Copyright by

Audrey Russek 2010

The Dissertation Committee for Audrey Sophia Russek Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation:

Culinary Citizenship in American Restaurants, 1919-1964

Committee:

Jeffrey L. Meikle, Supervisor

Warren J. Belasco

Sally H. Clarke

Janet M. Davis

Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt

Steven D. Hoelscher Culinary Citizenship in American Restaurants, 1919-1964

by

Audrey Sophia Russek, B.A., M.A.

Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of

The University of at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

The University of Texas at Austin December, 2010

Dedication

For my parents Frank S. Russek, Jr. and Marianne M. Emerson who feed my mind and my stomach

Acknowledgements

A dissertation is much like a recipe. While there is one person who conceives of the dish, it takes a lot of seasoning, trial and error, and other cooks in the kitchen to help develop it into a pièce de résistance. I have many fellow cooks to thank. First, I would like to acknowledge my advisor, Jeffrey M. Meikle. His advice, accessibility, and consummate professionalism helped to make the process of writing a dissertation not only bearable but enjoyable. Without the extraordinary generosity of his time and energy during the summer of 2010, I could not have completed this dissertation. It was also a pleasure and honor to work with the other members of my dissertation committee: Janet Davis, Elizabeth Engelhardt, Steve Hoelscher, Sally Clarke, and Warren Belasco. I am grateful for their commitment to and encouragement of this project, as well their feedback and numerous letters of recommendation. I also sincerely appreciate their recognition of the importance of teaching and mentoring and their support of my interest in balancing the writing of this dissertation with my commitment to the classroom. The American Studies Department at the University of Texas at Austin has been a safe haven in the trenches of graduate school. Early on, Mark Smith and Julia Mickenberg offered useful feedback on my teaching and writing that I have carried with me. I would also particularly like to thank Cynthia Frese, Ella Schwartz, and Valeri

Nichols-Keller. They not only helped me navigate the bureaucracy of a large state v institution, but they offered perspective, humor, and a reason to stop by the office. As mentors in other departments, Ann Daly and D‟Arcy Randall always treated me like a professional, a colleague, and a friend, and I am grateful for their wisdom and steady support. In one form or another, I have been in school for the last thirty-two years. Barbara Taylor, Ellis Turner, Bryan Garman, Ellen Piersen, and Bernie Noe have taught me what education, service, and lifelong learning looks like. Opportunities for research around the country would not have been possible without generous financial support. The American Studies Department and the University of Texas at Austin encouraged my original research with the Robert Crunden Memorial Award, the Louann Atkins Temple Endowed Presidential Fellowship, Professional Development Awards, and the Graduate Continuing Fellowship. The John W. Hartman

Center for Sales, Advertising, and Marketing History at Duke University provided me with a Hartman Center Travel Grant, and the New York Historical Society awarded me the Klingenstein Research Fellowship, both of which allowed me to conduct three weeks of research at each institution. This project would not be nearly as complete without the sources uncovered in an array of libraries and archives, and I am tremendously appreciative of the staff at the following institutions for helping me to navigate the vast resources in their collections and letting me make countless photocopies: the Alice Statler Library at the City College of San Francisco; the Nestlé Hotel Library and Kroch Library at ; the John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising, and Marketing History at Duke University; the Baker Library and Schlesinger Library at Harvard University; the Historical Society of Pennsylvania; the Historical Society of Washington, D.C.; the

Houston Public Library; the Library of Congress; the Museum of History and Industry (MOHAI) in Seattle, Washington; the New York Historical Society; the Schomburg vi Center at the New York Public Library; the San Francisco History Center at the San Francisco Public Library; the Shoreline Historical Museum in Shoreline, Washington; Texas Woman‟s University in Denton, Texas; the University of Alaska, Anchorage; and the Harry Ransom Center and Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin. In addition, the Inter-Library Loan staff at the University of Texas at Austin tracked down a vast number of hard-to-find guidebooks, cookbooks, and pamphlets, for which I am eternally grateful. While research and writing are satisfying endeavors, at the end of the day it‟s time to leave the papers behind and enjoy the company of others. I am incredibly appreciative of family, friends, and acquaintances who offered their homes, meals, and even their cars to me during my out-of-town archival research trips. In particular, I would like to acknowledge the generosity and hospitality of Stephanie Acker, Denise Dunning, Chuck and Karen Lockyer, and Dr. and Mrs. Thomas Dyckman. Jerry Logan gave me the gift of staying home while he conducted remote research at the College of William and Mary and then painstakingly copied all of the digital photographs onto CD-ROMs. I am also lucky to have had such an incredible group of friends and fellow graduate students in Austin who have offered support, encouragement, and much-needed distraction. Paul Rubinson, Jeff Hales, Missy Olive, Vanessa Green, Jeff Sigafoos, Alissa Sherry, and Tasha Beretvas all modeled for me that there is life after graduate school. Anna Thompson-Hajdk and Allison Wright were my salt and pepper—they have read more versions of this dissertation than anyone else, and our weekly meetings not only motivated me to keep writing, but they led me on a treasure hunt of coffee shops and cafés around Austin. I am indebted to Amy Ware for letting me ride her wake. I cannot imagine a more generous, selfless, and committed friend.

vii Finally, I would like to thank my family. My grandmother, Bettina Emerson, has been a lifelong model, showing me the potential for women with higher education, and she selflessly helped to support me and my cousins‟ education. My sister, Stephanie Magnell, peppered my inbox with interesting articles and job notices to keep me motivated and set up Skype calls so my nieces could feed me Cheerios through the computer screen when I needed a break. There are also those for whom “thank you” seems inadequate. My husband, Juan Arriaga, has been with me along every step of this crazy process. Every morning, when I was just too tired to get out of bed, Juan made me coffee and encouraged me to start the day. He has fixed my computer on countless occasions, worked alongside me late at night, and reminded me when we need to take a hike, climb a rock, or enjoy a delicious meal. I have never met someone who has worked as hard as he has to triumph over setbacks and achieve his goals, and his dedication and work ethic inspired me to complete this dissertation. My love for education is a gift from my parents. They have always believed in me and my potential, and they never once asked, “When are you going to be finished?” This dissertation is dedicated to them.

viii Culinary Citizenship in American Restaurants, 1919-1964

Publication No.______

Audrey Sophia Russek, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2010

Supervisor: Jeffrey L. Meikle

This dissertation examines how the growth of the “dining-out habit” captured the

American popular imagination in the twentieth century and suggests a rethinking of the social significance of restaurants in American culture by placing public dining spaces at the intersection of sensory experience, technology, and contests of power. In an urban industrial world where Americans found themselves saturated with sensory stimuli and innumerable choices, restaurants tried to create calm out of the chaos and uncertainty—including the social “disruptions” of changing gender roles, immigration patterns, and race relations— through manipulation of the built environment. Each chapter addresses struggles over power and authority and the material objects that represented this tension, from the technological regulation of air and sound or the monitoring of waitresses‟ physical appearance to representations of national and foreign heritage in themed restaurants and the role of guidebooks as instruction manuals for public dining throughout the . Central to this project is the complexity of racial, ethnic, and national identity as represented and performed in restaurants. Restaurants used thematic symbols of heritage, foreignness, domesticity, womanhood, and racial identity to generate idealized narratives of nationhood ix and performances of citizenship for American-born patrons, immigrant employees, and visitors from around the world as part of a national discourse of culinary consumerism.

American restaurants contributed to the fabric of the nation‟s social character, and in turn, culinary citizens claimed restaurant dining as a badge of prosperity, privilege, and social authority.

x Table of Contents

Introduction ...... 1

Chapter 1: Making Sense of Dining Out in American Restaurants…………...…..23

Chapter 2: America's Heritage of Hospitality: Historical Memory and Heritage- Themed Restaurants……………………………………………………………...... 80

Chapter 3: American Food with a Foreign Accent: Performing Ethnicity in U.S. Foreign Restaurants……………………………...... 197

Chapter 4: "The Battle of the Century Is Lipstick versus Elbow Grease": The Feminization of the American Restaurant from Housewives to Waitresses…..….259

Chapter 5: Directing Restaurant Traffic: On the Road with Discriminating Dining Guides in Jim Crow America…………………………………………………...... 379

Conclusion……………………………………………………………………..….482

Bibliographic Essay……………………………………………………………….491

Works Cited...... 497

Vita ……………………………………………………………………………...524

xi Introduction

“O todos hijos o todos entenados.” “Treat everyone equally.”1 As a boy, Feliberto Tijerina Villareal (1905-1965) listened to his mother repeat this phrase when dividing food among him and his siblings, a phrase that would influence his future career as a Mexican American restaurateur and yet also reveal the complexity of citizenship, consumerism, and civil rights within the American restaurant industry.2 In many ways, Tijerina (who Anglicized his given name to Felix in the 1920s) exemplifies the independent small restaurant operator in the United States, and the success and adversity he encountered mirror those faced by the industry at large in the mid-twentieth century. Felix Tijerina paid careful attention to creating an inviting Mexican-themed atmosphere for his mostly white, middle-class patrons. He worked hard to anticipate his customers‟ preferences, and his marketing choices point toward the values and desires of the larger white, middle-class American consumer public from the 1920s through the mid-1960s. Tijerina also struggled to negotiate the precarious challenges presented by the economic woes of the Great Depression, the labor and food shortages of World War II, and the consumer activism of the Civil Rights Movement. His experience of building a popular chain of small restaurants around , Texas, is both an original life story and a refrain played throughout the United States among independent entrepreneurs entering the restaurant field in the interwar and postwar years. Tijerina‟s story, along with the

1 A literal translation of the Spanish phrase reads “Either we are all children or all stepchildren”; idiomatically, the phrase translates into “treat everyone equally.” See Yolanda Nava, It‟s All in the Frijoles: 100 Famous Latinos Share Real-Life Stories, Time-Tested Dichos, Favorite Folktales, and Inspiring Words of Wisdom (New York: Fireside, 2000), 105. 2 Thomas H. Kreneck, Mexican American Odyssey: Felix Tijerina, Entrepreneur and Civic Leader, 1905- 1965 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2001), 28.

1 examples of countless other small, independent restaurants, comprise the subject of this dissertation. Culinary Citizenship in American Restaurants, 1919-1964 examines the culture of dining out in the United States during the formative years of the modern restaurant industry. This dissertation, however, does not attempt to be a complete history of restaurants in the first half of the twentieth century. Instead, its focus is on the experience of dining out in full-service restaurants and how the world inside the restaurant responded to life encountered outside of the restaurant. From the 1920s onward, restaurant dining, previously a leisure activity of the elite, became a routine ritual for middle-income Americans. The reasons why this change occurred can be explained by a number of factors: the renewed emphasis on food service following Prohibition‟s temporary end to alcohol sales and the subsequent cultivation of women and children as customers; the reduction in house servants who helped prepare meals in middle-class families; the rise of the automobile and the increase in Americans who found themselves away from home at meal time; the expansion of an urban workforce looking to grab a hot midday bite to eat; and the rise of women in the workplace for whom ready-made foods proved a time- saving convenience. This project, however, looks beyond these explanations to examine how the growth of the “dining-out habit” captured the American popular imagination. Restaurants used thematic symbols of heritage, foreignness, domesticity, womanhood, and racial identity to generate idealized narratives of nationhood and citizenship that appealed to the white, middle-class population. This dissertation examines how restaurants privileged the social values of the white middle class, including their expectations for originality, variety, and efficient, aesthetically-pleasing service, as part of a national discourse of culinary consumerism. American restaurants contributed to the

2 fabric of the nation‟s social character, and in turn, the country‟s culinary citizens claimed restaurant dining as a badge of prosperity, privilege, and social authority. Why did Americans eat at restaurants for reasons other than necessity? How did restaurants appeal to customers by offering them an escape from everyday life and from what were customers trying to flee? How did restaurants‟ efforts to seal out

“undesirables”—from spoiled food and unsanitary conditions to disruptive customers and inefficient staff—contribute to a larger culture of social exclusion? These questions guide this study‟s interrogation of restaurants as performative public spaces where managers, employees, and customers—assisted by devices such as uniforms, menus, and technological innovations—staged dining scenes that influenced Americans‟ expectations of foreign foods, comfort foods, convenience foods, and the characteristics associated with each type of meal. Examples such as the Felix Mexican Restaurants function as a lens through which to interpret and understand how middle-class ideals of comfort, variety, and familiarity, along with the consumer desire for stimulation and originality, are reflected in twentieth-century American restaurants. Felix Tijerina worked his way up in the restaurant world from a busboy to waiter at one of Houston‟s most popular dining spots, the Original Mexican Restaurant.3 In

1929, Tijerina partnered with another restaurant owner and opened his own business, the Mexican Inn, where he served authentic yet tempered Mexican dishes to a predominately white clientele amidst the music of a seven-piece mariachi band.4 Although the restaurant was popular, the financial strain of the Great Depression led Tijerina to close its doors in

3 Kreneck, Mexican American Odyssey, 41-42. The restaurant, owned by George Caldwell, was modeled after its namesake in San Antonio, the (original) Original Mexican Restaurant, another popular Mexican eatery, and was only one of ten dining locations recommended for Texas in ‟s 1937 edition of Adventures in Good Eating. 4 Kreneck, Mexican American Odyssey, 52. 3

1936. Forging ahead the following year without an outside investor, Tijerina and his wife Janie started the Felix Mexican Restaurant in 1937. The restaurant‟s success led to expansions in other Texas locations, totaling six units by the mid-1960s. The Felix Mexican Restaurants (as well as their competitors) benefited from public health officials‟ efforts to rid Houston of potentially unsanitary chili vendors and tamale stands, since restaurant operations with dedicated kitchens and washrooms were considered more hygienic.5 Tijerina combined his reputation for quality food service with a commitment to civic leadership and aligned himself with the city‟s white, middle-class community. He was a member of the Texas Restaurant Association, and he took advantage of opportunities to advertise in business directories and newspapers to build his patronage. For instance, in 1941, Tijerina listed his restaurant in The Woman’s

Building of Houston Directory, a prominent guide to regional businesses in which Tijerina was the only Mexican American business owner included.6 As reflected in this listing, Tijerina worked to attract an Anglo clientele, offering “[s]uperlative food, with the delicate flavor of Mexico modified to suit the American taste” and downplaying the spiciness of Mexican cuisine by reassuring customers, “For those who have not eaten Mexican food—It is not highly seasoned, and is not hot.”7 Like other restaurant operators, Tijerina deliberately crafted his restaurants‟ Mexican theme using décor and

5 Robb Walsh, “Combination Plates: Legendary Restaurateur Felix Tijerina Mixed Mexican Food and Texas Politics,” , August 31, 2000. For more on public health reforms targeted at food service operations in other Texas cities, see Jeffrey M. Pilcher, “Who Chased Out the „Chili Queens‟? Gender, Race, and Urban Reform in San Antonio, Texas, 1880-1943,” Food and Foodways 16, no. 3 (July 2008): 173-200. 6 “Felix Tijerina Lived „Rags-to-Riches‟ Life,” Chuck Wagon, October 1965, 35; Kreneck, Mexican American Odyssey, 85. 7 Advertisement, Felix Mexican Restaurant opening night, 904 Westheimer, Houston Press, June 23, 1948; Menu, Felix Mexican Restaurants, ca. 1963, Felix Tijerina, Sr. Family Papers, Houston Metropolitan Research Center, Houston Public Library, Houston, Texas.

4 dishes to “transport” customers south of the border during the course of a meal. Adobe walls, brightly-colored tables and chairs, wrought-iron chandeliers, woven Mexican draperies, and hand-carved woodwork added to the “Old World” rusticity of the interior design.8 To enhance his patrons‟ dining comfort in the hot Texas weather, Tijerina installed air conditioning units.9 He appealed to families by including reduced-priced children‟s plates on the menu, and when home-dining competition surfaced in the 1950s and early 1960s, he advertised that all the menu items could be purchased for “carry out” and reheated in their disposable aluminum containers.10

Like other patriotic Americans, Tijerina enlisted in the armed forces during World War II. His wife Janie, comparable to millions of American women in similar situations, assumed responsibility for running the restaurant while Tijerina served as a mess sergeant in the Air Force.11 Despite his national loyalty and military service, Tijerina experienced prejudice as an ethnic minority. Throughout Texas and other states, encountered discriminatory policies in restaurants where they tried to dine.12 Tijerina himself faced challenges to his citizenship status, first in 1940 after returning from a trip to Mexico and again from 1953 to 1956.13 Tijerina‟s story, however, also exposes the

8 Advertisement, Felix Mexican Restaurant opening night; “Felix Jr., 4, Turns „Busboy‟ for Opening of Dad‟s 3d Café,” Houston Press, April 8, 1952. 9 Advertisement, third Felix Mexican Restaurant, Houston Press, April 8, 1952. 10 Menu, Felix Mexican Restaurants, ca. 1963; “Be My Guest,” advertisement, Felix Mexican Restaurants, ca.1962, unidentified clippings, Felix Tijerina, Sr. Family Papers, Houston Metropolitan Research Center, Houston Public Library, Houston, Texas; “Felix Restaurant Winds Up 10th Year,” Houston Chronicle, November 14, 1962, 4. 11 “Felix Jr., 4, Turns „Busboy‟ for Opening of Dad‟s 3d Café.” 12 For affidavits of Mexican Americans attesting to discrimination in restaurants during World War II, see Richard Griswold del Castillo, ed., World War II and Mexican American Civil Rights (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008), app. G. 13 “Felix Tijerina Offers Proof of U.S. Birth,” Houston Press, February 15, 1956, 10. Kreneck convincingly argues that, in fact, Tijerina was a Mexican national who immigrated to the United States with his family as a young child. However, Tijerina insisted that he was born in Sugar Land, Texas, and he went to great legal lengths to “prove” his citizenship. Regardless of his actual place of birth, it is also evident that immigration officials overextended their efforts to challenge Tijerina‟s citizenship. 5 contradictions and inconsistencies along the path to equal rights for all Americans. His faith in the notion of racial uplift steered him toward business practices that gained the friendship of whites, whose support Tijerina believed was crucial for slowly dismantling prejudice against minorities in the United States.14 Like his food, Tijerina avoided confrontation with southern white sensibilities. Therefore, as a restaurateur in the segregated South, Tijerina enforced a policy of refusing service to . The stated practice, typed on restaurant letterhead, included word-by-word instructions for employees describing how to turn away black patrons, concluding with the reminder that “we have the right to select our customers” because “we are operating a private business, not a „public place.‟” Menus and other signs posted around the restaurants also maintained that the management “reserve[d] the right to refuse service to anyone.” Yet, as a proud law-abiding citizen, Tijerina posted another sign announcing that the Felix Mexican Restaurants would begin serving African American customers the day after President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law.15 The trajectory of Tijerina‟s work in restaurants and his efforts to design dining environments that looked, smelled, sounded, felt, and tasted like “authentic” Mexican restaurants, according to the expectations of his while, middle-class customer base, parallels the topics addressed in the following chapters, from restaurateurs‟ strategies for attracting customers to regulating the customers‟ dining experience once inside. The span of Tijerina‟s career also mirrors the scope of this project; he began work as a busboy in 1918, on the cusp of Prohibition, and he spent the next fifty years of his life in the

14 Kreneck, Mexican American Odyssey, 261-262. 15 “Negroes,” Personnel and Policy Directives, 1950s-1960s; Menu, Felix Mexican Restaurants, ca.1963; “Notice,” July 3, 1964, Personnel and Policy Directives, Felix Tijerina, Sr., Family Papers, Houston Metropolitan Research Center, Houston Public Library, Houston, Texas.

6 restaurant industry until his death in 1965, only a year after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 took effect. In the years between these two landmark pieces of legislation, both of which influenced the changing demographics of restaurant customers, the national restaurant industry grew into the third largest retail trade in the United States.16 Reportedly, in 1919, one in four urban residents ate at least one meal per day outside of the home in the country‟s 40,600 restaurants.17 By 1929 the number of restaurants nationwide had nearly tripled to reach 120,000, although a survey conducted by the Ahrens Publishing Company determined that only 25,000 of these were “worth while [sic] restaurants.”

Two-thirds of the country‟s restaurants served urban populations in 1929; the remainder operated in rural townships.18 By 1958, the country boasted almost 230,000 restaurants, and in 1962, studies determined that fifty percent of adults in the United States dined out at least once a week.19 No longer reserved for the country‟s dining elite or urban workforce, by 1964, restaurants performed a social service for the modern mobile (white) American. 1919 launched the modern era of the restaurant in the United States, a transition which is largely attributed to three factors: 1) the onset of Prohibition, 2) the founding of the National Restaurant Association, and 3) the formation of two national trade publications.20 Prohibition‟s effect on the nation‟s restaurants was profound. Despite its

16 A Market Analysis of the Restaurant Industry (Patterson Publishing Co., 1952), iii. 17 C. A. Patterson, “30th Anniversary Convention,” American Restaurant, May 1949, 37, 185; A Market Analysis of the Restaurant Industry (: American Restaurant Magazine, 1930), 8. 18 A Pictorial Study of the Hotel and Restaurant Markets (New York: Ahrens Publishing Co., Inc., 1930), 20; Market Analysis of the Restaurant Industry (1930), 11. 19 J. Terry Radigan, “Analysis of Restaurant Births and Deaths,” Restaurateur, October 1961, 11; Review and Summary of the Published Literature on Eating Out (Chicago: J. Walter Thompson Company Research Department, March 1964), 7. 20 “Restaurant Market Deserves Attention,” Food Business, September 1954, 10; Henry S. Ehle, “To Offset Growing Fixed Expenses, Restaurants Need Big Business Volume,” Outdoor Advertising Association News, August 1955, 2. 7 devastating effect on hotels and restaurants that had once depended on liquor for the majority of their profits, Prohibition helped to democratize dining out. Although many of the expensive restaurants that relied on alcohol sales closed their doors, other establishments re-focused their efforts on maintaining food quality and attracting a middle-class clientele to compensate for their losses. Full-service dining establishments began to cater to women as well as men in an effort to stay in business. Without the prominence of liquor in restaurants, it became more socially acceptable for women to dine out in public.21

The formation of the National Restaurant Association in 1919 can be traced back to the organizing efforts of a group of Midwestern restaurant operators in the „teens. Facing a city-wide strike by employees represented by labor unions, restaurateurs in

Kansas City recognized the need to organize, and they formed the Kansas City Restaurant Men‟s Association (KCRMA) in 1916. Two years later they launched an accompanying trade journal, the Kansas City Restaurant News. In the spring of 1919, the KCRMA met with restaurant operators from other Midwestern states and began discussing the benefits of a national organization. After inviting restaurateurs from around the country to Kansas City, on December 1, 1919, the newly-formed National Restaurant Association (NRA) held its first convention with John W. Welch at the helm as its first president. To represent this new national organization, Kansas City Restaurant News changed its name to National Restaurant News, and in 1925 the Ahrens Publishing Company purchased the trade journal and turned it into an independent publication.22 Additionally, the American

21 Harvey Levenstein, Revolution at the Table: The Transformation of the American Diet (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 183-185. 22 C. A. Patterson, Thirty Years of Progress in American Hospitality: A Historical Sketch of the National Restaurant Association (Chicago: American Restaurant Magazine, 1949), 1-3; Jack Hayes, “NRA: From the Beginning,” Nation‟s Restaurant News, January 1994, 21, 24. National Restaurant News changed its name to Restaurant Management in 1928. 8

Restaurant magazine, another publication with no formal affiliation with the NRA, published its first issue in October 1919. The efforts of the NRA to consider the problems of the country‟s small restaurant operations alongside larger businesses helped to unite restaurants on a national scale by appealing to their common and collective interests. As C. A. Patterson, the publisher of the American Restaurant magazine, wrote on the occasion of the NRA‟s thirtieth anniversary, “Taken individually restaurants were „small businesses,‟ but viewed collectively they were truly big business.”23 While historians pay much attention to the regional specialization of restaurants, it is important to consider that after 1919, restaurateurs identified both with their regional locality and as members of a nationwide industry. Through membership in the NRA, as well as their regional associations, and by using the variety of industry trade journals, operators from around the country collaborated and shared ideas for running a successful restaurant. Businesses in New borrowed methods from Texas cafés reprinted in industry newsletters, and restaurants in California tested out marketing strategies that worked for Florida eating places. This cooperative mentality, which gained momentum amidst the financial downturn of the Depression years, situated restaurants as part of a national collective as well as a regional operation. For this reason, I approach the restaurant industry primarily from a national perspective, following with regional differentiation when the distinction informs my analysis. The 1920s was a decade ripe for the expansion of a restaurant-dining public. The U.S. Census for 1920 showed that for the first time, the country‟s urban population exceeded the number of rural residents, and restaurants had long catered to a

23 Patterson, “30th Anniversary Convention,” 185. 9 predominately urban clientele.24 Between 1900 and 1920, the number of restaurants in the United States had grown at a rate four times as fast as the general population.25 By 1925, the majority of Americans were spending between thirty-five and forty percent of their income on food, in part because of increases in per capita wealth and the large quantities that Americans liked to eat; by the end of the decade, trade journals estimated that

Americans collectively ate more than twenty percent of their meals outside of the home, mostly in restaurants, cafeterias, and hotels.26 While celebrating the increase in the overall number of restaurants, industry leaders also cheered the subsequent demise of many “fly-by-night” food service operations that stained the reputation of the industry as a whole with their unsanitary conditions and poor-quality food.27 These “greasy spoon” establishments served the country‟s urban working class in an era when public eating places tended to fall into one of two categories: “the very elegant and the very inelegant.”28 The celebration of improvements to the range of restaurants serving the public is understandable if we consider the limited public dining options available to travelers and urban residents in the United States from the late-seventeenth through the nineteenth century. In the Colonial era and early republic, travelers could purchase meals at taverns, inns, and boarding houses, but these family-style meals were served only at pre- established times and were eaten quickly as diners moved on to their next destination. Taverns and saloons specialized in serving alcohol while their food was only peripheral

24 Market Analysis of the Restaurant Industry (1930), 12. 25 Pictorial Study of the Hotel and Restaurant Markets, 22. 26 “American Big Eaters,” Pacific Coast Chef, May 1925, 9; “Growth of the Eating-Out Habit,” Pacific Coast Chef, October 1927, 19. These statistics did not indicate demographic distinctions when referring to the “Americans” who ate in restaurants. 27 “The Outlook for 1928 in the Restaurant Business,” American Restaurant, January 1928, 25. 28 Patterson, Thirty Years of Progress, iii. 10 and often appeared in the form of a “free lunch,” which satiated patrons‟ hunger but increased their appetite for alcoholic beverages.29 By the late eighteenth century, the first restaurants whose sole business comprised of selling food for consumption on the premises appeared in the United States, including coffee houses and oyster houses. Hotel restaurants emerged as locations of fine dining, especially because many of them specialized in French cuisine, long considered by elite Americans to be one of the finest and most sophisticated types of food in the world. Elaborate menus detailed the extensive variety of culinary offerings that became the signature of hotel meals in the United States.

For instance, to celebrate the birthday of its namesake, General F. C. Fremont, in 1906 the Fremont Hotel in Los Angeles offered a menu consisting of no less than seven main courses, including Striped Sea Bass with Anchovy Sauce, Virginia Ham with Brussels

Sprouts, Sweet Breads with Asparagus Tips, Wild Goose with Currant Jelly, Sirloin of Beef, Spring Lamb with Mint Sauce, and Young Turkey with Dressing and Cranberry Sauce, not to mention numerous soups, salads, and desserts.30 The nicest hotels from New York and Boston to New Orleans and San Francisco catered both to out-of-town visitors and local residents, who comingled and socialized at shared mealtimes, since most hotels continued to operate according to the American plan—where the cost of lodging included meals, served to all guests, overnight or local, at the same time—through the early decades of the twentieth century. Hotel dining rooms in cities across Arizona, Colorado, and Nevada soon followed in the steps of their eastern and midwestern counterparts, hiring French chefs and catering to upper- and upper-

29 For more on the history and controversy of the “free lunch,” see Madelon Powers, Faces Along the Bar: Law and Order in the Workingman‟s Saloon, 1870-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 207-226. 30 Menu, Fremont Hotel, Los Angeles, January 21, 1906, Digital Menu Collection, Los Angeles Public Library, http://www.lapl.org/resources/en/menu_collection.html.

11 middle-class clientele.31 Alongside hotel dining rooms, fashionable restaurants serving the finest haute cuisine attracted the urban elite in cities with a reputation for delectable fare. Only the country‟s wealthiest citizens could afford to eat in the high-end French and German restaurants such as Delmonico‟s, Lüchow‟s, and Sherry‟s in New York City. Delmonico‟s, which opened its doors in 1828, is probably the most well-known of these early restaurants that catered to an impressive array of celebrities and upper-class socialites, including Charles Dickens, , and Lillian Russell. Industrialization and subsequent developments in transportation, infrastructure, and urban factories helped usher in new types of restaurants in the 1820s and 1830s, which tended to remain centered in larger cities that were closer to transportation networks.32 By the 1880s, lunch counters, cafeterias, and other establishments served the new urban workforce who could not get home for a hot lunch. Cafeterias were inexpensive, self-service restaurants modeled on the factory mode of production, and they focused on mass-produced food and accommodating hundreds of patrons with quick turnover. Also around this time, the multi-unit or chain restaurant emerged; the Fred Harvey Houses are often credited as the first of this public dining category. In 1876 Harvey contracted with the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway to serve passengers at stops along the rail line. Customers selected from standardized menus, and their orders were communicated ahead of time using train whistle signals, allowing the food to be served quickly so as not to interfere with the train‟s scheduled departure.33

31 A. K. Sandoval-Strausz, Hotel: An American History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 168- 171; Warren Belasco, Americans on the Road: From Autocamp to Motel, 1910-1945 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1979), 52-53; Levenstein, Revolution at the Table, 10-15. 32 Richard Pillsbury, From Boarding House to Bistro: The American Restaurant Then and Now (Boston: Unwin Hyman, Inc., 1990), 13-23; Michael and Ariane Batterberry, On the Town in New York from 1776 to the Present (New York: Charles Scribners‟ Sons, 1973), 38-46. 33 Peter Dukas and Donald E. Lundberg, How to Operate a Restaurant (New York: Ahrens Publishing Co., 1960), 3-4; Richard Pillsbury, No Foreign Food: The American Diet in Time and Place (Boulder, CO: 12

Restaurants continued to open throughout the United States in the first two decades of the twentieth century, growing alongside the market economy. Changes in leisure activities also contributed to a rise in restaurant dining. Not only were elaborate dinner parties fading as a prominent social activity among the middle classes, but the popularity of the automobile and a growing prominence of women in public places added to the increase of dining outside the home. Men and women joined each other as a couple in leisure activities more frequently, and restaurants were one place they attended together. Automobiles played a prominent role in this form of courtship, and as motoring emerged as a popular form of leisure, restaurants responded to motorists‟ need for places to dine along the roadside.34 By 1927, Joseph Dahl, a restaurant industry analyst, estimated that twenty-five to thirty percent of all meals in big cities were eaten in restaurants.35 The Depression, however, curtailed the restaurant industry‟s momentum by deterring Americans from spending discretionary money on dining out. Those who continued to eat in restaurants worried even more about cost and quality and started looking toward reliable reviews for help. Duncan Hines, who began keeping track of worthwhile eateries while motoring on the weekends with his wife, first published his collection of recommended dining places, Adventures in Good Eating, in 1936. Middle-

Westview Press, 1998), 174. For more on Fred Harvey and his restaurant chain, see Lesley Poling-Kempes, The Harvey Girls: Women Who Opened the West (New York: Paragon House, 1989) and Stephen Fried, Appetite for America: How Visionary Fred Harvey Built a Railroad Hospitality Empire that Civilized the West (New York: Bantam Books, 2010). 34 Suzanne Kapner, “Dining Through the Decades,” Nation‟s Restaurant News, January 1994, 202. For more on automobiles and courtship, see Beth L. Bailey, From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). 35 Jan Whitaker, “Domesticating the Restaurant: Marketing the Anglo-American Home,” in From Betty Crocker to Feminist Food Studies: Critical Perspectives on Women and Food, ed. Arlene Voski Avakian and Barbara Haber (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005), 101.

13 class Americans embraced his guidebook as a veritable authority on good taste, religiously following his suggestions as the path to finding the nation‟s “best” restaurants. World War II brought about new changes to the restaurant industry. Food service volume increased dramatically as women entering the workforce relied on restaurant food for more of their and their families‟ meals. In the years immediately following the war, the types of customers who frequented restaurants expanded significantly. In addition to business men and women, office workers, and shop clerks, restaurant patronage included tourists, female shoppers, and families with children.36 By the 1950s, Americans‟ relationship with food and dining out had entered a new era, and commercial dining became more casual and standardized.37 The post-World War II rise in suburbanization and emphasis on home-life placed more attention on meals shared around the family dining table. Restaurants, in the face of this competition from American housewives, tried to entice families to eat out by offering a child-friendly atmosphere, affordable meals, and even “meals-to-go.” Although numerous restaurants welcomed white families—including their potentially disruptive children—into their dining rooms in the postwar years, many of the same businesses continued to refuse service to black customers, young or old. The two decades following the end of World War II set the stage for the sit-ins and pocketbook protests of the 1950s and early 1960s that challenged the legality and ethics of discriminating against customers based on race, ethnicity, religion, or gender. Lizabeth Cohen describes how the ethos of the “Consumer Republic”—the postwar strategy of affirming democratic values through principles of mass consumption—firmly linked

36 R. W. Kerr, “Secrets of Success,” American Restaurant, December 1948, 62. 37 Andrew Hurley, Diners, Bowling Alleys, and Trailer Parks: Chasing the American Dream in Postwar Consumer Culture (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 13.

14 consumerism to citizenship and provided a framework for African Americans to challenge discrimination in public accommodations, including restaurants.38 In the years leading up to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, African Americans received little support from the national restaurant industry at large, and editorials unsympathetic to the integration and equal rights cause frequently appeared in the columns of trade journals.39

It would take federal legislation, not the policies of independent restaurant owners or the encouragement of the national industry, to create dining experiences accessible to all who could afford to pay the price of admission.

Important to Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the definition of public accommodations included “any restaurant…or other facility principally engaged in selling food for consumption on the premises.”40 While we tend to refer to the broad range of public eating establishments as restaurants, the term “restaurant” is not so easily defined, and its meaning has evolved over time. As Rebecca Spang convincingly demonstrates, restaurants originated in France not as a place but as a type of food. The restaurant was a bouillon, a restorative broth marketed to rejuvenate the energy depleted by extensive intellectual exertion. In 1766, the first restaurateur opened his business specializing in these healthful meals. As the social institutions that served restaurants became popular places for the social display of a delicate appetite, considered among French elite to be the mark of an enlightened mind, the word “restaurant” began to apply

38 Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers‟ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Vintage Books, 2004), 11, 166-191. 39 Joe Minster, the founding publisher of the Pacific Coast Record, was one of the more bigoted and outspoken critics of integration and African Americans in general. See “Integration,” Pacific Coast Record, September 1956, 12, 14; “Integration—We‟ve Had It,” Pacific Coast Record, August 1963, 6, 8; “Pity Poor Indian,” Pacific Coast Record, October 1963, 6; “Boosting Civil Rights?” Pacific Coast Record, September 1964, 7. 40 Transcript of Civil Rights Act (1964), Our Documents History Collaborative, http://www.ourdocuments.gov. 15 to the locations themselves, which eventually expanded their food offerings in the late eighteenth century.41 In the twentieth-century United States, real financial and political implications depended on the classification of a restaurant. Industry experts in the 1920s encouraged operators entering the field to name their businesses appropriately or risk losing clientele.

“The word restaurant suggests a real meal, efficient service and perhaps sociability,” explained one advice columnist, so a place resembling a quick-bite lunch room should not call itself a restaurant.42 Following Repeal in 1933, under the New York State Liquor

Control Law, only “bona fide eating places” could receive licenses to serve liquor for consumption on premises, but the terminology was so vague, a “bona fide eating place” could mean a fancy restaurant, a delicatessen, or even an ice cream parlor.43 In 1940, the

U.S. Census of Business categorized eating places according to three classifications: 1) restaurants, cafeterias, and lunch rooms, including cafés and grills; 2) lunch counters, food stands, and diners; and 3) soda fountains, and juice and ice cream stands.44 A few years later, an informational film on restaurant vocations divided the first classification into four types according to service: table service (also considered full service), self- service, counter service, and drive-in or curb service.45

To date, most scholarly and popular historical studies of restaurants in the United States focus on one of these specific genres, ranging from tea rooms to fast food and drive-ins, or on the significance of a single establishment or chain, such as Delmonico‟s

41 Rebecca L. Spang, The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 1-33. 42 Martha Belle Gwin, “What‟s In a Name?” American Restaurant, August 1923, 27. 43 “Definition of an Eating Place Is Burning Question,” American Restaurant, October 1936, 77-78. 44 A. W. von Struve, “Census Covers the Nation‟s Restaurants,” American Restaurant, January 1940, 80. 45 The Restaurant Operator, film. Produced by Holmes (Burton) Films, Inc., 1946, http://www.archive.org/details/Restaura1946. 16 or Harvey Houses.46 Others document the influence of restaurants or individual chefs within a specific geographic region, especially urban areas where the rapid growth of the “dining-out habit” played a prominent role in defining the city.47 While my project addresses a variety of restaurant types and examines a few case studies of popular chain restaurants, its focus is on independently-operated, small businesses that offered full (or table) service throughout the United States. In 1930, the first nationwide survey of American restaurants defined service restaurants as those “furnishing meals served at tables by waiters or waitresses,” which

“are generally regarded as the standard type of commercial eating place from which all other types and styles of service have been developed.” Important to the purpose of this

46 For monographs covering specific restaurant genres see Jim Heimann, Car Hops and Curb Service: A History of American Drive-In Restaurants, 1920-1960 (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1996); John A. Jackle and Keith A. Sculle, Fast Food: Roadside Restaurants in the Automobile Age (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); Patric Kuh, The Last Days of Haute Cuisine: The Coming of Age of American Restaurants (New York: Penguin Books, 2001); Jan Whitaker, Tea at the Blue Lantern Inn: A Social History of the Tea Room Craze in America (New York: St. Martin‟s Press, 2002). Single-restaurant studies include Ralph Blumenthal, Stork Club: America‟s Most Famous Nightspot and the Lost World of Café Society (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 2000); David Gerard Hogan, Selling „em by the Sack: White Castle and the Creation of American Food (New York: New York University Press, 1997); Carol Dawson and Carol Johnston, House of Plenty: The Rise, Fall, and Revival of Luby‟s Cafeterias (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006); John Mariani with Alex von Bidder, The Four Seasons: A History of America‟s Premier Restaurant (New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1994); Poling-Kempes, The Harvey Girls; Joan Kanel Slomanson, When Everybody Ate at Schrafft‟s: Memories, Pictures, and Recipes from a Very Special Restaurant Empire (Fort Lee, NJ: Barricade Books, 2006); Marvin and Walter Rosen, Welcome to Junior‟s! Remembering Brooklyn with Recipes and Memories from Its Favorite Restaurant (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1999); Jack Wechsberg, Dining at the Pavillon (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1962). 47 For example, see Batterberry and Batterberry, On the Town; Frances de Talavera Berger and John Parke Custis, Sumptuous Dining in Gaslight San Francisco, 1875-1915 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Co., 1985); William Grimes, Appetite City: A Culinary History of New York (New York: North Point Press, 2009); Thomas McNamee, Alice Waters and Chez Panisse (New York: Penguin Books, 2008). One exception of a text that covers a broad range of restaurants and regions is Sue Cobble, Dishing It Out: Waitresses and Their Unions in the Twentieth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), which is an excellent, in-depth examination of American restaurant culture alongside a focus on waitress unionizing. In addition, book-length studies of changing food habits in the United States by Warren Belasco, Hasia Diner, Donna Gabaccia, Harvey Levenstein, and Richard Pillsbury address the role of restaurants and their influence on the ways Americans eat, but these texts do not concentrate on restaurants per se. 17 dissertation, the survey described how “[r]estaurants coming under this classification satisfy the ultimate desire of the average person, providing a psychological satisfaction in the dignity of being served, in addition to the gustative pleasure of whetting one‟s appetite on the artistic creations of the restaurant chef.” Because the service and food quality held equal importance, operators of service restaurants needed to create “the most pleasant surroundings and the most agreeable atmosphere” to satisfy patrons.48 Service restaurants, more than self-service cafeterias or food stands, relied on a carefully built environment as well as food to create an attractive dining experience for customers.

This project also draws from numerous, less-documented, independently-owned restaurants for its source material. Small operators of service restaurants formed the core of the national restaurant industry, and their importance in the growth of dining out in the

United States should not be underestimated. While many independent restaurant operations often failed within the first year because of the owner‟s lack of business experience, they also helped pioneer new trends in restaurant dining. For small restaurants, trying out new ideas involved less financial risk than if a large chain were to undertake the same experiment. In this way, neighborhood eateries became “the laboratory for the restaurant industry.”49 One of the areas in which independent restaurants could experiment was food service. Historian and geographer Richard Pillsbury rightly argues that “virtually all of the new cuisine, cooking styles, and foods of the past several decades first entered the American diet in restaurant settings.”50 Restaurants, in partnership with food manufacturers, helped to develop and modify taste preferences among middle-class Americans. For instance, marketing representatives for

48 Market Analysis of the Restaurant Industry (1930), 14. 49 Harry Akin, “The Small Operator‟s Place in the Restaurant Business,” American Restaurant, July 1941, 75. 50 Pillsbury, No Foreign Food, 165. 18 the restaurant industry, acknowledging that “[w]hile it is true that many of the country‟s 500,000 away-from-home eating places are quite small,” tried to convince large food processors to invest in restaurants by claiming that they made excellent sites for brand advertising.51 While franchises and other chain operations have become some of the most recognizable names in towns and cities across the country, independent, local businesses have always been at the heart of the American restaurant industry. Trade journals recognized the contributions of small operators to the larger industry, and they celebrated the success of these businesses by sharing creative advertising, decorating, and food service ideas dreamed up and tested by these restaurants. In addition to the unpublished archival records of small restaurants that I have gathered where available, this study relies heavily on trade journals and descriptive guidebook listings, which are some of the few primary source publications to reference the multitude of independent eating establishments that opened and closed from the 1920s through the 1960s. The restaurant business was and is a precarious investment. In San Francisco, only two-thirds of restaurants operating in 1931 were still in business exactly one year later. Restaurants‟ survival rate did not improve much over thirty years: reports from 1961 indicated that sixty-four percent of restaurants nationwide failed within the first thirty months.52 Industry publications, marketing surveys, and dining guidebooks are some of the few sources to track and document these fleeting restaurants. When I mention in passing to friends and acquaintances that my dissertation is “about restaurants,” the response is often the same: “Oh, how interesting. I like to eat in

51 Jack W. Payne, “Are You Ignoring One-Fourth of Your Market?” Food Business, September 1954, 10. 52 Jay G. Jilliard, “Golden Gate Restaurant News,” Pacific Coast Record, November 1948, 53; Radigan, “Analysis of Restaurant Births and Deaths,” 11. 19 restaurants!”53 On the one hand, this personal identification with restaurants is somewhat taken for granted—the majority of the people with whom I converse about this project have the time, access, and financial means to frequent full-service restaurants at least on special occasions. Yet it also attests to the prominence of dining out in the twenty-first century, whether the meal is a burger from a fast food joint or a celebratory three-course meal at one of the finest restaurants in town. The owners of these two distinct types of restaurants clearly have different visions and goals for achieving financial success, yet both try to anticipate their consumers‟ desires. One of the goals of this project is to historicize the ways in which restaurant operators structured their businesses around the materiality of their customers‟ bodies and catered to middle-class customers‟ sensory preferences. By attributing social value to customers‟ sensory impressions, restaurants subscribed to what Jane Desmond terms “physical foundationalism,” or the notion that the body justifies what is “truthful” because of its inherent “realness” or “authenticity.”54 Determining how customers physically navigated their way to and through restaurants is central to understanding how they experienced dining out in the United States. By the middle of the twentieth century, restaurants had emerged as institutions fundamental to the country‟s social fabric. In a modern industrial world where Americans found themselves saturated with sensory stimuli and an overwhelming number of choices, restaurants tried to create calm out of the chaos and uncertainty. Within the restaurant‟s carefully-regulated dining environment, customers entered socially dynamic space intended to be both vibrant and soothing where they could embrace a service- oriented consumerism designed to cater to their individual preferences. Unexpectedly for

53 This statement is usually followed by asking how often I get to “conduct research” by dining out. The answer: not much. 54 Jane C. Desmond, Staging Tourism: Bodies on Display from Waikiki to Sea World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), xiv. 20 many customers, though, the socialization that took place in restaurants was not limited to the interactions among the parties of a single table. Restaurants also acclimated Americans to shifting cultural norms and modern gadgets. They introduced the general public to new technologies before the inventions appeared with regularity in middle-class homes, including air conditioning, dishwashers, and even television. Restaurants responded to the popularity of the automobile by opening roadside locations, adding parking lots to accommodate customers‟ vehicles, and inventing the drive-in and car- hops. Travel guidebooks helped hungry motorists navigate unfamiliar dining options when away from home. Customers, encouraged by these same guides to experiment with novel foods in restaurants, tried (and enjoyed) dishes like curry and enchiladas, foods that intertwined with traditional American favorites over time. In foreign restaurants (ethnic restaurants in today‟s parlance), Americans learned about the culinary customs and social traditions of immigrant populations and their native countries, ostensibly expanding middle-class Americans‟ penchant for and pride in a cosmopolitan identity. Restaurants also served as sites of social change. Between 1919 and 1964, restaurants evolved into socially-acceptable public places for women to frequent in all- female groups or solo, without requiring the accompaniment of a male escort to maintain an aura of personal respectability. In addition, the feminization of restaurants opened doors for women to enter the field as employees and business owners. Children assumed a more prominent public role through restaurants as well. Restaurants contributed to the socialization of children as consumers in a service-oriented economy, functioning as places where the nation‟s youth could practice proper etiquette, exercise the power of choice from menu selections, and learn the behavior of giving orders. Although complicit in the country‟s legacy of racial discrimination, slowly but conclusively restaurants also

21 negotiated the contested prejudicial practices of the Jim Crow era. On June 3, 1964, directed by Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed discrimination in public accommodations, restaurants could no longer legally hand-pick their customers based on race, gender, religion, or national origin. Restaurant operators, therefore, invited customers into highly-regulated dining spaces that offered diversion in times of social change and national crisis: a retreat into a masculine world of cigars and steak; an escape from the drudgery of housework and childcare; an imaginary vacation to a distant land; or a nostalgic trip down America‟s collective memory lane. Restaurants‟ strategies for constructing these idealistic environments, however, were often achieved at the expense of marginalized populations of Americans, including women, African Americans, Native Americans, and immigrants.

And despite all of the precautions, enforcement of rules, and other strategies for regulating customers‟ physical encounters within the dining environment, restaurants were still unpredictable places: babies cried, dishes broke, customers complained, and odors (pleasant or otherwise) wafted through the dining room. Operators‟ attempts to organize and monitor restaurant space represent the tensions between private and public, “good” and “bad” taste, exclusivity and equality. These efforts also characterize the social significance of the ritual of restaurant dining in the twentieth-century United States.

22

Chapter 1:

Making Sense of Dining Out in American Restaurants

“Sure I sell food….But if that were all I sold, the corner grocer and the hardware store that sells can-openers would be my competitors. But they‟re not. My patrons don‟t care to sit on the curb eating out of a can. They want service, atmosphere, comfort, palatable food served in an attractive manner, and variety enough to tickle the appetite.”55 The Cleveland restaurateur who explained his guiding business practices in these matter- of-fact terms tapped into the multifaceted performance of restaurant dining in the United States. For most Americans who could afford to eat in restaurants in the first half of the twentieth century, the outing was about more than purchasing food for nourishment. Restaurant dining was a social experience; a place of family celebration, business deals, romantic flirtation, and even solitude in a crowd. Restaurants served more than food, offering a highly regulated physical environment designed to please customers and generate a desire for them to return. This emphasis on manipulating a customer‟s sensory experience helped to create a set of privileged social expectations for middle-class (usually white) Americans based on invented ideals of “proper” hygiene, temperature, smells, and sounds.

Historical studies of restaurants tend to favor sight and taste when invoking the dining experience of patrons, emphasizing what restaurants looked like (both on the interior and the exterior) and what the food tasted like. The purpose of this chapter is to highlight the power and meaning invested in smells, sounds, and literal atmosphere within restaurants, as well as to demonstrate the importance of technologies in

55 J. O. Dahl, Selling Public Hospitality: A Handbook of Advertising and Publicity for Hotels, Restaurants and Apartment Houses (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1929), 60.

23 manipulating the dining environment. This chapter, as an intended contribution to sensory history, follows Mark M. Smith‟s definition of this approach to historical study as “considering not only the history of a given sense but its social and cultural construction and its role in texturing the past.”56 One of my goals is to show how restaurants—beyond the flavors and visual décor that guided each establishment‟s culinary theme—purposefully manipulated Americans‟ sensory experiences using an elite set of social standards that valued particular smells, sounds, temperatures, and other sensations. I pursue this objective by drawing heavily on trade journals in this chapter to understand how restaurants, as a collective organized body of businesses, shared ideas and promoted specific resources for creating the most desirable public dining spaces imaginable.

Throughout the interwar years, scientific studies raised public awareness about the intertwined importance of the five senses in tasting, enjoying, and digesting food. Eating engaged “all of the senses except hearing,” one writer reflected, “and a crisp stalk of celery will even bring that.”57 Astute restaurateurs, anxious to increase profits, followed reports that suggested certain smells, colors, sounds, and temperatures increased or decreased appetites, resulting in either larger checks or less business. In the 1920s, scientists reported that “the nose matters more than the palate” in determining how humans taste food, helping people differentiate between onions and apples or two types of meat.58 The Department of Agriculture and its newly-formed Bureau of Home

56 Mark M. Smith, “Producing Sense, Consuming Sense, Making Sense: Perils and Prospects for Sensory History,” Journal of Social History 40, no. 4 (Summer 2007): 842. See also Mark M. Smith, “Making Sense of Social History,” Journal of Social History 37, no. 1 (Autumn 2003): 165-186. In recent years several historians have furthered the field of sensory history, notably Smith, Peter Charles Hoffer, Connie Y. Chiang, Benjamin Aldes Wurgoft, Gerald J. Fitzgerald, and Gabriella M. Petrick. 57 Ralph Bienfang, The Subtle Sense (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1946), 48. 58 D. Fraser Harris, “Only Five Tastes,” Pacific Coast Chef, February 1926, 20-21. 24

Economics devoted time and resources to the study of palatability in an effort to understand how texture, flavor, and aroma affected taste preference across individual and familial habits and traditions.59 Stuffy dining rooms and foul odors affected digestion, argued critics of improperly ventilated restaurants, who lambasted the owners of cavernous eateries where “sunshine and air are as scarce as hen teeth.”60 Food and tobacco smoke were cited most frequently, but perfume, upholstery, and even deodorizers contributed to a cacophony of smells that swelled within restaurant dining rooms and kitchens, creating “an unpleasant atmosphere that takes the edge off the appetite.”61 In the

1930s, the Chicago-based architect Alfred Shaw, who consulted with restaurants, instructed his clients to consider all five senses when creating an ideal dining room and kitchen. A restaurant should be designed, Shaw argued, so that “there is no smell,” a task accomplished through proper ventilation and the absence of “cheap synthetic materials” that reeked of unwanted chemical odors. Sound-absorbing ceilings and other acoustical treatments were essential for reducing unwanted noise, while air conditioning dehumidified the air, making the “feel” of the restaurant more pleasing. As for the vision of a restaurant, Shaw deemed nothing more essential than “sparkle,” the sanitary, vibrant, polished quality that signaled cleanliness and refined comfort. All of these components were necessary tools, explained Shaw, for “a restaurant should be built as a background for people,” and restaurateurs should not depend solely on food “to anaesthetize your patrons”—all the senses needed to be invoked.62

59 C. D. Moran, “Studying Taste Qualities in Foods,” American Restaurant, July 1927, 33-34, 81. 60 G. C. Breidert, “Poor Ventilation Kills Appetites,” American Restaurant, December 1919, 18-19; “If I Were a Restaurant Owner,” American Restaurant, November 1919, 28. 61 “Avoid That Unpleasant „Kitchen Breath,‟” American Restaurant, November 1933, 36. 62 Alfred P. Shaw, “What Modernization Means to Your Restaurant,” American Restaurant, February 1937, 28-29, 82-86. 25

Eating in restaurants became a veritable dining synaesthesia: customers listened to the flavor of a steak through its sizzle; they distinguished whether they were eating beef or ham through its aroma—smell was on the tip of their tongues.63 By the late 1930s, the restaurant industry at large began paying attention to studies that suggested color influenced appetite. As a result, “edible” colors—including warm, soft reds and oranges, tan and light brown, and peach and pale yellows—came into vogue for restaurant décor while “hospital” white, along with cold greens and blues that altered one‟s mental sense of temperature, went out of favor because of their appetite-reducing qualities.64 In the early years of World War II, an American physician, Edward Podolsky, studied the findings of an experimental restaurant operator who used light filters to cast green and red tints throughout his dining room. The light scheme turned milk the color of blood, cast salads in a sky-blue shade, and presented steaks in a tinge of pale gray. Customers lost their appetites, leading Podolsky to conclude, “Unaccustomed colors in foods have an adverse effect on the digestion.”65 Foods of a monotonous color scheme plated together tended to be unappealing to diners as well. Following the Second World War, the Du Pont Company began marketing to restaurants a “Color Conditioning” painting program. Originally developed for industrial plants, the program helped businesses make the most profitable use of the psychological effects of color.66 The Frulite Company in New York followed a similar marketing path, selling its color-preserving chemical

63 Arthur W. Van Vlissinger, Jr., “Sizzling Steaks: Food for Thought,” Rotarian, September 1936, 39; Edward Podolsky, “The Matter of Taste,” American Restaurant, October 1941, 43. 64 “Decorations Cater to Guest‟s Nerves and Appetite,” Washington State Restaurant, Tavern and Tobacco News (June 1941), 11; “Color in Restaurants,” American Restaurant, January 1945, 40; “Color Sells More!” Washington State Restaurant and Tavern News (January 1951), 14; “Color Can Influence Your Business,” Washington State Restaurant and Tavern News (November 1949), 14. 65 Edward Podolsky, “How Color Affects the Guest‟s Appetite,” Restaurant Management, August 1945, 27, 56, 62. 66 “„Color Conditioning‟ For Restaurants,” American Restaurant, April 1949, 78. 26 solution to restaurants eager to serve fresh fruit that retained its original hue after slicing, rather than oxidizing into a dull brown.67 Physiologists argued that good digestion equaled good health and raised concerns over impediments to this process. For instance, many health specialists hypothesized that the human body could not properly digest under-seasoned foods.68 Loud noises disrupted good digestion, too.69 Two concerns, then, guided restaurants‟ interest in regulating the sensorial environment of public dining spaces: customers‟ health and personal comfort. Consistent, palatable food that was prepared and served under sanitary conditions was the first and foremost priority; a physical atmosphere devoid of sensorial “intrusions” followed close behind.

FROM GREASY SPOONS TO PAPER CUPS: SANITIZING RESTAURANTS IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

Public sanitation emerged as one of the predominant worries of middle-class reformers around the turn of the twentieth century. The germ theory of disease and the subsequent importance placed on “bacteriological cleanliness” became prominent public issues as home economists and public health officials encouraged Americans, particularly poor urban dwellers, recent immigrants, African Americans, and rural farm families, to adopt hygienic practices believed to reduce the spread of disease.70 In 1914, the bacteriologist Charles-Edward Amory Winslow published a piece in Popular Science

67 “Chemical Treatment Keeps Sliced Fruit Fresh,” American Restaurant, June 1941, 70; “Helps Retain Color in Fruit,” American Restaurant, August 1942, 43. 68 Podolsky, “How Color Affects,” 42. 69 Dahl, Selling Public Hospitality, 66. 70 Nancy Tomes, “Spreading the Germ Theory: Sanitary Science and Home Economics, 1880-1930” in Rethinking Home Economics: Women and the History of a Profession, ed. Sarah Stage and Virginia B. Vincenti (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 34-54. 27

Monthly where he explained how human contact, including transference of bodily fluids such as saliva, could directly and indirectly infect others with communicable diseases.

While earlier generations had focused on dust and “infected” air as a source of germs,

Winslow‟s argument shifted the public‟s consciousness about germs to “contact infection” at a time when infectious diseases could be pinpointed as the foremost cause of death.71 Mary Mallon, whose moniker “Typhoid Mary” designated her as the first known example of a “healthy carrier” of communicable diseases in the United States in 1907, scared the food industry into implementing physical exams of food service workers.72 By

1916, New York‟s Health Department required all food handlers to visit the Occupational

Clinic to be qualified as free from infectious disease and therefore allowed to work in the city‟s restaurants.73

Health officials and restaurant leaders attentive to the issue of public hygiene compared public dining rooms to those found in middle- and upper-class Americans‟ homes, arguing that a person who washed up before dinner in the family home would have the same expectations when eating out.74 These conceptions of “ordinary” hygienic behavior privileged the classes with access to soap and water, clean hand towels and dishes, and the physical space to separate garbage and human waste from food preparation. Owners of restaurants that catered to a working-class clientele often did not

71 Nancy Tomes, The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women, and the Microbe in American Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 237; Tomes, “Spreading the Germ Theory,” 35. 72 Tomes, The Gospel of Germs, 177. 73 Behind the Scenes in a Restaurant: A Study of 1017 Restaurant Employees (New York: Consumer‟s League of New York City, 1916), 3. 74 James V. Malone, “Restaurant Sanitation,” American Restaurant, September 1940, 36-37. 28 have the financial means to follow sanitation reformers‟ recommendations, such as providing each customer with an unused napkin and tablecloth.75 Sanitation, however, was about more than “clean” and “dirty.” These categories implicated one‟s social value.

Bridget Heneghan‟s study of race and material culture in the antebellum United States demonstrates that cleanliness “signaled a position along the scale of civilization….Filthiness of any kind came to represent moral as well as social degradation, and the lowest class of citizens was associated with filth. Conversely, cleanliness could be regarded as an antidote to immorality.”76 In the twentieth century, the psychologist and sociologist John Dollard observed how many white southerners in the United States believed black people smelled unpleasantly different from white people, and they used this aromatic distinction to stigmatize the black population and render them socially inferior.77 The frequent attribution of uncleanliness, as well as foul smells and loud noises, to African Americans, recent immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, and poor rural whites functioned to distinguish the “civilized” elite from the “putrid” masses whom many whites blamed for the degradation of the nation‟s health.78

A few concerned citizens sounded the alarms at the lack of municipal and state regulation of sanitary conditions in restaurants in the early twentieth century. In an

75 Tomes, The Gospel of Germs, 178. 76 Bridget T. Heneghan, Whitewashing America: Material Culture and Race in the Antebellum Imagination (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2003), 148. 77 John Dollard, Caste and Class in a Southern Town, 2nd ed. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1949), 378-380. 78 For more on the ties between a “culture of cleanliness” and the well-being of the United States as a nation-state, see Suellen Hoy, Chasing Dirt: The American Pursuit of Cleanliness (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). 29 editorial from 1909, reprinted in a 1928 issue of Mixer and Server, the official journal of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union, one concerned union member cited the lack of adequate ventilation, the comingling of garbage storage and food preparation, and the number of diseased cooks as endemic to the restaurant industry, all contributing to the contamination of food and the resulting food poisoning suffered by members of the dining public.79 Chicago‟s Secretary of the Board of Health argued that cooks, like plumbers, should be subject to exams that qualified them for food service preparation by demonstrating knowledge of sanitation practices.80 Some states did begin to regulate restaurant sanitation. In 1921, the City Health Department of Portland,

Oregon, initiated a formal inspection process where all restaurants failing to achieve a rating of seventy-five percent compliance or higher would be subject to legal punishment.

Three years later, Seattle‟s Department of Health and Sanitation published an article in the regional trade journal, Pacific Coast Chef, warning restaurants that polishing silverware with used napkins, allowing diseased workers to handle food, and creating inadequate ventilation in kitchens was a recipe for germ contamination.81 By the end of the decade, the restaurant industry appeared to be making substantial strides in the direction of hygienic food service. J. O. Dahl, a leading industry expert, commented in

1929 that “[s]anitation used to be a great talking point. In fact, it often seemed as if it

79 J. M. Bishop, “Avenues of Disease,” Mixer and Server, April 15, 1928, 41-43. 80 E. R. Pritchard, “When Hunger Assails,” American Restaurant, July 1920, 39. 81 “Portland Restaurant Heads Protest Publicity in Sanitary Status,” American Restaurant, March 1921, 32; “To Rate Portland Restaurants,” American Restaurant, April 1921, 35; M. T. Stevens, “Restaurant Sanitation,” Pacific Coast Chef, April 1925, 4-5. 30 might be quite unusual to have a clean kitchen. Now most people assume that state or municipal laws guard public health.”82

By the 1930s, well-established restaurants that catered to a middle-class clientele denounced the “fly-by-night” eateries and taverns that failed to uphold proper sanitary conditions and therefore affected the reputation of the entire industry. As new eating places popped up throughout the United States, especially serving the influx of working- class urban residents, already-established restaurants cried foul over this new crop of

“greasy spoons,” a stigma which the industry had worked hard to eradicate since the

„teens. These eating establishments tended to be located in out-of-the-way places, on roadsides and the outskirts of both small towns and urban areas, “preying” on travelers in need of food.83 Hot dog, barbeque, and other makeshift food stands often fell under this category if the business failed to uphold standards of cleanliness. Oftentimes, as small operations run by proprietors and staff with little training, the “greasy spoons” lacked basic sanitary conditions: food remnants clung to “washed” dishes, roaches and rodents scurried about, and without plumbing, food preparation involved little hand washing.

The major offenses were these health hazards and inedible, greasy food. Duncan Hines, a vocal proponent of sanitation in restaurants, reminisced that in the 1920s and early 1930s,

“the food to be found along our highways and byways…was pretty miserable fare.” As

Hines described, frying food was the method of choice in most of these eating places:

“the cooks (and I use the word freely) who were limited to this form of culinary

82 Dahl, Selling Public Hospitality, 66. 83 Thomas Farley Marshall, “Tourist Taverns Make Bid for Motorists‟ Trade,” American Restaurant, June 1933, 30-31. 31 expression were innumerable. They assaulted the long-suffering American stomach with fried meats, fried eggs, fried potatoes, and fried vegetables.”84 The unsanitary eateries serving almost inedible food were detrimental to the public and the restaurant industry at large. The editor of the American Restaurant trade journal smeared these establishments with the charge of housing “tinder for epidemics,” calling more reputable restaurants to

“regiment our industry under the banner of Sanitation” and protect the health of

America‟s public dining citizens.85 Numerous restaurants, intent on symbolically conveying sanitation to their customers, opted for stark white interiors with metal accents and clean lines, implying a sterile (and therefore healthy) dining environment. Chains like

Childs and White Castle incorporated glowing, white streamlined surfaces and glimmering glass and tile into their standard dining rooms and exteriors to reassure skeptical customers.86

No amount of stainless steel and white paint could erase the charges voiced by

Frederick J. Schlink‟s exposé, Eat, Drink, and Be Wary, a book that despite mentioning restaurants in only two out of its 322 pages rattled the nerves of “legitimate” restaurateurs across the country. Schlink, an engineer and physicist, made a name for himself as an advocate for citizens‟ consumer rights. Along with Arthur Kallet, Schlink founded

Consumers Research, Inc. to monitor deceptive business practices on behalf of consumers, filling in for the inadequacies of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act that failed

84 Duncan Hines, Duncan Hines‟ Food Odyssey (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1955), 29. 85 C. A. Patterson, “Endangering Public Confidence,” American Restaurant, May 1934, 25. 86 Philip Langdon, Orange Roofs, Golden Arches: The Architecture of American Chain Restaurants (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986), 18-20; David Gerard Hogan, Selling „em by the Sack: White Castle and the Creation of American Food (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 30-31. 32 to regulate food producers effectively. After partnering with Stuart Chase to write Your

Money’s Worth (1927), a book that called attention to misleading advertising practices,

Schlink published Eat, Drink, and Be Wary in 1935.87 Representatives of the restaurant industry reacted to the two pages of restaurant commentary as if Schlink had published a two-volume tome on the subject.

“Bleat, Wink, and Be Leary [sic]” was a more apt title for the book, suggested the editor of the American Restaurant trade journal. Schlink, his critics wailed, unfairly based his claims of unsanitary dishwashing methods, overuse of processed and synthetic foods, and garnish arranged to enhance a meal‟s portion size visually on biased reviews of the industry‟s “bastard children,” the so-called “greasy spoon” establishments.

Dismissing Schlink‟s claim that “[e]ven in the better restaurants every sort of expedient is used to cheapen the food at the cost of its digestive safety,” restaurateurs from around the country wrote editorials to newspapers and magazines accusing Schlink of exercising

“the tactics of a sensational evangelist” and blaming their lower-end restaurant brethren for casting a shadow across the whole of the public dining industry. The president of B/G

Foods, Inc. charged Schlink with seeking out the most “undesirable” restaurants rather than the finer establishments, while the owners of Carder‟s Restaurant in Chicago and the

Waldeck Restaurant in Kentucky argued that the “better class restaurants” were not responsible for these poor procedures—only illegitimate “greasy spoons”—“not to be

87 Frederick J. Schlink, Eat, Drink, and Be Wary (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1935); Harvey Levenstein, Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in Modern America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 16; Charles F. McGovern, Sold American: Consumption and Citizenship, 1890- 1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 164-178.

33 confused with a restaurant”—operated in such a filthy and inexcusable way.88 They and other industry representatives defended higher-end restaurants by insisting that surely their kitchens practiced more sanitary methods of dishwashing and food preparation than found in the common home.89 Distancing finer restaurants from those that served mainly a working-class and immigrant clientele based on accusations of uncleanliness and poor food handling, restaurant leaders revealed the extent to which sensory-based stereotypes had seeped into America‟s public dining culture.

Despite the collective efforts of industry leaders to challenge the public‟s perception of restaurants as “greasy spoons,” sanitation standards remained an issue during and after World War II, even for higher-end restaurants whose owners and managers blamed the hygiene problem on inexpensive eateries that served the working class. Intent on informing the American public about the dangers of reusing dirty linens, utensils, and glassware, New York‟s Department of Health opened an exhibit in the

Motor Equipment Museum at the New York World‟s Fair (1939-40) to display the latest in commercial dishwashing technologies. This performance of a scientific solution to one of the nation‟s foremost social issues exemplified the Fair‟s “philosophy of showmanship for the contributions of science and their application” and gestured to Americans that technology was the key to solving social problems.90 In part because of the labor shortage

88 C. A. Patterson, “Bleat, Wink and Be Leary,” American Restaurant, March 1936, 27; “Voice Protests to Attack on Restaurant Industry,” American Restaurant, April 1936, 32, 60. 89 “Leaders Continue Protests to Attack on Industry,” American Restaurant, May 1936, 90, 92. 90 “Sanitation Featured At Fair Exhibit,” American Restaurant, September 1940, 64; Robert W. Rydell, World of Fairs: The Century-of-Progress Expositions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 96. 34 during the Second World War, restaurants turned toward the only option of inexperienced, less desirable employees to fill vacancies.

These new employees, with less training and on-the-job knowledge about sanitary food handling practices, prompted restaurants to step back to square one in the hygiene checklist. Seattle‟s Department of Public Health issued an ordinance—modeled after the

U.S. Public Health Service‟s ordinance from 1940—that required restaurants to be inspected by a health officer every three months and, among various other sanitation rules, to post signs in toilet rooms ordering employees to wash their hands before returning to work.91 Operators throughout the country, from New York and Florida to

Texas and Alaska, in partnership with State Health Departments, initiated schools of sanitation and food handling, where employees could learn about subjects ranging from food poisoning and proper refrigeration to personal hygiene and spreading communicable diseases by holding glassware and utensils by the “mouth” end.92 Unfortunately, many restaurants could not be “bothered” to complete the courses. In Los Angeles, only 353 out of 692 restaurants that enrolled in a sanitation school sponsored by the local health department completed the course.93 The Federal Government also stepped in to curb unhealthy food handling practices in America‟s restaurants. The U.S. Public Health

91 City of Seattle, Department of Public Health, Regulating Food and Drink Establishments, Ordinance No. 74360, ca. 1945, 3, 6. 92 Andreas Bothe, “Operators Attend Sanitation School,” American Restaurant, January 1944, 73; James S. Warren, “Teaching Employees Sanitary Food Handling,” Restaurant Management, May 1944, 22-24; “Unique Food Handlers‟ School Held,” Chuck Wagon, February 1945, 16; George W. Cox, “Foodhandling Is an Art,” Chuck Wagon, May 1945, 14-15; Unidentified clipping, ca. 1950s, Lorena Showers Papers, University of Alaska, Anchorage. 93 “Sanitation Consciousness,” American Restaurant, January 1949, 14. 35

Service published a booklet titled From Hand to Mouth that called America‟s restaurant workers to service and reminded them that “Today‟s restaurant is the dining room of the

Nation” and it was their “patriotic duty to keep food as safe as possible.” Yet, as one food columnist casually observed, “it is a publication which anyone who can read English can understand.”94 Immigrant restaurant workers in the “back-of-the-house,” many of whom spoke minimal English, would not have been able to use the pamphlet for information on sanitary food handling. Many of these employees were of the groups categorically accused by middle-class health reformers as being responsible for unhygienic food practices. This disconnect between instructions and audience left much room for improvement in bringing about widespread changes in sanitation practices in the larger restaurant industry.

In spite of all of these efforts, the “sanitation problem” remained one of the leading focal points for the national restaurant industry in the postwar years. In almost every monthly issue of national and regional trade journals, a feature article or brief announcement about germs and the need for sanitary improvements appeared. Some tried to scare food handlers into compliance with frightening tales of “food infections” transmitted by unwashed hands, rodents, and undercooked meats. Using scientific terms, such as Staphylococcus and Eberthella typhi, regulators described amoebic dystentery, bacillary dystenary, ptomaine, typhoid fever, and other illnesses that unsanitary food handlers could be responsible for passing along to unsuspecting customers without

94 Crete Dahl, How to Get and Keep Restaurant Employees (New York: New York State Restaurant Association, 1945), 53; Alice Easton, “Pointers in Preventing Food Poisoning,” Restaurant Management, March 1944, 26. 36 careful adherence to hygienic practices.95 Paper drinking cups, which gained a following of hygienic-minded consumers prior to World War I returned to the market with renewed vigor amidst claims that they helped prevent contagious diseases. In a 1944 Dixie Cups advertisement, a sexy “female” paper cup leaned into a male pilot who whispered to her,

“my lips are for you…and you alone,” illustrating the single-use sanitary disposability of the cup.96 The Golden State adopted the California Restaurant Act (1947) to increase the severity of the state‟s sanitation regulations, including a requirement that all eating and drinking utensils be fully immersed in water with a minimum temperature of 180 degrees

Fahrenheit for at least thirty seconds to be considered effectively cleaned.97 The same year, New York‟s State Restaurant Association voluntarily subjected its member restaurants to sanitary inspections, and the findings were less than praiseworthy. The top ten “common faults” included improper refrigeration, the presence of roaches and rodents, dangerous insecticides (which apparently failed to work) near foodstuffs, and ventilation hoods encrusted in grease and dust.98

To help correct these problems and enforce codes of cleanliness, state-employed sanitarians, or health inspectors, made the rounds of area restaurants. While many customers praised their work, numerous restaurateurs accused inspectors of being

“snoopers” rather than professional sanitarians. In other words, restaurant operators felt

95 “It‟s Time to See Red,” Chuck Wagon, May 1947, 28-29. 96 Tomes, The Gospel of Germs, 250-251; “My Lips Are for You…and You Alone,” American Restaurant, February 1944, 64. 97 Berl ben Meyr, “Banishing All Germs,” Pacific Coast Record, April 1948, 87. 98 “N.Y. Sanitation Inspection Report Lists 16 Most Common Faults,” American Restaurant, June 1947, 58. 37 attacked for minor infractions rather than supported in their overall efforts to maintain a clean operation. Public health officers shot back, accusing whining owners of showing “a woeful ignorance of the need for inspection” and advising them to conceive of the sanitarian as a customer whose repeat business the restaurant wanted to insure.99

Although operators grumbled at the oversight, public health officials insisted that restaurants abide by sanitation guidelines, especially in the areas of dishwashing and food preservation.

A study conducted among military troops in 1917 was one of the first to confirm that diseases ranging from influenza and pneumonia to tuberculosis, scarlet fever, and trench mouth (a painful ulcerous form of gingivitis caused by excessive bacteria) could be transmitted through improperly cleaned eating utensils.100 Then, in 1923, physicians specializing in bacterial research announced that their studies indicated that unwashed table utensils could be carriers of tuberculosis bacilli; however, no (literal) guinea pig contracted the disease from a fork or spoon washed mechanically in boiling water.101

These findings prompted state and municipal health boards throughout the country to modify their sanitation codes by requiring restaurants to sterilize eating utensils with detergent and hot water over 180 degrees Fahrenheit (a practice already adopted by

99 “Pros and Cons on Sanitarians,” Restaurant Management, January 1949, 24; James S. Warren, “Do They or Don‟t They Snoop to Conquer?” Restaurant Management, November 1948, 24; John L. Gluth, “A Health Inspector Can Be Your Best Friend—If You Let Him,” Restaurant Management, November 1948, 54-55, 124, 126. 100 “Chlorine Improves Dishwater,” New York Times, December 8, 1935, X12. 101 “Infection through Dishes,” American Restaurant, January 1923, 45. 38

California).102 By the mid-1930s, however, with inadequately cleaned glassware, dishware, and utensils continuing to be a persistent problem, the chief of the Bureau of

Preventable Diseases in Washington, D.C., offered restaurants an acceptable alternative to the soap-and-hot-water sanitizing approach: immerse utensils in a chlorine solution for eight minutes, which was eventually reduced to five minutes and adopted by other state sterilization laws by the 1940s.103

The shortage of trained restaurant workers during World War II, as noted above, resulted in employees who did not consistently follow hygienic dishwashing guidelines.

Industry pamphlets and news articles throughout the war years constantly reminded managers to harp on employees, hammering down the importance of using mechanical dishwashers rather than human hands to sanitize eating utensils.104 “It is a disgusting procedure in many of the quick lunch type of restaurants where employees literally wash dishes with one hand and serve food with the other at the same time,” scolded one trade publication.105 Dishwashing detergent manufacturers seized the moment to build trade by frightening restaurants into using high-quality dishwashing solutions. The Super Soilax brand produced one of the more successful series of advertisements to tap into the fear that communicable diseases hovered on the rims of restaurant glassware and eating utensils. Throughout the mid-1940s, Economics Laboratory, Inc., which produced Super

Soilax, launched a number of advertisements featuring a close-up of a man or woman‟s

102 “New Rules for Washing Dishes,” New York Times, March 14, 1928, 20. 103 “Chlorine Improves Dishwater,” X12; “Dishwashing Tips,” Restaurant Management, July 1942, 44; “State Sterilization Law Is Amended,” Chuck Wagon, September 1947, 28. 104 “D.C. Cafes Strive for Cleanliness,” Washington Post, September 24, 1942, B1. 105 “Yours For Cleaner Dishes,” Restaurant Management, February 1942, 27. 39 face. The customer, in the act of sipping from a glass or biting a forkful of food, appeared oblivious to the danger looming above in the form of an ominous question: “Contact— with what?” “Who‟s next on this fork?” or “Jump off place for germs?” The detergent vowed to eradicate “saliva-borne bacteria” for “more real cleanliness than meets the eye.”106 Other disinfectants developed from wartime research, such as the Microb-Master

Automatic Dispenser, also promised to sterilize utensils and eliminate saliva-transmitted diseases through chemical solutions.107 Yet for bulky kitchen machines and surfaces where dishwashing was an impractical and impossible solution, restaurants needed to turn to chemical cleaning agents.

The challenge of using chemical detergents, deodorants, and insecticides was that by eliminating one problem, say, an infestation of cockroaches, a restaurant created another by putting potential poisons in close proximity to food. In the 1930s, this issue was easily “solved” by companies who claimed their insecticides were perfectly safe to ingest. Xodor, an insecticide produced by the Midway Chemical Company in Chicago, was intended specifically for restaurants because its smell quickly blended with kitchen odors and, if the product “happened” to be sprayed on food, an unsuspecting diner would not notice the tasteless, “harmless” chemical compound.108 Some products‟ names stretched irony to a new level. “White Death,” an insecticide distributed by the

Playcrafters Guild of America, promised to annihilate roaches, flies, and other pesky

106 “Contact—with What?” Restaurant Management, February 1944, 55; “Who‟s Next on This Fork?”Restaurant Management, April 1944, 53; “Jump Off Place for Germs?” American Restaurant, November 1943, 47. 107 “New Disinfecting Appliance Now Available to Restaurants,” Chuck Wagon, March 1946, 28. 108 “Insecticide Produced by Midway Chemical,” American Restaurant, January 1936, 58. 40 vermin, as well as absorb unpleasant restaurant odors, and not to burst into flames near a heat source. Of course, “White Death” did “not affect foods.” Similarly, “Doom”

Insecticide, an odorless, stain-free product created by the Edgar A. Murray Company in

Detroit, vowed to “bring sure death” to rodents, water bugs, and mosquitoes yet was

“safe for use anywhere around food, drink, humans or pets” (presumably not the family hamster, though).109 Even by the early 1940s, the benefits of insecticides were framed in terms of creating a sanitary, comfortable dining environment. The Best Insecticide

Company in Seattle manufactured its product in powder form, guaranteeing it as “a most sanitary means of extermination” because the powder desiccated insects “thus eliminating decomposition.” Likewise, Wynadotte Chemicals‟ general cleaner and cockroach repellant worked as a “pleasant but penetrating disinfectant.”110

Not all public health officials swallowed the “harmless” claim that accompanied insecticides and other chemical cleaning products. In the late 1920s, sanitation experts advised restaurants to use caution when using insecticides, like the highly-toxic Paris

Green, near places of food preparation and storage, lest “a flock of big flies managed to land in the Paris green box and then trail over the ice cream or sandwich of a customer.”111 Immediately following World War II, New York City‟s Health Department initiated a rash of restaurant inspections throughout the five boroughs, uncovering horrific violations including roach-infested stacks of dishes and eating utensils, as well as

109 “Insecticide Developed for Restaurant,” American Restaurant, July 1936, 50; “Insecticide Usage,” American Restaurant, May 1937, 81. 110 “New Insecticide,” Washington State Restaurant, Tavern and Tobacco News, June 1941, 30; “What‟s New,” Restaurant Management, August 1944, 41. 111 “Modern Sanitation,” Mixer and Server, July 15, 1928, 31. 41 roach poison sprinkled around open containers of food and dishware.112 Health and restaurant management experts warned operators only to use non-toxic, tasteless, odorless substances around food products, citing an example of the worst-case scenario where over 200 people fell ill and 47 died at a restaurant on the West Coast from eating scrambled eggs mixed with white roach powder mistaken for powdered milk.113

Insecticide, unfortunately, was not the only cause of food poisoning in restaurants.

Tainted food prompted many customers to file lawsuits against restaurants serving the injurious dishes. Frequently, courts found in favor of the plaintiff, deeming restaurants liable for serving “unwholesome” food. Cases reaching from Massachusetts to Missouri in the 1920s awarded $1000 to individual diners who fell ill after eating impure meals at restaurants.114 Stories of negligence abounded, too, such as a woman who bit into a corned beef sandwich only to crunch down on two pieces of glass the size of her fingertips; evidence showed that the sandwich-making station was situated next to glassware storage, a finding that prompted the court to find in her favor.115 More often, though, customers ingested food improperly stored before serving, which resulted in illness caused by food poisoning.

112 “Restaurant Clean-Up Stepped Up; 351 Visits Bring 30 Summonses,” New York Times, July 26, 1946, 23. 113 John M. Welch, “What‟s Behind the Clean Plate?” Chuck Wagon, May 1948, 16, 22; Crete Dahl, How to Get and Keep Restaurant Employees, 56. 114 Leslie Childs, “The Restaurant Man‟s Liability for Injury to Patron Caused by Tainted Food,” American Restaurant, December 1923, 33; “Liable for Spoiled Food,” Pacific Coast Chef, May 1927, 14. 115 Leo T. Parker, “How to Avoid Liability for Injuries from Injurious Food,” American Restaurant, May 1941, 104-105. 42

Sickness from contaminated foodstuffs affected thousands of restaurant patrons a year. Commonly understood to be a result of “ptomaine poisoning” in the early twentieth century, by the 1930s, the cause of food poisoning was more frequently linked to staphylococcus bacteria, which bred in foods left out too long in warm kitchens. Dairy products, especially cream, were responsible for numerous cases of food poisoning.

Ninety airline staff members in Chicago had to be hospitalized in 1942 after eating cream pies where the filling had sat on a counter overnight before baking. A year later, two people died and 50 were hospitalized in Oregon after ordering slices of cream pie tainted with salmonella; a similar case occurred again in Oregon in 1944 where another man died and seven customers fell ill from eating cream pies infected with staphylococcus. The problem persisted. In another city, 100 dinner-time customers complained of sickness after ingesting cream-filled éclairs where the cream had been sitting on the kitchen counter all day. Lunchtime patrons escaped with fresh éclairs, but by the evening, staphylococcus bacteria had cultured in the cream bowl, assisted by the kitchen‟s warm air.116

Proper refrigeration improved many of the conditions responsible for food-borne illnesses. Analogous to air conditioning, refrigerators offered restaurants “food conditioning” by creating the ideal storage temperature for foods. Refrigeration not only guarded against bacteria growth and maintained the freshness of fruits and vegetables,

116 Crete Dahl, How to Get and Keep Restaurant Employees, 56; Paul de Kruiff, “Food Poisoning,” American Restaurant, August 1943, 16, 18; “Food Poisoning—An Ever-Present Danger,” Washington State Restaurant and Tavern News, February 1945, 13; “Death Attributed to Cream Pies Made in Bakery,” Washington Post, May 1, 1944, 4; “Stop Food Poisoning Before It Starts!” American Restaurant, June 1945, 40-42. 43 thereby saving costs by reducing spoilage, but it also appealed to customers as a tangible symbol of sanitary food practices. Restaurants that could afford to install refrigerated window display units, such as Gallagher‟s steak house in New York and the Esquire Pub in Chicago, showed off the quality of their steaks to pedestrians and attracted more customers just passing by.117

Beyond refrigerators, companies also developed alternative technological solutions for keeping prepared food and its ingredients germ-free. Germicidal lamps and radiation treatments were widely advertised in restaurant trade journals as safe methods for sterilizing food, glassware, and utensils. The Sterilamp, manufactured by the

Westinghouse Electric Corporation, was first introduced to restaurants for widespread usage in 1937. Using an electronic tube to cast lethal ultraviolet rays on microscopic bacteria, viruses, and mold spores, the Sterilamp gained popularity among restaurant operators and inspired a host of imitators.118 Beck‟s Restaurant in Philadelphia installed

Steril-Ray Cabinets where customers could watch the technology sterilize glasses by exposing them to ultraviolet rays for two minutes. Sylvania Electric Products and General

Electric both created their own versions of germicidal lamps that used ultraviolet rays to

117 “Refrigeration—Answer to Old Questions,” American Restaurant, April 1940, 46; George M. Cox, “Avoid That Summer Slump,” Chuck Wagon, August 1942, 14; “Window Refrigeration Has Big Merchandising Power,” American Restaurant, January 1948, 108; Advertisement, Herrick Refrigerators, American Restaurant, September 1949, 116. 118 “Sterilamp Used to Destroy Bacteria,” Chuck Wagon, May 1946, 25. 44 sterilize surfaces, while other companies created add-ons, such as air disinfection units, to be used in conjunction with the lamp.119

Other manufacturers focused on different forms of radiation as sterilizing agents, marketing X-ray generators and radiation produced by nuclear fission for destroying bacteria on ingredients most susceptible to spoilage, such as fruits and vegetables. The

American Chemical Society even reported that ultrasound frequencies could effectively kill germs in milk and other liquids.120 Some restaurants opted instead for objects that created a barrier between hands and food to prevent bacterial transfer. The Pik-Up Fork, part of the Benedict Manufacturing Company‟s “Indestructo” line of products, used a syringe-style spring action to grab-and-release pieces of food, thereby eliminating hand- to-food contact when transferring prepared items to a customer‟s plate. Using a similar concept, the “Best” Lemon Shields, designed by the Best Novelty Manufacturing

Company in Chicago, created a sanitary, umbrella-like cellophane cover for lemon slices so restaurant workers and customers did not have to touch the wedge directly.

Cellophane, for which the Du Pont Company purchased manufacturing and marketing rights in 1923, appealed to germ-conscious customers because of its advertising promises to protect a product from bacteria spread by the human touch. “Best” Lemon Shields banked on this gesture of “attention to sanitation and refinement in service” reflected in

119 “What‟s New,” Restaurant Management, August 1941, 34; “What‟s New,” Restaurant Management, September 1945, 46; “New Air-Disinfecting Fixtures,” American Restaurant, June 1944, 48; “What‟s New,” Restaurant Management, February 1945, 46; “How to Inspect and Keep Them Clean,” American Restaurant, June 1950, 43. 120 “X-Ray Energy for Killing Germs,” Washington State Restaurant and Tavern News, March 1949, 8; “Sterilizing Food,” American Restaurant, April 1948, 136; “Sterilizing with Sound,” Restaurant Management, December 1952, 13. 45 its “practical, sanitary” covering.121 All of these options to reduce the likelihood of tainted food, however, tackled the problem of germs based on contact transference. To combat the issue of malodorous air quality as a contributing factor to the health of restaurant dining, operators turned to the ultimate in mechanical ventilation: air conditioning.

GOING WITH THE FLOW: REGULATING APPETITE, ODORS, AND AIR TEMPERATURE WITH MECHANICAL VENTILATION

Mechanical ventilation appeared slow to implement for restaurants throughout the country even though industry experts cited good ventilation as one of the keys to increasing patronage.122 The first uses of ventilating fans in restaurants appeared in the kitchens rather than in the dining rooms. Only eighty-nine of the 631 establishments classified as restaurants and cafés in San Francisco reported using mechanical ventilation in their dining rooms in 1929. One-hundred-twenty-five of these eateries stated that they used mechanical ventilation apparatuses in their kitchens.123 Installed in areas of food preparation, properly-designed fans pulled smoke and food odors away from the dining room, releasing them into the outdoors. The fans also kept food service workers more physically comfortable, which helped to improve kitchen productivity. Some of the earliest manufacturers of ventilation systems, such as the Chicago-based Ilg Electric

121 “Pik-Up Fork,” American Restaurant, July 1938, 58; “Shields Afford Sanitary Service of Lemon Wedges,” American Restaurant, August 1940, 48; Tomes, The Gospel of Germs, 249-250. 122 Dahl, Selling Public Hospitality, 61. 123 U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce, The San Francisco Restaurant Industry (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1930), 23-24. 46

Ventilating Company, boasted that their fans could change over the air in kitchens every two minutes, while taking only five minutes to circulate old air out of dining rooms.124

Ventilation emerged as one of the crucial matters of restaurant operation for owners and patrons alike, both for its role in maintaining healthy air quality and in creating a pleasantly-smelling dining room where customers‟ appetites expanded rather than waned as a result of unpleasant aromas. In the early twentieth century, popular science furthered the belief that dangerous, disease-causing germs thrived in hot, stuffy environments; therefore, air circulation was central to public health. Restaurant management schools warned future operators that simply installing wall fans helped cool down a dining room, but it would not draw out unappetizing odors and the build-up of heat from the kitchen.125 Dieticians and sanitation experts acknowledged that certain gestures, like improved ventilation, could have both a psychological as well as physical

“implication of cleanliness.” Through good air flow, laundered uniforms, and sufficient lighting, restaurants could promote “the psychology of cleanliness.”126 The language used to describe ventilation mirrored other hygienic practices: ventilators “washed air” to remove odors, replacing “dead” air with “purer” air, and removed air “contaminated” by grease and other rancid cooking fumes.127 One over-the-top manager advertised his air-

124 “The Art of Ventilation Is Become a Science,” in Ideas for Refreshment Rooms (Chicago: The Hotel Monthly Press, 1923), 204-205. 125 The Ware School of Tea Room Management: A Course in Tea Room, Cafeteria, and Motor Inn Management: Lesson IV (New York: The Ware School of Tea Room Management, 1927), 38. 126 “Restaurant Industry Launches Great Sanitation Campaign,” American Restaurant, July 1934, 30. 127 M. B. Brandewiede, “Castilla: Where St. Louis Dines Amidst Splendors of Old Spain,” American Restaurant, March 1930, 29; “The Art of Ventilation Is Become a Science,” 204; Breidert, “Poor Ventilation Kills,” 18. 47 conditioned dining room as “filled with air that is as sweet and pure as that from the snow-clad tops of the distant peaks.”128 Manufacturing companies hawked their mechanical ventilating technologies in restaurant trade journals throughout the 1920s and

1930s, promising to deodorize foul air with “odorless” vapors, dispel preferable aromas throughout a room, and circulate fresher air with minimal noise.129 Yet only one ventilation technology fundamentally altered customers‟ expectations of restaurant dining: air conditioning.

Before air conditioning appeared in American homes, its cooling benefits were felt first in factories, where regulated air temperature helped maintain a standardized product that could be otherwise affected by heat; keeping workers physically comfortable was a secondary effect.130 Air-conditioned commercial spaces of leisure and consumption followed, such as movie theaters, department stores, trains, and restaurants.

Defined by Marsha Ackermann as “mechanical cooling by means of refrigeration,” air conditioning became more than a form of temperature manipulation in the United States.

As Ackermann argues, air conditioning created a set of expectations for the American public, particularly the middle class residing in urban areas, that to manipulate and control the temperature of one‟s physical environment was a privileged achievement and

128 Dahl, Selling Public Hospitality, 63. 129 “Equipment News for March,” Restaurant Management, March 1938, 241; “Innovations in Equipment,” American Restaurant, December 1936, 74-75; “Dallas Fans Aid in Combating Foul Air,” American Restaurant, April 1933, 60. 130 Marsha E. Ackermann, Cool Comfort: America‟s Romance with Air-Conditioning (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002), 44. 48 a model of modernity.131 By the mid-1920s, movie theaters enticed sweaty Americans to cool off in front of the big screen in an air-conditioned room. In little time, department stores followed suit, with hotels and restaurants quick on their heels. Robert Jahrling, who operated the popular restaurant at the Highland Hotel in Springfield, Massachusetts, is credited with installing the first air conditioning unit in a restaurant kitchen in 1919.132

Other restaurants that could afford the expensive equipment followed in his footsteps.

Unlike the great outdoors, where weather was less predictable, inside air temperature could be controlled and regulated by air conditioning.133 By the eve of World War II, air conditioning had transformed into an environmental expectation for the nation‟s middle- class.134

Unlike mechanical ventilation, which circulated air but did not control its humidity, air conditioning systems pulled air from a room into a unit which filtered, saturated, and modified the humidity of the air before forcing it back out through a fan or

“blower box.”135 While many restaurant operators balked at the initial expense of this

“luxury item,” proprietors who watched their profits skyrocket paired with representatives from the leading air conditioning manufacturers to advertise the success and worthwhile investment of installing an A/C unit. Every summer, restaurateurs would watch their revenue decline along with patrons‟ appetites that withered in the hot

131 Ackermann, Cool Comfort, 1-5. 132 “Dividends From Air Conditioning,” American Restaurant, December 1944, 44. 133 For more on air conditioning and consumers, see William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), esp. 302-303. 134 Ackermann, Cool Comfort, 46. 135 Mark E. Mooney, “Principles Governing Room Cooling,” Catering World, February 1932, 18-20. 49 weather. Therefore, even in the economic downturn of the Great Depression and facing tighter competition, restaurants that could afford to install air conditioning units succeeded financially.

The advertised benefits of air conditioning generally fell into one of three categories: monetary profits, improved health, and odor removal. In the early 1930s restaurant industry experts predicted that air conditioning would shortly emerge as not only an expectation but a requirement for the dining public who would find “appetite in the air.” This forecast proved to be accurate. By 1938 one restaurant insider ventured that

“the greatest stimulants to the food business during the past five years have been from repeal and air conditioning.”136 Popular restaurant guidebooks, like Duncan Hines‟s

Adventures in Good Eating, mentioned which restaurants offered air-conditioned dining rooms, a piece of information that could be a deciding factor for many travelers, hot and sweaty from driving half the day in their (un-air-conditioned) cars. Basement restaurants reported substantial increases in the number of summertime customers after installing air conditioning units. When the New York Exchange for Woman‟s Work restaurant added a

Carrier Air Conditioning unit to its dining room in June 1939, offering customers the same kind of “cool comfort” found nearby at World‟s Fair exhibits, the management

136 “There‟s Appetite in the Air,” American Restaurant, June 1931, 48; “What About Air Conditioning,” Restaurant Management, February 1938, 90. 50 celebrated its effect on enticing customers to stop for a quick bite to eat on their way to and from the Fair.137

The spectacle of air conditioning convinced the American middle class that regulation of indoor temperature could be synonymous with social advancement—to be physically comfortable in a temperate indoor climate, to breathe in deodorized air, and to exercise control over a natural phenomenon such as weather elevated the stature and success of the nation‟s technological achievements. To illustrate these utopic visions, organizers of Chicago‟s Century of Progress Exposition (1933-34) and New York‟s

World‟s Fair (1939-40) exhibited model homes and other windowless structures outfitted with air conditioning to demonstrate firsthand the “push-button weather” marvel to fair- goers.138 In the same year that the Century of Progress Exposition featured its futuristic air-conditioned houses, manufacturers and engineers tried to motivate restaurants to install units by insisting, “People are becoming more air conditioned minded” and citing examples where air conditioning increased patronage from as far-ranging places as

Richmond, Virginia; Paris, Illinois; and Topeka, Kansas.139

During and following the war years, air conditioning manufacturing became increasingly competitive as more companies entered the field. No longer was having air conditioning a reason to celebrate; having the correct unit determined whether a

137 Restaurant Report: An Analysis of the Operation of Restaurants, Tea Rooms, Soda Fountains, Luncheonettes and Cafeterias in Department Stores (New York: National Retail Dry Goods Association, 1935), 16; New York Exchange for Woman‟s Work, “Cool Comfort,” Exchange Revue, June 1939, 19. 138 Ackermann, Cool Comfort, 77-102; H. R. Lorander, “„Push-Button‟ Weather,” Catering World, May 1932, 13-15. 139 Robert E. Hattis, “Air-Conditioning the Restaurant,” American Restaurant, August 1933, 27; Restaurant Report, 16; “Air Conditioning Builds Patronage,” American Restaurant, June 1935, 34-35, 74-76. 51 restaurant‟s air quality, like its porridge, was too hot, too cold, or just right. Restaurants that purchased “cheap” units risked high operating costs and too much humidity. General

Electric promoted its “Packaged Weather” with slogans like “Hot restaurants get the cold shoulder” and calling its air conditioning “real” in contrast to inadequate imitations. The

Carrier Corporation, often credited as inventing the air conditioner, also advertised that its units never left a restaurant too cold or drafty.140 This complaint was not uncommon.

Physicians warned restaurants and patrons that a temperature difference between outdoors and indoors greater than ten degrees Fahrenheit could “shock” customers with the drastic change and cause illness.141 Air conditioning, if not properly regulated, could be detrimental to one‟s health rather than improving it.

Aside from overly-cooled restaurants, the health benefits from mechanically circulated and “cleaned” air appealed to customers already concerned with the sanitary conditions of restaurants. One Seattle restaurant advertised, “The air in this Restaurant is completely changed every six minutes making available over forty cubic feet of clean tempered fresh air per person. No air is recirculated or „used over,” thereby reassuring customers that they were breathing “fresh,” not “recycled” air.142 The Lakeside

Company, which manufactured air conditioning equipment, encouraged restaurants to install units by arguing that public health and productivity would improve “when all

140 “Hot Restaurants Get the Cold Shoulder,” American Restaurant, January 1940, 51; “$140 Down Now Installs GE Air Conditioning,” Restaurant Management, April 1941, 77; “They‟re Talking About the Air Conditioning in Somebody‟s Restaurant,” Restaurant Management, September 1945, 65; “Air Conditioning That Is Different,” American Restaurant, June 1941, 25; Ackermann, Cool Comfort, 2. 141 “Use Reason in Air Conditioning,” American Restaurant, October 1940, 22. 142 Menu, C&S, Seattle, Washington, n.d., MOHAI. 52 indoor air is properly heated or cooled, circulated, cleaned and humidified or de- humidified.”143 Importantly, as this prediction suggested, air conditioning meant more than air cooling, which is now the common usage of the term. Instead, the concept of conditioning air applied to the act of treating air, of bringing air to a desired state— literally, to “condition” it. The preferred temperature might be warmer than the outside air or cooler; air conditioning units‟ success depended on their performance of manipulating air to the desired temperature and level of humidity.

“Cleaning” restaurant air benefited not only patrons‟ lungs but also their nostrils.

“Dining room halitosis,” caused by lingering cigarette smoke and stale kitchen odors in restaurants that lacked adequate ventilation, reduced customers‟ appetites and created an atmosphere of hazy discomfort.144 A medical term revived by Listerine in 1922 to market its antiseptic as “breath deodorant,” halitosis quickly came to represent the generification of scientific scare copy in the advertising world and in the restaurant world.145 Its application to restaurants implied social stigma in addition to describing the air quality.

Air conditioning units, like Listerine, could treat a restaurant‟s “bad breath,” and manufacturers cited the removal of unwanted odors as one of the major advantages of mechanical ventilation systems and particularly air conditioning. Some companies, such as the W. B. Connor Engineering Corporation and Union Carbide and Carbon

143 “Air Conditioning for Restaurants,” American Restaurant, March 1933, 6. 144 Harry Holmes, “How to Prevent „Dining Room Halitosis,‟” American Restaurant, March 1932, 32-34. 145 Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920-1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 18-21; Juliann Sivulka, Stronger Than Dirt: A Cultural History of Advertising Personal Hygiene in America, 1875-1940 (New York: Humanity Books, 2001), 184.

53

Corporation, improved upon standard air conditioning units by building an odor absorber unit, made of battery-activated coconut shell carbon that worked like an “army gas mask” to “wash” and then re-use “cleaned” air now devoid of tobacco smoke, garbage, and kitchen smells.146 Producers of elaborate electric fans claimed that their products pushed

“offensive greasy and oily odors” back toward the kitchen, reducing the number of complaints from irritated customers who left a restaurant smelling like their companion‟s meal. Air conditioning manufacturers, however, claimed that fans merely re-circulated stale and stinky air. To remove disagreeable “kitchen breath” required the powers of an air conditioning unit.147

Importantly, the aromatic preferences of white, middle- and upper-middle-class

Americans, who comprised the majority of restaurant patrons in the interwar and postwar years, determined the difference between pleasant aromas and foul odors. White, native- born Americans often found ethnic foods to have unfamiliar and, at times, unpleasant smells. “Strange odors will be encountered,” George Chappell warned readers of his 1925 dining guide who might venture into New York City‟s “Foreign Feeding Grounds.”148

Middle-class social reformers and manufacturers of personal hygiene products furthered the notion that immigrants lacked proper personal hygiene and needed to learn how to clean themselves according to American standards. For instance, the makers of Fels-

146 “Odor Absorber,” American Restaurant, May 1938, 100; “Keep „Odors‟ Off the Menu,” American Restaurant, April 1948, 152; “Odor Absorber,” American Restaurant, December 1939, 54, 56. 147 “Bayard Says,” Restaurant Management, August 1938, 78; “Avoid That Unpleasant „Kitchen Breath,‟” 36. 148 George Chappell, The Restaurants of New York (Greenberg Publisher, Inc., 1925), 148.

54

Naptha soap used advertisements to appeal to social workers‟ influence on ethnic minorities and their manner of cleaning: “Mrs. Rizzuto would like to live up to our standards of cleanliness,” read one ad. “But her methods are so primitive, so ineffective.

She‟s sadly in need of coaching in American ways.”149 Although body odor could likely be attributed to the crowded urban living conditions in which many immigrants lived

(including those who worked in restaurants) and the lack of plumbing for regular bath water, stereotypes of ethnic groups as malodorous persisted in much of the white, middle- class popular imagination.

The power to designate certain smells as pleasing and others as loathsome followed a long history of elite white Americans using odor as a marker of social distinction.150 To define a certain group of people based on sensory difference, such as the argument that they smelled differently than others, was an attempt to create what

Mark M. Smith calls an “artificial binary” between a white majority and racial or ethnic minorities. The distinction is captured in the matter-of-fact statement printed in the leading trade journal Restaurant Management: “Normal people don‟t like an atmosphere tainted with unpleasant odors.”151 This assertion summarized the value-laden implications of public space filled with competing smells. “Normal” people translated into fully

149 Hoy, Chasing Dirt, 145, illustration insert. 150 For examples of the historical uses of smell as a marker of social, racial, and ethnic difference see Connie Y. Chiang, “The Nose Knows: The Sense of Smell in American History,” Journal of American History 95, no. 2 (September 2008): 405-416; Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft, “Incensed: Food Smells and Ethnic Tension,” Gastronomica 6, no. 2 (May 2006), 57-60; Mark M. Smith, How Race Is Made: Slavery, Segregation, and the Senses (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). 151 Julius Levine, “Recovering and Re-Using Stale Restaurant Air,” Restaurant Management, September 1948, 49. 55

“Americanized,” “civilized,” privileged bodies, generally devoid of racial and ethnic markers, that unapologetically associated social authority with a deodorized environment.

