewish brother.”
Dave was apparently not as much of a shul-goer as his brother Alfred and did, like many Jews of his day, get interested in Christian Science as an alternative form of spirituality. (He said it helped heal his eczema.) In fact, according to historian Frank Baker, the controversial rabbi at the Benjamin’s synagogue, B’nai Jehudah, Harry Mayer, was one of only two members of the Reform clergy’s governing body to vote against a WWI-era “resolution stating one could not be both a good Jew and a Christian Science practitioner.” Most contemporary members of the Benjamin family in Kansas City, Los Angeles and elsewhere practice Judaism, a few still practice Christian Science.
Alfred died in 1923 — a rabbi and a Catholic priest presided at the funeral, and outside B’nai Jehudah a mourner was overheard saying “I would rather be Alfred Benjamin than anyone I know.” (An Alfred Benjamin Memorial fountain was erected in Swope Park.) After that, Dave did his best to take his brother’s place in the philanthropic community, cutting back his committments to Fred Harvey to devote more time to good works. A decade later — on March, 10, 1933 — he and his wife were in Los Angeles when that city was rocked by an earthquake registering 6.3 on the Richter scale. They were fine — the Journal-Post headline read the next day, “David Benjamin Telephones Calmly as Earthquake Showers Plaster.” But weeks later, in the privacy of his Kansas City home, he took ill while playing cards with his wife, his sister and one of his sons, and died of a heart attack.
Little is known about Schweizer’s religious beliefs — a lifelong bachelor (but a beloved “Uncle Herman” to his niece, Jennie Stein, in Chicago and other close family friends) he apparently did become more active in the Jewish community in Albuquerque as he grew older, both with the local chapter of B’nai Brith and the Reform congregation Temple Albert (in whose cemetery he was buried.) But he played a crucial role in one of the most famous Jewish-American events of the 20th Century.
In December 1930, Albert Einstein left Germany to spend the winter lecturing at Cal Tech just as Hitler’s Nazi Party was making its first significant election showing. He first sailed to New York, where he celebrated Hanukah with a huge throng at Madison Square Garden, and then spent time on the west coast. In March, 1931, he decided to make what had become the quintessential American pilgrimage — to see the Grand Canyon.
He was met there by a contingent of Hopi Indians — who Einstein assumed were local natives, not realizing that most of them worked for Fred Harvey. (He had recently told a class at Cal Tech, “there lies deep meaning in the fact that children of all civilized countries are so fond of playing Indians.”) Herman Schweizer was also there, both to meet the renowned scientist and to act as translator, since Einstein was still more comfortable speaking German.
As with all visiting dignitaries, the Hopi planned to present Einstein with a headdress and make him an honorary chief of the tribe. But they had no idea who he was.
So they pulled Schweizer, their boss, aside.
“What’s his business?” one of the Harvey Indians asked.
“He invented the Theory of Relativity,” Schweizer replied.
“All right, we’ll call him ‘Great Relative.’”
Stephen Fried is the author of Appetite for America: Fred Harvey and the Business of Civilizing the Wild West — One Meal at a Time (Bantam) and director of the annual Fred Harvey History Weekend in New Mexico. He teaches at Columbia and Penn. www.stephenfried.com. This article first appeared in “Text/Context: Fresh Encounters with Jewish Tradition,” a supplement to The Jewish Week.
