EDITORS’ BOOKSHELF

The Harvey Girls

Women Who Opened the West

by Lesley Poling-Kempes; Paragon House; 213 pages.

You might have found yourself in Waynoka, Oklahoma, or Gallup, New Mexico, but if you were a single woman venturing west in the late 1800s, working for Fred Harvey’s hotel and restaurant chain was the way to do it. Harvey was a Kansas restaurateur hired by the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway in 1878 to establish a dining system along its route from Chicago to the Pacific.

After having forged a passage to the coast, the Santa Fe had to devise ways to lure passengers onto its new line. Train travel in the seventies was neither glamorous nor comfortable, and vacationers were intimidated by the vast expanses of the West. Towns, many composed of no more than a few hastily erected shacks and a population of dangerous-looking miners, were few and far between. Accommodations were limited, and dining usually consisted of prairie-dog stew and “sinker” biscuits, with fresh coffee once a week. Fred Harvey revolutionized train travel by creating an extensive network of more than forty hotels and restaurants that continued to grow even after his death in 1901. “This seemingly small asset,” writes Lesley Poling-Kempes, “would soon make [the Santa Fe] one of the great railroads of the world.”

Harvey set high standards from the start. His impeccably clean and welldecorated establishments served specialty foods—such as Coney Island clam chowder, Long Island duckling, and Gulf of Mexico sea turtle—hauled in from all across the United States. Waitressing was not then a respectable occupation, but being a Harvey Girl held a certain cachet because of the credentials and manners required. Harvey did not allow his girls to chew gum, to live outside the dormitory he provided, or to wear make-up, jewelry, or anything other than his black-andwhite uniforms. One traveler remarked that the Harvey system was “like nothing so much as a good old German nurse, starched and firm.”

In The Harvey Girls the author argues that this highly structured system offered real benefits to many women. It provided a sisterhood and a safe haven for them in a rough land, presenting them with a unique opportunity to forge a new life: “Independence, selfesteem, travel to interesting places, were all by-products of the system,” Poling-Kempes writes. Although some felt that the job was like slave labor, most enjoyed working for a Harvey House. “I just wanted to work … [and] find out some things for myself, away from the farm,” said one employee from Kansas City. Being a Harvey Girl was a dignified way for women to go West alone.

The automobile and the airplane forced most Harvey Houses to close after World War II, but not before they had done a great service both to women and to the West.

Vital Statistics on American Politics

by Harold W. Stanley and Richard G. Niemi; Congressional Quarterly Press; 435 pages.

Franklin Roosevelt gave 998 press conferences during his twelve-year stint as President. That’s an average of 6.9 a month, which seems about right for a man who had to explain what he was doing about a national depression and a world war. In contrast, Richard Nixon gave only 37 during his nearly six troubled years in office, averaging one press conference every two months. What this statistic means, the editors of Vital Statistics leave up to the reader. That’s just as well, because interpreting the data in this book is half the fun of reading it.

Why, for instance, did the number of pages in the Federal Register, the executive branch’s daily publication of new regulations, jump from 35,586 in 1973 to 60,221 in 1975? Whereas the increase from 5,307 pages in 1940 to 15,508 in 1945 can be explained by the bureaucratic demands of World War II, was it Watergate or the oil crisis that caused a rise in the 1970s? Or, more realistically, was it the flurry of governmental regulations passed at the end of the Nixon era?

Vital Statistics provides the raw stuff of history. There are sections on standard subjects like the Constitution, elections, political parties, Congress, the Presidency and the executive branch, the judiciary, foreign policy, and economic policy; there are also data on topics like the popularity of public officials, media coverage of politics, and public opinion. You can find out that while Ronald Reagan had trouble with two of his nominations to the Supreme Court, John Tyler failed five times to get his man onto the bench and six times to secure three cabinet appointments between 1843 and 1844. You can look up the number of diplomatic posts the United States maintained in 1781 (4) and in 1988 (168). And you can determine which state has the longest constitution (Alabama) and which the shortest (Vermont).

All this is made plain. The charts can be read even by the functionally innumerate; sources are clearly stated at the end of each table. Included also are study questions that seem at first blush to be ridiculously simpleminded. They aren’t.