In the first half of the twentieth century, many business leaders and social reformers promoted air conditioning as the solution to eliminating interior odors and the lingering presence of less-desirable bodies.

Air conditioning manufacturers and supportive restaurant operators touted the technology as beneficial not only to patrons but to employees whose working environment was more temperate. Cooler air also meant that waiters and waitresses tended to sweat less, resulting in fewer customer complaints about their server‟s offensive body odor. The personal hygiene practices of waiters and waitresses had long been a topic among restaurant managers, carrying with it value judgments and stereotypes about racial and ethnic groups who constituted a large portion of restaurant service workers. Restaurants‟ rules for employees emphasized sanitary presentation of self, which translated into removing facial hair for many waiters. Training manuals and guides to restaurant operation included as part of a waitress‟s “duties” taking daily baths, tending to bad breath with careful tooth brushing, using a deodorant, and shampooing hair frequently. Because hair absorbed and retained such a wide variety of smells, one specialist in the physiology of odor explained, “for society‟s sake, it [hair] must be deolfacted effectively at reasonable intervals.”152 At the same time, a waitress was also forbidden from masking her body odor by wearing strong-smelling perfume because the

152 Bienfang, Subtle Sense, 67. 56 scent might be objectionable to diners and would likely interfere with their appetite.

Although managers continued to complain about the repellant effects of “Waitress B.O” through the postwar years, which they blamed for loss of appetite and customers, the development of more effective air conditioning systems and deodorizers improved the situation. One industry representative happily declared in the late 1950s, “It is rare that a customer has to complain about offensive body smells on the part of the persons who are providing food,” and he attributed this achievement in part to management regulations.153

Perspiration was not the only sensitive topic regarding smells produced by the human body. Restrooms and toilets might be an uncouth topic of conversation in restaurants, but they were central to the topic of sanitation in the nation‟s public eating establishments. Just as home economists deemed clean toilets a mark of a hygienic household, so were sanitary washrooms and toilets an indication of a restaurant‟s overall standard of cleanliness. In the early twentieth century, the knowledge that diseases such as cholera and typhoid thrived in human fecal matter was broadly accepted.154 Dirty toilet facilities in restaurant restrooms raised questions about the restaurant‟s overall attention to hygiene. Yet in the 1910s and 1920s, much of the emphasis on rest room cleanliness was superficial, especially since the conditions under which most employees lived and worked were terribly unsanitary, which increased the likelihood of bacterial

153 Tomes, The Gospel of Germs, 176; Research Bureau for Retail Training, A Training Program for Tea- Room Waitresses (: , 1929), 6, 23; J. O. Dahl, The Efficient Waitress Manual (Stamford: The Dahls, 1945), 6-7; “Getting Along on the Job,” Washington State Restaurant and Tavern News, November 1941, 7-8; Madeline Gray and Vass de la Padua, How to Be a Success in the Restaurant Business (New York: Greenberg, 1946), 255; “Delicate Subject,” American Restaurant, May 1941,10; Joe Minster, “Smelling Your Food the Latest,” Pacific Coast Record, July 1957, 12. 154 Tomes, “Spreading the Germ Theory,” 44-45. 57 dissemination.155 As the Consumer‟s League of New York City revealed in a 1916 study, most restaurant workers lived in over-crowded, dirty tenement houses that lacked adequate ventilation and circulated contagious diseases. Middle-class reformers attributed these unseemly conditions to the “low standards of the European peasant class from which restaurant workers are largely recruited,” yet they still held restaurant management responsible for allowing unacceptable hygienic situations, such as having kitchens that led directly to outside toilets.156

Municipal and state health codes began to add specific recommendations for restaurants‟ toilet facilities in the 1920s, including the requirement that restaurants offer toilets in all public eating establishments.157 By the 1930s, the director of the National

Restaurant Association called modern, hygienic rest rooms and toilets “increasingly essential in today‟s restaurant.”158 Industry experts advised operators to install nonabsorbent toilet compartments that reduced foul odors; check the plumbing to ensure thorough flushing; disinfect the toilet bowl and urinals on a daily basis; purchase name- brand, high-quality liquid or shaven soap (bar soap was deemed unhygienic); provide sanitary paper towels, and not store any food, utensil, or container in the toilet room that was involved in food preparation.159 The American Restaurant magazine urged

155 Tomes, The Gospel of Germs, 178. 156 Behind the Scenes in a Restaurant, 10-11. 157 The Ware School of Tea Room Management: Lesson IV, 11. 158 H. C. Siekman, “Restaurant Industry Plans Modernization Drive,” American Restaurant, January 1938, 29. 159 James V. Malone, “Check Your Washrooms Against This Schedule,” American Restaurant, October 1940, 52, 139-141; “Clean Those Rest Rooms,” Chuck Wagon, August 1948, 12, 32; George W. Cox, “A Yardstick To Go By,” Chuck Wagon, September 1942, 9, 13. 58 proprietors to pledge to maintain basic standards of cleanliness in their toilet facilities, which would be verified by a certificate from the magazine. In Minnesota, the

Department of Health issued “Cleanliness Awards” to restaurants that cleaned their restrooms daily, among other sanitation gestures; only 60 out of 1,500 restaurants received awards in 1940.160 This type of sanitary validation was important to potential restaurant patrons. The Ivy House restaurant in Williamsburg, Virginia, lost its listing in

Duncan Hines‟s restaurant guidebook, Adventures in Good Eating, because the restrooms

(albeit furnished with running water) appeared outside of the main building.161 Hines, a stickler for sanitation in America‟s public dining rooms, recommended patrons inspect the toilet facilities before ordering a meal under the rationale that “if the wash rooms were dirty and ill-kept the kitchen would probably be the same.”162 A Washington State sanitarian concurred, noting that he had “inspected hundreds of places and…never found one with a dirty washroom that had a clean kitchen.”163 Many customers reported back to

Hines, as well as industry trade journals, when they encountered toilets that failed to meet their approval, including one fried chicken joint that neglected to provide soap and warm water in its restroom for patrons eating the house specialty with their fingers. One study

160 “By the Hundreds!” American Restaurant, July 1941, 12; “„Cleanliness Awards‟ Issued in Minnesota,” American Restaurant, September 1940, 56. 161 Ellen Rutledge to Earle R. MacAusland, March 11, 1952, Ivy House Records, College of William and Mary. 162 Marion Edwards, “They Live to Eat,” Better Homes and Gardens, March 1945, 31; Newman Tucker, “Hines Visits Southland,” Pacific Coast Record, April 1949, 48. 163 “The Publisher‟s Note: Restaurants and Sanitation,” Washington State Restaurant and Tavern News, November 1950, 6. 59 revealed that fifty percent of men and sixty-five percent of women never returned to a restaurant with a dirty washroom.164

In response, restaurants and their suppliers turned toward new technologies to improve the hygienic conditions of public restrooms. Manufacturing companies designed soap dispensers that required only a touch of the fingertips to release the lather. Electric hand dryers that turned on with a foot switch offered a sanitary solution to towel drying.

Deodorizer cartridges fitted on restroom doors automatically squirted air freshener into the room every time a stall door opened.165 In the late 1930s, a few toilet manufacturers developed methods for sanitizing bowls and seats using the latest advancements in product design, plastics, and ultra violet rays. The American Radiator and Standard

Sanitary Corporation marketed a “wall-hung women‟s urinal” to restaurants, arguing that the absence of a seat made the product more hygienic. The company explained matter-of- factly that the “Sani-Stand” model was just as clean and efficient as the male version, and it came in a variety of pastel-colored finishes.166 The Sperzel Modern Seat Company invented a toilet seat with rounded features rather than “corners or crevices in which germs can lodge.” The seat design itself reduced the amount of physical contact a user would have with the surface, which was constructed out of stainless steel and Bakelite, one of the earliest synthetic plastics invented by the chemist Leo Baekeland and

164 Patrick D. Moreland, “Editorial,” Chuck Wagon, August 1947, 9; “Chicken But No Soap,” American Restaurant, June 1940, 48; “Why Restaurant Customers Don‟t Return,” Restaurateur, March 1960, 9. 165 “Soap Economizer,” American Restaurant, January 1941, 55; “Watrous Lather Dispensers,” American Restaurant, July 1941, 56; “Airtowel Dries Hands Quickly and Neatly,” American Restaurant, October 1948, 56; “Deodorizer Dispenser Fits On Restroom Door,” American Restaurant, April 1949, 129. 166 “Wall-Hung Women‟s Urinal,” Restaurant Management, December 1951, 64.

60 celebrated for its durability and wide range of uses.167 In competition, the Sterilseat Sales

Corporation advertised its newest toilet seat which used the Westinghouse Sterilamp

(also employed in kitchens to sanitize glassware and tenderize meat) to blast a “clear, blue halo” of ultra violet rays onto the seat, thereby “render[ing] all contact portions of the seat practically free from germ life.” A decade later, the Southern New England

Ultraviolet Company claimed to have designed a similar but more efficient toilet seat that protected seats with three times the power of earlier ultra violet ray models.168 These germ-fighting technologies might disinfect toilet seats and other washroom surfaces, but they did not effectively remove restroom odors. Air conditioners, too, could not be counted on as a reliable source for eliminating the dissonant array of smells that collected within a restaurant‟s interior. Restaurant operators, therefore, invested substantially in alternative odor-removal solutions to please their favored customers‟ olfactory preferences.

DOLLARS AND SCENTS: THE BUSINESS OF SMELL

According to a columnist for one of the major West Coast restaurant trade journals, “this matter of proper odors” began in restaurants when certain groups of customers complained about food smells they found off-putting. Fish, cauliflower, horseradish, corned beef and cabbage, and a variety of other food items, when cooked,

167 “Equipment News for September,” Restaurant Management, September 1938, 45; Jeffrey L. Meikle, American Plastic: A Cultural History (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995), esp. 31-62. 168 “Equipment News for December,” Restaurant Management (December 1939), 64; “New Sanitary Feature for Rest Rooms,” American Restaurant, July 1940, 51; “What‟s New,” Restaurant Management, February 1949, 78. 61 released aromas that some patrons found offensive, even if their dining room companions did not object. In an effort to retain the most frequent (and often wealthiest) customers,

“better class establishments” invested substantially in odor-eliminating technologies and enforced habits of cleanliness among employees in an effort to create a deodorized dining environment.169

The aroma of food could invoke an incredible array of reactions from different people, depending on their regional upbringing, familial traditions, occupation, nostalgic or disagreeable memories, and a variety of other factors. Closely-held beliefs that certain populations distinguished by class, race, nationality, ethnicity, or religion smelled differently often influenced an individual‟s reaction to an odoriferous encounter. In 1907, for example, a middle-class woman investigating the “working wage” of girls in Boston grabbed a bite to eat at The New Waverly restaurant in South End. She found the basement-level restaurant to be “stuffy, with a certain odor.” This experience reflected what Sarah Deutsch calls an “urban moral geography” that middle-class women used to imagine and navigate unfamiliar urban spaces as dangerous.170 In this instance, the smell of the restaurant functioned as an alarm, a signal demarcating the boundary between safe

(and familiar) and unsafe (and foreign). Likewise, in the 1920s, Konrad Bercovici declared that with practice, it was possible to navigate a city based on the smells emanating from restaurants “like signs in windows.” Describing the basement restaurants in New York‟s Little Italy, Bercovici invoked the “odor of fried fish and oil” along with

169 Minster, “Smelling Your Food the Latest,” 12. 170 Sarah Deutsch, Women and the City: Gender, Space, and Power in Boston, 1870-1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 78-98. 62

“the smell of dirt and sweat and other indefinable odors,” pronouncing that the olfactive combination was enough to “drive one out into the street, despairing of ever breathing fresh air again.”171 Clearly, Bercovici was envisioning a readership that did not include

Italians, who likely enjoyed and reveled in the food smells wafting from the kitchens of

Italian restaurants. In this way, food authorities assigned social value to the food odors predominant among different groups in the United States.172

Smell, like taste, was not a neutral encounter. Food did not always smell good depending on the person sniffing. One waitress who barely had a break to eat during her shift complained, ironically, that “often the smell of food all the time takes away my appetite so I can‟t eat any way.”173 Duncan Hines refused to list places in his dining guide where the food did not smell good according to his nostril palate.174 Oftentimes competing odors interfered with the otherwise aromatic scent of freshly baked bread or a savory steak. Tobacco smoke was one of the culprits. The pharmacologist Ralph

Bienfang declared the personal habit of smoking a “social problem” because it seeped into publically-shared restaurant air and saturated the clothing and hair of other patrons.175 Others concurred, including the Chicago Equity League, whose representatives complained in an editorial printed in the June 1941 issue of American

171 Konrad Bercovici, Around the World in New York (New York: The Century Co., 1924), 65, 125-127. 172 The social value of food odor extended into the realm of personal safety. Mark M. Smith describes how black slaves had to prepare stolen meat based on the cooking odors it would emanate for fear of calling attention to the crime: “no one can smell boiled bacon far; but fried flitch can be smelled a mile by a good nose” (Charles Ball quoted. in Smith, How Race Is Made, 34-35). 173 Behind the Scenes in a Restaurant, 15. 174 “Best,” New Yorker, April 17, 1954, 26; Phyllis Larsh, “Duncan Hines: His Is the Traveler‟s Authority on Where to Eat,” Life, July 8, 1946, 16. 175 Bienfang, Subtle Sense, 65-66. 63

Restaurant magazine that the “increasingly obnoxious” dining rooms filled with tobacco smoke made it difficult for a non-smoking patron to enjoy eating out in restaurants at all.176

While humans produced odors in restaurants from cooking, smoking, perspiration, and using the toilet, inanimate objects also added to the variety of smells that patrons encountered inside of a restaurant. J. O. Dahl identified thirteen sources in addition to human bodies that contributed “disagreeable odors” to restaurants ranging from old rags and garbage cans to ice boxes and dish-washing machines.177 Sometimes the unlikely offenders were products intended to improve upon the restaurant‟s atmosphere. In the

1920s, Alice Foote MacDougall, a highly-regarded restaurateur in New York City, complained about „the unpleasant odor of the disinfectants” used by commercial laundries to clean linens, a displeasing scent that lingered on the napkins and table cloths, prompting her to use paper napkins in her restaurants.178 Twenty-five years later, Seattle- area customers flared their nostrils at foul odors emanating from the plastic wallpaper and upholstery at a local restaurant, smelling rank enough “to kill anyone‟s desire for the

[otherwise excellent] food, because the sharp odor seems to penetrate the food.”179

Restaurants that attempted to update their interiors with fresh paint risked alienating their customer base with the acrid aroma of the paint. The persistence of the problem

176 “Against Smoking in Restaurants,” American Restaurant, June 1941, 12. 177 J. O. Dahl, Restaurant Management, 3rd ed. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1938), 82. 178 Alice Foote MacDougall, The Secret of Successful Restaurants (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1929), 209. 179 “Offensive Odors,” Allied Food and Beverage, January 1956, 6.

64 motivated some companies to invent odor-free alternatives. The American-Marietta

Company in Chicago marketed Valdura No-Odor paint to restaurants in the early 1940s, claiming that the product was not simply perfumed with a more pleasing scent but was in fact de-odorized, eliminating the typical offensive paint smell. At the same time, the

Holley Chemical Company in New York began advertising Ridsmel, a “paint deodorant” that promised to “eliminate and neutralize the offensive or sickening odor of oil paint, enamel, varnish,” and other coatings by adding a few drops to a gallon can.180 These inventions designed to neutralize the smell of paint merely brushed the surface of odor- removing products marketed to the restaurant industry.

In 1946, Ralph Bienfang declared in his book on odor and society, The Subtle

Sense, “Odors are often concerned in money gain and, conversely, may be involved in potential money loss.”181 Bienfang‟s identification of the “business of odors” accurately summarized the precarious nature of smell in restaurant operations. On the one hand, a pleasing or neutral-smelling interior added to a customer‟s dining enjoyment; foul or off- putting scents translated into reduced checks and loss of sales. Deodorants played a tricky role in creating the balance between sweet smells and displeasing ones.

The majority of deodorants marketed to restaurants claimed on their packaging to erase interior odors, even though the language tended to be vague and non-descript about how the deodorant worked. For instance, Oakite Deodorant No. 1 would “clean and disinfect in a single operation,” while Nox-Odor absorbed moisture and lasted

180 “New No-Odor Paint,” American Restaurant, February 1942, 48; “What‟s New,” Restaurant Management, November 1942, 36. 181 Bienfang, Subtle Sense, 90. 65

“indefinitely.” Advertisements for Wynadotte Steri-Chlor insisted the product was “very effective in getting rid of disagreeable odors,” while De-Odor Bomb simply instructed its users to “press the nozzle…and odors leave.”182 In these instances, restaurant operators experimented with the effectiveness of different products based on trial-and-error and word-of-mouth recommendations, knowing little about whether their chemical composition neutralized strong smells. Oftentimes, the deodorant masked odors deemed unpleasant with fragrances considered more preferable through product testing. For example, in 1945 the W. H. Wheeler Company sold a chlorophyll-based liquid air freshener that coated the inside of a restaurant with the scent of the forest using a motor- propelled fan that evaporated the liquid through propulsion. The inventor who can be credited with discovering the chlorophyll key to odor neutralization for restaurants, though, was Guy Paschal, who created the product known now under the common household name, Airwick.

Guy Sherman Paschal was born in 1902 and received his law degree from the

University of Virginia in 1924, but his interests tended more toward botany and zoology.

A man with a fine appreciation for the great outdoors, especially forests and grassy plains, Paschal was stumped by the questions, “How could woodsy air stay fresh despite the presence of dead plants and animals?” Determined to find a solution, Paschal spent much of the 1930s traveling throughout North America in a mobile trailer collecting samples later used in experiments conducted in his home basement. Paschal‟s work

182 “What‟s New,” Restaurant Management, May 1943, 38; “Nox-Odor,” American Restaurant, June 1943, 83; “What‟s New,” Restaurant Management, July 1943, 41; “What‟s New,” Restaurant Management, December 1951, 64. 66 changed the future of chemical air fresheners through his discovery of “odor- opposites.”183

The understanding that particular smells could be neutralized by an “odor- opposite,” or a fragrance that essentially canceled out the prominent aroma of the first smell, was Paschal‟s first major contribution to the field of chemical deodorizers and resulted in his first patent. In 1940, Paschal founded the AirKem Company to start marketing his air freshener products, and in 1943 he received a patent for his “treatment of air” method, which used chlorophyll—either alone or combined with formaldehyde as a germicide—to freshen air and impart an “invigorating quality that resembles fresh country air on the people breathing it, to give a sense of well-being even where the confined air has become vitiated.” Paschal identified the air conditioning industry as likely to find value in his invention, especially because air conditioning on its own often imparted a musty, stale aroma even as it re-circulated air.184 Restaurants, as both operators of air conditioning units and businesses highly invested in the dissemination of pleasing aromas, found Paschal‟s products useful and appealing.

Paschal‟s chlorophyll air freshening discovery was an immediate marketable success. Only six months after he received his patent, the Journal of Chemical Education reported that Paschal‟s invention was already being advertised throughout the United

States among delighted restaurant chefs and home cooks who could now prepare “onions

183 “Guy S. Paschal, 87, Developer of Airwick,” New York Times, June 1, 1989; “There‟s More Than You Think To the Importance of Smells,” Allied Food and Beverage, May 1959, 17. 184 Guy S. Paschal, 1943, Method and Composition for the Treatment of Air, U.S. Patent 2,326,672, filed February 11, 1941, and issued August 10, 1943. 67 or fish for dinner and entertain [guests] the same evening without social embarrassment.”185 Airkem, using the slogan “Good Air Is Good Business,” appealed to restaurant representatives, such as the chef at Seattle‟s Sorrento Fireside Dining Room and Grill, who in turn provided testimonial advertising verifying their satisfaction with the chlorophyll-based air freshener.186 Paschal, after determining that lemon peel neutralized fish odor and wintergreen canceled the lingering scent of an ash tray, expanded his product development into food flavor additives and insect repellents, yet his most popular invention remained the Air-Wick deodorizing air fresheners.187

Despite the popularity of chemical deodorizers, many restaurant operators complained that the products merely added to the odorous layers, rather than removing them.188 Trade journals advised managers to avoid restroom deodorizers with overwhelming fragrances that emitted a “peculiar” scent on their own.189 A number of chemical manufacturers tapped into this avoidance of strong-smelling air fresheners and marketed odor-free deodorants to restaurants. Popular products included Knox-Odor, which claimed to be an air neutralizer with “no odor of its own,” and OD-30, an all- purpose deodorizer that “has no odor…leaves no odor” yet was still capable of removing odor from refrigerators, food containers, laundry, toilets, ash trays, and human hands.190

185 William S. Hill, “Recent Chemical Patents,” Journal of Chemical Education 21, no. 2 (February 1944): 68. 186 “Good Air Is Good Business,” Washington State Restaurant and Tavern News, December 1947, 7. 187 “There‟s More Than You Think,” 17; “Guy S. Paschal.” 188 Gray and de la Padua, How to Be a Success, 256. 189 “Clean Those Rest Rooms,” 12. 190 “What‟s New,” Restaurant Management, January 1943, 37; “New Odorless Deodorizer Kills Smell By Oxidation,” Restaurant Management, March 1944, 53; “What‟s New,” Restaurant Management, April 1944, 41. 68

For restaurant managers still hesitant to use chemical deodorizers in areas of food preparation and service, companies offered alternatives based on the same technologies used to sterilize food and eating utensils. Both the Kisco Company and Bretford

Manufacturing sold electric deodorizing generators that produced ozone in an effort to eliminate (rather than simply cover up) stale smells within an enclosed space. Similarly, the Westinghouse Electric Company devised a three-watt lamp bulb called Odorout, which converted ultraviolet rays into ozone for destroying unpleasant odors. The company‟s marketing strategy for Odorout included emphasizing that it worked “without the use of chemicals, chlorodyne, or other deodorizers,” a decision that highlighted restaurant operators‟ reluctance to use potentially toxic chemical products around food.191

No matter what method restaurateurs used to eliminate unwanted smells, some industry leaders insisted that the only truly effective way was to operate a sanitary business. J.O.

Dahl dismissed the array of odor neutralizing products, stating “[d]eodorizing means nothing to me. It is unnecessary if everything is clean.” Smell was not the only sense that required “cleaning up” in restaurants, according to Dahl. The “evil” of noise also needed to be conquered for a restaurateur to operate a successful business.192

OVER-HEARD: NOISE- AND SOUND-CONDITIONING IN THE RESTAURANT DINING ROOM

Restaurants are not inherently quiet places. Pots and pans bang around in the kitchen, patrons chat and laugh their way through a meal, dirty dishes clatter onto bussing

191 “What‟s New,” Restaurant Management, May 1952, 154; “What‟s New,” Restaurant Management, December 1952, 96; “Food Newsnacks,” Pacific Coast Record, April 1952, 61. 192 Dahl, Restaurant Management, 77. 69 trays, and often music hums in the background. In the twentieth-century world of the

Machine Age, industrial and environmental noises contributed to a cacophony of disjointed, overlapping sounds that health experts cited as the cause of anxiety and indigestion among urban Americans. A report issued by the Noise Abatement

Commission of New York in 1929 found that almost two-thirds of the noises considered most offensive came from “traffic, transportation, and radios.”193 Restaurants and their patrons were no strangers to the overwhelming effects of these competing, abrasive sounds. Numerous studies conducted in the early 1920s and 1930s determined that excessive noise over-stimulated and depressed diners, causing them to lose their appetites, a finding that did not bode well for a business that depended on large checks generated by hungry patrons.194 The president of a cafeteria chain in Kansas City pronounced restaurant noise a form of “violence” that “strikes you down with almost the force of a blow as you enter the door.”195 Scientists developed a number of different experiments to determine the best ways to counter the “noise problem” in restaurants.

Solutions included drinking large amounts of coffee; one doctor reported the caffeinated beverage not only “builds up a bodily resistance to noise” but also “overcomes the injurious effects of many sounds to which the average person is subjected.”196 Other mangers used noise meters to gauge the acoustical level of different parts of the dining

193 Quoted in Joel Dinerstein, Swinging the Machine: Modernity, Technology, and African American Culture between the Wars (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003), 5. 194 H. C. Nulmoor, “When Noise Ruins the Digestion,” American Restaurant, August 1932, 34. 195 Dahl, Restaurant Management, 76. 196 “Your Coffee and Noise,” Catering World, March 1932, 45-46. 70 room so they could work to remedy the problem areas.197 By far, though, the most conclusive results showed sound-absorbing acoustical ceiling treatments to be the most effective design feature for reducing noise.

Ceiling tiles designed to reduce competing noises in enclosed spaces changed the way restaurants sounded much the same way air conditioning changed the way restaurants felt and smelled; it is no surprise, then, that the popular terminology for eliminating “unwanted sound” was “sound conditioning.”198 The Nankin Café in

Minneapolis, the Miller and Rhoads Tea Room in Richmond, Virginia, the White Turkey restaurants in New York, and Mader‟s German Restaurant in were just a few of the restaurants nationwide to install acoustical ceilings in the 1930s and 1940s.199

Companies that manufactured noise-reducing products competed for restaurants‟ business, each claiming that their ceiling tile, wall treatment, or chair glide was the most effective and economical way to build repeat patronage. “Peace and Quiet Invite

Restaurant Patrons…And they will return where the atmosphere is free from the scrape and clatter of chairs,” soothed an advertisement for Spring-Kushion chair glides.200 Nu-

Wood insulated wood molding inserted anonymous restaurateur “testimonials” to its advertisements that claimed, “We get fatter checks since Nu-Wood gave us beautiful,

197 “Keeping Your Restaurant Cool and Quiet,” Washington State Restaurant and Tavern News, December 1943, 14. 198 Henry J. B. Hoskins, “Sound Conditioning,” American Restaurant, November 1943, 34, 77. 199 “Where Chinese Foods Are Glorified,” American Restaurant, February 1933, 16; John T. Pheatt, “Muffling the Noise Evil,” American Restaurant, July 1936, 30, 62; “It‟s All in the Mader Family,” Restaurant Management, December 1936, 433; “New White Turkey Restaurant,” clipping, January 1953, New York Historical Society. 200 “Peace and Quiet Invite Restaurant Patrons,” American Restaurant, March 1930, 128.

71 modern decoration—and quieted noise at the same time.”201 Marketing materials for

Accoustone—one of the more prominent brands of acoustical tile—featured images of poised businessmen and elegant couples enjoying a refined, quiet meal; the same scene repeated in the next frame with the parties tense and arguing in a dining room filled with noise. “Patrons Avoid This—But Flock to This,” the ad copy warned restaurateurs.202 For customers to enter a restaurant, noise needed to leave.

The focus on noise pointed to a larger public conversation that accompanied industrialization, urbanity, and modern living. The increased pace of life, the plethora of machine noise encountered daily, and the anxieties of war and economic struggles took a psychological toll on Americans in the same decades as restaurants reported steady growth. To build business, restaurant operators equated prosperity with a quiet dining environment in two ways. First, studies showed that when customers were relaxed, they tended to order more food, which increased a restaurant‟s profits. Employees also were less likely to make mistakes, which reduced breakage, food waste from erroneous orders, and other money-sapping errors. A quiet atmosphere, though, also represented the prosperity of the patrons. In an age symbolized by speed and anxiety, a dining room filled with “living stillness,” as one industry executive called it, exuded leisure, composure, and civility.203 Quiet restaurants also improved the health of the nation‟s citizens. Industry publications cited numerous studies that showed how noise, similar to fear, caused

201 “Quiet Costs You Nothing Extra When You Beautify with Nu-Wood,” Restaurant Management, May 1938, 383. 202 “Patrons Avoid This—But Flock to This,” Restaurant Management, May 1938, 385; “„Earmark‟ of a Popular Restaurant,” Restaurant Management, October 1938, 77. 203 H. C. Siekman, “The Fight Against Noise!” American Restaurant, February 1940, 43. 72 nervous temperaments, “psychological strain,” tension, and irritability. If restaurants could help reduce these bodily reactions, they could contribute to a more efficient, relaxed, and productive nation.204

The argument that customers wanted to relax in a state of tranquility over the course of a meal pervaded trade journals and management guides throughout the interwar and postwar years. To attract the “best” customers, a quiet atmosphere had to reign, which even the dining authority Duncan Hines advised his readers. In his instructions on

“How to Judge Food and Service” and “How to Enjoy Eating Out,” Hines encouraged customers to ask themselves, “Is the place unnecessarily noisy?” If the restaurant seemed acceptable, Hines recommended, “Relax while you‟re dining. Don‟t bolt it and beat it,” which implied that his intended readership had leisure time to spend lingering in a restaurant.205 “First-class eating places” tended to customers‟ comfort through sound- conditioning, attracting a “better” class of customers. One trade journal described the difference in these terms: “[T]hen there‟s the matter of class distinction and gentility.

Noisy restaurants are just the reverse. They [hushed dining rooms] appeal to quiet, reserved people who appreciate good food, are willing to spend money for it and glad to report the delight they may experience in a quiet restaurant to other customers.”206 The value of quietness was in the customers‟ pocketbooks.

204 Chas L. Badley, “How to Conquer Noise!” American Restaurant, April 1942, 40-41; “Stop That Noise!” Restaurant Management, June 1942, 36-37. 205 Carol Lynn Gilmer, “Duncan Hines: Adventurer in Good Eating,” Coronet, November 1947, 102-103. 206 “Control of Noise Essential in the Modern Restaurant,” American Restaurant, July 1937, 54, 62; “Restaurant Noises and What They Cost You,” Chuck Wagon, January 1946, 12. 73

Importantly, though, not all customers placed the same value on the same sounds

(or lack thereof), as demonstrated by the protagonist of the pulp novel Skyscraper (1931),

Lynn Harding. Lynn, a young, single “sales researcher” at a bank in Manhattan “elected to breakfast in noise and confusion” at a crowded cafeteria, rather than eat at the Business

Club where she lived, because of the distractions, the loud voices, surrounded by people and heedless of them all the same.207 Often the different preferences for the way a restaurant sounded connected to a generational divide, where middle-aged customers favored restaurants with a soothing atmosphere, while younger patrons found the bustle, rhythm, and clamor of restaurants exciting. This distinction is most pronounced in the debates over broadcasting background music in restaurants and decisions about what type of music (if any) to play.

In the 1920s, jazz was all the rage. It was “hot,” it was active, it was interracial and cut across class lines, and it changed the way Americans participated in nighttime leisure. Jazz also sounded loud and busy. Joel Dinerstein argues that jazz “was the nation‟s popular music in the Machine Age (1919-45) because its driving, syncopated rhythms reflected the speeded-up tempo of life produced by industrialization in the

American workplace and the mechanization of urban life.”208 Yet it was precisely this speed, this chaotic energy, and this pace of urban living that many operators attributed to the “eat it and bolt” dining mentality that reduced restaurant profits and caused indigestion among stressed-out patrons. Therefore, even when middle-class (and middle-

207 Faith Baldwin, Skyscraper (1931; repr., New York: The Feminist Press, 2003), 9-11. 208 Dinerstein, Swinging the Machine, 5. 74 aged) customers and industry experts approved of dining background music, especially of the orchestral variety, many stopped short of appreciating the “„jazz‟ extreme.”209

“There is something about jazz which simply will not blend with food,” complained a trade journal columnist in 1927. Jazz music offended the appetite like a bad smell. “Perhaps it is the hectic rhythm which paralyzes the digestion organs,” the writer surmised. “Whatever it is, one cannot eat while jazz is being played, but must gulp the soup and bolt the fish in between selections.”210 If jazz set the pace for a meal, then its improvisation and speed disrupted a pattern of dining that was steady, precise, and predictable. Dinerstein notes that many Americans “frankly admired jazz‟s ability to capture the feel and spirit of urban, industrial life,” but for restaurants attempting to counter the effects of urban industrialism, jazz was nothing more than a distraction and deterrent.211 Their most reliable customers, the nation‟s businessmen who brokered deals over a fine steak, complained that jazz destroyed their ability to have serious, productive conversations in restaurants.212 “There are still those who like the restaurant where dining remains the chief function,” quipped one journalist for the New York Times, implicitly referencing the increase in restaurants where music prevailed.213

Even if restaurants chose not to broadcast jazz music, background tunes became an increasingly common part of the dining room atmosphere, largely a result of radio‟s

209 “What Popularizes a Restaurant?” Pacific Coast Chef, August 1923, 7. For more on jazz, restaurants, and American nightlife see Lewis A. Erenberg, Steppin‟ Out: New York Nightlife and the Transformation of American Culture, 1890-1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). 210 “Jazz and Dining Do Not Go Together,” Pacific Coast Chef, November 1927, 13. 211 Dinerstein, Swinging the Machine, 18. 212 “Wanted—Restful Restaurants,” American Restaurant, May 1920, 34. 213 Charles J. Rosebault, “Where New York Dines Out,” New York Times, May 27, 1923, SM8. 75 popularity in the 1930s and 1940s. In 1939, a radio announcer from Philadelphia wrote to the American Restaurant magazine to call attention to the station‟s favorable reputation among area restaurants that broadcasted its programs all night long.214 Steadily, industry experts allowed that radio programs could be an enjoyable, “well-modified background” to a restaurant meal, as long as they were “not allowed to blare away unregulated,” and customers who preferred not to listen could opt out.215 Music, then, transitioned from a blaring “noise” into an enjoyable “sound,” much like mechanical ventilation turned stagnant smells into fresh air. Advertisements for Seeburg sound systems appealed to restaurant operators using this parallel, comparing the system‟s regulation of sound volume and distribution to air conditioners‟ adjustment and control of room temperature.216

The monitor and control of the background music and its volume required a delicate balance between restaurant operator and diner. On the one hand, management wanted customers to feel in control of their selections so that their individual preferences played out over dining room speakers, personalizing their dining experience and increasing the likelihood of repeat patronage. On the other hand, it was a manager‟s responsibility to mediate between two (or more) customers who disagreed over the type and sound level of the music. The type of sound system installed in a restaurant determined who heard the music and who chose the tunes. The Wurlitzer Company‟s

214 “Music and Digestion,” American Restaurant, September 1939, 50. 215 “Soft Music,” American Restaurant, March 1944, 42; “Bayard Says,” 78; William H. Herring, “The Colonial at Decatur: „An Exemplary Set Up,‟” American Restaurant, April 1947, 96. 216 “Music-Conditioning,” Chuck Wagon, July 1947, 25.

76 juke boxes provided a limited selection of songs, but patrons controlled the background music by picking particular favorites.217 With Musicale, a “private” tableside broadcast system engineered by the Teletone Corporation, a “persuasive voice” recording announced the next song in the queue, determined by the company; customers who wanted to hear it had to pay individually to listen to it at their table.218 The S. H. Lynch

Company, which distributed Seeburg sound systems, marketed the Select-O-Matic Music

System in the late 1940s. With the Select-O-Matic, customers could choose from hundreds of song selections, and the system used its speaker design to balance the volume so listeners throughout the restaurant could enjoy the music and still carry on a conversation.219 Other companies marketed phonograph amplifiers to restaurants to distribute musical entertainment throughout the dining room at a consistent, continuous volume.220 By offering an extensive variety of song choices and letting customers control the selection (and at times, the volume), many restaurants successfully combined background entertainment with a satisfying meal.

217 “New Automatic Phonograph,” American Restaurant, January 1941, 34; “Oh, Boy, They Have Wurlitzer Music!” Chuck Wagon, June 1946, 7. 218 “Teletone Presents Private Music,” Chuck Wagon, May 1946, 37; “It‟s True, Too, That Suggestion Sells Music,” Chuck Wagon, July 1946, 37. 219 “It Used To Be „Juke Box‟ Now It‟s Seeburg,” Chuck Wagon, May 1946, 43; “Lynch Presents First Public Showing of New Select-O-Matic,” Chuck Wagon, May 1948, 36; “With Your Selective Menu…Selective Music,” American Restaurant, April 1950, 28. 220 “Phonograph Amplifier for Restaurants,” American Restaurant, May 1941, 62; “Phono Amplifier,” American Restaurant, September 1941, 56. 77

DIGESTING THE PAST, DESIGNING THE FUTURE

Technologies, such as sound systems, air conditioning units, and dishwashers may have regulated sensorial experiences, but they could not determine precisely how a customer heard, felt, or smelled a restaurant, no matter the invention. Manufacturers, however, never failed to keep trying. In the 1930s, the restaurant world was introduced to

Electrynx, an “electric palate” that “tasted” the level of acidity in fruits, vegetables, and coffee, deciding whether they were ripe (or strong) enough to serve. Apparently,

Electrynx never caught on, but a similar product surfaced in the 1950s. This time, a

Norwegian engineer invented an “electric tongue” that used electrodes to indicate the saltiness of a food product. Based on the lack of this product‟s staying power, it is safe to assume that the human tongue bested its electric counterpart.221

The partnership between technological devices and human experience still proved to be crucial to the success of the restaurant and food industries at large. Relying on the theory that “prospective customers react consciously or unconsciously to

Motion…Emotion…Color… Smell,” a restaurant in the early 1940s used mechanical ventilation to pump the odor of freshly-brewed coffee onto the sidewalk, enticing pedestrians to pop in for a cup of Joe. The aroma of coffee had such a powerful effect on consumers that in the late 1950s, producers of instant coffee claimed to “have captured

221 “An Electric Taster Has Recently Been Developed,” American Restaurant, February 1933, 58; “Electric Tongue „Tastes‟ Saltiness,” Restaurant Management, July 1952, 13.

78 the one missing ingredient”—the smell.222 Without the familiar olfactory accompaniment, the experience of drinking coffee just was not the same. These examples speak to the dual relevance of technology and the senses in constructing the culture of twentieth-century restaurants and their social significance. Restaurants used technologies in an attempt to produce an “ideal” sensory environment for patrons, and in the process, placed a higher value on temperatures, odors, and sounds preferred and expected by the country‟s urban middle-class. This pattern of privileging the preferences and expectations of white, middle-class Americans persisted in the visual design of restaurants as well.

The following chapter on heritage-themed restaurants shows how these establishments furthered nostalgic memories of the nation‟s history that favored a perspective of white, middle-class Americans as the protagonist.

222 “Ad Man Looks at Restaurants,” Restaurant Management, March 1941, 70; Joe Minster, “Special Recordings: Now—It Smells,” Pacific Coast Record, March 1958, 12.

79

Chapter 2:

America’s Heritage of Hospitality: Historical Memory and Heritage- Themed Restaurants

In 1949, the National Restaurant Association (NRA), in partnership with the food packaging company Standard Brands, released a documentary film on the history and variety of America‟s restaurants titled “America‟s Heritage of Hospitality.” The NRA promoted the film as “an inspiring and patriotic story that will appeal strongly to audiences of all types and ages.” A brochure for the film spotlighted its importance for learning about the history not only of America‟s restaurants, but of America itself. “Students, from the elementary grades through college, as well as adult groups, will gain a new and great concept of the bounties of America when they see AMERICA‟S HERITAGE OF HOSPITALITY,” claimed the promotion, summarizing the film as “the inspiring story of the precious quality of graciousness that had been identified with „the American way of life‟ from its early Colonial Days to its fullest flowering in this 20th Century.” In addition, the brochure attached a page of suggestions for learning exercises and lesson plans to accompany students‟ viewing, which included writing essays on early

American hospitality; taking a trip to a local farmers‟ market; and inviting a prominent local restaurateur to speak. Claiming to be more than a marketing tool, the film instructed students how to be good customers and good citizens. “The educational information contained in „America‟s Heritage of Hospitality‟ is both important and timely,” the promotion promised. “Schools can maintain student interest with post-showing activities

80 that will stimulate and develop student thinking about early American and present day modes of living.”223 Although the film introduced Americans to their nation‟s public dining history, America‟s restaurant industry had long included businesses that represented the country‟s “heritage of hospitality” by adopting historical motifs that offered customers a taste of the nation‟s past. For instance, hungry patrons could visit Irma Biesel‟s Old House in Louisville, Kentucky, located in a “genuine ante-bellum (Civil War, of course) mansion…that authentically preserves the elegant charm of the Old South,” while Fred

Harvey‟s restaurant at Gallup, New Mexico‟s El Navajo Hotel offered culinary tourists “Spanish and Indian architecture” and “authentic reproductions of colorful Navajo sand- paintings” along with their Southwestern-inspired meals.224 Similarly, “if you wish to recapture a bit of the graciousness and charm of Old Boston,” suggested Ruth Noble in A Guide to Distinctive Dining (1954), “visit the famed Salmagundi Restaurant. Walk through the doors of the old Brownstone home and you walk back into the Boston of long ago. Nothing is changed. The fine Colonial furnishings and table settings are truly authentic. And the food is prepared exactly as it was decades ago—fine New England dishes at their zesty best.”225

Heritage-themed restaurants proliferated from the 1920s through the early 1960s in the American culinary landscape, ostensibly inviting customers to learn about the country‟s national history through the comfort of a dining room. These eating establishments used emblems traditionally associated with the founding and growth of

223 “America‟s Heritage of Hospitality,” American Restaurant , November 1949, 103. 224 Raymond Ewell, Dining Out in America‟s Cities (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1954), 81; Duncan Hines, Adventures in Good Eating (Bowling Green: Adventures in Good Eating, Inc., 1947), 194. 225 Ruth V. Noble, A Guide to Distinctive Dining: Recipes from Famous Restaurants of America (Cambridge, MA: Berkshire Publishing Co., 1954), 19. 81 the United States as design schemes for attracting patrons; in other words, they decorated their dining spaces in material representations of America‟s heritage. This restaurant genre responded to the growing popularity of dining outside of the home during periods of increased interest in regional American historical traditions following World War I. From New England‟s Colonial Inns and antebellum Southern Plantations to the “wild”

West‟s Chuck Wagons and Indian Longhouses, heritage-themed restaurants appealed to white, middle-class Americans‟ nostalgia for the “good ole‟ days” of the United States, when freedom, rugged individualism, and family cohesion prevailed. These restaurants— clothed in their various genres— domesticated antiquated notions of northern colonial settlements, slave plantations, and westward expansion to attract a growing middle-class clientele. Heritage-themed restaurants produced symbolic scenes of the American past that glossed over the complexity of the country‟s historical record and furthered consensus narratives of national heritage and model citizenship. By dining in this theater of consumption, white, middle-class customers could claim a collective history that reaffirmed their standing as “civilized” Americans grounded in a moral dedication to family values and national pride. Americans in the early twentieth century actively participated in performances and public rituals, such as pageants and commemorative theater, which dramatized social and regional historic narratives as a way of locating their communities within a relevant and traditional past.226 As historian David Glassberg demonstrates, the use of tradition and historical imagery in the early 1900s both reflected and shaped American culture at

226 For examples of such performances, see David Glassberg, American Historical Pageantry: The Uses of Tradition in the Early Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); Steven D. Hoelscher, Heritage on Stage: The Invention of Ethnic Place in America‟s Little Switzerland (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998); and Stephen Eddy Snow, Performing the Pilgrims: A Study of Ethnohistorical Role-Playing at Plimoth Plantation (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993).

82 large, including the voices of Americans who were competing to define history for the greater public.227 Yet during the years of World War I, many of these “living history” performances highlighted a more pronounced national heritage as a way of unifying Americans as citizens in time of international conflict. Representations of pioneer life and colonial settlement persisted in material forms within the popular imagination in the wake of World War I. By the time of the stock market collapse and the start of the Great Depression, themes of the nation‟s founding history took on new significance as symbols of comfort and stability during challenging and uncertain times. Businesses adopted themes during this time with the intention of increasing sales through the use of symbolic motifs. According to sociologist Mark Gottdiener, “theming reduces the product to its image and the consumer experience to its symbolic content.”228 Heritage-themed restaurants that appeared in the 1920s and 1930s offered white, middle-class customers an imaginary escape from the stressful realities of everyday life through the glimpse of presumably “better” days from the past. Heritage-themed restaurants often succeeded in remaking the familiar, producing narratives of American history that glossed over the often problematic and unpleasant historical record. As historian Michael Kammen notes, “a surge of tradition can supply the basis for social cohesion” or “achieve an illusion of social consensus…[where] people invoke the legitimacy of an artificially constructed past in order to buttress present assumptions.”229 In the interwar and postwar years, many Americans found the “illusion

227 Glassberg, American Historical Pageantry, 2. 228 Mark Gottdiener, The Theming of America: American Dreams, Media Fantasies, and Themed Environments, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Westview Press, 2001): 73. 229 Michael G. Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 4-5. 83 of social consensus” in heritage-themed restaurants, which entertained and educated families while preserving an idealized collection of American traditions gathered around the national dining table. Restaurants that commodified images of American history tended to privilege narratives that opposed social change and modernization while simultaneously using modern trends in technology, architecture, design, and advertising to increase business. This modern/antimodern tension paralleled similar divides seen in world‟s fairs and museums, where artifacts of a presumably “less civilized” time and people were juxtaposed with up-to-date techniques of display and merchandising.

Reproductions of historical imagery that suggested a slower and simpler pace of life were a welcome respite for Americans who, in their leisure time, wanted to indulge in nostalgia for a livable past.

My interrogation of restaurants as spaces where competing narratives of U.S. history were conveyed through cultural representations of the past follows Richard Handler and Eric Gable‟s approach to studying the meanings of “living” museums. Diverging from conventional museum scholarship, Handler and Gable focus on the museum “as a social arena in which many people of differing backgrounds continuously and routinely interact to produce, exchange, and consume messages.” Similarly, restaurants are privately-owned public spaces in which a variety of people converge and make meaning out of the production of food, service, and decor. Heritage-themed restaurants, as sites of historical tourism, commodify idealized representations of American nationhood, not unlike their counterparts in “living” museums and historicized theme parks. This actualization of the past through one‟s palate can be a risky claim to the veracity of historical narrative. Customers participate in this version of the past,

84 which often omits the perspective of those who are not in power to frame the reproduction of historical images.230 What is distinct and relevant about heritage-themed restaurants is that they allow customers to experience and believe in a version of the past within a “naturalized,” everyday setting. Sitting down to dinner is arguably one of the most authentic and natural daily activities in which Americans participate (more so than, say, pretending to be a blacksmith or nineteenth-century glassblower). Therefore, the imagination required to transport one‟s self is stretched less—disbelief only requires slight suspension. The movement from observing history to participating in history within the restaurant space actualizes narratives of national heritage and transports history from the remote past to the lived present. The level of participation among visitors to theme restaurants is heightened because of the physical act of eating. When customers dine in theme restaurants, they affirm the spectacle of Otherness by moving beyond the tourist gaze to an internalized (literally digested) encounter. Culinary tourism is particularly relevant to the study of heritage revival sites, including restaurants. Folklorist Lucy Long‟s definition of culinary tourism is useful for conceptualizing food consumption as a distinct method of negotiating perceptions of difference through tourist encounters. Culinary tourism, according to Long, is “the intentional, exploratory participation in the foodways of an other—participation including the consumption, preparation, and presentation of a food item, cuisine, meal system, or eating style considered to belong to a culinary system not one‟s own.”231 In culinary

230 Richard Handler and Eric Gable, The New History in an Old Museum (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 9. For more on the power of generating historical memory in sites of public tourism, see Handler and Gable, The New History. 231 Lucy M. Long, “Culinary Tourism: A Folkloristic Perspective on Eating and Otherness,” in Culinary Tourism, ed. Lucy M. Long (Lexington: The University of Kentucky Press, 2004), 21.

85 tourism, food, as well as the setting in which it is served, is the main tourist attraction. Unlike historical replicas and other material objects that recreate history for tourists‟ enjoyment, food is distinct because it is physically ingested by consumers. As Long observes, one of “the peculiarities of culinary tourism” is how “the materiality of food helps to ground the experience for many tourists, helping them to relate it to their everyday lives.”232 The sensorial encounter with food, which represents another time and place, actualizes the encounter with the past. The scope of domestic-themed restaurants in which Americans consumed symbolic versions of national heritage and home-life range from Colonial Inns and Southern Plantations to Chuck Wagons and Indian Villages. Although these various genres of heritage-themed restaurants were not limited to particular areas of the United

States, each type tended to concentrate in the region tied to its historical motif. Therefore, Colonial-style dining rooms predominated in New England while plantation-themed restaurants appeared most frequently in the South. Eating establishments in western states attracted tourists with recreated scenes of the cowboy‟s Wild West, as well as Indian- inspired décor that framed Native Americans as, in Leah Dilworth‟s term, “living relics” of the region‟s past.233 Following an overview of the growth of theme restaurants in general, this chapter geographically navigates the patterns of popular interest in heritage- themed restaurants during the interwar and postwar periods, starting in New England and then moving on to the South before culminating in the expansive western United States. By using food and food service as the passage through which customers could slip into imagined moments of history, heritage-based restaurants suggested that their versions of

232 Lucy M. Long, introduction to Culinary Tourism, ed. Lucy M. Long (Lexington: The University of Kentucky Press, 2004), 5. 233 Leah Dilworth, Imagining Indians in the Southwest: Persistent Visions of a Primitive Past (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996), 79. 86 history were not only for observation and remembrance: to experience the nation‟s founding heritage one must, literally, consume it.

“WHERE EVERY MEAL IS AN EVENT”: SHOWMANSHIP AND THE SPECTACLE OF THE THEME RESTAURANT

The origin of heritage-themed restaurants is intimately tied to the growth of the modern tourist industry in the United States and waves of increased interest in the nation‟s historical origins. The popularity of national tourism gained momentum in the late nineteenth century as improvements in interstate railway lines made national cross- country travel increasingly feasible for Americans. Modern mass tourism, which Anthony Stanonis identifies as an industry that encouraged and assisted the mass public in gaining access to regional destinations and attractions, emerged during the interwar period after white Americans‟ interest in their immigrant heritage was renewed by interactions with Europe during the First World War. Additionally, the potentially disruptive changes and increased pace of life, which accompanied urban development and the widespread popularity of emerging technologies, including radio and the automobile, led many Americans to search for a reassuring sense of tradition and foundation in sites of national heritage.234

In the late nineteenth century, as more middle- and upper-class Americans experienced shorter work days and increased leisure time, the tourist trade situated itself as a revenue-generating enterprise for regional and local sites across the country. Tourism turned locations into destinations by promoting “quintessentially American places” and “deliberately arranging historical events and anecdotes, intentionally framing certain

234 Anthony J. Stanonis, Creating the Big Easy: New Orleans and the Emergence of Modern Tourism, 1918-1945 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2006), 22, 171.

87 scenes and views into a coherent national whole.” Indeed, “consuming the nation through touring,” as Marguerite Schaffer suggests, was a promising path to improving oneself as an American citizen.235 The idea of “consuming” the nation is not an exaggerated metaphor. According to anthropologists and preservationists who specialize in conserving historical sites and artifacts, heritage not only ensures cultural survival of the past; as an industry, it extends beyond preservation to act as “a new mode of cultural production.” Importantly, as Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett argues, “heritage and tourism are collaborative industries”: “once sites, buildings, objects, technologies, or ways of life can no longer sustain themselves as they formerly did, they „survive‟—they are made economically viable—as representations of themselves.”236 The public, as consumers, then visit and participate in the (re)production of the past by spending money on tangibles that bring history to life: a walk down a recreated Main Street; a replica of a hand-carved wooden flute; a dinner prepared from historic recipes, served on reproductions of antique dishes inside a restored historic home. Museums, as places for preserving history, along with world‟s fairs and department stores, ushered in innovative techniques of displaying artifacts in the early twentieth century. Neil Harris posits that these three forms of cultural institutions functioned as social centers that depended on fantasy and dramatic displays to generate patronage.237 Similarly, William Leach suggests that the concept of these “adult fantasy environments,” which were conceived around a central motif, originated in the late-

235 Marguerite S. Schaffer, See America First: Tourism and National Identity, 1880-1940 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001), 4. 236 Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 150-151 (emphasis added). 237 Neil Harris, Cultural Excursions: Marketing Appetites and Cultural Tastes in Modern America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 64. 88 nineteenth and early-twentieth-century stage shows and world‟s fairs, which effectively used “core themes” to unify the production and engage the audience or fairgoer. Their “architecture of merchandising” encouraged visitors to improve themselves through consuming objects as symbolic promises of a better life.238 In the interwar years, themed restaurants joined these other institutional centers of merchandising as sites of renewal, where “new” and “authentic” experiences motivated the public to participate in the theater of consumption with hopes of enjoying life more fully. Businesses such as restaurants, then, in the struggle to attract customers, modeled their interiors based on this concept of theatrical production and designated the term “showmanship” to market the philosophy to other business owners. Like “living” museums, world‟s fairs, and department stores, restaurants designed thematic attractions to entice customers and capture their interest. In some cases, the marketed concept was a specialty dish or a promotional gimmick; other establishments used decorative schemes and action-filled windows to draw in customers. Regardless of the precise strategy, this form of “subjective guidance” increased restaurant profits, even in lean times.239 “Fashion, interior display and decoration, and facades of color, glass, and light, then, were among the key strategies of early-twentieth-century American consumer capitalism,” and restaurant showmanship encapsulated these techniques in the design of theme restaurants.240 In effect, restaurants conceived of food in terms of merchandise. Good showmanship generated curiosity about the restaurants‟ offerings and increased sales.

238 William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 81-82; Harris, Cultural Excursions, 70. 239 Neil Harris explains that the director of the Buffalo Museum of Science, Carlos E. Cummings, coined the theory of “subjective guidance” in 1940 to describe the way in which a singular thematic symbol could draw the attention of a crowd moving through a collective space. See Harris, Cultural Excursions, 69. 240 Leach, Land of Desire, 111. 89

Importantly, restaurants could not rely simply on the taste of their dishes to generate customers. Attracting consistent patronage included promotions that involved all five of the senses. The director of the National Restaurant Association reminded restaurateurs in 1933 that, like the circus and movies, restaurants filled with action and color generated excitement and interest among customers and stimulated their appetites.241 Industry publications abounded with advice for both simple and complex ways to create “atmosphere” as a backdrop for the dining experience. It was a proprietor‟s job to learn about wall treatments, color associations, and period styles, because the customer‟s “eye must be pleased as well as his palate, and unpleasant surroundings will often destroy his enjoyment of well-cooked dishes.”242 Showmanship meant paying attention to the public‟s interests and dramatizing these interests on a large and visible scale.243

In 1926, the National Restaurant Association arranged for Dr. Stanley L. Krebs of the Institute of Mercantile Arts in Chicago, nationally proclaimed to be a “professional student of salesmanship,” to speak at its annual convention on the topic of “Salesmanship in the Restaurant.”244 By 1930, “showmanship” was the buzzword extraordinaire in restaurant trade journals. Almost every issue of American Restaurant and Restaurant Management in the early 1930s included at least one article instructing restaurateurs on building patronage through “showmanship.”245 Server uniforms, window displays,

241 A.A. McVittie, “My Restaurants Stage a New Show Each Day,” American Restaurant, December 1933, 28-29. 242 Helen B. Ames, “Pleasant Background Lure Trade,” American Restaurant, April 1934, 40. 243 “Use Showmanship,” CSC Advertiser (January 1937), 5. John F. Hogan Papers, John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising and Marketing History, Duke University. 244 “Some of the Speakers: Who They Are,” American Restaurant, October 1926, 64. 245 For examples of articles on showmanship and restaurants as theaters of consumption, see J.A.J. Jones, “Showmanship in the Restaurant Business,” American Restaurant, March 1931, 34-36, 66; Al B. Carder, “Staging Your Play for Restaurant Patronage,” American Restaurant, August 1933, 19-21, 50, 53; A.A. McVittie, “Showmanship in Restaurants,” American Restaurant, November 1933, 32-33, 58; J.B. Nealey, “Transform Theatre Into Restaurant,” American Restaurant, April 1934, 48; Kenneth C. Lovgren, “Where „Every Meal Is an Event,‟” American Restaurant, August 1935, 28-29, 71-72; M. Zenn Kaufman, 90 menus, wall treatments, and furniture, all were opportunities for successful merchandising. Accomplished merchandising evoked the feeling of atmosphere, even though restaurateurs did not necessarily agree on a definition of showmanship or atmosphere. Rather, they used the expressions to convey an emphasis on the physical design of the restaurant space and the overall dining experience for the customer.246 Atmosphere, according to an early restaurant operating manual, was “like culture, a by-product of countless intangible qualities….[It was] the spirit that permeates through the material and reflects the character and culture of the [restaurant] owner.”247 Thirty years later, restaurant publications still abstracted the terms while simultaneously locating the concepts in material objects. “Showmanship is the flamboyant—and it is the elegant and simple,” noted a prominent trade journal. “It can be spectacular; it can be restrained. It may be evidenced in Danish glassware…or in the solid conservative casserole dish.” Showmanship encompassed everything designed in a restaurant with intention: “that certain something, that certain extra touch, which makes a restaurant stand out just a bit more.”248 Yet as much as showmanship and atmosphere were vaguely descriptive, they were also active terms, concepts that emphasized the material ways in which restaurants could “stimulate,” “attract,” and “increase” patronage. Showmanship, according to one

“Showmanship in the Restaurant,” American Restaurant, June 1937, 56, 87-88; and Charles N. Tunnell, “Showmanship Keeps Customers Talking,” Restaurant Management, March 1938, 216-217. 246 The Roehm-Roehm Service Wear Company captured the elusiveness of the terms in an advertisement for restaurant uniforms. Promising to help create a “buying” atmosphere, the company suggested, “Atmosphere—that intangible quality, is determined by the quality of the surroundings.” (“Atmosphere!” American Restaurant, June 1940, 86.) 247 The Ware School of Tea Room Management: A Course in Tea Room, Cafeteria, and Motor Inn Management, Lesson III (New York: The Ware School of Tea Room Management, 1927), 18. 248 “Showmanship in Food Service,” Restaurant Management, October 1962, 49. 91 expert, needed to accomplish three things: attract attention, emphasize a point, and appeal to emotions. If customers responded to these three basic ingredients, then the showmanship had been successfully employed.249 Importantly, too, atmosphere offered change, an alternative to the scenes and experiences encountered outside the doors of the restaurant. Inherent in the concepts of showmanship and atmosphere was the belief that restaurants served more than food—they also offered customers adventure, escape, rest and relaxation. Aside from businessmen and women who ate out regularly from necessity, most other customers ate out as “an excursion not only for the body but for the soul.”250 Restaurants structured themes around the belief that people who could afford to eat out for leisure desired a change of pace, an escape from the everyday routine. Thematic interiors produced atmosphere, and atmosphere generated clientele.

Appealing designs in the 1920s and 1930s depended on realism for maximum effect. Some of the country‟s most famous theater directors, such as David Belasco, capitalized on the authenticity of reproductions to bring performances to life.251 Similarly, proprietors of themed restaurants worked tirelessly to recreate realistic spaces that removed customers to another place or reminded them of another time. Atmosphere took the form of wall paintings depicting village scenes or street lamps as interior lighting. Costumed waiters, red-headed waitresses, specialty menus, and contests for patrons all qualified as showmanship. Yet, the “realism” of these interiors often depended on customers‟ expectations of what a particular place or person should look like. Therefore, restaurant design manuals and advice columns reminded proprietors that

249 Kaufman, “Showmanship,” 56. 250 Madeline Gray and Vass de lo Padua, How to Be a Success in the Restaurant Business (New York: Greenberg, 1946), 223. 251 David Belasco‟s set designs were famous for their realism, even down to the food incorporated into scenes. See Samuel L. Leiter, From Belasco to Brook: Representative Directors of the English Speaking Stage (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991), 4-6. 92 elderly waitresses should wear fluffy aprons “in keeping with the homey atmosphere,” while young waitresses needed to be dressed in “smart, form fitting ones.”252 Window displays played an invaluable role as spaces in which restaurants could stage performances of food preparation intended to attract the passer-by on the street. Industry specialists advised restaurant owners to borrow liberally from department store windows and theatrical stage producers to conceptualize appealing restaurant fronts, all in the name of “staging the show.” The transparency of the window front could utilize motion to its advantage in a way that static displays and signage could not. Numerous restaurants capitalized on animation in their front windows, and employees prepared menu items from pizza to pancakes in plain view of pedestrians walking by. The ubiquitous New York restaurant chain, Child‟s, which was founded in 1899 by the brothers William and Samuel Childs, attracted a entire generation of customers who watched both white-capped chefs and “gorgeous beauties turning hotcakes” in the storefront windows.253 As one of the first restaurant chains to utilize motion-filled window displays to draw in customers (and demonstrate the sanitary methods of food preparation), Child‟s could measure its success by the eighty-six locations in operation by 1920.254

Carder‟s Restaurant on North Dearborn Street in Chicago gained national recognition in 1931 for stationing a female employee in the front window, who stood

252 Eugene E. Utz, “Character Pointers for Restaurants,” American Restaurant, March 1948, 90. 253 John Winkler, “The Man Behind the Pancake Front,” New McClure‟s, December 1928, 130; “Fair Flap- Jack Turner Flops into „Follies,‟” Pacific Coast Chef, April 1928, 13. In 1912, David Belasco recreated an entire, fully-operational interior of a Child‟s Restaurant for the third act of his play, The Governor‟s Lady. He ordered all of the décor, from coat racks and cash registers to ovens and coffee urns, directly from the Child‟s Restaurant Equipment Company, and a nearby Child‟s location delivered food fresh to the set each night, which was then prepared on stage. (Samuel L. Leiter, From Belasco to Brook: Representative Directors of the English Speaking Stage [New York: Greenwood Press, 1991], 4-6.) 254 Philip Langdon, Orange Roofs, Golden Arches: The Architecture of American Chain Restaurants (New York: Knopf, 1986), 10. 93 throughout the day pointing at displays of objects, which represented the various steps of coffee preparation. The display proved so successful at boosting coffee sales and patronage in general that Al Carder, the owner, planned another display in which a girl would demonstrate the process of making clover-leaf rolls. Importantly, Carder revealed that “the process in the window will simply be faked.”255 The employee would roll the dough into the shape of a clover-leaf and place the rolls on a baking pan, which she would pass along to another employee. This “runner” would take the rolls back to the kitchen, rework them into a ball, and return the dough to the girl in the window, already underway on assembling more rolls. In this way, two balls of dough could be reworked all day long, eliminating waste of unsold rolls while maintaining the illusion of constantly-made fresh bread. The physical preparation of the rolls by live performers added an element of realism, which confirmed for the passer-by that Carder‟s Restaurant prepared fresh rolls on-site, belying the fabrication of the scene. Several restaurants expanded the concept of the representative thematic window to the entire restaurant exterior. In the 1920s and 1930s, a number of restaurants opened in buildings that took the shape of dogs, apples, shoes, and perhaps the most famous of all, a brown derby hat. Conceptualized, in part, as an advertising solution for grabbing the attention of motorists, food service establishments in the form of green frogs, wide-eyed owls, and oversized pumpkins dotted the American landscape.256 While this style of restaurant-as-artifact appeared in locations as diverse as Phoenix, Arizona, where customers walked into Bacon‟s oversized “Coffee Pot” restaurant, and Wathena, Kansas, home to a giant apple-shaped café, most of the businesses were inspired by the

255 Jones, Showmanship, 66. 256 “Unusual Places That Get the Business,” Soda Fountain, February 1931, 23, 64. 94 architectural boom in Southern California that generated the proliferation of what Robert Venturi and his co-authors call “duck architecture.” The “duck,” according to Venturi et al, is a “building-becoming-sculpture,” where the building itself “is a symbol,” a structure distorted into an ornament, rather than being decorated by ornament.257 California hosted a large proportion of these object-styled restaurants, including the “Mother Goose

Pantry” in the shape of a shoe, and the famous “Brown Derby” restaurant, an architectural hat topped off with a sign in the shape of another hat, which read, “Eat in the Hat.”258 The “Brown Derby” opened in 1925 as the brainchild of film director Herbert

K. Somborn, who was inspired by both Hollywood and the architectural trends of Southern California.259 Duck architecture is relevant to understanding the purpose of theme restaurants as part of the twentieth-century commercial landscape, especially because of its intention to create buildings as spectacle, where, according to Venturi et al., “the building is the sign.”260 The showmanship of duck architecture makes the familiar seem novel, thereby stimulating interest in the commercial product. Therefore, a restaurant “in the form of a huge red apple” has “attention value.”261 The building is not only shelter; it is advertising. Theme restaurants, in this form, become a model of “pleasure-zone architecture,” structures which promise their visitors fun and vitality. The imagery of pleasure-zone architecture attempts to convey “the quality of being an oasis in a perhaps hostile context,

257 Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 87, 163. 258 Geo. E. Bergman, “We Never Grow Up,” Restaurant Management, November 1940, 52; Frank H. Williams, “Gosh! That‟s a Good Idea!” Restaurant Management, January 1928, 32-33; “NEWS,” American Restaurant, June 1931, 20. 259 “Popularity of Brown Derby Leads to Modernization,” American Restaurant, March 1937, 57-58, 105- 106; Joe Minster, “The Brown Derby,” Pacific Coast Record, April 1957, 16-17, 52. 260 Venturi, Brown, and Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas, 13. 261 Russell S. Brown, “Ideas of the Month,” Restaurant Management, November 1940, 28.

95 heightened symbolism, and the ability to engulf the visitor in a new role.”262 The goal of themed restaurants was precisely to achieve these conditions: offer customers refuge and indulge them in imaginary and imaginative role-playing through the use of symbolic atmosphere, which provided food and entertainment to visitors willing to pay for the experience.

Restaurant themes reflected the spirit of their times, rising and falling in popularity according to larger social, economic, and political factors. As the rest of this chapter details, the proliferation of Colonial-, Southern plantation-, Old West-, and

Indian-themed restaurants paralleled the expansion of regional tourism in the United States and followed on the heels of efforts to revive simpler stories of the nation‟s complex and controversial founding heritage. Most important, though, heritage-themed restaurants specialized in remaking the familiar, reinforcing mental images of social scenes and relations that glossed over the often problematic and unpleasant historical record.

MADE IN AMERICA: FARM-FRESH FOOD AND THE HOME-STYLE APPEAL OF COLONIAL RESTAURANTS

Perhaps no other genre of heritage-themed restaurants epitomized a celebration of the nation‟s history quite as much as Colonial-themed restaurants. Although New

England boasted a greater number of Colonial restaurants based on the area‟s founding history, Early American-style restaurants appeared throughout the country in old houses and pseudo-aged buildings alike,. Following the general advice for creating a themed atmosphere in restaurants, numerous Colonial-styled restaurants, such as Boston‟s Hungry Pilgrim and Nellie Brown‟s Old One Hundred in Connecticut, dressed the

262 Venturi, Brown, and Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas, 53.

96 waitstaff in knee breeches and crinolines, adding to a décor of American antiques peppered throughout the dining rooms.263 Advice manuals for opening a Colonial-themed eatery recommended stenciling colorful designs on replicas of period furniture; simulating wood paneled walls by applying a grainy comb to wet paint; and invoking the feel of an early American home by hanging brooms on the walls.264 While claiming that their goal was to please customers with a setting meant “to recapture the charm of a past but not forgotten era,” many of these restaurant capitalized on the middle-class public‟s steady desire for fresh foods during a period of increased food processing and agricultural industrialization.265 Material representations of the American Colonial era have been tied to the country‟s budding consumer culture since the late nineteenth century because, as Michael

Kammen quips, American heritage is good for business.266 Business leaders have cultivated public interest in the nation‟s history as a way of selling an experience, a product, or an idea. For instance, comparable to Fred Harvey‟s Indian detours, the Great Northern Railway offered travel packages to sites of historic significance throughout Minnesota and North Dakota in 1925.267 Macy‟s department stores sold “homespun suits” in 1936, and even Eleanor Roosevelt partnered with a furniture company that turned out

Colonial era furniture reproductions from 1927-1936.268 Therefore, the popularity of Colonial-styled restaurants in the 1920s and 1930s mirrored the larger nationwide interest

263 “Study No. 8: A Colonial Restaurant,” Restaurant Management, January 1958, 64; Bill Boston and Woody Hub, Boston Dines Out (Boston: Boston Dines Out, 1964), 39; “Introducing Nellie I. Brown‟s Old One Hundred,” Restaurant Management, October 1939, 22; “Brilliant Society Assembly at Show,” New York Times, November 16, 1922, 28. 264 Helen B. Ames, “Pleasant Backgrounds Lure Trade,” American Restaurant, April 1934, 40. 265 “Let‟s Look At—,” Chuck Wagon, July 1945, 34. 266 Michael Kammen, In the Past Lane: Historical Perspectives on American Culture (New York; Oxford University Press, 1997), 130. 267 Kammen, In the Past Lane, 134-135. 268 Kammen, In the Past Lane, 140. 97 in Colonial revivalism. American Colonial was the most popular and widespread style of architecture and furniture in the 1930s; according to art historian David Gebhard, middle- and upper-middle-class Americans liked the Colonial design for its simplicity. Opportunities opened up for Americans nationwide to view New England‟s Colonial architecture as they passed through the region on their way to the New York World‟s Fair in 1939-40; in addition, sixty percent of the Fair‟s modernist houses in the “Town of Tomorrow” depicted updated versions of Colonial architecture. Illustrations in the WPA‟s American Guide series, as well as popular magazines like Better Homes and

Gardens, whose articles featured model Colonial-styled homes and increased interest in the decorative genre, also called attention to the popularity of Colonial design in the interwar years.269

Additionally, the incorporation of Colonial Williamsburg, Inc. as a national “living museum” in 1928, followed by Henry Ford‟s Greenfield Village, played no small part in stimulating popular interest in the period of Early America.270 Historian Miles Orvell posits that tourist destinations and living museums, such as Colonial Williamsburg and Greenfield Village, capture the symbolic value of “Main Street” through their attempt to revive “values that seemed to be disappearing in American life [most notably, community, democracy, and family] in the face of industrial expansion and urbanization.”271 Colonial revivalism pushed back against the materialism and machinery of the Industrial Revolution, symbolically reintroducing core characteristics of ideal

269 David Gebhard, “The American Colonial Revival in the 1930s,” Winterthur Portfolio (Summer-Autumn 1987): 109-148. 270 Handler and Gable, New History in an Old Museum, 33. 271 Miles Orvell, “Constructing Main Street: Utopia and the Imagined Past,” in Public Space and the Ideology of Place in American Culture, ed. Miles Orvell and Jeffrey L. Meikle (New York: Rodopi, 2009), 97. 98

American life that seemed to disappear in the midst of increased industrialization and consumerism. Colonial Williamsburg motivated several restaurants to adopt a Colonial motif, including the famed White Turkey restaurants in New York and Connecticut, whose owners visited Williamsburg in 1935 and were “impressed with the gracious manner in which 18th-century Virginians lived.”272 Kentucky‟s chain of Canary Cottage restaurants renovated their Louisville location after it suffered extensive damage from floods in 1937. The owners razed the building and sent an architect to Williamsburg, Virginia, to scope out the supposedly authentic reproductions and restorations of Early American buildings. Based on this venture, the Canary Cottage redesigned the restaurant in “exact reproductions” of Williamsburg taverns and inns.273 The Stouffer‟s restaurant chain opened a handful of New York locations in the late 1930s and early 1940s inspired by Colonial Williamsburg and decorated in an Early American design, including hooked rugs and wrought iron stairways.274 Likewise, Henry Ford‟s purchase and restoration of the Wayside Inn in Sudbury, Massachusetts, in 1923, immortalized in Longfellow‟s poem, “Tales of a Wayside Inn,” renewed interest in dining out within an Early American setting.275

Clustered not only in the New England states, Early American themed restaurants abounded in Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Illinois, even reaching as far west and south as Washington and Florida. Motoring throughout the United States in the 1920s and 1930s, stopping in towns large and small, one would be hard pressed not to find a

272 “Life Partners Are Restaurant Partners,” American Restaurant, December 1948, 25. 273 R. Menter Wheeler, “Canary Cottage Case,” American Restaurant, March 1945, 28-29. 274 “Stouffer‟s Opens New York Restaurant,” Restaurant Management, February 1938, 89; “Stouffer‟s Presents Beauty in New Gotham Restaurant,” Restaurant Management, April 1941, 14-16. 275 Noble, Guide to Distinctive Dining (1954), 28. 99

Colonial-themed eatery, which often called attention to the motif simply by naming itself “the Colonial.” Clara Robinson‟s Colonial Food Shop, The Colonial Kitchen, The Colonial Inn, The Colonial Tea Room, Day‟s Colonial Restaurant—the word “colonial” acted as a quick and easy advertisement for early Americana and simple “home-style” meals. Restaurants housed in properties dating from pre-revolutionary days wasted no time incorporating the location‟s history into advertising literature, appealing to customers‟ desire for both fine food and dining time travel. The Abner Wheeler House in Framingham, Massachusetts, which was built in 1730, called attention on its menu to the preserved fireplaces in original condition, as well as the original “hand-hewn beams” and “white pine plank” floor.276 New York‟s Fraunces‟ Tavern, whose claim to fame was George Washington‟s farewell toast to the Continental Army officers in December 1773, worked hard to balance original Colonial-era features with its modern reconstruction.277 Restaurants that could not claim original history on site worked tirelessly to replicate the feel of Early America in tangible ways: artists painting murals filled with Colonial-era inns and taverns for Boston‟s relocated Patten Restaurant poured over volumes of illustrative history in the hopes of replicating the “exact type of wigs, clothing, shoes, coaches, [and] luggage” from the eighteenth century.278 Boston native

Joseph Ferrara captured the aura of a New England inn in his restaurant, The Bostonian, in San Francisco with wood-paneled walls, exposed-beam ceilings, lantern-styled lights,

276 Menu, Abner Wheeler House, New York Historical Society; Hines, Adventures in Good Eating (1938), 113. 277 G. Selmer Fougner, Dining Out in New York and What to Order (New York: H.C. Kinsey and Co., 1939), 69-70. For more on the cultural production and consumption of Colonial iconography and performances of living history, see M. Christine Boyer, “Cities for Sale: Merchandising History at South Street Seaport,” in Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space, ed. Michael Sorkin (New York: Noonday Press, 1992), 181-204; Karal Ann Marling, George Washington Slept Here: Colonial Revivals and American Culture, 1876-1986 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988); Snow, Performing the Pilgrims. 278 H. C. Nulmoor, “Where Optimism Paid Dividends,” American Restaurant, September 1933, 35. 100 and Pilgrim paintings. Although one guidebook writer acknowledged that “the place has more luxury than probably any inn of pioneer days,” the restaurant succeeded in projecting a sense of welcoming respite to a diner in search of a relaxing meal.279 Not all Colonial-styled restaurants mirrored Northeastern traditions. The Dolly Madison Dining Room in Seattle, Washington, served Southern dishes within a Colonial atmosphere, both of which tried to capture the attention of the customer. “Each of our plates is planned to make a picture,” explained the owner, Arthur Gable. “The eye first devours the food; merely to eat would be a vague function.” The décor functioned accordingly; the restaurant also noted that its “collection of pitchers and various bric a brac furnishes amusement for visitors.”280 Similarly, New York‟s Kopper Kettle, recommended to tourists and locals alike in dining guides as early as 1925, prided itself on “excellent Southern cooking” within a Colonial setting. The tiny basement restaurant kept an iron pot warming in front of an open fireplace, while cut-outs of people in Colonial-era dress hung on the walls.281 In response to the sheer number of Colonial-themed restaurants, industry supply companies that manufactured items from tablecloths and drinkware to cutlery and furniture sold products patterned as distinctly American in both manufacture and style.

Simtex Mills, producer of linens in the United States, advertised its products under the banners of “American Heritage” and “Hospitality: Made in America.”282 In its advertisements, the company suggested that Mount Vernon, George Washington‟s

279 Thompson, Eating Around San Francisco, 147. 280 Prudence Penny, Cosmopolitan Seattle: A Collection of Interviews with Chefs Who Tell Some of Their Famous Recipes (Seattle: Post-Intelligencer, 1935), 16. 281 George Chappell, The Restaurants of New York (New York: Greenberg Publishers, Inc., 1925), 57; Menu, The Kopper Kettle, New York Historical Society; Photo postcard, The Kopper Kettle, scrapbooks, New York Historical Society. 282 “Hospitality: Made in America,” advertisement, Simtex Mills, American Restaurant, February 1949, 79; “American Heritage,” advertisement, Simtex Mills, American Restaurant, March 1948, 109. 101 residence now maintained as a historic site, was “first and foremost a home, noted for dignified charm and hospitality.” Simtex‟s linens, used in America‟s restaurants, were simply an extension of the “tradition of gracious living” extended from Mount Vernon and other historic homes.283 The McNicol Pottery Company of Clarksburg, West Virginia, promised to bring “life-long patrons” to Colonial dining rooms because of the durability of both the chip-resistant china and its chintze pattern: “the never-fading tradition of Revolutionary America—an interior which appeals to all Americans—makes them feel at home,” explained one trade journal advertisement.284 This style of marketing suggested that restaurant customers, while living in the present, could vicariously inhabit a Colonial-era home and relive America‟s founding heritage through the tangible and sensorial interaction with replicas of material household objects.

Colonial-themed restaurants tended to offer a more limited menu that included a wide variety of fresh fruits, vegetables, and locally-sourced meats. Some Colonial-styled restaurants made an effort to tailor their dishes to ones reminiscent of the pre- revolutionary period, while others simply placed more of an emphasis on simple, “home- style” meals that invoked a feeling of farms and country life. Restaurants‟ “home cooking” fad was all the rage in the 1920s, appealing to a clientele of both men and women who, presumably, were no longer eating the same quality of freshly prepared meals as earlier generations. “Home-style” foods intended to be a throwback to the lost art of domesticity at a time when improved household technologies, shopping, and wage- earning work meant less time in the kitchen for women. The common reasoning for the shift away from home food preparation attributed it to the idea that “the housewife of

283 “American Heritage,” 109. 284 “McNicol Rose Marie” advertisement, McNicol Pottery Company of Clarksburg, American Restaurant, October 1934, 11. 102 yesterday, who took such pride in her cooking, now works in an office or factory, and her meals, as well as those of her husband and family, are eaten in a restaurant or come from a can”—these men and women, the restaurant industry believed, “are the typical American.”285 (Not all who lamented the lost art of home cooking blamed women; Helen Ewing, the recipe columnist for American Restaurant, countered that men were responsible for eliminating women‟s domestic occupations by commercializing the work “in order to make money.”286) Restaurants, therefore, pounced on the opportunity to offer “homesick” Americans a substitute to home cooking.

In the 1920s, restaurants used the “home cooking” catch phrase to capture nostalgia for an antimodern, preindustrial time that seemed to be more simple, slow- paced, and familiar. “In an era of prepackaged foods, name brands, and nationwide chains,” Samantha Barber observes, “it [home cooking] was humble, seasonal, and local.”287 At the least, restaurants advertising “home cooking” suggested these characteristics, although in reality, preparation of these same home-style foods often involved the use of packaged, frozen, and canned ingredients.288 Colonial-themed restaurants tapped into this “home cooking” trend, but they were also part of a less documented revival of truly fresh, seasonal, and local eating habits. In the 1920s, at the same time that processed foods appeared on more Americans‟ dinner plates and the restaurant industry at large profited from nostalgia for food “like mom used to make,” numerous individuals and organizations in the larger food industry advocated for a back-

285 Emory Hancock, “American Cookery,” Pacific Coast Chef, May 1928, 11. 286 Helen Ewing, “What About This „Home Cooking?‟” American Restaurant, March 1931, 45. 287 Samantha Barber, “Just Like Home: „Home Cooking‟ and the Domestication of the American Restaurant,” Gastronomica 2, no.4 (Fall 2002): 48. For more on the home-cooking trend, see Jan Whitaker, “Domesticating the Restaurant: Marketing the Anglo-American Home,” in From Betty Crocker to Feminist Food Studies: Critical Perspectives on Women and Food, ed. Arlene Voski Avakian and Barbara Haber (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005), 89-105. 288 Barber, “Just Like Home,” 49. 103 to-the-land style of eating, which they associated with authentically American cooking. Several of the most popular and acclaimed Colonial-revival restaurants appealed to customers because of their dedication to this local, seasonal American style of cooking. In 1926 the Department of Commerce collected surveys from 775 respondents (including restaurants, hotels, and housewives) on attitudes toward consumption of canned foods; 100 percent cited convenience as the primary reason for using canned goods, while “on the question of flavor, there was an overwhelming preference for raw products.”289 The inclination for raw, or fresh, fruits and vegetables went hand in hand with a mindset that tied food “of the land,” or harvested directly from American soil, to an authentically American style of eating. While this kind of local food was often intertwined in the popular imagination with “home cooking,” it was also frequently linked to American heritage as a way of defining the country‟s gastronomic diversity— “American food” was not solely synonymous with domestic family values; it also captured the variation of the nation in its attempt to assert a unified self-definition.290 Emerging out of World War I, many representatives of the American restaurant industry saw food as another way to situate the United States firmly on the world map. As the country slipped into the Depression years, consumption of farm-fresh foods and

American dishes allowed the wider public to express national pride even if their pocketbooks could not afford to “Buy American”—at least they could “Eat American.” Eating American, though, was a fairly complex task. On the one hand, immigration and the country‟s cultural diversity had helped to create what Christine Frederick called an “American bill of fare [that] can be truly said to be the most cosmopolitan in the

289 Frederick, Selling Mrs. Consumer, 162. 290 Jan Whitaker, “Domesticating the Restaurant: Marketing the Anglo-American Home,” in From Betty Crocker to Feminist Food Studies: Critical Perspectives on Women and Food, ed. Arlene Voski Avakian and Barbara Haber (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005), 91. 104 world.”291 Similarly, the hostess editor at Vogue, Katherine Blake, maintained, “There‟s a variety and character to our [American] cooking that probably evolved from the influence of a great many other countries—to say nothing of all the specialties of our own we‟ve developed.”292 On the other hand, the improvements in transportation that shipped regional foods around the country and introduced American consumers to foreign ingredients and international dishes also caused “the Neglect of Native or Sectional Dishes.”293 The increasing uniformity of American cookery was not necessarily beneficial in the minds of food aficionados: “This is a big country…and we have a great deal of outstanding sectional cooking,” remarked the editor of House and Garden. “You cannot lump American cooking into one picture.”294 Supporting this argument, the restaurant industry awarded first place in a menu contest to a New York restaurant that featured particular “New England Dishes” every day of the week and included regional culinary lore with each entry, ranging from Red Flannel Hash and Boiled Indian Pudding to Codfish Dinner and Boston Cream Pie.295 So while Americans claimed their food to be uniquely worldly, they also cited regional, local foods as the cornerstone of tradition and national pride. Helen Ewing, recipe columnist for the American Restaurant magazine, insisted, “„Home-cooked,‟ in

America, means American,” by which Ewing meant Early American or Colonial Revival.296 Already a promoter of Early American dishes, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office, Ewing and other staff members of the American Restaurant fairly

291 Frederick, Selling Mrs. Consumer, 122. 292 “The Food Experts Say…” Exchange Revue, February 1941, 5, Papers of the New York Exchange for Women‟s Work, New York Historical Society. 293 Frederick, Selling Mrs. Consumer, 122. 294 “The Food Experts Say…,” 5. 295 “Prize Winning Menus,” Restaurant Management, January 1942, 22-23. 296 Helen Ewing, “American Cooking Traditions,” American Restaurant, April 1931, 42. 105 burst with excitement over the anticipation of the First Couple‟s culinary influence on the nation: “All of us will feel (to some extent at least) this influence [of Colonial Plantation cooking] in the home of the Roosevelts, and we will see the return of food far more delicate, more popular than it has been in years.”297 Acknowledging both Southern- Plantation and Northern-Colonial styles as representative of “famous American cookery,”

Ewing emphasized, “it is no secret that American cookery, like American history, is little known by many of us. As it happens, the two are, at this point, closely interwoven….[and] there is equally good reason why it should again become the featured food fashion in our American restaurants.”298 In other words, to taste American food was to consume national history. The magazine‟s editor concurred, encouraging restaurateurs to “make a big feature of typically American dishes in our restaurant [sic],” and citing

“frequent evidence that we are about to experience a revival of that method of preparing and blending American farm products into tasty and palatable dishes according to recipes passed on to us by our forefathers and which have come down through the years under the name of American cuisine.”299 Colonial restaurants, therefore, were the perfect venue to showcase farm-fresh American food. Two restaurants that best exemplify the farm- or garden-fresh food appeal of the

Colonial motif are the Toll House in Whitman, Massachusetts, and the handful of White Turkey restaurants in New York and Connecticut. To date, the Toll House is best remembered for giving us the famous Toll House Chocolate Chip cookies (originally named Toll House Chocolate Crunch cookies by Ruth Wakefield). Beginning in 1930,

297 Helen Ewing, “Old Colonial Meal-Time Favories,” American Restaurant, June 1933, 32. This excitement parallels the 2009-2010 fervor over Michelle Obama‟s planting of a White House garden, often cited as the first White House garden since Eleanor Roosevelt‟s World War II Victory Garden. 298 Helen Ewing, “Let‟s Feature Our American Dishes,” American Restaurant, May 1933, 28. 299 C.A. Patterson, “Popularizing the American Cuisine,” American Restaurant, May 1933, 23.

106 though, the restaurant was most popular for its fresh fruits and vegetables, Colonial décor, and inviting hospitality. In August 1930 husband-and-wife partners Kenneth and Ruth Wakefield purchased an old toll house built in 1709, around twenty miles outside of Boston on the way to Cape Cod. Ruth—a former dietician, high school cooking teacher, and food lecturer—and Kenneth, who had previously worked for a meatpacking company, joined their interests in entrepreneurship and food to open the Toll House. In keeping with the history of the region, the Wakefields decorated the restaurant in a Colonial motif, from the floral designs to the period wallpaper. Like many other Early

American-themed restaurants, too, the Toll House marketed itself beyond its food, selling candies, cigarettes, and cigars; catering weddings and hosting bridge parties; and compiling a cookbook for guests from near and far who wanted to recreate Toll House favorites in their own homes.300 Yet the Wakefield‟s real pride was in their food. Along with the rural, domestic surroundings, the Wakefields relied on their reputation for fresh ingredients and ample portions to bring in first-time customers and to retain their business. Fresh fruits and vegetables, cooked to order in small quantities, could still be affordable, and the Wakefields set out to prove it. They hired an employee to head out to Boston‟s vegetable auction market daily at 4:00am to obtain regional, seasonal produce.301 After a year of operations, Ruth published a cookbook, Toll House Tried and True Recipes, in which she articulated her vision for the restaurant: “I still believe in small quantity cookery as giving the best results in flavor, consistency, and general quality, especially in baking, and I know there are no substitutes for butter,

300 See Menu, The Toll House, ca. 1940-48, Randall H. Greenless Menu Collection, Cornell University; Ruth Wakefield, Ruth Wakefield‟s Toll House Tried and True Recipes (New York: M. Barrows and Co., 1946). 301 “Secrets of a New England Success,” Restaurant Management, August 1937, 89-90. 107 cream, eggs, fresh fruits and vegetables in preparing a fine meal.”302 Even during World War II, the Wakefields tried to uphold this model of cooking, which made them “famous the world over as a great American restaurant.”303 Although fresh fruits and vegetables constituted the restaurant‟s most expensive cost next to employees‟ salaries, the Wakefields still offered them, even in the midst of wartime rationing.304

The Toll House began with seven tables, but by 1933 customer demand enticed the Wakefields to expand to 60 tables seating upwards of 225 guests.305 By 1942 the restaurant had a seating capacity of 350. Amidst all of the renovations and expansions, the Toll House owners worked hard to retain the Colonial ambience of the restaurant.306 However, by the late 1950s, when the establishment could seat up to 425 customers at once, the décor had shifted to a more modern interpretation of “Colonial,” signaling the changing times and preferences. Although the reception room still welcomed guests with antique furniture, Colonial wallpaper, braided rugs, and pewter accessories, the dining room‟s casserole dishes were imported from Paris, the finger bowls arrived from Germany, and the salad bowls—although made locally in Brockton, Massachusetts— were molded out of clear Lucite acrylic, which was considered more hygienic than wood and could “be buffed to remove scratches.”307 In addition, even though the Wakefields continued to emphasize the quality of their local ingredients, they had also learned the business model of tying their menu to popular nationwide brands, such as Heinz and Nestle. Therefore, even by 1942, the H. J. Heinz Company was incorporating the famous

302 Wakefield, Ruth Wakefield‟s Toll House, 5 (emphasis in original). 303 Sarah Shields Pfeiffer, “Here Is the Story of Far-Famed Toll House,” American Restaurant, December 1944, 32. 304 Pfeiffer, “Here Is the Story of Far-Famed Toll House,” 88. 305 “Secrets of a New England Success,” 91. 306 “Something New in Restaurants,” Restaurant Management, June 1942, 18. 307 “Toll House,” Restaurant Management, September 1959, 42. 108

Toll House into its advertisements, praising the restaurant for the “fine quality” of its foods, “the never-to-be-forgotten flavor of Toll House dishes,” and reminding readers that Heinz Vintage Vinegar was an essential component of Toll House cooking.308 By the mid-1940s, the restaurant also dedicated itself to using only Nestle-brand chocolate for the famed cookies, especially since Ruth had joined the advisory board at Nestle to consult on “chocolate problems” for the company.309 Yet despite the subtle shifts toward more modern methods of advertising, decorating, and preparing foods, the Toll House still retained its aura of hospitality through its Early American heritage and insistence on using fresh, local produce. As one dining guidebook recommended, “be sure that next time you‟re down east you visit the Toll House, „Where the Doormat Always Says Welcome.‟ Come to think of it, so does every door mat in New England.”310 In other words, New England‟s Colonial charm was synonymous with restaurant hospitality. Another longtime favorite Colonial-themed restaurant that built its success on its fresh, locally-sourced foods; ties to “authentic” American heritage; and associations between New England and comforting hospitality was the White Turkey Inn in Danbury, Connecticut, and its sibling restaurants in Manhattan. In 1934, another husband-and-wife team, Harry and Dorothy Davega, purchased the White Turkey Inn from Mary Morgan, the proprietor since 1904, whose husband‟s death prompted her to sell the business. The original property dated back to 1760; Mary and her husband, Charles, bought the old home in order to start a tea room, a type of restaurant specializing in homey, dainty dishes and décor that was particularly popular among women in the 1920s and 1930s.311

308 “The House That Builds Flavor,” advertisement, H. J. Heinz Co., Restaurant Management, April 1942, 39. 309 Pfeiffer, “Here Is the Story of Far-Famed Toll House,” 92. 310 Hines, Duncan Hines‟ Food Odyssey, 73. 311 Histories of the original building cite conflicting dates for its origin; some claim the property was built in 1760, while others date it back to 1670, which appears to be incorrect. See, for example, Richard Walsh, 109

The Morgans named their restaurant the White Turkey Inn to invoke the heritage of the region and their efforts to represent the best of American cookery: Citing Benjamin Franklin‟s suggestion that the turkey would be a more representative national bird for the United States than the eagle, the Davegas later explained, “The choice of a name was truly American for the turkey…is really a native of America and an Indian bird.”312 After operating as a moderately-successful wayside eatery for thirty years, the White Turkey Inn became exceedingly popular after the Davegas took over the business, expanding into three more locations in New York throughout the late 1930s and 1940s.313 Popular among

New York-area professionals, especially physicians and professors, and appearing in numerous restaurant guides, the White Turkey restaurants gained a reputation for fine American food and hospitality.314 As one New York guidebook writer gushed, “When you eat at any of these branches…you will find the essence of the best in America in the appointments, the service, and the food.”315 For customers unable to frequent the restaurant locations as often as they might like, the Davegas published a restaurant cookbook in 1948—complete with a historical biography of the restaurant dating back to

Jr., “White Turkey: A New Model Business,” American Restaurant, February 1939, 74, and “Radio Salesman Turns Inn-keeper,” Printers‟ Ink, April 1942, 71c. For more on the history of tea rooms, see Cynthia A. Brandimarte, “„To Make the Whole World Homelike‟: Gender, Space, and America‟s Tea Room Movement,” Winterthur Portfolio 30, no. 1 (Spring 1995), 1-19. 312 F. Meredith Dietz, Let‟s Talk Turkey: Adventures and Recipes of the White Turkey Inn (Richmond: The Dietz Press, 1948), 7-8. 313 In 1937 the Davegas opened the White Turkey Town House in Greenwich Village, known as “a country dining room in the city.” The couple opened a location for their fourth White Turkey on Murray Hill in 1941, one week after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and then three years later, they started another branch, the White Turkey Sutton Place. See Dietz, Let‟s Talk Turkey, 23-44; “White Turkey Chain Leases 57th and 2nd Ave. Corner,” Hotel Gazette, January 17, 1948, n.p. 314 Walsh, “White Turkey,” 78. 315 Robert Dana, Where to Eat in New York (New York: Current Books, Inc., 1948), 109. 110 the eighteenth century—to keep the public dining community interested in their efforts to preserve the nation‟s heritage through restaurants.316 The first improvements undertaken by Harry and Dorothy Davega at each of their locations included redecorating the entire space to offer an inviting Colonial atmosphere to customers with the help of Robert Kilborn, an architect who specialized in Early

American historic reproductions.317 The Davegas decided on the thematic scheme for their original restaurant in Danbury after visiting Colonial Williamsburg in 1935; the village‟s reminiscences of eighteenth-century living inspired them to recreate the period themselves.318 They hand-selected scroll-and-floral wallpaper, pre-Revolutionary ladies‟ “mourning dresses” for waitress costumes, Wedgewood and Spode fine china and glassware in Early American patterns, and even replaced the large windows with small- paned ones that invoked the Colonial period.319 As part of their advertising plan, the couple commissioned the official printer for the Colonial Williamsburg restoration project in Richmond, Virginia, who specialized in recreating Colonial-era typesetting (including varied capitalization, italics, and spelling), to print their house magazine for White Turkey customers, The White Turkey Gobbler, on handmade paper.320 Most important, though, the Davegas focused on their food, buying the best ingredients available and choosing particular products based on their seasonal availability and quality. “No meal is good that starts with poor food,” stated Dorothy Davega when

316 “Enjoy Life—Eat Out more Often Gets Patrons In…Hospitality Brings „Em Back,” American Restaurant, October 1949, 46-48. 317 Dietz, Let‟s Talk Turkey, 33. 318 Lester C. Leber, “Life Partners Are Restaurant Partners,” American Restaurant, December 1948, 25. 319 Walsh, “White Turkey,” 39; Dietz, Let‟s Talk Turkey, 38; Duncan Hines, Adventures in Good Eating (Chicago: Adventures in Good Eating, Inc., 1937), 60. 320 “Radio Salesman Turns Inn-Keeper,” 71d; “Life Partners Are Restaurant Partners,” 54. The Davegas hired the same printer to publish their cookbook. See “The Restaurant about Which a Book Was Written,” American Restaurant, January 1949, 88-B. 111 explaining the rationale behind their menu selections.321 Although the proprietors followed the mantra that “the atmosphere must be retained in the food,” they acknowledged serving dishes that evolved in the United States after its founding period. “Few American dishes except turkey, corn-on-cob, white and sweet potatoes are native- born,” they stated in their cookbook. “Like the Americans, other than the Indians, they came from across the seas but through generations of use they have taken out their culinary citizenship papers.”322 Authentic American food just needed to earn its merit badges through the course of generations, even if its origins began in another country.

Part of the way in which the Davegas captured what they considered to be truly American dishes was through their ingredients and cooking methods. Believing that their urban-dwelling customers were mostly “transplanted country kids” who wanted “old- fashioned food and lots of it,” the Davegas purchased their smoked turkeys from Max and Grace Blitzer, who ran Pinesbridge Farm Smoked Turkey (a local artisan poultry business), and their fresh herbs from the nearby Twin Tree Gardens, operated by George and Dorothy Eugenia Mangravite.323 Their menu consisted of items such as “Garden Spinach,” “Planked Fresh Bluefish,” and “Fresh Mushroom Omelette” among the various turkey, chicken, potato, and dessert offerings.324 Recommending that patrons allow

“ample time to cook your food properly,” the Davegas and their White Turkey restaurants reiterated the notion that America‟s heritage of hospitality was best represented through local, seasonal foods served in an Early American atmosphere.325 For, in the words of one edition of The White Turkey Gobbler, “Let it be herein noted that the three White Turkey

321 “Walsh, “White Turkey,” 38. 322 Dietz, Let‟s Talk Turkey, 35-36. 323 Leber, “Life Partners Are Restaurant Partners,” 24; Dietz, Let‟s Talk Turkey, 45-49. 324 Menu, The White Turkey, ca. 1941, New York Historical Society. 325 Duncan Hines Adventures in Good Eating (Bowling Green: Adventures in Good Eating, Inc., 1941), 69. 112

Establishments represent efforts to capture the Essence of various Phases of early American Life....[E]ach achieves complete Harmony between the delicious, yet simple Food that is served and the quiet, leisurely Atmosphere in which it is enjoyed.”326 Even if several of America‟s national dishes were really variations and adaptations of cuisine from around the world, the local origins of the ingredients and an Early American atmosphere restored the authentic “heritage of hospitality” intrinsic in Colonial-themed restaurants. One of the most prominent public culinary figures who urged Americans to consume more seasonal, regionally-specific food was Duncan Hines. Hines, a print salesman based in Chicago, drove around the country for work, and along the way noted more favorable places to eat while on the road. His wife, who also liked to eat and travel by car, joined him on the weekends for jaunts several hours away from home to try out restaurants. Word of Hines‟s personal tally of good restaurants got around to friends, who passed his name (and phone number) on to their friends. By Christmas 1935, Hines, exhausted by the prospect of giving everyone individual recommendations, printed up a list of restaurants as a holiday card. Instead of holding the wave of requests at bay, the card opened the floodgates, so by the following year, Hines printed and published the first red-covered Adventures in Good Eating. By 1938, he was turning a profit on the publication.327 Hines, tired of finding, across the nation, “waiters [who] try to shove chicken, steak, and chops down my throat,” advocated dining on regional specialties that tended to be more gastronomically creative, fresh, and tasty than nationally generic “American”

326 The White Turkey Gobbler (Danbury: Harry and Dorothy Davega), 1941, New York Historical Society. 327 Milton MacKaye, “Where Shall We Stop for Dinner?” Saturday Evening Post, December 3, 1938, 16. 113 fare. “Why should I stuff myself with chicken in California,” he asked, “when the whole Pacific Ocean, full of sea food, is right offshore?”328 One media profile of Hines highlighted his extensive familiarity with the day-to-day operations of farming, ranching, and gardening as a way of emphasizing his personal connection to and investment in local, “back-to-the-farm” eating.329 Hines believed that New England restaurants served the best food, in part because of their greater insistence on local foods and fresh vegetables, which were a selling point of many of the Colonial-styled restaurants.330 The Wakefield‟s Toll House ranked high on the top of his favorites list: “It makes my mouth water,” Hines drooled, “to think of the baked Injun Porridge as it is prepared at Toll House, Whitman, Mass. That‟s the kind of dessert that makes a fellow wish for hollow legs.”331 Likewise, Hines called the Davega‟s White Turkey Inn “another of my favorites.”332 “New England cookery, as simple and unadorned as any in America, is likewise some of the finest I‟ve ever eaten,” Hines reminisced in his autobiographical Food Odyssey. His reasoning: inexpensive, high-quality ingredients prepared with little fanfare constituted “a long heritage of fine cookery.”333 Elsewhere he remarked, “Much of our cooking falls down through the fact that too many cooks are still trying to discover something that will take the place of good butter, fresh eggs, rich milk, and a loving touch. It just hasn‟t been done yet.”334 For Hines, America‟s heritage of culinary hospitality was found in simple ingredients prepared according to regional traditions, and

328 Duncan Hines and Frank Taylor, “How to Find a Decent Meal,” Saturday Evening Post, April 26, 1947, 100. 329 Carol Lynn Gilmer, “Duncan Hines: Adventurer in Good Eating,” Coronet, November 1947, 101. 330 “Eater,” American Magazine, April 1941, 81. 331 Clementine Paddleford, “Duncan Hines Says…” Los Angeles Times, January 12, 1947, E12. 332 Hines, Adventures in Good Eating (1937), 60. 333 Hines, Food Odyssey, 70. 334 Quoted in Allen Abel, “Golden Oldies,” Washingtonian, May 2009, 85-86. 114

New England fare (often found in Colonial-themed restaurants) seemed best able to capture this signature quality of national pride. Other restaurant aficionados echoed Hines, including James B. Pond, who traveled the culinary lecture circuit speaking to dining clubs on the art of dining. Speaking before New York‟s Gourmet Society in 1938, Pond delivered a speech pleading

Americans to “Try to Get Local Dishes If You Can!” Americans, he claimed, “were making themselves ridiculous by ignoring the types of food and cooking for which they should be famous.” As example, Pond cited among his disappointing experiences one particular trip to Florida, where a restaurant served him lukewarm, canned orange juice explaining that states further up the East Coast paid better prices for the citrus fruit; therefore, they had to content themselves with the processed variety.335 Yet while numerous Colonial restaurants appealed to customers like Pond and Hines because of their insistence on regional recipes and seasonal, local ingredients, not all Early American-themed dining spots dedicated themselves to upholding the nation‟s “founding foods” in their service operations. Many Colonial-style restaurants simply jumped on the theme bandwagon, giving drab décor a Colonial facelift for the sake of rescuing the business through

“atmosphere.”336 Several chain restaurants were among this category, emphasizing their attractive Colonial décor within an otherwise thoroughly modern restaurant. The Tick Tock Tea Rooms in Southern California projected a comfortable, inviting atmosphere through external Colonial-styled architecture and “home-style” meals.337 Schrafft‟s

335 “U.S. Local Dishes Found Neglected,” New York Times, October 24, 1938, 19. 336 For example, see Mort Stein, “New Faces a Result of Paint, Purpose,” Pacific Coast Record, March 1963, 16. 337 “The Woman Executive,” Restaurant Management, December 1936, 438-439; Hines, Adventures in Good Eating (1938), 34. 115

Madison Avenue location played with decorative features from the eighteenth century, including pretty hostesses draped in “stiff blue taffeta picture frocks.”338 Harding‟s Colonial Room in Chicago, which claimed that the “pre-revolutionary period was the most hospitable in American history”—a hospitality captured by the period‟s architecture and material objects—also prided itself on its fast service.339 At the restaurant, “a pretty young damsel, costumed appropriately in Colonial style,” greeted and seated guests, demonstrating that a lunch and dinner spot did not need “to sacrifice good taste in restaurant decorations in order to offer patrons the quickest possible kind of table service.”340 The key to speed was a “thermotainer,” which kept pre-cooked foods warm. When a patron ordered from a limited menu, the waitress simply grabbed the plate of food kept warm by circulating air in the compartment and delivered it to the customer.341

Similarly, Sholl‟s Colonial Cafeterias in Washington, D.C., offered customers a blend of the old and the new in its Colonial-themed dining rooms complete with air conditioning and acoustically-treated ceilings, and a kitchen that used the latest pressure-cooker technology.342 Possibly the most famous restaurant chain to revive Colonial architecture for customer appeal was the unmistakable orange-roofed Howard Johnson‟s. In 1935,

Howard Johnson, a former newspaper salesman from Wollaston, Massachusetts, established what many consider to be one of the earliest and most successful franchise operations in the United States. The venture started in 1928 when Johnson opened a

338 Helen Josephy and Mary Margaret McBride, New York Is Everybody‟s Town (New York: G.P. Putnam‟s Sons, 1931), 105. 339 Hines, Adventures in Good Eating (1938), 81. 340 Drury, Dining In Chicago, 73; H. C. Siekman, “Modern Service in a Colonial Setting,” American Restaurant, April 1930, 29, 32. 341 Siekman, “Modern Service,” 30-31. 342 Lionel Herbert, “Sholl‟s Cafeterias,” American Restaurant, May 1945, 106-108. 116 hotdog stand and soda fountain on Wollaston Boulevard.343 His success grew when he began operating ice cream stands in the greater Boston area that served Johnson‟s own recipe for ice cream made from a higher 22 percent butterfat content than his competitors‟ typical 12 percent.344 By May 1935, Johnson‟s first Howard Johnson‟s franchise opened in Cape Cod, and within five years, Johnson had franchised 130 locations along major thoroughfares on the East Coast from Maine to Florida.345 Although the architecture of Howard Johnson‟s restaurants varied slightly in design prior to World War II, they all captured a sense of tradition and longevity through their

Colonial features: orange roof, green shutters, and a cupola with a clock, spire, and weathervane on the exterior; inside, knotted pine paneled walls, curtained windows, and home-like lamps.346 The effect was that each restaurant served as an advertisement for other locations.347 Warren Belasco observes that not only was the 1930s a period of renewed interest in early Americana, but the automobile was seen as a vehicle that transported its occupants to both another place and time. Motoring invited nostalgia, “the search for the old-fashioned.”348 Howard Johnson‟s restaurants, then, succeeded in part because of their roadside location (easily accessible to travelers) and additionally because of their Colonial theme, simply portrayed and offering a comforting respite away from home.349

343 Walter O. Voegele, “Here‟s Johnson‟s $10,000,000 Idea,” Restaurant Management, August 1939, 11. 344 Jesse Rainsford Sprague, “He Had an Idea,” Saturday Evening Post, November 2, 1940, 70. 345 Langdon, Orange Roofs, Golden Arches, 47. 346 Sprague, “He Had an Idea,” 34; Langdon, Orange Roofs, Golden Arches, 48-49; Levenstein, Paradox of Plenty, 48. 347 Voegele, “Here‟s Johnson‟s $10,000,000 Idea,” 13. 348 Warren J. Belasco, “Toward a Culinary Common Denominator: The Rise of Howard Johnson‟s, 1925- 1940,” Journal of American Culture 2, no. 3(Fall 1979), 507 (emphasis in original). 349 Interestingly, Johnson suggested that his own familial heritage authorized his use of a Colonial motif to invoke national traditions in his restaurant chain. He based his industry success, even in the face of setbacks, on his ancestry: Swedish roots from his father‟s lineage and “old-time New England on his mother‟s side,”(Sprague, “He Had an Idea,” 70.) 117

Like other successful Early American-styled restaurants banking on the tourist trade, Johnson stocked his franchise locations with products (many handmade) packaged under his own label, from candies and preserved fruit to bread, potato chips, and fountain syrups, that customers could purchase and carry with them as souvenirs or gifts after a meal.350 Additionally, even though Johnson did not advertise (or purchase) local, seasonal ingredients, he did insist on having daily food deliveries; using “nationally advertised, top quality products”; and serving “good, wholesome food, freshly prepared” and made-to- order on site, including baked goods.351 These food products, while not necessarily served “straight from the farm,” suggested a commitment to fresh ingredients and quality meals associated with a period when cooks spent long days standing over the kitchen stove. For this reason, too, Howard Johnson‟s restaurants advertised early on that they hired “women cooks throughout the 125 restaurants,” even though one-third of their total employees were men.352 Women as food preparers tended to be associated with the domestic realm of the Colonial kitchen and home-style cooking, rather than professional male “chefs” who dominated the fine-dining cuisine of higher-end restaurants. The component of reassuring customers seeking a nostalgic past by giving them glimpses of modernity was not lost on Howard Johnson‟s restaurants. The location in

Lancaster, Pennsylvania, with its wood-paneled walls and curtained windows also boasted of its modern grease-proof asphalt tile floors. In Forest Hills, New York, the Howard Johnson‟s was outfitted with up-to-date electric cooking equipment, such as a roll warmer and rectangular waffle baker, designed by Griswold engineers. The Howard

350 Walter O. Voegele, “Johnson Scores Again!” Restaurant Management, May 1940, 17; Voegele, “Here‟s Johnson‟s $10,000,000 Idea,” 13; Sprague, “He Had an Idea,” 71-72. 351 Frank C. Lyons, “Howard Johnson Methods Feature Highway Food-Service Along the Pennsylvania Turnpike,” American Restaurant, February 1941, 98; “Johnson Moves in on Café Society,” Restaurant Management, August 1941, 31; Voegele, “Here‟s Johnson‟s $10,000,000 Idea,” 38. 352 Voegele, “Here‟s Johnson‟s $10,000,000 Idea,” 36; Voegele, “Johnson Scores Again!” 15. 118

Johnson‟s in Cincinnati, Ohio, featured fire-retardant Georgia-style oak furniture, with seating finished in “fire-resistant beige leatherette” and table tops treated to repel burns from cigarettes.353 Belasco points out that one factor that made Howard Johnson‟s different from other Colonial-revival restaurants was its intention of newness—Johnson always built new locations from the ground up, rather than renovating a historic building.354 Additionally, his interiors featured modern comforts, such as air conditioning and soundproofing, to mediate the comfort of the dining environment.355 Following World War II, operators of Howard Johnson‟s locations updated the interiors with sleek Formica tabletops and plastic spherical lamps in an attempt to keep pace with the modern look favored by customers in the postwar years.356 These visual and technological nods to modernity functioned similarly to their counterparts in

Western-themed restaurants: they reassured customers that by participating in the public dining marketplace, they were benefiting from the latest advancements in kitchen science and structural design. A culinary trip down memory lane need not be regressive; indeed, the nostalgic atmosphere peppered with modern inventions reminded white, middle-class customers just how far they had progressed back to their civilized, industrial future. Parallels between heritage and modernity are not necessarily incongruent. For instance, Colonial revivalism, according to restaurant historian Jan Whitaker, “represented modernity in disguise” because the clean lines, lack of excessive ornamentation, and simple designs invited hygienic conditions.357 Chain restaurants

353 “Take a Tip from Howard Johnson‟s,” Restaurant Management, August 1941, 41; “Howard Johnson‟s Grille Features Griswold,” American Restaurant, August 1940, 13; “Howard Johnson Adds Another Link to His Restaurant Chain,” American Restaurant, March 1949, 92. 354 Belasco, “Toward a Culinary Common Denominator,” 513. 355 Voegele, “Here‟s Johnson‟s $10,000,000 Idea,” 12. 356 Langdon, Orange Roofs, Golden Arches, 52-54. 357 Jan Whitaker, Tea at the Blue Lantern Inn (New York: St. Martin‟s Press, 2002), 89. 119 apparently banked on this dual purpose—thematic and sanitary appeal—by adopting Colonial motifs in locations that opened in the interwar years. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Clark‟s Restaurant Company chain introduced a series of “Early American” themed restaurants throughout Ohio inspired by Williamsburg, Yorktown, and Jamestown, Virginia. One trade journal, which featured the restaurant as profitable example of the Colonial trend, interspersed examples of the newest Clark restaurant‟s “authentic reproductions” of architecture, furniture, wallpaper, and rugs with detailed descriptions of its modern engineering.358 Making sure that the reader understood that the restaurant was thoroughly modern, the author wrote, “A modern note in the Yorktown theme of the dining room is air conditioning. Another contrast to the Colonial atmosphere…is the huge airy kitchen, which is modern to the last degree. Here are found the latest developments and phases of modern restaurant equipment. Against the pale yellow titled walls in gleaming stainless steel is every modern device to unsure the prompt service of the tasty foods.”359 Although the trend in advertising “home cooking” waned in the 1930s, restaurants‟ emphasis on farm-fresh, regional ingredients persisted through World War II and the postwar years, likely because growing one‟s own food signaled a ready supply in times of food shortage. Philip Oltz, who opened his own country-style restaurant on a farm in the mid-1920s, pointed toward his farm as the secret to the Oltz House‟s continued profits during the war years. Not only did his customers enjoy the idea of his home-grown food, but the fact that his vegetable gardens were plentiful, his Jersey cows were full of milk for fresh butter, and his chickens were ready for the nightly dinner table

358 For more on the theoretical implications of “authentic reproductions” as a postmodern phenomenon, see Edward M. Bruner, “Abraham Lincoln as Authentic Reproduction: A Critique of Postmodernism,” American Anthropologist 96, no. 2 (June 1994), 397-415. 359 “Introducing Clark‟s Yorktown,” Restaurant Management, January 1940, 16-19, 36. 120 attracted business in a time of red stamps and dairy rationing.360 The Country Kitchen, which opened in the midst of World War II and adhered to an Early American decorative scheme, succeeded partly because of its “inexhaustible supply of fresh fruits and vegetables right in their own back yard.”361 Both the Green Parrot Inn, operating out of a farmhouse in Kansas City, Missouri, and the Knott‟s Berry Farm in California, supplied their menus with special breeds of chicken raised locally for the restaurants.362 Restaurants like these revealed competitive staying power in an industry deluged with processed, packaged, and generic meals. Standardization in food, evidently, could be both a welcome reassurance and a tired refrain. For the most part, Colonial-themed restaurants that opened and operated following World War II mirrored their prewar counterparts. Places like the Colonial

Hotel near White Springs, Florida, and the Yankee Pedlar Inn in Holyoke, Massachusetts, still prided themselves on serving “old-fashioned New England cookery” in “an atmosphere of gracious hospitality” that invoked Early American through period wallpaper, wrought iron decorations, and other tangible representations of the Colonial era.363 What is important to note, however, is that the versions of American hospitality presented in Colonial-themed restaurants were almost entirely and exclusively white, with the exception of representations of African American servitude displayed in Southern Plantation-themed restaurants and detailed in the next section. This conceptual production of American heritage in restaurants, by and for whites, reiterated a version of

360 Philip Oltz, “Restaurateurs Should Take to the Land!” Restaurant Management, September 1945, 34-35, 64. 361 Henry Wade Hough, “Discovering the Country Kitchen,” American Restaurant, July 1945, 22-24. 362 “Come In! Said Mrs. Dowd…,” American Restaurant, November 1938, 22-23, 72; Freeman, “Food Notes on a California Journey,” 79. 363 Gertrude S. Booth, Florida‟s Famous Eating Places with Their Favorite Recipes (Gainesville: Gertrude S. Booth, 1956), 52; Menu, Yankee Pedlar Inn, ca. 1950. Randall H. Greenless Menu Collection, Cornell University; Simmons, On the House, 257. 121 the nation‟s founding history that tended to ignore people of color (other than in a service capacity) while upholding and privileging a white model of national tradition and culinary citizenship.

PRESERVING THE OLD PLANTATION SOUTH

When Martin V. “Bud” Smith‟s Colonial House in Oxnard, California, celebrated its twentieth year of business in 1961, the restaurant reminisced fondly over the elements that had made the Early American-themed restaurant a success: its antique and copper colonial décor; its replica of an Old Southern mansion; and “what has become a trademark, a living sign, „Otis,‟ the colored boy, all dressed in a complete chef‟s outfit, standing atop a platform across the highway from the restaurant, waving a rolled napkin during the day or a brilliant flashlight at night, directing traffic into the extensive parking area.”364 The restaurant, which built repeat patronage through fresh foods, including an on-site bakery, high-grade chickens, and in-house butchering, adopted a Colonial motif to hold the customers‟ visual interest. Like other heritage-themed restaurant operators, Bud Smith prided himself on the “authenticity” of the décor, which included his “Living Landmark,” an African American man dressed as a chef who represented a living embodiment of contented black servitude for white consumers. So objectified was “Otis” perched atop a platform outside of the restaurant that “many motorists slow down to see if he is real.”365 The public (and highly visual) recreation of African American servants in plantation-themed restaurants situated these employees not only as decorative objects but as living emblems of a slave plantation past. In her analysis of the Southern white food

364 “Colonial House Celebrates 20th Anniversary,” Pacific Coast Record, July 1961, 16-17. 365 Jack Miller, “Beautiful Colonial House is Cinderella Restaurant,” Pacific Coast Record, July 1954, 33. 122 critic, Craig Claiborne, Doris Witt remarks that in the years following events destabilizing black/white relations in the United States—including the Civil War, the Great Migration, and the Civil Rights movement—white southerners‟ public discussion and hiring of servants was a way of reaffirming and performing their white identity and authority.366 In particular, the presence of “contented” blacks performing work for whites, either as slaves or as servants, suggested a world of white wealth, leisure, and privilege. As Jessie W. Parkhurst articulated in 1938, the tradition of the “Black Mammy” in Southern households became a mythological symbol of white status: “eventually she became an imaginary figure created in the minds of those who had never possessed a „Mammy,‟ for in order to be recognized as belonging to the aristocracy of the Old South it was necessary to be able to say that one had been tended to by a „Black Mammy‟ in youth.”367 Old Plantation-themed restaurants that created “Black Mammy” waitress positions and other visual representations naturalizing black service work for the benefit of white customers, therefore, suggested to white patrons that they, too, could imagine themselves as aristocracy (or at least worthy of being treated like such) over the span of a meal. As sites of food production, consumption, and service, restaurants appeared to be an ideal locale for recreating nostalgic visions of black servitude based on plantation life.

Plantation-themed restaurants offered customers a revised history of the Colonial- era South that tried to reconcile and redeem the slave plantation hierarchy. They served

366 Doris Witt, Black Hunger: Food and the Politics of Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 61. 367 Jessie W. Parkhurst, “The Role of the Black Mammy in the Plantation Household,” The Journal of Negro History 23, no. 3 (July 1938): 351. For more on the cultural function of the mammy figure in reimagining the Old South, see Alice A. Deck, “„Now Then—Who Said Biscuits?‟ The Black Woman Cook as Fetish in American Advertising, 1905-1953,” in Kitchen Culture in America: Popular Representations of Food, Gender, and Race, ed. Sherrie A. Inness (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 69-93.

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“genuine” southern dishes, often cooked from recipes claimed to be passed down through generations of white southern families but “faithfully” prepared and served by the “natural” talents of African American men and women, who now “chose” to remain in the recreated plantation life. Plantation-style restaurants were often run by white “southern belles” who dressed waitresses in stereotypical Mammy costumes, complete with kerchief bandanas. Cultural historian Jo-Ann Morgan explains that this kind of plantation iconography furthered the belief that “if Mammy voluntarily remained with „Missus‟ and „Massa‟ even though now freed, perhaps the slave-holding planter had not been so villainous after all.” The visual repositioning of former slaves as compliant servants—still ready and willing to take care of the dining needs of white patrons— erased the magnitude of slavery‟s oppression in the eyes of many whites by naturalizing blacks‟ post-slavery service roles.368 In these terms, plantation-styled theme restaurants provided a setting in which the bodies of the African American employees authenticated a mythology that privileged the southern white slave-based agrarian system. Old South plantation-themed restaurants abounded in the 1920s and 1930s. Featured throughout the south, as well as the entire East Coast, Chicago, San Francisco, and any other regional locale that offered customers a variety of restaurant genres, plantation-themed restaurants recreated the power structure of the Old Plantation lifestyle. Stock images filled out the décor, and guidebooks aimed at middle-class, white customers—from all over the United States—reinforced stereotypical character traits of the African American employees. The Restaurants of New York (1925) praised The Plantation in New York for being “managed with clever showmanship. Lights gleam

368 Jo-Ann Morgan, “Mammy the Huckster: Selling the Old South for the New Century,” American Art, 9, no. 1 (Spring 1995): 94. 124 from a huge half water-melon, and near the entrance a black Mammy cooks waffles in her log cabin.” The guidebook, however, made a point to note that “the „color‟ is confined strictly to the entertainment features.”369 In other words, the restaurant refused service to black patrons. In New Orleans, the St. Charles Hotel decorated its banquet hall “old plantation style” with cotton bales, imitation trees dripping in moss, and table settings, including “a red bandana kerchief for napkin.” Visitors to the upscale hotel dining room with a hankering for something sweet could order “Ole Mammy Creole pralines.”370 Even in the early years of Prohibition, when finer restaurants closed from losses attributed to truncated alcohol sales, San Francisco diners took pride in their city‟s eating houses, including “a tearoom ruled by the caprice of a fat black mammy, whose chicken-fried steaks and chess pie lure bankers and brokers to submit meekly to her brainstorms.”371 In Tulsa, Oklahoma, hungry motorists flocked to Chicken in the Straw, a drive-in restaurant which repeated its logo—a caricatured face of a black mammy—on the menus and signage. The African American women employed to serve customers wore mammy-style uniforms complete with aprons and headwraps, took orders for “Chicken „Mammy Style‟ with Shoestring Potatoes,” and endured customers addressing them simply as “Mammy.”372

Plantation-themed restaurants, and many southern-themed ones in general, perpetuated the social hierarchy of the plantation and tried to naturalize the association among African Americans, food preparation, and service work. Numerous restaurants made a point of reminding customers that although their establishments were “run by a

369 Chappell, Restaurants of New York, 119. 370 “Plantation Dinner in New Orleans,” in Ideas for Refreshment Rooms (Chicago: Hotel Monthly Press, 1923), 249-250. 371 Ada Page, “Down the Savory Trail from Forty-Nine,” The Wasp-News Letter, December 26, 1931, 68. 372 “H. D. Robards, “Drive In for Greater Profits,” Restaurant Management, October 1938, 38, 40, 78. 125 real Southern gentlewoman, whose hospitality is felt as soon as you cross the threshold,” African Americans (often “personally trained” by the manager) authenticated the southern atmosphere by completing the food preparation and service.373 Although many of these restaurants, often owned-and-operated by white women, professed to foster an atmosphere of harmony and respect among the staff and management, they still perpetuated stereotypical images of black service workers through the uniforms and overall plantation motif. Clara May Downey‟s nationally-recognized Olney Inn, located twenty miles outside of Washington, D.C., opened in 1926 as an Early American-themed restaurant. By the late 1930s, Downey redecorated the place to reflect a decidedly Southern Colonial mood. The interior, reminiscent of a “charming Southern country home” where guests could experience “the leisurely enjoyment of its traditional Southern

Plantation cuisine,” included African American “Bun girls,” who wore kerchief headwraps and passed hot breads to dining patrons.374 At the Plantation Café of San Antonio, Texas, the restaurant garnered praise for “fairly smack[ing] with the hospitality of the South,” including “corn pones, hot biscuits, and other Southern favorites…brought to the tables by a colored girl.” Describing the key to the Plantation Café‟s popularity, a trade journal emphasized that “personal supervision in one of the chief features of the place and had played a prominent part in its rapid success.” The owner, Mrs. Illg, not only supervised food preparation in the kitchen, but she also oversaw the service work of waitresses in the dining rooms.375 Ruth Thompson‟s

373 Jack L. and Hazel Blair Dodd, “The Old Kentucky Tavern,” in Bohemian Eats of San Francisco (San Francisco, n.p., 1925). 374 Clara May Downey, “The Four „M‟s‟ of Restaurateuring,” American Restaurant, April 1933, 25-26; “New Atmosphere at the Olney Inn,” American Restaurant, December 1940, 31, 58; Menu, Olney Inn, Randall H. Greenless Menu Collection, Cornell University; “The Ebersole‟s Camera Tour for Pictorial Ideas from Several Famous Restaurants,” Restaurant Management, November 1936, 356. 375 B.C. Reber, “The Feminine Touch in the Café,” American Restaurant, February 1928, 44-45. 126 restaurant guidebook, Eating Around San Francisco (1937) noted that the Dawn Club served “real southern recipes” developed by the manager‟s mother, “who was famous for her cooking.” Yet the manager, Mrs. Opal Roeder, also supervised “a staff of 77—the waiters and chefs are Negroes, whom she has trained.” Similarly, at the Southern Inn, the owner-operator Helen Cohn, “because she wished to specialize in Southern food she found a real Southern cook….a young Negro chef.”376 This emphasis on white women‟s oversight of restaurant operations was seen as empowering to these women, many of whom were recent entrées into the male-dominated restaurant world. At the same time, their reassurance of supervision indicated to white customers that African American employees, who were believed to be inherently untidy and unskilled, were being held to higher standards by the female managers.377

Part of the naturalization of black men and women as domestic or food workers tapped into a widespread association among (Southern) whites between African Americans and the tactile magic of food preparation. Mark M. Smith charges historians to consider “the role of the senses in structuring historical meaning,” and white Americans‟ investment in African Americans as predisposed to the physical dimension of food preparation is a useful example fitting Smith‟s call. Black preparation of Southern foods seemingly authenticated the taste of the dishes, despite the contradictory assumption among many whites that blacks did not have the palate to taste foods with the same appreciation as white people.378 For instance, the March 1938 issue of Restaurant

376 Thompson, Eating around San Francisco, 185-190. 377 Anthony J. Stanonis, “Just Like Mammy Used to Make: Foodways in the Jim Crow South,” in Dixie Emporium: Tourism, Foodways, and Consumer Culture in the American South, ed. Anthony J. Stanonis (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2008), 210; Lorenzo J. Greene and Carter G. Woodson, The Negro Wage Earner (Washington, D.C.: The Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, Inc., 1930), 235. 378 Mark M. Smith, How Race Is Made: Slavery, Segregation, and the Senses (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 4-6, 87-89. 127

Management featured one Kentucky restaurant where “the Southern cooks produce the food by „feel‟ as mammy used to, and the uniform excellency of it is due largely to the fact that Mrs. Reynolds [the white proprietor] samples early and often to be sure that it is up to par.”379 Creighton‟s Restaurants in North Carolina and Tennessee insisted their shrimp were “fried a delicious golden brown by Creighton Southern Mammies” as part of a strategy “to make this meal live on in your memory” as an authentic Southern platter.380 Commonly, white proprietors claimed credit for the meals cooked by black chefs, even while explicitly naturalizing the visceral connection between African Americans and food preparation. One of the most popular and nationally-recognized restaurants that mirrored this pattern of reviving the “best” of white southern traditions at the hands of contented black service workers was The Marigold in Niagara Falls, New York, followed by its sister location in the French Quarter of New Orleans. The Marigold was the creation of Mary Baldwin, a housewife from Pasadena. After her husband died in a plane crash, Baldwin moved her children back east where she had a support network of friends, and she opened a small restaurant to provide for her family. Among Baldwin‟s initial personnel hires, “a Negro Mammy was her selection for a cook. This Negro Mammy holding a platter of delicious browned chicken was used as her trademark.” Subsequently, all advertising and signage for The Marigold depicted Baldwin‟s signature feature of a black mammy figure implying not only Southern Plantation cooking, but plantation-style black servitude as well.381

379 “The Woman Executive,” Restaurant Management, March 1938, 207. 380 Harry R. Tully, “Merchandising Trends in the Restaurant of Today,” American Restaurant, June 1937, 78. 381 Della Caldwell, “Hello Folks! We‟re Back Again,” Restaurant Management, October 1938, 47. Baldwin insisted on hiring only African Americans for her kitchen and dining room staff with the exception of her dishwasher, who was always a Polish woman. Presumably, her reluctance to hire a black dishwasher 128

The Niagara Falls location operated seasonally; therefore, Baldwin expanded her venture into New Orleans, where she opened another location that doubled as “a training school for her colored help.” Baldwin‟s training and supervision of her employees was one of her restaurants‟ signature features, yet her oversight extended beyond the restaurant‟s walls. Restaurant reviews articulated Baldwin‟s management style in terms of generosity and care for her staff, a group of men and women who were presumably content to fulfill the desires of white customers. Baldwin provided living quarters “for all her colored help,” who were generally so happy, one review suggested, “you may hear them singing at their work,” lending “atmosphere to the restaurant and also added entertainment for the diner…[through] the chanting of Negro spirituals as they go about serving the dinner.”382 This juxtaposition of the demure, white “Southern” lady-of-the- house and “carefree,” devoted black service workers intentionally furthered a narrative of Southern history that re-imagined the plantation as a benign and desirable place to work and live. “By reifying the plantation home as the privileged site of southern history and femininity,” suggests cultural historian Tara McPherson, “and then coding this history as elegant and grand, such representations erase the history of oppression that such homes could easily symbolize and encourage a nostalgic form of southern history.”383

Importantly, restaurants were producing this revisionist narrative, creating a space in which white American consumers could physically experience—in essence, re-live—this

stemmed from stereotypes of African Americans as unsanitary and therefore unable to maintain standards of cleanliness. Of course, this rationale leaked inconsistencies with the desire to have African American hands prepare and serve food. For more on the sensorial construction of race and presumed racial attributes, see Smith, How Race Is Made. 382 Caldwell, “Hello Folks! We‟re Back Again,” 47-48. 383 Tara McPherson, Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 44. 129 imagined and nostalgic racialized social hierarchy that was steadily eroding in the twentieth century. As part of the plantation scene-setting, advertisements for the northern location of The Marigold played up the attraction that the restaurant transplanted genuine “mammies” from the South. In a distorted nod to the Great Migration, one ad featured a stream of black mammy figures holding roasted chickens and pouring out of train cars (presumably in New York), smiling, “Hello Folks! We‟re Back Again.” The finer print enticed patrons to stop by The Marigold “where the food is prepared and served by a staff of fifty-five dusky cooks and mammies brought up every summer from old New Orleans.”384 Restaurant guides rarely failed to comment on the human décor who made the northern Marigold a success story in Southern cooking. Duncan Hines called the restaurant “the smart place to dine” in Niagara Falls and noted that “dinner is a procession of tempting dishes brought in by colored mammies.”385 Raymond Ewell, author of Dining Out in America’s Cities, praised The Marigold for its “Deep South” furnishings and dishes generated from the treasure trove of Baldwin‟s family recipes, while instructing visitors not to seek out a menu but to “ask the deft, colored Mammy for suggestions.”386 Similarly, the southern location received accolades for offering a unique dining environment in General Zachary Taylor‟s former residence, which recreated “a typical Southern dining quarter with food prepared and served family style by colored „mammies‟ who pride themselves on their adroitness at both occupations.”387 Although these women were “taught to serve with the best manners,” another guidebook mentioned

384 Caldwell, “Hello Folks! We‟re Back Again,” 48. 385 Duncan Hines, Adventures in Good Eating (Bowling Green: Adventures in Good Eating, Inc., 1942), 215. 386 Ewell, Dining Out in America‟s Cities, 124. See also Ernest W. Fair, “New Orleans: Famous As a Gourmand‟s Paradise,” American Restaurant, August 1948, 78. 387 Simmons, On the House, 168. 130 that Baldwin “just in case, is always hovering about to aid patrons.”388 Like other plantation-themed restaurants, at The Marigold, the mammy-esque waitresses were not the only important female presence furthering the narrative of the Old South—the role of “the lady of the house,” the white female proprietor, was just as important in establishing the social juxtaposition of white authority and submissive black service. Running counter to twentieth-century American standards of womanhood and beauty, the typified mammy figure‟s matronly physical largesse and housemaid clothing minimized her threat to white women as a fellow female occupant of the domestic sphere.389

At the same time, on the other side of the country, another popular restaurant reveled in stereotyped caricatures of the plantation South: Topsy‟s Roost in San Francisco. The restaurant, managed by Henry Geise and designed by the Whitney

Brothers, capitalized on the seeming abandon and lack of “civilized” living many whites in the 1930s associated with African Americans in the southern United States. Borrowing from Harriet Beecher Stowe‟s neglected and unkempt child character in ’s Cabin (1852), Topsy‟s Roost tapped its namesake as a source of humor and for white audiences. The restaurant, therefore, recreated a large barn where chickens roosted and “the southern atmosphere abounds with the motif of pickanninies swarming everywhere.”390 Painted chicken footprints left tracks on table tops, and white customers had the option to eat at tables or dine in “roosts,” otherwise recognizable as private booths. The restaurant specialized in southern food, such as corn pones and “Mammy‟s green apple pie,” prepared by “Southern mammies” and served by a staff of thirty

388 Scoop Kennedy, Dining Out in New Orleans (New Orleans: Bormon House, 1945), 79. 389 K. Sue Jewell, From Mammy to Miss America and Beyond: Cultural Images and The Shaping of US Social Policy (New York: Routledge, 1993), 39. 390 “Topsy‟s at the Beach,” Inside Track, September 1935, n.p., Vertical File, San Francisco Public Library. 131

“colored waiters in spotless white uniforms.”391 Importantly, the caricatures of “untamed” black children implicated black adults as well, suggesting that black parents were absent, neglectful, and unable to provide guidance and basic necessities for their unruly, uneducated children.392 More than simply offering Southern-style food, though, the restaurant encouraged white customers to play, to run wild like barnyard animals and, supposedly, black children. Large indoor slides invited patrons (particularly women) to glide down from the balcony to the dance floor when the music started. Put down the cutlery and “enjoy a chicken dinner eaten with your fingers,” Topsy‟s Roost insisted.393 Accompanying this call for reckless behavior in good fun was a motif featuring caricatured black girls as “pickanninies.” A mess of curls springing out of her head and an exaggerated white smile typified the restaurant‟s trademark, a disheveled young black girl who held misspelled signs with backward-written letters that read, “You are slated for a good time here tonite” and “Topsy sez: Eat with your fingers.”394 Calling white patrons to eat with their hands suggested an abandonment of civilized table etiquette that could occur only within the protected boundaries of a restaurant designated for that purpose. The social risk of lacking in proper manners was tempered by the carefree dining space created purposefully for whites to experience that social (and apparently racial) transgression.395

391 Thompson, Eating around San Francisco, 253; G.W. Geiger, “Slide, Girls, Slide! Is the Cry at Topsy‟s When the Music Starts,” Restaurant Management, November 1936, 372-373. 392 For more on the pervasiveness of the pickanniny character and other insidious images and representations of African Americans in U.S. popular culture, see Patricia A. Turner, Ceramic Uncles and Celluloid Mammies: Black Images and Their Influence on Culture (New York: Anchor Books, 1994). 393 Thompson, Eating around San Francisco, 253. 394 Menus, Topsy‟s Roost, ca. 1930, San Francisco Public Library. See Stanonis, “Just Like Mammy Used to Make,” 208-233, for more on the racial and regional associations of eating food with one‟s hands. 395 A number of other plantation-themed restaurants, especially ones that specialized in serving fried chicken, encouraged their white customer base to play with “finger food.” For instance, Bishop‟s, Inc., which operated restaurants in Tulsa and Oklahoma City in the 1930s, urged “patrons to eat chicken with their fingers,” (Robards,”Drive In for Greater Profits,” 80). 132

Although plantation-themed restaurants were in the business of food, much of their appeal rested on visual emblems reminiscent of white concepts of slave plantation life. The use of visual strategies portraying images other than food was a critical and dominant method for reinforcing popular associations between African Americans and particular food items among the general middle-class population of white Americans. As

Michael Harris argues, “Because the discourse of difference was centered on the visual, visual representation came to be important in the reinforcement of these ideas of social hierarchy, or at least evidence of how thoroughly they permeated society.”396 Images suggestive of slave plantation life abounded in the material advertising for southern- themed restaurants. The Hotel New Yorker‟s dining room, with locations in Chicago, Detroit, Cincinnati, Dallas, and Minneapolis, featured a series of “Superstitions” menu covers, including one depicting a black mammy stirring a pot: “In the Old South „Mammy‟ believed that sauces and soups must be stirred to the RIGHT or they would not „make,‟” informed the caption.397 At Cleveland‟s Great Lakes Exposition in 1936, the popular Mammy‟s Cabin restaurant, which specialized in fried foods, was set up in replication of a log cabin, likely a suggestive nod either to slave quarters or Uncle Tom‟s Cabin.398

Perhaps the most popular and pervasive form of visual representation tying African Americans to food items was the window-front display. As detailed earlier in the chapter, window displays staged theatrical, eye-catching scenes intended to draw potential customers from the street and into the restaurant. Throughout the country,

396 Michael D. Harris, Colored Pictures: Race and Visual Representation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 32. 397 Menu, Hotel New Yorker, January 13, 1939, Alice Statler Library, City College of San Francisco. 398 “Griswold Fry Kettles Selected at Great Lakes Exposition,” American Restaurant, September 1936, 11. 133 restaurants relied on white customers‟ linkage between black mammies and fried chicken, breakfast breads, and plantation crops to advertise their house specialties. In 1933, at McVittie‟s Waffle House in Denver, patrons could find “a real Southern Mammy [who] makes real Southern hot biscuits in the electric oven right in the restaurant‟s front window.”399 In advertising fresh ginger sourced from a Barbados plantation for its specialty wafers, ice cream, and other desserts, the Mary Elizabeth Tea Room in New York created a window display of a mammy figurine holding a tray of cookies next to a sign reading, “Our Barbados plantation takes special pride in their ginger crop.”400

Kugler‟s Restaurants in Philadelphia, “Believing that a: „Southern Chicken and Waffle Dinner‟ conjures a picture of a Southern Mammy, somewhere in the background, in the public‟s mind,” felt “obliged to provide a Mammy—to fittingly merchandise such a dinner.” They situated a “smiling, plump, wholesome-looking” African American woman in the store front, dressed in a bright, gaudy costume, who shelled peas next to an antique waffle iron and sign reading “Southern Chicken n‟Waffle Dinner. 85c.”401 In line with the late-nineteenth century racialized subjects of domestic photography interrogated by Laura Wexler, these performed images of black servants in plantation-themed restaurants were both living human beings and “symbolic constructions that produced the highly political meaning of post-Civil War white domesticity.”402 The visualizations of African American servitude in plantation-styled restaurants furthered popular beliefs denying the magnitude of slavery‟s oppression and grounding the images within a larger national narrative of white dominance and black subjugation.

399 “Showmanship Like This—Brings Crowds Like This,” American Restaurant, December 1933, 26. 400 “Profit Through Many Windows,” Restaurant Management, January 1937, 13. 401 Harry R. Tully, “The Show Window…Your Silent Salesman,” American Restaurant, August 1939, 26. 402 Laura Wexler, Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 61. 134

We need to be cautious, however, about neglecting to acknowledge African American agency in participating in the restaurant workforce, even in themed operations where the recreation of southern plantation racial hierarchies waxed nostalgic for a social system no longer holding ground in the United States.403 Even by 1930, sociologists noted that “the old „mammy‟ class of servant has largely died off and their places are taken in many instances by younger workers who dislike domestic service, but enter it largely because they can secure nothing better.”404 Therefore, while some interpret the mammy figure as representing “the ideal slave” who reinforces white patriarchy, others like historian M. M. Manring argue that “the mammy might have been playing a role to suit her own purposes.”405 What might the purpose have been for African American women and men working in plantation-themed restaurants to play the role of mammy or other contented servants? Certainly, the financial incentive cannot be overlooked. In the 1920s restaurant work could be a desirable job option, depending on the class of restaurant. Yet many African Americans—waiters in particular—found themselves pushed out of restaurant work around the turn of the century. Foreign-born waiters from Italy, Germany, and Greece replaced many black waiters in the country‟s finest hotels and restaurants, relegating black waiters to lower-class eateries (which paid less), especially in cities such as Chicago and St. Louis. Although black men and women found work in restaurants during World War I because of labor shortages, these jobs quickly dissolved after the

403 For more on dispelling the notion of African Americans as “passive recipients of whites‟ actions” and challenging the standard of southern history based on white archives, see Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1996), esp. xv-xxii. 404 Greene and Woodson, Negro Wage Earner, 229. 405 M.M. Manring, Slave in a Box: The Strange Career of (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998), 26, 30. 135 war, often passing to white waitresses who could be paid lower wages than black waiters for the same work. Commenting on this phenomenon, one New York newspaper remarked, “Any one who has observed the restaurants and lunch rooms of Harlem owned by whites, but largely patronized by Negroes, will find this [replacement of black waiters by white waitresses] to be only too evident. The same applies to Chicago…The replacement of Negro men by waitresses in many instances, however, means the entire dismissal of Negro help, for ultimately the latter are often „supplanted by whites.‟”406 Throughout the 1920s, then, African Americans suffered labor setbacks in the restaurant industry as their former positions were filled by a largely white female workforce, often foreign-born. For women, waitress work was more appealing than domestic service. Many

African American women performed domestic work because there were few alternatives. Domestic work was the least preferable in the service industry because it impinged on the worker‟s freedom; many women across racial and ethnic groups preferred the grueling work of waitressing because they had more free time and did not have to heed to the whims of demanding housewives.407 Yet, African American women had a hard time finding work as waitresses. Between 1920 and 1930, the proportion of black women in the industry dropped from 12.1 to 7.6 percent.408 Therefore, it is reasonable to conclude that some African American women may have chosen the better wages and hours of waitress work in a plantation-themed restaurant despite the derogatory symbolism of the service characters they performed. Similar to Roy Hawkins, a former African American

406 Greene and Woodson, Negro Wage Earner, 94-96, 236. 407 See Lois Rita Helmbold, “Downward Occupational Mobility During the Great Depression: Urban Black and White Working Class Women,” Labor History 29 (Spring 1988): 140-151. 408 Dorothy Sue Cobble, Dishing It Out: Waitresses and Their Unions in the Twentieth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 23. 136 headwaiter at Salt Lake City‟s Coon Chicken Inn, who overlooked the racial bigotry of white customers in favor of a tidy sum of tips, the women who worked as waitresses in mammy costume at The Plantation and other restaurants may have viewed the economic benefits of the job as more important than challenging the status quo.409 Or, many of them may have quit in protest to their treatment by white customers, much like the high turnover rates Hawkins witnessed at his restaurant. Alongside the awareness of African Americans who chose restaurant service work at plantation-themed restaurants, often for lack of a better monetary option, it is important to note that not all southern-theme restaurants invoked the plantation metaphor, and not all southern-themed restaurants were owned, operated, and marketed by and to white customers. For example, a number of African Americans who had arrived in Chicago as part of the Great Migration recognized the entrepreneurial opportunities of starting restaurants that served comforting, familiar foods to other black regional migrants. Restaurants specializing in southern food favorites, such as Southern Home Cooking and the Southern Lunch Room, appeared throughout the Chicago area.410 Opening restaurants was just one opportunity presented by the Great Migration, which “drew upon black southerners who looked to urban life and the industrial economy for the social and economic foundation of full citizenship and its perquisites.”411 Importantly, restaurants could function both as places that tried to deny African American citizenship and as places that asserted and affirmed African American national and civil rights.

409 See Psyche Williams-Forson, Building Houses out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, and Power (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 66-71. 410 Hasia R. Diner, Hungering for America: Italian, Irish, and Jewish Foodways in the Age of Migration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 100. 411 James R. Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 19. 137

Rather than diminishing in popularity in the early 1950s during the burgeoning years of the Civil Rights Movement, restaurants framed by plantation-style motifs continued to attract a strong following of white American consumers while concurrently undermining African American rights of citizenship through their hierarchical social narratives. Restaurants remained segregated places that refused service to African

Americans despite the restaurants‟ willingness to employ them. Restaurant names invoking slave plantations, such as Cotton Patch and Mammy‟s Shanty, continued to serve Southern-style foods meant to invoke slave-based caricatures, including “a real mammy-size portion of Southern fried chicken,” “Cotton Patch barbequed spareribs,” and for dessert, “the pickanniny‟s delight of the bayou mint sundae.”412 Like their pre-war predecessors, plantation-themed restaurants operating after World War II hired African

American staff to fill symbolic decorative roles. The proprietor of the Camellia Grill in New Orleans, who employed thirty-two people—“all colored except [the] manager”— boasted that tourists ventured into the restaurant to see “an example of Southern charm, even if they are not hungry.”413 At the Parkerteria in Raleigh, North Carolina, a “gingham-gowned and turbaned waitress…known locally as „Aunt Jemima‟” served customers free cookies directly from a spatula, suggesting the cookies were fresh and directly retrieved from the oven exclusively for the dining patrons.414 Mammy‟s Pantry, in Brooklyn, New York, was listed as a model for “decorations [that] pay dividends” in a 1946 guide to successful restaurant operation. It praised the restaurant for offering playful menus “fashioned like little colored mammy dolls—you lift up a voluminous skirt, and

412 Dana, Where to Eat in New York, 18; Parry C. Benton, “Sauce for ,” Postcard, Mammy‟s Shanty, Atlanta, Georgia, ca. 1950, Alice Statler Library, City College of San Francisco; Ewell, Dining Out in America‟s Cities, 158; Virginia Forbes, Where to Dine (New York: The Sun, 1945), 2. 413 S. J. Swartz, “Showmanship in Sandwich Service,” Restaurant Management, August 1948, 53. 414 “Pictorial Pointers to Restaurant Profits,” Restaurant Management, June 1950, 52. 138 the menu is printed on a card underneath.”415 The sexual implications of this menu gimmick are undeniable, suggesting black women‟s dual “service capacity” in both the dining room and the bedroom. Rather than dictating the terms of her participation, the mammy, as slave woman, was subjected to whites‟ orders in both the plantation household and plantation-themed restaurant. As an operational strategy, these methods of objectifying black employees in subservient roles implicitly advocated for a version of national heritage that recognized African Americans‟ social contributions only in terms of their capacity to serve whites.

Many postwar Southern plantation-themed restaurants continued to claim historical accuracy in their dining productions, whether the menus consisted of recipes passed down through generations or the décor mirrored “authentic” objects from “real”

Southern plantations. Ruth Noble, author of A Guide to Distinctive Dining, reminded her readers in 1954 that the restaurants listed offered “food for thought as well, history and folklore in the stories of these restaurants throughout the United States.”416 Among the restaurants included was Aunt Fanny‟s Cabin in Smyrna, Georgia, located on an old plantation. According to Noble, the restaurant, “once the home of „Aunt Fanny,‟ a former slave” decorated its walls with “Civil War trophies” and served food “in the old- fashioned „family-style‟ of the South.”417 Similarly, Gourmet’s Guide to Good Eating told potential customers, Aunt Fanny‟s Cabin had “captured a charm I don‟t remember encountering ever before. Aunt Fanny is a colored mammy who keeps an eagle eye on the kitchen. The restaurant was originally started in her cabin and additions have been built. Located on an 1800-acre plantation, on moonlight nights a carriage will drive

415 Gray and de lo Padua, How to Be a Success, 229. 416 Noble, Guide to Distinctive Dining (1954), foreword. 417 Noble, Guide to Distinctive Dining (1954), 75. 139 guests through the grounds.”418 Duncan Hines, the famed guidebook writer, described the restaurant in 1947 as “owned by Fanny‟s mistress, Mrs. Campbell MacKenna. Black Mammy in colorful garb greets you at the gate…If you like the different, you‟ll revel in the atmosphere and appointments here.”419 In essence, this restaurant claimed to be the epitome of “living history,” a place where slavery still existed for the dining pleasure of white, middle-class twentieth-century families. One of the most well-recognized postwar plantation-themed restaurants that attempted to freeze time for patrons in the slave plantation South was The Old Southern

Tea Room in Vicksburg, Mississippi. Recommended by numerous guidebooks and prominent food writers, including Clementine Paddleford and Duncan Hines, the restaurant invited diners, in Hines‟s words, to “enjoy the pleasing charm of the furnishings and the services by colored waitresses, in bright „Mammy‟ costumes, bandanas, and hoop earring, who bring you steaming shrimp gumbo…in true Southern fashion.”420 The restaurant followed a script similar to other plantation-revival restaurants, emphasizing the business‟s Southern white heritage authenticated by the service work of “genuine” Southern black servants. In this vein, the Old Southern Tea Room served dishes “prepared from recipes handed down by generations of family servants” by “personable Negro women,” who also waited on customers while dressed in “„Mammy‟ costumes in an ante-bellum setting.”421 The restaurant gathered such a wide following that by 1960, Mary McKay, a self- declared “Southern Lady” and the proprietress of the Old Southern Tea Room, published

418 Gourmet‟s Guide to Good Eating (1948), 86-87. 419 Hines, Adventures in Good Eating (1947), 89. 420 Hines, Adventures in Good Eating (1947), 170. 421 Noble, Guide to Distinctive Dining (1954), 85; Hines and Taylor, “How to Find a Decent Meal,” 97.

140 a cookbook based on recipes from the restaurant. On the cover is a woman (presumably McKay) wearing a debutante-style dress. Inside, the introduction explains how McKay, living “a cream puff existence on the old plantation where third-generation-in-the-family cooks produce epicurean dishes by an art handed down from the days of slavery,” was transplanted to Vicksburg, Mississippi. Accompanying McKay was “Aunt Elvira”

(presumably her family‟s African American cook), who was transferred “from Mrs. McKay‟s kitchen to the restaurant” and, according the book‟s language, modeled the mythic contented slave/servant who, once freed from slavery, still chose to remain with her mistress.422 The cookbook, in promoting the restaurant, not only reinforced the myth of southern genteel life in the slave south through the written descriptions. Visual sketches of stereotyped southern plantation life peppered throughout the book used sight alongside the taste of the recipes to perpetuate the social and racial hierarchy of the plantation: African American children eating watermelon; a black “mammy” serving food with a broad smile on her face; a white “master” reclining on a porch sipping a mint julep. The production of these racialized images, both in the restaurant and in its promotional material, functioned to counter African Americans‟ fight for full participation as equal citizens during the start of the civil rights era.

Although the Old Southern Tea Room garnered regional fame, perhaps the most recognizable and popular restaurant nationwide to further a narrative of national heritage rooted in the mythology of the contented black house servant was Disneyland‟s Aunt Jemima‟s Kitchen. One of the Park‟s original restaurants from 1955, Aunt Jemima‟s Kitchen was one of the most frequented plantation-style restaurants in postwar America,

422 Mary McKay, Old Southern Tea Room, Vicksburg, Mississippi: A Collection of Favorite Old Recipes (Vicksburg: McKay, 1960). 141 serving over 1.6 million customers between 1955 and 1963.423 Scholars have contributed extensively to a rich body of literature detailing the significance of Aunt Jemima and the cultural production of the at large, including Doris Witt, who takes “the association of African American women with food…to be fundamental to the ongoing production of…U.S. national culture.”424 My purpose here is to extend Witt‟s claim and call attention to the less-documented Southern plantation-themed restaurants and their use of the mammy figure as a tool for both generating business and perpetuating associations between black women and household service, even while the civil rights movement was gaining momentum.425 According to a 1955 souvenir edition of the Long Beach Independent Press- Telegram, Disneyland designed the restaurant to “be a faithful representation of a

Southern plantation mansion…The charm of…Southern hospitality will be the key-note as Aunt Jemima herself prepares and serves her world-famous pancakes.”426 Herein lies the rub. Comparable to Clark‟s Twin T-P‟s restaurant, which marketed the employment of a “real” living Indian as hostess to authenticate the dining atmosphere, so did Disneyland use an actress to bring Aunt Jemima to life, thereby authorizing the historical version of the past served at the restaurant. The physical appearance of Aunt Jemima flipping pancakes naturalized the restaurant‟s recreated Southern plantation environment.

423 Arthur F. Marquette, Brands, Trademarks, and Good Will: The Story of the (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967), 137. 424 Witt, Black Hunger, 24. 425 For analysis on images of the mammy figure in American popular culture and memory, see Jewell, From Mammy to Miss America and Beyond; Parkhurst, “The Role of the Black Mammy in the Plantation Household,” 349-369; Patricia A. Turner, Ceramic Uncles and Celluloid Mammies: Black Images and Their Influence on Culture (New York: Anchor Books, 1994). For scholarship on Aunt Jemima in particular, see Marilyn Kern-Foxworth, Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, and : Blacks in Advertising, Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1994); Manring, Slave in a Box; and Witt, Black Hunger. 426 “Famed Aunt Jemima Will Cook” (1955). 142

Live performances of the fictional character of Aunt Jemima date back to the 1893 Columbian Exposition, when Nancy Green portrayed her to promote the R.T. Davis Milling Company‟s new pancake flour.427 After Quaker Oats acquired the brand and pancake flour in 1925, the company employed a handful of other women to represent Aunt Jemima at various conventions and expositions around the country throughout the

1930s and 1940s. Therefore, hiring someone to portray Aunt Jemima at Disneyland simply repeated the long history of imagining a fictionalized and stereotyped black character as a real person. In its opening year, Disneyland promoted the restaurant through the existence of a “live” Aunt Jemima: “a nationally-known, vital, living personality known to millions joins Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Snow White, Peter Pan, and the hundreds of other beloved story book characters who dwell in Disneyland when „Aunt Jemima‟s Kitchen‟ opens in Disneyland July 18th.” Tying the name-brand popularity and television advertising to the restaurant, the promotional literature continued by mentioning that the restaurant‟s entertainment would include “Aunt Jemima singing songs in her style that has entertained millions on TV, radio, and in personal appearances before audiences throughout the country.”428 To represent Aunt Jemima, Disneyland hired Aylene Lewis, who worked at the restaurant from 1956 until her death in 1964.429 In all respects, on the Main Street of Disneyland, Lewis was Aunt Jemima. Histories of Lewis, recorded by representatives of Disneyland and the Quaker Oats Company, conflated Lewis and Aunt Jemima until they were almost indistinguishable. Arthur Marquette, a historian for the Quaker Oats Company, recalled in 1967 how Lewis

427 Manring, Slave in a Box, 72-78. 428 “Famed Aunt Jemima Will Cook” (1955). See also Findlay, Magic Lands, 94. 429 Marquette, Brands, Trademarks, and Goodwill, 156; “Census,” Jet, March 18, 1965, 55. 143

“was greeted by name by people of all ranks and all age groups. Strolling through Disneyland in her traditional costume, smiling at the crowd, someone with a camera invariably asked her scores of times a day, „Aunt Jemima, how about getting my picture taken with you?‟”430 The photograph, as a record of “real” existence, offered a kind of fabricated proof of Aunt Jemima and her role in the country‟s national heritage.

Marquette‟s language is also unclear. Does the “traditional costume” belong to Lewis as well as Aunt Jemima? Unlike Mickey Mouse and Peter Pan, Disney characters whose life stories could be traced to fantastical tales, Aunt Jemima had a “real” life story, thanks to the imaginations of Quaker Oats representatives and their R.T. Davis predecessors. In this way, Aunt Jemima‟s Kitchen served white Americans not only pancakes but a version of Southern plantation history that naturalized the legacy of African American domestic slavery. Based on the popularity of Aunt Jemima‟s Kitchen at Disneyland, the Quaker Oats Company began franchising the Aunt Jemima trade name to restaurateurs around the country in 1961. All restaurants that entered the franchise contract were expected to occupy a building modeled after “an old Southern mansion design” and to use “pancake recipes created with Aunt Jemima pancake mixes.”431 The first franchise opened in

Skokie, Illinois, north of Chicago. Its clientele consisted “mostly of persons in the average and above-average income levels” who were primarily “family groups.”432 As part of the contract, operators were required to hire a woman to represent “Aunt Jemima—In Person.” The franchise Operational Manual specified the employee as

430 Marquette, Brands, Trademarks, and Goodwill, 157. 431 “Now It‟s Aunt Jemima,” Pacific Coast Record, January 1962, 28. 432 Tom Endicott, “Birth of a Franchise,” Restaurant Management, March 1961, 45. 144

[a] pleasantly featured Negro woman, fairly heavy, capable of personifying Aunt Jemima „in person‟ and willing to wear an Aunt Jemima costume. Must possess pleasing personality, pleasant voice, and be able to meet the public. She is to circulate between lobby and dining room as assigned by Hostess or Manager. Poses for pictures when so requested by customers. She offers children Aunt Jemima lollipops, balloons or souvenir buttons at table or as children leave. She must be intimately conversant with the legend of Aunt Jemima and capable of discussing in detail methods of food preparation relating to the Aunt Jemima kitchen menu.433

This last requirement suggested that Aunt Jemima authenticated the restaurant‟s southern atmosphere by overseeing the food preparation. This assumption gestured toward whites‟ naturalization of black women as expert cooks, a rationalization that helped confine professional roles for black women within food service, domestic work, and other hospitality industries.

Aunt Jemima, “Otis,” The Marigold Mammy, and a host of other “living trademarks” became synonymous with plantation-themed restaurants in the mid-twentieth century. In much the same way that restaurants framed by an Indian motif, such as the Southwestern Harvey Houses and Clark‟s Twin T-Ps, featured living Indian artisans and waitstaff to perform “Indian-ness” to authenticate and complete the experience for white customers of crossing a nostalgic historical threshold, so too did African American employees physically legitimize the “contented servant” character created by the restaurant to serve white customers. At the same time, though, white proprietors objectified black employees, using their presence in a similar fashion to the Early Colonial dining rooms and, as we will see next, the steer heads, branding irons, or porcelain antiques in chuck wagon restaurants: as decorative objects that helped generate “atmosphere.” The legacy of American restaurants‟ “heritage of hospitality,” then, should

433 Endicott, “Birth of a Franchise,” 48. 145 be read as one of exclusion and objectification of American citizens, rather than the “inspiring story of the precious quality of graciousness that had been identified with „the American way of life‟ from its early Colonial Days to its fullest flowering in this 20th Century.”434

HOME ON THE RANGE: MYTHOLOGIZING THE PIONEER WEST IN THEMED RESTAURANTS

The rise of Western-themed restaurants in the interwar years can be tied to a developing interest in the country‟s national heritage, as well as the prevalent image of the Old West as a frontier landscape and a growing tourist curiosity for the perceived exoticism of Native Americans.435 What is important about the array of visions of the West created by Western-themed restaurants is that they promoted versions of American history that located the West as an isolated landscape—a barren and unpopulated rustic frontier—rather than the geographic site of expansive, growing metropolises. These conceptions of a more “primitive” West created an imaginary escape from the nervous pace and stale routine of urban and suburban development. The adventure and novelty associated with the rustic pioneer and the “pre-civilized” Indian offered tourists—local, national, and global—a taste of exploration and freedom. Importantly, Westerners‟ “place of the mind” helped determine how the West was represented in (re)created cultural sites.

Western-themed restaurants offered students of all ages another opportunity for learning about the nation‟s past. Despite the early twentieth-century conception of the West as a closed frontier, an assumption famously introduced by Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893, many Americans still envisioned the West as an undeveloped landscape,

434 “America‟s Heritage of Hospitality,” 103. 435 For more on Americans‟ nostalgic interest in the nation‟s history and its material artifacts between 1917- 1945, see Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory, esp. 310-527.

146 one less tainted by the fast pace and social problems of urban centers in the eastern United States. Although the frontier, according to historian David Wrobel, “has become a metaphor for promise, progress, and ingenuity,” in the popular imagination the term “frontier” still invokes associations with cowboys and Indians, teepees and log cabins, horses and cattle, cast iron and covered wagons.436 These were the images on which restaurateurs depended to appeal to white American tourists looking to venture into stories of the mythic West. Without these imagined popular conceptions of the frontier, Western-themed restaurants could not domesticate and sell the images as tourist encounters. To achieve their goal, Western-themed restaurants usually adopted one of three narrative motifs: a pioneer/cowboy model, an American Indian design, or a combination of both.

Western-themed restaurants designed around a motif that invoked cowboy or pioneer life on the range or trail emerged as part of the American restaurant landscape roughly around the same time as distinctly Indian-themed restaurants, which we examine more closely in the next section. Cowboy-inspired restaurants sold Americans on a taste of the Wild West vicariously experienced through a “seated ride” in a covered wagon booth or a saddle-shaped bar stool. Similar to Indian-themed restaurants located in the southwestern United States, Old Western-themed restaurants most frequently appeared in regions of the country that could claim cowboys and pioneers as part of their state heritage. They first started to appear in states such as California, Illinois, and Minnesota in the 1920s and 1930s, around the same time that recreational tourism, which emphasized outdoor physical experiences, gained popularity.437 Dude ranching was one

436 Patricia Nelson Limerick, Something in the Soil: Legacies and Reckonings in the New West (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2000), 75-76. 437 Rothman, Devil‟s Bargains, 24. 147 of the favored forms of recreational tourism, a hobby vacation that, in the words of Hal Rothman, “evoked the West of popular culture and the incipient western movie, often filmed on the dude ranches near Los Angles.”438 By 1930, the dude ranch as a popular tourist destination was an integral part of conceptions of the West in the minds of Americans nationwide. Beginning in the 1920s, railroads heavily promoted western dude ranch vacations to families back East, largely because the ranches helped boost passenger rail travel. Full of outdoor activities, including horseback riding, fishing, and square dancing, dude ranches offered visitors a more comfortable taste of the Old West.439 The dining rooms at destinations such as El Pocono Dude Ranch in Thornhurst, Pennsylvania, extended a “warm western welcome” to visitors through homey, inviting wood-featured interiors and checkered tablecloths, leading at least one vacationer to declare on a postcard, “This is my favorite spot.”440 Based on the entrepreneurial opportunities associated with dude ranches, the Wyoming state legislature decided in 1937 to define the business as a “ranch offering accommodations, entertainment, and participation in regular ranch activities for monetary consideration.”441 It is likely that dude ranches (and television Westerns) inspired the stylization of Western-themed restaurants: restaurants dripping in memorabilia of the Wild West moved the outdoors inside, recreating the feel of trail riding, hunting, and lounging around the campfire through carefully designed interiors and menus specializing in broiled meats. The competition between the “frontier” West and the “urban” East even showed up in the advertising for non-Western restaurants, such as the popular

438 Rothman, Devil‟s Bargains, 141. 439 Susan Sessions Rugh, Are We There Yet? The Golden Age of American Family Vacations (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008), 97-100. 440 El Pocono Dude Ranch postcard, postmark 1956, New York Historical Society. 441 Rothman, Devil‟s Bargains, 140. 148

Longchamps chain in New York. Longchamps responded to the growing appeal of the American West with satire, suggesting that their own quality food in an urban setting could cause Western dreamers to wake up and smell the (literal) coffee. For instance, in a promotional pamphlet from 1930, published in conjunction with Harper’s Bazaar, the restaurant chain printed a fictional story titled “Damaged Out West.”

The tale featured Judy, a young woman who returned to New York after a summer on a Wyoming ranch, where she had become “a fresh victim of the lure of the Great Open Spaces.” Disenchanted with “Cramped City Life,” Judy told her friends that she was going to return the following year to open her own ranch: “„Out there,‟ said Judy loftily, „we have Realities instead of Appearances. What‟s a Patou model when you are battling with a bucking bronco? Or tea dances when you are dealing directly with

Nature?‟” Judy‟s companion, Harry, feared for the worst—that Judy would never “reawaken…to the delights of Metropolitan Life”—and resorted to one final attempt to bring her to her urban senses: He took her to the nearest Longchamps. Of course, after a delicious meal, Judy changed her mind, declaring that not only was New York the best place in the universe, but “Longchamps food is simply priceless.”442 By poking fun at the trend among urban tourists from the eastern United States to dabble in recreations of the

“rough n‟tumble” Wild West, Longchamps simultaneously affirmed the growing influence of this style of recreational tourism, including Western-themed restaurants. One of the first restaurants to capitalize on the emerging regional cuisine known as “Western food” was the Nut Tree in Vacaville, California.

442 “Damaged Out West,” Longchamps Harper‟s Bazaar (New York: Longchamps, Inc., 1930), 4-5, New York Historical Society. 149

In 1921, Edwin and Helen Power opened the Nut Tree on Highway 40 (now Interstate 80) between San Francisco and Sacramento, offering a limited menu of seasonal fruits, ice water, and lemonade to passing motorists. Over the next few decades the restaurant grew, adding a more extensive list of menu choices as well as a toy shop and narrow-gauge railroad to attract a family-based clientele. The menu cover depicted an etching of a cowboy or farmhand on a ranch; waitresses dressed in Western-styled striped, pleated skirts and served food advertised as distinctly Western (a cuisine now more synonymous with “California”), including fresh and dried fruits, nuts, and whole wheat bread. One mid-century guidebook writer likened the Nut Tree‟s Western-style food to “America‟s newest type of cuisine,” arguing that “it is packed with history, color and taste because it has been shaped by climate, tempered by many nationalities and improved with ingenuity.”443 Like other Western-themed restaurants, the Nut Tree, inspired by California‟s regional heritage, featured not only outdoor patio dining but the option to eat in either the Spanish Room or the Mexican Room, both ornamented with plates, rugs, and painted wood furniture invoking traditional Spanish and Mexican designs.444 The popularity of the restaurant grabbed the attention of such notable guidebooks writers as Duncan Hines for its “tempting food and nice service,”445 and the

Nut Tree wasted no time in using Hines‟s recommendation for advertising in the form of a prominent sign, shaped like an open book and reading “Adventures in Good Eating,” posted underneath the signature black walnut tree.”446

443 Alice Catt Armstrong, Who‟s Who: Dining and Lodging, North American Continent (Los Angeles: Who‟s Who Historical Society, 1958), 146. 444 Postcards, collection of Kathy Elwell, “The Nut Tree: Vacaville, CA,” Alameda, CA, City Information, www.alamedainfo.com/nut_tree_CA.htm. 445 Armstrong, Who‟s Who, 145-146; Duncan Hines, Adventures in Good Eating (1938), 49. 446 Postcard, collection of Kathy Elwell. 150

Utilizing Hines‟s signature phrase to promote the restaurant was only the beginning of the Nut Tree‟s groundbreaking use of outdoor advertising. In the mid-1920s, the restaurant began posting “three-dimensional plaster replicas of their insignia at strategic locations along highway 40.”447 Over the next thirty years, the advertising expanded into fifteen painted billboards placed in key points along major highways leading to Vacaville, often advertising the driving time or distance to the Nut Tree.448 The simple illustrations on the billboards, from cartoon-like watermelon slices, grapes, pineapples, and pears, to tomatoes, bread loaves, and a boy licking his lips, advertised one simple message: simple, fresh western food could be found at the Nut Tree.449 The owner Edwin Power attributed much of the restaurant‟s growth and popularity to its outdoor advertising, remarking, “I am happy to say that the ability of these bulletins to stop customers for the first time, and to remind those who have stopped in the past, has contributed greatly to the success of our business.”450 Importantly, the associations with the West as wide open (outdoor) space, along with improvements in roads for automobile travel, helped roadside Western-themed restaurants like the Nut Tree to flourish. In contrast to the Nut Tree, Kit Carson‟s Grill in San Francisco, which opened in 1936, invoked its Western atmosphere within an encapsulated indoor setting, bringing to life the feeling of the great outdoors through imposing, wall-sized murals and drawing on the pioneer spirit of the restaurant‟s namesake, Kit Carson. Its popularity and quality food landed the restaurant in a number of guidebook recommendations over the years,

447 Frank Gray, “A Tale of Two Restaurants,” Western Advertising, May 29, 1961, 16. 448 Gray, “Tale of Two Restaurants,” 16. 449 Photographs of Nut Tree billboards, Outdoor Advertising Association of America (OAAA) Photos, 1923-1966, Duke University Archives; OAAA Campaign Case Files, 1958-1965, Duke University Archives. 450 OAAA Campaign Case Files, 1958-1965, Duke University Archives.

151 including Ruth Thompson‟s Eating around San Francisco (1938) and Where to Eat: Dartnell’s Vest-Pocket Guide to America’s Favorite Restaurants (1947). The restaurant, advertised as a source of “true Western „he-man‟ food served in Western atmosphere tinged with intimacy and luxury,” prided itself on its blend of “rugged frontierism” and a modern, “continental suavity.” Calling attention to its “pleasing blend of the old and the new,” Kit Carson‟s Grill specialized in “broiled meals…ham and eggs, pioneer style, and other foods that have universal appeal” and offered the latest in concealed tube lighting technology with “authentic Indian motifs on inlaid tables,” covered-wagon shaped coasters, and red pottery water jugs authorized as “one hundred per cent Indian.” 451 From its “frosted glass doors with cacti design imbedded in the glass” to the “modern dishwashing arrangements,” the restaurant invited patrons to straddle the border of the historical rustic West and the sanitary, “civilized” up-to-date restaurant.452 Other Western-themed restaurants also played on their specific regional associations with the “American West.” Chicago‟s Stockyard Inn, categorized as “The Wild West” by the guidebook author John Drury, specialized in serving tender grilled steaks and garden-fresh vegetables to “ranchowners and stockmen from the wild west,” as well as other local customers.453 Since the Chicago Union Stock Yard opened in the

1860s, Chicago‟s “longhorn steer” and “Hereford beef critter” had inspired the opening of numerous steak houses throughout the area and increased beef consumption substantially after the Civil War. The Stockyard Inn became one of the city‟s favorites, a restaurant recognized as the place “where the visiting cattle barons go for their meals.”454

451 Ruth Thompson, Eating around San Francisco (San Francisco: Suttonhouse, Ltd., 1937), 163; “Spirit of 1836 Lives Again in Modern Grill,” Restaurant Management, May 1938, 394. 452 Thompson, Eating around San Francisco, 164. 453 John Drury, Dining in Chicago: An Intimate Guide (New York: H. Wolff, 1931), 69-70. 454 Matty and Don Simmons, On the House: History and Guide to Dining and Night Life in New York, Chicago, New Orleans, San Francisco, and Los Angeles (New York: Van Rees Press, 1955), 126. 152

Drury praised the restaurant for its relatively subtle décor, where “your nose smells nothing of cattle” and the interior avoided resembling “an artificial log cabin or ranch house,” instead featuring pine and oak paneling, along with wall prints depicting hunting scenes.455 However, the highlight of the restaurant was a display case in which various cuts of meat waited on ice for customers, who could choose their preferred steak “and then brand your own particular choice with any one of a number of handy branding irons.”456 Although the restaurant exuded a gruff and rugged masculinity tied to images of ranchers, cowboys, and stockmen, Drury did make a point to mention that “women are welcomed.”457 Early twentieth-century Western-themed restaurants in Minnesota tapped into the state‟s heritage as a site of both game hunting and pioneer migration. The Buckhorn restaurant, which opened in Long Lake, Minnesota, in 1931, attracted both an adult and family clientele to its rustic dining atmosphere.458 Customers ate at tables covered in checkered tablecloths surrounded by murals of cowboys on horseback riding in the Western plains, not to mention stuffed birds, numerous animal horns, other hunting trophies, and an extensive gun rack.459 Both Minneapolis and St. Paul hosted twin locations of the Covered Wagon, a restaurant in operation from the 1930s through

1957.460 The entrance to the Minneapolis version invited customers to walk into the restaurant under an awning shaped like the canvas cover to a Conestoga wagon. Inside, the restaurant recreated the outdoors with replicas of free-standing trees and faux tree

455 Drury, Dining in Chicago, 70; Simmons, On the House, 126. 456 Simmons, On the House, 126. 457 Drury, Dining in Chicago, 70. 458 Kathryn Strand Koutsky and Linda Koutsky, Minnesota Eats Out: An Illustrated History (Afton: Minnesota History Society Press, 2003), 14. 459 Photographs of the gun-rack display and dining room, Buckhorn, Long Lake, ca. 1950, Minnesota Historical Society Digital Photographs Collection. 460 Koutsky and Koutsky, Minnesota Eats Out, 15. 153 branches, including dangling bird feeders. Customers could choose to sit at square wooden tables covered in red-checkered tablecloths or in booths shaped like Conestoga wagons, complete with ornamental wagon wheels fixed to the sides and canvas covers overhead.461 Waitresses in pioneer-styled dresses served the favorite house steak, along with specialties such as mallard duck, ring-necked pheasant, and partridge. The menu featured a whopping two-hundred items, and guidebooks consistently praised the Covered Wagon as having “the real atmosphere of the West” where “the steaks are sizzling and the food is always good.”462

Although a novel dining attraction in the interwar years, pioneer- and cowboy- themed restaurants exploded in popularity after World War II. Their presence was not limited to the western part of the country, yet western restaurants in particular capitalized on the regional appeal to vacationing families from back east. The Spur Towne House in Buffalo, New York, brought the “outdoor Western touch” to its interior, as did The Trails restaurant in Los Angeles, which appealed to both adults and children with its “Western range atmosphere,” including a “horseshoe bar, wagonwheel lighting fixtures, covered wagon decorations and generally contrived rustic air.”463 At the Porterhouse in Chicago, customers could find “waiters dressed in cowpoke outfits and violinists playing square dance music while their fiddles rest on crimson and green calico blouses.”464 Cows contributed both to the menu and the décor. While restaurants like Rod‟s Steak House (operated by a “genuine” former cattleman) and Harman‟s Ranch in Arizona and Wood‟s

461 Photographs, Covered Wagon Restaurant, ca. 1939, Minnesota Historical Society Digital Photographs Collection. 462 Koutsky and Koutsky, Minnesota Eats Out, 15; Gourmet‟s Guide to Good Eating (1948), 173; Ewell, Dining Out in America‟s Cities, 91-92. 463 Ewell, Dining Out in America‟s Cities, 25; Craig Davidson, Dining Out in Hollywood and Los Angeles (Los Angeles: Harman Press, 1949), 73. 464 Simmons, On the House, 118. 154

Triple XXX in Waco, Texas, designed their menus in the shape of cattle or featured dishes called “Cattle Thieves Steak” and “Stampeded Beef,” other places, such as Bryan‟s Bar-B-Q, the Redwood Lodge in California, and the Buckhorn Tavern in Minnesota, upholstered their furniture in brown-and-white cowhide and bedecked the walls in horns and other hunting trophies.465 According to the dining guidebook writer

Raymond Ewell, the Buckhorn Pioneer Lodge in Denver housed “one of the most fabulous collections of stuffed big-game heads…you will see anywhere,” adding credibility to the restaurant‟s claim that its founder was “a real pioneer of the West and a buddy of Buffalo Bill.”466 Similarly, Eddie Kover, the owner of the Redwood Lodge, prided his restaurant on its collection of over 2,000 longhorn horns, including one with the world‟s record for the widest spread at 13-feet, 6 inches.467

Other restaurants invoked the Old West by recreating scenes of cowboy life. One restaurant turned its paper placemats into a map directing customers to the natural wonders and epic battle sites in “Texas: The Fun-Tier of America.”468 California‟s Danville hotel restaurant painted a livery stable and general store on its walls, while the Round-Up Room displayed a miniaturized round-up scene of cowboys lounging around a campfire.469 Most Western-themed restaurants figured the ensemble would not be

465 James Lewis, Doorway to Good Living: Selected Places (Beverly Hills: Lewis Publicity Service, 1948), 51; Menu, Rod‟s Steak House, Randall H. Greenless Menu Collection, Cornell University; Henry F. Unger, “They „Serve‟ Hospitality,” Restaurant Management, September 1958, 56-58; “Bill Wood, Paul Shelby Buy Triple XXX,” Chuck Wagon, April 1945, 18; Doris Henderson, “They Wouldn‟t Loan Him the Money,” American Restaurant, July 1947, 116; Len McLean, “Western Motif Highlights Successful Restaurant Operation at Eddie Kover‟s Redwood Lounge,” Pacific Coast Record, September 1960, 25. The Buckhorn Tavern was a different restaurant than the Buckhorn in Long Lake, Minnesota. 466 Ewell, Dining Out in America‟s Cities, 46. 467 McLean, “Western Motif,” 25. 468 Placemat, “Texas: The Fun-Tier of America,” Texas Woman‟s University Special Collections. 469 Jay G. Hilliard, “Restaurant Notes of Golden Gate,” Pacific Coast Record, June 1957, 50; “The Round- Up Room,” Restaurant Management (July 1948), 46-47.

155 complete without including the waitstaff in the motif. The “rancherette-waitresses” at the Garden Grill in Garden City, Kansas, as well as the Stagecoach Inn in Colorado, the Old Tascosa restaurant in Amarillo, Texas, and Oklahoma‟s Chicken in the Rough, dressed in colorful cowgirl uniforms. Similarly, the Hangman‟s Tree Café in Los Angeles, which opened in 1945, featured a “Wild West false front” behind which “waitresses attired in red-checkered shirtwaists and blue jean skirts, cowgirl fashion” served guests.470 Although the western motif was quite popular, chuck wagon service was more novel. Intrigued by the concept, which was unfamiliar to many restaurateurs outside of the Southwest, queries poured into restaurant associations by operators wanting to know more about the chuck wagon theme. Many responses cited Texas as the authority on chuck wagon meals, describing the food as “typically western, especially southwestern…served on ranches to cowboys.”471 Restaurant Management suggested that the name “connotes a place of hospitality and informality where the customer receives a large portion of roast beef, potatoes and gravy, other substantial foods and plenty of coffee” and recommended the use of objects associated with the name, from lariats and bridles to spurs and riding books, as decoration.472 One (slightly-defensive) owner of a Chuck Wagon restaurant in Bellevue, Washington, insisted, “„A Chuck

Wagon…isn‟t a smorgasbord or a buffet. You don‟t have fancy relishes and maybe bits of herring.‟ It‟s all pretty solid foods.”473 Chuck wagons reminded Americans of their

470 “Garden Grill Goes to the Rodeo…Almost,” American Restaurant, September 1947, 108; Hildegarde Mehline, “Preparing and Packaging Fried Chicken for On-Premise and Home Consumption,” Restaurant Management, March 1951, 28; Carolyn D. Timmons, “Cashing in on Environment in Dining Room Decoration,” Restaurant Management, June 1943, 22; “Practical Discussions Highlight Annual Convention,” American Restaurant, November 1940, 84; Davidson, Dining Out in Hollywood and Los Angeles, 102. 471 “Small Restaurant Questions,” American Restaurant, October 1949, 26. 472 Paul P. Logan, “Western Décor,” Restaurant Management, March 1964, 16. 473 Jeanne M. Parker, “By Says—A Chuck Wagon Isn‟t a Smorgasbord,” Allied Food and Beverage, June 1963, 10. 156 pioneer heritage, painting a picture of a time when hard-working cowboys had helped take hold of the American west. In 1945, the Dallas Morning News called chuck wagons “an integral part of the western tradition” that had become “a memento of the past, just as the open range gave way to an order of measured symmetry.”474 Like cowboy hats, spurs, and lassos, the chuck wagon in the world of western- themed restaurants came to symbolize the rustic and spirited dining of the frontier days. Restaurants used the chuck wagon to conjure up an atmosphere of simple and down-to- earth hospitality, serving food that could sustain someone over long distances. Chuck wagons invoked images of the Old West in the days of the pioneer and the cowboy, and western restaurants, in particular, adopted the theme to attract tourist customers. The ploy worked. In his entry for the Chuck Wagon restaurant in Sacramento, Raymond

Ewell, a writer of national and regional dining guides, claimed, “The scene conjured up in your mind by the name Chuck Wagon,” proves “100 per cent correct.”475 It is no surprise, then, that in the state famed for its outlaws and rough riders, the Texas Restaurant Association titled its monthly trade journal Chuck Wagon. Texas was not the only state to capitalize on the chuck wagon theme. Restaurants popped up across the United States, from northern Michigan to Sacramento, California.

The Evergreen Room in Seattle attached a three-dimensional fence front to its wood- paneled exterior and advertised its Chuck Wagon buffet with miniature replicas of a stagecoach and covered wagon in the front window.476 San Diego‟s Chuck Wagons featured an All-You-Can-Eat special, and even the Circus Room in Vancouver, Washington, climbed aboard the trend, listing Chuck Wagon dinners alongside

474 The Dallas Morning News, “Chuck Wagon,” Chuck Wagon, November 1945, 14. 475 Ewell, Dining Out in America‟s Cities, 149. 476 Photograph, Evergreen Room, Seattle, Washington, n.d., MOHAI. 157

“Tropical” cocktails on its menu.477 In Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Ed Hodgson, a World War II veteran, purchased a second-hand chuck wagon and set up shop on the road to Yellowstone National Park, attracting the family tourist trade. Hodgson long recognized that “to be a success in the restaurant business, you‟ve got to have atmosphere.” Maintaining the balance between rugged authenticity and claims to the sanitary benefits of modern technology, Hodgson reassured families that he had “a modern kitchen with a walk-in deep freeze and electric dishwasher,” even though he made a point of “cooking the grub in huge black kettles over open-pit fires, and letting the visiting waddies serve themselves from the kettles—like on TV.”478 Owing to the restaurant‟s popularity, Hodgson expanded the dining space to include a ranch-house, in addition to the outdoor wooden benches and recreated teepees where customers could eat their meals.

In catering to the escapist motivation to dine out, whether to get away on a family vacation or simply leave behind the cooking chores at home, Western ranch-themed restaurants offered a kind of instructional recreation to both adults and children. Customers could delight in lively gimmicks that functioned as entertainment and education. Citified New Yorkers could learn how to two-step the night away at the city‟s only country-styled night club, the Village Barn.479 The menu at Bill Daly‟s Red Barn in

Atlanta, Georgia, featured pop-up windows that, when opened, revealed the meal options.480 Both Fort Worth‟s Cattlemen‟s Café and Chicago‟s Sirloin Room encouraged patrons to play with their food by branding their chosen steaks with irons hot from the

477 “Chuck Wagons, San Diego, Calif.,” OAAA Campaign Case Studies, 1955-1963, Duke University Archives; Menu, Circus Room, St. Elmo Hotel, Vancouver, Washington, November 19, 1949, MOHAI. 478 “Operations in Brief,” Restaurant Management, March 1960, 61. 479 Postcard, Village Barn, ca. 1954, New York Historical Society. 480 Menu, Bill Daly‟s Red Barn, ca. 1951, Randall H. Greenless Menu Collection, Cornell University. 158 grill.481 The Saddle & Sirloin in Southern California also encouraged adults to act along with the theme. One guidebook described, “If it‟s Wild and Woolly West you want, with he-man food and waiters in the regalia of working cowpunchers on parade, saddles to swing a leg over at the bar, and cattle brands on the dishes, here it is….You‟ll find the menu printed in the shape of a Western saddle, too. It is permissible to address your waiter as „po‟dner‟ and to drink your whiskey straight….It‟s all in good fun, and you‟ll enjoy it.”482 Sitting on a bar stool made out of a saddle was likely the closest many customers would get to horseback riding, and they were happy to pay for the experience.483 Families were also happy to patronize places that entertained their children, and western-themed restaurants capitalized on this selling point. One journalist described how his children, at restaurants, liked to “fashion an Indian wigwam out of the breadsticks” then shoot peas at the Indians from holes in a veal cutlet fort.484 Tying themes to television Westerns, which was the most popular television genre, taking up one-quarter of all programming by 1959, restaurants appealed to children by naming special menu items with terms pulled from Westerns and recognizable to the younger crowd. Children‟s dinners at the Doll House, outside of San Francisco, offered young customers meals called “Hopalong Steak” for country steak and “Chuck Wagon” for a ground round burger.485 The Dude Corral in Loveland, Colorado, featured a “Cowboy Plate Special” for kids, delivered to the table with a miniature flag which read, “Howdy, Pardner. This is

481 Ewell, Dining Out in America‟s Cities, 61; “Patrons Brand Their Steaks at Sirloin Room,” American Restaurant, May 1950, 177. 482 Davidson, Dining Out in Hollywood and Los Angeles, 64-65. 483 “Mr. Brown Goes Western,” Washington State Restaurant and Tavern News, July 1949, 16. 484 Dick Asbaugh, “Cupcake Commandos,” Los Angeles Times, August 11, 1946, p. E11. 485 Bert Goldrath, “Family Volume,” Restaurant Management, January 1958, 44. “Country steak” commonly refers either to chicken-fried steak or Salisbury steak. 159 real cowboy grub. Eat all of it!”486 Children‟s menu items, commonly featured at western-themed restaurants, included “Round-Up Chow,” “Wagon-Train Handout,” “The Rough Rider,” and “The Davy Crockett,” names which promised to “make food taste much better to the modern TV addicts in the small fry set.”487 Paralleling the popular depictions of the Wild West on television, rather than favoring either a cowboy décor or an Indian motif, several restaurants drew from the vast (and often incongruous) array of objects and images associated with the American west. Colorado Springs‟ Stagecoach Inn, founded in 1941, combined woven Indian rugs, snowshoes, covered wagons, and waitresses in buckskin uniforms to channel an overall Western theme. The menu, which included Louisiana Jumbo Shrimp alongside fried chicken, also reprinted the Ute Indian Creation Legend so it could double as a promotional souvenir.488 Clark‟s Westerner, which opened on July 2, 1954, depicted a general western theme as well. Serving chuck-wagon style food, the restaurant invoked the old West with wall decorations, such as “antique pistols and rifles of the type which helped win the West,” as well as side-saddles, “parasols, high-button shoes, horse shoes…Navajo rugs, and a gambler‟s vest.” All of the items—including the Navajo rugs—were deemed “true early-day Western items,” and the restaurant enjoyed their function as both decoration and “conversation pieces for the customers as well.”489 One of the most popular themed restaurants that channeled both the Indian and pioneer heritage of the Old West was Knott‟s Berry Farm in Southern California. The

486 “Pictorial Profit Pointers,” Restaurant Management, August 1952, 47. 487 Peter Dukas and Donald E. Lundberg, How to Operate a Restaurant (New York: Ahrens Publishing Co., 1960), 132-133; Lema M. Weaver, “Lower Costs in Higher Volume,” The Restaurateur, December 1961, 17. 488 “Stagecoach Inn,” Pacific Coast Record, August 1954, 28-29. 489 Tibbetts, Mr. Restaurant, 164-165; Ray Olsen, “Clark‟s „Westerner,‟” Allied Food and Beverage, March 1955, 34-36. 160

Farm, which started as a roadside berry stand in 1927, began selling chicken dinners in the 1930s to increase profits during the Great Depression. By the mid-1940s, Knott‟s Berry Farm had grown into a veritable theme park phenomenon. In addition to its Ghost Town, where tourists visited a replica of an Old West Main Street, complete with a saloon, jail-house, and Chinese laundry, the Farm featured a Western-themed restaurant with an open kitchen, built to resemble a covered wagon.490 Decorated with partially- woven Indian rugs and blankets, the restaurant served steaks and Pioneer Stew to customers seated on “Indian tom-toms” surrounded by walls “covered with everything

Western from Texas longhorns to bucking broncos.”491 Most of the visitors were tourists, and Knott‟s Berry Farm was a favorite among families; according to one observer, “the children brought here go almost immediately into a delighted tizzy.”492 (Some of the adults were less taken, at least with the food, as evidenced by some visitors‟ marginal notes in their copy of Gourmet’s Guide to Good Eating (1948): “get jam—not dinner.”493) For children, Knott‟s Berry Farm tapped into the thrill of the old West, bringing television Westerns to life. However, the park taught children a version of American history that positioned American Indians simultaneously as relics and sources of amusement.

Knott‟s Berry Farm was only one of Southern California‟s popular theme parks to recreate simulations of American heritage through restaurants in the postwar period. Disneyland, which opened its doors on July 17, 1955, also recreated the Old West for

490 Rugh, Are We There Yet, 100-101; Valerie Beverage, “Dining Is Big Business in The Steak House at Knott‟s Berry Farm,” Pacific Coast Record, October 1955, 29; Leonore D. Freeman, “Food Notes on a California Journey,” American Restaurant, June 1940, 78-79. 491 Lewis, Doorway to Good Living, 83; Davidson, Dining Out in Hollywood and Los Angeles, 100. 492 Davidson, Dining Out in Hollywood and Los Angeles, 101. 493 Gourmet‟s Guide to Good Eating (1948), 14. Author‟s collection. 161 visitors in the section of the Park known as Frontierland.494 Like Knott‟s Berry Farm, Frontierland capitalized on the popularity of Westerns and designed recreational activities where children could interact with representations of the mythical frontier. As an amusement park, Disneyland offered visitors the opportunity to, in the words of one guidebook, “experience the high adventure of our forefathers who shaped our glorious history.”495 Cultural historian Susan Session Rugh documents how in Frontierland, “children could dance with Indians at the „authentic Indian Village where true-to-life, honest-to-goodness Indians from throughout the Great Southwest perform daily.”496

These participatory performances of history instructed middle-class American youth in versions of history more closely allied with fictive television shows than actual, lived experiences.

Television was not the only contemporary technology associated with Western- themed restaurants. Similar to Harvey Houses and other predecessors from the interwar years and earlier, postwar “Old West” restaurants highlighted their innovative technological equipment alongside their rustic “frontier” motifs. While it is true that restaurants in general advertised up-to-date features such as air conditioning, sound proofing, and the latest in cleaning technologies (see Chapter One), magazine articles and guidebook entries reminded readers with persistent frequency that dining in the “Old West” did not mean sacrificing the benefits of modern life. For example, after raving about the “crisp red-and-white checkered tablecloths” and “knotty pine paneling” at Janes‟ Westerner Café in Hot Springs, Arkansas, the Chuck Wagon added that the

494 For more on Disneyland‟s manipulation of the Western environment, see John M. Findlay, Magic Lands: Western Cityscapes and American Culture After 1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), esp. chap. 2, “Disneyland: The Happiest Place on Earth,” 52-116. 495 Disneyland: A Complete Guide (1956), quoted. in Rugh, Are We There Yet, 106. 496 Rugh, Are We There Yet, 107. 162 restaurant had recently upgraded equipment to include “a quick freezer box, new oven and new dishwashing machine.”497 The Ranch in Seattle transported customers to a rodeo of the Old West with all the fixings, including steak “cooked from the inside out under a JucyRay light which puts the flavor on the customer‟s plate instead of leaving it behind in the pan.”498 The Ranch‟s local competition, Clark‟s Westerner, with its “modern wrought-iron screens and gates” also “hint[ed] that you aren‟t quite back in the Wild West,” especially since its Chuck Wagon Buffet featured “infrared lights…as modern as today.”499 By calling attention to their use of up-to-date materials and kitchen technologies, Western-themed restaurants emphasized that—unlike their decorative motif—their business was not a “relic”; it was as current and relevant as their non- Western-themed competition.

Technology in Old Western-styled restaurants operated as the proverbial yardstick that measured “progress,” offering customers a taste of both the nation‟s past and an indication of how far the country had evolved. Like Chicago‟s Century of Progress Exposition of 1933-34 and the New York World‟s Fair of 1939-40, Western-themed restaurants utilized a “philosophy of showmanship for the contributions of science and their application,” upholding machinery as a solution to the restaurant‟s version of social problems (freezer-burned food; dishes turning cold before serving).500 By implication, customers‟ nostalgia for a preindustrial way of life was attractive for its sense of escapism rather than reality. Restaurants channeling the cowboy‟s Wild West reassured

497 “Janes‟ Westerner Café Featured in Article,” Chuck Wagon, April 1945, 15. 498 William C. Speidel, Jr., You Can‟t Eat Mount Rainier! (Portland: Binfords and Mort, 1955), 82. 499 Spiedel, You Can‟t Eat Mount Rainier, 31. 500 Robert W. Rydell, World of Fairs: The Century-of-Progress Expositions (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993), 96. 163 white, middle-class patrons of this fact through modern technologies that reminded customers of their own civility and future while dabbling in representations of the past. Old Western-themed restaurants also walked a curious line between a playful, inclusive version of frontier life and references to the violent, masculine American West of Teddy Roosevelt‟s Rough Riders where, according to gender historian Gail Bederman,

“white heroes achieve manhood by becoming „like‟ Indian warriors, while nonetheless remaining unmistakably white.”501 Restaurants like Seattle‟s Rough Rider Room at the Roosevelt Hotel deliberately invoked the former president and his “imperialistic manhood” within a gimmicky setting where waitresses donned prairie-styled uniforms and bar customers sipped cocktails while perched on saddle-shaped bar stools.502 This interplay between rugged masculinity and family fun speaks to the complicated use of heritage as a measure of ideal citizenship and pride in the nation‟s history. Hospitality suggests graciousness, service, and inclusiveness; yet, America‟s record of “hospitality” toward Native Americans and immigrant newcomers is more discriminatory and combative than welcoming. Therefore, by wrapping America‟s “heritage of hospitality” in symbols of nostalgia for a preindustrial past, cowboy- and ranch-styled restaurants tamed the undercurrent of aggressive Western narratives into a more benign mythology of life on the frontier.

FROM “WIGWAM BREAKFAST” TO “TEEPEE CHICKEN DINNER”: “DINING NATIVE” IN INDIAN-THEMED RESTAURANTS The cover of the October 1932 American Restaurant magazine—the journal‟s annual convention issue—featured a portrait of Indian Chief Two-Guns White Calf in

501 Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), 173. 502 Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 190; Speidel, You Can‟t Eat Mount Rainier, 90; “Mr. Brown goes Western…via the Roughrider Room,” Washington State Restaurant and Tavern News, July 1949, 16. 164 profile, solemnly staring away from the viewer and decorated in traditional beaded adornments, including a prominent shell earring. Anticipating many readers‟ reactions, the editor‟s page devoted itself to answering the question, “Why the Indian?”503 The reasoning, explained the editor, was that “Our Indian friend…reflects the best in American tradition. He was chosen to pose for one side of the Buffalo nickel, as the government recognized Chief Two-Guns White Calf as typically American. We feel that the AMERICAN RESTAUARANT magazine, too, typifies everything good in American culinary and service.”504

The National Restaurant Association‟s appropriation of the North American Indian in 1932 as a living emblem of American history is an important frame for contextualizing white Americans‟ relationship to the symbolism of the Indian in the

1920s and early 1930s. By the 1920s, the myth of the “vanishing Indian” was already being challenged by anti-modernists and intellectuals intent on repairing what they believed to be—in the wake of World War I—America‟s cultural myopia in ignoring its foundations in an indigenous past. Even in 1913, the year which commemorated the American Indian in the Buffalo (or Indian Head) nickel and the National Memorial to the North American Indian—“the Nation‟s memorial to a vanishing race”—the New York

Times acknowledged that the Indian population was increasing, growing in number from 270,000 in 1900 to 305,000 in 1910.505 Yet Anglo American proponents of Indian culture, who sought to increase the visibility of Native Americans in America‟s public

503 C. A. Patterson, “Why the Indian?” American Restaurant, October 1932, 27. 504 Patterson, “Why the Indian?” 27. 505 “Indians See Taft Handle the Spade,” New York Times, February 23, 1913, 15; “Are the Indians a Dying Race?” New York Times, February 23, 1913, 34. Ties between the commercial use of thematic motifs and constructed displays of domestic heritage are evident in the creation of the National Memorial to the North American Indian, which was funded by Rodman Wanamaker, the son of the department store founder, John Wanamaker. See “Indians See Taft Handle the Spade,” 15.

165 consciousness and generate appreciation for Indian art and traditions, still perpetuated a romanticized, paternalistic image of the Indian. In the 1920s, a number of Anglo American intellectuals, regionalists, and anti- modernists—notably Mary Austin, Edgar L. Hewett, and Mabel Dodge Luhan— campaigned to “rescue” Native American culture from the destructive forces of the federal government, which threatened to extinguish Indian traditions as a requirement for “civilizing” the Indian through assimilation. These advocates for preservation of Indian traditions “reasoned that native cultures possessed „secrets of life‟ that modern American culture lacked, among them deeply rooted beliefs in communalism.”506 This communalism of Native American culture represented a model for mainstream America, fractured by the conflict of war with Europe. As Robert Dorman notes, the American

Indian represented “the permanent wisdom of symbiotic membership in a natural community.”507 As a response to the crises of urbanization and modernity felt acutely by Americans dissatisfied with and cynical about the country‟s direction, Indians symbolized the beauty and authenticity deemed absent in the modern industrial machine age. Therefore, by the early 1930s, when the American restaurant industry was feeling the financial effects of the Great Depression, the cultivated symbol of the American Indian stood out as a recognizable emblem of “the best in American tradition.”508 Starting in 1930, in an effort to help sustain restaurant operators hard-hit by the nation‟s struggling economy, the National Restaurant Association focused its annual conventions

506 Carter Jones Meyer, “Saving the Pueblos: Commercialism and Indian Reform in the 1920s,” in Selling the Indian: Commercializing and Appropriating American Indian Cultures, ed. Carter Jones Meyer and Diana Royer (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2001), 190. 507 Robert L. Dorman, Revolt of the Provinces: The Regionalist Movement in America, 1920-1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 66-67. 508 Patterson, “Why the Indian?” 27. 166 on strategies for surviving the economic downturn, including cooperative advertising.509 Indian cultures and traditions represented communal effort and survival in the midst of the hardships of the Great Depression. It is no surprise, then, that the National Restaurant Association resurrected the Indian motif for the 1938 convention. Opposite exaggerated cartoon illustrations of Indians screaming “Wah! Hoo!” and “How!” the American

Restaurant Magazine drew parallels between Indians and restaurant operators. “Your old time Indian called it a pow-wow. Your modern business man calls it a convention,” wrote the magazine‟s editor and publisher, C.A. Patterson. Pushing the comparison further,

Patterson continued: “Even as the Indian liked his wampum and could not trade without it, so the restaurant operator likes his profit and cannot for long continue in business without it. Many of the good Indians of the restaurant business will be at Chicago,

October 3 to 7, for the annual National Restaurant convention.”510 Noticeably, Patterson‟s language places Indians in the rhetorical past, even as the Association appropriated Indian traditions for its own financial benefit, exemplifying Carter Jones Meyer‟s observation that “Indian cultures were put on sale as a means of educating the public.”511 Restaurants in the United States had used American Indian motifs and folklore for merchandising and sales promotion since the early twentieth century. On the eve of World War I, the Totem Pole Inn in Seattle, Washington, borrowed the symbolic carved pole for the café‟s name and window front lettering, shaping the “T” and “P” in the likeness of totem pole decoration.512 The Wigwam in Litchfield, Arizona, which

509 Jack Hayes, “NRA: From the Beginning,” in The National Restaurant Association: 1919-1994: 75 Years (New York: Lebhar-Friedman, 1994), 26. 510 C.A. Patterson, “About the Convention,” American Restaurant, September 1938, 22-24. 511 Jones Meyer, “Saving the Pueblos,” 206. 512 Photographs, Totem Pole Inn, ca. 1918, Museum of History and Industry (MOHAI), Seattle, Washington. 167 restaurant connoisseur Duncan Hines described in 1938 as an “extremely popular place….informal, homelike, and mighty comfortable,” operated out of a building fashioned to resemble Pueblo Indian dwellings. Clearly, the incongruence between the restaurant‟s name and its style of architecture failed to concern the management who apparently were more interested in promoting a generic Indian theme to attract business.513 Blending the retail offerings of a gift shop with its restaurant decoration, the Indian Shop in Long Beach, California, served customers twenty-three sandwich varieties on buttered toast, such as “egg salad and olive nut,” in surroundings accentuated by

Indian pottery, rugs, and jewelry collected by the proprietor, J.E. Jenkins. The restaurant, which was featured in the November 1928 issue of Restaurant Management, set up shop in a building designed to look like an Indian adobe pueblo. In contrast to the familiar

American-style fare served on the menu, the Indian artwork and thematic design functioned, according to the trade magazine, as an “atmospheric aid,” a device “used to splendid advantage on the walls of the restaurant and in other parts of the building in making the place unusually attractive.”514 In this vein, the restaurant extended the “Indian idea” to the menu design, which depicted “a cut-out Indian head on both the front and back.”515

Indians at the Indian Shop restaurant appeared then not as living people but instead as a likeness or symbol of a people whose inclusion in mainstream American culture was based on their contribution to the consumer marketplace. In Indians in Unexpected Places, Philip Deloria acknowledges that the cohort of Indians active in

513 Duncan Hines, Adventures in Good Eating (Chicago: Adventures in Good Eating, Inc., 1938), 20. 514 “How Successful Managers Built Light Lunch Volume,” Restaurant Management, November 1928, 310. 515 “How Successful Managers Build Light Lunch Volume,” 310.

168 cultural production in the early twentieth century were still operating under a revised rubric of colonialism, one that embraced Indians based on their association with “antimodern romantic primitivism.”516 Certainly, the Indian Shop capitalized on this expectation. The front cover of the menu portrayed a solemn male Indian in profile, bare- chested and draped in a woven blanket. The lack of clothing reinforced a primitive representation of Indians, while the menu—similar to the gift shop attached to the restaurant—suggested that the Indian was a keeper of goods (in this case, food) created for white consumption.

Similar to other Indian-themed restaurants that operated in the 1920s and 1930s, the Indian Shop reflected a simultaneous appreciation for Indian artwork, measured by the proprietor‟s interest in Indian-made collectibles, alongside an appropriation of Native culture and artistic traditions often disconnected from the lived experience of the Native artisans. According to historian Erika Bsumek, the primitivist interest in American Indian material products in the early twentieth century not only furthered the consumer market in “Indian-made” goods but also turned the consumption of the products into “a racializing practice.” The purchase and display of Indian-made artwork by middle- and upper-class whites “produced a racialized consumer by reifying the purchasers‟ sense of self as „white‟ or „civilized‟….[I]t enabled consumers to create their own narratives about the Diné [and other Indians] as a primitive and preindustrial group while reinforcing their own identities in contrast to those qualities.”517 Representations of Indianness in the Indian Shop, as well as in other Indian-themed restaurants, furthered white expectations of Indians as spiritual, authentically anti-modern, and within easy reach of the consumer.

516 Philip Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004), 234. 517 Erika Marie Bsumek, Indian Made: Navajo Culture in the Marketplace, 1868-1940 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas , 2008), 4. 169

One restaurant from the interwar period that exemplifies the fascination with American Indians supposed primitivism was the Navajo Café in Hollywood, California. The restaurant, which opened in 1928 and claimed to be “the only one of its kind in Hollywood,” specialized in American and English fare—including prime rib, roast chicken, Yorkshire pudding, and waffles, prepared by Chef Harry Worsley and served in

“a distinct Indian atmosphere.”518 Waitresses wore “Indian costumes in keeping with the interior decorations.”519 In addition to the novel décor, which included Indian-made baskets, rugs, and beads, the restaurant featured Madame Wanda, “Painter of Dreams,” a fortune teller who predicted customers‟ futures “through the medium of cards or crystals.”520 By partnering the occult with a decorative Indian theme, the restaurant conflated Indians with an exotic world of magic and mysticism. The pairing of the two themes revealed a distinct eye for the consumer: both gimmicks functioned to appeal to white customers by suggesting that Indians and magicians (or fortune tellers) were separate from the modern industrialization that characterized the budding technological progress of Tinseltown, evident in the area‟s urban growth and expanding film industry. The commercial representation of Indians as inherently primitivist fulfilled whites‟ expectations that Indians best symbolized America‟s heritage rather than future progress. Describing the appeal of Indians in American popular culture during the early twentieth century, Deloria explains that “for those in modern urban strongholds, Indians quickly became objects of nostalgic desire as they reflected both an earlier, virile time of colonization and an authenticity that modernity seemed to deny.”521 The identification of

518 “Indian Atmosphere,” Los Angeles Times, September 24, 1920, A7; “News of the Cafes,” Los Angeles Times, November 13, 1931, A22; “News of the Cafes,” Los Angeles Times, February 19, 1932, A12; “Navajo Chef Returns,” Los Angeles Times, October 15, 1930, A14. 519 “Waitresses Indian Maids,” Los Angeles Times, June 6, 1928, A8. 520 “News of the Cafes,” Los Angeles Times, January 13, 1932, A5. 521 Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places, 232. 170

Indians as “objects of nostalgic desire” not only appeared in cultural institutions such as museums and world‟s fairs, but also in restaurants and department stores, accentuating the parallels between these different structures of social merchandising. For instance, in March 1931, the Indian artist W. A. Pee, along with a well-known Indian lecturer, W. A. Cushman, partnered to host a dinner for Navajo artists at the Navajo Cafe. The artists had traveled from Santa Fe in order to display their artwork in an exhibit at a Los Angeles department store.522 As I note earlier in this chapter, department stores increasingly relied on central themes and techniques of showmanship to move their merchandise. The department store exhibit of Indian art simultaneously displayed the pieces as museum- like relics and as merchandise to be consumed. Indian-themed restaurants functioned in similar terms by showcasing Indian artwork as emblematic of the nation‟s heritage within a site specifically designed around consumption. These restaurants preserved representations of Indians that denied their modernity and located their contributions to American nationalism within material consumer objects. The consumption of Native American motifs as a sales technique for restaurants is visible in one of the earliest and most prominent restaurant chains: Fred Harvey Houses. Born in in 1835, Frederick Henry Harvey immigrated to the United States at the age of fifteen and found a job working the cash register at the Smith McNeill chophouse on Washington Street in New York City for two dollars a week.523 His interest in the industry grew out of this early exposure to restaurant work, and by the age of twenty-two, Harvey had moved to St. Louis, Missouri, and opened his own restaurant on the eve of

522 “Indian Artists Guests,” Los Angeles Times, March 18, 1931, A12. 523 Sources conflict regarding whether Harvey was born in 1835 or 1836. James D. Henderson, “Meals By Fred Harvey,” Journal of the Southwest 8, no. 4 (Winter 1966), 306. 171 the Civil War. Unfortunately, the war proved to bring the downfall of the restaurant.524 After the war, Harvey and his wife Sarah moved to Kansas, where Harvey joined the Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad (later incorporated with the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Railroad) as a mail clerk in 1862.525 As a railroad employee, Harvey traveled frequently, and he was little taken with the state of public dining options available along the rail lines, especially because his health had already suffered from a bout of typhoid fever. Food was greasy, gritty, and practically inedible, and railway passengers only had twenty minutes to tackle their food before re-boarding.526 Motivated by his disgust and disappointment with the dining facilities available to travelers, especially in the Midwest and West, Harvey partnered with J.P. Rice and opened an eating house in Wallace, Kansas, in 1875.527 Although the restaurant was successful, Rice did not value the same quality of food and service as Harvey did, and they terminated their partnership.528 Determined to succeed in the restaurant business, Harvey approached his former railroad employer and suggested a plan to operate restaurants at particular stops along the railway. After turning him down, the Burlington Railroad suggested he propose the plan to the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway. The Santa Fe agreed, and in 1876, Harvey opened a lunch room in the Santa Fe Railroad depot at Topeka, Kansas, that became known as the first Harvey House. The Santa Fe laid track in New Mexico in 1878, continuing through Arizona and into California by 1883. Between 1878 and 1889,

524 Kenneth Crist, “Chef for 12,000,000 Meals,” Los Angeles Times, August 27, 1939, I5. Harvey also became a naturalized U.S. citizen while living in Missouri. According to James Henderson, citizenship records in the Fred Harvey Files indicate that Harvey received his citizenship on July 17, 1858. See Henderson, “Meals,” 307. 525 Lesley Poling-Kempes, The Harvey Girls: Women Who Opened the West (New York: Marlowe and Co., 1989), 33. 526 Lucius Beebe, “Purveyor to the West,” American Heritage 18 (February 1967), http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/ah/1967/2/1967_2_28.shtml. 527 “Fred Harvey Is No More,” Los Angeles Times, February 10, 1901, 4; Henderson, “Meals,” 311. 528 Poling-Kempes, Harvey Girls, 34. 172

Harvey formalized several agreements with the Santa Fe that gave him exclusive permission to operate food and hotel services along the railroad, and Harvey‟s dining facilities expanded alongside the growth of the Santa Fe Railroad, which became synonymous with “Meals by Fred Harvey.”529 When Harvey died in 1901, he left behind forty-five hotels and restaurants, as well as a widow and five children; the eldest, Ford

Harvey, took over operations of the Fred Harvey Company.530 The company continued to be operated by subsequent generations of Harvey men, including Ford‟s younger brother Byron, Sr., and Byron‟s children, Byron Jr., Stewart, and Dagget Harvey.531

In order to capitalize on the regional appeal of the Southwest, Fred Harvey—in conjunction with the Santa Fe—incorporated Indian motifs into the thematic designs of Harvey House restaurants and accompanying resort hotels throughout the southwestern

United States, particularly in their locations in Arizona and New Mexico. Inspired and influenced by the Indian artwork collection of Herman Schweizer, one of the New Mexico Harvey House managers, Ford Harvey formed the Indian Department in 1902, which oversaw the purchase, sales, and retail display of Indian artwork and other material culture for the Harvey Houses.532 Not long after opening the Alvarado Hotel and Indian Building (1902) in Albuquerque and the El Tovar and Hopi House (1904-05) at the

Grand Canyon, both of which adopted a decorative Indian motif, the Santa Fe/Harvey Company partnership added an Indian theme to all of its advertising and promotional literature.533 The Fred Harvey Company teamed with the Santa Fe to sell a primitive vision of the American Southwest, centered on American Indians, to Anglo tourists from

529 George H. Foster and Peter C. Weiglin, The Harvey House Cookbook: Memories of Dining along the Santa Fe Railroad (Atlanta: Longstreet Press, 1992), 26; Poling-Kempes, Harvey Girls, 35-37. 530 “Fred Harvey Is No More,” 4. 531 “Harvey Girls, Good Food,” Newsweek, August 13, 1951, 66. 532 Poling-Kempes, Harvey Girls, 148; Dilworth, Imagining Indians in the Southwest, 81. 533 Poling-Kempes, Harvey Girls, 149. 173 the East. Collectively, the business partnership stimulated the growth of tourism in the Southwestern United States, as well as California, particularly by capitalizing on the growing rate of vacation travel made possible by the railroad, followed by the automobile. Along with its Southwestern resorts, the Fred Harvey Company began offering Indian Detours in 1926 through the 1930s that drove tourists into the rugged terrain of the Southwest to view American Indians and their residences through the lens of an automobile windshield.534 By 1924, the Harvey Company operated more than 200 restaurants around the country.535 Although one of the company‟s signature features was its waitresses, or Harvey Girls (whom I revisit in Chapter Four), the company was also known for its expansion of the tourist industry in the Southwest and its sales and promotion of Indian- made artwork. The Harvey Company‟s business acumen included an awareness of the needs and desires of customers who lived and traveled to particular regions of the country. As a 1939 feature in the Los Angeles Times observed, Harvey Houses offered solutions to the basic problem: “What is it travelers need, or will buy, when en route through definite areas?”536 For this reason, although the menu items served in Harvey Houses were generally uniform throughout the country, the décor and ambience of the restaurants, hotels, and gift shops varied depending on locale.537 Harvey‟s grandson, Byron Harvey, Jr., who was also president of the Harvey Company in the late 1940s,

534 For more on the Indian Detours, see Marta Weigle, “From Desert to Disney World: The Santa Fe Railway and the Fred Harvey Company Display the Indian Southwest,” Journal of Anthropological Research 45, no. 1 (Spring 1989), 115-137. 535 “Record for Tourists Is Predicted,” Los Angeles Times, April 16, 1924, A7. 536 Crist, “Chef,” I5. 537 The authors of The Harvey House Cookbook note that gradually, in the late nineteenth century, the most requested dishes appeared on Harvey House menus from Topeka to Albuquerque, and the opening of the Harvey House Test Kitchen made possible by the dissemination of the same recipe throughout the entire chain. See Foster and Weiglin, Harvey House Cookbook, 101. 174 noted that Harvey Houses “soon gained the reputation of having an atmosphere in harmony with the territory in which they were located.”538 The “harmony with the territory” also translated to the interior décor—each Harvey House restaurant was designed so that “all the elements such as lighting, decoration, uniforms and appointments, fit together, giv[ing] the impression of one concrete whole and register[ing] one definite impression on the guest.”539 In addition, the company believed that the high quality of the restaurants would stimulate a larger volume of business in the retail shops.540 For example, to tie together the different features of Harvey operations in the Southwest, restaurants would advertise the “interesting exhibits of Indian and Mexican curios” on the menus.541 The mythology of Fred Harvey as the man who “civilized the West” persists as a result of the myriad publications that document Harvey‟s biography and the history of his company, long after he died in 1901.542 More recent studies of the Harvey Company address the cultural bias of this perspective; as Lesley Poling-Kempes reminds readers in her history of the Harvey Girls, “this title [of „civilizer‟] reflects the attitude of the era: Indian and Hispanic culture, already well rooted and flourishing in the Southwest, was not „civilized.‟ Harvey and the railroad brought Anglo-American culture west, civilizing

538 Byron S. Harvey, Jr., “The Harvey Story, Part I,” American Restaurant, April 1947, 88. 539 Byron S. Harvey, Jr., “The Harvey Story, Part II,” American Restaurant, May 1947, 132. 540 Byron S. Harvey, Jr., “The Harvey Story, Part II,” 91. 541 Menu, Fred Harvey‟s Painted Desert Oasis, 1950, Northern Arizona University, Cline Library Digital Archives. 542 Some of the publications that credit Harvey as the great “civilizer” of the West include company- produced menus, pamphlets, and other promotional material: Beebe, “Purveyor to the West”; Erna Fergusson, Our Southwest (New York: Knopf, 1940); Foster and Weiglin, Harvey House Cookbook ; Dickson Hartwell, “Let‟s Eat with the Harvey Boys,” Colliers, April 9, 1949, 30, 32; Harvey, Jr., “The Harvey Story” (Parts I and II); Henderson, “Meals,” (1966); “On the American Restaurant Scene,” American Restaurant, April 1947, 134; Menu, Fred Harvey‟s Painted Desert Oasis (1950), Northern Arizona University Digital Collections; Menu, Fred Harvey‟s Painted Desert Oasis, Petrified Forest National Monument, ca.1950. Northern Arizona University, Cline Library Digital Archives. 175 the territories of New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Texas, and California with American language, food, dress, money, and values.”543 Although much of the rhetoric used in historical literature to describe Harvey‟s influence on the American Southwest emphasizes his “civilizing” effect, I suggest that rather than trying to “civilize” the Native American populations residing in the Southwest, the Harvey Company reminded whites of their own civility, particularly through the contrast of the Harvey Company‟s Indian Buildings and the restaurants‟ dining rooms. What is different about Harvey Houses compared to other Indian-themed restaurants in the early twentieth century is that although the restaurants incorporated Indian (often blended with Mexican) themes into the dining room‟s decoration, they did so sparingly. Additionally, the restaurants continued to serve the same high-quality

American food in a refined setting similar to the other Harvey House locations around the country. Despite the minimal Indian décor in the dining rooms, the role of the restaurants in Indian-themed Harvey House collectives should not be overlooked. Typically, at one of the Southwestern Harvey Houses, after passing through an Indian Building and observing Indian artisans at work, and likely purchasing a souvenir of Indian artwork, visitors would then dine in the restaurant. Unlike other Indian-themed restaurant that displayed large collections of artwork, rugs, blankets, pottery, weapons, and other Indian- made material artifacts around the room for maximum effect, Harvey‟s Indian Buildings and Rooms—apart from the dining rooms—served that function. Instead, the restaurants signaled to white customers the difference between their own “civilized” standard of living and that of the Indians working outside of the dining room doors.

543 Poling-Kempes, Harvey Girls, xiv. 176

To date, most academic and popular accounts of Fred Harvey and his company fall into two categories: 1) histories of the restaurants, including their significance as the first restaurant chain in the United States and the novelty of the Harvey Girls, or 2) analyses of the company‟s role in promoting tourism and commodifying American Indian culture in the Southwest, particularly concentrating on the ways in which Harvey developed tourist attractions and souvenir shops using the exoticism of the American Indian as a marketing tool.544 Few texts address the relationship between the restaurants and the Indian tours and gift shops in detail, perhaps because the two parts of the business often occupied different buildings. However, understanding the role of the restaurants in conjunction with the retail shops not only helps explain how visitors experienced the Harvey resorts; it also positions the dining rooms as a more relevant and prominent feature within the Indian theming of the Harvey Houses. As Leah Dilworth, whose work details Harvey‟s displays of Indians in the Southwest, observes, “In Fred Harvey‟s Southwest, the combination of the subjective gaze and the mobility of the train afforded tourists the freedom to choose the objects of consumption.”545 Likewise, the restaurant functioned as a similar screen, filtering tourists‟ proximity and interaction with the Indian

544 For example, see Foster and Weiglin, Harvey House Cookbook; Barbara Haber, From Hardtack to Home Fries: An Uncommon History of American Cooks and Meals (New York: Penguin Books, 2002), 87- 106; Mary Lee Spence, “They Also Serve Who Wait,” Western Historical Quarterly 14, no. 1 (January 1983): 4-28; Poling-Kempes, Harvey Girls; Bsumek, Indian-Made; Dilworth, Imagining Indians in the Southwest; Erik Trump, “„The Idea of Help‟: White Women Reformers and the Commercialization of Native American Women‟s Arts,” in Selling the Indian: Commercializing and Appropriating American Indian Cultures, ed. Carter Jones Meyer and Diana Royer (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2001), 159-189; Marta Weigle, “From Desert to Disney World.” 545 Dilworth, Imagining Indians in the Southwest, 108. One white traveler described the feeling of empowerment while watching Hopi ceremonial performances in this way: “My earliest ambition in life was to be a tourist. To travel and see the sights, to travel on and see more sights. A forever stepping out of Fred Harvey dining rooms, toothpick in mouth, with an air of smug satisfaction. A never-ending trail of indulgence requiring no work, no worry, no effort to understand such fuss and fol-de-rol on the part of such heathenish savages as these.” (Frank Waters, Masked Gods: Navaho and Pueblo Ceremonialism [Albuquerque: The University of New Mexico Press, 1950], 310.) 177 artisans working in an adjacent building. Like the train, which “mediate[d] the encounter between tourist and Indian,” the Harvey restaurants mediated the boundaries of consumption.546 After touring Indian artisanal workshops in the Indian Building and purchasing Indian-made souvenirs in the retail shop, guests would often head to the restaurant for a formal, American-style meal where they dined on steak and oysters served on fine china and Irish linen tablecloths. This dining environment shrouded in etiquette—men were required to wear sport coats, and spares were kept on hand for customers who arrived without one—reminded white visitors of their own civility.

Anthropologist Marta Weigle suggests that Harvey Houses differed from the more innocuous early chains, such as White Castle and Howard Johnson‟s, because “the closely linked Santa Fe/Harvey corporations also appropriated, displayed, and marketed the cultures of the Native American and, to a lesser extent, the Spanish colonial and Anglo (primarily hunter/trapper/prospector) Southwest.” One of the ways in which the Santa Fe /Harvey Company displayed and marketed Southwestern culture was through the architecture and interior design of their buildings. The first location to draw upon North American Indian legends was the Montezuma, a grand resort hotel that opened at the Hot Springs in Las Vegas, New Mexico, in 1882 and was named after the Aztec leader, who was believed to have bathed in the rejuvenating waters. The Montezuma also featured a museum of indigenous artifacts, including pieces of stone ruins from the Pueblo nation.547 In contrast to the atmospheric displays of American Indian culture featured in the resort‟s name and museum, the restaurant served guests in a distinguished dining room complete with linen tablecloths, chandeliers, electric lighting, and an

546 Dilworth, Imagining Indians in the Southwest, 105. 547 Weigle, “From Desert to Disney World,” 115, 120. 178 elaborate carved-wood serving buffet.548 At its opening dinner banquet, the Montezuma served Blue Point oysters, trout, lamb, and roast duck, and the regular menu consistently featured fresh fruits and vegetables, as well as turtle soup.549 Unlike other restaurants in the American West, the Montezuma refused to serve canned foods to its customers. Harvey Company employees contracted with suppliers in Mexico to ship seasonal fruits, vegetables, and seafood to the restaurant, and they negotiated with the local Yagui Indians for a supply of green turtles, which lived in a pool next to the resort until they were ready for consumption.550

Recognizing the popularity of the exoticism of the Indian (and Spanish Colonial, often used interchangeably) theme, the Harvey Company hired Mary Colter, an art teacher from Minnesota, to design the Indian Building (1902), an artisan workshop and retail store adjacent to the Alvarado Hotel in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Visitors to the Indian Building could watch Indian artists crafting pottery, weaving baskets, blankets, and rugs, hammering silver, and displaying the production of their work in a voyeuristic setting. The structural layout of the Indian Building in relation to the train depot and the Alvarado Hotel is relevant to reading the restaurant in relation to the Indian-themed tourist attraction. As Weigle describes, “the Albuquerque complex was constructed so that passengers alighted from their train, passed between Indians on the platform, entered museum rook of „fine‟ Native American and Mexican art, toured the demonstration area

548 Photograph, Dining Room at Hotel Montezuma, Hot Springs, Las Vegas, New Mexico, 1886-1901, Digital Photograph Collection, Western History/Genealogy Department, Denver Public Library. 549 Foster and Weiglin, Harvey House Cookbook, 99. 550 Poling-Kempes, Harvey Girls, 150b (photo caption). 179 where actual Indian craftspeople worked, then came to the salesrooms, ready to purchase articles resembling those just seen before going to lunch next door at the Alvarado.”551 While the Indian Salesrooms were heavily laden in pottery, rugs, baskets, and other items for purchase, the restaurant‟s use of the same items for decoration was minimal. Similar to the Montezuma, the Alvarado‟s main dining room featured formal wooden chairs surrounding tables covered in linen cloths and fine china, while electric lighting brightened the room. The room‟s mantel, with a tiled backdrop, displayed minimal artwork for effect: two woven baskets and a clay pot.552 Upon the opening of the hotel, the Topeka Daily State Journal commented that the dining hall, which was the largest room in the building, had a low ceiling with exposed black oak beams. “Twelve stalactite opalescent light bulbs, five large electroilers [sic] with eight lights each, and sixteen brackets of two lights each” lit up the room.553 This highlighting of the latest technologies, along with a menu that included the fancy-sounding dishes of Cold Vichyssoise Cream soup; Breast of Chicken, Jeanette; and Peach Alexandria, clearly called attention to the difference between the modern, “civilized” dining interior and the “Old World charm and traditional atmosphere” of the Indian Building.554 The emphasis on the contrast between “high society” dining and “primitive” displays of preindustrial frontier life becomes more pronounced considering that by the early 1940s, the Alvarado dining room was viewed as the social and culinary center of Albuquerque, where not only tourists but local families (those who could pay the cost of

551 Marta Weigle, “Exposition and Mediation: Mary Colter, Erna Fergusson, and the Santa Fe/Harvey Popularization of the Native Southwest, 1902-1940,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women‟s Studies 12, no. 3 (1992), 124. 552 Photograph, “Mantel in the Dining Room,” Albuquerque, New Mexico, Fred Harvey Collection, University of Arizona. 553 “Santa Fe to Call New Hotel „The Alvarado,‟” Topeka Daily State Journal, March 4, 1902. 554 Foster and Weiglin, Harvey House Cookbook, 19; The Alvarado, Fred Harvey Hotel, brochure, ca. 1940-1957, www.wheelsmuseum.org. 180 the high-end cuisine) gathered for weekly Sunday meals.555 Architectural historian Philip Langdon attributes the “slightly exotic” atmosphere of Harvey‟s Southwestern restaurants to a restrained Indian motif that otherwise conveyed “a soothing respect for tradition in service, in architecture, and in décor” through the use of high-quality silverware, table linens, and heavy wood tables that “represented the secure establishment of civilization in a harsh and mostly empty land.”556 Although Landgon‟s impression of the dining room as functioning to convey an aura of “civilization” is on target, certainly the Southwest was not a “mostly empty land” in the early twentieth century; in fact, its population was what drew the Harvey Houses to design these Indian-themed resorts in the first place. Following the Alvarado, the Santa Fe /Harvey partnership hired Colter to design the El Tovar and Hopi House (1904-05) at the Grand Canyon, the El Navajo in Gallup,

New Mexico, the El Ortiz in Lamy, New Mexico, and La Fonda in Santa Fe, New Mexico, among a range of other resort hotels and restaurants. These Harvey Houses borrowed from and mixed a variety of indigenous architectural styles, paying little attention to tribal and local specificity, instead aiming for a generic, regional “Indian” look. “As regional consolidation,” Western historian Hal K. Rothman observes, “it managed to hold the interest of a public largely uninterested in discriminating among the varieties of mythic Indian people.”557 At each of these locations, though, the restaurant— through the food, the décor, and an emphasis on modern technology—served to highlight the differences between the white guests and the indigenous people who functioned as tourist attractions for the visitors. “Travelers could be enticed to see „primitives,‟”

555 Poling-Kempes, Harvey Girls, 158. 556 Langdon, Orange Roofs, Golden Arches, 8. 557 Hal K. Rothman, Devil‟s Bargains: Tourism in the Twentieth-Century American West (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998), 70. 181

Bsumek notes, “but they did not want to be treated like them.”558 Therefore, the El Tovar advertised not only that “the cuisine is Harvey‟s best” but also that “every modern convenience is provided—such as steam heat (in season), electric lights…[and] private dining rooms.”559 In a similar contrast of “fine dining” to that of the regional American Indians, in 1933, guests at the El Tovar and Hopi House were invited to the De-Ki-Veh, a ritualistic Hopi ceremony being performed at Harvey‟s Indian Watchtower at the Grand Canyon, where they could partake of traditional Hopi foods at the Pik-Um-No-Vi (“the Hopi name for feast”) at the Camp Ground Site. According to the program:

On this occasion Hopi maidens will serve Hopi foods such as are provided for all ceremonial occasions at the Mesas. There will be NAUK-QUI-VI, a savory stew made of cracked white ceremonial corn, brought from the Mesas, and KA-NAL-SEQUI, ceremonial mutton. This is eaten with their own peculiar bread, PIKI, paper thin, made from finely ground colored corn. No Hopi feast is complete without the gifts of fruit, and MAZANA, apples, strung as garlands, will be distributed to the guests, as in Hopiland.

While dining, tourists “interested in Indian domestic life” could watch two Hopi women “grind the meal and bake the piki during the feast.” In case the unfamiliar food proved unappetizing to white visitors, the Harvey Company promised, “The Hopi hosts will be assisted by their white friends. For those who prefer the white man‟s food, there will be a

Barbeque.”560 Otherwise, the guests could head to the restaurant, where they could choose from menu items such as Troncon of Halibut, Prime Ribs of Beef, au Jus, and

558 Bsumek, Indian-Made, 32. 559 Fred Harvey Meals (1909), 14, Northern Arizona University, Cline Library Digital Archives. 560 “Di-Ki-Veh: The Blessing of the Kiva; A Hopi ritualistic ceremony as performed before invited guests at The Indian Watchtower, Desert View, May 13, 1933,”5, Northern Arizona University, Cline Library Digital Archives. 182

Snow Pudding with Custard Sauce, all quite a culinary contrast to the ground corn dishes served at the campsite.561 Along with cuisine, clothing was another symbolic attribute of the Harvey House restaurants that signaled difference between white guests and the Southwestern region‟s Indian residents. By the early twentieth century, Harvey already had a reputation for inflexibility when it came to the attire of his patrons. All of his restaurants upheld a mandatory coat policy for male customers, and Harvey Houses provided loaner coats if a prospective diner failed to arrive with one. In 1921, the Oklahoma Corporation

Commission sued Harvey on the basis of discrimination. In 1924, the Supreme Court of Oklahoma dismissed the case in favor of Harvey, arguing, “Always a part of the masculine garb, and often a major portion of feminine dress, [the coat] is worn as an adornment to satisfy the conventions of society rather than for bodily comfort and protection. Unlike the lower animals, we all demand the maintenance of some style and fashion in the dining room.”562 Similarly, the Harvey Girls waitresses wore modest, ankle-length black-and-white uniforms that they tried to keep rigorously clean throughout the course of meal service. However, to comply with the Indian-theme of the Southwest, the Harvey Company for the first time substituted a multi-colored blouse-and-skirt outfit for the waitresses at El Navajo, a uniform that was meant to capture the atmosphere and “traditional” clothing of the Mexican and American Indian populations in the region.563 These stylized uniforms were meant to invoke the “colorful” characteristics of the local

561 Menu, Fred Harvey‟s El Tovar, Grand Canyon, Arizona, 1912. Northern Arizona University, Cline Library Digital Archives. 562 “Must Wear Coats in Harvey Houses,” Los Angeles Times, July 13, 1925, A7; “Diner Must Wear Coat,” New York Times, December 14, 1924, XX2; Dickson Hartwell, “Let‟s Eat with The Harvey Boys,” Colliers, April 9, 1943, 32. 563 Foster and Weiglin, Harvey House Cookbook, 126-27.

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Indians in contrast to the more formal and “civilized” uniforms of Harvey Girls in other locations, as well as the requisite tidy appearance of the middle- and upper-class white patrons. The symbolic gesture of the uniform change carries more significance when considered alongside the emphasis that the Fred Harvey Company placed on Indian symbolism. For example, in 1930, the company published a pamphlet entitled “The Answer to 1000 Questions,” which reprinted dozens of “Navajo and Pueblo Motifs” as a kind of translating dictionary for the tourist visiting the Southwest. These Indian

Symbols, the text claimed, were “once used by the Indians in their written language…Centuries before the coming of the White Man,” and it further suggested, “Many of these picture-words you will recognize as integral parts of our modern culture.”564 A decade later, the company published a cookbook as an accompaniment to the popular dining cars in the Santa Fe Super Chief train, a text which used additional Indian figures and symbols to complement the reprinted Fred Harvey recipes. “The Indians of the Southwest are an unusually artistic people,” the cookbook explained. “They create symbols to represent the many things of their life and you‟ll find these creations on the jewelry, pottery, baskets and blankets that they make....As you leaf through this book, take note of the Indian symbols and their meanings.”565 Harvey Houses, however, did not always commit to accurate replications of Indian pictorial symbols in their decorating choices. Instead, figures that invoked white vistors‟ expectations of the region became more prevalent. Therefore, a mid-century billboard for the Fred Harvey House in Seligman, Arizona, advertised the establishment

564 The Answer to 1000 Questions: 103 Indian Symbols (Albuquerque: Fred Harvey, 1930). Northern Arizona University, Cline Library Digital Archives. 565 Super Chief Cook Book, ca.1941-1947. Northern Arizona University, Cline Library Digital Archives. 184 with both “Indian-styled” feathers and a sombrero-clad man sipping coffee, while the Harvey House at the Albuquerque airport etched “Indian-syled” stick figures onto its wall coverings and dressed the waitresses in uniforms similar to those worn at El Navajo.566 Historian Erik Trump attributes the Fred Harvey Company‟s insistence on imaging (and imagining) Indian artists “as artistic, domestic, and timeless peoples” to the company‟s tendency “to depoliticize their [Indians‟] history and erase the economic significance of their participation in the art market.”567 Arguably, the Harvey Company‟s structure of hospitality services that presented Indians and white tourists at opposite ends of a consumption dichotomy also served to minimize Indians‟ relevance in the modern industrial consumer marketplace, instead locating their visibility in symbolic reproductions of the nation‟s heritage.

In terms of the growing consumer and tourist culture in the United States, the Harvey Company tapped directly into the growing interest in souvenir collecting in the interwar and postwar years, and travel guides cited the Fred Harvey Indian Building in Albuquerque, along with Harvey‟s Hopi House at the Grand Canyon and the Indian Shop in Santa Fe, as “„musts‟ on nearly every railroad tour of the Southwest.”568 Indian-themed Harvey Houses presented tourists with a version of “civilized exoticism,” a narrative of the “primitive” Southwest that romanticized Indian culture and traditions while simultaneously objectifying them. In comparison to Indian-themed restaurants that resurrected the “rough-and-ready” feel to match customers‟ visions of the barren West, Harvey‟s restaurants presented more of a refined version of the West. Dilworth highlights Harvey‟s efforts to contain and regulate national visions of the region: “The Harvey

566 Fred Harvey Hotel Billboard, ca. 1950-1970; Fred Harvey Albuquerque Airport Interiors, 1949-1950, Northern Arizona University Cline Library Digital Archives. 567 Erik Trump, “The Idea of Help,” 168. 568 Charles Grutzner, “Among the Vacationists‟ Souvenirs,” New York Times, July 27, 1947, X12. 185 spectacle represented the Southwest as a peaceful and fully domesticated region. It was not the wild, manly, cowboys-and-Indians West.”569 Arguably, rather than helping to “civilize” the Native American populations residing in the Southwest, Harvey reminded white tourist of their own civility, particularly through the contrast of the Harvey‟s Indian buildings to his moderately-themed restaurant dining rooms.

By the 1950s, Indian-themed restaurants depiction of “authentic” Indian representations had shifted slightly, with an increased emphasis on stereotypic symbols of Indian culture— such as teepees, wigwams, totem poles, and Indian chiefs—largely influenced by the popularity of Westerns on television. Yet this reliance on recognizable signifiers of Indianness accompanied white Americans‟ persistent desire to interact with “real” Indians and experience Indian culture first-hand through music, dance, literature, food, and other cultural expressions, an interest that coincided with a larger rethinking of class- and race-based social stratification following World War II. Indian hobbyists reframed the declension narrative of the dying Indian into a new story of assimilation, one in which Indians‟ “authentic” past enriched America at large. Native historian Philip Deloria has convincingly argued that “playing Indian” helped white Americans preserve a sense of authentic national identity rooted in the paradox of the authentic Other.570 In particular, white Americans‟ use of traditional Indian objects in decorative schemes grounded the rigor of frontier mythology and the ideals of place-based community in representations of the “authentic” Indian. Postwar Indian-themed restaurants responded to the popular, hobbyist interest in “authentic” Indian culture by offering dining experiences that epitomized commercialized

569 Dilworth, Imagining Indians in the Southwest, 95.

570 Philip Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998): 129-131. 186

Indian symbolism. Within these restaurants, customers physically inhabited, applied, and gazed at stereotypical objects suggestive of Indian culture. The Indian Room in Chicago, referred to by one guidebook writer as the “popular Loop tepee,” served standard beef and chicken fare couched in a space “decorated with pottery, drums, weapons and Indian blankets.”571 Other guidebooks reported that at Hedge‟s Wigwam restaurant in Royal

Oak, Michigan, “[d]ecorations and furnishings have [an] Indian motif,” while San Antonio‟s Tee-Pee Trading Post was also “known for its fine steaks.”572 In 1950 Seattle‟s Manning‟s Restaurant hired the artist Jacobsen Grud to paint a wall mural invoking an

Indian motif, including totem poles and a canoe full of stick-figured Indians.573 At another of Seattle‟s restaurants, Clark‟s Twin T-P‟s on Aurora Avenue, restaurateur Walter Clark served a largely family-based clientele inside two adjoining buildings in the shape of teepees. The restaurant, which Clark acquired in 1941, advertised its “authenticity” through not only the teepee structure and walls decorated with American Indians in tribal costume, but also through the character of the hostess, a “living” Indian. Clark hired Harriet Shelton Williams, whose father was an American Indian Chief, not only to work as a hostess but to represent, through her familial heritage, the embodiment of a “real”

Indian for customers. Williams‟s body, as a natural and living form, authorized customers‟ encounter with the “Indian other.” She “dressed in traditional Indian fashion to greet customers” and wrote advertisements for the restaurant from the “Indian point of

571 Your Key to Dining Out in Chicago (Evanston, IL: Gourmet Club of Chicago, 1953), 10. 572 Duncan Hines, Adventures in Good Eating (1947), 158; Gourmet‟s Guide to Good Eating (Garden City, NY: Gourmet: The Magazine of Good Living, 1948), 323. 573 “Mural in Manning‟s Restaurant,” 1951, MOHAI. 187 view,” describing symbols of national heritage, such as the first Thanksgiving, from the perspective of Indians.574 Other Indian-themed restaurants‟ promises of ethnic tourism were validated by the decoration, often claimed to be gifts or purchases from Indian tribes. Yet, even Indian-made artwork or clothing was not necessary for a restaurant to capture the ostensible spirit of Native Americans, as long as the restaurant implemented a design scheme inspired by nature and the great outdoors. For instance, the president of the Indian Village Restaurant in Torrance, California, hired Academy Award-winning set designers to create the interior by drawing “upon natural resources, rocks, wood, waterfalls” to decorate the restaurant in “striking earth colors.”575 This continued reliance on associations between Indians and nature grounded Indian-themed restaurants in visions of American Indians as technologically regressive, preserving representations of Indians as simplistic and lacking in social development. Paralleling Southwestern Harvey Houses, mid-century Indian-themed restaurants also contrasted American Indians‟ anti-modern image with the restaurants‟ advanced technological developments, signaling to customers that “civilized” dining was not going to be compromised by a “primitive” theme. Trade journal articles on Indian-themed restaurants rarely failed to mention the up-to-date kitchen and dining room technologies used in the restaurant. Although The Chieftain‟s décor included exposed wooden beams, wrought-iron gates, and modernistic teepees on the walls, the “all-electric” kitchen boasted “Hotpoint ranges and a Raytheon radar range.”576 The Indian Village Restaurant, although “furnished from a basic motif representative of notable tribes,” was also

574 P.E. Tibbetts, Mr. Restaurant: A Biography of Restaurateur Walter F. Clark (Seattle: Murray Publishing, 1990), 100-102, 171. 575 “Indian Village Restaurant Born to Smith Bros. Fish Shanty Inc.,” Pacific Coast Record, July 1964, 21. 576 “The Chieftain: Wanatchee‟s Newest Restaurant,” Allied Food and Beverage, May 1961, 8-10. 188

“completely air-conditioned, equipped with sprinkler systems, custom-designed acoustics, forced air heat, [and] the latest controlled lighting and public address systems.”577 William Hewitt‟s Tillicum Indian Village claimed fame for “opening up a restaurant on a plot of ground that had no commercial electricity, no buildings, no water and no roads leading to it.” Hewitt impressed customers and critics alike by installing

“heavy-duty generators,” radios, and telephones, as well as drilling a “high-production well” to service the restaurants‟ supply and communications needs.578 These displays of technology as transformative and powerful suggested white superiority over Indians who, presumably, could not appreciate technological innovations. As Philip Deloria observes, “imagining Indians as technological primitives empowered an equal and opposite reaction—a celebration of the mechanical advances of a distinct white modernity.”579

Modern Indian-themed restaurants used technology as another marker of difference between the white Western world and indigenous peoples. Similar distinctions of difference appeared in the foods listed on Indian-themed restaurants‟ menus. Most Indian-themed restaurants did not serve traditional American Indian meals; instead, the menu items borrowed thematic symbols as a way of creating verbal “atmosphere” and catching the customer‟s attention. For instance, The Chieftain in

Wenatchee, Washington, served prime rib, crab legs, and chicken casserole. Ivar‟s Indian Salmon House included grilled cheese sandwiches, peanut butter and jelly, and corn chips on its children‟s menu, while San Antonio‟s restaurant, The Teepee, listed six versions of dinner steaks on its menu along with Teepee Chicken Dinner and Ham Steak with Red-

577 “Indian Village Restaurant Born to Smith Bros. Fish Shanty Inc.,” 21. 578 Jeanne Parker, “You‟ll Eat Tillicum Indian Style,” Allied Food and Beverage, April 1962, 15, 23. 579 Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places, 145-146. 189

Eye Gravy (both prepared “Virginia-Style”).580 To promote the “profitable full breakfast” eaten in restaurants, the General Foods Corporation created table tents, posters, and menu clips advertising a generic “Wigwam Breakfast.” The meal, which included “Log Cabin Wigwam Syrup, Armour Star Bacon, and Aunt Jemima Pancake Mix,” had no direct ties to traditional Indian food consumption, save for the cartoon Indian and incongruous teepee logo on the promotional material.581 Food, which has been used throughout history as a marker of class association and cultural authority, reminded customers that they need not regress, gastronomically, in order to partake of symbolic Indian culture.

Even when restaurants insisted that their décor featured design elements representative of American Indian culture, the decorative schemes rarely, if ever, distinguished among Indian tribes, instead lumping together color motifs and cultural symbols into a general Indian theme. One restaurant design consultant suggested using “the American Indian as a central idea” for creating an attractive restaurant interior. Pointing to one model restaurant, this consultant suggested others could also depict “dramatic scenes of Indian life” and color the rooms “using deep rich Indian reds and browns, with accents of gold and silver.”582 Seattle‟s Bon Marche department store‟s restaurant, the Legend Room, appealed to customers with a space furnished in décor representing “local Indians and their traditions,” including “warm colors [that] blend perfectly with natural wood furniture and trim.”583 The Indian Village Restaurant in Torrance, California, featured dining areas with names like Turquoise Room, Kachina

580 “The Chieftain: Wenatchee‟s Newest Restaurant,” 10; Children‟s menu, Ivar‟s Indian Salmon House, Seattle, Washington, c. 1960s, University of Washington Digital Collections, http://content.lib.washington.edu/cdm4/document.php; Menu for The Teepee restaurant, San Antonio, Texas, Randall H. Greenless Menu Collection, Cornell University. 581 “Business Builders,” Restaurant Management, April 1959, 30. 582 Harry J. Harman, “After You Bring Them In…,” American Restaurant, November 1945, 46. 583 “One Little Indian + Two Little Indians = Money in the Till,” Pacific Coast Record, April 1957, 30. 190

Room, and Wampum Room, while The Chieftain restaurant in Wenatchee, Washington, included a Pow Wow Room covered in wallpaper that featured “small abstract „cigar store‟ Indians.”584 Incidentally, The Chieftain also claimed that it “avoided the conventional overworked Indian clichés,” even though it proudly claimed a color scheme that relied on “Indian brown” and “maize yellow” and dressed its waitresses in Indian maiden costumes.585 Clark‟s Twin T-Ps was no different from its contemporaries. Describing its interior murals as symbolic portraits of characters such as “„Little Snowbird,‟ Indian

Papoose” and “„Morning Star,‟ Tribal Beauty,” the restaurant articulated its thematic purpose on the back of its teepee-shaped menu:

The historical Puget Sound region abounds with Indian lore and legends of the Redman. It has been our desire to create an atmosphere reminiscent of the Real American. Our aim is to offer that same true spirit of hospitality practiced by the teepee‟s blazing fireside before the coming of the white man. In designing this unique setting for the Twin T-Ps our one thought has been your enjoyment of our hospitality amid interesting surroundings.586

The irony of the country‟s history of showing a “true spirit of hospitality” toward Native Americans should not pass unnoticed. However, in the interest of appealing to middle- class white customers, Clark‟s Twin T-Ps favored the folkloric history of American

Indians. This simplified and romanticized representation of America‟s heritage nodded toward Indians as the “Real Americans” yet still presented symbols of their culture and traditions as available for whites‟ enjoyment and consumption.

584 “Indian Village Restaurant Born to Smith Bros. Fish Shanty Inc.,” 21; “The Chieftain: Wentatchee‟s Newest Restaurant,” 9. 585 “The Chieftain: Wentatchee‟s Newest Restaurant,” 9. 586 Menu, Clark‟s Twin T-Ps, MOHAI. 191

Representations of Indians in American popular culture reduced Indian traditions into material artifacts designed to be manipulated by white customers. From teepees and wigwams to turquoise and totem poles, postwar Indian-themed restaurants served up objects that, in Philip Deloria‟s words, encouraged customers to “play Indian.”587 Teepee- shaped buildings, interactive paper placemats, wigwam table tents, and menus in the form of “Big Chief” Indian-head face masks, designed to be worn and played with by children after ordering the meal, all encouraged non-Indian customers to experiment with “being Indian” over the course of a meal.588 One restaurant trade journal reprinted a prize- winning menu as a model for other restaurants, a menu which encouraged young patrons to imagine themselves as “little Indians” while they ordered. A list of meal choices, printed next to a caricature of an Indian child, read, “For breakfast this little indian likes to eat…” followed by the food options.589 The Indian Grill in Lander, Wyoming‟s Noble Hotel, according to restaurant guides, offered guests “an unusual dining treat.” Before dining from “a nice menu of varied dishes” while gazing at a large collection of Indian artifacts hung from the walls, customers walked through a teepee constructed just inside the entrance. Like a stage curtain, the teepee functioned as a portal, physically and imaginatively transporting patrons to another dining world.590

587 For more on the history of non-Indians adopting Indian culture through identity performances, see Deloria, Playing Indian; Shari M. Huhndorf, Going Native: Indians in the American Cultural Imagination (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), and Laura Browder, Slippery Characters: Ethnic Impersonators and American Identities (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). 588 See Menu, “The Teepee” restaurant, San Antonio, Texas, Randall H. Greenless Menu Collection, Cornell University; “Business Builders: „Wigwam Breakfast,‟” Restaurant Management, April 1959, 30; Paper placemat, Russ Drive-In, Muskogee, Oklahoma, ca. 1950, Texas Woman‟s University Special Collections; Children‟s menu, Ivar‟s Indian Salmon House, Seattle, Washington, ca. 1960s, University of Washington Digital Collections. 589 “Twenty-One Principles for Menu Making,” Restaurant Management, December 1941, 30. 590 Ruth Noble, A Guide to Distinctive Dining (Cambridge, MA: Berkshire Publishing Co., 1956), 131; Hines, Adventures in Good Eating (1947), 300. 192

Western-themed restaurants created an imagined playscape in which Anglo Americans could, literally, try on a commercialized version of Indian identity. The famed restaurant critic Duncan Hines joked that he was honored upon his tasting visit to the Pacific Northwest to be “adopted into the Royal Order of Totem Poles in Seattle with the name of Chief Muk Muk which, roughly translated, means „Heap Lik‟um Good Food.”591

A handful of restaurateurs admitted that their versions of “authentically Indian” were based on media-generated images associated with Native Americans, but in doing so they implied that “real” Indians were still too primitive, too shocking, for the general

American population. William S. Hewitt, owner-and-operator of Tillicum Indian Village, a “complete populated Indian village” designed around a restaurant on Blake Island, Washington, quipped to the media: “It [the village] won‟t be completely authentic…because the original Indians of the Puget Sound didn‟t wear any clothes. My Indians will wear what television has led people to believe Indians wear.”592 Hewitt, a caterer whose fascination with the potlatch style of cooking salmon—a traditional method of preparation among Puget Sound regional Indian tribes, where the fish is baked on vertical cedar planks around an open fire—inspired him to build the restaurant around the featured dish.593

In many ways, Hewitt‟s Tillicum Indian Village presented a more updated version of Indian-themed Harvey Houses from earlier in the century. The restaurant, which opened in 1962, was the brainchild of William “Bill” Hewitt, a food service professional

591 Duncan Hines, Duncan Hines‟ Food Odyssey (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, Co., 1955), 206.

592 Parker, “You‟ll Eat Tillicum Indian Style,” 15, 23. 593 Katie N. Johnson and Tamara Underiner, “Command Performances: Staging Native Americans at Tillicum Village,” in Selling the Indian: Commercializing and Appropriating American Indian Cultures, ed. Carter Jones Meyer and Diana Royer (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2001), 46. See also Blake Island‟s Tillicum Village, “History,” http://www.tillicumvillage.com/history.html.

193 who operated his own Seattle-area catering company, Hewitt‟s Catering Service, in the 1950s. During the summer of 1958, Hewitt attended an event sponsored by the Washington State Department of Fisheries where a man named Milo Moore, whose hobbies included baking salmon in the potlatch style, prepared the meal. Hewitt, fascinated by the “great deal of showmanship” involved in the process, asked Moore to show him the potlatch technique, which Hewitt used to cater a party for the Boeing Corporation. Although admittedly, “there were no Indians involved,” Hewitt and company deemed the potlatch party for Boeing a huge success, and Hewitt began to brainstorm a location on which to build an Indian longhouse restaurant.594 Like Harvey‟s interest in the Southwest, Hewitt‟s attraction to Blake Island as a site for the restaurant appealed to him because of its apparent lack of population and development, an area therefore ripe for cultivation. Tillicum Indian Village paralleled Harvey‟s Indian resorts in other ways. Both businesses selectively paid attention to tribal specificity, often choosing instead to advertise a general theme of “Indianness” throughout the grounds. In a booklet celebrating Tillicum Village‟s thirty-five years of operation, the company stated that its purpose was “to provide visitors with an overview of the Northwest Coast Indians,” confirming that the Village “does not represent any specific tribe or area within the Northwest Coast culture.”595 Both Harvey‟s and Hewitt‟s businesses depended on seasonal tourism and incorporated—alongside a primary interest in food service—“live performances” of Indian artists demonstrating their skilled craftsmanship in carving or weaving, and gathering crowds of tourists to watch displays of Native dances. In both

594 Mark Hewitt, The Story of Tillicum Village: 35 Years of Myth and Magic (Seattle: Tillicum Village and Tours, 1997), 5-6. 595 Hewitt, Story of Tillicum Village, 17. 194 operations, the agency of the Indian workers is also a complicated and nuanced element of the tourist marketplace.596 Although the workers profited financially from sales of their artwork, as well as cost of the entry fee, white owners and upper management continued to drive decisions about the presentation and circulation of stereotypic Indian images throughout the locations. In fact, at Tillicum Indian Village, Native American staff members were not involved in on-the-ground management of the site until 1993.597 Importantly, then, Harvey‟s and Hewitt‟s Indian-themed eating facilities, as well as their contemporaries, continued to affirm white authority even while purporting to “honor”

American Indian contributions to the nation‟s heritage.

BACK IN TIME: AMERICA’S HERITAGE OF LIVING-HISTORY RESTAURANTS

Heritage-themed restaurants did not disappear amidst late-twentieth century efforts to recognize the multiculturalism and transnationalism of America‟s citizens and residents. Rather, they have continued to “serve up a history lesson along with a meal” to an increasingly larger restaurant-going public.598 Historian Andrew Hurley documents this trend among operators of postwar American diners, showing how they, too, adopted heritage themes to engage customers in the experience of dining out. “Ever so gently,”

Hurley argues, “the postwar suburban diner nudged the nation toward a more pluralistic concept of citizenship, one that tolerated ethnic diversity and enabled the sons and

596 To date, Tillicum Indian Village is still in operation. In their essay “Command Performances: Staging Native Americans at Tillicum Village,” Katie N. Johnson and Tamara Underiner address the ongoing tension between “cultural exchange” and “cultural appropriation” at the Village. See Johnson and Underiner, “Command Performances,” 44-61. 597 Hewitt, Story of Tillicum Village, 50. 598 Sarah Smith Hamaker, “A Taste of the Past: Living-History Restaurants Transport Customers Back in Time,” Restaurants USA (October 2000), http://www.restaurant.org/business/magarticle . Hawmaker details the growth of restaurants in the early twenty-first century serving food from bygone eras within a historically recreated setting, ranging from the Middle Ages to the turn of the twentieth century. 195 daughters of European immigrants to assert their status as real Americans.”599 While this phenomenon may have been true in diners particularly, adopting a heritage motif did not guarantee a restaurant‟s gesture of acceptance toward American citizens‟ pluralism and diversity. Rather, it is arguable that heritage-themed restaurants furthered consensus narratives of the nation‟s founding and expansion, assuming a common past among

Americans and locking non-native-born, non-white populations into roles that suited and authorized these versions of history and denied their inroads in breaking down social and racial barriers.

Following on the heels of the “Heritage of Hospitality” film (1949), a restaurant- industry expert published Hospitality: A Twentieth-Century Frontier for restaurant owners in 1951. Waxing nostalgic for the country‟s legacy of food hospitality, the author wrote, “The American food service industry has played a major role in helping this nation to become the promised land of gracious living….The sum total of American food service design represents a vast contribution to the basic enjoyment of our national heritage.”600 Read in the context of heritage-themed restaurants, this claim suggests that America‟s restaurant industry played an active and deliberate role in maintaining a cautious and collective view of the country‟s past. As sites of everyday, public consumption, heritage-themed restaurants staged visual and tangible snapshots of the country‟s history that ran counter to efforts challenging and implicating social institutions in maintaining gendered, racial, and ethnic inequalities in the United States.

599 Andrew Hurley, Diners, Bowling Alleys, and Trailer Parks: Chasing the American Dream in Postwar Consumer Culture (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 72. 600 Kelly Vester, Hospitality: A Twentieth-Century Frontier; A Manual for Restaurant Owners (New York: Exposition Press, 1951), 17. 196

Chapter 3:

American Food with a Foreign Accent: Performing Ethnicity in U.S. Foreign Restaurants

An American and his Filipino friend walked into a restaurant in the Philippines.

The proprietor greeted the two men, and then launched into an enthusiastic conversation with the Filipino “in the native dialect” about choices for the meal while the American, “his face wreathed in a huge artificial smile,” waited to discover what his friend had ordered. The proprietor disappeared to the back and “within ten seconds there issued from that portion of the house such an odor that the smile literally dropped from the face of the American.” In a little time, the chef presented his piece de resistance: an egg that had remained “twelve days under the goose, and six weeks buried in the ground”— “neither an egg nor yet a fowl!” The American, startled and disgusted, roared, “And you expect me to eat that?” Calmly, his Filipino friend replied, “Egg-goose is very sanitary, for the earth has kept it from all the germs which your people fear so much, Funny Americano is it not?” After considering the Filipino‟s point for awhile, the American decided, “I guess it all depends on what you are used to, and I suppose there is such a thing as tolerance and narrow-mindedness in the matter of food as in all else. We will put it this way. I am not hungry enough to eat your balut, but I grant you that it is a very interesting and, yes, sanitary dish.”601 The moral of this tale from 1924, printed in the Pacific Coast Chef, one of America‟s early restaurant trade journals, is that Americans should respect cultural

601 “Chow,” Pacific Coast Chef, February 1924, 2-3. 197 difference, including differences between American and foreign foodstuffs. While the American in the story may not have been “hungry enough to eat” balut, throughout the middle decades of the twentieth century, Americans‟ tolerance for foreign flavors blossomed into a preference for the foods, in a large part because of the growth of restaurants representing foreign cultures and cuisines.602 This chapter explains how, from the 1920s through the 1960s, many middle-class, native-born white Americans in urban centers developed a taste for international foods through restaurant dining and took pride in having “appetites that are without prejudice” in contrast to their global counterparts.603

Although historians, such as Donna Gabaccia, have argued that “native-born American eaters with little sense of their own ethnic roots….sought out different identities by eating new foods,” I suggest that these same consumers were simultaneously seeking an affirmation of their own American identity through the gastronomic contrast.604 Dining on foreign foods did not merely expose Americans to global cultures; eating cosmopolitan fare was in essence a nationalist act—it distinguished this population of consumers as American. Advocates of American cosmopolitan dining noted with frequency the reluctance on the part of other foreign nationals and recent immigrants to take part in the crossover culinary experience. “The average American city dweller has a far more cosmopolitan

602 Throughout this dissertation, I assume that it is possible to consider what Americans ate as both food and cuisine. My rationale that such a thing as “American cuisine” exists falls in line with Krishnendu Ray‟s definition of American cuisine, which treats cuisine as “a particular kind of talk about cooking” imagined into existence by professional food writers and restaurants, where national cuisine is “performed in the public sphere” (Krishnendu Ray, “Nation and Cuisine: The Evidence from American Newspapers, ca. 1830-2003,” Food and Foodways 16, no. 4 [October/November 2008], 265, 289). 603 Brown, “For Gourmets and Others: Dining Abroad in the City,” New York Times, January 22, 1939, 45. 604 Donna R. Gabaccia, We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 121, emphasis added.

198 taste when it comes to food than has his counterpart in France and other European nations,” argued a journalist for the New York Times. “In no other country in the world do people partake of completely foreign meals with the consistency” of Americans in major cities. She continued to explain that while foreign restaurants opened in the United States expecting “to satisfy the demands of their countrymen,” by the mid-1930s, native-born

Americans constituted the bulk of their clientele.605 The growing popularity of ethnic food occurred, in part, because American restaurant patrons did not conceive of foreign dining establishments in monolithic terms. Instead, they viewed these public dining spaces primarily in one of two ways: foreign restaurants and foreign-themed restaurants. This difference is not intended merely to split semantic hairs—the two categories help explain how restaurants specializing in reproductions of global cultures and foodways, rather than those serving actual foreign dishes, changed the taste of local American food. The distinction between foreign and foreign-themed restaurants was not lost on descriptions of public dining places in newspapers, magazines, and industry publications in the years following World War I. Although the terminology might vary, foreign restaurants were usually located in a “foreign colony” of a city and served “native cookery” mostly to a first- or second-generation immigrant clientele from the restaurant‟s global region.606 The owner of a foreign restaurant almost always claimed a native homeland outside of the United States. White, middle-class Americans tended to regard foreign restaurants as either unappealing, dirty eateries or exotic sites of culinary adventure. On the other hand, foreign-themed restaurants served both foreign dishes and food “commercialized for American consumption.”607 They were operated by both

605 Helen Morgan, “Our Wide Taste in Food,” New York Times, October 13, 1935, SM17. 606 “City Eats 800 Tons a Day,” Washington Post, October 28, 1934, F6. 607 Bertha Anne Houck, “Gastronomic Adventures,” Los Angeles Times, May 13, 1928, K12.

199 foreign-born and native-born Americans; importantly, their goal was to entice a wide variety of customers. One trade journal summarized the criteria for a foreign-themed restaurant in this way: “Foreign-type restaurants feature their national dishes but almost always have a variety of strictly American offerings to meet the demands of those patrons who may like a certain national atmosphere but might not care for the particular type of national cooking.”608 Foreign-themed restaurants created ambience for effect; they attracted a middle-class American clientele through a dining world of difference. Paradoxically, in this nativist historical period when a large number of middle- class Anglo Americans advocated “Americanizing” the country, including a reversion back to traditional Early American-style foods, many of these Americans were also priding themselves on their growing preference for foreign foods. While this interest in global cuisine may seem counterintuitive, close examination reveals that by making careful distinctions between foreign and foreign-themed restaurants, native-born and assimilated, naturalized white Americans could measure—qualitatively—first- and second-generation immigrants against cultural standards of citizenship. By rating the extent to which foreign restaurateurs appealed to an American clientele, white customers also rated these recent immigrants as being worthy (or not) of national belonging.

Drawing substantially on restaurant trade journals, as well as lesser-known dining guidebooks, I argue that the global atmosphere and flavors of foreign-themed restaurants helped increase Americans‟ consumption of foreign foods. Trade journals and dining guides offer a glimpse into the history of small, independent restaurants that constituted over 95 percent of restaurant businesses around 1930.609 While historians have more

608 “A Study of an Italian Type Restaurant,” American Restaurant, February 1944, 29. 609 Marketing Analysis of the Restaurant Industry (Chicago: American Restaurant Magazine, 1930), 12.

200 thoroughly documented the stories of chain restaurants, few records or formal archives remain for the vast array of America‟s historical independent restaurants. Industry publications and regional guides called attention to successful restaurants within a particular moment—albeit from the perspective of operators and customers rather than employees—including small, regional restaurants that have long since disappeared. These sources, which also consider interior decorations and employees‟ speech and dress, reveal that foreign-themed restaurant owners consciously crafted dining experiences as temporary escapes for white, middle-class customers who sought a highly mediated kind of ethnic encounter. In the process, these proprietors contributed to a more cosmopolitan- tasting American cuisine by introducing foreign flavors into their dishes and broadening white customers‟ acceptance of foreign foods as part of America‟s national culinary repertoire. In his essay “Eating American,” Sidney Mintz argues that, historically, immigrants new to the United States have been pressured to give up their cultural traditions—including their way of eating—in the name of “Americanization.”610 While this sacrifice of tradition is true to an extent, it was not a universal condition for adapting to life in the United States. Instead, the efforts to “Americanize” food in U.S. foreign restaurants in the interwar and postwar periods mirror the multiple variations of the Americanization movement that took place in the early twentieth century. In his seminal history of American nativism, Strangers in the Land (1955), John Higham details how the “crusade for Americanization” divided into two groups: “100 per cent Americanized” and “International Nationalists.” The former “opened a frontal assault on foreign

610 Sidney Mintz, “Eating American,” in Food in the U.S.A.: A Reader, ed. Carole Counihan (New York: Routledge, 2002), 26. 201 influence in American life” by forcing immigrants to “abandon entirely their Old World loyalties, customs, and memories.” In contrast, Higham contends, International Nationalists supported the cultural heritage of immigrants, believing that their native traditions enriched the United States and its place in the “world community.”611 International Nationalists saw the cultural contributions of immigrants— including, I argue, their foodways—as complementary to “the future growth of a still unfinished nationality.”612 Similarly, while some in the restaurant industry supported a revival of traditional American cookery, those who operated foreign-themed restaurants embraced the introduction of foreign traditions, including ingredients, into American food.613 The contained space of the foreign-themed restaurant and its stylized representations of global cultures effectively popularized “foreign-ness” for American restaurant-goers. As a result, foreign-themed restaurants helped infuse Americans‟ regional palates with global flavors, leading to a more cosmopolitan conception of American cuisine.

THE RISE OF FOREIGN-THEMED RESTAURANTS IN THE 1920S AND 1930S

Prior to the First World War, only a select portion of the native-born American population ventured into foreign restaurants that did not have the culinary stamp of esteemed French or German cuisine. Public eateries serving foreign dishes catered to particular ethnic groups, especially bachelors and recent immigrants. Native-born,

611 John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1955), 247, 251. 612 Higham, Strangers in the Land, 251. 613 For example, see C.B. King, “National Dishes of America,” American Restaurant, March 1930, 60, 64, 68; C.A. Patterson, “From Our View Point,” American Restaurant, May 1920, 34; Helen Ewing, “Let‟s Feature Our American Dishes,” American Restaurant, May 1933, 28-31, 40.

202 middle-class white Americans (usually men) dabbled in these restaurants only when looking for dining excitement; otherwise, foreign restaurants were to be avoided. Descriptions of foreign foods usually echoed the sentiments expressed in this 1917 article on “Chinese Food and Restaurants”: “The man of timorous spirit or sensitive stomach who survives the ordeal of a Chinese dinner should be awarded a chop-stick badge for courage. It begins with Chop Suey…[which] may be, as the taste swears it is, a few old shoes, brass-buttons and a wornout pipe. At any rate it swims about in a bedragoned bowl, and you eat it if you can.”614 Foreign foods were often perceived negatively as representative of the immigrant populations entering the United States at rapid rates between 1905 and 1914, particularly from eastern and southern Europe. According to the 1910 census, 32 million Americans, or one-third of the country‟s population, lived in families with at least one foreign-born parent.615 As one journalist lamented, after returning to the United States from an extended absence, she longed for “an America full

614 Alice A. Harrison, “Chinese Food and Restaurants,” Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine, June 1917, 527. 615 Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Press, 2001), 84. The restaurant industry in the 1910s and 1920s actively engaged with the immigration policies of the day. Editorials in trade journals praised the Immigration Law of 1924 for continuing “to render the American people a tremendous service,” and the delegates to the 1927 Annual Convention of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union (HERE) heatedly debated whether to allow Asian culinary workers—including citizens of Asian descent—to join the union. (“Two Years of the Immigration Law,” Mixer and Server 36, September 15, 1927, 34.) The delegation ultimately struck down the motion, with those opposing admission of the “Yellow Peril” outweighing the opinion of delegates such as Hugo Ernst of Local 33, who welcomed “these Japanese and Chinese or any other colored citizen [to] come in and compete with me if he does go under the same wage scale as myself and he can render a service which is preferred to my own, because then he is a better man than I am.” (“Report of Delegates to Annual Convention,” Mixer and Server 36, September 15, 1927, 289.) It is important to keep in mind that the restaurant industry, as well as customers, did not agree on the place of the foreign restaurant owner and worker: foreign restaurants and their foreign-born proprietors and staff were both vigorously accepted and rejected in the first half of the twentieth century. Certainly, regional differences came into play. Asian culinary workers were fiercely opposed on the West Coast, where they presented more labor competition, as well as higher resident populations. However, evidence of both appreciation for and discrimination against foreign restaurants, including their food and staff members, is prevalent throughout guidebooks, popular periodicals, and trade journals of the time.

203 of real Americans.” Instead, she found the country populated by people “so foreign that my fear is they will assimilate the American, who, after all, is too fine a type to be sacrificed….All America during my absence has been turned, not into the melting-pot some call it, but the dumping ground, the refuse heap of Europe.”616 As spaces of public engagement, entertainment, and consumption, restaurants were places where nationality could be defined and redefined, especially through the food one was willing to consume. During World War I, many restaurants displayed their patriotism through decidedly American imagery. For instance, the Hof Brau restaurant in

San Francisco, “world-famous for its German dishes and beer, its atmosphere,” changed its name to The States Restaurant (to the chagrin of Henry L. Hirsch, the founder). “German music gave way to patriotic American tunes and jazz,” and a stained-glass map of the United States was mounted over the dining room entrance.617 “The States [was] deemed more appropriate and patriotic during war-torn days,” one guidebook writer explained. “Over the booths were the names of the states of the Union. One could dine in Wisconsin, in Delaware, in Texas, or any State which held significance either as to birth place or for sentimental reasons….[O]ne felt indeed fortunate to be securely esconed [sic] in New Jersey.”618 This kind of appropriation of the foreign theme in favor of the domestic is just one way in which restaurants‟ material space could be manipulated to represent and uphold ideals of U.S. nationalism. Nationalist rhetoric also emerged in discussions about the nationality of America‟s chefs. The restaurant industry bristled with feelings of inferiority when

616 Elizabeth Robbins Pennell, “A Stranger in My Land,” The North American Review, June 1918, 880. 617 “Hof Brau Will Get New Home,” San Francisco Chronicle, May 28, 1933; Ernest A. Dench, “A Booth for Every State,” American Restaurant, April 1923, 55. 618 Ruth Thompson, Eating around San Francisco (San Francisco: Suttonhouse, Ltd, 1937), 75.

204

American food was compared to the culinary skills of the Continent, and most particularly, French cuisine. “[I]n America, there is a great deal heard of the marvelous cuisines of the European restaurant and no praise heard of our own,” bewailed one industry representative. Defending American cookery, he continued, “the fact is that the menus of the American eating places are fully up to the standard set on the continent, and many times ever surpass them…”619 A chef pronounced the “old idea that whatever is foreign is superior” as “a threadbare bugaboo,” and supported the training of more American-born chefs, especially as immigration restrictions closed the country to chefs from abroad.620 Irritated with the reliance on foreign chefs to staff the finest kitchens of restaurants in the United States, industry insiders rallied to teach American-born chefs the skill of restaurant food preparation.621 In 1925, the American Caterers‟ Association announced the formation of the first training college for chefs in the United States.622 Many in the industry believed that American chefs were not only equal, but in fact preferable, to foreign-born cooks: “A good American cook and good American dish make a combination that no foreigner with whatever flights of fancy and deftness of fingers, can equal,” the Chicago Evening Post declared in 1926.623 The general consensus was that America lacked native-born chefs because the industry did not command the same cultural level of respect as in European countries like France and Italy, which raised cuisine to the level of art. In the United States, the profession occupied a lower status, making it a less-appealing vocation for young men

619 De Witt Harry, “Why Not American Cooks,” American Restaurant, April 1920, 15. 620 Chef Berger, “Tolerance,” Pacific Coast Chef, August 1926, 16. 621 According to the Pacific Coast Chef, “at the beginning of the World War less than two per cent of the men engaged in handling food in public places were American citizens and none of them American born” (“Page an American Chef,” Pacific Coast Chef, June 1924, 4). 622 “American Chefs to Take Place of European,” Pacific Coast Chef, October 1925, 10. 623 “American Trained Chefs (from Chicago Evening Post),” Pacific Coast Chef, May 1926, 15. 205

(and occasionally women).624 However, even in the midst of efforts to develop native- born American chefs, several members of the restaurant industry called for greater tolerance and appreciation of foreign-born chefs. “Drawing the line between American and European Chefs should be done in a less provoking manner than is usually done,” one culinary association member recommended. “It is only by understanding each other, by knowing the work for which one is best suited, that we can hope to keep harmony and good fellowship.”625 In other words, the restaurant industry could facilitate greater appreciation and acceptance for other cultures, rather than contribute to international antagonisms, already heightened in the United States by World War I, the Bolshevik Revolution and the Communist threat, and nativist efforts to close America‟s borders to foreign immigrants. The industry‟s potential to ameliorate discrimination against foreign restaurants is evidenced by a series of articles entitled “Nationality and the Restaurant” that appeared in the American Restaurant magazine, “articles dealing with nationality in the restaurant business.” However, these foreign restaurant portraits were also premised on essentialist characterizations that belied a continued belief in the “inborn” qualities of national populations. The articles, which praised Greeks as good businessmen and Chinese as highly sanitary, claimed “to present to the reader an unprejudiced view of the nationalities in the restaurant field, putting the „race question‟ in the discard….”626 The writer‟s attempt to assuage potential fears of foreign restaurants and to encourage Americans to patronize these establishments, while at the same time holding on to deep-

624 J.G. Hilliard, “Must We Develop Our Own Cooks?” Pacific Coast Chef, April 1926, 6; Paul Mueller, “The 100 per cent American Chef,” Pacific Coast Chef, March 1926, 12-13. 625 Henry Charles Monttrand, “What Is Ailing the Culinary Art? Can Its Ills Be Healed, Cured?” Pacific Coast Chef, May 1926, 8. 626 “Nationality and the Restaurant,” American Restaurant, November 1919, 17. See also “Nationality and the Restaurant,” American Restaurant, December 1919, 20.

206 rooted stereotypes, mirrors the growing acceptance and popularity of foreign and foreign- themed restaurants in the 1920s and 1930s. The growth of foreign-themed restaurants in the United States coincided with a number of political, economic, and cultural changes: the onset of Prohibition, the increase of an urban female workforce, the rising popularity of socializing outside of the home, and the growth of a visual culture produced as part of the burgeoning consumerism associated with movie theaters, department stores, and nightclubs. Many of the high-end, haute cuisine restaurants that profited from alcohol sales closed their doors as a result of the Eighteenth Amendment. To stay in business, restaurants lowered their prices, changed their designs, and focused on a new clientele: middle-class men and women. In 1927, the restaurant industry determined that over 20 percent of Americans‟ meals were eaten outside of the home, a result of increased wealth; a greater desire for travel and leisure facilitated by the automobile; and the “servant problem,” which reflected a decline in the availability of domestic help as a result of more restrictive immigration laws.627 However, the industry‟s first comprehensive marketing survey in 1930 suggested, “Perhaps the most important factor that is causing the growing trend of food consumption away from home is the increasing tendency towards urban dwelling.”628 Men and women who lived in urban areas contributed not only to the general increase in dining out; they also were more likely than their small-town counterparts to experiment with foreign foods as a result of the “cosmopolitan influence.”629

627 “Growth of the Eating Out Habit,” Pacific Coast Chef, October 1927, 19; “More Money Means More „Eating Out,‟” Mixer and Server, January 15, 1928, 57. 628 Marketing Analysis of the Restaurant Industry, 12; C. A. Patterson, “The Outlook for 1928 in the Restaurant Business,” American Restaurant, January 1928, 25. 629 Grace and Beverly Smith and Charles Morrow Wilson, Through the Kitchen Door: A Cook‟s Tour to the Best Kitchens of America (New York: Stackpole Sons, 1938), 27. 207

Even as early as 1910, food journalists observed that, in New York, “it was quite a common practice for groups to go off to some restaurant serving foreign food and enjoy thoroughly the different manner in which it was served.”630 Visitors and tourists, along with local residents, took advantage of the foreign dining opportunities in big cities. The Washington Post reported that 2,000 delegates of the American Home Economics

Association, who traveled to New York from places such as Corvallis, Oregon; Burlington, Vermont; and Austin, Texas, chose to dine out in Chinese, Swedish, German, Japanese, and Russian restaurants during their stay.631

In the 1920s and 1930s, restaurant patrons tended to be white, middle- and upper- class men and women although, as one restaurant study confirmed, “men customers outnumbered women in a large majority of…restaurants.” This study also showed that

“women in secretarial and business work” were the “most important [group] of [female] patrons.”632 Tourists, including women, also contributed to a large percentage of restaurant sales, especially in urban areas. Marjorie Hillis, in her guide for women vacationists, recommended foreign restaurants including the East India Curry Shop, Giovanni‟s Italian restaurant, and the Golden Horn, which served Turkish specialties. All of these restaurants qualified as places where “two or more women might go…with no qualms or embarrassment.”633 The industry was attuned to its clientele. The vice- president of the National Restaurant Association remarked, “The dinner business, at least for most restaurants, doesn‟t come from the laboring classes. It comes from the families of white-collar workers.”634 Social historian Katherine Leonard Turner points out that in

630 Helen Ewing, “The Glories of Appetizers and Cocktails,” American Restaurant, November 1935, 68. 631 “Chinese Food Makes a Hit with Experts,” Washington Post, June 28, 1934, 13. 632 “Why the Survey,” American Restaurant, September 1938, 27. 633 Marjorie Hillis, New York, Fair or No Fair: A Guide for the Woman Vacationist (New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1939), 76-77. 634 R. Cooley, “Streamlining Your Ideas,” American Restaurant, October 1938, 98. 208 the early-to-mid twentieth century, local, small ethnic restaurants that catered to single men and recent immigrants—who did not have the time, means, or ingredients to prepare traditional foods—were some of the only restaurants within reach of the working class.635 Among the overall growth of restaurants, foreign-themed venues, in particular, thrived for several reasons. First, to support U.S. participation in World War I, the federal government, under the leadership of Herbert Hoover, and the U.S. Food Administration (a precursor to the Food and Drug Administration) asked Americans voluntarily to practice food conservation. Several ethnic cuisines were made of economical ingredients that were less in demand than meat and other scarce foodstuffs. For example, Chinese restaurateurs, who used little-to-no wheat and minimal meat in their cuisine, fared well during the war.636 Therefore, these diets were budget-friendly and became more acceptable during the war. Also, foreign restaurants that had previously catered to a predominately native clientele witnessed their numbers of customers diminish alongside increasingly tighter immigration restrictions. As the operator of Beliska‟s Restaurant, which catered to Russian and Hungarian immigrants, described, “Since de immigration is closed, you know, it grows gradjally less people; it is shrinking, yes, business is shrinking liddle by liddle.”637 Therefore, restaurant owners became more willing to adapt their restaurants and cuisine to non-immigrant consumers in order to stay in business.638

635 Katherine Leonard Turner, “Buying, Not Cooking: Ready-to-Eat Food in American Urban Working- Class Neighborhoods, 1880-1930,” Food, Culture, and Society 9, no. 1 (Spring 2006), 13-40. 636 “Page an American Chef,” 5. 637 Herman Spector, “Nobody Boddas You (Beliska‟s Restaurant),” ca. 1938, Manuscript Division, WPA Federal Writers‟ Project Collection, Library of Congress. 638 Harvey A. Levenstein, “The American Response to Italian Food, 1880-1930,” in Food in the U.S.A.: A Reader, ed. Carole Counihan (New York: Routledge, 2002), 75-90. German immigrant restaurateurs were particularly willing to distance themselves from their national heritage following World War I. Konrad Bercovici tells the story of one first-generation German American deli owner who, during the war, renamed Leberwurst as “liver sausage” (channeling Freedom Fries eighty years later) and hung a sign announcing “No foreigners served here,” which apparently attracted numerous customers (Konrad Bercovici, Around the World in New York [New York: The Century Co., 1924], 342-343). See also Steven D. Hoelscher, 209

The cosmopolitan make-up of America‟s largest cities, from New York and San Francisco to Chicago and New Orleans, in the early twentieth century also facilitated interest in foreign foods. Many restaurants capitalized on Americans‟ culinary curiosity by offering the national dish of various countries to menus‟ lists of weekly specials.639 The variety of seasoning and spices, less common traditional American cooking of this period, appealed to Americans bored with the more basic, straightforward American fare. Several catering associations, in fact, supported a campaign to add more originality to American foods, which they dismissed as dull and lacking innovation. “All America has produced or imitated [in the past century] is chop suey, hamburger, steak, hot dog, and lunch places among pills, purges and disinfectants,” critiqued the group of chefs and caterers.640 Yet other industry members suggested that American cuisine in the 1920s was in transition, as foreign foods from the French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Chinese “remodeled” American dishes served in restaurants, creating an American culinary art representative of “the varied and cosmopolitan tasted of one of the greatest admixtures of people that the world has even known.”641 As a result, dishes ranging from Anglicized goulash to Seaweed soup to the Japanese-influenced Suki Yaki graced American restaurant tables in the 1920s.642

In 1921, the Los Angeles Times reported that “so popular is the demand for certain national types of cooking that…the connoisseur may eat his ecstatic fill in any language

Heritage on Stage: The Invention of Ethnic Place in America‟s Little Switzerland (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998): 75-82. 639 Vernon O‟Reilly, “You Can Still Get Good Food Around Here,” San Francisco News, October 30, 1950, 15; J.O. Dahl, “Business Building Ideas,” American Restaurant, July 1925, 48. 640 “„American Menus Need Uplifting,‟ Say U.S. Chefs,” Pacific Coast Chef, January 1928, 9; “Something About Cooking,” Pacific Coast Chef, June 1925, 14. 641 “The American Culinary Art,” Pacific Coast Chef, June 1924, 13; “American Culinary Art Now Ordinary,” Pacific Coast Chef, July 1924, 3. 642 “Hungarian Gulyas,” Pacific Coast Chef, February 1926, 7; “Chinese Recipes,” Pacific Coast Chef, August 1927, 15; “Suki Yaki Is Served to Friends,” San Francisco Examiner, April 14, 1929. 210 which he may desire.”643 This editorialized remark echoed statistics on international food imports. By 1920, the United States was importing $1.84 billion of foreign food, compared to only $226 million in 1900.644 As one New York Times food writer announced in the opening to her 1934 article on “Appetite‟s Pride and Prejudice,” “Food prejudices largely affect the diet of all nations.” Yet, she continued, “local contacts, restaurants and markets, along with travel abroad, have at the same time given us [Americans] tolerances, till from the familiarity the more cosmopolitan have been led first to „endure, then pity, then embrace,‟ and so learn of table pleasures the more provincial citizens have missed.”645 One of the places where Americans encountered foreign foods in the 1930s was at Chicago‟s Century of Progress Exposition in 1933-34 and the 1939-40 New York‟s World Fair.

World‟s Fairs played an influential role in introducing Americans to foreign foods. As early as 1876, the simulated displays of world cultures at America‟s World‟s Fairs packaged foreign “villages” as part of each fair‟s “educational” entertainment, and many countries chose to operate restaurants as a way of inviting Americans and other visitors to experience their cultural traditions. The exposure to foreign foods at world‟s fairs generated curiosity and a taste for these foods long after a fair closed its doors. For instance, at the 1933 Chicago World‟s Fair, the brother-owner duo of Robert and Max Eitel, who operated several German restaurants in Chicago and Milwaukee, replicated Germany‟s Old Heidelberg Inn and served traditional German fare by waitresses dressed in “colorful peasant costumes, complete down to the last detail of the leather purse

643 Wynonah B. Johnson, “Dining „Round the World in Los Angeles,” Los Angeles Times, January 1, 1921, V19. 644 Hoganson, Consumers‟ Imperium, 110. 645 Henrietta Ripperger, “Appetite‟s Pride and Prejudice,” New York Times, November 11, 1934, SM14. 211 swinging from their belts.”646 Based on the restaurant‟s popularity at the fair, the brothers reconstructed the restaurant in Chicago the following year so customers could continue to “experience” Germany through its culinary recreation. Finally, the onset of the Great Depression inspired the creation of novel, escapist dining atmospheres that distracted customers from the grey reality of everyday life.

Restaurant trade journals, such as American Restaurant and Catering World, documented this desire for variety, declaring it an “everlasting call for something new” that took the form of “Chop Suey Week” and nightly “chilly con carne” and “spaghetti a la Caruso” specials as restaurants sought to “capitalize on this desire for foreign foods.”647 Restaurant management books reminded restaurateurs that customers were “yearning for far places,” for “strange sights, strange foods, tantalizing odors—without going more than a few miles from their own front doors!”648 As J.O. Dahl, a leading restaurant industry expert, explained in his book Restaurant Management: “The mere mention of their names [of foreign countries] inspires dreams. All of us cannot go to these distant places, but in some degree we can bring them to the public.”649 Native-born American customers looking to dabble in world travel over the span of a meal were usually interested in a kind of packaged authenticity, a cultural reproduction that was different enough to feel foreign, but familiar enough to be appealing. This fabricated authenticity of the foreign-themed restaurant environment is comparable to Daniel Boorstin‟s concept of the pseudo-event, a self-fulfilling planned experience that is designed in response to

646 H. C. Siekman, “A Century of Progress Restaurants,” American Restaurant, June 1933, 26. 647 Patrick McKee, “The Everlasting Call for Something New,” American Restaurant, November 1934, 33; Thomas Gibbons, “What Customers Want Today,” Catering World, June 1932, 18. 648 Madeline Gray and Vass de lo Padua, How to Be a Success in the Restaurant Business (New York: Greenberg, 1946), 224. 649 J.O. Dahl, Restaurant Management: Principles and Practice, 2nd ed. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1938), 68. 212

Americans‟ “extravagant expectations.” According to Boorstin, pseudo-events render travel adventures pre-contrived rather than spontaneous, where the exotic and familiar converge in self-contained environment.650 In much the same way, native-born Americans sought out foreign-themed restaurants with the expectation that the stage would be set for just the right balance of strange and recognizable.

VARIATIONS ON A FOREIGN RESTAURANT

The performance of ethnicity within the restaurant space and the cultural reproduction for tourist appeal was not, and had not been, always a part of foreign restaurants. While it was true that many restaurants placed food on the back burner, so to speak, in favor of an exotic, cosmopolitan décor, numerous establishments were owned and operated by immigrants who provided familiar native foods to their community. Guidebook authors were often quick to point out restaurants that fit this description. Konrad Bercovici observed that “the same clients came night after night for their dinner” at a Syrian restaurant in New York, where “the menu was printed in Arabic as if were [sic] in Arabia.”651 Ruth Thompson described the Tao Yuan Chinese restaurant in San Francisco as “the place where the Chinese and their families, in their native costumes, eat with chopsticks. No American food can be obtained there, but some Americans…have discovered it and the Orientals will cater to them courteously to the extent of giving a choice of chopsticks or knives and forks.”652 Many Chinese restaurants, motivated by the tourist economy, cultivated exoticism in Chinatown restaurants for non-Chinese tourists seeking “picturesque foreignness.” Once the tourists left, these same restaurants served

650 Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1962: repr. New York: Vintage Books, 1992), 3-6, 77-117. 651 Bercovici, Around the World in New York, 34. 652 Thompson, Eating around San Francisco, 89. 213 elaborate meals to well-to-do Chinese families, and the restaurants turned into places “where the Chinese felt at ease and the Americans became the foreigners.”653 Similarly, historian Hasia Diner notes in her study of Italian, Irish, and Jewish immigrant foodways, “well through the 1920s, the general public was not the intended consumer.”654 In order to generate more business, especially after immigration restrictions slowed the influx of restaurants‟ foreign national customers, many foreign-born restaurateurs worked hard to welcome native-born Anglo American guests. At the Red Star Inn, a Bavarian restaurant in Chicago, the proprietor Papa Gallauer attracted customers with “[d]ecorative beer steins…and fat waiters with German accents,” as well as his own “beaming personality.” Guidebook writer John Drury claimed patrons flocked to the restaurant because of the food, “the quiet, old-world atmosphere, and Papa

Gallauer.”655 Morris Ehrlich, who emigrated from the “old country” around 1900, advertised his restaurant to an American-born clientele by emphasizing sanitation, “including an up-to-the-minute water filtering system, for the protection of the patron‟s health,” as part of “a pleasing admixture of Old European style cookery and modern American restaurant service.”656 The targeted customer, then, was a key distinction between foreign restaurants and foreign-themed restaurants. Revealing the conscientious practice of serving Russian dishes palatable to Americans, Mrs. Valentine A. Varipaeff, the founder and owner of the Russian Tea Room in San Francisco, explained to one guidebook author how it had “taken years of study and experimentation”: “I watch my guests and talk to them about what dishes they like, so I have been able to find out the

653 Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1998), 247, 253. 654 Hasia R. Diner, Hungering for Americans: Italian, Irish, and Jewish Foodways in the Age of Migration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 75. 655 John Drury, Dining in Chicago: An Intimate Guide, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: H. Wolff, 1931), 76-77. 656 H. C. Siekman, “Old-Time Dishes in a Modern Way,” American Restaurant, September 1931, 46. 214

American taste in Russian dishes and cater to it,” she explained.657 Although her food remained traditional, it was also selectively foreign to appeal to white, middle-class Americans‟ tastes. The interest in appealing to a wide-ranging clientele was critical for a foreign- themed restaurant to be accepted simultaneously as an “American” restaurant, which is best illustrated by George Chappell‟s 1925 dining guide. In The Restaurants of New York, Chappell divided New York City‟s foreign restaurants into two categories; his criteria for differentiation are worth quoting at length. Chappell singled out a “class of restaurant which defies [New York] geographical grouping, namely those of foreign peoples who, dwelling among us, still cling to their national cuisine….French, German, Italian, Spanish, Mexican, Hawaiian, Syrian, Japanese, Chinese, they are found wherever a few of their appetites are gathered together.” These “enclave” foreigners were not “foreign citizens”; instead, they were designated outsiders with “queer, unknown tastes.”658 Clinging rigidly to foreign culinary traditions, these restaurants exhibited a loyalty to their homeland that set them apart from American cuisine. In contrast, Chappell identified foreign restaurants that intentionally invited in “all” Americans. By creating décor and food that appealed to the native-born American palate, they were worthy of the distinction of not being designated simply as “Foreign Feeding Grounds.”

In considering the restaurants of our foreign citizens it is evident that there are many, particularly among the Germans, French and Italians, which have for many years been favorite meeting and eating places for the general public, regardless of nationality. They still retain a national character and their bills of fare are marked by many special dishes which

657 Thompson, Eating around San Francisco, 138. 658 Chappell, Restaurants of New York, 8, 148. 215

speak eloquently of the Fatherland or La Patrie, but they have also become, to a certain extent, Americanized. They are the rendezvous of all. A number of the restaurants of these countries have been mentioned in previous pages of this book. If I recall them under this supplementary heading of “foreign” places, it is because they must be included in the two categories. While patronized largely by the general public, they still remain the gathering places of those who enjoy meeting old friends with whom they can speak their native language and share their native dishes.659

In Chappell‟s view, Americanized foreign restaurants were not really “foreign”; they were representative of cosmopolitan America and therefore foreign-themed. By proving their loyalty to the United States, they earned the title of “foreign citizens.” If the patronage of and enthusiasm for foreign-themed restaurants mirrored the “international nationalist” support of immigrant cultures in the United States, tolerance for foreign languages within the restaurant space also echoed the contradictory demands from proponents of Americanization. Social historians, such as Andrew Haley and Harvey Levenstein, have documented the widespread effort to Anglicize menus in American restaurants in the early-to-mid twentieth century.660 Middle-class customers tired of the pretension of French terminology and other foreign words begged restaurants to Americanize their menus in the name of national pride and consideration for the tongue-tied patron. The use of foreign terms in restaurants turned Americans into “copy cats,” claimed dissenters throughout the 1920s.661 Even into the 1930s and 1940s, restaurant trade journals suggested that American restaurants would finally come into fruition when “terms of French and other foreign origins…disappear from the American menu.” At that point, “importations of everything will be looked upon with disdain and

659 Chappell, Restaurants of New York, 148 (emphasis added). 660 Andrew Haley, “„I Want to Eat in English‟: The Middle Class, Restaurant Culture and the Language of Menus, 1880-1930,” Midwestern Folklore 29 (2003): 28-39; Levenstein, Revolution at the Table, 191-193. 661 C. A. Patterson, “Restaurateur,” American Restaurant, May 1920, 34. 216 petulance,” claimed Irwin Keeler, editor of the Pacific Hotel and Restaurant Review, and “there will be an emphasis on good ole American dishes.”662 The rising popularity in dining out among Americans occurred, the industry suggested, when menus dropped foreign phrases from the food descriptions—until then, “the American public was too busy to be bothered translating fancy foreign terms into understandable English.”663 In other words, English-only advocates within the industry‟s ranks implied businesses which continued to describe dishes in foreign languages were responsible for slowing the growth of the dining out habit.

On the other side of the table, numerous chefs (often of French origin) argued that the use of foreign languages on menus, and in particular the appearance of French terminology, was not a pretentious gesture but rather served a functional purpose. Foreign words had become standardized within the restaurant industry, they argued, summarizing in a single word or short phrase a geographical, historical, or technical reference. They were not for “swank” or “grandstanding.” Rather, “arbitrarily [coining] American names to substitute for foreign words,” such as “[rechristening] sauerkraut liberty cabbage,” simply made Americans look and sound “ridiculous.”664 Others in the industry, including those born outside of the United States, mediated a middle ground, proposing that

English appear alongside a foreign language on menus.665 What is most evident, however, is that there was no consensus on the issue.

662 Irwin Keeler, “Americanization of the Menu Predicted,” Keeler‟s Pacific Hotel and Restaurant Review, July 1945, 14. 663 C.A. Patterson, “What‟s In It?” American Restaurant, June 1936, 36. 664 Daniel Woeflin, “French Appellations Are on Menus to Stay,” Pacific Coast Chef, May 1924, 2. See also L. Paquet, “Why Menus Are in French,” Pacific Coast Chef, December 1923, 1; “What Is In a Name?” Pacific Coast Chef, February 1925, 18; and Maxime Huguet, “Why French Dishes Have Queer Names,” Pacific Coast Chef, December 1927, 16-17. 665 Emile Michea, “Too Much A La,” Pacific Coast Chef, January 1924, 2; “Americanizing the Menu,” American Restaurant, January 1923, 45. 217

Within the increasingly nativist political climate of the 1920s, much of the debate over menu language tied to the Americanization and English-only movements that were gaining momentum amidst growing nationalist impulses. The American Restaurant magazine, one of the industry‟s leading trade journals, repeatedly printed editorials throughout the early 1920s supporting the idea of a one-language nation. “So we have restaurants on American soil owned and controlled by men from almost every country,” the magazine acknowledged in February 1920. However, the article continued, taking a decidedly nativist stance: “We native Americans cannot help but register surprise and even suspicion when we hear foreign tongues spoken…in public restaurants.” While, for the restaurateur and his foreign-born staff, “it may be hard to twist the tongue around to say it in American,” using English was necessary for “restaurant men of foreign birth” to be “one hundred per cent American.” According to the restaurant industry, “the taking out of citizen papers does not make an American citizen. The change must take place in the heart”—and, apparently, on the tongue.666 This kind of advocacy for English-only restaurants, however, only tells the part of the story that more closely aligns with the “100 per cent Americanization” viewpoint. Some of the opposition to foreign languages in restaurants tied back to the same reasons why Americans desired native-born chefs: it was a response to feelings of inferiority compared to Europeans and their cuisine. The Longchamps chain even used this widespread perspective to sell their French-influenced American dishes. Owned by Henry Lustig, the dozen or so locations of the restaurant in New York City specialized in fresh vegetables and other fine, affordable French dishes served in a sleek atmosphere

666 “Americanism,” American Restaurant, February 1920, 30. 218 that exuded modernity.667 In 1930, the business circulated a promotional pamphlet that included a story entitled “The French Influence.” Richard, after leaving a long day at the office, returns home only to be bombarded by the shrill recitation of his wife‟s French lesson. Lucille “had gone French with terrible speed,” Richard reflects, shaking his head at her obsession with all things French: the language, clothing, furniture—even waxed moustaches. Cleverly, Richard devises a plan to lure Lucille into a Longchamps restaurant where he declares, “And let me tell you, dearest, the French Influence is all right when it comes to cooking!....If you could taste these [delicious French] things, sweetheart, why then you would drop being French and thank heavens you‟re American and that Longchamps is right at hand to give you a French cuisine such as even Paris cannot boast!” Lucille agrees to order dinner, and after the meal she “promised to quit being French.” The moral of Richard‟s story, of course, is that Francophiles focused too narrowly on the un-American, thereby missing out on the best restaurant food—even better than “real” French cuisine—that America had to offer.668 Richard also seemed to suggest that the United States could afford to have fewer French speakers outside, as well as inside, the restaurant space. Although many Americans pushed to Anglicize the menu, several foreign-themed restaurants still profited from the use of foreign languages and heavy foreign accents as spoken by the restaurant workers.669 The appeal of foreign-language speaking employees was as much—if not more—for the benefit of English-speaking American customers as

667 William Grimes, Appetite City: A Culinary History of New York (New York: North Point Press, 2009), 224, 260. 668 Longchamps House and Garden: Milk Fed Duckling (New York: Longchamps, 1930), 4, 7. 669 In discussions questioning the existence of an American cuisine, both Sidney Mintz and Krishnendu Ray (despite their different conclusions) support the idea that cuisine is inextricably tied to language and the “talk” about food, not only the tasting of food (Mintz, Eating American, 23-33; Ray, “Nation and Cuisine,”259-297). 219 for foreign nationals. Why would native-born American patrons delight in listening to foreign languages in speech and yet protest menus written in the same languages? Certainly, one reason is likely that hearing another language contributed to the “atmosphere” of the restaurant and the ever-elusive notion of authenticity. Jane Desmond attributes this kind of authorization to the concept of “physical foundationalism,” or the belief that the body is an inherently real or authentic indicator of identity because it is “natural.” “Live performers,” Desmond suggests, “not only authenticate these packaged differences; they also offer the possibility of contact with them,” thereby creating an encounter with “people who are „different‟ from you.” Simultaneously, the production commodifies identity, replacing historical accuracies with an unmediated (and highly subjective) experience.670 The physical act of speaking a language other than English naturalized the restaurant‟s recreated foreign environment. Some restaurants in the late 1920s and early 1930s, such as Child‟s restaurant in New York, started to hire multilingual waitresses “for the convenience of the foreign patrons who may not be well versed in English.”671 Yet, despite the range of languages spoken by the staff—at one restaurant, thirty-two different languages were collectively spoken by the waitresses—“the expected influx of foreign patrons failed to appear. But plenty of Americans came in.”672 One journalist, describing the appeal of Armenian and Greek restaurants in New York City in 1923 noted:

The good Anglo Saxons who at first came there out of curiosity, and later brought their friends to show off, have come to like the food. They have learned a little Armenian, a little Greek, have bought curios from the new

670 Jane C. Desmond, Staging Tourism: Bodies on Display from Waikiki to Sea World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), xv-xvi. 671 “Waitresses are Linguists,” New York Times, March 5, 1931, 26. 672 Jerome Beatty, “How People Act in Restaurants,” American Magazine (1932), 134. 220

immigrants who come there and now look like Armenians themselves. Indeed, neither the proprietor nor his waiters have learned English. Last Summer the owner had engaged an English-speaking waitress. He lost many customers because of that. So he became wise. He refuses to speak even the English he knows.673

Many foreign-themed restaurants believed that the use of foreign languages added to the “showmanship” of the establishment and helped increase food sales—foreign languages spoken in restaurants could “season” the atmosphere if used with restraint. Fabricated authenticity could contribute to the reality of a foreign-themed restaurant as “pseudo-event,” as evidenced by the story of a French chef in New York in the 1920s. A friend stopped by the French restaurant where Barnabette was employed as a cook. “Bonjour, camarade,”Barnabette greeted his friend, “with that slight „h‟ before the „r‟ which is the privilege of the Parisian.” Puzzled by a phonograph and several books resting on a nearby table, the friend asked, “What is all that?” “Oh,” Barnabette replied, “I have no time….I am studying to become a chef.” Further confused, since the man was already a chef, the friend asked Barnabette to explain himself. “Mais oui! Mais oui!” Barnbette replied. “One can never become a chef, no matter how good he is at his trade, with a Gascon accent.” And so, the guidebook-writing friend wrote, Barnabette “worked more than a year to eradicate his southern French accent,” but in the process, he “also lost his good, thick, pleasant voice, and acquired a falsetto, this being the only means to disguise his origin.”674 The irony here is that even though Barnabette is actually French, he doesn‟t have the accent that Americans expect of a French chef. Therefore, in order to qualify as “authentic,” he must practice the art of self recreation, feigning to be, essentially, who he already was.675

673 Konrad Bercovici, “America Europeanized,” New York Times, September 16, 1923, SM4. 674 Bercovici, Around the World in New York, 314-315. 675 For a detailed analysis of self-masquerading in fiction and film, see Wendy Doniger, The Woman Who Pretended to Be Who She Was: Myths of Self-Imitation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 221

Another explanation for American patrons‟ acceptance of restaurant staff who spoke a foreign language was that speech did not challenge the customer‟s access to food as long as the staff member understood English. Andrew Haley notes that “the struggle over the language of dining was never merely about words, it was about cultural authority.”676 English-speaking customers rejected foreign language menus if the descriptions hindered their ability to understand what they were ordering. Comparing the menu to a catalogue, one industry expert argued that non-English menu descriptions prevented customers from knowing what the restaurant had for sale.677 Yet if a foreign language spoken among staff members facilitated the restaurant operation, or provided a kind of musical background for the English-speaking patron, the language could be tolerated as long as it did not prevent the customer from enjoying (and correctly ordering) the meal. For instance, at La Salle Du Bois in Washington, D.C., “waiters—indeed, all the employees—carry on their business in the language of the homeland, although, of course, English is used as the means of communication with American patrons.”678 Waiters who translated menus “with intriguingly long titles in German” at Luchow‟s famed restaurant in New York, or San Francisco chefs “who spoke many languages and cooked in all of them,” added “old world courtesy” and novelty to the dining experience.679

676 Haley, “I Want to Eat in English,” 33. 677 Jay J. Kalez, “Your Menu Is Your Catalogue: „That‟s Why the Wise Restaurateur Lists His Food in English,‟” American Restaurant, May 1930, 41, 76, 78. 678 M. B. Schnapper, Washington‟s Dining Out Guide (Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press, 1944), 55. For other examples of restaurants in which foreign languages assisted in the efficient operation of the establishment, see L.K. Everett, “„Atmosphere on Toast‟ in This Unique Café,” American Restaurant, April 1930, 46-47 and Joe Minster, “Robbie‟s Restaurant Wedding of Varied Talents,” Pacific Coast Record, August 1964, 20-21. 679 Edith M. Barber, “Eating According to the Best German Traditions,” Better Homes and Gardens, March 1931, 126; Vernon O‟Reilly, “The City That Knows Chow,” San Francisco News, November 3, 1950, 21. 222

“The American linguistic situation produces an almost inescapable paradox,” argues Dennis E. Baron in The English-Only Question. “Minority-language speakers are encouraged to abandon their native tongues and become monolingual in English to demonstrate their patriotism, their willingness to assimilate, and their desire to enter the economic mainstream. Once they do this, they are encouraged…to learn a foreign language in order to strengthen their country‟s position in the international arena.”680 Employees‟ use of non-English languages as part of the restaurant‟s atmosphere was acceptable and even encouraged if it benefited the restaurant financially, which was indicative of satisfied customers. Even in the process of “Americanizing” restaurants, foreign languages operated as a tool to create more cosmopolitan consumers.

SETTING THE STAGE FOR SUPPER

American restaurateurs, both native- and foreign-born, recognized the profitable appeal of recreating a global atmosphere for their customers. Childs Company, which operated a chain of nationwide restaurants, noticed its profits declining and responded by opening two new restaurants, recreating the atmosphere of Old France and Old Spain, respectively. In Old France, waitresses “dressed in gay peasant costumes of blue, green, red and white, with a tiny black hat perched coquettishly on their heads.”681 At Child‟s Spanish Gardens, the company even went “to the trouble of picking dark-eyed beauties dressed in suitable multi-colored dresses to serve you.”682 The American Restaurant magazine praised Colorado restaurateur W. E. Murphy for making “the good Irish name of Murphy synonymous with chile, tamales and similar Spanish and Mexican delicacies”

680 Dennis E. Baron, The English-Only Question (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 15. 681 Nels H. Seaburg, “In Old France…The Latest Child‟s,” Restaurant Management, June 1928, 314. 682 J.J. Berliner, “Childs Restaurants Go Over the Top,” Catering World, April 1932, 9. 223 through his restaurant‟s Spanish architecture and good food.683 Similarly, the Pacific Coast Record gave credit to Mexican-born Señora Consuelo Castillo de Bonzo, proprietress of the Casa La Golondrina in Los Angeles, who opened the restaurant in 1930 to serve “real South-of-the-Border cuisine” alongside “quaint Mexican atmosphere.”684 Clearly, performance and representation were integral components of foreign-themed restaurants.685 Still, a restaurant could take its culinary modifications too far. One restaurant operator lamented, “the trouble with Chinese [restaurants is that] they try so hard to be

Americanized.”686 Weighting the scale between exotic foreign interiors and authentic yet palatable food was a difficult balance for Americanized foreign restaurants to strike. At the Aladdin Studio Tiffin Room in San Francisco each customer was encouraged “to imagine he is inside Aladdin‟s cave” while “Chinese dishes are favored on the menu and Chinese girls in native costume are employed as waitresses.”687 Other operators, recognizing the profits and appeal of particular foreign foods, incorporated the production of foreign cuisine and atmosphere into their restaurants, without modifying the original

683 K. Lovgren, “Fine Foods and Atmosphere Make Murphy‟s Famous,” American Restaurant, April 1937, 44, 108. 684 Joe Minster, “Los Angeles Landmark,” Pacific Coast Record, October 1961, 38-39. 685 The materiality of the restaurant space, and the production of racial and ethnic images within the eating establishments, are part of what Kristin Hoganson calls “performative geography”—the performance of the geographically-different through the manipulation of costume, stage settings, and cultural ephemera thereby producing “representations of difference” (Hoganson, Consumers‟ Imperium, 137). American-born white customers wanted to feel welcomed by the difference, rather than alienated by it. Therefore, successful foreign-themed restaurants tried to invoke foreign places and yet retain some level of familiarity for its patrons. For instance, owners of the Pagoda Inn advertised their restaurant on its menus as “High Class Chinese & American,” stating: “It is the aim of the management to introduce a part of the Chinese civilization to our American friends.” Similarly, businesses like Green‟s Chinese American Restaurant in Philadelphia offered “American or Chinese Food—You Ask for it, we have it,” and San Antonio‟s Shangri- La Restaurant served “typical Chinese food and also specializes in American steaks and fried chicken dinners” (Menus, Pagoda Inn and Green‟s Chinese American Restaurant, n.d., Henry Look Papers, The Historical Society of Pennsylvania; “Shangri-La Offers Chinese Food,” Chuck Wagon, August 1944, 9). 686 “Tong Y. Chin and the Golden Dragon,” American Restaurant, December 1936, 42. 687 Ernest A. Dench, “A Handful of Idea,” American Restaurant, April 1923, 55. 224 theme. For instance, David L. Stewart, who served American food at his restaurant, The Barn, built a “Chinese Grotto” room and added a Chinese food kitchen, complete with Chinese-born chefs, who prepared Chicken Sub Gum Chow Mein alongside orders for American Turkey dinners.688 Philip Gertner, the son of Austrian immigrants, decided “that the Orient had no monopoly on” sukiyaki and added Japanese food, along with

French Crepes Suzettes, to his menu. He hired “colorful little Japanese girls” to make the crepes in the window of the storefront using chopsticks, “a fact which the gay New Yorker chronicled as an „international note.‟”689

Harvey Levenstein argues that this “culinary and thematic mishmash” was a direct result of Americans‟ rejection of strange foreign foods: exotic decorations appealed to the customers‟ desire for a visually stimulating dining environment, while the food remained familiarly “American.”690 This explanation, however, does not sufficiently encompass restaurants like the Aladdin Studio where the “mishmash” was a collision of two “foreign” themes and foods, neither one decidedly “American.” Similarly, Coffee Dan‟s Old Madrid restaurant promoted four house specialties: a Salad Bowl, Olla Podrida (“a Spanish specialty”), a Health Platter, and Vegetable Chop Suey, all of which attempted to appeal to a range of customers through the mix of exotic and diet foods.691

The seemingly random mix of decor and dishes was a response to Americans‟ longing for “the thrill of having run away for an hour or two from their own too-familiar world,” explained one restaurant management guide. “Start with the best decorations you have

688 W. O. Voegele, “He Doesn‟t Know the Restaurant Business But,” Restaurant Management, September 1938, 29-31. 689 Robert F. Marshall, “A Profitable Business Built on Other Peoples‟ Ideas,” American Restaurant, May 1934, 62, 64. 690 Harvey A. Levenstein, Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 49. 691 “Merchandising Methods Keep Old Madrid in the Public Eye,” American Restaurant, June 1940, 66. 225 and the best food you can cook, regardless of period or place.”692 In other words, restaurant success depended on offering customers a change of pace, which could be reflected in the food, the décor, or both. Neither had to be “100 per cent American.” Rather than clinging to a recognizable “American” dining environment, white middle- class urban Americans delighted in their culinary adventurism—it helped to distinguish their national pride and character. Restaurant workers played a crucial role in creating the ambience of foreign- themed restaurants, in no small part because of the industry‟s tendency to view the employees as decorative objects themselves. One design consultant suggested that a “convincing interior” motif could “come from a combination of history and people, or from a race of people.”693 “Decoration applies to waiters and dishes too,” another restaurant manual reminded readers in the section, “Providing Escape By Decoration,” adding as a side note, “You don‟t even need the same kind of decorations as food.”694 Along these lines, Helen Orcutt, “an expert on dress” for waitresses, advised restaurateurs that if a woman “waits in a restaurant of old Spanish flavor, she must dress the part of the señorita, even to the high comb and mantilla.”695 Seeming to follow this advice, “a coffee house has put its girls into the flowered cottons of Spanish peasants,” noted the New York

Times in 1928.696 The view of employee-as-object functioned to naturalize the foreign realism of the restaurant, rather than call attention to its artificiality. Some restaurants exemplified their reliance on physical foundationalism by advertising the physical features, rather than just the costumes, of their employees.

692 Gray and de lo Padua, How to Be a Success, 225-228. 693 Harry J. Harman, “After You Bring Them In…Follow Through With an Attractive Interior,” American Restaurant, November 1945, 46. 694 Gray and de lo Padua, How to Be a Success, 227. 695 “Proper Costumes for Waitresses,” New York Times, May 30, 1928, 18. 696 Diana Rice, “The Waitress of Today is Trained for Her Job,‟ New York Times, May 20, 1928, 136. 226

Because the bodies of staff members validated the “foreign-ness” of the restaurant, restaurateurs invested in the “authenticity” of these employees. “Speaking of waiters, they are as imported as the Mouquin delicacies,” declared a review of Mouquin‟s French café in New York City.697 The Gertner restaurants suggested patrons might enjoy the novelty of Japanese food “concocted by dainty little Japanese girls, complete with kimono, wooden clogs, rice powder and sloe eyes,” while the dining room of the Hotel Californian explained that the “colorful touch” of the “little Chinese maidens…had to be sacrificed” and replaced by American girls when three of the Chinese girls married.”698

Probably the most extreme example modeling Desmond‟s concept of physical foundationalism occurred in Portland, Oregon, in 1963 where a restaurant operator was cited for racial discrimination because he refused to hire waitresses other than those of

Asian descent. “I have no prejudice against any race,” he declared, “but I am determined to carry out my Chinese theme even to employees. These petite Oriental girls in their brilliant kimonos, which incidentally cost me over $10,000 for the crew are a real attraction.”699 The emphasis on “native” costumes and employees, while pretending to promote a favorable image of foreign cultures, simultaneously objectified the employees, presenting them as caricatures for a dining audience. In the minds of many restaurateurs who operated foreign-themed restaurants that represented a nation or ethnicity different from their own, the characterization of human beings as decoration justified a disregard for cultural sensitivity and respect. Although many foreign-themed restaurants prided themselves on the “authenticity” of their staff, others had to rely on servers whose origins differed from the

697 “Mouquin‟s Famous for Its French Cuisine,” The Restaurateur, April 7, 1923, 45. 698 Marshall, “A Profitable Business,” 64; Augusta Stacy, “Shears Salad,” Hotel Monthly, October 1925, 77. 699 “Chinese Restaurant,” Pacific Coast Record, July 1963, 11. 227 nationality or global region recreated within the restaurant space. Despite the predominance of men in the restaurant industry, many American-born women from immigrant families, especially from northern and western Europe, worked in a variety of foreign-themed restaurants, especially after the Immigration Acts of the 1920s reduced the number of male immigrants who supplied the restaurant industry with labor prior to

World War One. Dorothy Sue Cobble, in her monograph on waitress unions, points out that “employers preferred women in these new-style eateries. Few of the exotic „theme‟ restaurants called for men: women were more suited for the role of decorative object.”700

In 1916 the Consumer‟s League of New York published a study on female restaurant employees and determined that out of 1017 women restaurant workers, 50 percent emigrated from northern or western continental Europe, one-third were American-born, 7 percent were Irish, 6 percent from eastern Europe, and 4 percent “other.”701 Frances Donovan, a Chicago author who immersed herself in the restaurant industry in order to write about it, observed in 1920 that most waitresses in the Midwest, although American- born, came from small towns where they lived with their foreign-born parents and spoke “with an accent which betrays this parentage.”702 As Cobble notes, most waitresses were from “old immigrant” groups, and employers continually showed bias against hiring women of Asian, Latin, or Jewish descent.703 Except, I argue, when the phenotypic traits of their bodies authenticated the “atmosphere” of the foreign-themed restaurant. It is reasonable to conclude, then, that if restaurant employees predominantly included American-born women of northern and western European descent, some staff

700 Cobble, Dishing It Out, 22. 701 Behind the Scenes in a Restaurant: A Study of 1017 Women Restaurant Employees (New York: Consumer‟s League of New York, 1916), 8. 702 Frances Donovan, The Woman Who Waits (Boston: Gorham Press, 1920), 133. 703 Cobble, Dishing It Out, 29-30. 228 members in foreign-themed restaurants that recreated environments outside of this region were role-playing ethnicity—pretending to symbolize the national or regional theme portrayed in their restaurant‟s theme. Laura Browder argues that “ethnic impersonators force us to rethink our easy assumptions about identity; they…make us question how all identities are constructed. They revise the basis for a national sense of self.” In the case of foreign-themed restaurants, employees who performed ethnicity for American-born, middle-class customers presented distilled depictions of the foreign for the dining public. Most of these employees were American citizens (almost always a requirement of the job), yet their employment required them to act the part of foreigners, suggesting that their legal and social status in the United States was different from the patrons they served. In this way, American-born citizens from immigrant families remained foreigners, national outsiders who perpetuated stereotyped caricatures about peoples from other countries. The danger of this kind of ethnic impersonation, according to Browder, is that “there is no moment that performers let down their guard and become other than what they represent themselves to be.” As a result, “impersonators may trap their [audience] further in essentialist thinking about race and ethnicity.”704 American-born consumers, experimenting with the foreign-themed dining adventure, may have wished to expand their knowledge of global cultures, but the representative bodies of the waitstaff frequently reaffirmed preconceived judgments and associations.705

704 Laura Browder, Slippery Characters: Ethnic Impersonators and American Identities (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 6, 9, 11. 705 Nor was the objectification of the foreign body limited to the waitstaff. Restaurateurs often returned to the United States from travels abroad with ideas for costumes and interior decoration. In the 1930s, the American Restaurant magazine ran a series of articles entitled “Letters from a Restaura-tourist to His Brother.” The restaurateur, on his travels through places like Bali, the Philippines, China, Japan, and Cuba, included numerous crude, superior statements about life in these countries and the bodies of their citizens. For example, in one letter that hyper-sexualizes the “exotic” Balinese women, he commented that “the men all liked Bali” because “the most that anyone wears here is a sarong.” This statement is accompanied by a photograph of a Balinese woman naked above the waist, with the caption, “Balinese girls invariably have 229

In addition to capitalizing on the physical characteristics of restaurant workers, leading industry experts also recommended the potential of using employee costumes to recreate effective foreign atmospheres. Spanish restaurants, such as the Barcelona Café in Miami and the Castilla restaurant in St. Louis decorated waitresses in “peasant garb with voluminous skirts, embroidered waists, and colored handkerchiefs,” while the busboys donned a “bright sash and gaudy blouse,” all arranged by the “wardrobe mistress.”706 Wooden shoes practically became industry standard at Dutch restaurants; berets abounded at French restaurants; and restaurants featuring multi-national cuisine, such as the Mayfair Café of All Nations in Washington, D.C., dressed waitresses according to the country she represented.707 The Angelica Jacket Company, leading supplier of uniforms to the hotel and restaurant industries, started producing styles reminiscent of Italian folk costumes. Similarly, the Fehrman Garment Company offered restaurant uniforms in “typical models such as those worn at Laube‟s Old Spain.”708 Yet the costumes and restaurant settings could also objectify service employees, contributing to exaggerated portraits of foreigners, such as the Los Angeles journalist who wrote

Don‟t be surprised if your dusky waitress, after serving you Mexican bean soup, should drop her tray, spring upon the stage and execute a roistering Spanish dance to the accompaniment of clacking castanets and a strumming orchestra—while her whirling skirt roguishly reveals a pair of something on their minds” (A. Boyd Pixley, “Letters from a Restaura-tourist to His Brother,” American Restaurant, May 1937, 54-55). 706 “Touring with Hofman,” American Restaurant, June 1937, 42; M. B. Brandewiede, “Castilla: Where St. Louis Dines Amidst Splendors of Old Spain,” American Restaurant, March 1930, 28, 76. 707 “Prizes for Best Window Displays,” American Restaurant, February 1933, 40; Seaburg, “In Old France,” 314; Chanticleer, “Lotus Presents Plenty of Girls in Floor Show,” Washington Post, August 7, 1935, 9; Ruth Anne Davis, “Color, Service, and Good Food Café‟s Keynote,” Washington Post, August 24, 1935, 9; Mary Harris, “Ringside Table,” Washington Post, November 21, 1941, 6; Georganne Williamson, “On the Town,” Washington Post, February 24, 1950, C7. 708 H. C. Siekman, “Touring the Exhibits at the „Restaurant World‟s Fair,‟” American Restaurant, November 1931, 47. 230

prettily dimpled knees—and then with a deep under-slung curtsey, she should hop down and serve you with the Enchilada.709

The “native” costumes worn by waiters and waitresses—many of whom did not self- identify with the restaurant‟s ethnic origins—distanced American customers from identifying with their “foreign” servers. In reference to white Americans‟ desire to “play Indian” throughout the history of the United States, Philip Deloria argues, “Costume and disguise…can have extraordinary transformative qualities.” These garments can “[signify] a racial, ethnic, or class category different from one‟s own. Disguise readily calls the notion of fixed identity into question.”710 Standard-issue neutral-colored uniforms worn by restaurant staff throughout the United States would have reminded customers of their everyday lives, rather than suggesting that, by walking through the restaurant doors, they had fallen into a foreign wonderland. “Native” costumes renewed the restaurant and its waitstaff for customers in constant search of something new, similar to the way one clothing expert suggested women might “hold a husband.” “Men soon tire of a costume, a personality, an attitude. They like change, surprise, excitement,” this fashionista explained. “Remember above all, that contrast is the trick. If you are tailored for morning, be…Oriental and exotic for night.”711 Foreign-themed restaurants, through costume and a staged interior setting, could offer customers this desired contrast to their everyday lives, thereby offering an incentive to patronize the restaurant while at the same time reaffirming notions of “foreign otherness.” Costume also allowed customers themselves to indulge in escapist fantasies of “playing native.” A prominent restaurant man, Fred Miner, circulated a photograph of

709 Charles Fletcher Scott, “Los Angeles on Parade,” Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine, 1931, 7. 710 Philip Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 6-7. 711 Malvina Lindsay, “The Gentler Sex,” Washington Post, March 21, 1939, 13. 231 himself “decked out in true Korean style” in the American Restaurant trade journal, following his tour of Asia as an emissary for the 1933 Chicago World‟s Fair. The photo‟s caption playfully suggested that readers would be unable to recognize Miner in his false beard and Korean costume, implying that only authentic costume was needed to transform into the “other.”712 For instance, the guidebook writer Ruth Thompson, whose exuberance for the “Oriental fun” of the Yamato Hotel‟s dining room— where “you may wear one of the kimonos”—belied the veracity of her wish “that I had been born Japanese” with the declaration, “It‟s fun! It‟s delicious! It‟s a thrill if you are the type who enjoys the unusual.”713 Thompson enjoyed “playing” Japanese, but only in the contained space of the restaurant.714 A restaurant‟s design and material props contributed substantially to its foreign mood, or so many industry experts believed. Proprietors went to great lengths to furnish their interiors with authentic décor imported from foreign lands whenever possible (much like their employees). The Chinese room at the Hotel Statler in Buffalo, New York, displayed walls paneled in Chinese landscape scenes, along with hangings of “oriental fabrics and colorings,” while the Mandarin Café in San Francisco inspired an article on Chinese architecture and interior design in Architect and Engineer.715 The Restaurant

Mayan in New York was so proud of its close adherence to the history and decorative traditions of the Mayan civilization that it published a 24-page promotional booklet on

712 “Fred Miner,” American Restaurant, September 1931, 45. 713 Thompson, Eating around San Francisco, 13-15. 714 “Playing ethnic” was not reserved for restaurant patrons. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, society women, philanthropic women‟s organizations, and other women‟s clubs hosted numerous benefit dinners in which debutantes, college girls, and other up-and-coming young women dressed the part of the “other” and volunteered as waitresses. See, for example, “130 Mothers Serve a Colorful Dinner,” New York Times, October 25, 1932, 8; “Aids in Benefit Plans,” New York Times, May 18, 1933, 23; “Miss Rebecca Tarwater To Sing Mountain Songs,” Washington Post, October 21, 1934. 715 Ideas for Refreshment Rooms (Chicago: The Hotel Monthly Press, 1923): 364-365; K. Hope Hamilton, “Influence of Chinese Art on Modern Interior Decoration,” Architect and Engineer, January 1926, 73-80. 232 the restaurant in the 1930s, retelling Mayan history and displaying in detail how “authentic Mayan ornamentation and color treatment prevail in the table decoration as well as the furnishings,” such as the use of the Mayan architectural feature, “emphasis on the horizontal.”716 Foreign-themed restaurants around the country followed suit, advertising “an exact reproduction of an Italian courtyard,” imported Spanish paintings and tapestries, traditional Swedish metal and glass work, and even sawdust and a “hedge of boughs” in an informal Italian café.717 All of these material objects were the industry‟s way of recreating an authentic and still comfortable foreign dining experience for American customers. The problem, however, was that American-born patrons already had preconceived ideas about what “foreign-ness” was supposed to look like. This preference for “expected difference” limited the scope of restaurants‟ experimentation with foreign foods and consumers‟ exposure to truly representative global culinary and cultural traditions. The restrictive effect of these boundaries of difference is best exemplified by Konrad Bercovici‟s story of Yussuf Ben, a twenty-year old Turkish immigrant who sold Turkish rugs at cafés and restaurants in New York. Bedecked in an outfit made by a master tailor in Turkey, and sporting a red fez, Yussuf Ben peddled his wares to the after- theater ladies, who, “as long as he looked Turkish…were sure that the rugs he sold were what he pretended they were.” However, after a few months, Yussuf Ben‟s Turkish shoes

716 Victor W. Knauth, et. al. Mayan Motifs (New York: Restaurant Mayan, ca.1930), 19, 21. 717 M. S. Sullivan, “He Brought His Restaurant Home from Italy,” Restaurant Management, March 1928, 121; Hazel Blair Todd, “Where San Francisco Bohemians Eat: Castilian Café Reminiscent of Old Spain,” San Francisco Bulletin, undated newspaper clipping, San Francisco Clippings vol. 6, San Francisco Public Library; Walter Rendell Storey, “Old and New Blended in Modern Rooms,” New York Times, September 18, 1932, SM12; Hazel Blair Todd, “Where San Francisco Bohemians Eat: Unique La Boheme Is Italian Stronghold,” San Francisco Bulletin, undated newspaper clipping, San Francisco Clippings vol. 6, San Francisco Public Library. 233 wore out, and he replaced them with “the most American-looking shoes” as a way of better fitting in with American culture. “And when he put them on a new step came into his feet, and in spite of the red fez and the home-made coat and trousers Yussuf was not half as Turkish as he had been on the previous day.” As a result, the after-theater women began to suspect the authenticity of his rugs, and he made fewer sales.718

In an effort to appeal to his customers and recover from the lost sales, Yussuf Ben practiced his English, cut his hair short, and shaved off his moustache. Despite retaining his red fez, his customers turned against him. “He is not a Turk at all,” one lady declared.

“He is a faker. He speaks American as well as you do.” And so, Bercovici tells us, Yussuf Ben failed at the business of selling Turkish rugs because “he looked too American. His red fez too counterfeit. People no longer spoke to him in broken English with many accompanying gestures to help him understand what they said. He did not look foreign. There was no sport in dealing with him.”719 The moral here is that Americans‟ desire for and consumption of the foreign is predicated on fixed notions of authenticity. As immigrants followed the rules and bowed to the pressure to adapt to American culture, paradoxically Americans rejected the changes if the foreign began to look too familiar. The American national pride in the cosmopolitan dimension of the country demanded that immigrants (including their food) Americanize—but not too much.

718 Bercovici, Around the World in New York, 406-407. 719 Bercovici, Around the World in New York, 407-410.

234

SPICES OF LIFE: THE RISING POPULARITY IN FOREIGN-FLAVORED FOODS

The success of foreign-themed restaurants depended on more than the atmosphere created by the employees. Reproductions—however diluted—of traditional foreign dishes held considerable appeal for Americans bored with the relatively bland standard of typical American fare. Tired of under-seasoned food, numerous patrons demanded more from the restaurant industry in the 1920s and 1930s. “Haven‟t American chefs ever heard of salt, pepper, mustard, paprika, cloves or the other spices and herbs that European chefs use as a matter of course? Must restaurant food in this country be flat, tasteless, dull and uninteresting?” one disgruntled patron questioned.720 Persons hired to develop recipes for restaurants and other institutions of mass feeding responded accordingly. “Foreign cooking is delicious,” recommended one recipe writer for the American Restaurant magazine. “The flavorings used abroad are sometimes combinations of our own spices and sometimes herbs and seasonings native to the country. Some of these are anise, cardamom, garlic, ajinomoto, allspice, many kinds of red peppers, citron, dill, rosemary, basil, and many others.” The author then advised restaurant cooks in how to prepare dishes using these unfamiliar spices and adapt them to American palates. Anticipating skepticism on the part of American chefs, she cautioned, “Some of the combinations sound outlandish, but if you have never eaten apricots in soup, nor cloves in meat, do not condemn them untried.”721 On another occasion, the same author remarked that despite Americans‟ familiarity with foods from India, Mexico, and Spain, too many delicious dishes had been overlooked, potentially because of their “burning spices” flavor profile. Modify the

720 Susan Noble, “And Season to Taste,” American Restaurant, October 1936, 60. 721 Erna Elizabeth Toevs, “Foreign Foods in America,” American Restaurant, June 1930, 43. 235 dishes, she recommended, and by “substituting commoner commodities at hand, these [recipes] may be copied with satisfactory results.”722 In the interwar years, numerous popular and industry periodicals offered restaurants and home-cooks alike recipes based on “genuine” foreign restaurants‟ dishes that could be copied and adapted for everyday American dining.723 Through the partnership of recipe developers, experimental chefs, and curious customers, foreign flavorings made their way into restaurants that served a variety of “American” fare. Among the favorite foreign cuisines of native-born Americans was Italian. Italian restaurants became exceedingly popular between the wars, in part because Americanized Italian-themed restaurants created a space where white, middle-class Americans imagined they could let their hair down, throw their hands up, and play in a more festive, gregarious atmosphere. Hasia Diner‟s study of Italian immigrant foodways argues that particular foods, including oils, cheeses, and macaroni, reserved for only the wealthy elite in Italy, were available to Italian immigrants in the United States. In part because of this availability of food, and continuing the Italian family-oriented emphasis on food preparation and consumption, “Italian immigrants placed a high premium upon eating certain foods and eating them well,” which carried over into the appeal of American

Italian restaurants.724 Levenstein has also suggested that Italian restaurants were particularly popular because they were frequently run by boarding house operators who specialized in making homemade alcohol. When the Eighteenth Amendment shut down their competition, Italian restaurants thrived among non-Italians because the restaurants

722 Erna Elizabeth Toevs, “Winter Dishes from Abroad,” American Restaurant, January 1931, 35. 723 For example, see Grace Turner, “Give Your Meals a South-Sea Tang,” Los Angeles Times, September 24, 1939, I11. 724 Diner, Hungering for America, 51. 236 continued to serve alcoholic beverages to their customers.725 According to Konrad Bercovici‟s 1924 New York guidebook, Italian restaurants were “extraterritorial as far as prohibition in concerned.” Most Italians, Bercovici claimed, viewed Prohibition as the “best law for the poor…bootlegger.”726 These restaurants advertised themselves to a native-born American clientele by promising food “such as one gets in Italy,” and in the process “enveloped food in the themes of pan-Italian identity, submerging local loyalties” to promote a unified “national” image of Italy to Americans.”727 The food, however, often was not what one could get in Italy. Despite claims that chefs “[prided] themselves on giving Italian home-style cooking in their restaurants,” “fine, traditional American specialties called „spaghetti with meatballs‟ and „cotoletta parmigiana‟” should be “just for fun called Italian,” remarked one Italian-born restaurateur.728 Another chef from northern Italy admitted that he had never tasted spaghetti until he arrived in the United States.729 What appealed to native-born American customers was the representation of Italy translated through the restaurant‟s ambiance and service, preferably a setting that conveyed “cultural rebellion and adventure” within a

725 Levenstein, “American Response to Italian Food,” 87. Italians were not the only nationality accused of this alcohol service scheme. The larger industry believed foreign restaurants, in general, which “offered distinctly foreign meals to appeal to the nationalities” in New York City neighborhoods, violated Prohibition law and presented unfair competition to law-obeying restaurants. See A.W. Dunlap, “Is Prohibition Just Another Name for Unfair Competition?” Restaurant Management, February 1929, 84-86. Gary Gerstle suggests, ironically in this case, that Prohibition resulted in part from opposition to immigration—it was an effort on the part of the government “to change the drinking behavior of individuals deemed incapable of changing themselves” (see Gerstle, American Crucible, 91). Instead, Prohibition had more of an impact on native-born, white ethnic Americans less familiar with the art of homemade alcohol. 726 Bercovici, Around the World, 129. 727 Diner, Hungering for America, 66-67. 728 Edith M. Barber, “Delicious Italian Food at Its Source,” Better Homes and Garden, October 1930, 56; Diner, Hungering for America, 54. 729 Susan Mills, “Madrillon‟s Noted Culinary Duo Do Brother Act Explanatory of Whys and Wherefores of Cooking,” Washington Post, February 13, 1934, 11. 237 safely contained environment.730 One guidebook suggested customers dine at San Francisco‟s Riveria restaurant to “[s]ave yourself the price of a trip to Italy…if you wish to be transported for the evening…to an atmospheric place breathing luxury and Latin feeling which is delightfully stirring and different” and leaves “the cares of the outside world behind.”731 In a more explicit suggestion of “cultural adventure,” the 1925 restaurant guidebook, Bohemian Eats of San Francisco, printed a drawing alongside the entry for Bigin‟s Bologna Restaurant that included a naked couple engaged in intercourse while leaning against a tree; in the open-field background, a trio of “Italians” participate in a similar act. “It is here,” states the guidebook, in reference to the restaurant, “that one appreciates the full meaning of the word „atmosphere.‟”732 The same author wrote a profile on Bigin‟s Bologna Restaurant for the San Francisco Bulletin, including a description one of the restaurant‟s wall panels, a provocative painting by Guillermo Vercellino titled “Carnival,” which furthered an image of the restaurant as deliciously risqué.733 These depictions of “ethnic performance,” complete with mood music and costume were all part of what some restaurateurs called the “showmanship” of foreign restaurants that “helps the sales and maintains tone for the restaurants that use it.”734 American restaurant patrons delighted in the escapism associated with Italy, and Italian- themed restaurants worked hard to meet customers‟ expectations of the perceived exoticism of the country. At the same time, though, many owners of Italian-themed restaurants tried to move beyond the gimmicks and represent the cultural contributions of their native

730 Gabaccia, We Are What We Eat, 99. 731 Thompson, Eating Around San Francisco, 10-11. 732 Jack L. and Hazel Blair Dodd, Bohemian Eats of San Francisco (San Francisco: n.p, 1925). 733 Hazel Blair Dodd, “Where San Francisco‟s Bohemians Eat: No Monkey Business Here,” San Francisco Bulletin, undated clipping, San Francisco Clippings vol. 6, San Francisco Public Library. 734 “A la Carte Menus Found Outmoded,” 25. 238 country while simultaneously asserting their loyalty to the United States. One restaurant review of Enrico & Paglieri‟s Italian restaurant noted that “though you may not get a chance to see them, Enrico is the owner of a gold spaghetti fork and spoon, presented to him in 1937 when he became the dean of the New York Society of Restaurateurs. This honor, conferred more often in Europe, has been shared by no other American.”735 Here,

Enrico, whose regular customers included mostly native Italians, is offered a kind of dual citizenship within the “restaurant nation”—his name and his restaurant confer Italian nationality upon him, but he is legally a citizen of the United States.736 Similarly, Pietro

Orcino, a native of Piemonte, Italy who owned-and-operated the Avignone Freres restaurant in Washington, D.C., was elected president of the Washington Restaurant Association.737 By safely navigating the gastronomic waters between the two countries, and providing his customers with an accessible version of Italy, Enrico was rewarded with the approval of the American restaurant and dining community. Certainly, self-identified ethnic restaurant owners had a personal investment in the portrayal of their native country presented to American customers. For example, Hasia Diner shows how Italian Americans, “as a group often stigmatized by the dominant culture for its low aspirations and violent character,” used public distribution of their food to “present their cultural distinctiveness as rich and worth preserving.”738 As a result, by the middle of the twentieth century, the American restaurant industry credited Italy as “second only to France in the art of fine dining” and “a land that rivals France in the abundance of its culinary treasure.”739 Restaurants provided immigrants the opportunity

735 “News of Food,” New York Times, June 24, 1946, 34. 736 Barber, “Delicious Italian Food,” 24. 737 “Restaurateurs Elect Pietro Orcino,” Restaurateur, February 1962, 7. 738 Diner, Hungering for America, 226. 739 Jessie Alice Cline, “Tempting Italian Dishes,” American Restaurant, February 1947, 30; Grace H. Woolley, “Books for Profit,” Restaurant Management, February 1959, 15. 239 to become “foreign citizens” who retained ties to their cultural heritage but also carved a legitimized space for their belonging in the United States. In this vein, numerous restaurateurs and foreign-born patrons pushed for greater representational accuracy in foreign-themed restaurants. Foreign-themed restaurants could operate as sites of resistance, pushing back against essentialist stereotyped depictions of foreign cultures. In turn, they could work to validate the presence of foreign immigrants in the United States. As Diner aptly states, Italian Americans and other self-identified ethnic groups “had a stake in performing their food identity for others.”740 That stake was obtaining “foreign citizenship.”

AMERICA’S CULINARY AMBASSADORS: FOREIGN-THEMED RESTAURANTS DURING AND AFTER WORLD WAR II

World War II brought with it a resurgence of nationalism throughout the United States, including within America‟s restaurants. Restaurateurs and their employees demonstrated their national pride, as a kind of proof of citizenship, by displaying American flags, adding stars and a red-and-blue color scheme to menus, and respecting government-mandated price regulations and food restrictions. Considering the international composition of most restaurants‟ staff, restaurants—as cultural institutions—represented the international-national dimension of citizenship and civic pride in wartime America. Lucius Boomer, the famed president of the Waldorf Astoria hotel, reminded his employees of this fact, stressing their common ground as American citizens, even if their families‟ countries-of-origin differed. “No discrimination or ill will between employees because of racial of other background will be tolerated in our daily life in the Waldorf,” Boomer issued in a statement to his entire staff. “Citizenship being a

740 Diner, Hungering for America, 226. 240 condition of the employment in the Waldorf-Astoria” meant that employees should respect each other in the name of American patriotism.741 “Americanism should always mean tolerance of others, individual liberty and the right of individuals to their own religious, political, and social relations—always with due recognition of the similar rights of other people.”742 In other words, Boomer was suggesting that the hospitality industry, with its particularly transnational qualities, should represent America‟s greatness on the world stage because of its global inclusiveness. Some in the restaurant industry struggled either to envision or articulate how

America‟s cuisine could be simultaneously foreign and national. J. E. Frawley, president of the American Hotel Association, observed that “while the war is having an internationalizing influence…one effect of the war will be the Americanization of cooking in this country.”743 While this statement may read as a contradiction in terms, in many ways Frawley was right. The Americanization of cooking around World War II did take on an international dimension. Amy Bentley argues that during World War II, “Every meal served was a political act.”744 For the restaurant business, then, daily operations tied directly to American politics. By serving foods prepared with global flavor profiles and based on traditional foreign recipes, restaurants reflected the United

States‟s desire both to claim national pride and demonstrate its willingness to sit at the head of a global family dining table. Even before the war, American food writers were pointing out that “the adaptation…of unfamiliar food invading the home and widely adopted, is a phenomenon

741 Lucius Boomer, quoted in “Common Sense,” American Restaurant, October 1939, 56. 742 Lucius Boomer, quoted in C.A. Patterson, “Employees and the War,” American Restaurant, June 1940, 48. 743 J. E. Frawley, quoted in Keeler, “Americanization of the Menu,” 14. 744 Amy Bentley, Eating for Victory: Food Rationing and the Politics of Domesticity (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 31. 241 that exists in the formative years of all countries. It has been strengthened in America by the tremendous number of foreigners who have married John or Mary Smith, or who have entered the restaurant business.”745 The founder of the Wine and Food Society reminded critics, “You cannot lump American cooking into one picture,” and acknowledged, “There‟s a variety and character to our cooking that probably evolved from the influence of a great many other countries—to say nothing of all the specialties of our own we‟ve developed.”746 The patriotic dimension of wartime eating increasingly emphasized how foreign foods were becoming American foods. For example, one New

York journalist noted that “immigrants or their offspring still [keep] old country customs going, with American trimmings.” Another noted how “„Americanized‟ versions of alien comestibles turned a pretty penny for lots of restaurateurs.”747 Some even lamented that

America had not taken enough advantage of immigrants‟ culinary influences: “The conglomeration of nationalities which form our country ought to have given us a gastronomic coat of many colors,” this food writer admitted, suggesting instead that “average” Americans who did not “like an unfamiliar taste” were responsible for bland versions of American cookery.748 American restaurants had a responsibility to “awaken” American national cooking with brighter flavors and bolder tastes—these were the

“American dishes [the United States could] send to far corners of the world as ambassadors of good will.”749 In the war years, the global dimension of American-styled foreign cuisine was more frequently praised as American rather than as cosmopolitan, thereby privileging and taking pride in a national way of eating.

745 Morgan, “Our Wide Taste in Food,” SM17. 746 “The Food Experts Say,” Exchange Revue, February 1941, 5. 747 Lee Shippey, “Lee Side,” Los Angeles Times, February 24, 1949, A5; Karen Bradfield, “Cosmopolitan Cookery,” Los Angeles Times, August 28, 1949, G12. 748 I. H. “Gastronomic Creation,” Exchange Revue, March 1941, 6-7. 749 I. H. “Gastronomic America,” Exchange Revue, February 1941, 15. 242

The restaurant industry recognized the war‟s influence on expanding Americans‟ preference for foreign foods, and it responded in turn, using cosmopolitan dining as a way of demonstrating patriotism and pride in things American. The suspension of imported foods during World War II “Americanized” foreign dishes simply by the fact that they were prepared using domestic ingredients. “In New York City‟s 2000-odd foreign restaurants,” reported the New York Times, “about the only things left that can rightly be called „foreign‟ are the recipes, for since Pearl Harbor halted most imports, the food is now strictly American.”750 American restaurateurs found ways to improvise hors d‟oeuvres, or “hoover doovers” to use Americanized parlance, substituting “American- grown” foods when “the French, German and Dutch pate de fois gras and Russian caviar” disappeared from suppliers‟ shelves.751 Based on wartime food restrictions, prominent members of the restaurant industry saw the opportunity “to develop a truly American cuisine.” George Mardikian, chef-owner of the famous Omar Khayyam‟s restaurant in San Francisco (and an Armenian immigrant), predicted “that America will yet have the finest cuisine in the world, because it is a blending of all national foods.”752 In addition, the restaurant industry‟s successful efforts to add popular foreign foods to the list of OPA-regulated pricing, as well as their anticipation that returning soldiers‟ palates would have an increased preference for foreign foods, shows how closely foreign foods were intermingled with a cosmopolitan—and yet distinctly American—national identity. On July 31, 1944, almost all restaurants fell under

750 “„Foreign‟ Dishes,” New York Times, November 14, 1943, SM20. A similar phenomenon happened during the First World War. The Pacific Coast Chef reported, “As a result of the war, imports of macaroni from Europe were absolutely cut off, and the people of the United States had an opportunity to become weaned from the foreign product. American manufacturers took advantage of the situation…so that by 1920 there were about 450 establishments producing macaroni….” (“Macaroni in United States,” Pacific Coast Chef, May 1925, 13). 751 “For Real American Tid-Bits,” American Restaurant, March 1941, 62. 752 “Mardkian Sees Opportunities for American Cuisine,” American Restaurant, February 1943, 66. 243 regulation of the Office of Price Administration, which determined ceilings on the prices of principal foods. The items on the list, however, expanded in mid-August to extend “the same sort of price protection to the eater of exotic dishes,” which included menu standards such as shish kebab, blintzes, ravioli, and moo goo gui pan.753 Recommended rationed menus also included German Pancakes with Apple Sauce, Long Island Duckling with Date Sauce, and Bell Peppers filled with Curried Shrimp and Risotto. Texas restaurant owners increasingly added dishes such as “Ragout of Native Cabrito” to their menus, taking their red ration points further with goat meat. Even the Food Distribution

Order 19, which regulated spice supplies for civilian and restaurant purchases, recognized the increase in spice usage by Americans in 1943. Only mace and nutmeg increased in quota percentages for 1944—black pepper, cinnamon, cloves, ginger, allspice, and white pepper all remained at their 1943 levels.754 Post-World War II industry trade journals also commented on how, “when the boys overseas come marching home,” the soldiers were going to have preferences for global foodstuffs that would need to be reflected in restaurant menus. “They‟ll come back from many foreign lands—China, Australia, India, North Africa,” reported the Texas State Restaurant Association secretary-treasurer. “They will have eaten many dishes native to those lands. For many of them, they will have cultivated a liking, and they are

753 “Restaurants Serving Exotic Foods to Get OPA Prices,” New York Times, July 20, 1944, 21. For more discussion of the OPA and its price-setting challenges, see Bentley, Eating for Victory, esp. 14-24. 754 G. O. Podd, “Have Your Menus Gone to War?” American Restaurant, February 1943, 33; E. Hickman, “Stretch Red Ration Points with Goat Meat,” Chuck Wagon, March 1945, 14; “Higher Mace and Nutmeg Quotas,” American Restaurant, March 1944, 54. Restaurant trade journals continued to offer recipes and methods for adding more heavily spiced foods onto menus throughout the 1950s and 1960s, including the use of sweet basil, Birdseye chili, thyme, marjoram, fennel and caraway seed, allspice, saffron, cinnamon, cloves, ginger, and turmeric. See “Spice Lore,” Restaurant and Tavern News, October 1947, 10; “Spices Enhance Cuisine,” Allied Food and Beverage, May 1959, 13-14; and “Spices Add Subtle Flavor,” Allied Food and Beverage, March 1960, 36. 244 going to demand them when they get back home.”755 Others concurred following the Korean War: “the number of men and women in the armed services, who learned to like Oriental foods, have brought about greater demands for foods from the Far East,” Restaurant Management observed in 1958.756 The popularity of foreign dishes tasted while overseas even prompted the Navy Wives Clubs of America to publish a cookbook,

Best Recipes from Home and Abroad (1959), featuring “335 unusual recipes collected from all over the world by navy wives and an occasional husband.”757 Ironically, the restaurant industry—as well as military families—could demonstrate their patriotism by adding foreign foods to menus. The popularity of foreign-themed restaurants continued to grow after World War II, with many restaurant critics and food guides wishing for even more high-quality establishments around the country. Roger Dahlhjelm, one of the founders of the Southern California Farmers Market that operated a dozen restaurants on site—including places serving Mexican, Cantonese, and British cuisine—hoped “now that the restaurant has become a fundamental part” of the Market, “in the not-too-distant future, the Market will be able to boast kitchens serving foods representative of most of the nations of the world.”758 Similarly, Raymond Ewell, a national restaurant guidebook author, praised the restaurants in San Francisco which served foreign cuisine, but did regret that the city offered no Scandinavian, Syrian, or Turkish restaurants in 1949.759 Other restaurant guides expressly encouraged American customers to visit foreign-themed restaurants.

755 “Menus Will be Changed More When War Is Over,” Chuck Wagon, May 1943, 9; C. A. Patterson, “Postwar Nutrition,” American Restaurant, July 1944, 50. 756 Alice Easton, “Add Unusual Dishes to Your Menu,” Restaurant Management, January 1958, 54. 757 Woolley, “Books for Profit,” 15. 758 “A Dozen Restaurants Under One Roof,” Pacific Coast Record, September 1949, 32. 759 Raymond Ewell, Dining Out in San Francisco and the Bay Area, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: Epicurean Press, 1948), 9. 245

The authors of Menu: The Restaurant Guide to New York highlighted the point that “visitors in New York all too frequently patronize the same restaurants year after year and miss the opportunity of adventuresome dining” in the city‟s “authentic foreign restaurants.”760 Foreign-themed restaurants still paid much of their attention to the material design, rather than the food. This emphasis was seen strictly as a business decision to offer customers the “proper atmosphere.”761 “We have always felt that we were not just selling food; we are selling enjoyment,” explained Albert Gee, owner of Ding How Restaurant in Houston, Texas. “People do not leave their comfortable home and travel across town to a restaurant just to eat, but rather to enjoy the experience of dining.”762 If patrons wanted a foreign dining experience, restaurants were going to give them one.

Developments in passenger jetliners after World War II, more affordable airfares, and greater disposable income in the 1950s increased Americans‟ international travel. However, when the time or money for overseas vacations was unavailable, industry leaders suggested, foreign-styled restaurants offered a substitute. “For those who can‟t travel to far away places…the next best thing is to dine in a corner of Sunny Italy and eat native food,” promoted the leading Washington, D.C. restaurant magazine.763 To make this vicarious adventure possible, foreign-themed restaurants went on “an international décor binge.” Travel posters, murals depicting country landscapes, palm trees—even

760 Menu: The Restaurant Guide of New York, 1956 ed. (Camben, ME: John H. Montgomery, 1955), 10. 761 Larry Hilaire, “Sixteen Ways in Which to Profit from Restaurant Hospitality Month,” Restaurant Management, September 1952, 39. 762 Albert Gee, “Selling Wine with Chinese Food,” Restaurant Management, May 1951, 47. 763 “Décor with a Purpose,” Restaurateur, November 1960, 36. 246 classical weaponry—cluttered restaurant interiors in an effort to create the illusion of world travel.764 Like their pre-war predecessors, foreign-themed restaurants of the 1950s and early sixties continued to place an emphasis on the bodies of employees as a way of advertising the authenticity of the restaurant. Seattle‟s Terrace Room assured customers that “waitresses in the room are Japanese girls and all wear Oriental costumes,” while Mrs. Ululani Saiki, co-owner of Nikko‟s Japanese restaurant, was declared “Japanese by breeding.”765 Two brothers, “with Italian accent and appearance of Roman gladiators,” operated San Francisco‟s Red Lizard, employing waiters who “were all Italians.”766 New labor laws, such as the California Fair Employment Practice Act, which was aimed at preventing employers from hiring on the basis of nationality, angered restaurateurs who desired the “foreign” body to represent the foreign-themed restaurant. “You mean to tell me that if I was running a Chinese chop-suey place and had to have a Chinese cook,” asked one outraged editorial, “….[I] cannot ask whether he is Italian, German or French?”767 In order to preserve the manufactured site for culinary tourism, restaurants wanted to fulfill diners‟ expectations of what a particular country should look like. Waitresses of Polish descent serving Japanese food disrupted the power of the imagined space. To preserve the aura of world travel, many foreign-themed restaurants continued to encourage customers to interact with the material ambience in order to make their restaurant adventure more active. “Exotic” Asian restaurants were often the places where

764 “Décor with a Purpose,” 36; Leo Nejelski, “Menu Merchandising: Nationality Dishes, Regional Foods and Special Recipes,” Restaurant Management, August 1958, 63-64. 765 “The Amazing Mrs. Saiki of Nikko‟s,” Allied Food and Beverage, November 1962, 10; “Olympic Hotel‟s New Terrace Room,” Allied Food and Beverage, February 1957, 31. 766 Jay Hilliard, “The Red Lizard Returns,” Pacific Coast Record, August 1948, 44. 767 Joe Minster, “So This Is Freedom?” Pacific Coast Record, December 1959, 8. 247 this kind of performative play occurred: At the House of Shishkebab in Hollywood, “guests were given pairs of Syrian slippers” during their meal, while at both Tokyo Sukiaki in San Francisco and Bush‟s Sukiyaki Garden in Seattle, customers removed their shoes at the entrance and either walked barefoot or replaced them with Japanese sandals.768 Learning to use chopsticks emerged as a favorite interactive experience, and many East Asian-themed restaurants took pride in teaching the uninitiated.769 Like luggage stickers on travel lockers, chopsticks allowed frequent customers to show off their extensive “foreign restaurant travel.” Las Vegas‟s Don the Beachcomer restaurant even displayed a case of “personalized chopsticks for regular customers.”770 These kinds of participatory dining experiences were not only educational but escapist. For customers seeking a break from the mundane, standardized experience of the 1950s Organization

Man, interactive foreign-themed restaurants created a transformative space where consumers, over the course of a meal, could play out fantasies of world travel. Overall, foreign-themed restaurants that emerged in the postwar years did not differ greatly from their interwar predecessors with the exception that there were simply more of them, and many placed a greater emphasis on the authentic origins of the décor, including employee uniform styles. After the war, foreign-themed restaurants

“modernized” by dressing waitresses “in a costume native to the country whose food she

768 Evans Plummer, “Restaurant Notes of Southland,” Pacific Coast Record, April 1953, 41; “Nipponese Motif Unique in Northwest,” Allied Food and Beverage, January 1962, 6-7; Jay Hilliard, “Restaurant Notes of Golden Gate,” Pacific Coast Record, July 1952, 43. 769 Chopsticks fascinated and intimidated white-ethnic American diners as evidenced by the frequent references to the culinary tools in advertisements and casual food trivia. For example, during World War II, the Reed and Barton silverware supplier humorously advertised, “Ever Eat Peas with Chopsticks?” alongside a drawing of a couple in eveningwear fumbling with the chopsticks while a maitre d‟ swept peas on the floor. The ad copy, intended to get restaurants to use the company‟s silverware repair service, advised restaurants, “A quick course for your guests on how to eat with chopsticks (and a supply of chopsticks) is one way around the silver shortage. But think of the nervous break-downs!” (Restaurant Management, January 1945, 48). 770 “No Blowfish, No Fans, No Bamboo,” Pacific Coast Record, June 1963, 16. 248 serves.”771 In fact, in the dozens of articles featuring foreign-themed restaurants in industry trade journals from 1945 to 1965, there are almost no restaurants profiled that do not mention the “authentic native costume” in which waiters and waitresses are dressed. Waitresses at Mexican restaurants dress like señoritas in colorfully embroidered skirts; at Irish restaurants, the costumes are green-and-white and often match the table cloths.

Waitresses wear kimonos at Japanese restaurants, muu-muus at Hawaiian, mantillas at Spanish restaurants, peasant-style dirndls at German restaurants, wooden clogs at Dutch restaurants. Costumed employees were one of the props used to locate American restaurants within a globalized culinary dialogue. Through foreign-styled restaurants, the United States could demonstrate its openness to and respect for world cultures. “The waitress is the restaurateur‟s good will ambassador to the public,” declared one international-themed restaurant, and bi-lingual employees dressed in “native” garb communicated to travelers from home and abroad the strengths of America‟s cosmopolitan diversity.772 Accompanying this movement toward more accurate reproductions of countries‟ material culture was resurgence in the popular favor of foreign language use in restaurants. While the debate still split the industry—there would always be those who believed restaurants should “use American—not bad French or other foreign language terms”—increasingly more restaurant reviews and trade reports praised staff members for speaking multiple languages and sought to educate the growing population of middle- class restaurant diners in the art of ordering food in foreign terms.773 Restaurants like Seattle‟s Kalua Room continued to mix foreign metaphors by naming dishes “Prawns

771 Frank C. Porter, “Area‟s 110 Chinese Restaurants Keep Going Despite Low Profits,” Washington Post, April 27, 1958, C9. 772 Leo West, “Jet Food Service on Earth,” Pacific Coast Record, November 1962, 16. 773 Edward E. Forster, “Your Menu…Make It Sell!” Pacific Coast Record, July 1954, 28. 249

Curry Samoa en Casserole” and “Crepe Suzette ala Kalua.”774 Irishman Thomas Cooney, pronounced “one of America‟s great chefs,” was also praised as “a born linguist” who spoke not only Italian, German, French, and English but also Latin.775 Chef Wing Sing Gee of Los Angeles‟s Ming Room on Restaurant Row trained his “pretty Chinese waitresses” to “explain the ingredients in Wor Sui Op, Poo Law Gai, and Yah Toy Tuk, which to many Americans at first appears to be so much a garbled type.”776 The clarifying translations, along with Gee‟s willingness to adapt his Cantonese menu to American palates, kept his American-born patrons coming back. Long Beach,

California‟s Die Bierstube treated customers to German-speaking waitresses in dirndl costumes, while waiters at George Mardikian‟s Omar Khayyam restaurant in San Francisco counted 26 languages spoken among them, which was guaranteed to make “a traveler from abroad feel at home.”777 Apparently, in the wake of World War II, restaurant owners believed they could maintain international relationships with tourists from allied countries and foster a more tolerant American worldview through the foreign- themed restaurant environment. One way in which Americans could facilitate relationships with other nationalities was through world travel. If not financially possible, foreign restaurant dining was the next best thing. To assist American world travelers (and wanabes), Myra Waldo wrote Dining Out in Any Language: The Menu Translator. The book featured recommended restaurants, tipping policies, and overall dining trends in France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Denmark, Holland, Norway, and Sweden, alongside the foreign language terms

774 Don Reed, “Kalua Room Brings Tropics to Seattle,” Allied Food and Beverage, January 1954, 17. 775 “World Famed Irish Chef Cooney Passes Away in Los Angeles,” Pacific Coast Record, January 1953, 49. 776 Bee Canterbury, “Ming, Wing, and Poetry,” Pacific Coast Record, May 1949, 52. 777 “„Die Bierstube‟—An Innovation,” Pacific Coast Record, December 1961, 24; Jay G. Hilliard, “Restaurant Notes of Golden Gate,” Pacific Coast Record, June 1957, 31. 250 most likely to appear on each country‟s menus. Although Waldo assembled the book especially for Americans traveling abroad, she reminds readers that the text “can also be helpful when dining in foreign restaurants in the United States.”778 Other so-called language experts tried their hand at helping the struggling restaurant customer. Mrs. H. L. More provided readers with a three-page pronunciation guide in Washington State‟s culinary journal. Although the article specifies its intention to help consumers pronounce the most common French terminology on American menus, the guide also reveals the increasing popularity of non-French foreign foods. Not only does Mrs. More guide readers through the correct pronunciation of canapé (“kan-a-pā‟) and julienne (shu‟-lee- en‟), but she also includes antipasto (an-tee-pahstoh), borsch (borch), chutney (chut‟- nee), and mulligatawny soup (mull-ee-ga-tawnee).779 These translation aids indicate that foreign foods—ranging from the more popular French and Italian to the common Russian to Indian—were appearing frequently enough on American restaurant menus to warrant pronunciation guides. With foreign languages reappearing in restaurants with increased frequency in the postwar years, restaurant aficionados often advocated the educational benefits of foreign restaurants, particularly as places to polish one‟s foreign language skills. “Eating in foreign restaurants provides a pleasant way of practicing your new talent,” chirped one advocate; “It‟s wonderful when dining in a Swedish, Czech, Italian or French restaurant to be able to read the menu and also speak to your waiter in his own tongue.”780 Others saw the potential benefit to educating children. “Why not plan an adventure in eating and,

778 Myra Waldo, introduction to Dining Out in Any Language: The Menu Translator (New York: Bantam Books, 1956), v. 779 Mrs. H. L. More, “Say It Smoothly as the French Do,” Allied Food and Beverage, December 1961, 10- 12. 780 Anita Daniel, “Our Local Book in Foreign Tongues,” New York Times, August 12, 1945, SM11. 251 incidentally, in human relationships?” a newspaper column suggested. “Make a point of planning to have a meal in a foreign restaurant,” the columnist advised, as “a simple and effective way of beginning to help your children become world citizens, interested in their fellows from other countries.”781 An important semantic difference appears in this article; rather than the emphasis being placed on immigrants to become America‟s

“foreign citizens,” postwar social critics were suggesting that native-born Americans become “world citizens.” The popular press promoted the idea that “appreciating other peoples and ways…can be developed through increased exposure” in restaurants.782

The newly-emerging ideal of “world citizen” is reflected in the restaurant industry‟s postwar embrace of foreign-born chefs as representatives of America’s democratic values and cosmopolitan cuisine. On the West Coast, the industry‟s leading trade journal featured Chef Charles Braun, “who happens to be a Hungarian by birth,” praising him for his “„know how‟ to work in the kitchen of a restaurant with American dishes today” while being “prepared to take on a job in a Viennese restaurant the next day, in an Italian place a year thereafter.”783 The craft of cosmopolitan cooking, like Americans‟ cosmopolitan dining habits, characterized the best chefs that America had to offer. Another featured chef, William Blum (“a German of high birth”), is lauded for his renunciation of German citizenship during the Nazi occupation and his grand efforts to Americanize once in the United States: “he devoured books on cooking, the English language, citizenship, and American history. Soon he had lost nearly every vestige of his

781 Dr. Ernest G. Osborne, “The Family Scrapbook,” Washington Post, August 6, 1948, C8 (emphasis added). 782 Phyllis Ehrlich, “A Variety of Restaurants Extend Welcome to Child,” New York Times, November 13, 1959, 32. 783 Thomas J. Minster, “Craftsmanship Counts,” Pacific Coast Record, June 1948, 47. 252

German accent and was probably better informed on America than most natives.”784 Yet Blum also represents the best continental cuisine—including his specialty Roasted Pheasant with Curry Sauce—that America has to offer. Foreign-born chefs, after demonstrating allegiance to the United States, were then valued for the traditional culinary culture they retained. They helped create “foreign-ized” American food rather than “Americanized” foreign food. Probably the most prominent example of a “world citizen” American chef is George Mardikian, the proprietor of the Omar Khayyam restaurants in San Francisco and

Fresno, California. Mardikian, an Armenian immigrant who arrived in the United States in 1922, founded what many considered to be “the most representative Armenian restaurant in America.”785 Although Mardikian used his local celebrity to assist Armenian refugees, he was also an intensely patriotic American, and he exemplified for many in the restaurant industry the ideal naturalized citizen and the highest example of a civic leader. Mardikian, who claimed that his favorite organization was the Boy Scouts of America (because “those boys are realizing their responsibilities as citizens so early”), became extremely active in assisting the American armed forces provide food to soldiers during World War II and the Korean War. He hosted free dinners at his restaurants for service men, and for his work with the military, he received the Army‟s Medal of Freedom.786 What is important about Mardikian‟s style of civic leadership is that his activism on the global level is never far from his American patriotism. Similarly, restaurant critics and

784 Charles H. Andrews, “Terrorized Refugee to Ace Chef in Ten Years,” Pacific Coast Record, October 1952, 54. 785 Jay Hilliard, “Gallery of GGRA Officers and Directors,” Pacific Coast Record, September 1954, 20. 786 Terry Hansen, “A Restaurateur Who Exemplifies the Spirit of Public Service,” Restaurant Management, March 1952, 76. 253 customers alike considered his Armenian dishes some of the best foreign-styled American food.787 Talented chefs could prepare foreign-themed dishes with ingredients and methods that were more challenging for the home cook to find and master, which was one reason why foreign-themed restaurant dining appealed to the American public.788 However, these caterers still heeded to advice reminding them to temper the flavoring for an American palate. “The owner of a foreign type restaurant, especially in a small community,” advised one trade journal, “should be most careful to be sure that the appeal will be broad enough to include all segments of the population.”789 To find recipes that would be palatable to American customers, trade journals such as Restaurant Management and American Restaurant listed monthly suggestions of cookbooks that would bring in profits for the up-to-date restaurateur. From the late 1930s through the early 1960s, the industry recommended a variety of books, ranging from Casserole Cookery to Soups, Sauces and Gravies. Yet with monthly frequency, cookbooks specializing in foreign dishes were included on these lists of must-reads. Recipes of All Nations (1938) included dishes from twenty-nine countries, all “selected for their appeal to the average taste.”790 Meals “thoroughly intelligible to the American cook” could be found in the World Wide Cook Book (1940), which listed 508 recipes from seventy-two countries.791 ). In the year 1949 alone, Grace H. Woolley, book reviewer for Restaurant Management, recommended Swedish, Mediterranean, Puerto Rican, Italian, Hawaiian,

787 George Mardikian himself praised not only America but also American food, and he located his establishments within the category of American restaurants (George Mardikian, Song of America [New York: McGraw-Hill, 1956]). 788 I. H., “Coastwise Gastronomics,” Exchange Revue, March 1941, 14; Easton, “Add Unusual Dishes,” 54. 789 “Study of an Italian Type,” 29. 790 “Recipes of All Nations,” American Restaurant, June 1938, 107. 791 “The Restaurant Library,” American Restaurant, March 1940, 18. 254

Hungarian, and French cookbooks among others. Americans were continuing to respond to an affinity for foreign-flavored foods, yet there was more of an emphasis on how these foods shaped a particularly American, rather than decidedly “foreign,” cuisine. One example of an Americanized menu item is curry. By the 1940s, recipes for curry appeared frequently in the pages of both regional and national restaurant trade journals, not just directed at foreign-themed restaurateurs. “It may be that „East is East and West is West‟, but when it comes to a deliciously spicy curry served with fluffy rice, then the tastes of the two shall meet!” proclaimed one recipe writer.792 Chefs and food manufacturers alike promoted “the salt of the Orient” in dishes “adapted to American ingredients and methods,” including “tips on using curry powder to season traditionally American foods.” Men, women, native-born, foreign-born, all were ready to order curry from the menus of American restaurants, and the industry was encouraged to respond to the changing taste.793 Not all representatives of the restaurant industry favored the globalization of the American menu. Several restaurateurs preferred to advertise regional American dishes with slogans like “Eat American.”794 Others highlighted their enthusiasm for American foods, featuring “typically American dishes” that “appeal to American tastes”—including the foreign-influenced Creole stuffed peppers, onion soup au gratin, petit fours, and chicken in paprika sauce (which was singled out as a “popular mid-western food”).795 Yet

792 Jessie Alice Cline, “Curries Are Popular and They Save Meat,” American Restaurant, January 1948, 38. 793 “Curry: Salt of the Orient,” Pacific Coast Record, August 1948, 47; “Curry Recipes Offered,” Pacific Coast Record, May 1959, 25; Louis P. De Gouy, “Good Food Hints,” Restaurant Management, November 1941, 32. See also Grace H. Woolley, “Books for Profits,” Restaurant Management, January 1958, 16 and “Tips on Using Curry Powder for Outstanding Cuisine,” Pacific Coast Record, November 1960, 30-31. 794 “Culinary Geography While You Eat,” American Restaurant, September 1942, 30. See also “Apple Pie Only True American Food,” Allied Food and Beverage, November 1959, 26. 795 Leonore Freeman, “American Foods Hold Spotlight,” American Restaurant, February 1941, 38, 80, 82, 86. 255 what is important to notice is that when the restaurant industry and dining public praised the Americanization of restaurants in the postwar period, they often emphasized the trend away from exotic décor and foreign-born chefs and the shift to regional designs and American-trained staff. Restaurant food, on the other hand, was simply complimented as becoming more sophisticated. “We are no longer a three-dish people—meat, potatoes and pie,” one industry representative declared.

We have learned to read a menu, to recognize the difference between shish kebab and Yorkshire pudding….at home we haven‟t neglected international food appeal. We have come a long way from the chop suey „palace‟ with its pseudo-Chinese food, to the splendid restaurants featuring genuine Cantonese cooking; to the German, the Swiss, the French, the Scandinavian smorgasbords; the Italian and Hungarian and Armenian establishments specializing in the tempting dishes of their forbearers. At the same time we are developing our own native dishes.796

America was finding its national cuisine in the midst of, rather than separate from, foreign food influences.

FROM FOREIGN CITIZENS TO AMERICAN CITIZENS TO WORLD CITIZENS: CONCLUSIONS

Throughout the middle decades of the twentieth century, Americans‟ tolerance for foreign flavors blossomed into a preference for the tastes, so that by the 1960s, in “almost every sizable town and city” in the United States, one could “find a variety in their restaurants that is absolutely staggering. There are always a few good steak-and-chop houses in every city, but you can also eat Chinese, French, Italian, German, or Scandinavian food.”797 Even lesser-known African food appeared on the national scene,

796 A. B. Sandy Wells, “It‟s a Two Way Street,” Pacific Coast Record, August 1959, 23. 797 Mary and Vincent Price, A Treasury of Great Recipes: Famous Specialties of the World‟s Foremost Restaurants Adapted for the American Kitchen (New York: Ampersand Press, 1965), 223. 256 and its feature at the 1964 World‟s Fair led to the creation of one of the first African cookbooks published in the United States.798 Certainly, immigrant communities‟ business acumen and their entry into the industry of mass food production contributed in no small part to the expanding prevalence of ethnic foods in the mid-twentieth century. Foreign- themed restaurants, however, complemented the wider food industry. Importantly, they also popularized “foreign-ness”—including the taste of less familiar foods—through recreated fantasy spaces of foreign travel. The material production of racialized and ethnic performances within foreign- themed restaurant spaces functioned in two interconnected ways during the interwar and postwar years. On the one hand, native-born, middle-class Americans could manipulate and interpret the representations to maintain and justify standards of Americanization required for cultural acceptance in the United States based on visual and oral identity markers. In contrast, self-identified racial and ethnic minorities could use theme restaurants as spaces to counter unfavorable representations and assert their rightful national presence and participation in social life. By the 1950s, global culinary traditions were becoming a part of American national cuisine. As immigrant newcomers became accustomed to living in the United States, native-born Americans adapted the country‟s cuisine to incorporate global tastes. The exposure to and genuine pleasure found in the addition of spices and other flavors used in foreign foods gradually changed what tasted “American” in American dishes. Through the introduction of foreign flavors to mainstream American dining, facilitated by attractively exotic global décor, foreign-

798 Bea Sandler, The African Cook Book: Menus from the Tree Houses Restaurant of the Pavilion of Africa, New York World‟s Fair, 1964-1965 (New York: Harvest House, 1964), 2.

257 themed restaurants added a cosmopolitan taste to traditionally American foods. This “Americanization” of restaurant food in the United States through the addition of “foreign” ingredients contributed to a broader “world citizen” vision of American identity in the mid-twentieth century.

258

Chapter 4:

“The Battle of the Century Is Lipstick versus Elbow Grease”: The Feminization of the American Restaurant from Housewives to Waitresses

“Women go into the restaurant business by the hundreds in answer to a subconscious instinct for homemaking.” With that claim, renowned restaurateur Alice Foote MacDougall began the foreword to her 1929 manual, The Secret of Successful

Restaurants.799 According to MacDougall‟s expertise, women were reshaping not only the operations of the restaurant, but its social function. The restaurant world was slowly becoming a substitute for the home, as more people, especially women, ventured out for dinner in an era of servantless households where there was “little, if any, joy in cooking one‟s own dinner, much less cleaning up after it.”800 MacDougall, one of the early female pioneers in the male-dominated restaurant world, touched on one of the key associations between women and restaurants in the twentieth century: the role of the home. While some, like MacDougall, argued that recreating the home in the public sphere offered women the best of both worlds, others suggested that restaurants attracted women (as both patrons and workers) because they offered an alternative space to women, removing them from the home. Both positions had merit; however, what is most relevant in evaluating the increased presence of women within the patriarchal structure of the restaurant industry is that symbols of femininity and domesticity, such as the home, were used as devices to negotiate the space that women could occupy. National ideals of

799 Alice Foote MacDougall, The Secret of Successful Restaurants (New York: Harper and Bros., 1929), ix. 800 MacDougall, The Secret of Successful Restaurants, 126.

259 beauty, motherhood, and marriage determined the boundaries of women‟s influence and role in framing the public space of the restaurant. In the wake of Prohibition, when high-end restaurants closed without alcohol sales to keep them afloat, women stood out as a saving grace in the restaurant industry. “Every side street in New York bristles with small restaurants,” explained George

Chappell in his 1925 dining guide. In Chappell‟s eyes, many of these little eateries, tucked away in the city‟s neighborhoods, “have created a splendid outlet for the ability and ambition of our modern women.” Giving credit to the restaurants for opening their doors to the female population, Chappell quickly corrected himself, acknowledging the ambition and perseverance of women themselves, “for it is the women who have created the small restaurant,” he lauded.801 As for patrons, one industry expert declared “the so- called „emancipation‟ of the housewife” as one of the main “causes of this rise of public eating places in general esteem,” highlighting a positive shift in the public‟s perception of dining away from home.802 In 1936, nine out of the seventeen most popular restaurants nationwide, voted on by the American Home Economics Association, featured women as owners, operators, or cooks, signaling that women were carving out a distinct niche for themselves in the rapidly expanding restaurant industry.803 As the United States entered

World War II, and women assumed jobs outside of the home in war industries, restaurant service emerged as a time-saving alternative to home cooking.804 Yet, in the postwar years, when families turned inward to their suburban homes and television sets, women‟s

801 George Chappell, The Restaurants of New York (New York: Greenburg Publishers, Inc., 1925), 123. 802 H.C. Siekman, “The Art That Builds Patronage,” American Restaurant, June 1930, 38. Siekman begrudgingly acknowledged the importance of women‟s patronage, but then quickly suggested that (presumably male) restaurateurs needed to be given “a lion‟s share of the credit,” too. 803 “Women‟s Votes Pick America‟s Most Popular Restaurants,” Restaurant Management, October 1936, 248. 804 “Interesting Facts About Restaurants,” Washington States Restaurant and Tavern News, October 1950, 21. 260 relationship to restaurants appeared tenuous again, as restaurants ominously predicted, “It‟s Here Again…„Eating-At-Home‟ Competition,” and asked, “Is the housewife doing too good a job in the kitchen at home?”805 These contradictory perceptions of women, such as viewing housewives as both crucial customers and cutthroat competition, characterize the feminization of the restaurant industry in the first half of the twentieth century. The growing acceptance of women in restaurants was accompanied by a series of signifiers that called attention to the problematics of feminizing male public space. Cosmetics, diet foods, fashion shows, beauty contests, children, and home-like decorations implicated women in altering restaurant dynamics for both customers and service workers. These symbols of American womanhood reminded patrons—male and female alike—that they coexisted in a shared public space and framed the acceptable space and roles that women could occupy in restaurants. While some men (both patrons and operators) objected to women in restaurants, disparaging female customers as chatty loiterers and poor tippers and waitresses as sloppy and inefficient, the majority of male industry leaders recognized the crucial participation of women in restaurants from a business perspective. As J.O. Dahl, one of the leading industry experts, stated in his book Restaurant Management (1938),

“The modern woman is being blamed for so many things that we should be thankful to give her credit for a large part of the better tendencies in present-day eating habits….The average restaurateur did not learn to cater to this new business [of female patrons] until thoughtful women started to compete for this business and take it from him. Many managers have not yet seen the light.”806 This simultaneous resentment of and

805 “It‟s Here Again…,” advertisement, Angelica Uniforms, American Restaurant, October 1945, 26; “Social Revolution,” Allied Food and Beverage, March 1953, 7. 806 J.O. Dahl, Restaurant Management, 2nd ed. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1938), 243. 261 dependence on women as customers, employees, and operators reflected an ever-present contradiction that followed women‟s contribution to restaurants in the twentieth-century United States. This chapter addresses the feminization of the restaurant industry, concentrating on two particular representations of American womanhood—the female patron and the waitress—to trace how cultural symbols of femininity and domesticity determined the boundaries of women‟s participation in restaurants. Following a general overview of the changes that brought about an increased visibility of women in public dining rooms, this chapter furthers the claim that restaurants encouraged female customers and employees to contribute to the growth of the industry while simultaneously limiting their roles to ones bounded by expectations of motherhood and marriage; and beauty, fashion, and aesthetic labor.

THE FEMINIZATION OF THE RESTAURANT INDUSTRY: AN OVERVIEW

Until the early twentieth century, the United States had never been wholly comfortable with women frequenting restaurants. American and British travelers to France in the mid-nineteenth century were startled by the number of French women who

“so brazenly dined in public.”807 Whether these visitors admired or scorned the frequent appearance of women (and, at times, children) in restaurants, they consistently agreed that women‟s presence in restaurants signaled an undesirable home space. According to Rebecca Spang‟s groundbreaking study of the origin of the restaurant, women in Paris restaurants “„proved‟ what had long been suspected: domesticity was unknown in

807 Rebecca L. Spang, The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 199. 262

France.”808 In contrast, many Americans believed that women in the United States, who centered the family in their upkeep and tending of the home, had little need to carve out a niche within public dining spaces. Etiquette pronounced that only at certain meals—and in particular company— could respectable American women dine out. In the words of Richard Sennett: “In the restaurants of the nineteenth century, a lone respectable woman dining with a group of men, even if her husband were present, would cause an overt sensation.”809 Venturing alone into the public dining sphere, women risked associating themselves with servants, or even worse, prostitutes. Women who were accompanied by male relatives or any other suitable male escort could eat in upscale restaurants for dinner. Lunch establishments, however, often closed their doors to women with “class,” and almost all restaurants turned away women who ventured to dine without a male companion. The grand hotels opened up as spaces where, for the first time, women from the upper echelon of society could dine out in the public sphere without losing their respectability, yet they still required a male chaperone.810 Women, understandably, were not content with this arrangement, and a handful of dining establishments opened to cater particularly to women. In New Orleans, for

808 Spang, Invention of the Restaurant, 200. 809 Richard Sennett, quoted in Joanne Finkelstein, Dining Out: A Sociology of Modern Manners (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989), 40. 810 Finkelstein, Dining Out, 40. Hotels, as A. K. Sandoval-Strausz has shown, were resolutely gendered spaces, and both sexes maintained the divisions. Unescorted men entered hotel lobbies through the main entrance, while women and women with escorts used the ladies‟ entrance, which often led to separate lounges or waiting areas as well. Hotel bars not only closed their doors to women exclusively, but they also usually refused to serve non-hotel guests, too (A. K. Sandoval-Strausz, Hotel: An American History [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007], 168-169). Even as late as the 1960s, some restaurant critics still evaluated restaurants based on whether the establishment‟s bar was in the same room as the diners, since “ladies must be protected from rough talk and behavior” (Creighton Peet, “Tired and Hungry and Miles from Home?” Herald Tribune Magazine, August 21, 1960, 7, 6).

263 example, Acme Oysters inaugurated a “ladies‟ saloon” in the city‟s French Quarter in 1876, while Merz‟s Saloon followed with a “café for ladies” the following decade. Deciding that men had enough dining perks, Merz attempted to “revolutionize the order of things” by creating an entrance exclusively for women and allowing men to dine at the café only if escorted by women.811

The opening decade of the twentieth century ushered in a number of eating establishments that served the growing numbers of single female boarders and office workers populating urban areas. One journalist claimed to have observed 1,000 stenographers eating during the lunch hour at one restaurant on Newspaper Row.812Accompanying these female diners was an assumption that women were “notoriously parsimonious” in buying lunch, sharing portions and neglecting to tip the server.813 Prejudice against their dining expenditures aside, many of these working-class women patrons found greater independence and social stature in the act of dining out in restaurants. “Working girls,” historian Sarah Deutsch concludes, “in commercial restaurants…became respected customers—ladies—in a position to order rather than be ordered.”814 This empowerment of female patrons also highlighted the power dynamic between customers and their servers in restaurant work.

While women‟s appearance as customers became more frequent and acceptable in the early twentieth century, so, too, did waitressing positions. Although men held two- thirds of all waitstaff jobs in 1900, women assumed more of these service roles as the

811 Karen Trahan Leathem, Three Women and Their Restaurants: Elizabeth Bégué, Marie Esparbé, and Corinne Dunbar (New Orleans: Newcomb College Center for Research on Women, 2000), 3. 812 Janet MacDonald, “Eastern Menus,” Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine, November 1904, 525. 813 “The Observer” Harper‟s Weekly, August 3, 1901, 766. Three decades later the suggestion that women tipped less than men still persisted, even as restaurant executives tried to convince the workforce otherwise. For example, see “To the Ladies!” American Restaurant, March 1945, 40. 814 Sarah Deutsch, Women and the City: Gender, Space, and Power in Boston, 1870-1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 98. 264 restaurant field grew steadily and demanded more employees. During World War I, the male labor shortage opened up even more opportunities for waitresses.815 Acknowledging women‟s progress in the industry, one employment guide reported in 1919 that although “the average waitress used to be considered a rather ordinary person and treated accordingly,” more waitresses were gaining employment in nicer hotels and restaurants, along with recognition for their work, as a result of “numerous strikes and war conditions.” These waitresses, considered more respectable and of a higher class than their earlier counterparts, were gaining a reputation “that their services are far more satisfactory than those of men,” which suggested that “the job of waitress…will attain a real standing in the world of work.”816 Although male waiters still dominated the profession, especially in higher-end establishments, women were proving that they could do just as competent a job (and employers could pay them lower wages). Prohibition transformed the dining landscape. High-end restaurant profits decreased and businesses folded in the absence of alcohol sales.817 Without alcohol, restaurants became more respectable places for women to frequent, and many restaurants reached out to women patrons in the wake of the Eighteenth Amendment. Additionally, many business owners were quickly realizing the buying power of the female consumer.

“It is the women who carry the pocket-books, who spend most of the payroll,” the Hotel Monthly advised its readers. “When she has money to spend business is good at the department stores, restaurants, cafeterias, theatres, and wherever money is put into

815Dorothy Sue Cobble, Dishing It Out: Waitresses and Their Unions in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 2, 19. Cobble‟s monograph is an excellent and detailed source of information on the rise of waitressing and waitress unions in the twentieth-century United States. 816 Helen Christine Hoerle and Florence B. Saltzberg, The Girl and The Job (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1919), 42. 817 See, for example, “Prohibition and the Eating Habit,” Pacific Coast Chef, November 1925, 5.

265 circulation for present day needs and luxuries.”818 By the late-1920s, women constituted 60% of restaurant customers, a substantial increase from 1917, when women were counted as only 20% of the restaurant-going public.819 They no longer required a male escort to dine at hotels or other reputable restaurants, in part because the increased public interaction between unacquainted men and women was also becoming more socially acceptable.820 Waitress work, too, attained greater respectability for similar reasons, as well as the fact that it no longer connected directly to the sale or serving of alcohol. The 1910s and 1920s also emerged as important decades for female entrepreneurs in the restaurant business. The percentage of women proprietors almost tripled during this period, rising from 9 percent to 24 percent by 1930.821 As the number of women customers increased, restaurants that catered to this female dining population made significant inroads. These establishments, often taking the form of tea rooms and wayside inns, tended to be run by women, since they employed an almost exclusively female staff, and male employees tended not to be comfortable working under the direction of a woman. The popularity of tea rooms in the early-twentieth century can be credited, along with Prohibition, for launching the trend toward woman-friendly dining. As the Pacific Coast Chef noted in 1924, “the Tea Room craze has hit the country hard.”822 Tea rooms, often owned-and-operated by women, many with a college degree in nutrition or home

818 “Women Spend the Money,” in Ideas for Refreshment Rooms (Chicago: Hotel Monthly Press, 1923), 157. 819 Dahl, Restaurant Management, 243. 820 “The Double Standard,” Mixer and Server, January 15, 1928, 37. Women may not have needed a male escort in first-class restaurants, but etiquette dictated that men respect unescorted women by not flirting with them—until after they paid their checks. See “How to Behave When in a Restaurant,” Mixer and Server, January 15, 1928, 19-20. 821 Cobble, Dishing It Out, 50. 822 “Tea Rooms Are in Vogue,” Pacific Coast Chef, June 1924, 11.

266 economics, recreated the atmosphere of private homes and served light meals to appeal to female diners.823 By the 1930s, with the Depression weighing down nearly everyone‟s pocketbooks, many restaurants suffered the financial consequences. Women‟s patronage continued to surface as a necessary and valuable source of restaurant revenue.824

Recognizing the value in appealing to women, the Seattle restaurateur Walter Clark opened the Salad Bowl in 1931, a restaurant that specialized in its namesake on the menu in order to bring in a largely female clientele.825 More than men, women tended to advertise restaurants by word-of-mouth, which was an important and yet largely intangible source of merchandising.826 Studies also suggested that the increase in women working outside of the home, along with spousal pressure to give women a break from kitchen chores, were responsible for the larger visibility of women in restaurants. “Restaurants of today have replaced the wives of yesterday!” announced an officer of the Louisville Restaurant Association.827 “Emancipation of the housewife,” claimed the editor of the American Restaurant magazine, “who gets away from the cookstove and steps out to dinner occasionally, has compensated for the loss of transient salesmen patronage. This is the greatest factor in the return of prosperity to the restaurant industry.”828 Other industry experts concurred, citing “the modern wife who has little

823 “Tea Room Beauty,” Restaurant Management, February 1939, 38-39. 824 For more on the Great Depression‟s economic effect on restaurants, see P.E. Tibbetts, Mr. Restaurant: A Biography of Walter F. Clark (Seattle: Murray Publishing, 1990), 49-50. 825 Tibbetts, Mr. Restaurant, 54. 826 “A Food Service Manual,” Pacific Northwest Caterer and Steward, December 1931, 14. 827 “Voice Protests to Attack on Restaurant Industry,” American Restaurant, April 1936, 60. 828 “Convention of Ohio Group Is Great Success,” American Restaurant, June 1936, 37.

267 time for home cooking” and who insisted that her husband take her out to dinner once a week as the key to restaurants‟ success during the Depression years.829 Yet, despite the awareness of women‟s role in keeping the restaurant industry afloat in the 1930s, female customers were still pigeon-holed into stereotypes about their dining habits. After voting on their choices for America‟s most popular restaurants in

1936, female members of the American Home Economics Association‟s Business Section were categorically measured against the male food writers, whose remaining ballots presumably would balance out women‟s preference for “home-like” cookery and restaurants operated by fellow women.830 In Dallas, Texas, male restaurateurs voiced their concern over female patrons who arrived at restaurants at the height of the lunch hour, yet ordered little food and lingered at the table, “gossiping with each other.”831 To counter these negative perceptions of women diners, a number of restaurant guidebooks aimed at female readers appeared in the 1930s, encouraging women to dine out alone or in groups (unescorted by male companions) and steering them toward restaurants where they would likely feel welcomed. Helen Josephy and Mary Margaret McBride published New York Is Everybody’s Town in 1931, including a section on “Dinner with the Girls.” Similarly, Marjorie Hillis, who also advocated women living alone, timed her dining guide to coincide with the New York World‟s Fair of 1939-1940. In New York, Fair or No Fair: A Guide for the Woman Vacationist, Hillis acknowledged that while there were still “few things you [women] can do comfortably without an escort in New York,” dining in dozens of restaurants was one activity, and she was happy to guide her readers

829 Raymond S. Tomkins, “Hash-House Visionaries,” Pacific Northwest Caterer and Steward, June 1931, 136; “„Sit-Down‟ Strike for Wives,” American Restaurant, February 1937, 42. 830 “Women‟s Votes Pick America‟s Most Popular Restaurants,” 248. 831 “A Touchy Problem,” Café News, October 1931, 16.

268 to restaurants where “the timidist female would feel perfectly comfortable alone.”832 The dual positioning of women as simultaneously essential to and unwelcome in the nation‟s restaurants persisted. Wartime conditions and male labor shortages once again opened up the number of waitress positions available during World War II. The labor shortage was so acute that restaurant trade journals printed articles full of strategies for convincing housewives to apply for restaurant work.833 Additionally, as more women entered the workforce nationwide, including war industries, the amount of time spent on home food preparation decreased, and restaurants were happy to fill the void. One industry publication suggested that more than half of restaurant customers were women in 1943.834 Despite government- imposed rationing and food shortages, restaurant dining increased among Americans during the war.835 From 1939 to 1948, food sales in restaurants more than tripled, growing from $42 billion to $131 billion.836 The postwar years signaled a more complex time in American restaurant growth and women‟s role within the industry. On the one hand, by 1951, Americans were eating one quarter of all meals away from home, and restaurant publications continued to envision an ever-increasing popularity in restaurant dining, even going so far as to predict that “the dining room in the American home is on the way out” and would no longer exist, architecturally, by the 1970s.837 Yet, at the same time, restaurants throughout the country experienced a lull, suggesting that “members of the average family units have

832 Marjorie Hillis, New York, Fair or No Fair: A Guide for the Woman Vacationist (New York: Bobbs- Merril Co., 1939), 72-73. 833 See, for example, Eugene A. Conklin, “Help Wanted,” American Restaurant, February 1944, 20, 22, 24. 834 “How Much Do You Know About Women?” Restaurant Management, February 1943, 30. 835 Market Analysis of the Restaurant Industry (Patterson Publishing Co., 1952), 2. 836 “Study of Eating Places,” Allied Food and Beverage, April 1953, 32. 837 Cobble, Dishing It Out, 27; Jim Malone, “From 2:00 to 5:00,” Restaurant Management, November 1951, 84. 269 been „hibernating‟ since the end of World War II” in their suburban homes, where they preferred home entertaining and television to dining out on the town.838 Strategizing to bring dinner patrons back into restaurants, industry leaders increasingly focused on women and their dining out habits. In 1961, the American Restaurant China Manufacturers Association conducted a study of female patrons across income levels; the results suggested that women not only dined out more frequently as a population, but they had a fair amount of influence determining where their families dined out together.839 The increased attention to women‟s importance to the restaurant industry, however, received mixed reviews. Some industry leaders argued that restaurants were now neglecting male customers in favor of appealing to a female clientele, while businesswomen pointed out that in high-end restaurants, women continued to be seated at the worst tables and received indifferent service, regardless of their buying power.840 As a profession, restaurant service work continued to be performed by female employees. In 1958, one-third of American women worked outside of the home, and waitressing ranked sixth in size among jobs filled by women.841 Waitress work, though, was also exclusionary, with women of color and women over the age of thirty finding few positions compared to their younger, white counterparts.

These waves in the receptivity of the restaurant industry toward female patrons, employees, and even proprietors reflect the conflicting attitudes among Americans toward the feminization of restaurants in the first half of the twentieth century. As the rest

838 “Eating and Drinking Out Grows More Popular,” Allied Food and Beverage, November 1959, 33. 839 “Survey Finds Women Eating Out More Frequently,” Restaurateur, October 1961, 9; “It‟s the Women Who Can Make or Break a Restaurant!” Restaurateur, December 1962, 18. 840 “The Editor Says: Never Underestimate the Power of a Man!” Allied Food and Beverage, July 1954, 6; “Don‟t Write Off the Ladies!” Pacific Coast Record, March 1957, 14. 841 “The Working Woman‟s Role,” Allied Food and Beverage, December 1958, 45; Cobble, Dishing It Out, 27. 270 of this chapter reveals, restaurants locked onto a range of symbols that represented women in the public‟s perception, and they used these signifiers of femininity and domesticity to negotiate the physical and psychological space that women occupied in restaurants. Beginning with women as patrons, I show how restaurants associated physical markers—such as diet foods, lipstick stains, children‟s high chairs, and takeout containers—with female customers and used these objects as devices for interpreting how, when, and where women should dine out in restaurants.

DINNER WITH THE GIRLS: MRS. DINER-OUT AND THE BUILDING OF FEMALE RESTAURANT PATRONAGE

Some of the earliest restaurants to welcome women as patrons in the early twentieth century were, in many ways, seen as extensions of the home.842 If a woman‟s place were in the home, than a woman‟s place in the public dining world was a home-like restaurant.843 When people, including women, needed to eat away from home, restaurants could serve a provisional function. This role of public dining spaces as recreating the essential characteristics, atmosphere, and hospitality of the private home was not lost on restaurateurs, especially as Americans increasingly moved their leisure activities, socialization, and entertainment into the public arena. “A restaurant supplies an essential

842 Between 1995 and 2005, several restaurant historians produced much-needed recovery work documenting the origins and influence of “homelike” restaurants and their most popular manifestation, the tea room. Three of these influential essays include Cynthia A. Brandimarte, “„To Make the Whole World Homelike‟: Gender, Space, and America‟s Tea Room Movement,” Winterthur Portfolio 30, no. 1 (Spring 1995): 1-19; Samantha Barbas, “Just Like Home: „Home-Cooking‟ and the Domestication of the American Restaurant,” Gastronomica 2, no. 4 (Fall 2002), 43-52; Jan Whitaker, “Domesticating the Restaurant: Marketing the Anglo-American Home,” in From Betty Crocker to Feminist Food Studies: Critical Perspectives on Women and Food, ed. Arlene Voski Avakian and Barbara Haber (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005), 89-105.; Jan Whitaker, Tea at the Blue Lantern Inn: A Social History of the Tea Room Craze in America (New York: St. Martin‟s Press, 2002). 843 In similar terms, sisters Josephine and Jeannette Ware, proprietors of The Ware Coffee Shop in New York City, asserted “that woman‟s place is in the tea-room has been accepted as an inevitable corollary of „woman‟s place is in the home‟” (Jeanette and Josephine Ware, “The Tea-Room Business,” Journal of Home Economics 16, no. 10 [October 1924]: 565). 271 function of the home,” advised J.H. Joyce, proprietor of Portland‟s Hazlewood Restaurants, to the recently-formed National Restaurant Association in the early 1920s. Likening the restaurant keeper to a household host, Joyce continued the analogy, calling restaurants “social centers [where] a great responsibility rests with the management to see that they maintain the atmosphere of a well-regulated home.”844 Similarly, Alice Foote

MacDougall declared that “the restaurant business is little by little acting as a substitute for the home and becoming more and more a place of rendezvous,” and Al Carder, whose Chicago-based restaurants adopted the slogan, “A Home Like Place to Eat,” suggested,

“A restaurant, even at its best, is only a substitute for the home.”845 By functioning as a replica and replacement for the home, restaurants claiming to be “home-like” also soothed anxieties over women‟s entrance into the public dining world by setting boundaries on the space that women could occupy and modify. Restaurants that mirrored the domestic sphere, effectively marketing themselves as by and for women, applied a “separate but equal” approach to women‟s participation in restaurant life in the 1910s and 1920s. By the 1930s, however, a generation gap emerged in restaurants; daughters of the women who had popularized the home-like eatery were making forays into other styles of restaurants and began rejecting the more conservative public dining habits of their mothers. Mothers themselves by the 1950s, this younger generation of women then became both steady customers and restaurants‟ greatest competition as they oscillated between the home and restaurants for food and entertainment.

844 J. H. Joyce, “Restaurant‟s Standing in Community,” in Ideas for Refreshment Rooms, 114. 845 MacDougall, The Secret of Successful Restaurants, 126; Menu, Carder‟s restaurant, December 17, 1932, New York Historical Society Menu Collection; Al B. Carder, “Staging Your Play for Restaurant Patronage,” American Restaurant, August 1933, 50.

272

The appeal of “home-style” restaurants was based on the belief that the combined growth in urban living, the development of processed foods, and the decline in domesticity as women entered the workforce at rapidly growing rates meant that women were no longer devoting as much time or energy to preparing basic, wholesome meals from scratch.846 As one food journalist quipped, the 1920s “were the days of the advertising slogan, „like mother used to make,‟ which might have been, „like mother used to make.‟”847 Home-like restaurants promised to restore the home and the comfort of “home-cooked” meals to the American public by recreating homey décor and by serving simple and familiar foods. As seemingly straightforward and benign as “home cooking” sounds, public attitudes toward that style of food reflected more complex, individualized responses to the concept. First of all, as Jan Whitaker has noted, “home cooking” generally meant food similar to dishes prepared in middle-class Anglo American homes; restaurants‟ versions of “home cooking” included little reflection of ethnic diversity and traditions.848 When restaurants did acknowledge the range of global interpretations of home cookery, it tended to be in defense of not offering a home-like menu.849 The public‟s response to homestyle restaurants was also mixed. While some who favored the home-like motif suggested that “too little attention is given to the important trend of the eating public today toward „home cooking,‟” skeptics joked that

846 Helen M. Woods, “Some Things I Have Noticed,” American Restaurant, March 1923, 27; Edith M. Barber, “Everyone Likes Home Cooking!” Better Homes and Gardens, April 1931, 44. 847 M. O. Waugh, “Fifty Years of Feeding Folks,” Restaurant Management, October 1945, 47 (emphasis in original). 848 Whitaker, “Domesticating the Restaurant,” 91. 849 “Foods Like Mother Used to Make,” Pacific Coast Chef, February 1927, 16-17. The article, which argued that “home cooking” could never please all customers because the idea of home-style food “does not mean that what suits Jack suits Jean,” presumably received substantial attention because it was reprinted in the journal a year and a half later. See “Food Like Mother Used to Make,” Pacific Coast Chef, June 1928, 13-14. 273 home cooking would invoke more bad memories than pleasant ones.850 Regardless of whether someone praised or berated the home-cooking trend in American restaurants, nearly all agreed that it was a style of feeding associated predominantly with women. The basic reference to the home in “home cooking” situated the style of food preparation in the realm of “cookery” rather than “cuisine.”851 In much of the public imagination, male chefs, who supposedly trained in the culinary arts, “elevated” food preparation to a professional level. Women, on the other hand, who prepared and sold food for profit, were seen as extending their “natural” domestic abilities into the public realm, thereby remaining “cooks” in the eyes of their customers. Guidebooks, restaurant reviews, and magazine features continuously affirmed this distinction in the language used to single out restaurants where women prepared the food. The guidebook author

Robert Dana observed that among restaurants serving regional American food in New York City, “almost all are dominated by women, which is natural, since it is the rare American male who chooses cookery as a career.”852 Schrafft‟s, the famed chain of tearoom-style restaurants in the greater New York region, hired only women cooks, since the owner, Frank Shattuck, “claimed only they could cook food as it would be cooked for a family dinner.”853 Duncan Hines, whose little red guidebooks steered customers across the country to a range of dining establishments, almost always called attention to places

850 Woods, “Some Things I Have Noticed,” 27; “Took Warning,” La Estrella (New Mexico), November 24, 1923, 2. 851 For discussions and debates over the existence of an American cuisine, see Sidney Mintz, “Eating American,” in Food in the U.S.A.: A Reader, ed. Carole Counihan (New York: Routledge, 2002), 26; Krishnendu Ray, “Nation and Cuisine: The Evidence from American Newspapers ca. 1830-2003,” Food and Foodways 16 (2008): 259-297. 852 Robert W. Dana, Where to Eat in New York (New York: Current Books, Inc., 1948), 108. 853 William F. Longgood, “Daintiest Beaneries in Town,” Saturday Evening Post, December 4, 1954, 87.

274 with “women cooks,” a detail otherwise unmentioned in places where men prepared the food. Praise for the “natural” abilities of (white) women who cooked for profit seemingly gave credit to their public feeding contributions while simultaneously limiting their abilities and accomplishments to a place designated as an extension of the home.

Few and far between were the food writers who suggested that formal training and education in domestic science and home economics “enabled [a female cook] to become an expert culinary artist.”854 Rather than complimenting women‟s business acumen and professional culinary skills, many male proprietors and customers suggested that women were successful at feeding others because caretaking resonated from their practice of tending to others at home. Some female tea-room operators, such as Mrs. J. E. McRee, contributed to this notion as well, in part to attract a wide array of customers. McRee, who ran The Daffodil Tea Room in Atlanta, Georgia, insisted that her business strategy was to bring “into my practice my own housekeeping ideas—good, wholesome, well- cooked food, a glad handshake, and a welcoming smile.”855 In this way, even if the home-style restaurant‟s food were actually made from a combination of canned, pre- packaged, and hand-made products (like many restaurants‟ meals across the country), the establishment could still garner praise for its abilities to make customers feel “at home” through the comforting and familiar style of service and décor.

854 Irving Scheyer, “Tea Room Success and Why,” American Restaurant, December 1919, 31. 855 “What One Woman Did,” The Independent Woman, March 1920, 10. A number of female tea room proprietors played up their abilities to recreate “home” for customers seeking the matronly care. Bertha Carrington, operator of the Green Gate tea room in Syracuse, cited the secret to her success as making “guests feel as if they were at their own tables” and “feel that they were each and every one members of one large family group.” Robert K. Doran, “The Formula of „Green Gate,‟” American Restaurant, September 1928, 53. 275

Tea rooms were one of the most popular and enduring home-style restaurants that specialized in catering to a female clientele in the first half of the twentieth century. Many of the early tea rooms opened along country roads to feed the growing number of motoring tourists in the United States, although a substantial number appeared in the nation‟s metropolitan centers, too. Rather than trying to compete directly with conventional restaurants, they sold customers on an alternative to heavy, formal meals by offering lighter, simple, reasonably-priced (but not cheap) dishes in a restful setting. Perhaps most important to tea room operators, though, was the notion that “a Tea Room must have a great deal of home-like atmosphere.” While some in the industry claimed “singing birds and flowers do build business,” others recommended home-grown food (where possible) and a catchy name.856

One of the most successful operators serving “home-type” cooking was Alice Foote MacDougall. MacDougall, a widow at age forty with $38 to her name and three children to care for, took over her husband‟s New York coffee roasting business in 1908.857 In December 1919, with her sons grown and returned from war, MacDougall and her boys opened the Little Coffee Shop in Grand Central Station, specializing in serving hot coffee and warm waffles to Manhattan crowds.858 Their business success prompted her to expand to three more locations around the city where she maintained a restful setting for customers through interiors decorated with soft colors and Spanish or Italian

856 W. R. Needham, “How Best to Build Tea Room Business,” Restaurant Management, January 1928, 24; C. H. Claudy, “Organizing the Wayside Tea House,” Country Life in America, June 1916, 54-55. 857 Alice Foote MacDougall, The Autobiography of a Business Woman (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1928), 51-54; Helen Ferris and Virginia Moore, “Alice Foote MacDougall,” in Girls Who Did: Stories of Real Girls and Their Careers, Helen Ferris and Virginia Moore, ed. (New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., 1927), 237-250. 858 MacDougall, The Secret of Successful Restaurants, 7-10.

276 pottery, glassware, linens, and other objects.859 The décor dominated each restaurant to such an extent that one guidebook surmised, “for a moment you think you‟re in a museum, there are so many copper, brass, wrought-iron, and pottery pieces along the old walls and hanging from the ceilings.”860 Much of MacDougall‟s success was a result of both her frugal business operations (reportedly, waitresses had to pay $10 a week to work at the restaurants) and her intention to fill the public dining gap between cheap, poor- quality “greasy spoon” joints and expensive, high-end restaurants.861 By targeting the newer population of restaurant patrons who were willing to accept smaller portions of good food for reasonable prices, MacDougall successfully captured this segment of the market. Although men tended to criticize the small portion size of dishes served at home- style restaurants like MacDougall‟s and Schrafft‟s, dismissing them as indicative of

“dainty” female diners, the choice to reduce the size of the meals enabled this type of restaurant to profit even through the hard-hit Depression years. Department stores operated some of the most popular tea rooms in the 1920s and 1930s, such as Gimbel‟s Little Tea Room in New York, Filene‟s in Boston, Wanamaker‟s in Philadelphia, and Seattle‟s Frederick and Nelson‟s Tea Room.862 As women‟s culture—the time and activities shared among different groups of women, collectively— shifted from the domestic sphere into the public arena, designated sex-segregated spaces,

859 Alice Foote MacDougall, “Eating Aesthetically,” Forum, September 1928, 396; “Business: Frugality, Inc.,” Time, March 7, 1932. 860 Dana, Where to Eat in New York, 116. 861 “Business: Frugality, Inc.”; Helen Josephy and Mary Margaret McBride, New York Is Everybody‟s Town (New York: G.P. Putnam Sons, 1931), 105; “Waitresses‟ Jobs Cost $10 a Week,” Mixer and Server, June 15, 1928, 17-18. These sources do not specify whether waitresses had to pay this sum upfront or if it was deducted from their wages. The notion that an operator would claim a lump sum each week as part of the terms of employment was unusual during this time. 862 Stella Crossley Daljord, “The Little Tea Room at Gimbel‟s,” The Nation, July 3, 1920, 11-13; “Catering at Wanamaker‟s,” Hotel Monthly, May 1914, 82; “Restaurant-Tea Room in Filene‟s Store, Boston,” in Ideas for Refreshment Rooms, 163; William C. Speidel, Jr., You Can‟t Eat Mount Rainier! (Portland: Binfords and Mort, 1955), 46. 277 such as department stores, followed. The nation‟s large department stores were dominated by women shoppers, and leading businesses such as Macy‟s, Wanamaker‟s, and Marshall Field‟s promoted large-scale merchandising and consumerism through elaborate forms of sensorial stimulation, using lights, mirrors, and row upon row of goods for sale to catch the eye (and the wallet) of women with purchasing power.863 Part of this all-encompassing spectacle included offering tired shoppers restful places to rejuvenate, grab a bite to eat, and admire the merchandise.864 Even as early as 1904, the largest department stores in New York City operated “fine” restaurants “to accommodate the shopping patrons,” serving “delicate and well prepared food” at affordable prices during the lunch hours.865 By the 1930s, department store tea rooms had become such prominent fixtures that researchers conducted numerous studies to determine how best to maximize the dollars spent by shoppers.866 One of the methods was to offer “style shows” or “model parades” during mealtimes where live “mannikins” modeled the latest fashions to female customers, thereby entertaining the diners and promoting the newest ready-to- wear merchandise.867 These fashion shows, which linked women‟s primary role as consumer to both shopping and dining out, along with a host of other gimmicks aimed at

863 Two relevant texts on the history of women shoppers and department stores are Susan Porter Benson, Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890-1940 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1988) and Elaine S. Abelson, When Ladies Go A-Thieving: Middle-Class Shoplifters in the Victorian Department Store (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). For more on the spectacle of department stores, see William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1993). 864 Irving Scheyer, “Tea Room Success and Why,” American Restaurant, December 1919, 31. 865 Janet MacDonald, “Eastern Menus,” Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine, November 1904, 525. 866 For example, see Ina M. Hamlin and Arthur H. Winakor, Department Store Food Service (Urbana: University of Illinois, Urbana, 1933) and Restaurant Report: An Analysis of the Operation of Restaurants, Tea Rooms, Soda Fountains, Luncheonettes and Cafeterias in Department Stores (New York: National Retail Dry Goods Association, 1935). 867 “Ideas of the Month,” Restaurant Management (April 1939), 25; Restaurant Report, 19.

278 a mostly female clientele, marked tea rooms as women‟s spaces and tended to deter men from frequenting the restaurants.868 Many men resisted dining in tea rooms and other women-centered restaurants on the grounds that the food was too “light” and the predominantly female company intimidating, a sentiment captured in the 1925 cartoon depicting “How a Man Feels After

He‟s Entered Schrafft‟s by Mistake,” which was a New York restaurant chain popular among women. Men‟s feasting (or lack thereof) in tea rooms and other women-oriented restaurants was the subject of many jokes during this period. By categorizing tea rooms as restaurants designed especially for women, male customers and, to an extent, restaurant executives, confirmed tea rooms as “a room of their own” and effectively contained women within the space of tea room-like restaurants. Some female customers and restaurant operators embraced tea rooms as distinctly feminine places. In defense of accusations that the lag in the country‟s tea room business was a result of men‟s disfavor with them—men who detested doilies, dainty food, and ladies‟ annoying chatter—one tea room operator declared, “If men don‟t like tea rooms, they can stay away. Maybe women patrons prefer their absence anyway. Women don‟t barge into men‟s grills. Why should men want to invade the woman‟s special eating place?”869 While the idea that women might want to designate dining space as their own, separate from men, has merit, the reality from a business perspective was that restaurants—tea rooms and other establishments alike—conceivably could double their sales if they served both men and women, and most restaurants depended on the expanded sales base.

868 Guidebooks tended to make special note of tea rooms that appealed to men, thereby calling attention to its rarity. For instance, Duncan Hines mentioned that at Bullock‟s Tea Room in Los Angeles, “men are finding the food in this department store tea room to their liking as well as the women”(Duncan Hines, Adventures in Good Eating [Chicago: Adventures in Good Eating, Inc., 1937], 25). 869 “Tea Rooms As They Are Or Tea Rooms A la Overbaugh!” American Restaurant, November 1944, 34.

279

For the most part, restaurants that catered to a female clientele tried not to limit their pool of customers and worked to attract male customers, too. Mary Elizabeth‟s tea room in New York City allowed men to smoke in the upstairs lunchroom, while the New York Exchange for Woman‟s Work restaurant, “urged by the needs of its man clientele and the acute condition of the servant problem,” expanded service into the dinner hour in

1919. By 1927, the Exchange Restaurant specified that they were catering “as carefully to the discriminating Business Man or Woman as to the Leisurely Shopper,” and customers described the restaurant as “not a NOISY place at all…quiet, well dressed women will be seated at small tables for one or two and here and there a sprinkling of well turned-out men.”870 Duncan Hines, who appreciated tea rooms for their cleanliness and home-style cooking, which was one of his favorites, urged men not to shy away from certain tea rooms simply because of their name. The Christopher House Tea Room in New Jersey was a spot “where more men are served than women,” including judges, lawyers, and “literary folk.” At the Casco Bay Tea Room in Yarmouth, Maine, a friend of Hines assured him, “Don‟t be scared of the name Tea Room,” and Hines passed along similar advice to his reader, praising the excellent seafood served there.871 Regardless of the actual number of men who dined in tea rooms, the name of the restaurant genre itself evoked images of gaggles of women pecking at dainty food while chatting incessantly with one another. Women were valued not only as patrons but as operators of tea rooms. Manuals, courses, and advice columns that detailed how almost any woman could open and operate

870 Harriet Blanchard, “Tea Table Talk to the Tired Traveler,” American Travel, February 1914, 39; Yearbook (New York: New York Exchange for Woman‟s Work, 1927); untitled clipping in scrapbook, New York Journal, October 6, n.d., New York Exchange for Woman‟s Work Records, New York Historical Society. 871 Hines, Adventures in Good Eating (1937), 121, 86.

280 a tea room business proliferated during the 1910s and 1920s.872 Yet many of the women who operated tea rooms believed that home-style restaurants were challenging to manage because the owners had to consider not only the “the home point of view” but the commercial viewpoint.873 Simply to operate a tea room or a home-like eatery with the same principles and structure of managing a home, rather than a business, was a recipe for failure. It was not only the “simpering, incompetent type of woman, of the smelling salts era,” who failed at operating a tea room; “alert, poised women,” too, could find their restaurants going under without proper attention to food quality, careful service, and disproportionate expenditures on location and rent.874 Several tea rooms, then, hired recent home economics graduates to manage and oversee daily operations of the businesses. The Kansas City Tea Room, which opened in September 1921 only to fold in

July 1922 because of its debt, re-opened in September 1922 with Nellie Reece Evans, a recent recipient of a degree in home economics, at its helm.875 Additionally, many women with home economics training opened their own tea rooms and received praise for their operational success. Emily Taggert, credited with opening Seattle‟s first “real tea room,” the Pine Tree, in March 1923, found her successor in Ruth Holland, a graduate in home economics from the University of Minnesota.876 Home economics, a scientific approach to nutrition that made headway in the early twentieth century through the

872 See, for example, Kate Brew Vaughn, “Tea-Rooms May Be of Any Design, but Must Have Food and Charm,” Dallas Morning News, July 30, 1920; Cecil Reams, “Tea Room Pitfalls That Trap the Unwary,” Restaurant Management, December 1928, 368-372; The Ware School of Tea Room Management (New York: The Ware School of Tea Room Management, 1927). 873 Ware and Ware, “The Tea-Room Business,” 566. 874 Reams, “Tea Room Pitfalls,” 368-372. 875 Verna Lewis Browning, “Kansas City‟s Tea Room Triumph,” Independent Woman, July 1939, 213. Like many other degree-holding women trained in restaurant management, Evans left Kansas City to open her own tea room in 1937. 876 Prudence Penny, Cosmopolitan Seattle: A Collection of Interviews with Chefs Who Tell Some of Their Famous Recipes (Seattle: Post-Intelligencer, 1935), 26, 38.

281 reform efforts of Ellen H. Richards and the New England Kitchen, prepared many young female college graduates for tea room management.877 By the 1920s, numerous jobs in food processing and industrial feeding depended on the expertise of home economists, including the operation of tea rooms, where “a course in Domestic Science [was] usually necessary” to prepare a new manager for running the business.878

Because of the growth in tea room competition, along with the exorbitant cost of rent to operate tea rooms in large cities, the undertaking of new tea room establishments peaked in 1927, the same year that the highest number of tea room failures occurred, too.

In 1928, Kansas City granted 1,000 restaurant licenses to new operators, yet by the start of 1929, 450 of these tea rooms had folded.879 The 1930s witnessed a brief resurgence in tea rooms as women, hurt financially by the Depression, launched homestyle, low-cost eateries to help support themselves and their families.880 Yet by the 1940s, only the occasional operator launched a new tea room business; as the former personnel director of the Childs restaurant chain declared in 1944, “the tea room…is fast slipping into decline.”881 What contributed to the success of tea rooms through the early 1930s, and why did their popularity decline? Certainly, gendered patronage played a role on both

877 Harvey Levenstein, “The New England Kitchen and the Origins of Modern American Eating Habits,” American Quarterly 32, no. 4 (Autumn 1980): 369-386; Harvey Levenstein, Revolution at the Table: The Transformation of the American Diet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), esp. 147-160. For more extensive coverage of the influence of home economics in the United States, see Sarah Stage and Virginia B. Vincenti, ed., Rethinking Home Economics: Women and the History of a Profession (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997) and Laura Shapiro, Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century (1986; New York: Modern Library, 2001). 878 Hoerle and Saltzberg, Girl and the Job, 74. 879 H. C. Nulmoor, “Women in the Tea Room Business,” American Restaurant (January 1931), 52, 60. 880 Michael and Ariane Batterberry, On the Town in New York: From 1776 to the Present (New York: Charles Scribner‟s Sons, 1973), 242. 881 “Just a Step from Seed Store to Tea Room,” American Restaurant, August 1944, 28-29, 52; “Tea Rooms As They Are,” 35. 282 fronts.882 In urban tea rooms, a female clientele predominated, particularly among businesswomen and the growing number of office workers, such as stenographers. Wayside tea rooms that served a wider group of tourists attracted more men but also functioned as informal meeting places for women‟s club members and those interested simply in socializing with one another over a light bite to eat. One tea room manual distinguished two primary types of tea room patrons: “regulars,” who returned frequently both for the food and the service, and “transients,” or infrequent visitors, who stopped by based on the tea room‟s reputation for good food.883 While some tea rooms catered to a particular class of women, in general most female customers were either middle- or upper-middle class.884 Although tea rooms remained in favor through the 1940s, the home-like appeal waned, starting in the 1930s. One likely reason for the dwindling popularity of “quaint” atmosphere speaks to the changing tastes and behaviors of a younger generation of women. Although a substantial amount of scholarship interrogates women‟s dining habits in the twentieth century, these studies often demarcate women based on race, ethnicity, class, profession, and occasionally, marital status, without noting the differences among women of different ages. While quantitative data on the age of women patrons is limited, we can still gather a sense of the different generations‟ attitudes toward dining out by interrogating anecdotal and literary sources. In the 1920s, older generations regulated and supervised dining out in restaurants for young women. For instance, at Radcliffe College, female students received a list of local restaurants approved for dining at with young

882 “Tea Rooms Are in Vogue,” Pacific Coast Chef, June 1924, 11. 883 Alice Easton, Recipes and Menus for Restaurant Profits (Stamford: Whitlock Press, 1940), 1. 884 Doran, “Formula of „Green Gate,‟” 80. 283 men.885 Yet even by the early 1920s, tea room operators were noting differences among their female customers from two decades prior. “The character of her [the tea room operator‟s] clientele has changed greatly in twenty years,” remarked Sallie Tucker in 1923, a woman credited with opening the first modern tea room in New York City:

Formerly the woman was a shopper who dallied over the teacup while she gossiped with her friends; today the visitor is the quick, alert business woman who reads her paper while waiting for her luncheon, eats without making any attempt to know the woman beside her, pays her check and leaves. She is spending her own money, the woman of twenty years ago was spending her husband‟s. Time did not figure with the patron of earlier days, but the patron today never becomes so interested in paper or pastry that she forgets the clock.886

In contrast to the popular image of the dawdling, gossiping group of middle-aged women customers, Tucker suggested that restaurants‟ role in young women‟s lives in the 1920s was approaching the function it served for men: a site of socialization but also quick food service away from home during the course of an increasingly fast-paced way of life. The generation gap became even more pronounced in the 1930s as more educated young women displayed independence by living apart from their families prior to marriage.887 While many of the lodging houses and business clubs that rented rooms to young working women maintained an aura of propriety through housemothers and curfews, the conservative setting proved too much for many twenty-something women. In Faith Baldwin‟s novel Skyscraper (1931), the twenty-two-year-old protagonist Lynn

885 Beth L. Bailey, From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 19. 886 “Pioneer of the Modern Tea Room,” in Ideas for Refreshment Rooms, 131. 887 To assist this new group of solo women, self-help writers published books instructing women on how to live successfully on their own. One popular author, Marjorie Hillis, generated a number of these books: Marjorie Hillis, Live Alone and Like It: A Guide for the Extra Woman (1936) and Corned Beef and Caviar: For the Live-Aloner (1937). 284

Harding, a girl originally from the Midwest who lived in a Manhattan business club and worked at a bank, found “there was something about the slightly institutional atmosphere [of the business club], hedged about with rules and regulations…against which she rebelled.” To escape “this intangible atmosphere of caged femininity,” Lynn took her breakfast every morning at a cafeteria in the midst of “noise and confusion” where she was “surrounded by women, to be sure, but women in whom she was not forced to take a companionable interest.” In contrast to the presumed appeal of the restful, calm tea room, Lynn sought out a dining space where she could remain independent, indifferent, and relatively anonymous.888 Not infrequently did women of different generations patronize the same restaurants, but often these restaurants tipped toward modern styling on the decorative scale. At Theodore‟s in New York City, where the food was “as up-to-date as the atmosphere,” a visitor likely would “see some of the most successful business girls about town lunching here, as well as smart ladies of leisure.”889 Occasionally, differing perspectives on the respectability of restaurants that catered to a predominantly female clientele emerged, speaking to the ways in which younger women were breaking down the barriers of conservatism in restaurants. One of the most pronounced debates occurred in the 1930s, following the repeal of Prohibition. In the late nineteenth and early-twentieth century, the presence of alcohol was seen as a threat to women‟s morality, and social attitudes shunned white women‟s public appearance in places that served alcohol. (This belief is one of the main reasons why restaurants at this time were male-dominated spaces; as sites of public alcohol

888 Faith Baldwin, Skyscraper (1931; repr. New York: The Feminist Press, 2003), 7-9. 889 Hillis, Fair or No Fair, 74-75. 285 consumption, restaurants could test the moral respectability of women who ventured into them.) By removing the sale, and therefore visible consumption, of alcohol, Prohibition lifted many of these social restrictions for both female patrons and waitresses, and women (as shown in this chapter) frequented restaurants in numbers never matched before.

On December 5, 1933, Repeal lifted the ban on the sale of alcohol in public establishments, and men and women alike stopped by their local bars and restaurants to raise a toast to the occasion. While many of the younger set celebrated the new freedom of public alcohol consumption, others worried that drinking in public still signaled a shaky moral reputation for women. Both Linda Detman and Dorothy Sue Cobble have cited evidence showing how, prior to the 1940s, many Americans continued to scorn women‟s presence in bars (and at restaurant bars), either as patrons or service workers.890 While some men worried about the “invasion” of their privileged masculine space, other critics (both men and women) worried that alcohol and the mixed-sex social atmosphere that accompanied its consumption would corrupt women. However, industries with a financial investment both in alcohol sales and the design of the physical space in which it was served, welcomed women as drinking customers because they helped to increase profits. Similarly, young men and women with less conservative views of alcohol and socialization cast off the suggestion that women should not grab a drink at bars with their friends or a date.

890 Dorothy Sue Cobble, “„Practical Women‟: Waitress Unionists and the Controversies Over Gender Roles in the Food Service Industry, 1900-1980,” Labor History 29, no. 1 (Winter 1988): 5-31; Linda A. Detman, “Women Behind Bars: The Feminization of Bartending,” in Job Queues, Gender Queues: Explaining Women‟s Inroads into Male Occupations, ed. Barbara F. Reskin and Patricia A. Roos (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 241-255. 286

Even as early as the spring of 1933, the restaurant industry and alcohol producers began preparing owners and the general public to ready for a mixed-sex drinking clientele that would want to spend time at fashionable, modern bars that reflected the here-and-now rather than the stuffy ways of the past. One feature in the American Restaurant trade journal contrasted photos of “Pre-Volstead Bars” with “Modern Service

Units.” In the bar modeling the upcoming 1933 version, a respectable-looking man and woman enjoyed beers at the bar, while a female bartender served a male customer, and two women sat together at a table in the background. The caption informed readers that the modern bar, and its time saving devices, will reflect “the trend toward modernism in design.”891 Similarly, a regional Northwest industry publication called the modern bar “a thing of beauty,” predicting new bars would be full of “beautiful marble, stainless steel and lichrome fixtures, mechanical refrigeration, and the new standard of appearance and sanitation.” Comparing “the old type of bar” to other things of the past, including “long skirts” and “long hair,” the journal featured a photograph of three well-dressed young women and a man raising a beer and toasting the male bartender. Customers were going to like the new style of bars, the journal declared, “because it‟s the modern way. And the new generation will not have it otherwise.”892 A modern, progressive direction seemed to be dictating the terms of the newly-opening bars, both in their design and their clientele. Alcohol producers and manufacturers of restaurant supplies began to feature women as alcohol consumers in their advertisements, thereby visually reassuring women that it was acceptable to drink in public and encouraging doubters to acknowledge the changing times. Pabst Blue Ribbon Beer released a series of advertisements in 1933

891 “Pre-Volstead Bars Compared With Modern Service Units,” American Restaurant, April 1933, 20. Lichrome was likely a trade name for chrome. 892 “Modern Bar a Thing of Beauty,” Pacific Northwest Caterer and Steward (March/April 1933), 4-5, 10. 287 depicting a woman reminiscent of the early Betty Crocker image with a sophisticated hat and cropped hair lifting a beer to her smiling lips with both hands. Like the woman, the beer claimed to be high-class: “Only a beer that excels all others in unvarying goodness could achieve nation-wide acceptance as the best of the better beers.”893 The International Nickel Company, which manufactured Monel Metal—a copper-and-nickel alloy used to make work-surfaces and sinks—encouraged proprietors to use its product because of its appeal to women. Next to a panoramic image of the bar and dining room at the Schlitz Winter Garden restaurant in Chicago, an advertisement depicted a smiling young woman with a cocktail glass raised to her red lips. The ad copy quoted the woman as saying, “Since December 5 I‟ve celebrated a „Cocktail Hour‟ in nearly every really good bar in town. I love it!....the real fun of „Cocktail Hour‟ is being where there‟s a crowd….And there‟s one thing I‟ve noticed. The gay, smart, crowded places always have cheerful- looking bars…I mean, all that stunning, shiny, silvery-looking metal at the back.” This silvery-looking metal, Monel Metal, was “only one of the reasons why it is behind all her favorite bars.”894 Despite the lingering resistance to women consuming alcohol in public, young men and women in the 1930s—along with the businesses that wanted to profit from selling them alcohol—signaled that the era separating women from public alcohol consumption was on the way out. Critics of women in bars and self-identified social reformers, however, did not give up easily. In 1936, the president of the Society of Restaurateurs in New York surveyed his members and found that ninety-five percent of them objected to serving women alcohol at restaurant bars (although they were willing to serve drinks, along with

893 Pabst Blue Ribbon, advertisement, American Restaurant, July 1933, 4. 894 Monel Metal, advertisement, American Restaurant, May 1934, 6.

288 meals, tableside). And in the midst of World War II, despite the fact that “under recent city laws there [was] no restriction against unescorted women drinking in public bars,” a Seattle police sergeant dug up a 1907 city ordinance prohibiting women without male companions from entering “places in which liquor is sold” to justify arresting and jailing seventeen women, ages eighteen to thirty-nine in a “week-end drive against unescorted women” in bars.895 Despite efforts to “modernize” the mindset of older generations, young women continued to face opposition to their visible participation in public alcohol consumption.

One of the more telling episodes in the confluence of restaurants, female bar patrons, and generational differences in acceptable social behavior occurred at the Woman‟s Exchange Restaurant in New York City. Like other philanthropic woman‟s exchanges around the country, the New York Exchange for Woman‟s Work opened its doors in the 1870s to benefit immigrant and lower-income women by consigning their homemade clothing, needlework, baked goods, and other gifts. Long recognized as a conservative organization, the Exchange made headlines in 1934 when the operators of the restaurant “went modern” and, “in its pursuit of business,” decided to open a bar in the popular restaurant.896 With a wink, nod, and send-off to its prominent (and conservative) founders, the Exchange acknowledged the changing times: “This reversion from the stiff-backed old-fashioned thought to the very modern beliefs has been complete,” declared one local newspaper. “Even the name of the bar is a challenge to the good ladies of the swooning era—for it has been dubbed the „Crinoline Bar,‟ a paradox in

895 “Café Men Frown on Women At Bars,” New York Times, September 29, 1936, 29; “Unescorted Women in Bars Arrested in Seattle Under Old 1907 City Ordinance,” Washington State Restaurant and Tavern News, August 1942, 3. 896 “Women‟s Exchange Opens „Crinoline Bar,‟” New York World Telegram, April 26, 1934, n.p., clippings, New York Exchange for Woman‟s Work, New York Historical Society. 289 itself.”897 To inaugurate the opening of the bar, the Exchange hosted a cocktail party where two local debutantes, Elizabeth and Beatrice Elphinestone, played the part of barmaids dressed in costumes of their great-grandmother‟s generation complete with poke bonnets and crinoline hoop skirts. Even the invitations to the opening night event caricatured the bygone conservative era: they detailed “a much-bustled madame waving her lorgnette in shocked dismay at the announcement of a bar.”898 Regional newspapers went to town, so to speak, in their coverage of the event. The New York Telegram, Herald Tribune, City Sun, Journal, Post, and American all printed stories emphasizing the bar‟s break from the organization‟s conservative traditions. “The thought of cocktails and a bar undoubtedly would have shocked the founders of the exchange,” reported the Evening Sun.899 At the same time, though, the papers delighted in the restaurant‟s departure from its past and entry into modern times. “Name Your Poison, Grandma!” teased the New York Post next to a photograph of the costumed Elphinestone sisters. Not all patrons of the Exchange Restaurant were amused. Jean C. Cochran, a member of the Author‟s League, objected acutely to the opening night event for the Crinoline Bar and wrote a long letter to the editor of the New Jersey Courier-News in which she accused both the Author‟s League and the Exchange

Restaurant of “encouraging drinking.” Just days following her invitation to a “Repeal Art Show” at the St. Moritz Hotel, hosted by the Author‟s League, which asked guests to bring recipes for their favorite cocktails to be entered as raffle tickets, and each piece of artwork on display featured a bottle or saloon in its image, Cochran saw the notice for the

897 “Women‟s Bar: Fair Sex Take Another Shot at Prohibition,” New York American, April 26, 1934, n.p., clippings, New York Exchange for Woman‟s Work, New York Historical Society.

898 “Women‟s Bar,” April 26, 1934. 899 Clipping, New York Evening Sun, April 27, 1934, n.p., New York Exchange for Woman‟s Work, New York Historical Society. 290 opening of the Crinoline Bar. Appalled by both events, Cochran questioned, “have these women acted in good faith?” Although she acknowledged that the Woman‟s Exchange “for years, has done fine work,” the opening of a bar for a largely female clientele crossed the moral line. “What is going to happen to America if women openly and unashamedly drink at bars and encourage other women to do so?” Cochran demanded. “It seems to me this is a most insidious form of evil, when women encourage a dangerous habit under the guise of charity,” she continued, adding that she was going to “refuse to give to any charity that allows such methods.”900

Cochran‟s appeal to her fellow readers clearly illustrates the generational and social divide over acceptable behavior for women patronizing restaurants. Alcohol became a device used both to limit and encourage women‟s presence in restaurants.

Unlike the home-style images of domesticity dripping from the walls of tea rooms, which created an acceptable “home-like” boundary for women within the masculine restaurant industry, women‟s public consumption of alcohol problematized the feminization of restaurants by signaling a dramatic change in acceptable social behavior for women. Unlike home-style restaurants, spaces which anchored women in the past, modern restaurants complete with bars suggested that women‟s increasing visibility in all kinds of public dining spaces would be the wave of the future.

BEAUTY MARKS: THE RESIDUAL EFFECTS OF FEMALE PATRONS AND THEIR COSMETICS

Women‟s physical presence in restaurants, particularly those with a solid male clientele base, did not go unnoticed, and many male customers pointed to lipstick residue

900 Jean C. Cochran, “Encouraging Drinking,” Courier-News (New Jersey), May 2, 1934, n.p., clippings, New York Exchange for Woman‟s Work, New York Historical Society.

291 on glassware, changes on menus to “lighter fare,” and other signifiers of womanhood to complain about the feminization of restaurants. Frequently, when describing the ways in which women upset the male dining environment, men invoked the public application of cosmetics. When advocating a ban on women in bars, both as customers and as barmaids, the New York-based International Barmen Association suggested that “the powder puff and the lipstick curb free speech…and can only lead to a deterioration of the art of drinking.”901 In 1924, a writer for the Washington Post condemned women‟s “primping in public,” citing the worst offenses as brushing hair, applying powder, and painting lips at a restaurant table.902 “I suppose it would be regarded as extremely vulgar if I went into a restaurant and occupied the time between ordering my meal and it being served by cleaning my finger nails,” editorialized one male critic, adding, “yet women consider it all right to open their vanity bags, splash their faces with powder, smear their lips with colored grease, and even…comb their shingled locks. Personally, I think this conduct is disgusting, though I have not the personal courage to protest in a public place.”903 Instead, he ranted to the pages of a leading restaurant journal. Other restaurant men, “individually and collectively,” need to cry “down with the lipstick,” urged the American Restaurant magazine.904 The displeasure was not limited to the United States. Reform efforts in Berlin, Germany, attempted to restrict female patrons from applying lipstick

901 “Bartenders Urge Ban on Barmaids,” New York Times, October 13, 1936, 29. 902 “„Primping‟ in Public,” Washington Post, November 13, 1924, 6; E.V. Durling, “On the Side with E.V. Durling,” Los Angeles Times, September 24, 1938, A1; Katherine Brush, “Out of My Mind,” Washington Post, March 17, 1940, S8. 903 “Public Titivation,” Pacific Coast Chef, April 1925, 10. 904 “Beware the Pretty Girl,” American Restaurant, May 1924, 51. 292 and powdering their faces and necks at the public dining table, citing men‟s choice not to shave at the table as a model of comparative behavior.905 American women who stopped at restaurants for a bite to eat with friends, family, or (occasionally) alone, often wore makeup, especially from the 1920s through the mid- 1950s, when wearing copious amounts of makeup came into vogue. “What inspires romance and love is looks, not cooks,” waxed one beauty expert, referring offhand to the adage that the way to a man‟s heart was through his stomach.906 In the years following World War I, market sales in colorful, “visible make-up,” including lipstick and blush, increased substantially as part of an emerging association between cosmetics and what Kathy Peiss calls “the externalization of the gendered self,” where a woman‟s appearance played a more prominent role in her identification as a modern woman.907 According to

Lois Banner, in the 1920s, cosmetic companies claimed the second highest advertising budget, only behind the food industry, and by 1930, the revenue generated by cosmetic companies topped almost $180 million.908 Cosmetics advertising, which was geared toward white women, stressed a connection between women‟s use of cosmetics and their social, sexual, and consumer roles.909 While etiquette books decried the public application of makeup, many young women simply ignored this behavioral advice when dining in restaurants prior to World War II. Social etiquette dictated that, similar to the time-and-place restrictions for a

905 “Berlin Men War on Women Who „Doll Up‟ at Meals,” New York Times, October 8, 1927, 17; “Topic of the Times: Restaurants as Beauty Parlors,” New York Times, October 12, 1927, 26; “Restaurant Primping,” Washington Post, October 29, 1927, 6. 906 Nell Vinick, Lessons in Loveliness: A Practical Guide to Beauty Secrets (Longmans, Green and Co., 1930), 1. 907 Kathy Peiss, “Making Faces: The Cosmetics Industry and the Cultural Construction of Gender, 1890- 1930,” Genders 7, no. 7 (Spring 1990): 143-146, 150-151, 157. 908 Lois Banner, American Beauty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 271-273. 909 Kathy Peiss, Hope in a Jar: The Making of America‟s Beauty Culture (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1998), 134. 293 woman dining in public, cosmetics application was acceptable only in particular instances. An etiquette manual from 1908 deemed it acceptable for women to re-apply rouge and powder at the restaurant table during lunch but not dinner.910 One cosmetics expert claimed that “it was unthought of to make up in public until after World War I” and cited the prominent use of the “ladies‟ lounge” for refreshing make-up after a meal, while another beauty advice manual reminded women that applying powder in restaurants “stamps you as having poor breeding.”911 “DON‟T POWDER NOSE IN PUBLIC” advised Mary Brian, columnist for the Los Angeles Examiner. Other beauty authorities admonished American women, in contrast to their European counterparts, for powdering noses in public.912 Yet women re-applied makeup after eating in restaurants with such frequency that some restaurants gave away souvenir folding matchbooks that contained match-sized sticks of rouge.913 Implicitly condoning public application of cosmetics, Alice Foote MacDougall refused a patron‟s request to place signs asking female customers not to use make-up at the dining table.914 Kathy Peiss argues that by the 1920s and 1930s, applying makeup in restaurants and other public places was an empowering gesture for young women. “As they put on a feminine face,” Peiss suggests, “these women briefly claimed a public space, stopping the action, in a sense, by making a spectacle of themselves.”915 At the same time, she acknowledges that many Americans— including cosmetics manufacturers—considered the public application and wearing excessive amounts of make-up “vulgar” because it involved “showing the artifice”: the

910 Banner, American Beauty, 216. 911 Gilbert Vail, A History of Cosmetics in America (New York: The Toilet Goods Association, Inc., 1947), 117-118; Peiss, Hope in a Jar, 155. 912 “Oh, Girls, Make a Listen,” Mixer and Server, November 15, 1927, 50. 913 “Some Cleveland Restaurants,” American Restaurant, October 1930, 66; “Lip Sticks Offered in Match Book Form,” American Restaurant, April 1931, 88, 90. 914 MacDougall, The Secret of Successful Restaurants, 195. 915 Peiss, Hope in a Jar, 186. 294 purpose of make-up is to make you look naturally more attractive—not artificial, not painted,” explained one beauty manual.916 The regulation or removal of women‟s use of make-up in restaurants, then, signaled a resistance to the feminization of the space and limited the ways in which women could assert “the gendered self” in public dining establishments.

Cosmetics, and particularly lipstick, had a dark side often cited by city health officials in the interwar years. A doctor from New Jersey warned women of lipstick‟s danger as a “microbe carrier.” Unsuspecting, lipstick-wearing women applied the dangerous culprit, and then swept the microbes into her internal bodily system with her tongue, “thus breeding disease.”917 Based on fears that cosmetic companies were making false claims about the health and safety of their products—including the denial of using mercury and lead in certain brands of rouge, lipstick, and hair dye—the federal government, under the 1936 Food, Drug, and Cosmetics Act, mandated that cosmetics be regulated by the Food and Drug Administration.918 Even with the mandatory oversight, many city health departments singled out lipstick as a germ trap and used the prominent pink stains as a tool in enforcing restaurant health codes. One of Washington, D.C.‟s health inspectors called lipstick a “magnet to bacteria” and credited lipstick with helping his office uncover 50% of dirty glasses in restaurants. He even joked that men should be “forced to wear it so that the record would be 100 per cent.”919 Coney Island‟s magistrate fined twenty restaurants for sanitary code violations after learning that “a lady‟s lipstick contains an oil ingredient to which germs readily attach themselves, and that this oil

916 Peiss, “Making Faces,” 158; Vinick, Lessons in Loveliness, 86 (emphasis in original). 917 “Warns Girls Against Lipstick, Saying It Carries Microbes,” New York Times, January 17, 1927, 19. 918 “Warn Women to Use Cosmetics with Care,” New York Times, May 12, 1927, 20; Banner, American Beauty, 274. 919 “Bacteria Count Per D.C. Spoons Is Cut to 6,000,” Washington Post, December 7, 1937, 8.

295 when transferred from the lips to a drinking glass cannot readily be removed by water heated to 180 degrees” without extra scrubbing. Apparently, according to the court, the restaurants lost “the battle of the century…lipstick versus elbow grease.”920 Lipstick won. As much as lipstick and other cosmetics found greater social acceptance as a tool for defining ideal femininity, they were used to invoke fear over the larger implications of women occupying previously male-dominated public places, including restaurants. As female cosmetics‟ usage increased, so did the restaurant industry‟s negative references to make-up grow as a strategy for regulating public dining conditions. Following the Second

World War, many men, displaced and displeased with women‟s entrance into public spaces they had previously claimed, sought a return to protected masculine spaces that fostered male camaraderie. Previously male-dominated industries launched efforts to reclaim spaces for men by removing traces of women, particularly in the form of makeup. One Seattle-based company signaled women‟s impermanency as workers by requiring female employees to remove nail polish and lipstick on-site with a handkerchief and acetone distributed by a manager.921 Some of the most aggressive battles against women‟s make-up, however, engaged the dreaded lipstick stain. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Calgon, Inc. ran a series of advertisements in the leading restaurant trade journals, including Restaurant Management and American Restaurant Magazine, enticing restaurants to use the mechanical dishwashing detergent Calgonite with just one image: a cup with a woman‟s lipstick print. A short exclamation, splashed next to the cup, screamed a warning to restaurants. Phrases like “Evidence!” “Branded” “Warning!” “Germ trap!” and “No! No!” cautioned business owners against

920 “Lipsticks Aid in Campaign,” Los Angeles Times, August 4, 1934, A3; E.V. Durling, “On the Side with E.V. Durling,” Los Angeles Times, November 12, 1937, A1; “Lipstick a Germ Carrier,” New York Times, September 17, 1936, 25. 921 Peiss, Hope in a Jar, 244. 296 the horrors and embarrassment of dirty, unsanitary drinkware marked by the tell-tale lip stain. More detailed ad copy continued the admonishment with frightening comparisons to the dangers of poorly-cleaned dishes.922 “Lipstick always indicates dangerously inefficient dishwashing…but its absence is no guarantee that your washing procedure is safe,” one advertisement warned.923 “Strong alkalis cut lipstick,” another acknowledged,

“but they cannot remove dangerous, unpleasant washing film nor the filth imbedded in it.”924 Yet another suggested lipstick was comparable to a disease-ridden symptom: “Poor dishwashing is like measles…you are lucky if red spots show up to help diagnose your trouble.”925 Calgon was not the only producer of industrial-strength dishwashing detergent or machinery to invoke the lipstick stain as a feature of its advertising. Super Soilax,

Armour and Company, Oakite, Hamilton Beach, Blakeslee, and Kelite Products all developed advertising campaigns in the 1940s and 1950s that guaranteed the quality and efficiency of their products based on the detergent‟s or dishwasher‟s ability to remove the visible stain left behind from a female customer‟s lips. All of the advertisements, however, acknowledged that germs and other “foreign matter” invisible to the naked eye existed on dishes and utensils lacking thorough sanitation. The focus on women‟s lipstick marks, then, was multifaceted. On the one hand, the lipstick stain, as a clearly visible indicator of a dirty dish, was a familiar signal to restaurant customers that the glass had not been properly cleaned. At the same time, though, lipstick marks signaled a woman‟s

922 See Restaurant Management and American Restaurant, January 1947 through January 1950. 923 “Evidence,” American Restaurant, January 1947, 21. 924 “Wash More Dishes Cleaner,” American Restaurant, January 1948, 51 (emphasis in original). 925 “Only a Symptom,” American Restaurant, March 1948, 27.

297 presence in the restaurant, reminding customers who followed her turn at the table that she had occupied the same dining space. The advertising campaigns featuring women‟s lipstick stains mirrored middle- class white America‟s conflicted feelings about women‟s patronage of restaurants and the social meaning of her increasing appearance in public dining spaces. In many ways, postwar restaurants in the United States depended on women‟s pocketbooks to turn a profit. To this end, the restaurant industry “thanked” women‟s critical eye for cleanliness and their use of cosmetics for revealing dining establishments that failed to uphold basic sanitary conditions. Many male restaurateurs and their male clientele, however, still held deep-seated ambivalence and discomfort with the presence of women in restaurants, except when she accompanied her family in a public gesture of domestic coherence.

Calgon‟s lipstick campaigns in the postwar years invoked the advertising scare tactics used by companies to market personal hygiene products in the 1920s. Then, businesses such as the Scott Paper Company ominously cautioned consumers, “A single contact with inferior toilet tissue may start the way for serious infection—and a long painful illness.”926 By the 1940s, companies like Super Soilax declared that lipstick was “beauty for women, but a haven for germs!” and “dangerous to your diners‟ health.”927 These equations, tying representations of women‟s public appearance to disease, demonstrate how makeup, as a signifier of women‟s physical presence, threatened the masculine authority of the restaurant. Acknowledged as a necessary customer-base, women still faced reluctant acceptance among many waiters and male patrons who had, for decades, laid claim to America‟s restaurants.

926 Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920-1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 103. 927 “Lips Stick!” Restaurant Management, August 1943, 7; “Can You Identify It?” American Restaurant, February 1948, 33. 298

Ultimately, the restaurant industry at large conceded that women were at the heart of their customer base. Women, who had dined out with increasing frequency while working in war industries, became more regular customers after the war.928 According to a 1961 survey by the American Restaurant China Manufacturers Association, 300 female restaurant patrons across 36 states determined that women were eating out more often.929

This recognition is also evident in the range of marketing ideas tailored to female consumers. The Chas. A Stevens & Co. department store opened “The Circle” restaurant in 1941, “designed specifically to attract women” and “decorated with murals depicting the irresistible manner in which a man is ensnared by the circles of women‟s influence.”930 Nick Copanos, president of the Gazelle Restaurant Company in Cleveland, Ohio, recognized that “the majority of food sales [approximately 60 %] were made to women guests” and added the “Powder Room” to his restaurants, decorated according to more feminine tastes.931 Restaurants even began installing the Pursook, a hook designed by Margaret Hogue “on which a lady may hang her purse” underneath the table.932 In terms of makeup, men were not the only ones who noticed the remnants of cosmetics left behind by previous customers. As domestic authorities trained to detect dirt and fingermarks, women—according to industry studies—had a more critical eye for grime, grease, and general uncleanliness.933 Advertisements for Armstrong Linoleum flooring and Syracuse China reminded restaurants of this fact: “Women are pretty fussy

928 “Interesting Facts About Restaurants,” Washington State Restaurant and Tavern News, October 1950, 21. 929 Henrik Ibsen, “It‟s the Women of American Who Can Make or Break a Restaurant!” Restaurateur, December 1962, 18. 930 “New Department Store Restaurant Venture,” American Restaurant, April 1941, 54; “What‟s New in Chicago,” Restaurant Management, September 1941, 36-37. 931 Pat Pompillo, “Profits from Serving Women,” Restaurant Management, June 1941, 31. 932 Edward E. Greene, “What‟s New,” Restaurant Management, July 1949, 52. 933 Grace E. Smith, “Has Woman a Career In Food Selling?” American Restaurant, November 1923, 37.

299 about the way a restaurant looks…from first-hand experience in their own homes,” and “Every woman to-day is keenly conscious of the art of the table setting,” the companies declared, suggesting that their products passed the white-glove test.934 “Mrs. American Housewife is your greatest competitor,” warned one trade journal, “and Mrs. New Diner- Out is particularly allergic to the tell-tale finger mark, the smudge of grease, the speck of dust.”935 The 1961 American Restaurant China Manufacturers survey also recorded that over 93% of female customers were aware of the restaurant‟s table appearance, including its tablecloth, flatware, dishes, and glasses.936

It is not surprising, then, that women who enjoyed lipstick and other cosmetics yet wrinkled their noses at the lip-stained mark of dirty dinnerware embraced developments in indelible lipstick in the postwar era. The cosmetics industry benefited from the scientific discoveries that emerged during wartime chemical research.937 Using technologies developed during the war, Hazel Bishop created and marketed “a lanolin- based smearproof lipstick” following World War II that, according to ad copy, “stays on you, not on him.”938 Dorothy Gray‟s Super-Stay lipstick also entered the market, as well as Lip-Stae, a gloss applied over lipstick that insured protection against lipstick smears on glasses and napkins.939 Kathy Peiss suggests that smear-free lipstick and other stay-put cosmetics in the postwar era contrasted with the public application of lipstick so visibly popular in the 1920s and 1930s.940 Makeup had become a tale of self-improvement,

934 “How Much Do You Know About Women,” Restaurant Management, February 1943, 30; “Critical…and Not to be Ignored,” American Restaurant, January 1933, 77. 935 “The Editor Says: Opportunity Knocks,” Allied Food and Beverage, October 1953, 5. 936 “Survey Finds Women Eating Out More Frequently,” Restaurateur, October 1961, 9. 937 Banner, American Beauty, 272. 938 Banner, American Beauty, 273; Peiss, Hope in a Jar, 247. 939 Evelyn Hayes, “The Beauty Box,” Washington Post, June 26, 1951, B5; “What‟s New,” Restaurant Management, June 1950, 80. 940 Peiss, Hope in a Jar, 247. 300 symbolizing the self-made American woman, and its remnants on glassware and utensils called attention to the female patron‟s inroads within restaurant dining rooms. Diet foods on menus, which also accompanied the increase of women dining in restaurants, paralleled cosmetics in the reaction they invoked from male customers and industry leaders. Although the 1920s witnessed an intensified focus on slim bodies and eating less for women and men, the addition of more nutritional, “wholesome” items to restaurant menus called attention to the greater number of female patrons frequenting restaurants. Menus that included healthier options and catered to diet fads became one of the main targets of male resentment over women‟s inhabitance of restaurants. Although cultural ideals of American female beauty and femininity expected women to maintain a slender form as another manifestation of “the externalization of the gendered self,” many middle-class white men argued the restaurant was not the place for women to practice these exercises in caloric self-restraint. At the same time, though, restaurants and food suppliers readily identified the marketability of diet foods and weight-loss menus to attract female patrons. Here again, external symbols of womanhood and femininity—in this case, diet foods—highlighted the conflicting and contradictory attitudes toward accepting women as a staple figure within restaurants‟ shared public space. Despite the social pressure for women to maintain a thin bodily figure, men suggested that restaurants should not be responsible for assisting in this common goal. As cultural markers that called attention to women‟s occupation of public space, salads, “light” fare, and other health foods implicated women in changing the menu features of popular restaurants and problematized the larger social tolerance of women as restaurant patrons.

301

SCALING BACK THE MENU: DIET FOODS, HEALTH FADS, AND GENDERED APPETITES

Groaning boards and twelve-course meals typified the elaborate menus of high- end restaurants in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century. Lavish spreads of food urged patrons to eat more than their full, and corpulent celebrities like Diamond Jim Brady and Lillian Russell gained mythic status for the amount they consumed at one sitting while feasting at New York‟s finest restaurants, such as Rector‟s, Louis Sherry‟s, and Delmonico‟s.941 Yet scientific advances in understanding nutrition, especially calories and vitamins, through the educational reform efforts of home economists, contributed to a greater emphasis on wholesome, balanced meals in building a nation of strong, healthy citizens in the years leading up to World War I. Some of the first popular diet books to help Americans “reduce,” such as Reducing Weight Comfortably and Eat and Grow Thin, appeared on shelves in the years immediately preceding the Great War. This steadily growing appreciation of slim bodies as models of fitness and health gained even more momentum during the war, when “reducing weight became civil defense.”942 Fat became symbolic of overindulgence and waste at a time when Americans were practicing restraint and economy to aid in war efforts. One doctor snipped that “any healthy, normal individual, who is now getting fat is unpatriotic,” while a Cornell

University professor opined, “There are probably a good many million people in the United States whose most patriotic act would be to get thin gradually and gracefully and then to stay thin.”943 Middle-class white Americans increasingly associated a heavy-set appearance with the working class and “unfavorable” Eastern and Southern European

941 Batterberry and Batterberry, On the Town in New York, 170-176; John Mariani, America Eats Out (New York: William Morrow and Co., Inc., 1991), 49-59. 942 Hillel Schwartz, Never Satisfied: A Cultural History of Diets, Fantasies, and Fat (New York: The Free Press, 1986), 141, 174. 943 Schwartz, Never Satisfied, 141-142. 302 immigrant populations. In this equation, good American citizens were thin American citizens. By the 1920s, health and beauty became conflated in the eyes of middle-class Americans. The notion that diet determined not only internal digestive health but external attractiveness and personal success achieved wide social acceptance, particularly among white and black middle-class women whose attention to outward appearance was becoming part of an everyday practice of beauty culture and feminine identity.944 Young college women learned how to lose weight in home economics courses, and the social pressure intensified to exert control over one‟s body and choose healthful foods, rather than yield to one‟s personal tastes and preferences for high-fat, sweet treats. The sociologist Christine Frederick observed in 1929 that “health and right feeding have been made almost synonymous, and added to it all has come a powerful motive—a specific desire on the part of women to keep thin, to hold or gain beauty through foods.”945 Not all women, though, viewed the reducing craze as healthy, such as the supervisor of dietetic courses at the Pratt Institute, who expressed concern that “thousands of young girls in schools, colleges, and offices are starving themselves under the mistaken impression that they are dieting.”946 Beauty experts also noted that “hasty reducing” led to “slack” skin and increased wrinkles.947 Despite these inklings of unease over the extreme emphasis on maintaining a body of the “right” size, the ideal of the slender

944 Margaret A. Lowe, Looking Good: College Women and Body Image, 1875-1930 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 135-146. 945 Christine Frederick, Selling Mrs. Consumer (New York: Business Bourse, 1929), 131 (emphasis in original). 946 “Modern Youth Doesn‟t Diet—It Starves,” Pacific Coast Chef (November 1927), 12. Not all men favored the super-slim look either, as expressed in a poem printed in a 1928 issue of the Mixer and Server: “That most of their legs they do show/ Some flappers don‟t deny—/But they‟re so doggone skinny „tis/Hard to understand why” (Sam Hill, “Not Worth Looking At,” Mixer and Server, January 15, 1928, 58). 947 Vinick, Lessons in Loveliness, 67. 303 female figure maintained a stranglehold in the middle-class popular imagination after World War I. When Prohibition closed the curtain on many of the high-class restaurants specializing in extensive menus, coinciding with the heightened preference for slimmer bodies, the timing was ripe for restaurants to participate in the weight reducing trend, especially since the “slim silhouette” had “put a serious crimp in recovery of the old ways of eating.”948 Some restaurants, such as Lindy‟s in Chicago, featured popular fad diets, like the “Hollywood 18 Day Reducing Diet,” on their menus.949 Others positioned a scale, or “weighing machine,” in the restaurant so customers could monitor the success of their diets. When patrons proved uncomfortable displaying their poundage for all to see, some restaurants replaced the machine models with ones where customers could view their weight through a peephole without announcing it to those around them.950 Considering both male and female customers, restaurant operators and consultants debated whether or not gendered food preferences existed as part of their menu strategizing.951 Restaurateurs, such as Alice Foote MacDougall, who ventured that “there is no such thing as separate men‟s and women‟s taste,” likely resisted differentiating between gendered groups of diners because they did not want to deter male customers from entering restaurants geared to women‟s preferences.952 Other proprietors acknowledged that “there is a determined effort being made by the American people, especially the women, to keep thin,” but “the average man also is becoming sensitive” to

948 Vernon O‟Reilly, “The City That Knows Chow,” San Francisco News, November 3, 1950, 3, 21. 949 Menu, Lindy‟s Hollywood 18 Day Reducing Diet, ca. 1929. New York Historical Society. 950 Jerome Beatty, “How People Act in Restaurants,” American Magazine, December 1932, 57. 951 This debate has persisted into the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Joanne Finkelstein, in her sociological study on public dining habits, cites the theorists Roland Barthes and Pierre Bourdieu, among others, who identify gender differences among food preferences and food distribution. See Joanne Finkelstein, Dining Out: A Sociology of Modern Manners (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1989), 47-51. 952 MacDougall, The Secret of Successful Restaurants, 205. 304 carrying extra weight on his frame.953 Therefore, some industry leaders, including J.O. Dahl, Director of the Hotel and Restaurant Bureau, who prided himself on his love for good food and slim figure, advocated for restaurants to adopt healthier menus and consult with dieticians. Similarly, in his widely-read guide, Restaurant Management, Dahl included a section on how to cater to customers‟ specialized eating habits, suggesting particular foods for reducing weight and recommending that restaurateurs “have a competent dietician make up a few well-balanced food combinations for people who wish to reduce.”954 Despite the implicit gesture that nutritional, low-calorie meals were for both women and men, the latter tended to shrug off the suggestion that they were, in any way, responsible for the healthy eating trend.955 Men who did select lighter menu options were fodder for widespread teasing among their counterparts who questioned their masculinity and accused them of “getting girlish” with their food choices. “American men are getting effeminate in their food tastes,” sneered the chef of one of the country‟s most acclaimed steak houses, located in the Palmer House in Chicago. Lamenting the drop in sales of “steaks, chops, roasts and boiled meats,” Chef Ernest Amiet complained that that there was “little difference” between the meals “ordered by reducing determined women and the average business

953 “Are We All Eating Less?” Mixer and Server, July 15, 1928, 26.

954 J. O. Dahl, “Do Your Customers Count Calories?” Restaurant Management, January 1928, 10-12; J. O. Dahl, Restaurant Management: Principles and Practice, 2nd ed. (New York: Harper and Bros., 1938), 245. Dahl also included strategies for designing menus to help people gain weight and cure constipation, among other health issues, but his general focus in most publications addressing health and restaurant food was on counting calories for weight loss. 955 Jessamyn Neuhaus posits that emphasis on difference between men and women‟s culinary habits and preferences was a way to “safeguard the masculinity” of men, particularly male cooks. If women prepared and ate food differently than men, the two could not be compared or valued equally. See Jessamyn Neuhaus, “Ladylike Lunches and Manly Meals: The Gendering of Food and Cooking,” in Manly Meals and Mom‟s Home Cooking: Cookbooks and Gender in Modern America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), chap 4. 305 man.”956 Yet, this tendency for the “average business man” to order healthy, lighter lunches and dinners was rarely recognized among the majority of restaurateurs and customers who believed “women, on the whole, have a more healthful appetite than men” and attributed the addition of salads, toast, and vegetables on menus to the rise of female customers.957

As restaurant attendance waned during the 1930s, when the nation slipped into the economic hardships of the Great Depression, the financial incentive for restaurateurs to become calorie conscious was even more evident in the number of industry-recognized business models praised for successfully introducing health foods onto menus. Manhattan‟s Trufood Dairy & Vegetarian Restaurant, Bossow‟s Golden Rule restaurant in Chicago, the “Health Counter” at Horluck‟s in Seattle, and the dining room at Boston‟s

Hotel Kenmore all received accolades for their health food service, including light desserts such as vegetable flavored ice cream.958 Restaurants that were reluctant to bend to the health trend found encouragement to comply with the shift to healthier menus from statistics that showed thirty percent of Americans in 1935 were overweight, as well as a plethora of cookbooks that provided diet food recipes for industrial feeding.959 To encourage restaurants to find profits in healthy eaters, the editorial director of the

American Restaurant magazine noted that in 1938, Americans spent $1 billion on vitamin

956 “Men Getting Girlish,” Pacific Coast Chef, September 1928, 11.

957 The Ware School of Tea Room Management: A Course in Tea Room, Cafeteria, and Motor Inn Management: Lesson XI (New York: The Ware School of Tea Room Management, 1927), 4; “The Story of Mary Elizabeth‟s,” American Restaurant, July 1923, 42. 958 “Eat Your Way to Health!” promotional pamphlet, Trufood Dairy and Vegetarian Restaurant, November 1937, New York Historical Society; “New Restaurant Is Now Opened,” American Restaurant, September 1935, 38; “For Those Who Must Diet,” Restaurant Management, September 1936, 176; “Boston Goes in for Health Ice Cream at the Georgian,” American Restaurant, June 1931, 49. 959 Redmon B. Davis, “Weight Reduction Menus as a Source of Profit,” American Restaurant, June 1935, 38-39, 73; “New Books,” Restaurant Management, August 1936, 98. In this monthly list of recommended books, almost half the titles listed were related to diet and nutrition in August 1936. 306 supplements, twice as much as in 1937.960 Dieticians enjoyed newfound employment as restaurant consultants, yet not everyone appreciated their expertise. One manager complained that the one-plate combinations, frequently recommended by dieticians, “ruins real service,” while another restaurateur predicted restaurants “will gain nothing but ridicule” by “meddling” with prescribed diets for the public.961 Many of these critiques about the prominence of diet foods in restaurants were leveled at women, whom male restaurateurs—including Albert J. Pixley, president of the famed Chicago Pixley & Ehlers restaurant chain—accused of introducing “gastronomic monstrosities,” such as the

American salad, and corrupting good cooking. “The culinary arts have fallen into the hands of the women,” lamented Pixley. “As in dressmaking—which is properly a masculine business—the feminine touch has been ruinous.”962 Pointing to foods generally associated with females, Pixley charged women with upsetting restaurants‟ commitment to serving tasty, satisfying meals to a hungry public. As symbols of American womanhood, fad diets and health foods magnified the extent to which women were disrupting men‟s claims to restaurants as a privileged masculine space. Although some industry insiders and hopeful customers reported that reducing diets and slim figures were falling out of favor in the 1930s, “as dead as last year‟s best seller,” these predictions proved to be wishful-thinking at best.963 Instead, restaurants found that by emphasizing the association between healthful eating and an attractive external appearance, they could appeal to middle-class women‟s desire to achieve the

960 Herbert C. Siekman, “This Vitminitus—and the Restaurant,” American Restaurant, November 1941, 25. 961 Jay Roberts, “Does It Pay to Employ a Dietician?” Hotel Management, July 1927, 7-9; Jean Bovet, “The Caterer‟s New Problems,” Pacific Northwest Caterer and Steward, January 1932, 6; Peter Borras, “Restaurateurs Should Not Play the Role of Dietician,” Restaurant Management, November 1928, 299. 962 “A Challenge to American Cookery,” American Restaurant, February 1936, 40, 69-70. 963 “Diet Faddism Is Debunked,” American Restaurant, June 1936, 30, 53-54; L. R. Lawrence, “Reducers” (an original poem), American Restaurant, April 1935, 64-65; “Eating for Style,” American Restaurant, October 1931, 52. 307

American ideal of “natural” feminine beauty. The Helena Rubenstein Salon of Beauty on Fifth Avenue in New York City opened its Zurich Room café “for beauty-conscious guests with discriminating tastes” and offered “an energetically-charged step to body perfection in a luncheon of sunshine vegetables and fruits.”964 “[N]ourishing creams and other beauty preparations are no longer designated as „food‟ for the skin,” one beauty column instructed, citing fruits and vegetables as the new “Food for Beauty.” Following this thought, dietary consultant Ann Delafield, whose admirers praised her success at “making wallflowers into orchids,” suggested “an elimination diet” of citrus fruit, tomato juice, and vegetable broth, described by the New York Woman‟s Exchange Revue as a diet “which looks rigid but is guaranteed to contain enough calories for any person‟s hard day of work.”965 The American Restaurant trade journal also encouraged women to find beauty through food, not cosmetics, but being in the business of food sales, the journal advocated a more substantial diet for women. Reminiscing over the inspiration for its 1938 Vita-Girl campaign, which sought to crown a beautiful girl who also demonstrated a healthful appetite, the magazine‟s editor said the idea for the contest emerged “after watching stenographers and young office girls eating in drug stores, usually eating a sweet roll and a chocolate soda or a „carrot salad‟ and a soft drink, then proceed to paint their lips and pretend they look healthy.” This beauty practice yielded false results. Healthy eating was the true path to an attractive appearance, he claimed. “After all, good food not only makes good health, but it makes one look healthy. The reigning beauties of years ago didn‟t know what cosmetics were, so let‟s show the girls of today how a natural healthy red-cheeked glow can be obtained by a more careful selection of food, thereby

964 “Ideas of the Month,” 25. 965 “The Beauty Spotlight,” Exchange Revue, February 1941, 26. The New York Exchange for Woman‟s Work Records, New York Historical Society. 308 making it unnecessary to cover up by artificiality an anemic face.”966 Ultimately, if women were going to eat less in order to maintain or achieve a slim figure, restaurants needed to find a way to profit from the diet trend or else lose sales. They succeeded by furthering food marketing campaigns that suggested beautiful, sophisticated, fashion- conscious women were thin women who consumed healthful foods.

Several national brands and food distributors partnered with restaurants to promote particular items as diet-friendly. In a two-page advertising spread for a restaurant trade journal, Wesson Oil featured drawings of models in the latest fashion followed by copy that read, “Fashion says, „Be slender,‟ and women depend upon salads to help them meet the command….Wesson oil, all by itself, won‟t win their favor for you. But it can add to your salads the goodness that has won the approval of millions of

America women.”967 United Fruit Bananas offered free booklets of banana recipes, promising to help restaurants keep female customers slim with satisfying banana salads.968 An advertisement for teased a slender, fashionable-looking woman, who seemed not to have the willpower to resist delicious waffles with Log Cabin syrup: “Gosh, Mrs. Sampson—What‟s Going to Happen to Your Figure?”969 Similarly, Ry-Crisp reminded restaurateurs that dieting customers would “gladly pay more for food they know will help streamline their figures,” and offered menu guidelines featuring the low-calorie cracker to please “feminine guests” whose mantra was “Bumps and bulges…must come off!”970 Ry-Crisp also paired with the nationwide Slenderella weight- loss program that promised, alongside a physician of the dieter‟s choosing, to help

966 C. A. Patterson, “Selling Your Restaurant…to the Public,” American Restaurant, July 1939, 28, 76. 967 “What Do Paris Styles Mean to You?” advertisement, Wesson Oil, American Restaurant, August 1931, 74-75. 968 Advertisement, United Fruit Bananas, Restaurant Management, April 1941, 42. 969 Advertisement, Log Cabin, Restaurant Management, March 1939, 53. 970 Advertisement for Ry-Krisp, American Restaurant, May 1940, 75. 309

Americans drop pounds: “You are not alone since you will be in the company of many other individuals who have the same problem as you have,” read the program‟s brochure. “Together we can accomplish the desired result.” This support network included restaurants, which by serving Ry-Crisp and other Slenderella-approved foods, helped women lose weight without being confined to the home.971

Eating to maintain and lose weight in restaurants became so readily associated with female customers that one restaurant in Cleveland distributed free diet booklets to female patrons, while a tea room in Seattle noted that its “goodies for little boys and girls to eat” was a “menu served to children only,” a statement that suggested women might be inclined to order its smaller portions.972 The New York Exchange for Woman‟s Work, which operated a restaurant popular among the city‟s female socialites, incorporated reducing tips from well-known dieticians and authors into its monthly Exchange Revue.973 Even during World War II, restaurants revived much of the same rhetoric from World War I, suggesting that “women must keep trim and fit to do their bit for Uncle Sam” by eating Ry-Crisp and other low-calorie foods.974 Yet the perception of women as restaurants‟ only weight-loss customers was misguided. Rather, evidence points to some restaurateurs‟ awareness that men also desired and selected from low-calorie menus.

Although the American public most readily tied dieting trends to women, the reach of “weight watching” extended to men as well, particularly by the postwar years.

971 The Slenderella Story (New York: Slenderella International, ca. 1957), 3. Julie Benell Collection, Texas Woman‟s University; advertisement for Ry-Krisp and Slenderella luncheons, American Restaurant, August 1941, 61. 972 “Chef‟s Chatter,” Restaurant Management, February 1942, 2; Children‟s Souvenir Menu, Frederick and Nelson Tea Room, Seattle, Washington, MOHAI. 973 “Prescription for Diet,” Exchange Revue, June 1940, 26, The New York Exchange for Woman‟s Work Records, New York Historical Society. 974 “What I Know About Women,” Restaurant Management, February 1943, 1.

310

“So large a segment of the public is weight conscious,” claimed the manager of one hotel dining room, that listing the calories of each dish on the menu “provides a genuine service” to customers.975 Other proprietors agreed, citing their popular diet menus and often noting the number of male patrons who favored these options. Eaton‟s Restaurant in Southern California offered a Diet Menu for overweight people who “would like to continue eating and still reduce,” with appetizing meals for men and women. The owner of Arizona‟s Lulu Belle restaurant invented a Diet Special entrée with sirloin steak that so pleased a male customer, he “made a month‟s reservations for lunch and dinner at the

Lulu Belle.”976 Other restaurants, such as the Peter Pan restaurants in New York, also featured meat-focused weight-control options to appeal to “heartier” appetites.977 The Olde Town Restaurant, which catered to an “Executive Set” of male stock brokers, attorneys, coffee merchants, and insurance salesmen, added a “waistline-portion” special to its lunch menu to help these particular customers exercise “quantity-wise…a bit of restraint.”978 Another food journalist observed “businessmen bring in their diets and depend on the help to look after them” at Schrafft‟s, a popular restaurant chain often linked to a predominantly female clientele.979 Other weight-loss studies that influenced restaurant menus, such as those conducted by the Cereal Institute, Inc. and the

Continental Baking Company, Inc. (producer of Roman Meal and Wonder Bread), focused on nutrition and weight-reduction for both women and men.980 However, popular

975 “Helping Customers to County Their Calories,” Restaurant Management, November 1952, 7. 976 “A Special Menu for Dieting Customers,” Pacific Coast Record, April 1957, 32; Moyca Bates, “Cuisine A La Floradora,” Pacific Coast Record, May 1955, 36. 977 Menu, Peter Pan‟s Weight Control Corner, October 1956, Randall H. Greenless Menu Collection, Cornell University. 978 Jane Nickerson, “News of Food,” New York Times, March 31, 1954, 30. 979 Longgood, “Daintiest Beaneries in Town,” 84. 980 “Overweight Can Order More and Still Reduce,” Pacific Coast Record, August 1963, 16-17; Roman Meal Calorie Counter and „Eat to Reduce‟ Plan, Continental Baking Co., Inc., ca. 1950, Advertising Ephemera Collection, John W. Hartman Center, Duke University Archives; William I. Fishbein, Simplified 311 opinion continued to perpetuate a battle of the sexes taking place in the menu arena, where “dainty” feminine salads faced off against “hearty,” manly, stick-to-your-ribs plates. This tendency to associate reduced-calorie menus solely with female customers singled out women as the party responsible for increasing restaurants‟ focus on nutrition when the majority of (male) customers and operators did not believe it was the restaurant‟s responsibility to educate the public on health eating habits.981 Recognizing the extent to which certain male customers resented the “invasion” of women into restaurants and avoided eating with the opposite sex, numerous restaurateurs returned to pre-Volstead practices and opened men‟s grills and other male- only dining rooms. As noted earlier in this chapter, restaurants at the turn of the twentieth century catered predominantly to men, and dining spots that served both sexes asked women to enter through separate entrances and often maintained sex-segregated dining rooms, such as the Rathskellar in Seattle, which featured a Ladies Café where women could dine.982 Several restaurants, including Maylie‟s in New Orleans, refused admittance to female customers altogether until after World War I.983 As women began to frequent restaurants at a steadier pace, exclusive men‟s rooms remained in vogue, promising male customers a masculine respite from women‟s dining company. In contrast to the home- and-garden, airy décor designed presumably for women‟s tastes, male-only dining rooms

Meal Planning for Scientific Weight Loss, ca. 1950s-1960s, Julie Benell Collection, Texas Woman‟s University. 981 In one study from 1942, Restaurant Management surveyed participants in its “Menu Profits Clinic” and learned that 83 percent did not think restaurants should be responsible for teaching the public about nutrition, and 91 percent believed advocating fad diets and other nutritional programs in restaurants was a bad idea (“Shall We Sell Nutrition,” Restaurant Management, May 1942, 38). 982 Robert S. Fisher, “Mirror of Taste: The Restaurant As a Reflection of the Changing Appetites of Seattle,” in More Voices, New Stories: King County, Washington's First 150 Years, ed. Mary C. Wright (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002), 95-97. 983 Scoop Kennedy, Dining Out in New Orleans (New Orleans: Bormon House, 1945), 82.

312 featured dark, brooding wood-paneled walls and aggressive, “manly” ornamentation, such as hunting trophies and weapons collections. For instance, the men‟s café at the Hotel Statler in Buffalo, New York, displayed a “heavy beamed ceiling decorated with hunting scenes in the days of bow and arrow and spear,” while its walls boasted oak wood and volcanic travertine stone transported from Mount Vesuvius.984 Men also considered the food in these restaurants to be more strongly seasoned and tailored to men‟s heartier appetites. A frequent patron of Browne‟s Chop House in New York City, Boswell Johnson, claimed that on the upstairs floor where women were allowed with male escort, “there was no flavor to” the food, and for over twenty years, he refused to be seated there.985 Whether there was any truth to this statement is a moot point; in the interwar years, many men, unhappy with women‟s entrance into their private-public spaces, blamed women for the demise of favorite restaurants.986 Numerous women-centered restaurants, especially tea rooms, deliberately opened men‟s grills in order to expand their paying clientele. Schrafft‟s, long popular among women, operated a Men‟s Grill in its Chrysler Building location for “distinguished business men of the surrounding Fifth Avenue district.”987 The men‟s grill in the White Turkey Townhouse, like other male-focused dining rooms, selected “sturdy yet graceful appearing chairs” to invoke a more masculine feel.988 Tea rooms with attached men‟s

984 Ideas for Refreshment Rooms, 363. 985 Boswell Johnson, “Browne‟s Chop House,” New York Sun, September 28, 1933. 986 The extent to which men attributed women as the cause for restaurants‟ financial, culinary, and operational woes could be extreme. In 1933, two days after Herbert‟s Bachelor Grill in San Francisco opened its doors to women to avoid bankruptcy, fire gutted the restaurant. Many loyal customers attributed the fateful fire and eventual decline of the restaurant to the presence of women, and Herbert‟s finally closed for good in 1938. See John F. Allen, “Older San Francisco Men Drop Tear for Fire Swept Site of Famous Grill,” San Francisco Examiner, July 31, 1946, 8, col. 1; “Oldtimer Offers Plan to Save Herbert‟s: Bar Women, Cater Exclusively to Men as of Yore,” March 30, 1938, unidentified clipping, San Francisco Public Library. 987 Around the Clock With Schrafft‟s (New York: The Frank G. Shattuck Company, 1932), 6, 17. 988 Richard Walsh, Jr., “White Turkey…a New Model Business,” American Restaurant, February 1939, 39. 313 grills included the Helen Swope‟s Restaurants and Frederick & Nelson‟s in Seattle, along with the Carson‟s Tea Rooms in Chicago, only accessible through the Men‟s Store via an express elevator which opened into the “wood-panelled [sic] masculine sanctum.”989 Other department stores, such as Marshall Field‟s, also operated grills with food “of the more substantial variety” in a dining room “where no women are allowed.”990 These exclusively male spaces, however, were still siblings to female-centered dining rooms, which were too close in proximity for many men in search of a highly-protected masculine restaurant.

Unpredictably for some male restaurateurs, women did not hesitate to venture into more masculine restaurants unless otherwise restricted. For instance, the Colonial Restaurant at the Harold Square Hotel in New York City thought its customers would consist mostly of men and designed its tap room with “a decided masculine touch.” However, much to the hotel‟s surprise, “women insisted on coming in.”991 Therefore, as female patrons acquired a stronger foothold in the nation‟s restaurants through the 1930s and 1940s, numerous establishments reached out to a male-only clientele, especially after World War II, when men found women occupying not only their former jobs but also their places of leisure. While it did not refuse to admit women, Bob Murray‟s Dog House, a casual 24-hour food joint in Seattle, advertised to men with the slogan “All Roads Lead to the Dog House” and included a map on its menu with road posts reading “Redheads,” “Blondes,” “Brunettes,” “Night Clubs,” and “Private Secretaries,” all along the path to

989 Fisher, Mirror of Taste, 101; William C. Speidel, Jr., You Can‟t Eat Mount Rainier! (Portland: Binfords and Mort, 1955), 46-47; Menus, Frederick and Nelson‟s Tea Room and Men‟s Grill, MOHAI; Duncan Hines, Adventures in Good Eating (Chicago: Adventures in Good Eating, Inc., 1938), 80. 990 Hines, Adventures in Good Eating (1938), 82. 991 “Guests Will Climb For Good Food and Drinks,” Restaurant Management, July 1936, 61.

314 the Dog House, clearly suggesting the myriad distractions and indiscretions that might land a male customer at the restaurant‟s doorstep.992 The White Turkey‟s Hunt Room provided “a haven for tired business men” where women were turned away without a male escort.993 Other restaurants began adding male-only features to their operations: Dave Chasen‟s Restaurant in Hollywood opened a bachelor‟s room in 1949 “for men who want to escape from women,” while Russet‟s in Indianapolis began offering the “Stag Noontime Luncheon,” which closed its doors to women and children until the evening hours.994 In the 1950s, Bay Area-businessmen, desiring a local lunch spot exclusive of women, rallied the Hotel Leamington in Oakland to open a midday dining room “For Men Only.” The hotel complied, advertising the new location “using the anchonistic [sic] caveman, complete with leopard skin, big stick and Neanderthal voice effect to keep ladies out,” and quickly found its new male-only Peralta Room restaurant at 100 percent occupancy.995 Certainly, mid-century restaurants recognized the profitable advantage of appealing to male customers‟ sense of manhood and masculine identity. However, offering public dining rooms devoid of women was not the only way to generate a large male customer base. Cognizant of married women‟s enjoyment of dining out, with or without their children, the restaurant industry launched advertising

992 Menus and photograph, Bob Murray‟s Dog House, Seattle, Washington, ca. 1940, MOHAI. Indiscretions often occurred at restaurants as well. The Taft restaurant posted a placard asking gentlemen “not to „mix‟ with ladies who are present without escort” in order “to prevent embarrassment to you, and to maintain the high standards of The Taft” (Placard, Taft Restaurant, restaurant scrapbooks, 1946, New York Historical Society). 993 F. Meredith Dietz, Let‟s Talk Turkey: Adventures and Recipes of the White Turkey Inn (Richmond: The Dietz Press, Inc., 1948), 41; “Radio Salesman Turns Inn-Keeper,” Printers‟ Ink, April 24, 1942, 71d. 994 “National Restaurant News,” Restaurant Management, September 1949, 8; Ernest W. Fair, “Indianapolis,” American Restaurant, January 1948, 32. 995 “New Peralta Room for Men Only,” Pacific Coast Record, September 1958, 16.

315 campaigns directed at husbands, suggesting their masculine role as provider and head of household was at stake if they failed to take their wives and families out to dinner.

EATING ON HIGH (CHAIRS): THE ASCENDANCY OF FAMILY-FRIENDLY DINING

By 1930, middle- and upper-class white men were more accustomed to the regularity of dining in restaurants; as one survey summarized, “Man is less dependent on the wife for food.”996 Despite the growth of patronage in the 1920s, restaurants noticed a sharp drop in volume in the early 1930s. Alarmed by the decline in sales nationwide in the years immediately following the stock market crash of 1929, the National Restaurant Association (NRA) queried its members for hard data on the fluctuation in numbers of patrons between 1931 and 1932. According to the responses, the average restaurant experienced a 5.17 percent decline in customers, with some restaurants reporting a decrease up to 26 percent. These worrisome statistics prompted the NRA to reiterate “the importance of keeping people interested in eating out. In view of the decreased family incomes and the publicity of lower food prices, more people are eating at home for reasons of economy and the alert restaurateur who answered the questionnaire knows we

996 A Pictorial Survey of the Hotel and Restaurant Markets (New York: Ahrens Publishing Co., Inc., 1930), 22. The Longchamps restaurant chain played with this fact in a short story printed in one of their promotional pamphlets. Titled “The Suspicious Wife,” the story featured a wife who, upon returning from a vacation in the country, was greatly disturbed to find her husband “looking so sleek and well-fed” with a guilty expression on his face. Fearing the worst, the wife rifled through his pockets while he was taking a shower and discovered key evidence: a Longchamps menu. “I know now why you haven‟t missed my management at home,” she declared. “You‟ve been eating at Longchamps regularly all while I was gone!” (“The Suspicious Wife,” in Longchamps True Story [New York: Longchamps, Inc., 1930], 6.) The national restaurant industry also suggested that women in the late 1920s and early 1930s perceived eating dinner in restaurants as negative reflection on their home cooking abilities and the antithesis of family cohesion. See “Serving the Industry,” American Restaurant, November 1949, 140; Suzanne Kapner, “Dining Through the Decades,” Nation‟s Restaurant News, January 1994, 201. Along these lines, the California Packing Corporation got into trouble with the restaurant industry for a Del Monte spinach advertisement that suggested that home cooking was healthier and more thoughtfully prepared than restaurant food. See C. A. Patterson, “More Pity for Husbands,” American Restaurant, February 1931, 27; “A Statement by Del Monte to the Restaurant Trade,” American Restaurant, March 1931, 20. 316 must meet this condition.”997 The solution devised by industry leaders and furthered by the leading industry publication, the American Restaurant magazine, along with regional newspapers, included aggressive cooperative advertising and an appeal to the chivalry of America‟s husbands: “Take Her Out to Dinner At Least Once a Week.”998 In 1928, the restaurant industry recognized that 2 million of the 8.5 million

American wage-earning women combined professional work “with home, husband and family.”999 Yet many of these women were not members of families that dined out in restaurants with any regularity. In households that could sustain themselves on a single income, housewives—including women with higher education—performed more household chores independently (without hired help) throughout the 1920s and 1930s, and while often grabbing a bite to eat while running daytime errands, they rarely ate dinner in restaurants. The well-documented “servant problem” of the 1920s, a result of fewer immigrant domestic workers entering the country because of restrictive immigration laws, as well as expanded opportunities in factory work for unskilled women, contributed to “more work for mother,” as Ruth Schwartz Cowan has aptly shown. During the Depression years, restricted household budgets cut back even further on hired domestic help. Yet performing one‟s own domestic work was becoming not only more socially acceptable for women without wage-earning jobs but more expected. As Cowan documents, not only was hands-on, highly-involved child care more of a requirement for being a “good mother” between the wars, but this was also a time when housewives took on the simultaneous task of hostess, kitchen laborer, and guest when

997 “The Nation and Its Restaurants,” American Restaurant, June 1932, 25-26. 998 C. A. Patterson, “Solving Today‟s Problems,” American Restaurant, February 1932, 29. 999 “The Woman‟s Day,” Mixer and Server, April 15, 1928, 25. 317 entertaining at home.1000 All of these areas of increased labor among middle-class housewives pointed toward a potential source of patrons eager to take a break from the home.1001 Tapping into the desire for servantless housewives to have a “day off” from cooking, as well as husbands‟ anxiety about failing to appear as a stable provider for their families, restaurants, under the wing of the national industry publication American Restaurant, plotted the “Emancipation of the American Housewife” in the spring of 1931. Promoting cooperation among restaurants to increase the country‟s overall volume of patrons, the campaign urged restaurants large and small to advertise with copy stressing, “The average housewife deserves one day‟s freedom a week from cooking duties.”1002 Housewives, the industry argued, were over-worked and underappreciated. If their husbands truly loved their wives and valued developing stronger relationships with the children (suggested the industry), then they would take their families out to dinner. With dramatic language, advertising copy reminded husbands that the “steady routine” of housework was “deadly and monotonous” for housewives, yet if they took their family to a restaurant, “she and the kids will hail your idea with pleasure, and you will immediately become more of a hero than ever to your family.”1003 Dining out with the whole family not only improved the marital relationship, but a father could facilitate a smoother

1000 Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 172-181. 1001 “Twelve Cities Boom in Last Months of 1929,” American Restaurant, February 1930, 55. 1002 H. C. Siekman, “„Take Her Out to Dinner at Least Once a Week‟ Is Keynote of Co-operative Advertising for Restaurants,” American Restaurant, March 1931, 28; Duke Hutchinson, “Cooperative Newspaper „Ad,‟” American Restaurant, June 1931, 28-30. 1003 Duke Hutchinson, “American Restaurant‟s „Eating Out‟ Movement Favorably Received,” American Restaurant, April 1931, 30-31; Duke Hutchinson, “Big Campaign Successfully Launched,” American Restaurant, May 1931, 29; “The Publicity Program,” American Restaurant, July 1931, 27. 318 relationship with his son or daughter and “help them develop poise” and formal etiquette by enjoining them in a family restaurant meal.1004 Although the formal “Take Her Out to Dinner” campaign abated in 1932, the industry‟s efforts to promote “the final emancipation of the housewife from that bondage known as cooking for the family” continued up until World War II.1005 Although a housewife might find some joy in family food preparation, the restaurant industry conceded, she still likely wanted a break. Importantly, though, this “liberation from the dishpan” merchandising technique focused as much, if not more, on the benefits to husbands and children as those for the wife.1006 Which man wanted to be married to a woman who looked older than her years? Restaurants, their operators contended, could offer a solution to signs of premature aging: “Men who look at their wives only to discover that they are beginning to show their age can do something to keep their wives young-looking longer. They can free them from the hot and steamy kitchens a few nights a week by taking them out to a restaurant for dinner.”1007 Restaurants, as labor-saving spaces of leisure, could be the new fountains of feminine youth. Additionally, restaurants depicted dining out as being important to the educational and emotional growth of children. Among fellow members of the hospitality industry, restaurateurs acknowledged that it was in restaurants‟ best economic interest to teach children to become regular restaurant patrons for the future, as well as influence their parents to take them out to eat in the here and now.1008 “The children will make the

1004 Lewis W. Briton, “New Slants on Restaurant Advertising,” American Restaurant, April 1933, 34-35. 1005 Damon Runyan, “Take Her Out to Dinner,” American Restaurant, October 1937, 134-135. 1006 Herbert C. Siekman, “We‟ll Wash the Dishes!” American Restaurant, September 1940, 29. 1007 “Solution,” American Restaurant, October 1937, 47. 1008 C. A. Patterson, “Where Will They Dine?” American Restaurant, March 1940, 25; “Future Restaurant Patrons,” American Restaurant, May 1930, 38; “A Man‟s Size Appetite,” American Restaurant, May 1932, 52; C. A. Patterson, “Why Restaurants „Grow as Long as They‟re Green,‟” American Restaurant, July 1940, 84. 319 family come out,” predicted one restaurateur, who initiated Thursday-night Family Nights to entertain children and their parents by showing films to the kids while the adults lingered over their meals.1009 Another successful operator admonished her colleagues whose establishments served patrons of questionable character, reminding them, “If we want to cater to a family trade we must have a respectable atmosphere in which to invite Father, Mother and the Children….an atmosphere of quiet refinement—a proper setting for well-bred people.”1010 Restaurants could gain a better reputation (and increase patronage) if they used the family unit as a path to social uplift. Proprietors‟ messages to the parents, likewise, encouraged them to view the restaurant as a time- and labor-saving substitute for the home dining room, where the father could still preside over the dinner table nonetheless. Relieving wives of the “tedious tasks” of the kitchen, restaurants around the country urged families to host large gatherings and Sunday dinners at their establishments, where they served food “family style” and offered fathers the option of carving the main course roast themselves.1011 In this way, restaurants maintained the patriarchal structure of the family home, recreating an acceptable domestic-like space for women, along with their spouses and children. Prior to World War II, restaurants that catered to children were few and far between. Restaurants and parents alike saw children as a public nuisance, a population that was too disruptive for the serene atmosphere of the public dining room. Parents who took their children out to restaurants were advised to bring along child-size silverware and bibs from home, ask to be seated away from the busiest part of the restaurant, and

1009 “Practical Discussions Highlight Annual Convention,” American Restaurant, November 1940, 84. 1010 Minnie A. Albert, “How We Can „Glorify‟ the Restaurant Industry,” American Restaurant, September 1931, 33. 1011 Annette M. Snapper, “Tell-Tale Impressions of Small Restaurants,” American Restaurant, February 1940, 89; Orvis R. Connolly, “Maintaining Pre-War Standards in Dining Room Service,” Restaurant Management, July 1945, 45. 320 leave once the children became restless. “Be nice to baby and win mamma and papa‟s repeat business…maybe,” summarized the mentality of many restaurants.1012 “Child and adult trade will not mix,” scowled a failed restaurateur. Adults could barely hear themselves talk amidst the noise, and children tended to be demanding and discourteous, constantly getting underfoot and on top of furniture, to the dismay of restaurant owners

(and the delight of sturdy-fabric upholstery manufacturers).1013 However, even by the 1920s, a handful of restaurants commented on the increase of shopping mothers stopping with children for a bite to eat, as well as the influx of families venturing out for Sunday dinner. Campaigns during the Great War had emphasized the importance of healthy children for the nation‟s future defense, and restaurants, as public feeding institutions, tapped into this public mentality in the following years.1014 Families dining in restaurants also painted a public picture of a cohesive family unit, one where the parents were teaching the children proper manners and caring for their social development, thereby nurturing good citizens for the future. Always searching for a way to increase profits, restaurants began to share ideas with each other for appealing to the younger set of patrons. Offering lower-priced half portions and special children‟s menus, advertising Sunday dinner “family feasts” to build family solidarity, and providing child-sized high-chairs formed some of the strategies used in the 1920s to encourage parents, along with their children, to patronize restaurants.1015

1012 “Serving Meals for Babies,” American Restaurant, October 1939, 18. 1013 Helen Agin Gordon, “We Tried to Build a Business,” Nation‟s Business, February 1939, 48; “Can Your Furniture Stand This?” Restaurant Management, April 1941, 79. In the early 1940s, the United States Rubber Company marketed a tough, stain-resistant, heavy-use fabric called Naugahyde that it claimed could withstand children jumping on the upholstery. 1014 Ethel Colson, “Why Not Children‟s Luncheon‟s?” American Restaurant, March 1920, 21. 1015 “Do You Provide Half-Portions for Children?” Pacific Coast Chef, April 1924, 11; M. A. Gleason, “Little Tots,” Restaurant Management, May 1928, 253-254; “Gosh! That‟s a Good Idea!” Restaurant Management, February 1928, 87; “Gosh! That‟s a Good Idea!” Restaurant Management, July 1928, 41; Advertisement, Handy Chair High Chair, Restaurant Management, October 1928, 234. 321

By the time the “Take Her Out to Dinner” campaign got underway in the early 1930s, a few restaurants had garnered a nationwide reputation for catering to the child trade, such as the California-based Pig‟n Whistle chain. Founded in 1910 by I. H. Ackerman, the Pig‟n Whistle chain of restaurants grew rapidly from San Francisco down to Hollywood. The only child-friendly restaurant featured in Ruth Thompson‟s 1937 restaurant guide, Eating Around San Francisco, and still recommended a decade later in Raymond Ewell‟s Dining Out in San Francisco (1948), the Pig‟n Whistle enticed children with nursery rhyme-named menu options, including “Old Mother Hubbard” and

“Little Red Riding Hood,” and accompanying songs, puzzles, and other distractions.1016 Children received “Little Pigs in Ever-Everland” books as souvenirs and picked prizes out of a treasure chest for finishing their meal.1017

Other restaurants adopted the fairy-tale themed food choices and prize chest for cleaning the plate, ranging from Mother Goose rhymes across the children‟s menu at New York‟s Hotel McAlpin and Pittsburgh‟s Joseph Horne department store to Pinocchio-illustrated menus at Carder‟s in Los Angeles.1018 Inspired by Carder‟s, John Ebersole, the proprietor of the John Ebersole‟s Nut and Coffee House in White Plains, New York, began focusing on the family trade in 1934, supplying booster seats, kiddie

1016 Ruth Thompson, Eating Around San Francisco (San Francisco: Suttonhouse, 1937), 168-169; Souvenir Menu, Pig‟n Whistle, ca. 1939, San Francisco Menu Collection, San Francisco Public Library; Raymond Ewell, Dining Out in San Francisco and the Bay Area (Berkeley: Epicurean Press, 1948), 13. 1017 “Southland Cafes,” Los Angeles Times, April 19, 1940, B25; Sidney Hoedemaker, “The Restaurant Manager of 1941,” American Restaurant, August 1941, 37. 1018 “Off the Griddle,” American Restaurant, May 1938, 72; “Catering to Shoppers,” Restaurant Management, June 1937, 494-495; “Carder Goes West!” Restaurant Management, April 1940, 42. This trend continued into the 1950s and 1960s. A “Huddle Dinner Dialer” menu from California‟s Huddle restaurants in 1956 made a game out of ordering with a round spinning “counter” and a paper menu designed as a board game. The child was supposed to order the “Alice in Wonderland,” “Mother Goose,” or other menu options based on where the counter stopped (Menu Collection, Alice Statler Library, City College of San Francisco). 322 menus, and cakes on musical trays for children‟s birthday celebrations, leading Duncan Hines to recommend the restaurant in 1938 as a place where “children receive special attention…[with] certain dishes being planned particularly with them in mind.”1019 All of these strategies, while directed at children, were meant to make dining out easier, and therefore more attractive, for the whole family.

At times, parents complained that restaurants didn‟t pay enough attention to child customers. One restaurant trade publisher (and parent of three) observed in 1940 that many modern restaurants failed to “realize how families radiate to places where they think of children and children‟s menus and dishes suitable for children‟s appetites….those places are where parents will always go back.” Looking toward the future, the same publisher suggested, “We must not forget that the children of today are the men or women of tomorrow and they are going to radiate with their business to the places that were not indifferent to them as children.”1020 In response, the restaurant industry worked to introduce restaurateurs to methods useful for attracting family customers. Ideas such as offering lollipops, kiddie menus, puzzles on placemats, and even treasure chests for child diners became popular in the early 1940s. Restaurant-supply companies marketed “Lo-Hi” chairs which allowed “the youngster to use the same dining surface as the „grownups‟ and facilitate[d] their job of helping him with his food,” as well as Kiddy-Trays, “a sliding, adjustable shelf which fits any standard counter or table.”1021

1019 “Al Carder Is His Inspiration,” Restaurant Management, August 1936, 90-91; “More Gleanings from the National Restaurant Show,” American Restaurant, November 1939, 24; Hines, Adventures in Good Eating (1938), 175. 1020 C.A. “Pat” Patterson, “Why Restaurants „Grow As Long As They‟re Green,‟” American Restaurant, July 1940, 83-84. 1021 “New Lo-Hi Chair for Serving Children,” American Restaurant, September 1940, 60; “Kiddy-Tray for Serving Children,” American Restaurant, October 1940, 74.

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In 1941, the artist Hal Cooper began a monthly layout in The American Restaurant Magazine called “Attractions for Kid Customers,” using cartoons and other illustrations to translate kid-friendly dining ideas to restaurants on the hunt for new marketing techniques. One of the reasons for the catering-to-kids series was the belief that “every restaurant that does a good job of [successfully merchandising to the child patron] is building future patrons for all restaurants.”1022 Astute restaurant owners, however, recognized that parents and children were spending more family time together, from picnics and camping trips to a day at the beach or amusement park.1023 In order to compete with these other forms of leisure and entertainment, restaurants needed to make their dining rooms comfortable and welcoming spaces for the whole family for more than special occasions. This focus on family-friendly dining accelerated following the Second

World War as family sizes grew; the United States fostered a more child-centered culture; and parents increasingly turned inward to the home as the primary site of social activities and relaxation. During World War II, restaurant volume doubled to accommodate wartime industrial feeding and the increased female workforce, who had less time to cook meals at home. Many in the industry predicted that dining out in restaurants would become “one of the permanent social changes brought on by the war” as “women war workers will not voluntarily go back to many kitchens.”1024 In addition, the increase in discretionary income and automobile ownership, along with more leisure time, promised to boost restaurant volume.1025 International travel, which virtually halted during the war, piqued

1022 “Catering to Kids,” American Restaurant, April 1941, 50. 1023 Hal Cooper, “Pardon Our Harpin‟,” American Restaurant, August 1941, 48. 1024 Market Analysis of the Restaurant Industry, 2; Patrick D. Moreland, “A Basis for Comparison,” Chuck Wagon, September 1944, 5. 1025 “Impressions: Comments on Marketing and Selling,” Outdoor Advertising Association of America, Inc., August 25, 1955, 1. OAAA Campaign Case Studies, 1955-63, Duke University Archives. 324 interest in American national tourism, leading to restaurant dining while away from home.1026 Yet restaurant profits fell sharply in the early 1950s.1027 Who or what was the culprit? The American housewife. According to industry studies, “1951 was a bitter year, profitwise, for the restaurant business.”1028 The “problem of meeting housewife competition” was a common refrain in industry publications during the postwar years.1029 “Mrs. American Housewife is your greatest competitor,” warned the editor of the trade journal Allied Food and Beverage.1030 “Competition is in the homes”; “the American home is a competitor”; “the danger of increased prices is reflected in the housewife”—almost every trade journal and restaurant operations manual published in the 1950s and 1960s attributed the industry‟s lag in profits to the housewife “doing too good a job in the kitchen at home.”1031 Studies concluded that “recession periods” in the restaurant industry could be traced to two factors, both directly related to the American home: 1) the high birth rates of the baby boom and, and 2) the growth in television.1032 The increase in small children in the home, coupled with the popularity of watching TV, resulted in “a

1026 Mathew Walker, “To America Two Fairs,” The Living Age, June 1940, 385; H. B. Meek, Education for the Restaurant Industry of the United States: A Report to the National Restaurant Foundation, April 15, 1964, 8. 1027 Marketing Analysis of the Restaurant Industry, 2. More restaurants showed signs of failure in the late 1940s, too. See “Yours to Enjoy,” Restaurant Management, April 1949, 6. 1028 “A Slight Turn for the Better,” Restaurant Management, April 1952, 39. 1029 Robert Majeroni, “How We Meet—AND BEAT—Local Competition from Home-Cooked Meals,” Restaurant Management, December 1949, 27-29. 1030 “The Editor Says: Opportunity Knocks,” Allied Food and Beverage, October 1953, 5. 1031J. Walter Thompson, Co., How to Promote Your Restaurant: Merchandising and Advertising Guidebook (Chicago: National Restaurant Association, 1965), 13; “Restaurants…and the Housewife,” Allied Food and Beverage, August 1953, 7; Joe Minster, “Special Recordings: Mrs. Public Best Price Control,” Pacific Coast Record, May 1952, 12; “Competition With Dining at Home Is Real Pricing Problem,” Restaurateur, June 1964, 19; “Social Revolution,” Allied Food and Beverage, March 1953, 7. 1032 “We‟re Going Ahead!” American Restaurant, May 1947, 150; “NRA Convention Report,” Pacific Coast Record, June 1953, 35; George E. Clark, “As Times Change…So Do Restaurants,” Allied Food and Beverage, June 1952, 7. 325 devastating effect on restaurant volume.”1033 Staying-at-home meant eating-at-home, which spelled disaster for the dining-out industry. At the war‟s end, an Indianapolis-based food columnist surveyed local housewives and discovered that 26 percent of their families dined out together—parents and children—several times a year, while 23 percent visited restaurants once or twice a month. Only 17 percent ate out as a whole family on a weekly basis, while 26 percent stated they never ate out as a family unit.1034 The food culture of the 1950s suggested that a woman‟s contributions to her family included preparing “home-cooked” meals, and processed food companies alongside cookbooks worked to convince housewives that “what had once been a tiresome chore could be transformed into a creative adventure.”1035 This mentality, that women‟s creative expressions could find an outlet in the home, situated housewives as competitors rather than cooperative customers of restaurants. Additionally, some mothers argued that staying at home was less of a chore than the ordeal of maintaining decorum among children in restaurants.1036 Realizing the need to offer more persuasive incentives to the home-minded mother, restaurants argued that they purchased better grades of food than families; therefore, their meals for children were more nutritious and better balanced.1037 Essentially, “the campaign to bring mother out of the kitchen” meant catering to children.1038

1033 “What „Take Home‟ Service Means to You,” Allied Food and Beverage, September 1952, 23-24. 1034 Beverly Forbush, “What 500 Women Want In Post-War Restaurant Service,” Restaurant Management, November 1945, 25-26. 1035 Erika Endrijonas, “Processed Foods from Scratch: Cooking for a Family in the 1950s,” in Kitchen Culture in America: Popular Representations of Food, Gender, and Race, ed. Sherrie A. Inness (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 159. 1036 Martha Hope West, “Regardless of Age,” New York Times, May 10, 1959, XX29. 1037 “JWT Food Service News,” October 31, 1960, J. Walter Thompson Newsletter Collection, John W. Hartman Center, Duke University Archives; “Consider Home Competition,” American Restaurant, March 1947, 2196; “The Mighty Restaurant Market,” Restaurant Management, June 1952, 45; Jim Malone, “More About Kids,” Restaurant Management, November 1951, 82. 1038 “Small Fry Are Big Business,” Restaurateur, May 1960, 10. 326

Highlighting the importance of cultivating the family trade, one restaurant study pointed out that by 1956, the average family size had increased 67 percent from 1940.1039 To capture this customer base, restaurants drew on studies by women‟s organizations to support the notion that dining out was good for the housewife and beneficial to the family as a whole. A representative for the Home Makers‟ Research Center of the College of St.

Francis in Illinois supported the belief that eating out both freed women from the chore of cooking and encouraged “a friendlier feeling all around.” “We feel that when the entire family eats out,” she offered, “a definite contribution to family welfare is made.”1040

Supporting this opinion, a summary of four research studies conducted between 1956 and 1962 discovered that in families with children, the children accompanied their parents to dinner in restaurants more than half the time. While families cited celebrating special occasions, vacationing, and desiring a change of routine as primary reasons for eating out together, between two-third and three-fourths of the families questioned maintained that they preferred to bring children along to the restaurant because “children like to eat out…and the children learn to behave in public.”1041 Another survey revealed that when families dined out together, 57 percent of those questioned preferred a medium-priced restaurant.1042 This preference signaled an interest in the atmosphere and quality of the restaurant, not just in its convenience. Although the conception of youthful customers as rowdy diners did not change during and following World War II, restaurants decidedly marketed their wares to children as a way of enticing families to dine in their establishments. Restaurant studies

1039 Joe Minster, “Building Better Business,” Pacific Coast Record, February 1956, 14. 1040 “Eating Out a Part of Family Life,” Restaurant Management, April 1951, 12. 1041 Review and Summary of the Published Literature on Eating Out (Chicago: J. Walter Thompson Co., 1964), 10-15. 1042 Beverly Forbush, “What 500 Women Want in Post-War Restaurant Service,” Restaurant Management, November 1945, 25. 327 revealed that one of the strongest deterrents to eating in restaurants, other than the cost, was having small children.1043 Yet the experience of dining in a restaurant for America‟s youth was important to “giving children the poise, confidence and sense of comradeship that come from joining the family in a grown-up meal in a restaurant.”1044 In other words, dining in restaurants could teach children how to be well-behaved, confident, experienced citizens. Recognizing this potential educational opportunity, parents dined out with their children more often in the postwar period, a change which is reflected in the growing number of restaurant guidebooks that listed places well-suited to “quiet the hungry yowls of the children”: Dining Out in San Francisco (1948), Dining Out in Hollywood and Los Angeles (1949), Everybody’s Restaurant Guide (1953), On the House (1955), and New York: Places & Pleasures (1959), to name a few.1045

To attract families, many restaurants in the years following World War II suggested that their businesses doubled as self-contained classrooms, which could expand children‟s horizons. “Dining out is a part of every child‟s education,” declared one Pennsylvania-area restaurateur.1046 America‟s youth, argued the restaurant industry, were learning about nutrition and health in school, and restaurants could complement this education by teaching children how to choose healthful foods.1047 The educational director of the National Restaurant Association claimed children “gain important knowledge in public eating establishments” and cited the benefits to family cohesion, since “no time is the feeling of „togetherness‟ expressed so well as when the family „eats

1043 General Foods Eating-Out Index and Consumer Attitudes Survey, (Princeton: Benson and Benson, Inc., 1960), 9, John W. Hartman Center, Duke University Archives; “The American Family Dines Out,” Restaurant Management (April 1959), 54-55. 1044 Frank O‟Donnell, “Eating Out with the Children,” Los Angeles Times, April 8, 1951, G20. 1045 Craig Davidson, Dining Out in Hollywood and Los Angeles (Los Angeles: Harman Press, 1949), 11-12. 1046 Hal Cooper, “Attractions for Kid Customers,” American Restaurant, September 1941, 34. 1047 “Feed the Family to Fill the Restaurant,” American Restaurant, March 1950, 33. 328 out‟!”1048 More than “helping” mother with the dishes, restaurants could also assist parents with their children‟s education, a prospect that proprietors hoped would entice families to eat out. Many ideas for entertaining children during restaurant meal times, therefore, appealed to parents‟ desire to educate their children, both intellectually and socially. Al

Gordon, the manager of the Ranch Wagon in Sacramento, researched and designed placemats complete with historical narratives to match the restaurant‟s historical décor. “So authentic are the illustrations and information,” reported Restaurant Management,

“schools use the mats in history classes.”1049 Along with academic lessons, instruction in normative gender roles did not escape the young customers. Several restaurants trained future housewives and waitresses by miniaturizing food preparation and service to the delight of little girls. At both the Abraham & Strauss restaurant and the restaurant at Ayer‟s Department Store, waitresses delivered children‟s meals to the table in little ovens and stoves, out of which the child could serve herself the meal.1050 Grade-school children on a restaurant field trip in Maryland declared that restaurateurs performed community service by “saving work” for mommy, while a little boy suggested to his teacher that fathers should take “Mom” out to dinner more often because it inspired her home cooking.1051 Children also learned how to socialize like adults. Cocktail hour did not discriminate against the underage in the 1950s; restaurants served alcohol-free

1048 “Restaurants Important for Youth Says Kathryn Bruce,” Allied Food and Beverage, October 1956, 21.

1049 “Ideas,” Restaurant Management, January 1962, 33. 1050 Hal Cooper, “Attractions for Kid Customers,” American Restaurant, July 1941, 36; C.A. Patterson, “Meeting the Challenge of Emergency Trends,” American Restaurant, August 1941, 39. 1051 Ruth K. Stroh, “Secure Tomorrow Today,” Restaurant Management, January 1961, 39.

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“highballs” to children with “the same garnish, the same glassware, but filled only with ginger ale,” cherries, and grenadine, a gesture intended to make children feel more grown up.1052 Another adult behavior practiced among youth in restaurants was ordering adults around. As more children came of age in an era devoid of household servants, dining out in restaurants was likely the only occasion when parents encouraged children to tell adults to perform work for them.1053 The gesture of ordering from a menu and demanding attentive service was considered acceptable behavior within the walls of a restaurant, even for children. Restaurants, then, educated middle-class youth to expect service workers to fulfill their requests and desires, reinforcing social stature according to class and occupation while eliminating social deference based on age. Increasingly, though, postwar restaurants were seen by families, educators, and restaurateurs alike as spaces where America‟s youth learned behaviors that prepared them to be good Americans as well as citizens of the world. “Why not plan an adventure in eating and, incidentally, in human relationships?” one newspaper columnist suggested. At foreign restaurants, children could meet employees or patrons whose country-of-origin was the same as the cuisine being served—hearing personal stories and tasting the foreign foods could be “a simple and effective way of beginning to help your children become world citizens, interested in their fellows from other countries.”1054 Dining on Russian cutlet à la czar (finely chopped chicken croquette with small browned potatoes) at the Sherry-Netherland Little Restaurant and Carnaval Room could teach boys and girls to be more “sophisticated.”1055 In New York, “the gateway to a variety of [international]

1052 Bert Dale, “Building Beverage Business,” Restaurant Management, August 1951, 24; “When Their Parents Order Drinks,” Restaurant Management, January 1952, 29. 1053 I would like to thank Serena Zabin for bringing this point to my attention. 1054 Dr. Ernest G. Osborne, “The Family Scrapbook,” Washington Post, August 6, 1945, C8. 1055 Jane Nickerson, “News of Food,” New York Times, April 19, 1954, 20.

330 wonders” for children was only “the nearest subway turnstile” away. International outings, where “adventurous youngsters might like to try a Middle Eastern luncheon or supper at one of the number of Syrian, Armenian, or Lebanese restaurants” offered educational opportunities in global citizenship.1056 What were the anticipated benefits of these material lessons in world cultures?

Some parents viewed the dining field trips as etiquette practice for family travel abroad. “To prepare your children for the trip” (preferably to Scandinavia, which was proclaimed to be “a marvelous place to take children”), “you might plan a let‟s pretend period every day,” such as taking “them out to a good restaurant to practice their manners.”1057 However, more educators and parents viewed the experience as a way of teaching tolerance and understanding of people and cultural practices from other countries.

“Experts point out that appreciating other peoples and ways, like appreciating art, can be developed through increased exposure,” one journalist advised.1058 Another food writer reminded her readers, ““Nor is a visit to a [foreign] café solely an adventure. It is an education in international understanding.”1059 Foreign-language instruction could be part of the visit: “A lesson in Spanish could start with the restaurant‟s name, which means „oven,‟” one article suggested, steering educators and their pupils to Fornos restaurant in

New York. Most important, though, was the idea that exposure to the cultural artifacts of foreign countries gave American children “a better understanding of other people,” a “„painless‟ way [to absorb much] about other cultures—religion, history, food, music and dancing.”1060

1056 “World „Trips‟ for Children on Tap Here,” New York Times, May 22, 1959, 30. 1057 J.B.W., “Train Junior for Travel Abroad,” Washington Post, January 25, 1960, B4. 1058 Phyllis Ehrlich, “A Variety of Restaurants Extend Welcome to Child,” New York Times, November 13, 1959, 32. 1059 Bertha Houck, “Gastronomic Adventures,” Los Angeles Times, May 13, 1928, K12. 1060 “World „Trips‟ for Children,” 30. 331

Parents and schools more readily added foreign-themed dining experiences to children‟s social education in the postwar years. One food writer encouraged other mothers to take their children “on a round-the-world eating binge…without leaving your city limits.” She then described taking her son and a group of his friends on a “global tour” of Los Angeles where they dined in “the Orient, the South Pacific, Spain and

Mexico with time off for a kosher dill pickle and an American hot dog,” lamenting that they had to skip France, Germany, and Scandinavia that day.1061 On the East Coast places like the Latin American-inspired La Fonda and the Japanese-themed Saito Restaurant specialized in serving “groups of teachers with students who learn first-hand about the Orient, its food and culture while they dine.” At Saito, “tots as young as 4 or 5 can be introduced to removing their shoes, squatting on floor cushions and eating with Japanese tools.”1062 At the end of the 1960 school year, Grace Ferrante, a New York schoolteacher who had previously spent a year teaching in an American school in Tokyo, took her second-grade class to Saito. At the restaurant, students, the girls dressed in kimonos, tried out their Japanese vocabulary and chopstick skills, which they had practiced in class using pencils. While most of the eight-year-olds struggled to grasp grains of rice and slices of cucumber salad, one boy—“an old hand” at manipulating chopsticks, “showed his classmates how to go through a meal in short order.”1063 Not all children, however, were receptive to unfamiliar foods and dining practices, even as restaurateurs and other adults tried to expand their culinary horizons. Hody‟s restaurants in California were a popular dining scene for families in the 1950s.

1061 Mary and Vincent Price, A Treasury of Great Recipes: Specialties of the World‟s Foremost Restaurants Adapted for the American Kitchen (New York: Ampersand Press, 1965), 223. 1062 Ehrlich, “Variety of Restaurants,” 32; Craig Claiborne, “Food News: Latin-American Zest on Midtown Menu,” New York Times, December 9, 1960, 35. 1063 Anna Petersen, “Second-Graders Take „Final Exam‟ in Japanese,” New York Times, June 11, 1960, 23.

332

Sidney Hodemaker conceptualized his restaurants as “family-type” by favoring children as his desired clientele. Kids‟ specials, a large supply of high chairs and bibs, menus that doubled as clown masks, and prizes for cleaning one‟s plate attracted parents and their little ones who wanted a meal out but feared disrupting the mood of other establishments.1064 Although Hody‟s served primarily American-style foods, it occasionally added variety to the menu by including “foods of different nationalities.” According to one dining guidebook, on one of these international food days

a two-foot hombre strolled into a Hody‟s with his mother and father in tow….His five-gallon hat remained on his tousled head and his fists rested on his two six-shooters. His father read the menu to him and then suggested a few items. “But, ah tell yew, podner,” the terror of the plains was heard to say, “ah just ain‟t got a hankerin‟ for matzoh ball soup!”1065

The anecdote, certainly re-told for readers‟ amusement, also gestured to the fact that unfamiliar foods were not likely to win over child diners. On the other hand, housewives tended to prefer restaurant food that they were not likely to prepare at home, and many restaurants specialized in offering these types of meals to grow its base of women patrons. As early as the 1920s and 1930s, when restaurants started more deliberately to seek out female customers, conscientious proprietors like Patricia Murphy put themselves “in the role of housewife planning a family meal” and created menus that included “items people didn‟t bother with often in their own kitchens,” like hot rolls and popovers, “new and fancy things they do not make

1064 Sidney Hoedemaker, “Catering to Tourists, Families and Business People in a New Location,” Restaurant Management, June 1949, 39-43, 98, 100; “Family Diners Happier at Hody‟s,” OAAA Campaign Case Files, 1956, John W. Hartman Center, Duke University Archives; “We Love Your Children,” Food Merchandising Supplement, April 1963, 22-23, OAAA Campaign Case Files, John W. Hartman Center, Duke University Archives. 1065 Matty and Don Simmons, On the House: History and Guide to Dining and Night Life in New York, Chicago, New Orleans, San Francisco, and Los Angeles (New York: Coward-McCann, Inc., 1955), 239. 333 at home.”1066 This strategy of selling foods less likely to appear on the home dining table gained momentum in the postwar years with restaurants featuring a variety of unwieldy or intimidating dishes like lobster, prime rib, and leg of lamb; unusual options like fried bananas, or deep-fat fried potatoes, chicken, fish, and other products that “few women know what to do with” or owned the proper equipment necessary to prepare the item.1067

According to multiple surveys conducted in the 1950s and 1960s, female patrons across middle- and upper-level income groups continued to prefer restaurants that specialized in foods “just a little above and beyond,” “something you cannot get at home,” and ones

“they would not bother to take the time or effort to prepare.”1068 Simply offering menu items that families had difficulty preparing at home, however, was not enough incentive to boost restaurant profits in the postwar years, and many restaurants turned toward brand-name promotions as a solution. Brand-name advertising in restaurants initially took hold in the 1920s and 1930s, around the time that women and children began to dine out in greater numbers. Brand- name products authorized a kind of quality assurance by implying that restaurants were willing to spend more money on a reputable and recognizable brand than risk using a

1066 Patricia Murphy, Glow of Candlelight (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1961), 16-17; “Why Do They Go Out to Dine?” advertisement, Wesson Oil, American Restaurant, February 1931, 22-23. 1067 Hazel Palmer, “Make Eating Out a Game,” Restaurant Management, December 1952, 34; Helen Ewing, “What You Can Serve When They Take the Family Out to Dine,” American Restaurant, October 1931, 62; C. A. Patterson, “Selling Your Restaurant to the Public,” Washington State Restaurant Tavern and Tobacco News, August 1941, 6; “Small Families Mean Bigger Business,” advertisement Lily Cups, American Restaurant, January 1950, 7. 1068 George E. Clarke, “State Wide Restaurant Survey,” Allied Food and Beverage, May 1953, 13; “It‟s the Women of America Who Can Make or Break a Restaurant!” Restaurateur, December 1962, 18; “Survey Finds Women Eating Out More Frequently,” Restaurateur, October 1961, 9; Review and Summary of the Published Literature on Eating Out, 38. ‟s based the original TV Dinner on the same concept of offering an almost-ready-to-eat meal that was rarely prepared at home other than on festive occasions: the turkey dinner. Introduced in October 1953, Swanson‟s original TV Dinner served up turkey with gravy and “stuffing,” mashed (or “whipped”) sweet potatoes, and peas. See Karal Ann Marling, As Seen on TV: The Visual Culture of Everyday Life in the 1950s (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 232-233.

334 generic substitute. In 1920, 75 percent of restaurants surveyed nationwide—including small and large establishments, independents, chains, and hotels—stated that they looked favorably on listing brand-name products on their menus, whether or not they were already engaged in the practice.1069 Customers responded positively “because national advertising has convinced [them] that certain catsups, breakfast foods, and flour are better.”1070 This psychological appeal of brand name products led to advertising partnerships and brand-name tie-ins between restaurants and national food processors. In the 1930s, a pamphlet detailing the history of The Planters restaurant in New York transitioned into an advertisement for Borden milk, while the H. J. Heinz Company began producing packages of Heinz products especially for children‟s menus.1071 These brand- name foods tended to be convenience foods as well—pre-packaged items requiring minimal effort on the part of the cook to get the meals table-ready.1072 Brand-name foods also helped smooth the nation‟s transition to the packaged- food cuisine that took hold of American kitchens, particularly following World War II. While brand-name products were not necessarily synonymous with convenience foods, a large number of the major food companies produced processed meats, canned fruits, pre- sliced bread, pre-mixed barbeque sauce, and other convenience foods recognized and used in both American households and American restaurants. The mechanization and industrialization of the food industry helped develop an astonishing array of prepared convenience foods by mid-century; the challenge was convincing home cooks to use the

1069 “Putting Branded Foods on the Menu,” American Restaurant, April 1920, 18-19. 1070 C. A. Patterson, “Half Your Menu Is Nationally Advertised,” American Restaurant, February 1920, 24. 1071 “The Planters,” 1933, New York Historical Society; “Heinz Offers Variety of Foods for Children‟s Menus,” American Restaurant, August 1932, 66; “Happy Family on the Cover,” American Restaurant, July 1938, 12. 1072 “A Canned Foods Menu,” in Ideas for Refreshment Rooms, 245.

335 products. With more women working outside of the home and spending less time on meal preparation—some estimates count the average number of hours women spent making food at 28 hours a week in 1943, a total that dropped to 18 hours a week by 1968—time- saving foods had real kitchen appeal, and families were willing to pay more for the convenience of processed foods.1073

The benefits of prepared foods were not just for housewives. By 1960, restaurants nationwide spent 15 percent of their grocery bills on convenience foods ranging from pre-peeled fresh and frozen potatoes to pre-portioned cuts of meat and packaged cake mixes. With greater frequency, more commercial restaurants also began experimenting with ready-to-serve and boil-in-the-bag meals, including macaroni and cheese, pot roast, turkey dinners, and Hungarian goulash.1074 These items arrived in innovative packaging designs that aided the distribution and shelf life of convenience foods like meat.1075 La Louisiane Restaurant in New Orleans, in partnership with the Memphis Peabody Hotel, merchandised its meals across state lines by flying complete frozen dinners packed on dry ice to the hotel, which then served them the next day to customers.1076 Restaurants, in partnership with national food processors, used these convenience foods to draw housewives out of the kitchen, not just by offering to “free up” time spent on food preparation, but as an assurance that the restaurant was serving high-quality food, just

1073 Roger Horowitz, Putting Meat on the American Table: Taste, Technology, Transformation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 129. For more on the use of convenience foods in postwar home kitchens, see Laura Shapiro, Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), 43-84, and Sherrie A. Inness, Secret Ingredients: Race, Gender, and Class at the Dinner Table (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 17-37; Marling, As Seen on TV, 220. 1074 “Convenience Foods—Who Cooks the Cook‟s Goose?” JWT Food Service News, June 23, 1960, 1; “It‟s in the Bag—Everything from Appetizer to Goulash,” JWT Food Service News, August 29, 1960, 2-3. J. Walter Thompson Newsletter Collection, John W. Hartman Center, Duke University Archives. 1075 For more on the development of the convenience meat industry, see Horowitz, Putting Meat on the American Table, 129-152. 1076 “Meals By Mail,” Chuck Wagon, August 1945, 13.

336 like the housewife would choose for her family: essentially, what was good for the home was good for restaurants. Of course, the paradox here is that women and their families left the home kitchen to eat similar (if not the same) food in restaurants, even though women cited preferences for restaurant meals less likely to be found in the home. While much of the research on brand-name convenience foods concentrates on their use in homes, restaurants, too, participated in the shift to pre-packaged dinners and ingredients, rather than making an entire meal from scratch. As far as nationally- recognized brand names were concerned, restaurants did not try to hide the fact that they used them in their kitchens. In fact, by the 1950s, restaurants lamented the lack of interest shown by national food companies in cooperative advertising. From 1945 to 1953, “food processors [have been] preoccupied with the consumer market,” complained Jack Payne,

Sales Promotion Manager for the American Restaurant magazine. Payne concluded, “(and this is fast becoming one of the most incredible oversights in American marketing history) the food processing industry has almost totally neglected the big volume, high margin ¼ market—the nation‟s restaurants.”1077 America‟s food manufacturers needed to wake up and smell the profits. The notion that chefs scoffed at the use of pre-mixed and prepared foods was an utter misconception, and both food companies and restaurants could benefit financially from more deliberate advertising of brand-name products in restaurants. Brand names appealed to housewives because they reassured buyers of a standardized product, one that (supposedly) would not vary over time or package. In the 1890s, “Grandma didn‟t need labels,” explained the Grocery Manufacturers of America,

1077 Jack W. Payne, “Are You Ignoring One-Fourth of Your Market?” Food Business, September 1954, 10.

337 because “her choice was limited” and “foods were unprocessed,” so labels were not necessary. Descriptive labeling and quality assurance, however, was the key to informed purchasing for the household consumer in the 1950s.1078 Restaurants carried this rationalization into their dining rooms, and advertisements for brand-name products appeared on menus, billboards, and table tents steadily throughout the two decades following World War II. Like the H. J. Heinz Company twenty years earlier, Campbell Soup advertised on children‟s menus in the late 1950s, promoting the slogan “It‟s Fun to Eat Out.” In December 1956, Kraft Foods launched billboards encouraging families to

“Dine Out and Enjoy a Kraft Cheeseburger,” while the Heinz Company advertised its fifty-seven varieties with the slogan, “Dine Out for Variety in‟57.”1079 Perhaps the largest effort, though, was General Foods‟ “Be the Greatest Guy in the World” promotion.

In November 1955, the General Foods Corporation launched a massive advertising campaign to spark interest in family restaurant outings. Similar to the “Take Her Out to Dinner” directive of the 1930s, the General Foods‟ slogan, “Be the Greatest Guy in the World—Take Your Family Out to Dine,” pressured husbands to stake their manhood and bread-winning status on treating the wife and kids to restaurant meals. With the television personality and comedian Danny Thomas as its spokesman, General Foods conveyed the message that there was “a good restaurant for every mood, every need, and every pocketbook.”1080 Importantly, General Foods turned to the medium of television to

1078 The Label Tells the Story, January 1959, 12-13. J. Walter Thompson Advertising Collection, Duke University Archives. 1079 “Children‟s Menu Available,” Pacific Coast Record, October 1957, 31; Elinor Lee, “Homemaker Has a Right to Eat Out,” Washington Post, December 7, 1956, C3; Levenstein, Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Modern Eating in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 128-129. 1080 “National Restaurant Association to Launch Related Industry Drive in 1956,” Allied Food and Beverage, December 1955, 11-12; “Isabell Named First „Greatest Guy in the World,‟” Allied Food and Beverage, March 1956, 23; “Business Builders,” Restaurant Management, October 1958, 28; “General Foods Produces TV Film to Promote Dining Out,” Allied Food and Beverage, November 1957, 30. 338 encourage households to eat out in America‟s restaurants.1081 Between 1945 and 1950, Americans bought 11.6 million television sets, and by the 1950s, this number increased to more than five million sets purchased each year. These home entertainment centers, like the plethora of other household appliances and electronics that accessorized a middle- class consumer-focused lifestyle in the postwar era, were meant to promote homogenous traditional family values and normative gender roles for all ages.1082 Television, similar to housewives, began to compete with restaurants for families‟ leisure time, and the restaurant industry recognized that it needed to use this popular form of entertainment to foster family values outside of the home in the nation‟s commercial dining rooms. The triumvirate of restaurants, television, and brand-name food products joined forces again when Kraft Foods launched a cooperative advertising campaign with the

National Restaurant Association (NRA) in the late 1950s. Mirroring General Foods‟ strategy, Kraft hired the famous satirist and “Hoosier Philosopher” Herb Shriner to promote, along with his wife and children, family restaurant meals. With the Kraft and NRA logos framing the slogan “Two guides to great eating,” advertisements featuring Shriner encouraged families to “Make it [restaurant dinners] a weekly event.” “It‟s part of growing up for the kids,” Shriner explained as the voice of Kraft Foods. “And what it does for mother‟s morale is something wonderful to see. No cooking—no clean-up afterwards—blessed escape from the daily treadmill of those three meals.”1083 Kraft, which launched its first television advertising show in 1947, developed the commercial

1081 Television proved to be a successful method for marketing convenience foods in general, and national food companies promoted brand names for home consumption as well as for use in restaurants (Marling, As Seen on TV, 216.) 1082 Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 147-154. 1083 Advertisement, “Kraft, Restaurant and Corporate,” Kraft Foods Company, J. Walter Thompson Advertisements Collection, Duke University Archives.

339 format throughout the 1950s and early 1960s to show housewives that Kraft products— including those offered in restaurants—were the best choice in terms of cost, quality, and convenience.1084 Other restaurants, especially fast food chains, also recognized the reward of television broadcasting as a profitable marketing medium. The White Castle hamburger chain, slow behind its competitors to use television to reach customers, began allotting funds for promotional television spots geared toward children in the mid- 1950s.1085 Television, suggested the restaurant industry, excelled in food advertising and primed people for dining out by portraying tempting pictures of food and friendly service.1086 Television and housewives merged as the force to be reckoned with in the 1950s, at least as restaurants were concerned. Some restaurateurs predicted—even before the end of World War II—that postwar restaurants would need to cater to children and package meals for home consumption in order to stay afloat.1087 Television exacerbated the situation. By the late 1940s, restaurateurs were asking, “How seriously will television affect my business?” Their worst fears of declining dinner sales came true as privately- owned television sets enticed families to stay home and watch their favorite shows.1088 Middle-class households shifted their leisure inward to the family home and out of public

1084 “Kraft TV” (1964); “Kraft Commercials Stress Service to Housewife,” April 10, 1964; Script for film presented to Kraft (1964), 15, Sidney Ralph Bernstein Co. History Files, J. Walter Thompson Company Archives, Duke University Archives. 1085 David Gerard Hogan, Selling „em by the Sack: White Castle and the Creation of American Food (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 140-142. 1086 “Recipe for Today‟s Food Advertising: New Ideas, Better Presentations,” Printers‟ Ink, July 27, 1956, 23. “N.R.A. President Hilaire Outlines Plans to Upgrade Restaurant Industry,” Pacific Coast Record, June 1957, 52. 1087 Leo Oppenheimer, “Simplified Menus and Hominess Needed,” American Restaurant, October 1944, 104, 106. 1088 “Coming…A New Restaurant Trend,” American Restaurant, April 1949, 125; “Navigating in the Sea of Falling Sales,” Restaurant Management, June 1950, 27.

340 places, like the restaurant. Desperate not to lose this population of customers, restaurants experimented with a variety of strategies to maintain sales. Some restaurants installed televisions in their dining rooms and above the bars, especially in the early years of television when communal watching—especially among working-class families who could not yet afford to own a TV—was more common.1089 In

1947, the Monte Carlo restaurant in New York installed a giant television screen, “the largest yet offered the public” claimed one journalist, behind its bar with speakers at individual tables so customers could choose whether or not to listen to the show.1090 The threat of declining patronage led a handful of other restaurants to purchase the commercial television system, Trans-Vue, a multi-screen entertainment center that allowed for one master tuner to control the images of up to ten screens via remote- control. Multiple screens positioned throughout the restaurant meant better viewing angles for more patrons, an attraction especially for families that did not yet have a television in the home.1091 Other businesses introduced television for kids rather than parents as a form of built-in babysitting while the family dined out. Mothers surveyed by restaurants had long complained (more or less delicately) about the hassles of dining out with small children, where they had to “eat with one hand and try with the other to keep Junior from standing up to put mashed potatoes on the hat of the lady in the next booth.”1092 In the 1940s, a

1089 Richard Butsch, The Making of American Audiences: From Stage to Television, 1750-1990 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 238-240. 1090 “Monte Carlo Restaurant Undergoing Redecoration,” Hotel Gazette, October 25, 1947, clippings, New York Historical Society. 1091 “Commercial Television Set,” Restaurant Management, January 1950, 52; A. W. Berhsohn, “Sell-a- Vision,” Pacific Coast Record, October 1948, 65-66, 69; “There‟s a New Development in Television for Restaurants,” American Restaurant, July 1949, 64; John C. W. Daly, “Television for Taverns Tested,” Pacific Coast Record, January 1950, 51-53. 1092 Chloris Killian, “Helping Mothers Relax,” American Restaurant, August 1947, 33.

341 handful of restaurants, including the Granada Café in Minneapolis and the Casa de Manana in La Jolla, California, opened nursery rooms where parents could drop off little ones so the adults could dine in peace.1093 By the 1950s and 1960s, these restaurant playrooms—such as the one featured at the Barb Restaurants throughout Washington State, tended to feature television sets where kids, bored with table talk, could watch cartoons or Westerns.1094 For the most part, though, restaurants recognized that no matter their efforts, families wanted to stay home, glued to their television sets, which replaced movies as the most popular form of entertainment in the 1950s.1095 Many independent small restaurants joined the larger chains in offering take-out as another form of “TV dinner.” Meals packed for takeaway service appeared infrequently but still existed in the 1920s and

1930s. The Western Hotel Reporter shared the tip of assembling “meals all ready for the housewife to heat and serve in an emergency or hurry,” while the Restaurant Report, published by the National Retail Dry Goods Association in 1935, recommended the sale of box lunches, hors d‟oeuvres and tea sandwich catering, and take-home desserts as strategies for boosting profits.1096 Carry-out service increased during World War II when

1093 Dorothy E. Lane, “Why Not Cater to Traveling Tots,” American Restaurant, April 1948, 110; “Restaurant Operator Has Baby-Sitting Service,” American Restaurant, December 1948, 88. 1094 “Happy Kids Bring „Hoppy‟ Real Success,” Pacific Coast Record, September 1959, 30-31; “Children‟s Playroom Planned for Cohn‟s New Bellevue Barb,” Allied Food and Beverage, December 1962, 27; “Bellevue Barb‟s Décor Shows New Trend for Neighborhood Spots,” Allied Food and Beverage, July 1963, 13, 15; “The Barbs,” Washington State Restaurant and Tavern News, November 1964, 9, 19. Studies from the 1950s and 1960s showed that families with children were most likely to dine out on Sundays, especially for the evening meal. Taking children out to eat for breakfast or lunch occurred less frequently (the times when children‟s programming was more likely broadcasting on television), but they did accompany their parents, it usually was on the weekend. See Review and Summary of the Published Literature, 8-11. 1095 Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 282. 1096 Clifford E. Clinton, “What About the Future Restaurant?” American Restaurant, January 1931, 55; Restaurant Report, 20. 342 women, working in war factories, had less time to prepare hot, full meals from scratch and often relied on restaurants to supplement dinner with ready-to-serve foods. When paper cups and cartons faced wartime shortages, women brought their own containers from home to fill with restaurant food.1097 By 1948, the U.S. Census of Business reported that over 4,000 restaurants in the United States offered food to-go.

As television ownership increased among American families, so did restaurants‟ take-out business. By 1955, 64.5 percent of American households owned a television set.1098 That same year, the national restaurant industry asserted that “take-home food services, gingerly tested just a few years ago, have become an important part of the operating picture of many restaurants today.”1099 Restaurant food prepared for home consumption was needed “because television is cutting into on-premise dinner business with ever-increasing severity.”1100 Throughout the 1950s, issue after issue of restaurant industry publications implored restaurants all across the country to offer take-out in order to combat the television problem and draw families back to the restaurant.1101 Goff‟s Restaurant in Wanukesha, Wisconsin, appealed to time-worn, harried housewives with “Take-Home” dinners that allowed “hurried or tired” women, running late from work or shopping, to “dine at home without cooking.”1102 At Bob‟s Coffee Shop in Chula Vista,

1097 “Detroit Restaurants Have Carry-Out Service,” American Restaurant, April 1944, 58; “There Are Profits in a „Carry-Out‟ Business,” American Restaurant, February 1947, 86; “A Report on Take-Home Foods,” Restaurant Management, August 1952, 6. 1098 Butsch, Making of American Audiences, 235. 1099 Henry S. Ehle, “To Offset Growing Fixed Expenses, Restaurants Need Big Business Volume,” Outdoor Advertising Association News, August 1955, 2. 1100 “Delivering Take-Home Meals,” Restaurant Management, July 1952, 49. 1101 For example, see Herb Siekman, “Idea Time from 2 to 5,” Restaurant Management, May 1952, 30; George E. Clark, „As Times Change…So Do Restaurants,” Allied Food and Beverage, June 1952, 7; “The Booming Take-Home Business,” Restaurant Management, July 1952, 7; “What Take-Home Service Means to You,” Allied Food and Beverage, September 1952, 23-24; “NRA Convention Report: Frozen Cooked and Take-Out Foods,” Pacific Coast Record, June 1953, 35; “45 „Extra‟ Touches,” Allied Food and Beverage, October 1960, 19. 1102 “Counteracting Television,” Restaurant Management, June 1952, 60. 343

California, a restaurant specializing in American and Mexican food, customers purchased 80 gallons of hot sauce a week, along with other menu items, for home consumption in 1959.1103 The disposable container industry also made headway in the postwar years. “Housewives are eager customers for the new and highly profitable restaurant take-home- orders plan,” the Lily-Tulip Cup Corporation announced, and their paper products were ideal for food transport.1104 The Chicago-based Olsen & Anderson company made waves in the late 1940s with their Doggie-Pak “Take It Home to the Dog” cartons, which reduced waste for dog owners and those with small appetites, while the O‟Connell-Ragan Company, based in Tacoma, Washington, invented a “glacin-lined, grease proof” Snack- Sac that protected car upholstery and clothing from the stains left by leaking leftovers.1105

Other restaurants, looking to compete with the frozen food industry‟s popular TV dinners, designed their own versions of TV dinner trays in the form of paper cartons. Joe Carbone of Scotty‟s Café in Tacoma, Washington, created the Video Vittles Take-Home Tray with a cover resembling a television set, which managed to hold portions of soup, salad, entrée, potato, vegetable, bread, butter, dessert, and a drink. The West Coast Paper Company produced a similar product called the “Wifesaver,” a collapsible carton made from “tasteless, odorless board” that could hold soup, a main course, coffee, and condiments.1106 These forms of packaging intended not only to compensate for lost

1103 “Mexican Food with an American Accent,” Restaurant Management, December 1959, 72. 1104 “Home Meal Planning Is a Picnic—When You Do It!” American Restaurant, April 1950, 66. 1105 Advertisement, Doggie-Pak, American Restaurant, November 1948, 145; “Doggie-Pak Pleases Patrons,” American Restaurant, January 1949, 99; “Ideas—Wise and Otherwise,” Chuck Wagon, June 1947, 24. 1106 “„Tray Vittles‟ Package Ready,” Allied Food and Beverage, August 1954, 32; “Joe Carbone Designs „Video Vittles‟ Tray,” Allied Food and Beverage, December 1953, 36; “„Wifesaver‟ Carry-Out Carton,” Allied Food and Beverage, November 1955, 53. 344 dinner sales, but they also countered competition from fast food restaurants like White Castle that had sold middle-class families on the idea of carry-out hamburger dinners since the early 1930s.1107 Trying to put a positive spin on families‟ withdrawal from public space in the age of television, restaurant leaders cited take-home meals as “evidence of America‟s growing dependence upon the restaurant industry.”1108 Yet, at the same time, restaurants begrudgingly acknowledged their growing dependence on American women as critical to their consumer base. Their worst competition was also their most valued customer.

Consistently, studies conducted in the 1950s and early 1960s revealed that more than any other family member, wives stood as “a more important motivating force,” initiating dining out over half the time, while husbands accounted for one-third of the suggestions to eat out.1109 Women were more likely to value cleanliness, attractive surroundings, meals requiring technique beyond their home cooking talents, and the luxury of being waited on than their male counterparts.1110 Female patrons contributed to and guided many of the changes to restaurants in mid-century America, leaving behind visible, material markers that clearly signaled the feminization of the restaurant industry. The innovation of products ranging from take-out containers and high chairs to industrial-strength dishwashing detergent capable of removing lipstick stains all spoke to women‟s profound influence on the restaurant industry between Prohibition and postwar America. These objects also served as symbols complicating the relationship between

1107 Hogan, Selling „em by the Sack, caption to illustration 10 following page 86. 1108 The Restaurant Industry (Chicago: The National Restaurant Association, 1952), 8. 1109 General Foods Eating-Out Index and Consumer Attitudes Survey, 9; Consumer Panel Reports on Dining Out Habits and Attitudes (n.p., Standard Brands, Inc., ca.1960), 6; Review and Summary of the Published Literature on Eating Out, 9. 1110 “The American Woman Speaks Out on Dining Out,” Restaurant Management, May 1961, 100, 102, 188, 192. 345 women and restaurants by implying that women created more work (or, by the 1950s, not enough work) for restaurants. America‟s public dining industry needed women in order to sustain profitable businesses, but it cautioned against undermining the industry‟s patriarchal foundation by forgoing masculine preferences. This careful regulation of women‟s participation in restaurants and the conflicting values placed on the female body affected waitresses as well.

WAITING THEIR TURN: THE AESTHETIC LABOR OF WAITRESSING IN THE UNITED STATES

“Weight 120 pounds; must have musical voice; must be graceful; must be intelligent and of a pleasant disposition; must not wear glasses; not permitted to wear jewelry; hair to be worn neat—no rats or fanciful dressing to make the head conspicuous in this respect.”1111 These qualifications for a waitress, listed in a 1916 issue of Hotel Monthly, call attention to the complexity of waitress work in the twentieth-century United States. Among these requirements is no mention of her ability to perform demanding physical labor, which constituted much of waitresses‟ daily work. Instead, the emphasis fell on her appearance and demeanor, suggesting that a waitress‟s job was as much (if not more) about aesthetic labor than food service.

The importance placed on a waitress‟s physical features and her conformity to twentieth-century American standards of beauty reflected the industry‟s anxiety over women working in restaurants. While many restaurants began to replace waiters with waitresses after World War I, especially because they could be paid lower wages and constituted an abundant labor source, the increased presence of female employees threatened to disrupt the masculine authority of restaurant culture. The industry,

1111 “Qualifications of Waitress,” Hotel Monthly, June 1916, 39.

346 therefore, carved out a particular niche for female employees—like their customer counterparts—where symbols of femininity and beauty framed the space they occupied and the roles they performed.1112 In particular, restaurants attempted to control waitresses‟ visibility and appearance through hiring qualifications, training manuals, uniform fashions, and waitress beauty contests. The paternalism of these occupational rituals signaled that the male-dominated industry was willing to accept female employees as long as they adhered to designated behavioral rules and fulfilled restaurant men‟s expectations of feminine comportment and ideal American womanhood.

As part of their job requirement, waitresses displayed deliberately-constructed ideals of femininity and heterosocial behavior, using clothing, cosmetics, and bodily expressions to mediate food service. In recent years, sociologists have argued that the body “is a central location for the expression and reproduction of power relationships” and that when social institutions regulate physical appearance, they tend to “reproduce assumptions about sexuality and gender,” leaving little room for resistance to these social and cultural expectations.1113 In a similar way, restaurants‟ workplace rules for waitresses regulated their body size, personal grooming, and attire, thereby recreating cultural symbols of femininity that placed a greater value of women‟s labor on aesthetic performance rather than competent, intelligent service. Waiting tables was an occupation dominated by white European male immigrants and black men in the nineteenth and early-twentieth century, as noted previously. Unlike Europe, however, where the waiter achieved status as a respectable and skilled

1112 Cobble, Dishing It Out, esp. chap. 1, 2, and 7, provides a well-detailed overview of the growth of waitressing as a profession and the occupational demands of waitress work. 1113 Kirsten Dellinger and Christine L. Williams, “Makeup at Work: Negotiating Appearance Rules in the Workplace,” Gender and Society 11, no. 2 (April 1997): 152-153.

347 professional, restaurant workers in the United States—both male and female—did not garner the same respect by the general public. Instead, waiting tables was considered unskilled work that could be performed by anyone. This lack of professional respect discouraged a number of professionally-trained waiters from pursuing this line of work after immigrating to the United States, and women gradually filled in for their vacancies.

Waitress work in the early twentieth century was not considered a respectable profession for women, and many waitresses admitted concealing their jobs from friends in fear of social disgrace.1114 Many Americans believed waitresses to be “more free and easy in manners and speech than other wage-earning women,” in a large part because the job demanded that they interact with male strangers “in an environment laden with sexual overtones.”1115

Despite the long hours and morally questionable interactions with male strangers, many women preferred waitress work to factory jobs or household domestic service because of the fixed hours and social interaction.1116 As the sociologist Frances Donovan observed while studying the working and living conditions of waitresses, “it is the group life that makes the appeal and the lack of it is the strongest reason why girls are unwilling to work in private families.”1117 The social dimension and independent lifestyle that waitress work offered women helped the occupation to grow in popularity, alongside the increase in restaurant dining among America‟s business class. For instance, in 1913, a

1114 Frances Donovan, The Woman Who Waits (Boston: The Gorham Press, 1920), 130; Alice Kessler- Harris, Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 135-137. 1115 Kessler-Harris, Out to Work, 136; Cobble, Dishing It Out, 6. 1116 Lois Rita Helmbold, “Downward Occupational Mobility During the Great Depression: Urban Black and White Working Class Women,” Labor History 29, no. 2 (Spring 1988): 149. 1117 David M. Katzman, Seven Days a Week: Women and Domestic Service in Industrializing America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 143-144; “The Story of the Waitress,” The Independent, June 18, 1908, 1378; Donovan, Woman Who Waits, 94. 348 survey of the vocations of boarding house residents in Boston revealed that in equal percentages, waitresses and stenographers comprised the greatest number of boarders, attributed largely to the popular cafés and restaurants in the area.1118 The conditions for women working in restaurants were arduous and exhausting, especially in the early decades of the twentieth century. Managers expected waitresses to be on their feet for up to twelve or thirteen hours a day, with few to no breaks to stop and rest their feet. Depending on the class of restaurant, a waitress might make only $5 or $6 a week, and many had to work seven days a week. The job was physically demanding, and many women fell ill from the strain of carrying heavy trays and standing all day.1119 Concerned with the physical and moral dangers of these working conditions on young women, the Consumer‟s League of New York published an exposé titled Behind the

Scenes in a Restaurant: A Study of 1017 Women Restaurant Employees, which called for labor laws to regulate waitress work. One oft-disgruntled patron, after reading the pamphlet, was so appalled to hear about the disparity between waitresses‟ work and wages that he published an editorial in the New Republic encouraging educated Americans who dined in restaurants to support revised labor reforms for waitresses.1120 Other editorials and personal accounts of waitress work appeared in popular periodicals around this time, calling attention to the undesirable workplace conditions and often advocating tipping and waitress unionization.1121

1118 Albert Benedict Wolfe, The Lodging House Problem in Boston (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1913), 94. 1119 S. M. Franklin, “Elizabeth Maloney and the High Calling of the Waitress,” Life and Labor, February 1913, 37; Louise de Koven Bowen, The Girl Employed in Hotels and Restaurants (Chicago: The Juvenile Protective Association of Chicago, 1912), 11-12. 1120 Behind the Scenes in a Restaurant: A Study of 1017 Women Restaurant Employees (New York: The Consumer‟s League of New York City, 1916); Signe K. Toksvig, “Out of a Pamphlet,” New Republic, December 30, 1916, 242-243. 1121 See, for example, “Being a Waitress in a Boardwalk Hotel,” Scribner‟s, September 1921, 314-325; Ruth Gordon, “The Forgotten Industry,” Survey, January 15, 1923, 514-517; Arthur Brisbane, “Be 349

World War I and Prohibition, along with the expansion of urban areas that facilitated an increase in dining outside of the home, contributed to the growing acceptability of waitress work and influenced the changing face of restaurant service. With a shortage of male labor resulting from servicemen heading off to war, followed by immigration restrictions of the 1920s, more higher-class restaurants turned to waitresses for their dining rooms. In addition, by removing the visible presence of alcohol from restaurants, Prohibition made public dining establishments more respectable places for women, including female employees, and the number of waitresses in the labor market rose steadily in the 1920s and early 1930s.1122 By the late 1920s, women held 59 percent of all waitstaff positions in the United States, and most of these waitresses were white.1123 Restaurants claimed that they hired intelligent, detail-oriented women who possessed

“good health and endurance, and a cheerful disposition,” along with physical strength, yet their assertions belied the tendency to hire women based almost entirely on their appearance.1124 Some patrons grumbled that this trend “brought into service younger girls whose facial makeup and bobbed hair is their particular asset,” thereby displacing the dignified, conscientious waiter. Yet restaurant managers around the country found that the eye appeal of waitresses helped to increase their customer base, and restaurants continued to hire women based on their aesthetic, rather than manual, capabilities.1125 Although the emphasis on a waitress‟s physical appearance accelerated during the 1920s, coinciding with the shift toward outward displays of beauty and what Kathy Peiss has

Considerate of the Waitress,” Hotel Monthly, June 1924, 58; “Arthur Brisbane‟s Opinion of a Waitress,” American Restaurant, June 1924, 34. 1122 Hoerle and Saltzberg, The Girl and the Job, 42. 1123 Cobble, Dishing It Out, 22. 1124 Mary L. Dutton, “Restaurant Management,” in An Outline of Careers for Women: A Practical Guide to Achievement, ed. Doris E. Fleischman (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, and Co., 1928), 434. 1125 “Prohibition Makes Change,” Pacific Coast Chef, June 1928, 22; Arthur S. Loeb, “Cleveland, Ohio,” Mixer and Server, January 15, 1928, 63. 350 described as “the externalization of the gendered self,” one particular group of waitresses gained renown as early as the late-nineteenth century for their attractive, conservative attire and hospitable demeanor: the Harvey Girls. Around the turn of the century in the western United States, miners, prospectors, and other single, transient businessmen and laborers lived in boarding houses and took their meals at restaurants and other forms of public dining rooms, which created a distinct regional demand for waitress work. Fred Harvey, who founded a chain of restaurants along the Santa Fe railway (as discussed in chapter 3), attempted to bring a level of etiquette and wholesomeness to his establishments through his waitresses, juxtaposing them against “pretty waiters,” or waitresses who dressed more-or-less provocatively and, reputation-wise, hovered just shy of prostitution.1126 In contrast, the Harvey Girls embodied a respectability monitored by house matrons and restaurant personnel who ensured that they followed behavioral codes. Early newspaper advertisements for Harvey House waitresses encouraged “young women, 18-30 years of age, of good character, attractive and intelligent” to apply for open positions.1127 After personal interviews became too cost-prohibitive in the early 1920s, the Harvey Company asked all potential waitresses to fill out an application, including a photograph and references.1128 Since Harvey preferred to hire waitresses with little-to-no experience in order to train them according to company rules, professional

1126 Mary Lee Spence, “Waitresses in the Trans-Mississippi West: „Pretty Waiter‟ Girls, Harvey Girls and Union Maids,” in The Women‟s West, ed. Susan Armitage and Elizabeth Jameson (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987), 220-223. Spence has also shown that this association with prostitution was merely speculation and fabrication: in 1888, out of 471 California prostitutes, only 2 cited previous work as a waitress. See Mary Lee Spence, “They Also Serve Who Wait,” Western Historical Quarterly 14, no. 1 (January 1983): 23. 1127 James D. Henderson, “Meals by Fred Harvey,” Arizona and the West 8, no. 4 (Winter 1966): 315. 1128Spence, “Waitresses in the Trans-Mississippi West,” 226.

351 references would have been less important; therefore, this hiring process emphasized the physical attributes of potential waitresses, as well as personal references that could speak to a pleasing personality. Waitress uniforms also reiterated this focus on the Harvey Girls‟ appearance: between the 1880s and the 1920s, the standard uniform remained virtually unchanged, consisting of a black dress that hung eight inches above the floor, a white apron, black shoes, and black stockings. In addition, Harvey Girls‟ hairstyles and accessories were strictly regulated by the company; the waitresses were forbidden from wearing jewelry or cosmetics, and managers would go so far as to wipe a Harvey Girl‟s‟ face with a moist cloth to verify that she did not have on make-up.1129 Harvey Girls and their compelling feminine appeal achieved a level of mythology, one that the Fred Harvey Company buttressed to help maintain its restaurants‟ reputation, even going so far as to mention their personal hygiene and marriage-potential: “The girls are ever in their best bibs and tucker, spotlessly gowned, manicured, groomed, combed, dental-flossed—bright, healthy, intelligent girls—girls that are never fly, flip nor fresh, but who give you the attention that never obtrudes, but which is always hearty and heartfelt,” gushed a promotional pamphlet from 1909, mentioning as an aside that Harvey Girls rarely lasted more than six months before they married some “millionaire mine owner or ranchman.”1130 This authorization by male restaurant leaders operated as a verbal stamp of approval, a seal of quality assurance that the waitress “product” had been tested and approved. Almost forty years later, the company continued to praise “the strong influence of the waitresses whom he [Fred Harvey] transplanted from among the wholesome farm girls and school teachers” of the Midwest as “a fine type of American

1129 Polling-Kempes, 55-58. See chap. 3 of this dissertation for exceptions to the standard uniform at southwestern-themed Harvey Houses. 1130 Fred Harvey Meals, ca.1909, Northern Arizona University, Cline Library Digital Archives.

352 womanhood,” who continued to “make good wives because our personnel department has continued to select them carefully.”1131 Using their charm and powers of feminine persuasion, Harvey Girls were also expected to steer customers to particular dishes on the menu, likely ones that had a high profit margin or used ingredients in great supply. Managers reinforced this practice by inquiring, at the end of the lunch or dinner hour, how many of each dish the waitress had sold.1132 This oversight of Harvey Girls reinforced the patriarchal vision of the company that placed a high value on the waitresses‟ respectability and attractiveness. While the rules of conduct and appearance helped to professionalize Harvey Girls‟ work, they also limited the girls‟ agency and freedom of self-expression in the restaurant workplace. Surely influenced by the success of Harvey Houses and the Harvey Girls, other restaurants in the twentieth century adopted similar physical and personable expectations for its waitresses, requiring them “to be experienced, intelligent, pleasing in appearance, and to dress simply in every respect,” in addition to supplying references and purchasing white and black uniforms.1133 Girls of Irish, German, Polish, and Scandinavian descent gained a reputation as “naturally” competent waitresses.1134 The choice to hire women who conformed to American standards of beauty, regardless of their education, experience, or ethnic heritage, however, was quickly emerging as a popular trend among restaurant managers. A report by the Juvenile Protection Association of Chicago noted

1131 Byron S. Harvey, Jr., “The Harvey Story,” American Restaurant, April 1947, 40, 84 (emphasis in original). 1132 Wanda A. Landrey, Boardin‟ in the Thicket: Recipes and Reminiscences of Early Big Thicket Boarding Houses (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 1998), 59. 1133 “Careful Selection of Waitresses,” Hotel Monthly, June 1914, 57-61. 1134 The Ware School of Tea Room Management: A Course in Tea Room, Cafeteria, and Motor Inn Management: Lesson VI (New York: The Ware School of Tea Room Management, 1927), 7; Kathryn Overbaugh, “When You Hire That New Waitress,” American Restaurant, September 1937, 60; Donovan, Woman Who Waits, 171. 353 how several Chicago-area restaurants considered “pretty girls” an added attraction and source of profit; one establishment deliberately placed its attractive waitresses in the downstairs room which served men, while the more matronly and simple-looking waitresses worked the upstairs room that catered to women.1135 From 1920s through the 1950s, restaurants left no doubt about their preferences for a “custom-made” waitress. Of medium height—between five feet four inches and five feet seven inches tall, the ideal waitress would be “a perfect physical specimen, mentally and physically alert and neat and cheerful,” with “correctly arranged hair, immaculate uniform, silk hose, trim slippers, manicured hands,” as well as “right-handed, pretty without make-up, with at least a tenth grade education.”1136 Brushed hair and teeth, clean shoes, and fingers free from nicotine stains also factored into her hiring appeal.1137 The value of a waitress‟s ability to perform aesthetic labor, rather than manual service, is evident in these qualifications that favored attractive women over seasoned workers. The beauty and fashion culture that guided waitress hiring practices was widely broadcast throughout the industry and the American public at large, communicating to potential waitresses that personal appearance amounted to their greatest asset. The Director for Public Relations of a large restaurant chain in Chicago listed appearance as the primary quality in a waitress, followed by brains and sex appeal. Plain looks could prove a liability; sociologist Frances Donovan described occasions where “the waitress is laid off because some more attractive girl has applied for her job.”1138 J. O. Dahl, a

1135 de Koven Bowen, Girl Employed in Hotels, 12. 1136 “The Custom-Made Waitress,” American Restaurant, April 1937, 56; A. A. McVittie, “My Restaurants Stage a New Show Each Day,” American Restaurant, December 1933, 60; “Warning…” American Restaurant, September 1937, 45. 1137 How to Get and Keep Restaurant Employees (New York: New York State Restaurant Association, Inc., 1945, 21; “Getting Along on the Job,” Washington State Restaurant and Tavern News, November 1941, 7; George Wenzel, “What Should a Waitress Know?” Allied Food and Beverage, June 1953, 9. 1138 Donovan, Woman Who Waits, 125. 354 highly-regarded expert in the field of restaurant management, detailed the preferred physical characteristics for waitresses in 1933, a list which is worth quoting at length to emphasize the extent to which the female body was inspected and graded:

A waitress must have a clear complexion, regular features, no deformities, erect carriage, slender hands and fingers that are not too short, with well shaped nails, well shaped legs, strong ankles and good arches, no painful bunions nor deformed toes, no bad tonsils nor adenoids (so that she must breathe through her mouth), no superfluous hair, visible scars or any other physical irregularity which might make her a misfit. She should have good eye sight; hearing; sense of smell, taste, and color.1139

Not only did these requirements rate women according to a perceived aesthetic value, they also discriminated against poorer and immigrant or ethnic women who lacked access to medical and dental care, or did not conform to the white, hairless ideal of feminine beauty that proliferated in the United States between 1914 and 1945.1140 Rather than evaluating a waitress on the skills of waiting on table and work ethic, restaurants believed that women‟s greatest contribution to the dining room was the display of attractive, normalized (white) heterosexual femininity—without these aesthetic features, managers (and many customers) considered a waitress to be less qualified for her job. Dahl was one of the few to acknowledge the standards as problematic: “I know that it sounds cruel to place so much emphasis on physical characteristics over which most people have no control,” Dahl admitted. “But it is good business for you and in the long run it is better for the girls who eventually find a place where they can be most happy.” Where this

1139 J. O. Dahl, Dining Room Management for Head Waitress and Hostesses (Stamford: J. O. Dahl, 1933), 4. 1140 For more on the notion of superfluous hair as antithetical to twentieth-century American beauty, see Christine Hope, “Caucasian Female Body Hair and American Culture,” Journal of American Culture 5, no. 1 (Spring 1982): 93-99; Rebecca Herzig, “Situated Technology: Meanings,” in Gender and Technology: A Reader, ed. Nina E. Lerman, et al. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 72-97.

355

“place” was, Dahl never explained, but his rationale clearly implied that the focus on feminine features was a business, rather than personal, decision.1141 Restaurant manuals explained that waitresses should be well-groomed, especially in the care of their hair and hands. Natural hair color was preferable to artificial, and “straight stringy hair” was considered undesirable. In the 1920s, the socially-debated bobbed haircut gained acceptance among managers, although most insisted waitresses wear hairnets to hold their free-flowing locks at bay, which were too short to tie back easily.1142 Red, rough hands signaled that a young woman was “accustomed to hard work,” an inescapable irony considering waitressing was challenging manual labor—a waitress‟s hands, however, were supposed to belie this fact.1143 “The girl who is good looking has her pick of the jobs,” admitted Donovan. “The advertisements announce it and most managers insist on it. „There ain‟t no chance for an old hen, they all want chickens and they want „em slender,‟ is a remark which defines the situation.”1144 A waitress‟s success was limited to and by her body—an older, heavier body, even if capable of carrying heavy trays and attending patiently to customers, was generally excluded from restaurant table service, indicating that women‟s roles in the restaurant industry were regulated by aesthetic ideals of American womanhood.

Industry experts cited well-groomed, well-trained waitresses as the key to a restaurant‟s success (or, if lacking these qualities, responsible for the restaurant‟s downfall). A proprietor in Wisconsin advertised only for slender waitresses in 1920,

1141 Dahl, Dining Room Management, 5. 1142 “Where Does Bobbed Hair Go? Many To Want It Back Soon,” Dallas Morning News, August 20, 1922, 3; Martha Belle Gwin, “Putting the „Rest‟ Into Restaurant,” American Restaurant, June 1923, 61; “Bob-Haired Waitresses,” Pacific Coast Chef, November 1924, 10. 1143 “Stone Lists Attributes of Successful Waitresses,” American Restaurant, March 1933, 38; The Ware School of Tea Room Management: Lesson VI, 8, 18; Overbaugh, “When You Hire That New Waitress,” 58. 1144 Donovan, Woman Who Waits, 211. 356 rationalizing that they moved more quickly and “take up less room” than heavier-set girls; the restaurant industry agreed, suggesting that a slender waitress could serve “20 per cent more guests than a stout lass.”1145 One hiring guide recommended that restaurateurs select “dining room employees who are free from physical defects which tend to arouse curiosity and cause loss of appetite,” similarly suggesting that a female interviewee with crooked stocking seams, dandruff, and a visible slip would also appear disheveled on the job.1146 Another waitress training manual recounted how “good- looking, neatly uniformed” waitresses became an indispensable part of new restaurant growth following World War I, so that “each year the waitress becomes more important to the business life of the civilized world.”1147 All of these rules and regulations amounted to a selective hiring process for waitresses that placed more value on aesthetic features rather than manual skill and mental sharpness. Although patrons seemingly enjoyed gazing at pretty servers—the editor of a leading trade journal argued that men spent more money on lunch when served by attractive waitresses—good looks could not compensate for poor service. A number of restaurants acknowledged the importance of waitresses being thoughtful and skilled at their job, suggesting that waitresses should “have something on their minds besides Their

Hair.”1148 In Hollywood, the Circus Café advertised that all of their waitresses possessed at least a high school education, while another restaurant manager joked, “Of course, we cannot use the beautiful but dumb Dora….But if Dora is beautiful and not dumb, so much

1145 “Tells Why Waitresses Should Be Slender,” American Restaurant, April 1920, 28; “Restaurant Advertising,” Restaurant Management, June 1940, 21. 1146 Crete Dahl, How to Get and Keep Restaurant Employees (New York: New York State Restaurant Association, 1945), 19-20. 1147 J. O. Dahl, The Efficient Waitress Manual (Stamford: The Dahls, 1945), 5. 1148 Zenn Kaufman, “Sell Beauty With Your Meals,” American Restaurant, August 1937, 72; Dorothy Blake, “When Beauty Puts a Crepe on the Cash Register,” Restaurant Management, August 1928, 102-104.

357 the better for Dora.”1149 Despite these patronizing gestures of appreciation toward smart, capable waitresses, the emphasis on their bodily features pointed to a male restaurant culture that obscured the emotional, physical, and intellectual demands of waitress work by fixating on waitresses‟ outward appearance. Restaurants that organized waitresses based on coordinating physical features viewed the female “decorative arrangement” as part of the establishment‟s “showmanship,” a device to attract customers either by its novelty or sameness. Al Carder, the proprietor for a Chicago-chain of namesake restaurants, recommended hiring waitresses of the same height, weight, and approximate age in order to “form a part of the background”: “all our girls are brunettes,” he explained, “not that we object to blondes, but because blondes would be more conspicuous and brunettes are more plentiful.

Because of uniform size and coloring, you simply do not notice them.”1150 Other restaurants used coordinating hair color to grab customers‟ attention. A popular restaurant in New York placed waitresses in different rooms according to hair color (black, blonde, and brunette), while two other New York restaurants hired only redheads (at one, hostesses were the exception, who all had black hair). Similarly, the Welch Grill in Omaha, Nebraska, advertised in the local papers that the restaurant was hiring only redheaded waitresses. The stunt turned out to be solely a marketing gimmick, but it increased patronage nonetheless.1151

1149 Harry R. Tully, “Merchandising Trends in the Restaurant of Today,” American Restaurant, June 1937, 76; Diana Rice, “The Waitress of Today Is Trained for Her Job,” New York Times, May 20, 1928, 136. 1150“Reign of Beauty in Business,” New York Times Magazine, June 15, 1924, SM5; Al B. Carder, “Staging Your Play for Restaurant Patronage,” American Restaurant , August 1933, 50; Arthur W. Van Vlissinger, Jr., “Sizzling Steaks: Food for Thought,” Rotarian, September 1936, 41. 1151 Cobble, Dishing It Out, 22; Jerome Beatty, “How People Act in Restaurants,” American Magazine, December 1932, 134; M. Zenn Kaufman, “Showmanship in the Restaurant,” American Restaurant, June 1937, 88; R. B. Wallace, “Talking About the Grill‟s Red Headed Girls,” Restaurant Management, April 1928, 210-211. 358

Arranging waitresses by hair color was one way in which some fanciful restaurateurs exercised control over the placement and appearance of female bodies within the restaurant space. The bulk of managers, however, regulated waitresses and their physical displays of femininity through training manuals and bodily inspections, enforced under the pretext of workplace professionalism. As noted above, a waitress‟s physical appearance was considered central to her employment at many restaurants. One critic of women‟s increasing labor presence in restaurants in 1931 dismissed blonde waitresses as “just about as good…as a blind halfback.” According to this critic, “a scientific study has indicated that blonde waitresses are less courteous, less intelligent, and less reliable than brunettes. The modern ideal of a waitress is a combination of the best qualities of Florence Nightingale, Ruth Hanna McCormick, Clara Bow, and the

Mona Lisa. She must have a good manicure, just the right amount of rouge, and the entire menu by memory.”1152 Whether “modern restaurant experts” believed the “perfect” waitress to be blonde or brunette, tall or petite, with long hair or short, importantly, her success never depended wholly on her ability to perform table service work. In order to regulate waitresses‟ appearance as part of their job requirements, training courses and rule books proliferated in the 1920s through the 1950s to remind waitresses of their professional obligations. Spokane‟s Hotel Davenport dining room transitioned to a female waitstaff in the early 1920s by initiating a school for future waitresses “where all applicants of apparent fitness [were] given an opportunity to prove their worthiness,” while the Ware School of Tea Room Management trained future managers how to judge the general appearance of waitress applicants when

1152 Raymond S. Tompkins, “Hash-House Visionaries,” Pacific Northwest Caterer and Steward, June 1931, 136. 359 interviewing.1153 Howard Johnson‟s, Pig‟n Whistle, Schrafft‟s, Child‟s, The Olney Inn, and other popular chain and independent restaurants nationwide operated their own waitress training schools or “coaching programs,” with attendance and “graduation” being a requirement of employment.1154 Independent schools of waitress training popped up all around the country from Massachusetts and Texas to California and Alaska; in the

1930s, Radcliffe College was one of a handful of East Coast women‟s colleges to offer a waitress course as part of their career services.1155 Tea room waitresses at Filene‟s in Boston received a booklet, “Rules for Waitresses,” that covered the essentials of service, beginning with “Personal Appearance.”1156 A waitress training course in Pittsburgh only considered high-school graduates who were between five foot, one-inch and five-foot, four-inches tall and 18 to 25 years of age with “good personal appearance; neatness, good carriage; and interest[ed] in restaurant work.”1157 All of these forms of guidance and rules reiterated the notion that without training, waitresses would be merely “hashers,” the derogatory term for the loud, uncouth, grumpy server of the stereotypical “greasy spoon” establishment.1158 Yet almost all of the instructional courses, training manuals, and rule

1153 “A School for Waitresses,” in Ideas for Refreshment Rooms, 183; The Ware School of Tea Room Management: Lesson VI, 8. 1154 “Here‟s Johnson‟s $10,000,000 Idea,” Restaurant Management, August 1939, 28; Sidney Hoedemaker, “Setting a Company Standard for Restaurant Workers,” American Restaurant, April 1930, 33-34; “No „Hashers‟: Waitresses Now Must Have Tact and Charm and Apply Their Psychology,” Literary Digest, May 1, 1937, 26-27; “Waitress Manual Analyzed,” American Restaurant, April 1933, 27. 1155 “Training Classes Completed in Dallas,” Chuck Wagon, July 1948, 11; “500 Complete Waitress Training in ‟47,” Chuck Wagon, March 1948, 22; Lessie M. Oakley, “Training Waitresses and Personnel Work,” Catering World, December 1931, 36, 39, 59; “Training School for Waitresses,” unidentified clipping ca. 1950s, Lorena Showers Papers, University of Alaska, Anchorage; “Waitress Course, 1932-33,” Radcliffe College Career Services Records, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University. 1156 “Restaurant Tea-Room in Filene‟s Store, Boston,” in Ideas for Refreshment Rooms, 163-164. 1157 “A Waitress Training Course in Pittsburgh,” Employment Service News, June 1936, 10-11. 1158 For more on the effort to phase out the term “hasher” from restaurants, see “Three Tips On Waitress Control,” Restaurant Management, September 1937, 185.

360 guidebooks specified waitresses—not waiters—as the target audience, which suggested men did not require such extensive regulation. Similar to training courses, written manuals provided waitresses with a list of rules that they were expected to study, memorize, and follow. Like children, waitresses should be “seen and not heard,” as well as refrain from touching their hair or even lifting their hands above their chin while on duty.1159 Among the requirements described by A Training Program for Tea-Room Waitresses from 1929, in regard to her “Personal Behavior and Appearance,” a waitress should stand “squarely on both feet with chest up”; avoid touching her hair or face while in the dining room; bathe daily, wash her hair weekly, wear a hairnet, and use “a deodorant if necessary.” Additionally, a waitress needed to refrain “from wearing a great deal of make-up, perfume or jewelry,” as well as from chewing gum.1160 Lists of regulations reminded waitresses to “use cosmetics sparingly,” while employers were encouraged to hire waitresses—ideally 110 to 125 pounds—based on “Morals: Clean living and clean looking” as well as other qualities, including an appearance “free from…freakish hair dress, etc.”1161 Other restaurants created regulatory forms, rating charts, and pictorial reminders to guide and monitor waitresses‟ appearance.1162 For enforcement, restaurants insisted on daily physical

1159 Lillian M. Gunn, Table Service and Decoration (Chicago: J. B. Lippincott, Co., 1935), 16-17. 1160 Research Bureau for Retail Training, A Training Program for Tea-Room Waitresses (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, 1929), 6. 1161 “Don‟ts Given Waitresses,” Los Angeles Times, March 14, 1936, A8; “Regulations for Employees,” American Restaurant, March 1933, 23; “How to Select and Train Waitresses,” Restaurant Management, December 1937, 520. 1162 “Before Going On Duty,” Restaurant Management, December 1937, 521; “Before Going on Duty,” Restaurant Management, October 1938, 23; “How to Select and Train Waitresses,” Restaurant Management, December 1937, 520; “Round the Clock with the Efficient Waitress,” Restaurant Management, October 1938, 17-21; “An Ideal Wheeler Girl,” Restaurant Management, December 1938, 60; Arthur C. Robinson, “Sanitarian‟s News Letter,” Allied Food and Beverage (July 1951), 14; Travis Elliott, “A Waitress‟ Pledge of Public Service,” in Capsule Chats with Restaurant Operators (Austin: Texas Restaurant Association: 1955), 14-15. 361 inspections, where head waitresses and managers peered closely at a waitress‟s face, fingernails, and shoes for evidence of excessive make-up, jewelry other than a wedding ring, unkempt fingernails, and even artificial hair color.1163 To encourage waitresses to spend time and money on their appearance—including women whose features did not conform to the ideal—restaurants appealed to the reigning beauty culture in the United States, joining the ranks of ladies‟ magazines and beauty books that insisted, “Good grooming will make you better liked and more successful than mere good looks.”1164 Restaurateurs stressed the financial benefits of keeping up appearances to their female employees by insisting that “beauty is a distinct asset to any business, as feminine beauty is very pleasant and soothing to most people.”1165 Waitresses, therefore, found themselves spending a substantial portion of their earnings on clothing, make-up, and hair-and-skin care products to make themselves more desirable employees and to earn bigger tips. These purchases were real financial investments, not simply examples of young women yielding to the sway of merchandising and peer pressure. As part of her participant-observer waitress study, Frances Donovan confirmed that well-dressed, glamorous girls were more likely to get hired: “It is not what you are but what you wear that determines your social standing as a waitress.”1166 Although some restaurant men discouraged the over-emphasis on rules and regulations, arguing that the

1163 Carder, “Staging Your Play for Restaurant Patronage,” 21; Restaurant Report, 23-24; “News and Views in Words and Pictures,” Restaurant Management, January 1938, 14; Hoedemaker, “Setting a Company Standard for Restaurant Workers,” 34; “Houston‟s Drive-In Trade Gets Girl Show with Its Hamburgers,” Life, February 26, 1940, 84-87. 1164 Dahl, Efficient Waitress Manual, 7. 1165 “No „Hashers,‟” 27. 1166 Donovan, Woman Who Waits, 208. 362 structure created wooden puppets rather than servers with individual personalities, the majority monitored waitresses with a vocabulary of do‟s and don‟ts.1167

THERE SHE IS, MISS AMERICAN WAITRESS

While the dining room provided the main stage to display waitresses, their physical attributes and service skills were also evaluated in waitress beauty contests. Indeed, the feminization of restaurant table service paralleled the growing popularity of beauty contests in the twentieth century, which became a national ritual in 1921 with the advent of the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City. Restaurants also started to venture into beauty contests as a promotional technique in the mid-1920s. Remarkably, when event organizers suspended the Miss America pageant in 1928 because it was failing to attract the “right” kind of contestant, a waitress beauty contest formally replaced the Miss American parade of national beauties. This substitution is noteworthy because it suggests that the ideal representative waitress, celebrated for her aesthetic and personable qualities, symbolized the archetypical American woman. In 1925, the American Restaurant trade journal included beauty contests as a “business building idea.” Noting that “[b]eauty contests are not a new thing but they never do lose their appeal and popularity,” the feature mentioned that a Northern restaurant partnered with a local newspaper to stage a local beauty contest and generate publicity for the restaurant.1168 The growing emphasis on externalized beauty as part of

1167 “Hire Waitresses for Brains, Let Them Act Naturally, Says Restaurant Trade Publisher,” Dallas Morning News, March 29, 1940; Charlotte Hughes, “The Girl With the Tray,” New York Times, March 3, 1940, 106; “Don‟t! Do!” American Restaurant, December 1944, 53; “It‟s Smart to Be Pleasant—And More Fun, Too!” American Restaurant, November 1944, 27; “Do‟s and Don‟t‟s Folder,” American Restaurant, February 1948, 39. 1168 J. O. Dahl, “Beauty Contest,” American Restaurant, October 1925, 97.

363 the modern American woman‟s identity also translated into her role at work. Joan Sangster, whose scholarship analyzes beauty contests in post-World War II Canadian labor unions, argues that the juxtaposition of beauty and labor in union (or workplace) beauty contests reinforced an ideology of highly sexualized female workers that contrasted with views of their white male counterparts, whose labor was not tied to performances of sexuality.1169 This gendering of labor also occurred in restaurants, where women‟s work embodied an aesthetic component and designated a particular role for waitresses—separate from waiters—that eased their acceptance into the male-dominated industry. The spectacle of waitress beauty contests is best epitomized by the search for America‟s Vita Girl. In late 1937, seven restaurant men relaxed over coffee and cigars after dinner, including the publisher and editor of the American Restaurant magazine, C.A. “Pat” Patterson. As the conversation turned toward beautiful women, the men soon began to share their definitions of ideal feminine beauty. Although their versions differed, they all agreed that an attractive woman was a healthy woman; in other words, men in the business of eating concurred that a beautiful woman was also a good eater. As Patterson later recounted, “if a woman hopes to possess even a minimum amount of beauty, she must eat not only the right kind of food, but she must eat at least three meals a day.” Furthermore, Patterson declared, “it is up to the restaurant men…to point out the way for American women in their search for beauty.”1170 The restaurant men‟s interest in the health and beauty of the American woman ran deeper than her appearance and their personal titillation. Women with a hearty appetite,

1169 Joan Sangster, “„Queen of the Picket Line”: Beauty Contests in the Post-World War II Canadian Labor Movement, 1945-1970,” Labor 5, no. 4 (2008): 83-106. 1170 C.A. Patterson, “Can We Find the Vita-Girl?” American Restaurant, May 1938, 51.

364 presumably, would be more likely to frequent restaurants and order more food. To encourage this ideal type of American woman, the National Restaurant Association (NRA) launched the Vita-Girl campaign, a beauty contest that would crown one winner the nation‟s Vita-Girl. The contest ran counter to the diet trends of the late 1930s and designated women working in restaurants as the group from which the winner would be chosen. The campaign operated with twin goals: promote the vitality of women through food and, in turn, increase sales for the restaurant industry. To convince restaurateurs to use the contest as a promotional technique, Patterson suggested “that the Vita-Girl has merely been created by us to dramatize an idea—as the symbol of a serious plan that will result in lasting health values to the people—and at the same time call attention in vivid manner to the care and thought being given to the preparation of fine foods served in

American restaurants.”1171 Emphasizing the link between a waitress beauty contest and the financial benefit to the restaurant industry, he reminded readers, “The restaurant man has great merchandising opportunities in the Vita-Girl. Women, we know, want more than anything else in the world to be attractive, and we can convince them that good food and enough of it will point the way in their search for beauty.”1172 Importantly, according to the rules of the contest, the most beautiful type of woman in America would be a wage-earning woman. In October 1938, after pouring over dozens of photographic entries, the NRA awarded the Vita-Girl trophy and title to Miss Constance Freelund, a waitress at Harding‟s Colonial Room in Chicago who represented “the healthful charm that is typical of all young ladies working in the restaurant industries.”1173 Freelund, a wholesome-

1171 C.A. Patterson, “The Vita-Girl Campaign,” American Restaurant, March 1938, 45. 1172 C. A. Patterson, “Where Is the Vita-Girl?” American Restaurant, July 1938, 35. 1173 “Here She Is! The Vita-Girl,” American Restaurant, October 1938, 49.

365 looking girl with dimples and a face framed by short curly hair, embodied the vitality, youth, and charm (rather than overt sexuality) that the restaurant industry valued in order to uplift the public‟s conception of waitress work to a level of respectability for women. The Vita-Girl campaign was not the first waitress beauty contest sponsored by the NRA to achieve this goal, nor would it be the last. In fact, waitress beauty contests emerged as a signature feature of the restaurant industry from the mid-1920s through the early 1960s. Restaurants employed these contests as a business strategy that furthered particular representations of feminine beauty and gendered labor in the twentieth century.

The importance of waitress beauty contests for understanding the larger role of American restaurants in contributing to national ideals of womanhood is two-fold. First, waitress beauty contests functioned to regulate ways in which restaurant space became feminized during the interwar and postwar years. As cultural and business historian Kathy Peiss suggests, “beauty and appearance have played an important role in employment….Formal uniforms, customary dress codes, hairstyles, makeup requirements, and weight restrictions became visual cues that served to unify the corporate or brand identity, put forward a pleasing face to the public, and manage employees.”1174 Beauty contests, then, helped to maintain standards for waitresses‟ appearance in restaurants, an industry whose profits seemingly hinged on the physical display of its female workforce. Second, waitress beauty contests claimed to select representative types of ideal American women—women who labored outside of the home. Beauty pageants are important not only because they uphold idealized images and standards of beauty; they

1174 Kathy Peiss, “On Beauty…and the History of Business,” in Beauty and Business: Commerce, Gender, and Culture in Modern America, ed. Philip Scranton (New York: Routledge, 2001), 16 (emphasis added).

366 also signify values of the dominant national discourse. As Sarah Banet-Weiser articulates, “Pageants create a national field of shared symbols and practices that define both ethnicity and femininity in terms of national identity.”1175 Waitress beauty contests, then, complicate historical notions of idealized American womanhood. On the one hand, they reaffirmed that a woman‟s appearance should remain one of her top priorities; yet, on the other, they rewarded women who worked outside of the home, which seems to run counter to popular accounts that suggest domestic homemakers—not working women— typified feminine American values. Lois Banner notes that “the history of beauty contests tells us much about American attitudes toward physical appearance and women‟s expected roles.”1176 Waitress beauty contests reveal restaurants‟ investment in women (preferably “attractive” women) as critical to the financial success of the industry. These contests indicate a previously male-dominated public arena in which middle-class women, in particular, were encouraged to seek employment for the mutual benefit of both the waitresses and the restaurant business, even though the value placed on women‟s work was as much for their physical appearance as for their job skills. The first documented reference I have found for a waitress beauty contest is from 1926 when the NRA, through the American Restaurant Magazine, launched a contest to determine “America‟s Most Beautiful Waitress.” Citing the only requirement as being “employed in a restaurant within the borders of the United States,” the magazine encouraged waitresses with “brains as well as beauty” to enter the contest. In addition to a portrait photo, waitresses needed to submit a 200-word letter on the topic of “Why a Restaurant Operator Should Attend His National Convention.” (One can only speculate

1175 Sarah Banet-Weiser, The Most Beautiful Girl in the World: Beauty Pageants and National Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 6-7. 1176 Banner, American Beauty, 249. 367 as to the reason why the NRA included this requirement.) The magazine went on to assert that the NRA had “always maintained that America contains many beautiful waitresses,” and they were going to select the woman who could be a “representative of the American waitress; she must „glorify‟ the American waitress.”1177 In the months leading up to the contest, the NRA not only encouraged waitresses to enter themselves; it suggested proprietors somehow get a photograph of their restaurant‟s prettiest waitress—even if it meant surreptitiously taking a snapshot of her— and, on her behalf, entering her into the contest. The reason: the waitress was not the only potential winner; her employer stood to gain substantially from the publicity and other rewards. The woman crowned “America‟s Most Beautiful Waitress” would win three prizes: 1) a portrait of herself painted by the artist H. S. Daley; 2) a scholarship for the general course of Lewis Hotel Training Schools in Washington, D.C., which would help prepare her to manage tea rooms and other restaurants; and 3) screen tests with a major motion picture studio, which could lead to a movie contract. This waitress‟s employer, however, would receive a five-year subscription to the American Restaurant magazine and specialty equipment from a manufacturer, as well as increased business from the publicity—just for claiming her as an employee.1178

In October 1926, the NRA announced that Miss Anna Louise Wolters of Pfeiffer‟s Restaurant in Buffalo, New York, was “America‟s Most Beautiful Waitress.” The 5-foot, 6-inch tall nineteen-year-old, who weighed 118 pounds and did not have

1177 “Glorifying the American Waitress,” American Restaurant, June 1926, 61. 1178 “Enter Your Beautiful Waitresses Now,” American Restaurant, July 1926, 52-53. Later beauty contests promotions also emphasized the benefit to employers as well as waitresses. In 1955, California‟s “Queen of Quisine” pageant mentioned that “contestants will get valuable publicity in the press, radio and TV for the restaurant they represent, so it will be of benefit for employers to enter an employee” (“Drive-In Ass‟n Gala „Queen of Quisine‟ Contest Set for April 27 at Biltmore,” Pacific Coast Record, April 1955, 43).

368 bobbed hair, won the portrait painting; the first runner-up, Ellen Nageleisen (same dimensions, no bobbed hair), won the Tea Room Management training course. The article announcing the winners casually mentioned that the lack of bobbed hair “might have influenced the judges.”1179 This preference for girls without bobbed hair mirrored the selection of the early Miss America queens. As the historian Charles Funnell explains, judges tended to associate bobbed hair with the rebellion of youth, and “judges [of the early Miss America pageants] were convinced that the traditional long hair of the Victorian woman was an essential part of „natural‟ beauty.”1180 Both the Miss America pageant and waitress beauty contests relied on a rhetoric of beauty equated with respectability and conformity rather than youthful exhibition and sexuality. For instance, the promoters of the first national waitress beauty contest emphasized that their goal was to uplift the waitress, to raise her above associations with floozy beach beauties and “hard boiled flappers.”1181 “Our fundamental purpose in conducting this contest,” claimed the NRA, “was primarily to establish the fact in the minds of the American public that the profession of waiting on table was an honorable position and one no girls should be ashamed of. We felt that by giving publicity to this, we would invite a higher type of American womanhood to this business and thus elevate waitresses….[N]ot only do the American restaurants have beautiful waitresses, but more than the average of high moral standard.”1182 Waitress beauty contests, therefore, were supposed “to show the outside world that the American waitress is a truly representative

1179 “Buffalo Waitress Wins Contest,” American Restaurant, October 1926, 82-83, 144. 1180 Charles Funnell, quoted. in Kimberly A. Hamlin, “The First Miss America Pageants, 1921-1927,” in There She Is, Miss America: The Politics of Sex, Beauty, and Race in America‟s Most Famous Pageant, ed. Elwood Watson and Darcy Martin (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 38. 1181 C. A. Patterson, “The Waitress Glorified,” American Restaurant, October 1926, 81. 1182 Patterson, “Waitress Glorified,” 81. 369 type of American womanhood.”1183 The argument of upholding waitresses as models for ideal American womanhood is best exemplified by the replacement of the Miss America pageant with a waitress beauty contest in 1928, a substitution that has yet to be addressed in the history of America‟s beauty pageants. In 1928, the president of the Hotelmen‟s Association announced the suspension of the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City because too many “women who seek personal aggrandizement and publicity by participating in various stunts” were entering the contest. According to almost every historical account, because the hotel owners objected to the immoral tendencies exhibited by contest participants, which in turn discouraged middle-class hotel patronage, the Miss America pageant dissolved in 1928 and only resumed again in 1935.1184 However, what is not mentioned is that the NRA announced in 1928 that its waitress beauty contest would replace the Miss America pageant.1185 According to an announcement in the American Restaurant trade journal:

arrangements have been made with civic organizations of Atlantic City to supplant the National Beauty pageant of 1928 with a national contest among America‟s most beautiful waitresses….The plan will be to select contestants by having each restaurateur attending the tenth annual convention of the association bring along his most beautiful waitress. The regular Atlantic City pageant [i.e., Miss America]…will be resumed in 1929 with drastic changes in regulations to eliminate commercialism which caused it to be dropped this year.1186

1183 “Buffalo Waitress Wins Contest,” 83. 1184 For accounts of the suspension the Miss America pageant, see Banet-Weiser, The Most Beautiful Girl in the World; Banner, American Beauty; Frank Deford, There She Is: The Life and Times of Miss America (New York: Viking, 1978); Hamlin, “First Miss America Pageants”; A.R. Riverol, Live from Atlantic City: The History of the Miss America Pageant Before, After, and in Spite of Television (Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1992). 1185 Hamlin, “First Miss America Pageants,” 44. 1186 “Beauty Contest for Waitresses to Be Convention Feature,” American Restaurant, July 1928, 50.

370

In actuality, the Miss America pageant did not resume until 1935; in the interim, the NRA continued to host annual waitress beauty contests in Atlantic City. The transition from Miss America to America‟s Most Beautiful Waitress is important because, in essence, pageant sponsors apparently convinced a public concerned with the morality of young women that waitresses were emblematic of the ideal type of American woman, whom the Miss America pageant attempted (and, presumably, was failing) to select. In the early years of its inception, the Miss America pageant selected winners who embodied youthful beauty rather than brazen sexuality. In 1921, after Margaret Gorman won the first Miss America title, Samuel Gompers, head of the American Federation of Labor, complemented her by stating, “She represents the type of womanhood America needs—strong, red-blooded, able to shoulder the responsibilities of home-making and motherhood. It is in her type that the hope of the country resides.”1187 Indeed, according to Sarah Banet-Weiser, the Miss America pageant always defined itself as a contest that promoted respectability (rather than sexuality) as an ideal quality of femininity and American womanhood. The contest‟s suspension in 1928 occurred because pageant officials were failing to attract young American women whom they could uphold as “a symbol of national pride, power, and modernity.”1188

The replacement of the Miss America pageant with a waitress beauty contest signaled an important difference in the perception of public displays of femininity. Arguably, both contests provided a platform for women to pursue entrepreneurial opportunities based on the commercial exhibition of their bodies. Yet if public leaders suspended the Miss America pageant out of concern that its contestants too readily used

1187 Gompers, quoted. in Banner, American Beauty, 269. 1188 Banet-Weiser, Most Beautiful Girl, 32, 37. 371 the contest to launch a career as a “professional beauty,”1189 waitresses were praised as professional women who happened to be beautiful. Importantly, the restaurant industry suggested that waitress work grounded women in a carefully-monitored public environment where they could maintain and exhibit both desirable femininity and a morality simultaneously exemplified by a committed work ethic and a devotion to improving her physical appearance. The NRA continued to host national waitress beauty contests from the 1930s through the 1960s, and regional associations added similar events to their convention programs as well. Food corporations, such as General Foods and the Kellogg Company, often sponsored contests to help encourage the use of brand-name products in restaurants.1190 State restaurant associations in Illinois, Wisconsin, Oklahoma, New York,

Minnesota, California, Ohio, West Virginia, and Washington, D.C. sponsored contests in which waitresses won titles such as “Waitress of Tomorrow,” “Restaurant Queen of America,” “Prettiest Waitress,” and “Most Charming Waitress.” Los Angeles, in an effort to promote nutritional health as well as beauty, hosted a contest which designated the winners: Miss Vitamin A; Miss Vitamin B; Miss Vitamin C; Miss Vitamin D; Miss Vitamin E; and Miss Vitamin G. Additionally, the judges chose “a plump girl to represent

Miss Carbohydrates and a slender waitress to be known as Miss Protein.”1191 In most of these events, judges evaluated waitresses based on their “personality, charm, posture, good looks, and general neatness”—all qualities by which these women were judged on the job as well.1192

1189 Hamlin, “First Miss America Pageants,” 42. 1190 See, for example, “Buffalo Beauties,” American Restaurant, November 1931, 16; “Coffee a Problem for Restaurants,” New York Times, January 17, 1954, F14. 1191 “Cafés to Serve Balanced Meals,” Los Angeles Times, March 16, 1939, A2. 1192 “News and Views in Words and Pictures,” Restaurant Management, January 1938, 14; “2,000 Expected at Session of Restaurateurs,” Washington Post, December 5, 1937, 17; “King to Address 372

If waitresses who followed these guidelines represented ideals of American womanhood in a professional setting before the Second World War, how did the war influence considerations of feminine beauty in the workplace, especially when women‟s workplace was more frequently a factory or industrial plant? Here, Mary Anne Schofield‟s work on what she calls “the conundrum of glamour and grime, of Miss

America and Rosie the Riveter,” becomes relevant to waitressing.1193 Schofield argues that “the simultaneous acknowledgment that women could perform men‟s jobs while also preserving the essentials of their femininity…resulted, oddly enough, in „a narrowing rather than an expansion of women‟s spheres.‟”1194 By constructing a standardized, essentialized image of American womanhood that conflated women‟s appearance with their ability to do their job, ideal American women‟s work remained a commitment to maintaining femininity and serving her family, even when her family expanded to her customers. Many of the waitress beauty contests and “personality competitions” held after World War II, however, were noticeably different than their pre-war predecessors. Older women, despite their work experience, maturity, and greater likelihood of remaining at the job, were little valued by the restaurant industry prior to World War II. The rare restaurant, like Denver‟s Daniel and Fisher Tower Tea Room, preferred waitresses over

Restaurant Men,” Washington Post, December 6, 1937, 14; “Waitresses Vie for Title of Washington Restaurant Queen,” Washington Post, December 6, 1937, 4; “On Our Cover,” Restaurant Management, June 1937, 482; “Prettiest Waitress in State,” Los Angeles Times, April 16, 1936, 3; “Minnesota Convention Feature,” American Restaurant, January 1936, 44; “De Met‟s Organization Holds Own Preliminary Contest,” American Restaurant, November 1933, 38; “Coppernoll Scores Foes in Convention Address,” American Restaurant, December 1934, 40; “Plan Beauty Contest,” American Restaurant, February 1935, 33; “Restaurant Coronations,” American Restaurant, June 1937, 37; “Judging a Waitress Personality Contest,” American Restaurant, August 1938, 50; “Beauty Is Served,” American Restaurant, September 1939, 30. 1193 Mary Anne Schofield, “Miss America, Rosie the Riveter, and World War II,” in There She Is Miss America, 54. 1194 Schofield, “Miss America,” 58. 373 the age of forty; the majority considered thirty years old to be the “turning point,” mentioning in surprise when a proficient waitress “about forty (not a type you would ever think of employing in a high-class restaurant) appeared table side.1195 During World War II, however, when male labor shortages once again required restaurants to look for alternative labor sources, seniors, housewives, and particularly mothers with children emerged as viable sources of employees. At Sholl‟s Cafeteria in Washington, D.C., Annie Smith attracted attention as the area‟s oldest busgirl at the age of eighty-one, while “oldsters” filled open positions at Dutro‟s Sea Food Restaurant in Minneapolis.1196 The flexibility of restaurant hours also accommodated mothers who needed to balance both child care and work. Lorena Showers, an Alaska waitress who became a union leader in the 1950s, called her 10:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. shift “ideal” because it coincided with her three children‟s school hours.1197 A few restaurants assisted working mothers by setting up nursery rooms for children of employees that provided childcare during their shifts.1198 Many of these women stayed on at their jobs after the war ended, and their prominence in the waitress workforce is reflected in the postwar contest winners.1199

1195 Anna M. Pearson, “Not One Waitress Under Forty,” American Restaurant, October 1928, 106-107; “Thirty Is Turning Point, Milady,” Mixer and Server, October 15, 1927, 32; “Waitresses Must Sell,” Washington State Restaurant, Tavern and Tobacco News, September 1940, 12. 1196 “Hotels Here Shift to Womanpower,” New York Times, June 17, 1943, 18; Emily Towe, “Wait for It, Pay for It—and Like It!” Washington Post, August 8, 1943, L1; James V. Malone, “Oldsters Solve Help Problem for Dutro,” American Restaurant, February 1943, 21-22. 1197 Lorena Showers, Fifty Years in Alaska: A Union Member‟s Story, Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Local Union 878 (Anchorage: Ken Wray‟s Printing, Inc., 1990), 41. 1198 “Housewife Workers,” American Restaurant, November 1943, 98; Elizabeth Henriksen, “Establishing a Children‟s Nursery Enabled Us to Employ Mothers,” Restaurant Management, December 1943, 24-25. The Schrafft‟s chain of restaurants in New York even provided maternity benefits to waitresses, including a guaranteed year of (unpaid) leave (Longgood, “Daintiest Beaneries in Town,” 84). These examples, however, appear to be the exception rather than the rule considering trade journals‟ decision to highlight the practices as novel ideas of interest to other operators. 1199 Not all restaurants in postwar America valued the working mother. Vic Bergeron, proprietor of the famed Trader Vic‟s restaurants, insisted women were “out of place in a specialty restaurant,” dismissing them as qualified employees by emphasizing their domestic ties and physical limitations: “Women are not physically able to handle this type of job right,” Bergeron criticized. “Their kids get sick, so they leave the 374

Although a number of the pageants after World War II continued to select women for their achievement in “embellish[ing] interior premises” and cited women‟s body measurements along with their place of work, several contest winners were older, married mothers who were judged on so-called professional skills in addition to their appearance.1200 For instance, in 1961 Shirley Herath won Washington, D.C.‟s “Most

Photogenic Waitress” contest, followed in 1962 by Noreen Rodakowski and in 1963 by Betty Warrington. All three women were married and both Herath and Warrington were mothers of several young children.1201 According to the selection criteria, the judges chose the winning waitress based solely on her photograph, with no other information other than the name of the restaurant in which she was employed.1202 If this actually was the case, the judges seemed to prefer waitresses who embodied a slightly older appearance suggesting care-giving rather than youthful sexuality. Although this recognition of ideal American women as both mothers and wage- earners runs counter to the representative image of the 1950s homemaker, acknowledgment of the important dual role of citizen-mothers and citizen-workers took center stage at the 1952 conference on “Women in the Defense Decade.” According to historian Julia Kirk Blackwelder, middle-class women in the 1950s began to assume at least part-time employment as part of their parental responsibilities in order to sustain the

job and go home. Other domestic problems keep them upset. When they try to describe some exotic or unusual dish they sound as if they were working in a cafeteria” (“„Trader Vic‟ Not For the Girls,” Pacific Coast Record, October 1961, 12). 1200 “Waitress in Working Girl Beauty Contest,” Los Angeles Times, October 7, 1953, 6; “Miss Restaurant Chosen by WSRA For October Publicity,” Allied Food and Beverage (October 1960), 11. 1201 “Most Photogenic Waitress,” Restaurateur , October 1961, cover; “Photogenic Waitress Entries Due September 26,” Restaurateur, September 1962, 18; “Most Photogenic Waitress,” Restaurateur, October 1962, cover; “Mother of Three Wins Miss Photogenic Waitress Contest,” Restaurateur, November 1963, 11. 1202 “Photogenic Waitress Entries Due September 26,” 18. 375 family‟s consumer comforts.1203 Therefore, when representatives from government and social agencies, colleges, and universities gathered at the “Women in the Defense Decade” conference, their proceedings “reflected a growing body of opinion that the U.S. economy and its democratic institutions depended not only upon an acceptance of the working life, but also on increasing the movement of wives outside of the home and into the realm of public activities.”1204 In this way, middle-class mothers who worked outside of the home (compared to their working-class counterparts, who had been part of the labor force for generations) became emblematic of an ideal type of American womanhood, one who sustained the home and the nation through both maternal nurturing and participation in consumer productivity and service. In Undressed for Success, performance scholar Brenda Foley argues that beauty pageants “use a fictive presentation of the „normal feminine‟ to promote and sustain their own political agendas” through “culturally constructed notions of what „appropriate‟ feminine behavior looks like.”1205 Certainly, with waitress beauty contests, the national restaurant industry furthered notions of ideal American femininity and beauty as a marketing technique for increasing restaurants‟ profitability. To legitimize waitress work as reputable, the restaurant industry promoted middle-class women‟s participation in the nation‟s workforce. By claiming waitress work as not only respectable but also integral to maintaining a beautiful physique, the restaurant industry rewarded attractive women who contributed to their workforce and helped to boost sales through their “healthful charm,” “high moral standard,” and “pleasing” appearance. Waitress beauty contests and other

1203 Julia Kirk Blackwelder, Now Hiring: The Feminization of Work in the United States, 1900-1995 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1997), 148. 1204 Blackwelder, Now Hiring, 159-160. 1205 Brenda Foley, Undressed for Success: Beauty Contestants and Exotic Dancers and Merchants of Morality (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 9.

376 day-to-day techniques of regulating working women‟s bodies within restaurants contributed to national definitions of female beauty while simultaneously rewarding women‟s labor at a time when domesticated images of “homeward bound” American women were readily upheld as the ideal and the national norm.

VANITY ON DUTY: WOMEN AND RESTAURANTS IN THE 20TH CENTURY

Shortly after the end of World War II, the Angelica Jacket Company, the largest manufacturer of service employee uniforms worldwide at the time, distributed an advertisement in leading restaurant trade journals that ran with the slogan, “A Woman‟s Vanity is Always on Duty….” The ad featured a sharply-dressed waitress striking a model pose accentuating her attractive uniform while staring off in the direction of seated customers, including two fashionable women and their male companions. The ad copy read, “when a woman knows that she is her most attractive self, her „on duty‟ hours are more pleasant, more productive, better business relations for you.”1206 The advertisement tapped into the social assumption that beauty took work and woman‟s work, including waitressing, required beauty. The female customers in the ad were implicated along with the waitress in the expectation to project an “attractive self,” an aesthetic femininity that was used in restaurants to designate the space that women could occupy. The advertisement epitomized the association between symbols of femininity and domesticity—such as cosmetics, child patrons, or in this case, up-to-date fashion—and the industry‟s use of these signifiers to establish behavioral expectations for and outline the physical and social positioning of women in restaurants.

1206 Edward F. Ruder, “An Old-Timer with New Ideas,” Pacific Coast Record, November 1948, 79-80; Advertisement, Angelica Jacket Company, American Restaurant, December 1947, 69 (emphasis in original). 377

Concepts of feminist geography are useful for understanding how the feminization of restaurants invested these places of public food consumption and service with contested values. As geographer Linda McDowell explains, “Places are made through power relations which construct the rules which define boundaries. These boundaries are both social and spatial—they define who belongs to a place and who may

1207 be excluded, as well as the location or site of the experience.” In the case of twentieth- century American restaurants, the power dynamics between men and women, as well as waitresses and customers, determined the physical place that particular groups of women could claim within public dining rooms. Restaurants structured gender into the spatial layout of their dining rooms, rooms which functioned as both places of work and places of leisure for various groups of women in the United States.1208 The industry invited women into restaurants as both customers and employees while simultaneously limiting their contributions and influence to aesthetic and domestic categories. The disparity between behavioral expectations for men and women in restaurants—as both customers and workers—highlights the contested and problematic positioning of women as part of the social ritual of dining outside of the home in the twentieth century.

1207 Linda McDowell, Gender, Identity, and Place: Understanding Feminist Geographies (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1999), 4. 1208 In his essay “Meatpacking,” which informs my analysis here, Roger Horowitz details how meatpacking operations in the United States gendered meat processing based on cuts of meat and the physical location of men and women within packinghouses. See Roger Horowitz, “Meatpacking,” in Gender and Technology, 267-294. 378

Chapter 5:

Directing Restaurant Traffic: On the Road with Discriminating Dining Guides in Jim Crow America

The verdict was in. On December 19, 1942, the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit affirmed the finding for the plaintiff, Adventures in Good Eating, Inc., upholding the lower court‟s judgment that the defendant, Best Places to Eat, Inc., had indeed “infringed plaintiff‟s copyright in the publication of a restaurant directory.”

After more than two years working its way through the Illinois court system, the civil suit that Duncan Hines and his company (named after his famous restaurant guide) filed against a copycat competitor, was resolved. Duncan Hines, “with a large and growing list of epicurean followers,” now had the court‟s backing that his restaurant handbook was the original and authoritative guide to dining in America‟s restaurants nationwide.1209 Duncan Hines, a salesman for the direct-mail advertising company, J. T. H. Mitchell in Chicago, spent numerous hours on the road for work and leisure in the 1920s.1210 Along the way, Hines jotted down the names of good restaurants he encountered while driving around the country, including ones located outside of urban centers. Hines first published his red-covered Adventures in Good Eating in 1936. By 1938, he was turning a profit on the publication. Hines‟s restaurant guide, updated and published annually through 1962, became a restaurant patron‟s manifesto. Adventures in Good Eating, however, was not the first directory of restaurants in the United States, although it does hold the distinction of changing the way Americans selected restaurants

1209 Adventures in Good Eating, Inc. v. Best Places to Eat, Inc., 131 F.2d 809 (7th Cir. 1942) 1210 Louis Hatchett, Duncan Hines: The Man Behind the Cake Mix (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2001), 33-47. 379 and, along with its European predecessors, influencing the stylistic layout and content of restaurant guides throughout the rest of the twentieth century. English-language dining guides in the United States published between 1920 and 1965 varied in format: some included long narrative passages describing a restaurant‟s history, personnel, and décor—alongside food specialties—while others consisted of a directory-style list of entries that merely included a restaurant‟s name and address, perhaps with a word or two indicating the hours of operation or the type of cuisine served. Like a map, these restaurant guides helped consumers find their way amidst unfamiliar surroundings and choices. Maps, according to Robert W. Karrow, Jr., “have an undeniable, if sometimes elusive, way of expressing knowledge of, mastery of, and control over the environments they depict; knowledge, mastery, and control are undoubtedly kinds of power.”1211 When reading restaurant guidebooks, it is useful to consider the inherent value of lists and maps—succinct forms of information that reveal as much from what is absent among the content as what is included. In the context of interpreting an eighteenth-century diary, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich offers the perspective that the convention of recording brief lists of information, while seemingly mundane and insufficient for thorough analysis, actually reveals larger themes and relates to important social problems in history.1212 Selective lists of restaurants also possess information not readily apparent: the criteria used to create the few restaurants chosen for inclusion in a dining guidebook speak to the social values of those invested with the authority to choose the restaurants. What is the value of a list? The authority of a list comes from the process of its creation and the explanation of its contents. “The formulation of a list is also

1211 Robert W. Karrow, Jr., introduction to Maps: Finding Our Place in the World, ed. James R. Akerman and Robert W. Karrow, Jr. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007), 7. 1212 Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife‟s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 7-29. 380 understood to be the formulation of an authority and legitimacy (for both the list maker and for those titles [items] included on the list,” argues Caroline Hamilton.1213 Dining guides not only suggest lists of favorable restaurants; they also expose the biases of their creators in terms of food preferences, the surrounding atmosphere, and demographics of fellow patrons. The authors of twentieth-century restaurant guidebooks exercised power over the public dining environment because they steered customers toward certain culinary destinations, thereby leading them away from presumably undesirable places. This kind of commanding direction imbued the authors and their guidebooks with social authority. At the same time, though, I want to suggest that the authority of restaurant guides extended beyond the book to the reader. In many ways, restaurant guidebooks mirrored instructional manuals for improving the self—they helped white, middle-class Americans to develop critical faculties necessary for discriminating between the socially “acceptable” and “unacceptable,” categories applied not only to food, service, and sanitation, but to individual people as well. By soliciting reader participation, restaurant guidebooks cultivated shared criteria for evaluating the nation‟s restaurants based on guidelines articulated in prefatory material. In turn, they imbued readers with a sense of social authority by praising those who responded to the editor, sharing their own evaluations of the quality of the restaurants included in each guidebook. In the fifty years following the end of World War I, restaurant guides encouraged white, middle-class readers to use the books as a tool for generating a sense of national identity based on regional pride, the practice of eating for recreation (rather than for necessity), and high

1213 Caroline Hamilton, “Culture™: Consuming Culture and the Construction of an Amazon „I,‟” par. 24, http://www.newcastle.edu.au/group/poetics/issue-03/hamilton.htm.

381 consumer expectations, categories which signaled prosperity and consumerism as identifiable and valued American qualities. In essence, guidebooks served as instructions for both self improvement and national improvement—Americans could better themselves and their country by patronizing “favorable” restaurants. Dining guides helped to foster a public restaurant culture in the United States and pride in the country‟s culinary offerings. Yet these guidebooks, whose stated goals were “to raise the gastronomical standards of appreciation and selection of the American people” by encouraging each reader “to assert yourself as a gourmet,” assumed a white audience. Discrimination against people of color in restaurants served as the modus operandi throughout much of the United States (not only the South) in the Jim Crow era. For this reason, mainstream guidebooks, geared toward fostering a white dining public of the “best patronage,” were useless for racial and ethnic minorities, despite their claims to being a “valuable and vital accessory” for American travelers.1214 Minority leaders, therefore, created guidebooks for their own communities, directories that listed safe and welcoming restaurants. These guides, however, tended to include succinct lists, rather than narrative entries, of noteworthy establishments, signaling a different set of criteria for evaluating restaurants. In minority guidebooks, the quality of the food was not a measure of the restaurant—whether the restaurant would offer service to the individual was the decisive factor for inclusion. While mainstream guidebooks ignored non-white Americans as part of their imagined readership, alternative dining directories, designed by and for minority groups, asserted that all Americans should have the privilege of reliable and safe access to public services, including eating away from home. The history

1214 Gourmet‟s Guide to Good Eating (Garden City, NY: Gourmet, 1948), ii; Your Key to Dining Out in Chicago (Evanston: Gourmet Club of Chicagoland, 1952), 2.

382 of American restaurant guidebooks, therefore, is not only a story about directing customers to the best places to eat; it tells us about the social struggle of marginalized Americans to challenge the presiding order of discrimination in U.S. restaurants.

A GUIDE TO THE GUIDES: A SUMMARY OF TRAVEL AND DINING GUIDEBOOKS PRIOR TO WORLD WAR I

Twentieth-century American restaurant guidebooks fit squarely into the centuries- long tradition of travel writing, city handbooks, and touring guides, which were especially prevalent in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. John Murray‟s Hand-book for Travellers on the Continent is often cited as the most famous nineteenth- century guidebook in England.1215 The red-covered, pocket-sized Hand-book, first published in 1836, deviated stylistically from earlier travel writing by addressing the reader using the first-person plural point of view. It also rated the routes using a star system and verified the information contained within by asserting that either Murray, or his trusted friends, had actually traveled the recommended routes; for further assurance, Murray also encouraged readers to submit feedback to the publisher in order to correct errors and oversights.1216 This kind of reader participation would become a central feature of America‟s restaurant guidebooks in the twentieth century. A contemporary of Murray, the German Karl Baedeker, published his first English travel guide in 1839, three years after Murray‟s Hand-book appeared. The Baedeker, which had a red cover similar to Murray‟s, included more specific details about restaurants and their cost than Murray‟s Hand-book, a kind of “collectively verifiable information” which made it more of a

1215 Inderpal Grewal, Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire, and the Cultures of Travel (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 102. 1216 Esther Allen, “„Money and little red books‟: Romanticism, Tourism, and the Rise of the Guidebook,” LIT: Literature, Interpretation, Theory 7, nos. 2-3 (1996): 213-218; Stephen L. Harp, Marketing Michelin: Advertising and Cultural Identity in Twentieth-Century France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 253-254. 383

“marketable commodity.” Also, although Karl Baedeker died in 1859, the publishing company continued to print new editions of his guidebook for decades. According to Esther Allen, “the attribution of all of them [the guidebooks] to an omnipotent „Karl Baedeker‟ inspired their users, many of whom seem to have assumed that they were in fact all written by one intrepid traveller, with confidence in their uniformity and consistent reliability, and this strategy ultimately proved even more effective than Murray‟s.”1217 Subsequent restaurant guides would practice both methods of appealing to readers, but ultimately, at the heart of a guide‟s success was its ability to convince readers that the information was accurate, reliable, and useful. Guidebooks for touring European cities have included dining recommendations since at least the eighteenth century. In terms of dining-focused guides, many consider

Alexandre Grimod de la Reynière‟s Almanach des Gourmands to be one of the first collections of food criticism. Published annually between 1803 and 1812 (with the exception of two years), the Almanach des Gourmands identified Reynière as a prominent and regarded food critic for Parisian gourmands in post-revolutionary France.1218 In the 1920s, Maurice-Edmond Sailland, under the pseudonym of Curnonsky, tied together gastronomy and tourism in a French dining guidebook that advocated for simpler dishes, both in assembly and presentation.1219 However, it is the Michelin red guide—introduced by the French tire maker in 1900—that has made the strongest impression on the Western world‟s dining public and is upheld as precursor to the restaurant guidebooks of the mid-to-late twentieth century. The Michelin company, as a

1217 Allen, “„Money and little red books,‟” 219-221. 1218 Stephen Mennell, All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), 266-272; Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, “Michelin in America,” Gastronomica 8, no. 1(Winter 2008): 50. 1219 Mennell, All Manners of Food, 276-277. 384 manufacturer of tires, had a real investment in promoting automobile tourism in France in the early twentieth century. While editions of the pocket-sized, red-covered book prior to World War I contained entries for automobile repair services and overnight accommodations, the guide expanded in 1923 to include a section with specific restaurant recommendations, and “gastronomy soon replaced technical information at a noteworthy raison d‟être of the Michelin guide.”1220 Several features of the Michelin red guide, including its rating system, the efficiency of its content descriptions, and its emphasis on reader participation, helped sustain readers‟ trust in its recommendations and would serve as a model for imitators and competitors, both in Europe and the United States. Even today, the Michelin guide is probably best known for its system of ranking restaurants based on one-to-five stars, a system which the company devised in the 1920s to create a visible hierarchy of dining places for potential customers. Although the red guide was not the first to use stars to highlight particular entries, Michelin originated the systematic rating of restaurants based on symbolic tags.1221 One of the more important implications of this ranking system was the efficiency and brevity of the accompanying content. Most restaurant entries included barely a line of description, which might mention house or regional specialties, such as bouillabaisse or choucroute.1222 According to Stephen L. Harp, the Michelin company was a strong proponent of Taylorism (Taylorisme), or the principles of scientific management promoted by Frederick Winslow Taylor in the 1880s. The efficiency inherent in the tenets of Taylorism found a place in the Michelin guide, and its readers, mostly on-the-go French and foreign tourists, seemingly appreciated concise entries that could be perused more quickly. “The stars

1220 Harp, Marketing Michelin, 245. 1221 Harp, Marketing Michelin, 225-254. 1222 Mennell, All Manners of Food, 281; Harp, Marketing Michelin, 250.

385 became the sole indicator of relative quality of restaurants,” explains Harp. “The long descriptions of meals that were so important in the writings of…various gastronomes, had no counterpart chez Michelin.”1223 In addition to providing useful information, the guidebooks also played the part of judge (with readers as the jury), deciding which restaurants were important and which could be decisively ignored.1224 Instead of lengthy narratives on which customers could base their dining choices, the Michelin guide relied on reader participation to verify the accuracy of its otherwise unexplained selections. Tracing the history of guidebooks uncovers a long pattern of imitation, where one guidebook mirrors the successful attributes of another while attempting to improve the overall design or modify the guide‟s purpose, sometimes resulting in legal battles over accusations of plagiarism.1225 The Michelin red guide apparently borrowed liberally from the design of the Touring Club of France directories, which were published in the 1890s, including the red cover and the gesture of requesting feedback from readers, facilitated by a card included in the book, which readers could fill out and return by mail. The Michelin company rewarded readers for their input, offering to mail subsequent editions of the red guide to a reader‟s home in exchange for corrections, and even launching a competition in 1908, where the reader who found the most corrections would be deemed the winner.

In addition, the Michelin guide assured its users that its entries were not influenced by payment or other gestures of persuasion from restaurant owners.1226 Both contemporaries and successors to the Michelin guide used these methods to involve readers in upholding

1223 Harp, Marketing Michelin, 254. 1224 Janet Floyd, “The Restaurant Guide as Romance: From Raymond Postgate to Florence White,” in Historicizing Lifestyle: Mediating Taste, Consumption and Identity from 1900 to 1970s, ed. David Bell and Joanne Hollows (Hampshire, UK: Ashgate, 2006), 41; Allen, “„Money and little red books,‟” 221. 1225 In addition to the lawsuit Hines filed against Best Places to Eat, Inc. in 1940, the Michelin company sued the German tire company, Continental, for plagiarizing the red guide in 1913. The courts ruled in Michelin‟s favor. See Harp, Marketing Michelin, 70. 1226 Harp, Marketing Michelin, 59, 62-63, 254-255. 386 the quality, accuracy, and reliability of the publications and instill a sense of critical authority to the restaurant-going public. In the United States, travel guides surfaced alongside the growth of urban and regional tourism in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century. Some of the early models for the urban travel guides appeared with the handbooks created for the international expositions hosted by the United States in 1876 and 1893.1227 City guidebooks, such as Appleton‟s General Guide (1879-1901), The Tourist‟s Hand-Book of New York (1905), and Around the World in New York (1924), portrayed the urban environment as adventure and leisure space, directing American tourists (both local and national) on selective paths through major American city centers while glossing over the sub-standard living conditions of the area‟s poor and marginalized residents. Like their

European counterparts, several of these guidebooks—including ones, like the Michelin red guide, published for automobile tourists, such as the Automobile Association of America‟s (AAA) Official Blue Book—requested feedback and corrections from readers; denied that monetary influence factored into their selection of listings; and encouraged an efficient mode of sightseeing modeled in the deliberate style of concise entries.1228 Importantly, as motoring emerged as a popular pastime for middle- and upper-middle- class Americans in the 1920s and 1930s, including single-day excursions, restaurant- specific guidebooks appeared as a new addition to roadside tourist literature, alongside complementary forms of visual advertising.

1227 Catherine Cocks, Doing the Town: The Rise of Urban Tourism in the United States, 1850-1915 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 161. 1228 Cocks, Doing the Town, 143-161. 387

FORKS IN THE ROAD: DIRECTIONS TO AMERICA’S RESTAURANTS IN THE AUTOMOBILE AGE

“Good-bye to the home-fired [sic] chicken and the assorted sandwiches of old,” cried the New York Times in 1925: “The hot-dog has taken their place.”1229 This pronouncement declared what many Americans had already confirmed from their automobile excursions around the country: roadside food stands had become a ubiquitous feature of the American roadside landscape, and wayside restaurants were hot on their heels. As the same New York Times article insisted, “one cannot go half a mile on many roads without being urged to eat.” Road food provided fuel for motorists just as service stations sold gasoline for their vehicles. As long as there have been cars on the road, potential and regular patrons have debated the merits and drawbacks of roadside eating spots.1230 In the decades following World War I, while some suggested that the “best” restaurants serving motorists were independently-owned, employed waitresses (not waiters), and had a solid base of local customers, other tourists and traveling businessmen complained unceasingly about the overall poor quality of the country‟s restaurants that catered to a traveling clientele.1231 Yet among the majority of Americans traveling and touring on the nation‟s highways and byways, there was a general agreement—even among motorists denied service at roadside restaurants—that finding places to stop and eat while on the road was an indispensable component of traveling by automobile.

At the turn of the century, only the financially elite owned automobiles, and these new consumer purchases signified both monetary wealth and cultural capital. In 1908,

1229 “Family Picnic Basket No Longer Seen By Roadside,” New York Times, July 12, 1925, X8. 1230 For information on some of the earliest forms of road food, including hotel dining rooms, picnics, and campsite kitchens, see Warren Belasco, Americans on the Road: From Autocamp to Motel, 1910-1945 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979). 1231 Don Nichols, “Roadside Food Has Improved,” Restaurant Management, March 1958, 4.

388 however, Henry Ford sold his first Model T, and by 1914, the lowered cost put Ford‟s vehicle within reach of a larger portion of middle-class Americans. Cars put individual Americans in charge of their travel journeys, which was both an empowering and democratizing experience, and auto touring emerged as a popular pastime for enthusiasts in the first two decades of the twentieth century.1232 Leisure travel in automobiles changed how Americans socialized with one another and spent meal time together as families. Robert and Helen Lynd observed in 1929 that residents of Middletown took more vacations thanks to their cars and the greater number of workplaces that offered one-to-two weeks of vacation time a year, including industrial plants. Because the automobile had the ability to transport people across greater distances within a relatively short period of time, the vehicles facilitated brief excursions for the town‟s residents, even ones who received unpaid vacation time. In a similar vein, the Lynds observed that the automobile “has done much to render obsolete the leisurely Sunday noon dinner of a generation ago,” as casual Sunday drives reduced this meal into a hurried bit to eat before heading out in the family car.1233 Newspapers commented on the fierce competition among roadside food vendors, and the national restaurant industry did not remain silent on the matter, either, since road stands were deemed to be in direct competition with full service restaurants. In 1927, at the National Restaurant Association convention, industry executives brainstormed ideas for competing with roadside stands, which restaurateurs criticized for their general lack of sanitation and experienced operators. Indeed, this strategizing was understandable

1232 Karl Raitz, “American Roads, Roadside America,” Geographical Review 88, no. 3 (July 1998): 372; Marguerite S. Shaffer, See America First: Tourism and National Identity, 1880-1940 (Washington: Smithsonian Institute Press, 2001), 132-138. 1233 Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1929), 261-263, 153n. 389 considering roadside food service operators—including food stands and fully-operational restaurants—had much to gain financially from the dramatic increase of cars on America‟s roads. Between 1904 and 1927, the United States built one million miles of highway, and by 1929, almost half of all Americans owned a car.1234 In the early 1930s, even within the midst of the national Depression, Americans continued to find amusement in roadtrips, although they tended not to venture as far, often remaining within fifty miles of home.1235 Eateries popped up along major highways as business operators realized travelers preferred stopping along the road for services rather than venturing down side streets and other unknown territory. Some roadside stands, like the Texas-based Pig Stand, founded by Jesse G. Kirby in 1921, succeeded in part because of their location near the intersection with a major highway.1236 Other service restaurants, including the Sinclair Tavern outside of St. Louis, debunked the unsanitary stereotype by inviting patrons to check out the kitchen and posting official AAA-issued signs that verified the automobile association‟s endorsement.1237 Yet well into the years leading up to World War II, despite the necessity of stopping to eat on the road, Americans continued to balk at roadside restaurants and food stands over concerns that the businesses failed to maintain adequate sanitary standards.

“Where do we eat?” asked the Ladies‟ Home Journal in 1934. Most important, the

1234 “Family Picnic Basket,” X8; “Roadside Inn Question Stirs Restaurant Industry,” American Restaurant, September 1927, 51; “Roads,” Mixer and Server, September 15, 1927, 36; Catherine Gudis, Buyways: Billboards, Automobiles, and the American Landscape (New York: Routledge, 2004), 44. 1235 “Tourist Food-Service Analyzed,” American Restaurant, August 1933, 42. 1236 W. Dwayne Jones, “In Search of the Vernacular Twentieth-century Drive-in Restaurant,” in Preserving the Recent Past, ed. Deborah Slaton and Rebecca A. Shiffer (Washington, D.C.: Historic Preservation Education Foundation, 1995), 31-40. 1237 Thomas Farley Marshall, “Tourist Taverns Make Bid for Motorists‟ Food Trade,” American Restaurant, June 1933, 31, 53. Warren Belasco notes that the development of the numbered U.S. highway classifications in the late 1920s helped increase business for services located along major highways. See Belasco, Americans on the Road, 138-139. 390 magazine decided, was identifying “the things about most roadside eating places that do not appeal,” and it listed a paragraph of “don‟ts” for the roadside operator.1238 “The food along the highway is of all kinds—good, bad and indifferent,” remarked one traveling journalist, who proceeded to suggest methods for identifying better restaurants along the nation‟s highways.1239 Restaurant industry leaders, worried that the critical assessments of roadside eateries would reflect negatively on restaurant businesses as a whole, provided “then” and “now” pictorial guides for improving the appearance of roadside restaurants.1240 With car purchases showing no sign of slowing down (vehicle registration in 1939 reached a high of almost 31 million), and Americans eating over 400 million meals a year while on the road, the proliferation of roadside restaurants continued unabated during and after the war, as did the criticism leveled against the quality of the food.1241 In 1944, reports estimated that up to 40 million people were eating at restaurants each day, an increase from the 25-to-30 million customers who grabbed a bite away from home prior to World War II.1242 As noted in Chapter Four, the increased numbers of working mothers during the war helped to boost restaurant patronage, as well as the need for male and female wartime industry workers to grab lunches away from home. Coupled with the continuously rising use of the automobile for regional tourism (even in the midst of gasoline rationing), the increase in restaurant patronage was geared toward highway eateries, and many entrepreneurs tapped roadside restaurants as the key to a bright

1238 “Where Do We Eat?” Ladies‟ Home Journal, May 1934, 133. 1239 P. D. Converse, “Eating Well On the Trip,” New York Times, July 14, 1940, 121. 1240 “What‟s New in Roadside Restaurants,” Restaurant Management, December 1937, 525; “Roadside Restaurants,” Restaurant Management, November 1938, 38-39. 1241 C. A. Patterson, “Where Will They Travel?” American Restaurant, January 1940, 44. 1242 “Post-War Restaurant Book to Mean More Coin Mch. Locations,” Billboard, October 28, 1944, 69.

391 business future, especially after the war ended.1243 A number of them succeeded, such as Jack Abraham, who opened the J&J Café in Bristow, Oklahoma, on Highway 66, and the Benhards, who operated their namesake restaurant on Highway 40 in California. Abraham utilized large roadside billboards to attract motorists as far as 100 miles away and focused on personalized service and high-quality food. The Benhards, who faced competition from nearby restaurants—businesses with the advantage of being listed in prominent dining guides—published a free road information bulletin to attract traveling customers and concentrated on the quality of the food.1244 Despite these success stories, numerous other roadside restaurants failed, a downfall usually attributed to bad food and sub-par sanitation. Nationwide, roadside restaurants collectively had a reputation for mediocre—or even barely edible—food in the interwar and postwar years. Although a handful of restaurant chains, including the widely-recognized Howard Johnson‟s, worked to counter this dining prejudice with standardized, consistent meals and service, the majority of America‟s independently-owned highway eateries suffered the wrath of tourists and business travelers who armed themselves with Alka Seltzer before hitting the road.1245 In 1951, Winthrop Sargeant published a piece in Life magazine humorously articulating this contempt for the quality of roadside restaurants. Sargeant‟s withering critique blasted roadside eateries for their “curious lack of respect for regional specialties”; French fries

1243 Francis Keally, “Planning Roadside Restaurants for Today‟s New Patronage,” Restaurant Management, October 1945, 33; “New Restaurants Springing Up: Highway Spots Main Increase,” Billboard, December 15, 1945, 75. The business success of roadside restaurants depended more on volume than the average check, which was on the lower end since most customers ordered sandwiches, a light breakfast, and often only a beverage. See “Freeway Eateries Not Hot,” Pacific Coast Record, October 1961, 10. 1244 Ernest W. Fair, “Patronage of Tourists, Travelers, and Townsfolk Totals One-Half Million Customers a Year,” American Restaurant, May 1949, 57-59, 197-200; “Benhard‟s—The Operation with Information,” American Restaurant, December 1949, 40-42. 1245 Letters to the Editor, Life, September 3, 1951, 2. 392 that had “long since taken on the texture and aroma of old rubber” from having been “ready to serve for days”; and the universal use of ketchup as a “culinary cosmetic,” which made the distinction between steak and liver only identifiable “by dredging for samples and methodically examining their texture.”1246 Needless to say, restaurant operators and national industry publications created an uproar over the article, while amused patrons insisted on its (albeit satirical) accuracy. Letters from readers poured into the offices of Life magazine. Those with a vested financial interest in upholding a positive image of restaurants (such as the National

Restaurant Association and independent restaurateurs) complained, “I don‟t think Mr. Sargeant knows what he is talking about,” and accused Life magazine of brushing off their resentment of “such an unfair article.” The general public, however, felt empowered to voice support for an essay that articulated their roadside restaurant woes. “Mr. Sargeant‟s story is one of the truest things I‟ve ever read,” wrote one reader, while another backed up the article with an anecdote about finding a “worm,” which turned out to be a rubber band, in his wife‟s fish (as if the clarification made the dining situation better). “I want to endorse 100% what Mr. Sargeant had to say,” insisted a “traveling man”: “The meals in most places are terrible and not fit for human consumption. The places are filthy and poorly kept. Cockroaches range unmolested and rodents are plentiful.”1247 Writing, as a form of public engagement with social issues, created an opportunity for average restaurant patrons and the readership of national publications to

1246 Winthrop Sargeant, “The Roadside Restaurant,” Life, August 13, 1951, 75-82. While Sargeant dismissed the prominent appearance of ketchup in the nation‟s restaurants, leading producers of the condiment celebrated its popularity. In the 1940s, Heinz released advertisements for its Tomato Ketchup depicting intersecting road signs sticking out of the bottle neck and declaring, “From coast to coast the route to good eating is clearly marked by the Heinz 57 keystone label” (“Signpost to Good Eating,” Life, October 20, 1941, 30). 1247 Letters to the Editor, Life, 2; “Correspondence Controversy,” Restaurant Management, November 1951, 32. 393 voice their agreement with or differences of opinion regarding the quality of U.S. restaurants. This form of written exchange, which was also adapted to restaurant guidebooks, helped instill a sense of social authority among white, middle-class restaurant patrons, empowering them with criteria to define the “best” and “worst” of the United States.

In order to combat the public‟s negative perceptions about roadside restaurants and attract motorists to their businesses, independent and chain operators depended extensively on visual roadside advertising, including billboards and unique architecture.

Potential patrons responded to these marketing techniques, but they also increasingly relied on guidebooks to help them select where to stop for a meal. Restaurants lucky enough to be included in a popular dining guide, then, could complement the publicity with road signs or other visual attractions; other eateries overlooked by restaurant guides had to be more creative in enticing customers. Billboards and other forms of outdoor advertising that helped commercialize public space emerged in the 1890s, influenced by other promoters of visual advertising, including the entertainer P. T. Barnum and the department store visionary John Wanamaker.1248 By 1905, some estimates suggested that billboards covering fifty miles spanned Chicago streets.1249 Yet by the 1920s, billboards were shifting from city centers to roadways, and in the ten-year span between 1917 and 1927, money spent on outdoor advertising increased from $2 million to $85 million.1250 These roadside billboards functioned similarly to guidebooks, helping travelers to navigate unfamiliar territory,

1248 Laura E. Baker, “Public Sites Versus Public Sights: The Progressive Response to Outdoor Advertising and the Commercialization of Public Space,” American Quarterly 59, no. 4 (December 2007): 1187-1189. 1249 Baker, “Public Sites Versus Public Sights,” 1191. 1250 John A. Jackle and Keith A. Sculle, Motoring: The Highway Experience in America (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008), 40. 394 although unlike dining directories, they attracted a mass audience, calling out to the wide cross-section of Americans on the road. Additionally, outdoor advertising specialized in positioning American motorists as in a dual role as both consumer and commodity— billboards not only sold products to travelers, but they acted as a scope for businesses, including restaurants, to identify and “purchase” consumers with their advertising dollars.1251 Critics of billboards complained that the oversized forms of advertising epitomized the worst of the United States: a disruptive, unrefined, chaotic scene that distracted from the country‟s natural beauty.1252 Middle-class environmental reformers critiqued “impudent” roadside billboards as sporadic “eyesores and health hazards,” adding to the sloppy appearance of hot dog stands and decrepit inns along the nation‟s roads.1253 The real threat, however, was to the authority of cultural elites who decided on the “proper” usage of public lands using a rationale that, as Laura E. Baker argues, suggested visual order determined social order. Outdoor advertising was one method of shaping public culture, “and, by extension, citizenship and nationhood by architectural means,” explains Baker. By crossing social and class lines in their marketing reach to “the entire population,” billboards “destabilized architectural and landscape design‟s power to properly form cities—and citizens.”1254 Restaurant operators, however, differed

1251 Gudis, Buyways, 37-39, 56-57. This notion of reversing the gaze, where the consumer became the consumed, was reiterated in some of the outdoor advertising literature. For instance, the Outdoor Advertising Association of America described the billboard bulletin for the Black Angus restaurants in these terms: “Distance from base of trim to ground is ten feet, commanding an excellent view of incoming traffic on U.S. 66 in Springfield” (“Bulletin Attracts Customers,” Outdoor Advertising Association News, February 1959, 2.) 1252 Raitz “American Roads,” 383-384. 1253 Benton MacKaye and Lewis Mumford, “Townless Highways for the Motorist,” Harper‟s, August 1931, 347; “Roadside Eateries,” Chuck Wagon, November 1944, 19; Jackle and Sculle, Motoring, 43. 1254 Baker, “Public Sites Versus Public Sights,” 1188-1198; “Outdoor Advertising Campaign Experiences: Pixley and Ehlers,” ca. 1945, OAAA Campaign Case Files, Duke University Archives. 395 in this assessment for the most part. They identified billboards as a useful and effective technique for guiding motorists to favorable food service destinations. Importantly, restaurants were less concerned with the social and class destabilization than troubled landscape reformers because, in the interwar period, legal loopholes allowed most restaurants to refuse service to patrons for “justifiable reasons.”1255 Billboards might appeal to the masses, but restaurants could still weed out “undesirable” patrons. The popularity of billboard advertising among restaurant operators accelerated in the 1930s and early 1940s, despite a slight overall decline in outdoor advertising as a result of the Great Depression.1256 The Chicago Association of Restaurateurs launched a cooperative billboard campaign in 1933 along area highways to attract World‟s Fair visitors to the city‟s restaurants. The Constantine restaurant in Mobile, Alabama, installed eight billboards complete with neon tubing which lit up the restaurant‟s name at night. Many restaurants emphasized their food quality with concise, straightforward slogans, easily digested by the motorist driving by quickly: “Good Food Is Good Health,” stated a billboard for Hilaire‟s Restaurant in New York, while a billboard in Minneapolis invited patrons to “Enjoy Good Food at Harry‟s Café.” Others promised air-cooled dining rooms and guidebook-verified meals: outside of Memphis and Atlanta, the Pig‟n Whistle chain used billboards to emphasize “Delicious Food and Soda,” along with an “Air Conditioned Dining Room,” while in Missouri, Pete Christus positioned signs simply reading, “Air Conditioned, PETE‟S CAFÉ, Boonville, Mo., AAA.” In the place of text, several restaurants substituted colorful images replicating their food, which was the case with the

1255 Although many states outside of the South had laws preventing restaurants from discriminating against patrons based on color, race, or religion, operators could easily circumvent these laws by claiming that the unwelcome patron appeared intoxicated or unclean, dressed improperly, or failed to follow arbitrary rules of the house. See “Would You Serve a Colored Person?” American Restaurant, January 1928, 26-27. 1256 Jackle and Sculle, Motoring, 33. 396

Pixley & Ehlers Chicago-area chain. Johnny‟s Diner, too, displayed large cut-outs of plates piled with steaks, eggs, salad, toast, and French fries, reminding motorists every few miles that they were getting closer to the restaurant.1257 Although many restaurants decided against initiating major billboard advertising campaigns during the war years, roadside advertising picked back up again in 1947 and remained steady through the 1950s as Americans took their vacations to the road. Florida‟s National Roadside Council reported that the number of billboards along their state‟s highways increased up to 68 percent in 1947 and 1948, years when individual operators allotted upwards of $23,000 of their budgets to advertise their particular restaurants on billboards.1258 These advertising trends mirrored the steady rise of tourists traveling by car. “America is on wheels and will be more and more in the future and that means more eating out,” predicted one Boston-based food supplier. In 1952, over 90 percent of tourists to Washington state arrived by automobile, and food costs for dining out comprised their largest travel expenditure. The hospitality industry predicted that more than 80 million vacationing motorists would be traveling on the nation‟s highways in 1955. A decade later, the restaurant industry sounded the same refrain: Americans

1257 “Chicago‟s Co-operative Advertising,” American Restaurant, June 1933, 38; John Grane, “How a Small Café Uses Highway Signs to Build Good Will and Patronage,” Restaurant Management, September 1949, 42-43; “Outdoor Brings „Em In—We Keep „Em Coming Back,” Pig‟n Whistle Campaign, OAAA Campaign Case Files, ca. 1958; “Bill Boards,” American Restaurant, September 1939, 50; Pixley and Ehlers Campaign , OAAA Campaign Case Files, ca. 1945; “Report of Contract and Promotional Work with National Restaurant Association By Business Development Committee,” May 26, 1950, OAAA Campaign Case Files; poster designs and billboard photographs, ca. 1934-1941, OAAA records, John W. Hartman Center, Duke University Archives. 1258 “Billboard-Lined Roads Shock Roadside Worker,” Miami Herald, January 2, 1949; “How the Advertising Dollar Is Spent,” Restaurant Management, July 1948, 39.

397 were spending more time on the road, and highway advertising was the key to capturing their food dollars.1259 By the 1950s, a majority of American restaurants believed that outdoor advertising was the most effective method of attracting customers, and over half of all restaurants across forty-two states, surveyed by the American Restaurant magazine, used some form of highway signage. “Dollar for dollar, we‟re getting more visibility…with billboards than any other print media,” asserted the sales promotion director of Child‟s restaurants, which launched its outdoor advertising campaign in 1954.1260 Ralph G.

Peterson, director of public relations for the National Restaurant Industry, echoed this claim: “We feel now…that the outdoor medium is perhaps the best for sustained promotion of the food products and the idea of „eating out‟ more often in restaurants.”1261

Individual operators concurred with these assessments. The operator of Schuler‟s restaurant of Marshall, Michigan, used outdoor posters displayed prominently along state highways to capture the attention of “the vast majority of his diners [who] are out-of- towners coming from all directions [and] tempted by the promises of excellent cuisine and service.” Similarly, in Milwaukee, the Mader brothers “blanketed” routes leading into the city from all directions with outdoor bulletins. “We are located in the heart of the nation‟s summer playground,” they explained, “and when people draw near in their

1259 L. Patrick Stanton, “Signing Up for a Bigger Daily,” American Restaurant, August 1955, 50; Sterling E. Soderling, “More Americans Ride, So More Dine Out, Restaurant Men Find,” Wall Street Journal, May 13, 1955; “1952 Tourist Expenditures in Washington Highest in History,” Allied Food and Beverage, December 1952, 7; Jack Herbert, “Advertise Where Your Customers Are—On the Road, Highway Advertising Executive Tells Motor Hotel Operators,” Restaurateur, September 1963, 7. 1260 James S. MacDonald to Irving Trachtenberg, January 6, 1955, OAAA Campaign Case Files, Duke University Archives; “Childs Restaurants Score with Humorous Multiple Posters,” Outdoor Advertising Association News, April 1955, 7. 1261 Stuart Peterson, “Your Answers to the $200,000,000 Question,” American Restaurant, September 1957, 70-74; “Chicago Billboard Test On Dining Out Is a Success,” Food Field Reporter, April 30, 1956; “Kraft Expands Restaurant-Food Tie-In Via Outdoor Posters,” April 23, 1956, OAAA Campaign Case Files, Duke University Archives. 398 search for pleasure our advertising draws them to our restaurant.”1262 Traveling motorists needed dining guidance in unfamiliar territory, and restaurants used their advertising dollars to steer potential customers in their direction. The methods used by outdoor advertisers to call attention to area restaurants mirrored some of the techniques adopted by guidebooks, except the emphasis was placed on the visual rather than the print. Outdoor advertising‟s form of sensory stimulation was meant to complement, not compete with, other forms of advertising media.1263 While indoor methods of advertising, such as newspapers, radio, and television, attracted potential customers‟ attention during their leisure time, outdoor advertising‟s opportunity to persuade motorists and pedestrians was quick and fleeting. Time was of the essence, and this emphasis on efficiency and essential information generally took the form of brief word copy, familiar phrasing, and easily-identifiable images that could be recognized by occupants of fast-moving cars.1264 Several restaurants discovered that three-dimensional cut-outs helped their billboards stand out. From Wisconsin to California, restaurants featured oversized 3-D animals, clocks, waitresses, and other trademark symbols of their dining themes.1265 Other businesses relied on wordplay and misspellings, hoping motorists would stop by the restaurant to inquire about the sign‟s meaning or mention the mistake. Both Earl Abel‟s in San Antonio and Ernie‟s restaurant in Seattle used the technique of incorrect spelling, while Anderson‟s restaurant in Clarksburg, West

1262 “Win Schuler‟s Promotional Ideas,” Chuck Wagon, August 1963; “Outdoor Points the Way Nation‟s No. 9 Restaurant in Marshall, Michigan,” ca. 1960; “Local Outdoor Doing a National advertising Job for Mader‟s Restaurant in Milwaukee,” ca. 1958, OAAA Campaign Case Files, Duke University Archives. 1263 “„Sign Up‟ for Profits,” Fast Food, January 1958, 57-58. 1264 Stanton, “Signing Up for a Bigger Daily,” 88. 1265 “Billboard Advertising,” Drive-In Restaurant, July 1963, 27; “„Willkomen‟ to Mader‟s,” Outdoor Advertising Association News, September 1955, 18; clippings from Outdoor Advertising Association News, September 1956 and September 1957; “Chalet Sells Its Setting with Distinctive Bulletins,” OAAA Campaign Case Files, Duke University Archives. 399

Virginia, used a made-up word, “Garap,” as a “teaser” to generate public interest and response.1266 Despite all of the favorable appeal of outdoor advertising for restaurant operators, highway signage still had its drawbacks. Industry specialists warned restaurants against false promises: beware of advertising meal specials or other features, such as air conditioning, only to have a motorist stop and find the menu item missing or a hot and stuffy dining room. These misleading messages proved bad for the restaurant business, collectively.1267 Also, while the restaurant industry debunked claims that highway billboards were responsible for traffic accidents, representatives did remind future and current billboard operators to follow a state‟s or township‟s placement rules, lest they risk fines (or even imprisonment!) for illegally-built structures.1268 A number of restaurants, therefore, chose to use alternative forms of visual advertising to achieve a similar result of grabbing hungry motorists‟ attention. Structural advertising found a following among operators eager to stand out amidst the commercialized landscape of city streets and interstate highways. While some turned sidewalk trash bins and bus stop benches into advertising signs, many others relied on unique architectural designs to turn heads.1269 Although a number of wayside

1266 Michael F. Olive, “Is Everything Alright?” Restaurant Management, January 1952, 42-43; “Restaurants Rely on Signs and Outdoor Advertising,” Signs of the Times, December 1954; “„Garap‟ Campaign Proves Bulletin Readership,” Outdoor Advertising Association News, June 1954, 11; “Teaser Test Ends Doubts of OUTDOOR‟S High Readership,” OAAA Campaign Case Files, 1958-64, Duke University Archives. 1267 “Don‟t Hamstring Prospective Patrons,” American Restaurant, June 1947, 18; “Make It So,” American Restaurant, January 1950, 16. 1268 “Odds and Ends,” Pacific Coast Record, October 1964, 12; Stanton, “Signing Up for a Bigger Daily,” 88; Ned Greene, “Billboard Advertising,” Restaurant Management, March1958, 11; “Mild Restrictions on Billboards,” Restaurant Management, May 1958, 13; “A Billboard Wallop,” Pacific Coast Record, August 1961, 10. 1269 “Pictorial Pointers to Restaurant Profits,” Restaurant Management, December 1950, 39; “Unusual Advertising Idea,” American Restaurant, March 1950, 106.

400 restaurants played up their rustic atmosphere as part of the commercialization of rural life for city dwellers, others used unusual and creative architecture as a form of advertising.1270 As noted in Chapter Two, restaurants that operated out of buildings in the shape of symbolic structures, from derby hats to giant apples, stimulated interest through the visual spectacle of the building. Restaurants-as-objects appeared throughout the country, but they concentrated most heavily in Southern California. These restaurants were very much part of the automobile landscape, since their main purpose was to catch the attention of motorists passing by. On a main thoroughfare in Massachusetts, an “odd roadside restaurant” seated second-floor diners in a structure shaped like a dirigible balloon. Anne Fleming operated her Mother Goose-inspired roadside restaurant, which was situated on a highway extending north of Ogden, Utah, out of a giant shoe-shaped building, complete with strands of rope to simulate shoestrings. Other popular roadside restaurant designs included another shoe in Pasadena and a mammoth frog in Santa Monica, California.1271 As advertising methods, these gimmicks were effective in getting noticed by motorists, but they did not guarantee that, once inside, a customer would be satisfied with the quality of food, sanitation, or visual appearance. Motorists wanted more than directions to a restaurant in general; they desired help finding good restaurants. It was this interest in and need for dining guidance that stimulated the success of restaurant guidebooks as purportedly “unbiased” forms of restaurant advertising.

1270 Gudis, Buyways, 55. 1271 “Roadside Restaurant Resembles a Dirigible Balloon,” Popular Science, December 1937, 46; “Lunch Room Build Like a Shoe Attracts Highway Travelers,” Popular Mechanics, August 1936, 192; “„Woman in Shoe‟ Has Restaurant,” Modern Mechanix, February 1936; “Chamber of Horrors—No. 4,” Life, February 1936, 40; “Roadside Stand Resembles Huge Frog,” Popular Mechanics, July 1931, 170.

401

MAIN (STREET) COURSES: U.S. RESTAURANT GUIDES PRIOR TO 1936

Many of the city handbooks and automobile guides published in the United States in the twentieth century‟s first two decades included names of restaurants, but these dining directives fell under the context of regional or local place description, rather than constituting noteworthy selections of particularly delectable fare. Turn-by-turn directions based on mileage, accompanied by detailed maps and brief descriptions of sites of interest filled out the pages, along with a handful of advertisements. Hospitality services received one line of mention at the point in the direction where the establishment appeared. For instance, in the Automobile Blue Book, under the touring directions for Route 10 from New York City to Waterbury, Connecticut, after turning right at mile 81.8 to Southbury, a motorist would find “Tea Room: Pergola.” Further down the page, the

Pergola Tea House advertised its “Chicken Dinner Every Day,” along with its hours of operation. Despite the lack of informative detail about dining accommodations, many of these automobile and city guides did go to the trouble of attempting to weed out unseemly services. For instance, the 1923 edition of the Automobile Blue Book informed readers that “[o]ur representatives carefully investigate the facilities of all hotels, garages, restaurants, service stations and other establishments advertising in the Blue Book,” yet these names were simply intended to be helpful suggestions rather than authoritative directions. Like the publishers of the Michelin guide and similar books, the Automobile Blue Book included advertisers whom the publisher identified as “worthy of your patronage” because the book made “a sincere effort to shut out undesirable representation.” However, if a reader found any of the advertised establishments lacking, the publishers asked to be notified about the unsatisfactory service.1272 In this way,

1272 Official Automobile Blue Book, vol. 1 (Chicago: Automobile Blue Books, Inc., 1923), 31, 7-8. 402 guidebooks entrusted readers with the authority to judge satisfactory services based on readers‟ personal criteria. While motorists in the United States used brief listings of restaurants in city and regional guidebooks for dining resources in the 1910s and 1920s, some of the earliest restaurant-focused guidebooks appeared for American tourists traveling to Europe, especially Paris. These guides tended to be geared toward gourmets, or people who aspired to assume the title. In the prefatory chapter to London Restaurants by “Diner- Out,” the author quickly defined a “true gourmet” as “an artist in food,” instructing his readers that to perfect this art meant to eat sparsely and insist on a conversation with a person “of authority” in the restaurant.1273 France, and Paris in particular, with its reputation for some of the world‟s finest cuisine, enticed many Americans (who could afford the excursion to the Continent) with expectations of culinary delights. Both Summerville Story‟s Dining in Paris (1927) and Julian Street‟s Where Paris Dines (1929) tapped into this tourist market, introducing American travelers to the history, head-waiters, and house specialties of Paris‟s famous restaurants. Both authors organized their guides by type of restaurant (“Restaurants of „Yesteryear,‟” “Picturesque Oddities,” etc.), and relayed their expertise and culinary knowledge in first-person narrative.1274

Street, who composed essays for popular American periodicals such as Everybody‟s Magazine and Collier‟s Weekly, published some of his earliest articles in book form, including a volume titled Paris á la Carte (1912), which included descriptions of a number of Parisian restaurants. By the 1920s he was well-recognized for his writings

1273 London Restaurants (New York: Bretano‟s, 1924), 1, 5 (emphasis in original). Copy in the general collections of the Perry-Castañeda Library, University of Texas at Austin. 1274 Sommerville Story, Dining in Paris (New York; Robert M. McBridge and Co., 1927); Julian Street, Where Paris Dines (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran and Co., 1929).

403 about food and place, and in 1934 he helped initiate the founding of the New York branch of the Wine and Food Society.1275 Where Paris Dines followed a similar format to one which would be adopted by guidebooks to U.S. restaurants ten, twenty, and even thirty years later. Street introduced the text by reminding readers that his selections constituted the preference of one person—they were not scientific, nor were they necessarily authoritative, unless the reader trusted his judgment. Six categories of consideration influenced Street‟s 321 pages of restaurant descriptions: “cooking, [wine] cellars, service, setting, prices, and tradition.”

He also suggested that by not being a Frenchman, his selections were less biased, and he confirmed that “no favours of restaurateurs” had influenced the dining rooms included in the book. Directly addressing visitors from the United States arriving in France, Street noted that “Americans are always in a hurry and always eat too fast,” encouraging them instead to practice a when-in-France rule of dining, which would seem slower and less efficient to many Americans than the typical full-service restaurants in the United States. The substantial number of listings (detailed using the second-person address, “you”) included in the text was in direct response to the small number of restaurants mentioned in his earlier book, Paris á la Carte. With few restaurant recommendations to follow,

American tourists arriving in Paris swarmed one of the locations zealously praised by Street, over-crowding the restaurant and disrupting service. After several days, though, the proprietor adjusted to the influx in American tourist patronage and proudly posted a sign declaring his was “the famous Restaurant du Coucou so justly praised by Julian Street.”1276 As Duncan Hines would demonstrate in the 1930s, this kind of advertising

1275 Sophie Kerr, introduction to Table Topics, by Julian Street (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1959), viii-x. 1276 Street, Where Paris Dines, 1-8. 404 based on a critical endorsement had the power to dramatically increase patronage, but the original qualities of the restaurant could suffer as a result. Books specifically featuring restaurant recommendations (and not overall tourist information) for establishments in the United States begin appearing in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Rather than inviting readers to join in as critical teammates, most of these early collections implicitly or explicitly asked readers to trust the first-hand knowledge of the individual or collective authors. Although several of these guides indicated they were useful for local residents and visitors alike, the overall tone was geared toward a reader unfamiliar with a particular city‟s dining scene. These early restaurant guidebooks usually focused on one urban area that had a reputation for good restaurants: New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and New Orleans. Occasionally, lists of the most popular restaurants throughout the United States would be compiled by an industry journal or consumer advocacy organization, but books for the larger public concentrated on the dining needs of city tourists and residents.1277 “We want you to feel at home in our City,” cooed the authors of Bohemian Eats of San Francisco (1925). Identifying tourists to the Bay Area as their primary audience, Jack and Hazel Blair Dodd, culinary authorities and columnists for the San Francisco

Bulletin, wanted each visitor to the area to discover the best foods available rather than departing “with unpleasant memories of where he has eaten. Hence this booklet.” In the same vein as their contemporaries, the Dodds assured readers, “Every one of the restaurants represented have [sic] been tried out—and have proved their value as food

1277 For lists of favorite nationwide restaurants compiled by Restaurant Management and those approved by the Consumers‟ League of Massachusetts for maintaining acceptable sanitary conditions and upholding legal working hours, see “Most Popular Restaurants,” Restaurant Management, November 1936, 358; “Most Popular Restaurants,” Restaurant Management, December 1936, 452; “List of Restaurants Approved by the Consumers‟ League of Massachusetts,” pamphlet, June 1921, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University. 405 centers of merit.”1278 To highlight the range of the city‟s culinary offerings, the book included an example of a seafood restaurant and another capturing the Old U.S. South, as well as Spanish, Italian, French, Chinese, Armenian, and Mexican gustatory delights. On the other coast, George Chappell‟s volume, The Restaurants of New York (1925), accomplished a similar feat as the Dodd‟s text, although Chappell covered more restaurants across New York and intended his book to be “both for the benefit of the out- of-town visitor and for the enlightenment of the resident of the metropolis.” Although Chappell included well-known, reputable restaurants, his purpose was also to uncover the hidden gems—what he called “fascinating feeding grounds”—of public dining throughout the city. Like Street, Chappell advised his readers to slow down the American-style of hurried eating and instead take in the surroundings. Certainly, the book contained “omissions and citations to which all will not agree,” acknowledged Chappell, but he insisted the book was merely “a personal record” of “my own preferences,” and should not be taken as specific instruction. Even though Chappell was not asking his readers to engage with him directly through correspondence by debating his choices, he implicitly indicated that readers, as diners, were entitled to have their own culinary yardsticks that measured “good food.” Importantly, to support this perspective, Chappell insisted his book was merely a “slight survey,” and he was “[w]ithout in any sense attempting to write a guidebook.” In other words, Chappell wanted to distance himself from the instructional directives of guidebooks and instead foster a curiosity and adventurism in exploring the city‟s restaurants. Encouraging experimentation with food

1278 Jack L. and Hazel Blair Dodd, Bohemian Eats of San Francisco (San Francisco: n.p., 1925), 1.

406 was another gesture of empowerment for readers, suggesting that “gourmets” were not the only group of eaters capable of credibly evaluating the nation‟s food.1279 A handful of other restaurant guides to New York followed in Chappell‟s footsteps. Vanity Fair‟s Gastronomic Baedeker: A Pocket Guide to the Gustatory Delights of New York (1931) introduced readers to the tastiest dishes at renowned restaurants through a seven-page sentence separated only by ellipses.1280 In 1934, George Ross published a collection of 365 restaurant recommendations titled Tips on Tables, geared toward readers “who make it a diversion, daily or otherwise, of dining and wining out.” Like so many other individual guidebook authors, Ross validated his choice of entries (and acknowledged the 19,351 Manhattan restaurants omitted) by claiming, “I have selected only those places that can boast the best repute, the finest cuisines, the most colorful atmosphere, and the utmost reliability.” How Ross measure these superlatives was absent from the introductory material; instead, by purchasing the book, the reader was meant to trust his judgment.1281 John Drury, taking fewer chances with his guide to Chicago restaurants, enlisted the famous author Carl Sandburg to write the foreword endorsing Drury‟s qualifications for selecting quality restaurants. Dining in Chicago: An Intimate Guide (1931) was written for both Windy City residents and visitors; the book jacket described the text as a “lively directory,” and a New York Times review praised Drury for telling “all about each of the places to which he guides the way,” although it did add that readers “must take his word for the quality of their [the restaurants‟]

1279 George Chappell, The Restaurants of New York (New York: Greenberg, 1925), 7-9, 164-165. 1280 Brillat Savarin II, Vanity Fair‟s Gastronomic Baedeker (New York: Conde Nast Publications, 1931). The authorship of this book is clearly a playful pseudonym, suggesting the author is a “direct descendent” of Brillat Savarin, one of the most famous French gourmands and a lifetime bachelor who died in 1826. 1281 George Ross, Tips on Tables: Being a Guide to Dining and Wining in New York at 365 Restaurants Suitable to Every Mood and Every Purse (New York: Covici, Friede, 1934), vii-viii.

407 entertainment, insinuating that guidebooks required no absolutes or warranties.1282 In more the style of an actual directory, the Library Journal published a record of New Orleans restaurants in 1932, including little more than the street name and an occasional nod to the type of meal served.1283 Despite their differences in layout and audience, all of these collections of recommended restaurants indicate that an audience and readership was building for restaurant guidebooks by the early 1930s. Americans, with their newfound freedom offered by the automobile, did not want to get lost on the course of restaurant dining.

From their inception, restaurant guidebooks promised to help customers make more efficient, informed decisions about where to eat. The directive of the guide (hopefully) enhanced the experience of eating out by weeding out undesirable locations.

Guidebooks also provided other functions, too. Like the automobile in which they traveled so often, guidebooks created a sense of independence for the motorist and potential restaurant patron by allowing him or her to choose when and where to eat. No longer were the majority of motorists burdened by the limitations of hotels‟ food service hours and dress requirements or the chore of packing food for the duration of the trip.1284 Instead, using a guidebook‟s listings, travelers could select a restaurant‟s formality, cost bracket, and type of food based on the description in the guide. Additionally, restaurant guidebooks offered an alternative to the debatable reliability of a word-of-mouth recommendation from a gas station attendant or local resident, who might simply have

1282 John Drury, Dining in Chicago: An Intimate Guide (New York: H. Wolff, 1931), ix; “Chicago Restaurants,” New York Times, July 5, 1931, 49. 1283 “New Orleans Restaurants,” Library Journal, April 15, 1932, 381. 1284 African Americans are a notable exception to this freedom from the necessity of packing food for the road, as explained in more detail later in the chapter. For more on the alternatives of hotel dining and autocamping food preparation, see Belasco, Americans on the Road, 52-56.

408

“bad taste.” Most important, perhaps, restaurant guidebooks turned customers into critics by inviting a form of dialogue through formal correspondence and informal marginal annotation. In contemporary discussions about the history of food writing and food criticism, guidebook authors are sometimes described as food critics, a description which points to the relationship each has with a larger public readership. Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson argues that food criticism, “not to be confused with incidental talk about food among acquaintances,” is “defined both by its mode of diffusion—through mass media—and by its objective, which is to influence dining decisions,” and she identifies three categories of food critics: the Judge, the Tribunal, and the Plebiscite. According to Ferguson, the Judge shapes “taste” for unknowledgeable diners simply through personal clout. The

Tribunal ranks restaurants based on an assumed consensus about “good” and “bad” food standards, while the Plebiscite relies on democratic contributions and opinions, which can lead to a lack of quality discrimination. Although I disagree with Ferguson‟s claim that “the Zagat survey [founded in 1979] was the first…publication to issue an open call for diners‟ opinions,” I think she is on track by identifying readers as critics.1285 Readers evaluated the best and the worst of the restaurants they visited, and often motivated readers conveyed this information to a guidebook author as one critic speaking to another, or noted it as marginal comment in their book copy. To compose a list of the “best” among a particular category (such as restaurants) is one way, explains Michael Bérubé, “to produce criticism.” The authority of a list comes from the creator “developing the faculty of discrimination,” which informs the selections for the list. It is this “intellectual labor,” which the “creator has to explain” and

1285 Ferguson, “Michelin in America,” 49-52. 409 rationalize that gives merit to and justifies the content of the entries.1286 Readers, by participating in the revision of these lists, as well as agreeing or disagreeing with the original author, asserted themselves as critics, not just consumers ready and waiting to be molded passively by presumably credible information provided by an “expert.” The collective verification from readers not only supported the authoritative voice of culinary wisdom that declared the best of a region‟s restaurants, but the act of engaging with the author instilled a sense of authority among readers, both culinary and social. Even marginal annotation functioned as a form of dialogue, putting a reader on “equal” footing with an author. This practice of concurring and correcting (as evidenced in individuals‟ guidebook notations) empowered readers with their own cultural authority—they were not simply letting a guidebook blindly lead them through unknown territory.1287 Guides which encouraged readers to invest themselves with similar skills, methods, and practices used by the author implied that the reader, too, had the power to be a verified dining critic. Most notations in personal copies of books tend to be recorded for the reader‟s own reference. Certainly, several readers simply made note of the restaurants they visited, placing a check mark or jotting down the date of their meal next to an entry. At the same time, however, it is possible to interpret statements or notes that correct, confirm, or counter the guidebook as showing a confidence in a reader‟s sense of authority to engage with the accuracy of the author‟s selections. For instance, one reader of London Restaurants (1924) noted that Hatchett‟s offered “good English food” and

1286 Michael Bérubé, “Pop Culture‟s Lists, Rankings, and Critics,” Chronicle of Higher Education, November 17, 2000, http://chronicle.com.exproxy.lib.utexas.edu/article/Pop-Culture-Lists. 1287 Many copies of historical guidebooks housed in library collections, as well as those offered by rare books sellers, are editions previously used by individuals and thus contain personal notes, marginal comments, and symbols like check marks and asterisks. 410 underlined “oysters” in the description of Scott‟s, emphasizing his agreement with this house specialty. This reader also placed a star next to the Coventry listing and, next to the entry, wrote in pencil, “Recommended.”1288 Similarly, followers of guides to U. S. restaurants also engaged with and modified the recommended lists of restaurants. One owner of a copy of the 1948 edition of

Gourmet’s Guide to Good Eating contributed hand-written notes on restaurants omitted from the Gourmet’s Guide that he or she deemed worthy of entry. Rickett‟s, added at the top of one of the Illinois pages, was “open around the clock—good fowl—not so good service—good frozen daquiris [sic].” The Sirloin Room of the Stockyard Inn (also not included in this edition) was “Highly over-rated,” while The Roundup in Portland (not listed) had “good breakfast—reasonable.”1289 In terms of restaurants mentioned in this edition of the Gourmet’s Guide, the reader noted that Park Lane in New York City, while recommended for its food, was only “good for hotel” according to the reader‟s standards, and the Stockholm restaurant was “too salty—not worth it.” This reader made note of further recommended places to avoid as well: “Get jam—not dinner,” was the assessment under Knott‟s Berry Place in Buena Park, California. The entry‟s description of Fisherman‟s Grotto in San Francisco as “a little too much on the tourist side” was underlined, and the reader added “eat at Marie‟s instead,” a restaurant not mentioned in the book. Additionally, the reader noted that the Pink Cricket in Santa Barbara “burned down.”1290 These handwritten additions to personal copies of guidebooks indicate that readers used criteria similar to those of the authors‟ in their own evaluations of

1288 London Restaurants, 67, 82, 91. Copy in the general collections of the Perry-Castañeda Library, University of Texas at Austin. 1289 Gourmet‟s Guide to Good Eating (1948), 92, 95, 281. Author‟s collection. 1290 Gourmet‟s Guide to Good Eating (1948), 251-252, 14, 38, 43. Author‟s collection.

411 restaurants, and they tended to model their revisions on the format of other entries in the book. Along with making marginal notations for their own personal reference, many readers also took the initiative to send in corrections and recommendations to authors. This gesture signaled that a reader believed he or she possessed enough culinary (and cultural) authority to evaluate the quality and worthiness of a particular restaurant.

Possibly the first dining-only guidebook to U.S. restaurants that solicited reader responses was Duncan Hines‟s Adventures in Good Eating.

THE DIRECTOR OF DIRECTORIES: DUNCAN HINES AND THE PHENOMENON OF ADVENTURES IN GOOD EATING

Adventures in Good Eating, as described in the opening of this chapter, first appeared in book form in 1936. It quickly caught the attention of the restaurant industry, which both praised the compilation as “an authentic guide to many outstanding eating places” and chided itself for not generating a similar collection first: “Shame on us, restaurant folk, that a printer, expert in food though he is, should have written our guide book for us,” admonished a contributor to the American Restaurant magazine in 1937.1291 The industry quickly embraced Hines as an expert source on the secrets of successful restaurants, inviting him to speak at the nineteenth annual convention of the National

Restaurant Association and suggesting to members that they use his guide to visit “the recommended places in order to get good ideas” that could be reproduced in their own restaurants.1292 Although sales were solid in 1936 and 1937 (5,000 copies sold the first year, which more than tripled with 16,000 sold the next year), and radio broadcasts called

1291 “New Books,” Restaurant Management, August 1937, 84; Nola Treat, “So This Is Meal Time!” American Restaurant, April 1937, 45. After this nod to Hines‟s book, Treat‟s article continues with her own Duncan-esque tour through a handful of Massachusetts restaurants. 1292 Thomas D. Gibbons, “Well-Balanced Program Will Feature Restaurant Show,” American Restaurant, September 1937, 36-37; “National Restaurant Association Official Program,” American Restaurant, October 1937, 45; “Book Views,” Restaurant Management, June 1938, 485. 412 attention to the publication, two articles in national periodicals launched Hines into the public spotlight in 1938.1293 The first appeared in an August issue of Publishers’ Weekly; the other feature in the December 3 issue of Saturday Evening Post caught the attention of the dining and motoring masses. Titled “Where Shall We Stop for Dinner?” the Saturday Evening Post piece by

Milton MacKaye minted Hines as a “professional taster” and explained that unlike other directories (such as the Automobile Blue Book), where advertisers paid for their listings, Hines accepted no remuneration for his entries. MacKaye also reiterated what Hines confirmed in his 1939 edition: “voluntary correspondents” helped him verify the credibility of suggested restaurants and confirm that previous listings were upholding high standards.1294 One of these “visiting representatives” was a man named Warren B.

Gibbs, a wealthy gentleman who liked to travel extensively around the United States with his wife, excursions which included seventeen roundtrip ventures from coast to coast.1295 After obtaining a copy of Adventures in Good Eating in 1936, Gibbs approached Hines about helping the former print salesman verify his recommendations. Hines, in both the 1937 and 1938 editions, praised Gibbs and reassured his readers that Gibbs‟s “judgment of what constitutes a good meal, may be thoroughly relied upon.”1296 Clearly, Gibbs conducted a substantial amount of work to merit four paragraphs of praise in Hines‟s book. Even though Hines framed Gibbs‟s desire to contribute in terms of the wealthy connoisseur‟s conviction “to help make the book dependable and much worth while to

1293 Duncan Hines, “An Appreciation,” in Adventures in Good Eating (Chicago: Adventures in Good Eating, Inc., 1938), xiii; “From Hobby to Publishing,” Publishers‟ Weekly, August 6, 1938, 354-355. 1294 Milton MacKaye, “Where Shall We Stop for Dinner?” Saturday Evening Post, December 3, 1938, 15- 16, 80; Duncan Hines, Adventures in Good Eating (Bowling Green: Adventures in Good Eating, Inc., 1939), xiii. 1295 MacKaye, “Where Shall We Stop for Dinner?” 16. 1296 Duncan Hines, Adventures in Good Eating (Chicago: Adventures in Good Eating, Inc., 1937), xiv.

413 travelers all over America,” MacKaye‟s article revealed an even more cooperative side to Gibbs. There, Gibbs is quoted as saying to Hines, “You‟ve got something worthwhile here….I‟ve been to many of the places you recommend, and I quarrel with your judgment in only one instance. I had planned to do a book like this, but you‟ve beaten me to it. The book fills a real want, and I‟m willing to turn over to you all data I‟ve collected.”1297

Hines quickly accepted Gibbs‟s offer. The importance of this exchange is that even though Hines is remembered as a singular dining authority (and he happily embraced this praise), as a businessman, Hines smartly recognized that his guidebook would only be as good as the help he received. From the beginning of Adventures in Good Eating, Hines acknowledged the influence of fellow “gasoline pilgrims” who shared their own lists of “best places” to eat and stay with Hines and inspired him to start compiling his own “best of” list. Hines, however, did not trust the general public‟s recommendations simply based on their word, since “there is no accounting for taste‟s [sic] in food any more than there is in clothing, printing or marriage.”1298 Therefore, Hines assembled a group of “discriminating gourmets” whom Hines authorized to be his official “voluntary checking staff.” This team included such renowned celebrities as radio personalities Mary Margaret McBride and Lawrence Tibbett; the syndicated cartoonist Gluyas Williams; the Pulitzer Prize- winning journalist Ernie Pyle; and food writer Julian Street (who also wrote an introduction to wines for Adventures in Good Eating).1299 Although Hines acknowledged approximately 600 people as regular contributors to his book by the late 1940s, the most

1297 Hines, Adventures in Good Eating (1938), xiv; MacKaye, “Where Shall We Stop for Dinner?”16. 1298 Hines, Adventures in Good Eating (1937), vii. 1299 Frank J. Taylor, “America‟s Gastronomic Guide,” Scribner‟s Commentator, June 1941, 15; Clementine Paddleford, “Duncan Hines Says…” Los Angeles Times, January 12, 1947, E12; Marion Edwards, “They Live to Eat,” Better Homes and Gardens, March 1945, 70.

414 recognizable names gave credibility based on their celebrity profiles rather than their recognized food expertise (except in the case of Street).1300 Since Hines backed up their tasting skills, attributing many of his book‟s listings to “the advice of friends whose standards are at least as high as ours,” his readership rarely questioned the authority of these additional “restaurant raters.”1301 Instead, for many readers, the thought of having their own suggestions and critiques taken as seriously as those of McBride or Pyle was exhilarating, a boost of confidence in their own social influence. Hines used this reader investment to his advantage. In addition to his personal (and famous) friends, Hines needed help from his mass dining disciples and their willingness to follow his evaluative doctrines in order for the book to succeed over the long term. One of the ways Hines accomplished this task was to invite reader responses.

In the 1937 edition, which included over 1,200 entries, Hines explained that “[i]n no sense is this book offered as a complete list of those eating places worthy of being mentioned,” and he invited readers to provide further suggestions by filling out a postcard (included in the book) and nominating “the names of outstanding inns located in the Country, rather than the conventional restaurants, tea rooms and hotels.” This request emphasizes that, at least in the initial editions, Hines wanted to help motorists find places to eat in out-of-the way locations, since they likely needed less guidance in major cities and places rife with quality restaurants. Hines then appealed to readers by stating, “I shall appreciate hearing from you as to how you enjoyed dining there [at places listed in the book]” and mentioning that “[c]onstructive suggestions for improving the serviceability of this book will be appreciated.”1302 A sensible businessman, Hines recognized the

1300 Newman Tucker, “Hines Visits Southland,” Pacific Coast Record, April 1949, 46. 1301 “Best,” New Yorker, April 17, 1954, 26. 1302 Hines, Adventures in Good Eating (1937), x. 415 essential (and cost-effective) role that readers could play in making his guidebook a reputable and current collection of recommended restaurants. To foster this congenial relationship with his readers, by the 1938 edition, Hines added, “I certainly wish that it were possible to meet all my readers personally. Unlike the majority of business contacts, I think of myself in the role of host to many, many friends.”1303 Readers enjoyed feeling a part of Hines‟s circle of acquaintances, and they quickly and eagerly complied with his requests for restaurant feedback over the next twenty-five years of updated editions. Similar to the readers of other guidebooks, followers of Adventures in Good

Eating habitually scribbled brief notations in the margins of personal copies. One reader corrected the average dinner price at The Krebs in Skaneateles, New York, crossing out $1.50 and writing in $1.75.1304 The owner of a 1949 edition added Lander‟s [Landee‟s?], described as “good,” to the Denver, Colorado, section and corrected the name of a Fort Morgan restaurant from Buchanan‟s Café to Reynolds Café. In the Iowa section, the reader added “good” next to Bishop Cafeteria but only “fair” next to the entry for the Iowana Hotel dining room.1305 Readers of a 1951 edition added that the Hawley Manor in Newtown, Connecticut, required a coat for entry, and they also concurred with the depiction of Edgemere Manor, described as “a charming white house” where the “food is good and atmosphere pleasant,” by adding the word “attractive” on the side. They also updated the book to reflect that Sandra‟s restaurant in Nashville was “closed.”1306 Devotees of Hines and his red-covered book, however, also responded directly to Hines

1303 Hines, Adventures in Good Eating (1938), xii. 1304 Duncan Hines, Adventures in Good Eating (Bowling Green: Adventures in Good Eating, Inc., 1941), 221. Author‟s collection. 1305 Duncan Hines, Adventures in Good Eating (Bowling Green: Adventures in Good Eating, Inc., 1949), 74-75, 126. Author‟s collection. 1306 Duncan Hines, Adventures in Good Eating (Bowling Green: Adventures in Good Eating, Inc., 1951), 74, 77, 285. Copy in the general collections of the Perry-Castañeda Library, University of Texas at Austin. 416 with enthusiastic praise and justifications for including their personal favorites that had not yet made an appearance in the guide. Samplings of this correspondence found its way into subsequent editions of Adventures as public endorsement for the publication. Other letters influenced the guidebooks‟ entries, even if they never found their way into print. In the early editions of Adventures, Hines included excerpts from readers who both delighted in the usefulness of the red dining guide and could not help but mention (kindly) that Hines had the foresight to publish as a book what they, too, had imagined doing themselves: compile lists of “best” restaurants around the United States. “This books does something that I always had a hankering for myself,” admitted one reader. “It identifies the really good places to eat and as one who has traveled about a bit, I know how pitiably few and far between they are.” Another reader gushed, “You are doing something I always felt the need of and wanted to do but did not do. This book of yours is surely a Motorists‟ Dream!”1307 A fan from Indiana cheered Hines while putting himself on level footing: “Your book is a swell idea,” he wrote. “I have been cataloging places of this sort for a good many years. I have enjoyed the food in thirty-eight of the places listed in your little red book.”1308 A fellow contributor to the country‟s food scene commended Hines with a sigh of self-defeat. He conceded,

You have beaten me to it. I have been connected with the food industry for 35 years and ever since my boyhood days one of my hobbies has been seeking out unusual and good places to eat. I promised myself that some day, whenever I got around to it, I would compile a little directory of those places I had found where one could dine pleasantly and not merely „feed.‟ Your „Adventures in Good Eating‟ now makes that effort entirely unnecessary on my part. It is much more comprehensive than anything I could have originated because it covers the country from coast to coast

1307 Hines, Adventures in Good Eating (1938), 23, 79. 1308 Hines, Adventures in Good Eating (1941), 53. 417

whereas my experience has been largely limited to the East and Middle West.1309

While these readers felt a sort of comradeship with Hines for accomplishing what they had dreamed of completing, others felt pleased with the validation Hines provided for their own dining preferences. “Bought this book yesterday and have already dined at three of your places,” attested one hungry reader, adding, “My marginal notes fully agree with you.”1310 Another correspondent acknowledged that the book “lists many of my favorites.”1311 An Ohio resident expressed how his own sense of self-worth levitated when measured against Hines: “You have provided a real service for those interested in better life,” he wrote, “and I certainly wish to compliment you. It is always gratifying to have one‟s own opinions corroborated by authority, and I am most pleasantly impressed with the fact that your comments about places I know agree so closely with my own.”1312 These responses speak both to the authority invested in Hines but also to the ways in which that evaluative power reflected back on readers who considered themselves on par with the food writer, even if they did not play the food game professionally. By the 1940s, Hines was receiving 500 to 600 letters a day, on average, from exuberant readers who shared dining anecdotes, asked for Hines‟s opinion on the subject of food, or otherwise commented on his business practices.1313 Readers‟ passions for favorite restaurants not listed in Hines‟s red book could be over the top. Passing along a devoted fan‟s recommendation for the delicious food at Ethel‟s Restaurant in Central

1309 Hines, Adventures in Good Eating (1938), 92. 1310 Hines, Adventures in Good Eating (1941), 73. 1311 Hines, Adventures in Good Eating (1938), 45. 1312 Hines, Adventures in Good Eating (1941), 61. 1313 Edwards, “They Live to Eat,” 70; Horace Sutton, “The Wayfarer‟s Guardian Angel,” Saturday Review of Literature, November 27, 1948, 38. 418

City, a friend of Hines commented, “This woman is as full of adjectives as a dog is fleas so you may want to take all this [lavish praise] with a grain of salt!”1314 Other readers struck a more balanced tone. In 1940, Lorene Gernon of Chicago thanked Hines for the excellent dinner she had at the Hoe Kow Chinese restaurant (where Hines recommended customers “[t]ry their egg rolls and spiced barbequed pork”), but according to her tastes, the Lawrence Tea Room “falls far below the high standards of the many delightful places you recommend. Because you are doing such a grand job we are calling your attention to this „just fair‟ tea room.”1315 Presumably, Gernon‟s letter had some genuine influence because the Lawrence Tea Room appears to have lived a single-edition lifespan; it was not included in the 1939 edition, and failed to be listed again in the 1941 edition, yet the Hoe Kow restaurant remained.

Importantly, Hines cultivated a familiarity with his unidentified readers through the tone of his writing, which helped foster their dedication to his collection of restaurant recommendations. “People he never saw,” observed one journalist, “wrote to him as intimate friends, pouring out their motoring adventures, suggesting new eating and lodging places they had found, reporting on or quarreling with his judgment on those he had already mentioned.”1316 Indeed, one reader, who felt compelled to note that “with one or two exceptions we are in accord with your remarks regarding these various places,” also admitted, “Since we possess and have formed the habit of frequently referring to all three of your publications, together with having heard very complimentary remarks regarding yourself and your Mr. Gibbs…we feel that our acquaintance is a bit more than

1314 Beulah Hines to Duncan Hines, ca. June 1939, Duncan Hines Papers, Cornell University. 1315 Lorene M. Gernon to Duncan Hines, April 28, 1940, Duncan Hines Papers, Cornell University; Hines, Adventures in Good Eating (1941), 102. 1316 Taylor, “America‟s Gastronomic Guide,” 14-15. 419 just book form.”1317 Readers found Hines‟s style of writing entries, which was more conversational than instructive, not only engaging but familiar, and it “inspired confidence in his fans.” Through the talkative tone of his writing, Hines cultivated a personality for his books—“the mirrored personality of Duncan Hines”—even though hundreds of people helped compile the content. In this way, Hines was able to maintain an association with his books as “a one-man proposition,” despite their collaborative genesis.1318 The extent to which the dining public trusted Hines and his restaurant endorsements was legendary. Hines‟s followers were mostly middle-aged white Americans, whose income and professions allowed them to spend discretionary money on restaurants and have the leisure time in which to travel.1319 Many readers hesitated to dine out on the road without their trusty red book. The personal reputation of Hines and Adventures in Good Eating became so conflated that one travel bureau director suggested “a Duncan Hines Guide” could function as an “escort” for women traveling alone.1320 On more than one occasion, Hines inspired the composition of poetry.1321 Yet as much as Hines‟s readers revered him, not all placed blind faith in his recommendations. One book

1317 Father of Ray C. Newhaus to Duncan Hines, ca. 1940/1941, Duncan Hines Papers, Cornell University. The other two books to which he refers are Lodging for a Night, which listed places to stay, and a recipe book called Adventures in Good Cooking. Hines added these two publications to his oeuvre in 1938 and 1939, respectively. 1318 Carol Lynn Gilmer, “Duncan Hines: Adventurer in Good Eating,” Coronet, November 1947, 101-104. Hines was not the first author of a guide to U.S. restaurants to use this conversational tone. George Ross, in Tips on Tables, composed his text using both the first-person “I” and the second-person familiar “you” to convey the dining scenes of 365 restaurants. 1319 Phyllis Larsh, “Duncan Hines: He Is the Traveler‟s Authority on Where to Eat,” Life, July 8, 1946, 16- 17. 1320 Saul Pett, “No Dangers Best Lone Women Motorists Who Are Cautious and Act Like Ladies,” Washington Post, October 25, 1948, B6. 1321 See William S. Rigdon, “Adventures in Good Eating,” in Hines, Adventures in Good Eating (1941), 92; Phyllis McGinley, “My Own Baedeker: Memo for Duncan Hines,” in Three Times: Selected Verse from Three Decades with Seventy New Poems (New York: Viking Press, 1960), 59-60.

420 purchaser admitted, “I checked up on a great number of the places listed in your book and tried to be very critical in view of your article in the Saturday Evening Post criticizing the cooking in most public eating places in the South where I was born and raised. However, in all fairness, I must admit that the places recommended by you were just what you said they were, and I can find no room for argument.”1322 Another reader, after relying on a feature in Life magazine that stated one of Hines‟s favorite restaurants was the Cranes Canary Cottage in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, ventured over to the restaurant only to discover that it had closed four years earlier. The unsatisfied customers begrudgingly decided,

“We still like both LIFE and Mr. Hines but we‟re so mad…”1323 Readers were not the only ones to discover chinks in the Hines armor. Restaurants, too, realized that a Duncan Hines endorsement could leave a bad taste in one‟s mouth.

Although restaurants usually coveted a chance to claim, “Recommended by Duncan Hines,” the process of appearing in Hines‟s little red book was more arbitrary and less regulated than many restaurants expected. The Ivy House Restaurant‟s experience is a good example. On July 8, 1948, the husband-and-wife team, David and Emily Routledge, opened the Ivy House in an unpretentious, understated building in Williamsburg, Virginia. The small restaurant could accommodate only fifty-two guests at thirteen tables, but the deep green interior with white woodwork and “Reynolds Painting” Spode china decoration seemed to please visitors. Emily greeted customers as the restaurant‟s hostess, while David worked behind the scenes as chef; the couple employed William and Mary college students as table servers. They prided themselves on their seafood, steaks, salad, pecan pie, and “astronomical” pancakes, advertised as “out of this

1322 Hines, Adventures in Good Eating (1941), 72. 1323 G. G. Thorne, Letters to the Editor, Life, July 29, 1946, 7.

421 world.”1324 Word-of-mouth recommendations helped improve their business and attract a number of visitors passing through town, many of whom were surprised to hear that the Ivy House Restaurant was absent from popular national dining guides, such as Adventures in Good Eating and Gourmet’s Guide to Good Eating.1325 In November 1949, one of these transient customers, George E. Sheetz, followed up his pleasant experience at the Ivy House by writing to Duncan Hines at Adventures in Good Eating, Inc. Sheetz, like many of Hines‟s devoted followers, found enjoyment in participating in the reader-response reviews of listed restaurants, a practice encouraged by Hines as a way to learn about new restaurants and regulate the quality of those already listed. After praising some of Hines‟s recommendations but amending others—for instance, suggesting Grunewald as a better seafood restaurant than Bob‟s in Richmond—

Sheetz continued: “there is a place in Williamsburg that you haven‟t mentioned yet that is the best for good food that I have found down here….you should look into it. It is a small place on the north side of town called Ivy House Restaurant.” The remainder of Sheetz‟s letter described the food specialties, specifically “York River oysters, French fried shrimps…filet mignons…a dainty salad, crisp onion rings, superb coffee, and…pecan pie.”1326 Sheetz confirmed that he was not a friend (and therefore biased customer) of the owners, but he thought the restaurant worthy of inclusion in Adventures in Good Eating. Six months later, another letter praising the Ivy House Restaurant landed on the correspondence desk at the company‟s headquarters. This time, a man named Jay Holmes

1324 “What One Grocer Did” and Ruth Mauzy, “McFadden Says…,” unidentified clipping; Mrs. Harvey F. Rostiser, “Recipes for Your Scrapbook,” South Bend Tribune, April 25, 1955; Norman R. McVeigh to David and Emily Rutledge, June 27, 1957; Emily Rutledge to Howard E. Reinchardt, November 15, 1950, Ivy House Records, College of William and Mary. I owe a tremendous thanks to Jerry Logan for his research assistance in acquiring these materials from the College of William and Mary. 1325 L. A. Roden to Earle R. MacAusland, June 2, 1950, Ivy House Records, College of William and Mary. 1326 George E. Sheetz to Adventures in Good Eating, Inc., November 8, 1949. Ivy House Records, College of William and Mary. 422 personally recommended the restaurant, and Hines followed up with a form letter thanking Holmes for the suggestion and adding that “when either my representative or I have an opportunity to be in that part of the country, we shall be pleased to stop by.”1327 On the same day that he replied to Holmes, Hines sent a standardized card to the Ivy House Restaurant, which informed them that “your place has been recommended by a guest friend who believes it should be listed in my book, ADVENTURES IN GOOD EATING.” The card proceeded to reiterate that the notice did not guarantee a listing in Hines‟s book because he could not “list places until I have an opportunity to inspect them personally or have one of my representatives do so.” If the Ivy House wanted to be considered for listing, the owners needed to fill out an information blank, which they completed in June 1950. Until confirmation that their restaurant would appear in

Adventures, Hines explicitly forbade them from using his name in any advertising or signage.1328 The Rutledges were thrilled to receive Hines‟s invitation to send him more information and eagerly anticipated the potential for increased business that a listing in Adventures would bring.1329 To encourage Hines to add the Ivy House to his popular dining guide, a friend of the Rutledges, Kathryn Windel (also president of the Hitching

Post Motel) sent Hines another word-of-mouth recommendation in July 1950, a letter which belied Windel‟s acquaintance with the owners. (This habit of recommending favorite restaurants operated by one‟s friends most certainly was a common occurrence, which potentially clouded the “unbiased” listings in Hines‟s book.) Ellen Rutledge, in

1327 Jay Holmes to Duncan Hines, May 19, 1950; Duncan Hines to Jay Holmes, May 27, 1950, Ivy House Records, College of William and Mary. 1328 Notification Card from Duncan Hines, May 27, 1950, Ivy House Records, College of William and Mary. 1329 Emily Rutledge to Duncan Hines, June 29, 1950, Ivy House Records, College of William and Mary. 423 correspondence thanking Windel for her letter to Hines, once again expressed her investment in the guidebook listing, one she anticipated with bated breath: “Perhaps one of these days Duncan will get around to Ivy House,” she sighed, “—and I DO hope he does. It‟s thanks to letters such as yours in my files that will bring him sooner or later, I hope.”1330 Although Hines never stopped by the Ivy House, Ellen‟s wish came true in

November 1950 when she and David received notice that they were “New Members of the Duncan Hines Family.”1331 The listing for the Ivy House Restaurant first appeared in the forty-second printing of Adventures in Good Eating in 1951. The entry included the location, hours of operation, and price range along with a description of menu options clearly borrowed from George Sheetz‟s letter, especially considering neither Hines nor a representative had yet dined at the restaurant: “Among their specialties are York river oysters in season, Virginia baked ham, French fried shrimp, French fried onion rings, tossed salad, hot muffins and pecan pie.”1332 In January 1951, perhaps hoping to update the entry, Ellen Rutledge wrote Hines to mention that they had installed an air conditioning unit in the restaurant, and she and David were “looking forward with pride to our first year as a member of the Duncan Hines family!”1333 Throughout 1951, the Rutledges enjoyed the increased patronage as a result of the listing, and they took advantage of being “Recommended by Duncan Hines” in their promotional advertising. However, in the

1330 Kathryn L. Windel to Duncan Hines, July 13, 1950; Duncan Hines to Kathryn Windel, July 24, 1950; Ellen Rutledge to Kathryn Windel, August 16, 1950, Ivy House Records, College of William and Mary. 1331 Duncan Hines to Members of the Duncan Hines Family, November 1, 1950; Duncan Hines to David Rutledge, November 1, 1950, Ivy House Records, College of William and Mary. 1332 Hines, Adventures in Good Eating (1951), 303. Hines did not include George Sheetz among the hundreds of individuals he thanked by name in the introductory material, “In Appreciation,” people “who gladly contribute so much of their time in discovering new places” (Hines, Adventures in Good Eating [1951], xvi-xix). 1333 Emily Rutledge to Duncan Hines, January 24, 1951, Ivy House Records, College of William and Mary.

424 midst of the excitement, Emily and David were attuned to the fact that neither Hines, nor one of his representatives, had made an appearance at the restaurant. “Someday we hope to show you those [guest book] comments,” Emily eagerly wrote Hines in August 1951, adding that “It‟s been a joy to be a member of your family.”1334 The joy, unfortunately, did not last long.

In October 1951, David Rutledge received a letter from a disgruntled patron, Malcolm Walker, who claimed he had visited the Ivy House based on the “Approved by Duncan Hines” sign prominently displayed by the restaurant. Displeased with the lack of order in seating guests, as well as “an insufficient and inefficient staff,” Walker expressed further dissatisfaction with the children‟s menu options and the overall appearance and level of cleanliness of the restaurant. “I am sure that if D. H. himself checked (I doubt that he has ever been near)…the whole establishment would not measure up to his standards,” huffed Walker.1335 Considering that Walker took the time to write to the Rutledges, it would not be a stretch to imagine that he sent a similar letter to Duncan Hines informing him of the unsatisfactory dining experience. Whether or not Walker influenced Hines to check on the restaurant is undetermined, but Hines did send a representative to the Ivy House, who promptly recommended that Hines pull the listing from the subsequent edition of Adventures in Good Eating. Despite his claim to including only restaurants that had been approved by himself or trusted representatives, Hines actually listed restaurants in Adventures in Good Eating that had been praised by his readers without verifying that they lived up to his

1334 Emily Rutledge to Duncan Hines, August 3, 1951, Ivy House Records, College of William and Mary. 1335 Malcolm C. Walker to David Rutledge, October 18, 1951, Ivy House Records, College of William and Mary. 425 standards.1336 Furious about the circumstance, the Rutledges seemed to believe it was worse to be listed and then pulled from the book, which gave the appearance that the restaurant was declining in quality, rather than never having been included in the first place. When Hines‟s competitor, Gourmet’s Guide to Good Eating, approached the Rutledges about including the Ivy House in their guidebook the following year, the

Rutledges hesitated, wary of the potential fallout: “We are fully aware of the honor paid us and glad our guests and friends feel us worthy of a GOURMET listing,” explained Ellen. However, after a most unpleasant experience with Duncan Hines, we are, frankly, unwilling to be listed by you until some representative, designated by you, can personally check us without warning us in advance. We were never checked by Mr. Hines or any of his representatives. We foolishly accepted listing [sic] and were removed in one year because we had “outside restrooms”. (They DO have running water but are on the side of our building—OUTside, that is. They are “cleaned” restrooms.)1337

The president of Gourmet magazine assured the Rutledges that their experience with Gourmet’s Guide would be quite different. “[Y]our experience with Duncan Hines should have no bearing on the matter [of appearing in Gourmet’s Guide],” he rationalized. “Guess you didn‟t buy enough of his books!”1338 Although readers nationwide trusted Hines‟s authority and the criteria he claimed to use for choosing worthy restaurants, owners, on the other hand, could find his selection process to be opaque, inconsistent, and biased.1339

1336 Hines‟s rubric for granting restaurant‟s his approval was repeated innumerous times, both in Adventures in Good Eating and in the multitude of features on Hines and his dining guidebook. 1337 Ellen Rutledge to Earle R. MacAusland, March 11, 1952, Ivy House Records, College of William and Mary. 1338 Earle MacAusland to Ellen Rutledge, March 16, 1953, Ivy House Records, College of William and Mary. 1339 Other restaurants, even those that had more positive experiences with Duncan Hines, expressed that updating entries to include pertinent information for customers was indeed a challenge, despite the annual postcard sent to restaurants already listed in Adventures In Good Eating that asked for changes and corrections. “I should like to take this opportunity to tell you that many people do come to us as a result of 426

Duncan Hines‟s business practices reflect a man who, despite his claim that Adventures in Good Eating was “not a money making scheme on my part,” kept a close eye on his expenditures and sales from the beginning.1340 In the 1937 edition, Hines encouraged readers to take the picture postcard souvenirs distributed by many restaurants and to send him “constructive suggestions” on these postcards; this plan reduced the number of detachable cards Hines needed to include within his book.1341 Instead, restaurants, rather than paying Hines directly for advertising, indirectly reduced his overhead by supplying his readers with ready-made response cards. Hines also refused to replace older, unsold editions of the guidebook with updated versions. Restaurants, hotels, gas stations, and bookstores purchased Adventures in Good Eating at a reduced rate to sell to travelers for the list price; the business profited from the difference.

However, if an older edition did not sell out before a newer one was issued, the establishment was forced to sell the out-of-date copies or absorb the loss. Hines explained to these places that asked to exchange old printings, “This I cannot do, any more than an automobile dealer could accept the return of your old model car for a new 1951 model. So please do not ask me to accept the return of old books for credit or replacement.”1342 This analogy was slightly disingenuous since the older editions might be out-of-date, but

your listing but that some of them seem surprised to find us open on Sunday,” the operator of the Window Shop in Cambridge, Massachusetts, informed Hines in 1955. “Can this fact be emphasized in any way?” She also noted, “The major change in our service is the inclusion of Wines and Beers about which I wrote you some weeks ago. That is a real change which should be noted.” In the 1958 edition of Adventures In Good Eating, the book implies that the Window Shop is open on Sunday, since other restaurants that are not include the note “Closed Sundays.” However, there is no mention of the Window Shop‟s alcoholic beverage options, a specification that seems to have been phased out of all listings. See Mrs. Joseph C. Aub to Duncan Hines, March 15, 1955, Window Shop Records, Schelsinger Library, Harvard University, and Duncan Hines, Adventures in Good Eating (Ithaca: Duncan Hines Institute, Inc., 1957), 159. 1340 Hines, Adventures in Good Eating (1938), ix. 1341 Hines, Adventures in Good Eating (1937), xii. 1342 Duncan Hines to Members of the Duncan Hines Family, December 11, 1950, Ivy House Records, College of William and Mary. 427 they certainly were not “used.” As a business decision, Hines‟s choice makes sense profit-wise, although it left some Duncan Hines “family members” less than satisfied. Hines retained tight control over the use of his name and the company‟s signage for similar financial purposes. As part of a signed agreement, when a restaurant consented to be included in Adventures in Good Eating, it agreed not to proceed with any printed advertising that used Hines‟s name “until you hear from me [Duncan Hines] personally in writing.” The application to be considered by Hines required restaurant owners to agree to the following:

(1) you will not used any sign referring to Duncan Hines or to a listing in my publication except an official Duncan Hines identification sign, which may be leased from us; (2) if your listing should be discontinued, you are to immediately return this sign on notice from us and immediately discontinue the use of the name of Duncan Hines, or any reference to a listing in either of my publications on all advertising materials, menus, folders, newspaper ads, etc.

In 1950, signs could be leased for $20.00 for the first sign and $15.00 for each additional one.1343 When recommended restaurants asked to use his endorsement on their promotional materials, Hines forbade them from printing his name directly onto paper copies such as menus, letterhead, and the like. “Please do not use my name on business cards and things of that type,” Hines instructed, “as it only hurts the sale of my books.”

As an alternative, though, restaurants could purchase “small gummed labels,” official Duncan Hines stickers that could be ordered directly from Hines‟s office for the “nominal

1343 “Important! Signs and Other Advertising Material Bearing the Name of Duncan Hines,” business pamphlet, Ivy House Records, College of William and Mary; “Eating for a Living,” Newsweek, May 23, 1955, 75. 428 price” of fifty cents for one-hundred labels and affixed to table tents, menu cards, and other restaurant paraphernalia.1344 While Hines asked restaurants to pay for visual evidence of his endorsement, restaurants in turn often asked customers to pay more for food once they received Hines‟s stamp of approval. “No sooner does one of them set out an „Approved by Duncan Hines‟ sign than prices rise sharply,” complained one of these dining victims. “Mr. Hines has been the cause of financial annoyance to at least one tourist.”1345 Other customers were perturbed by the public‟s apparent unwavering devotion to Hines, an adherence that many believed limited Americans‟ dining adventures rather than facilitated them. “Take to the open road this summer and forget about slipping the latest edition of Duncan Hines into the compartment on the dashboard,” encouraged the New York Times in 1948.1346

Winthrop Sargeant, a humorist writing for Life magazine in 1951, called this mindset the “Duncan Hines theory”: A traveler committed to Hines “ventures out equipped with a guidebook listing the restaurants which his expert has tested. When he finds them he doesn‟t do too badly,” but he ends up sacrificing a more extensive tour of the United States.1347 Despite railing against Sargeant‟s overall negative assessment of roadside eating spots, restaurant industry insiders concurred that the notion that America‟s only worthwhile dining places were ones recommended by Duncan Hines was bunk.1348 A handful of readers, too, began to question the absoluteness of Hines‟s selection process, doubting his “cultivation of neutrality.” One writer for the New York Times

1344 Duncan Hines to John David [Rutledge], August 7, 1951, Ivy House Records, College of William and Mary. Hines implied that if restaurants used his name too extensively in their advertising, customers would rely less on his book and sales would fall. 1345 R. J. Hadley, Letter to the Editor, Life, July 29, 1946, 7. 1346 Jane Nickerson, “Eating En Route,” New York Times, June 6, 1948, XX28. 1347 Sargeant, “The Roadside Restaurant,” 75. 1348 “A Blow Below the Belt,” Restaurant Management, September 1951, 31.

429 recalled an experience where Hines visited a restaurant that served clam chowder and oyster stew on alternating days of the week. Hines walked in on a clam chowder day and asked for oyster stew. When the proprietor informed him that the only option was clam chowder, Hines tried to needle the owner into giving him a bowl of oyster stew. When the owner refused to comply, Hines left without purchasing anything, and the restaurant never appeared in the little red book.1349 Other restaurants left out of the guidebook countered their exclusion by posting humorous signs that read “Not Recommended by Duncan Hines,” “Condemned by Duncan Hines,” and “To heck with Duncan Hines, Joe

Hickey [the Wyoming governor] ate here.”1350 These examples suggest that the “democratic” participation of readers in shaping U.S. restaurant culture through solicited feedback only extended to voices that echoed Hines (or other guidebook authors).

Americans governed by a different set of dining principles tended to view Hines‟s authority as “a sort of [dining] dictatorship,” which refused to allow opinions that did not conform to his standards.1351 Duncan Hines died from lung cancer on March 15, 1959, in Bowling Green, Kentucky, yet his guidebooks lived on in new editions for another three years. Roy H. Park, with whom Hines partnered in 1949 to produce Duncan Hines brand name food products—including jam, ice cream, and the famous cake mixes—took over the job as editor and tried to reassure readers that “the new books are authoritative and unbiased” like the old ones, with “analysis by the [Duncan Hines] institute headquarters and staff” rather than Hines himself.1352 Without Hines at the helm, Park issued a policy statement

1349 John Gould, “The Importance of Being Ornery,” New York Times, July 17, 1955, SM11. 1350 Matt Weinstock, “So—Life Is Just a Bowl of Clichés,” Los Angeles Times, June 10, 1963, A6; Marie Smith, “Politics No Divider,” Washington Post, February 5, 1961, F1. 1351 Gould, “Importance of Being Ornery,” SM11. 1352 “Gourmet Duncan Hines Dies of Cancer at 78,” Los Angeles Times, March 16, 1959, 2; “Duncan Hines, Arbiter of Food, Lodging, Dies,” Washington Post, March 16, 1959, B2; “Duncan Hines Passes—But Not 430 explaining the new method of selecting restaurant for inclusion in the guidebook. Inspectors continued to visit restaurants, and the Duncan Hines Institute continued to collect comments from readers. However, the Institute shifted to conducting an “annual restaurant opinion audit” to collect 60,000 nominations for restaurant places throughout the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Importantly, only “top business and professional people who have a taste for good living and the means to support it” received the survey since, according to Park, “[t]hey know the best places to eat.”1353 Rather than cultivating a personal relationship with the public dining masses, Park decided that the customers most likely to “know fine food are corporation executives, advertising and public relations men, and others who eat a lot on expense accounts”—like himself.1354 The format changed to include two columns on each page with shorter descriptions and more abbreviations, thereby losing the conversational tone present through the 1958 edition, even when entries became shorter to accommodate more listings. Park‟s decision did not pay off. In November 1962, the Duncan Hines Institute announced it was discontinuing publication of all the guidebooks because the need for the directories had become “obsolete.”1355 “American travelers are sophisticated enough to rate eating and lodging places for themselves,” rationalized Park, who also contended that individual preferences varied so extensively, it was impossible to accommodate all readers when compiling a guidebook.1356 While the number of high quality restaurants in

Books,” Pacific Coast Record, April 1959, 17; Hatchett, The Man Behind the Cake Mix, 179-197; “The Hines-Park Varsity,” Tide, August 3, 1951, 44. 1353 Roy H. Park, “Statement of Policy for the Years Ahead,” Pacific Coast Record, July 1960, 7. 1354 Creighton Peet, “Tired and Hungry and Miles from Home?” Herald Tribune Magazine, August 21, 1960, sec. 7, 4. 1355 “Hines Discontinues Restaurant Guide,” Washington Post, November 24, 1962, D6; “Good Restaurants Write Finish to Hines Food List,” Los Angeles Times, November 24, 1962, 17; “Duncan Hines Books Stop,” Restaurateur, June 1963, 17. 1356 “Travelers Do Own Judging,” Pacific Coast Record, April 1962, 33.

431 the United States had certainly multiplied since Hines first started Adventures in Good Eating in 1936, the continued success of dining guides well into the twenty-first century undermines Park‟s argument. Instead, it is reasonable to consider Duncan Hines‟s importance as a living individual to the value of the guidebook, even if he gradually played less of taster-inspector role as the years wore on. With his personality so intertwined with the recommendations, the knowledge of Hines‟s absence from composing the book likely reduced readers‟ confidence with the publication. Likewise, the Duncan Hines Institute placed less faith in the average reader by granting more power in the hands of those who ate from expense accounts. This gesture created a hierarchical stratification that potentially alienated Hines‟s longtime white, middle-class followers, who were suddenly no longer credited with the authority to judge the “best” of the nation in terms of food.

WHINING AND DINING: STEERING AMERICAN TRAVELERS THROUGH THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE INEDIBLE

Duncan Hines‟s Adventures in Good Eating expanded in region, quantity of entries, and description beyond any previous publication, but his was not the only guidebook carried by motorists around the United States in the mid-twentieth century.

Competitors and imitators quickly made their way onto the dining scene in the 1930s and

1940s, although the confluence of greater disposable income, increased vacation time, and heightened focus on shared family activities combined to make the years following World War II the Era of the Restaurant Guidebook. As families hit the road for summer vacations and business travelers crossed the country by car, restaurant-specific guidebooks and general travel guides with dining recommendations kept pace with the growing numbers of restaurants nationwide. Some guidebooks appealed to the housewife

432 by including famous recipes that the home cook could try to recreate after tasting the restaurant‟s original. Others specialized in listing historic restaurants; family-friendly restaurants; restaurants for businessmen; restaurants for women traveling alone; restaurants for penny-pinchers and diners with deep pockets; and restaurants (supposedly) for “everybody.”

A handful of restaurant guides appeared in the late 1930s and early 1940s whose scope, like Hines‟s modern classic, covered restaurants throughout the United States. While some of these handbooks resembled Adventures in both layout and content, others took alternate routes to capture different audiences. In 1938 Grace and Beverly Smith collaborated with the journalist Charles Morrow Wilson to publish Through the Kitchen Door: A Cook‟s Tour to the Best Kitchens of America. After an introduction by Wilson that proceeded to document the worst of America‟s restaurants, from “salt shakers that won‟t give out salt” to the “900 low-to-mediocre hamburgers purchased here and there” (all of which Wilson decided he could forgive and forget), the book chronicled the Smiths‟ dining experiences and eating exercises from New England to the Pacific Northwest.1357 Unlike Hines‟s Adventures in Good Eating, which was as much a well- organized catalogue as an engaging read, Through the Kitchen Door more closely resembled a food memoir and was in no way an easy-to-use reference for motorists needing a quick suggestion for a place to stop in the next town. The National Restaurant Association (NRA), disappointed with itself for letting a civilian beat it to the guidebook punch, published their own directory in 1940, A Guide to Popular Restaurants. Because the organization represented all of its members, regardless

1357 Grace and Beverly Smith and Charles Morrow Wilson, Through the Kitchen Door: A Cook‟s Tour to the Best Kitchens of America (New York: Stackpole Sons, 1938), 6.

433 of the actual quality of the restaurant, the guide could not single out favorites. Instead, the book included the entire “roster of the membership of the National Restaurant Association” and sold the directory for 25 cents, well under the $1.50 cost of Adventures in Good Eating. To put a positive spin on the large (and largely uninspected) inventory of eating spots, the NRA promoted its “comprehensive” listings. Additionally, the NRA distinguished its guide from others that “have filled only a limited need because, in attempting to „recommend,‟ they have confined their listings to the most pretentious restaurants where prices, of necessity, are in the higher levels.”1358 In other words, A

Guide to Popular Restaurants was a directory for the dining masses, and it included only enough information for a customer to identify the state, street address, and type of service offered by each restaurant.

Prior to the end of World War II, with the exception of Best Places to Eat (whose authors Hines sued successfully for copyright infringement, as noted earlier), the majority of other restaurant handbooks that covered the entire United States also included information on hotels and tourist sites of interest. The Traveler‟s Windfall; Where to Eat, Sleep, and Play in the U.S.A. was another popular guidebook that started in 1939 “to furnish the discriminating traveler…with an unbiased an accurate list of above-average places to eat and sleep, together with interesting things to do along the way.” Organized by state, the book opened each state section with a few paragraphs covering regional activities and local sites for exploration. Then, broken down by city, the guide listed basic information about hotels and restaurants (location, price range, etc.) and a few quoted descriptions excerpted from reader responses. The president of the Traveler‟s Windfall

1358 A Guide to Popular Restaurants (Chicago: National Restaurant Association, 1940), 1.

434

Association, Hilda Robbins, explained to readers that the book was intended to be “the American cousin of the old and well-loved European guide, the Hand Me Down,” and like her contemporaries, Robbins solicited information and evaluations from readers. The reader-response strategy of composing the book‟s listings placed the power to determine the “best” of the United States‟ hospitality and tourism industries in the hands of its citizens. As Robbins attested, “information poured in from all sides until we feel this edition is no longer ours, but yours [the readers].”1359 In contrast to this democratic method of compiling a guidebook‟s content, other authors chose the route of substantiating their books based on their own cultural authority. Roland Luverne Hill was one of these men. Hill, who began compiling information on interesting sites and accommodations during the New Deal era, started publishing a number of tourist guides in the early 1940s that included restaurant listings. In 1942, he delivered Living the Life of Rolly, a diary-style guidebook that alternated between listing his daily activities while traveling and addressing the reader directly. Organized by sections dedicated to travel routes, such as “Our Most Recent Trip to California via Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona,” the book followed Hill as he “stopped” at restaurants along the itinerary to describe their atmosphere and food.1360 Like Through the Kitchen Door, Hill‟s Living the Life of Rolly appeared to be more conducive to pre-travel reading. Hill followed up this publication with other guidebooks including Hillsway, organized for more efficient on-the-road usage, in the late 1940s and 1950s. Although the publishers of Hillsway did encourage readers to “write him from time to time telling him of new places you have been to and

1359 The Traveler‟s Windfall; Where to Eat, Sleep and Play in the U.S.A. (Bronxville: The Traveler‟s Windfall Association, Inc., 1941), iii. 1360 Roland L. Hill, Living the Life of Rolly (Los Angeles: Wetzel Publishing Co., 1942), 128.

435 places you think he should know about and visit,” the stated value of the book rested in Hill‟s personal reputation.1361 Hill, his publishers (incredulously) claimed, had not only visited every state and county, but he had walked onto “every” college campus in the United States, stopped at “every” national monument, and had otherwise “patronized most of the 9,000 places recommended in the book.” His long list of honors, accolades, and various forms of commendations acted as validation and credentials for his guidebook-authorship skills. Unlike his contemporary Duncan Hines, Roland Hill did not provide a list of criteria used to evaluate restaurants or other accommodations. Yet he did follow in his competitor‟s footsteps when seeking monetary remuneration from the businesses he included in the guidebook. Not only did he offer to sell restaurants a “certificate of recommendation” for $1.00, but he then pressed restaurants to send him $5.00— expressly not as an advertising fee, but for the “listing.” “You couldn‟t buy your way into HILLSWAY—you had to be patronized and scrutinized and picked by the author,” explained the publisher by way of justification; “but now that you are selected, we, the publishers, feel it is only right, just and proper that you do a little to help in the publishing and distributing of this book that so greatly enhances the prestige of your already fine place.”1362 Hill wanted his initial selections to appear unbiased, but he was nonetheless not keen on restaurants getting “free” advertising from his publications. The question of who would benefit most from the guidebook publication—the customer, the restaurant, or the publisher—varied from book to book, yet the majority of dining guides that did not

1361 Roland L. Hill, Hillsway: America‟s Only Where to Go, Stop, Eat, Play and Shop Travel Guide (Long Beach, CA: Hillsway Co., 1954), 3. 1362 Hill, Hillsway, 76, 88. 436 accept payment for listings emphasized their obligation to the reader, especially dining handbooks for particular cities. Restaurant guides to individual cities published up through World War II paid particular attention to cultivating visitors‟ appreciation of that urban center‟s culinary offerings. Ruth Thompson, whose book Eating Around San Francisco first appeared on bookstore shelves in 1937, collected the stories she wrote about the city‟s restaurants over a four-year span for the San Francisco News. Leading with the caveat that it was impossible to list all of San Francisco‟s restaurants, Thompson explained that her intention was to relay the tales of the “picturesque, typical, historical, romantic, and interesting houses of good food.” Her introduction set up the history of the city as a “restaurant-eating center,” encouraging readers to get excited about both the food and the lore of the area‟s public dining rooms.1363 Across the continent, G. Selmer Fougner, who offered his job as a food and wine columnist as authorship credentials, complied a handbook of New York restaurants, Dining Out in New York and What to Order (1939). Acknowledging other New York restaurant guides and their comprehensive inventories of eating places, such as the New York Sun‟s “Where to Dine” list, Fougner explained that his book intended to fill the need “to tell the prospective diner-out just what to order in the better restaurants of New York.” This stated purpose implied that novice customers, whether “a visitor to the city or a permanent city dweller who dines out occasionally,” had not yet developed the faculties to select the tastiest menu items or to identify the house specialties.1364 Apparently, Foughner‟s guide was successful in its intentions because the New York Sun followed up its “Where to Dine” columns with its

1363 Ruth Thompson, Eating Around San Francisco (San Francisco: Suttonhouse Ltd., 1937), iii, v. 1364 G. Selmer Foughner, Dining Out in New York and What to Order (New York: H.C. Kinsey and Co., 1939), vii. 437 own guidebook of the same name complete with menu recommendations. The Sun took their responsibility to consumers a step further by inviting readers to contact their “Where to Dine Bureau,” where staff members were “always happy to give you personal advice and, if you wish, to make reservations at any restaurant.”1365 Competition existed not only among restaurants but among guides to restaurants as well.

Guidebooks to major cities such as New Orleans and Washington, D.C., also appeared during the war years. Merlin “Scoop” Kennedy, who authored Dining in New Orleans and then joined the Red Cross after delivering the manuscript, was a native of the Crescent City and a consummate eater. The guidebook submitted Kennedy‟s credentials by way of Arnold Gingrich, then-editor of Esquire magazine, who introduced Kennedy to readers as “The People‟s Gourmet.” Customers, and in particular tourists, constituted Kennedy‟s audience. After detailing the purpose of the book and the methods for selecting its twenty-nine recommended restaurants, Kennedy referenced the thousands of visitors who had arrived in New Orleans, aware of the city‟s reputation for food, but unsure of the most interesting places to eat. “This book,” stated Kennedy in straightforward terms, “attempts to act as an honest and reliable guide to a cross section of New Orleans‟ better eating houses.”1366 In contrast, Washington‟s Dining Out Guide

(1944) was “dedicated to those Washingtonians who live to eat—and not vice versa.” Consisting of recommendations generated from a cross-section of Washingtonians, “including a Government worker, a journalist, a housewife, a Navy lieutenant, a chemist, an advertising specialist, a home economist, and a publisher,” the book attempted to offer dining suggestions across a range of prices and cuisines. This guide, too, invited readers

1365 Virginia Forbes, Where to Dine (New York: The Sun, 1945), iv. 1366 Scoop Kennedy, Dining Out in New Orleans (New Orleans: Bormon House, 1945), 16-17.

438 to write in with their own opinions, and it also gave a nod to Adventures in Good Eating and The Traveler‟s Windfall, noting which of its restaurants cross-listed with these publications.1367 The implicit and explicit references in restaurant guidebooks to other dining directories helped to distinguish each book‟s particular niche, especially as the number of restaurant guides appearing on bookstore shelves and cash register sales racks skyrocketed in the years following World War II. New York, San Francisco, New Orleans—these cities cultivated a reputation early in the twentieth century for being centers of culinary creativity. Yet, with the growth of restaurant patrons in the age of the automobile, coupled with the increased frequency with which people ate out to save time during World War II and a renewed focus on shared family experiences after the war, regions less known for their restaurants called attention to their local gems in postwar guidebooks. Boston, a city with a solid restaurant history dating back to the nineteenth century, encouraged visitors and residents alike to enjoy the adventurous experience of dining out. In 1938, the Woman‟s City Club of Boston celebrated its twenty-fifth birthday with a new edition of Where to Stop and Shop in Boston and Along New England Motor Trails, which included numerous suggestions for recommended roadside restaurants.1368 Guidebooks such as Beans, Beef, & Bourbon:

A Native Guide to Dining and Wining in the Boston Area (1955) and Boston Dines Out (1964) steered customers‟ tastebuds to the likes of the Hi-Da-Way on Boylston Place, a home-cooking eatery, and the Locke-Ober, “the city‟s most respected restaurant.”1369

1367 M. B. Schnapper, Washington‟s Dining Out Guide (Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press, 1944, iii- iv. 1368 Where to Shop and Where to Stop in Boston and Along New England Motor Trails (Boston: Women‟s City Club of Boston, 1938). 1369 Harland and Ann Riker, Beans, Beef, and Bourbon: A Native Guide to Dining and Wining in the Boston Area (Boston: Harland A. Riker, Jr., 1955), 25; Bill Boston and Woody Hub, Boston Dines Out (Boston: Boston Dines Out, 1964), 45. 439

Further south down the East Coast, Eating Out in Philadelphia (1948) introduced visitors to the city‟s “heritage of good eating,” while The Weekly Guide to Ocean City, New Jersey kept tourists up-to-date with a list of “The Favorites for Fine Food,” including local hot-spots like The Chatterbox and Hogate‟s Sea Food Restaurant.1370 In the Midwest, locals and tourists alike who considered themselves part of “a discriminating public” discovered the “traditionally excellent food, moderate prices…complete air-conditioning and…genial hospitality” of Ohio‟s celebrated restaurants through guides like Dining Out: Interesting Places to Dine in Ohio.1371

Newspaper columnists and gourmet dining clubs published their own “gastronomical tours” of Chicago, including Eating Out in Chicago (1947) and Your Key to Dining Out in Chicago (1952), to help the reader “assert yourself as a gourmet and zestfully discover those „new spots.‟”1372 States along the Pacific Coast refused to be left out the culinary spotlight, and guides such as Eating Up and Down the Coast: A Gastronomic Guide to Sunset Land (1935), Doorway to Good Living…Along the Western Wonderland (1948), You Can‟t Eat Mount Rainier! (1955), and its aptly titled sequel, You Still Can‟t Eat Mount Rainier! (1961) challenged the region‟s restaurant “inferiority complex” and invited readers to experience the best of Western hospitality.1373

Numerous restaurant guidebooks tapped into the postwar ambition among white, middle-class housewives to prepare elaborate meals for family and guests, a trend

1370 Eating Out in Philadelphia (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Inquirer, 1948); Weekly Guide of Ocean City, N.J., July 6, 1957, 38, 40. 1371 Dining Out: Interesting Places to Dine in Ohio (Cleveland: Dining Out Publishing Co., 1946), 3. 1372 Elizabeth Rannells, Eating Out in Chicago (Chicago: The Chicago Sun, 1947), 1; Your Key to Dining Out in Chicago, 2. 1373 Eating Up and Down the Coast: A Gastronomic Guide to Sunset Land (San Francisco: Sunset Magazine, 1935); James Lewis, Doorway to Good Living: Selected Places Along the Western Wonderland (Beverly Hills: Lewis Publicity Service, 1948); William C. Speidel, Jr., You Can‟t Eat Mount Rainier! (Portland: Binfords and Mort, 1955), 1; William C. Speidel, Jr., You Still Can‟t Eat Mount Rainier! (Seattle: Nettle Creek Publishing Co., 1961). 440 cookbook authors and publishers were already exploiting.1374 In a dual gesture toward dining out and dining in, restaurant guides covering regions throughout the United States recommended popular or famous restaurants accompanied by a recipe or two from the restaurant‟s chef. The Ford Treasury of Favorite Recipes from Famous Eating Places (1950) and its companion volume (1954), as well as Ruth Noble‟s Guide to Distinctive

Dining: Recipes from Famous Restaurants of America (1954) and Ruth Chier Rosen‟s Restaurant-Tour: A Guide to the Best Dining in the United States with a Favorite Recipe From Each Restaurant (1959) rounded out some of the most popular restaurant-recipe guidebooks that were national in scope. Regional favorites included Florida‟s Famous Eating Places with Their Favorite Recipes (1956); Dining a la Oregon (1959); and A Cook‟s Tour of San Francisco: The Best Restaurants and Their Recipes (1963).1375 These guides provided out-of-town visitors to the restaurants with a kind of “edible souvenir,” as coined by one travel director, keepsakes that allowed them to savor their culinary travel adventures once the trip was over, a similar concept to restaurant‟s distribution of their own souvenir picture postcards. In general, travelers could count on restaurant guidebooks to help them “locate better-than-average restaurants while touring” and explore the regional and ethnic

1374 For more on this “Housewife‟s Dream,” see Laura Shapiro, Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), esp. chap. 1. 1375John A. Armstrong, Dining a la Oregon: A Guide to Eating Adventures in Oregon Restaurants Featuring Famous Recipes for Specialties of the House (Portland: J and K Publishing Co., 1959); Gertrude S. Booth, Florida‟s Famous Eating Places with Their Favorite Recipes (Gainesville: Gertrude S. Booth, 1956); Nancy Kennedy, The Ford Treasury of Favorite Recipes from Famous Eating Places (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1950); Nancy Kennedy, The Second Ford Treasury of Recipes from Famous Eating Places (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1954); Doris Muscatine, A Cook‟s Tour of San Francisco: The Best Restaurants and Their Recipes (New York: Charles Scribner‟s Sons, 1963); Ruth V. Noble, A Guide to Distinctive Dining: Recipes from Famous Restaurants of America (Cambridge, MA: Berkshire Publishing Co., 1954); Ruth Chier Rosen, Restaurant-Tour: A Guide to the Best Dining in the United States with a Favorite Recipe from Each Restaurant (New York: Richard Rosen Associates, 1959).

441 diversity of the nation‟s cuisine.1376 Yet the majority of dining directories published from the 1920s through the 1960s targeted a predominately white, gentile, middle-class readership that adhered to traditional gender roles and conventional family values. Although they rarely (if ever) mentioned specific groups excluded from their imagined audiences, restaurant guidebooks implicitly fostered a fraternity of middle-class white consumers and privileged white authority as the dominant social discourse. To this end, mainstream guidebooks included recommendations of restaurants that refused service to people of color simply because these restaurants‟ policies, as part of the public dining status quo, existed as a non-issue for most white authors and readers alike. In contrast to the title of the California dining directory, Everybody‟s Restaurant Guide (1953), not “everybody” could count on mainstream restaurant guidebooks.1377

DISCRIMINATING DINING: U.S. INEQUALITY IN RESTAURANT SERVICE

African Americans faced discrimination in restaurants both in and outside of the U.S. South, so many black travelers chose either to pack meals to carry along for the entire trip, or they sought to patronize black-owned businesses where they knew they would be welcomed. The number of black entrepreneurs who opened restaurants outside of the south in the northern and western United States increased substantially during the years of the Great Migration. From 1900 to 1940, approximately 1.7 million African Americans migrated from the U.S. South to urban centers in the north and west, especially New York City and Chicago.1378 Between 1910 and 1920, Chicago‟s African

1376 Carol Lane, Traveling By Car: A Family Planning Guide to Better Vacations (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1954), 149-151. 1377 Edward M. Wait and John Clark, Everybody‟s Restaurant Guide (Berkeley: Everybody‟s Restaurant Guide, 1953). 1378 Robert E. Weems, Jr., Desegregating the Dollar: African American Consumerism in the Twentieth Century (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 7. 442

American population increased from 44,103 to 109,456, and New York City‟s rose from 91,709 to 152,467.1379 Restaurants were both a viable business opportunity and a source of social clout, since the identity of being a black entrepreneur carried social prestige. One survey by the Negro Business League in 1928 found that restaurants and groceries comprised thirty percent of the total number of black-owned businesses, and in 1930, over 200 women were listed in a city directory under the title of “restaurateur.” Tracey Poe argues that for African Americans, “the process of becoming entrepreneurs and consumers was, paradoxically, a submission to the middle class values that dominated

American society and an expression of individuality and ethnic pride.”1380 These middle- class values included an effort on the part of middle-class black consumers to favor more “respectable” restaurants rather than the less-refined eateries.

African American women and men who opened restaurants in the 1920s through 1940s catered to the growing number of black travelers, especially those migrating north who sought out regionally-familiar foods. In the 1940s, Helen Aglin and her husband Hubert launched the popular H&H Café in Chicago, while in Richmond, California, Minnie Lue Nichols prepared Southern food for a local restaurant, which proved to be so popular for migrants looking for “cultural continuity,” she was able to take over the restaurant operation from the previous owner.1381At the Howard Restaurant outside of Decatur, Georgia, the African American owners, Captain and Mrs. Henry Howard,

1379 Elizabeth Ross Haynes, “Negroes in Domestic Service in the United States,” Journal of Negro History 8 (October 1923): 388. 1380 Tracey N. Poe, “The Origins of Soul Food in Black Urban Identity, Chicago, 1915-1947,” in Food in the U.S.A. A Reader, ed. Carole M. Counihan (New York: Routledge, 2002), 92, 99-103. 1381 Poe, “Origins of Soul Food,” 91; Shirley Ann Wilson Moore, “„Not in Somebody‟s Kitchen‟: African American Women Workers in Richmond, California, and the Impact of World War II,” in Writing the Range: Race, Class, and Culture in the Women‟s West, ed. Elizabeth Jameson and Susan Armitage (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997), 524-525.

443 decided to deter white patrons in order to make their black customers feel more welcome. “We do not solicit white customers, but they come,” explained Mrs. Howard in 1929. “At first we were not sure about serving them here in the restaurant, but my lawyer looked up the matter at my request and found that I could. However, they create a problem here in the South, and we have decided to screen them off when they come in because our own colored customers object to eating with them.”1382 For the Howards, providing a service for black patrons carried more social (and financial) weight than the money brought in by white customers. Similarly, Billy‟s Café in Little Rock, Arkansas, operated by H. M.

Whitcomb, made a point to advertise widely with the slogan, “Where Colored People Are Served the Best of Food,” leaving no question about his prioritized customers.1383 These restaurants, however, were often difficult to locate for out-of-town visitors.

Wealthy blacks, as well as poor ones, were shut out of most high-end, white- owned restaurants. A group of social anthropologists observed in their fieldwork from the 1930s that African American “members of the upper economic group…cannot eat in white restaurants…of the same economic level as their own….Well-to-do colored persons of the professional group cannot even wait inside white restaurants in Old City for sandwiches to be eaten outside.”1384 Likewise, Hortense Powdermaker, a cultural anthropologist, concurred. “Any American visitor [to the Deep South]….will note that here, as in many places up north, Negroes are not allowed to eat in white restaurants,” Powdermaker remarked, “but [they] may patronize two or three small eating places run by and for colored people.”1385 In 1934, the Crisis reported on protests by African

1382 Albon L. Hosley, “The Restaurant „Too Far Out,‟” Crisis, September 1929, 320. 1383 Ernest W. Fair, “Little Rock: A Good Place to Do Business,” American Restaurant, September 1948, 62. 1384 Allison Davis Burleigh B. Gardner and Mary R. Gardner, Deep South: A Social Anthropological Study of Caste and Class (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1941), 466. 1385 Powdermaker, After Freedom, 43. 444

Americans and Mexican Americans over a restaurant in Monrovia, California, that posted a sign in its window declaring that it served to “white[s] only.”1386 On the occasion when white-owned restaurants accepted black patronage, usually out of financial necessity, they created separate entrances for black customers and often hung curtain dividers between dining sections to prevent white and black diners from observing one another while eating.1387 However, for the most part, white-owned restaurants refused to serve African Americans in search of a meal, and increasingly throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, middle-class black businessmen and leisure travelers, fed up with the discriminatory practices, filed suit against the offending restaurants. The number of reported instances of racial discrimination in restaurants is substantial and yet, in all likelihood, accounts for only a minute proportion of the actual number of cases where African Americans were denied service in restaurants prior to 1964. One of the earliest and most notorious debates surrounding discrimination in restaurants occurred in 1934, when Oscar De Priest, the only black member of Congress, protested against the policy of the House of Representative‟s public restaurant to refuse service to black patrons. The House operated a smaller restaurant in the basement for African American employees and visitors, reserving its other restaurant for whites only.

De Priest collected the number of signatures required to bring his resolution to the floor of the House, and representatives voted to assemble a special committee to investigate the issue. In May 1934, the five-member committee voted to maintain racial segregation in the House restaurant, an establishment run with taxpayers‟ money. To avoid the charge that a government-operated public dining room was refusing service to some of its

1386 Daisy Lampkin, “California Campaigns for the N.A.A.C.P.,” Crisis, July 1934, 210-211. 1387 Mark M. Smith, How Race Is Made: Slavery, Segregation, and the Senses (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 88. 445 citizens, the restaurant changed the sign from “Public Restaurant” to “For Members Only,” yet it continued to allow the white public to eat in its dining room.1388 Controversies surrounding racial discrimination in restaurants persisted through the 1940s and into the early 1960s. Following the House Restaurant debate, one of the most prominent disputes involved the popular and ubiquitous restaurant chain, Howard

Johnson‟s. As described in Chapter Two, Howard Johnson started one of the first and most successful restaurant chains in the United States with a small soda fountain operation in

1925. In 1935 he began franchising his roadside restaurants, and by 1941 there were 150 Howard Johnson‟s restaurants feeding travelers throughout New England and the Mid- Atlantic regions.1389 Between 1945 and 1948, Johnson expanded his roadside empire by authorizing the opening of approximately 15 new locations each year. In 1947, Johnson‟s 230 restaurants pulled in $150 million from customers, and by 1948 Johnson had set his sights on expanding west into California.1390 Yet all was not smooth sailing for Johnson‟s chain of orange-roofed restaurants. In 1941, Thurgood Marshall, then assistant special counsel for the NAACP, was refused service at a Howard Johnson‟s restaurant in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Marshall, livid over the encounter, managed to eke out an apology from the chain, only to be refused service again at the same location in 1947. This time, unable to produce his desired outcome, Marshall sued the restaurant for $500.1391 In

1388 Elliott M. Rudwick, “Oscar De Priest and the Jim Crow Restaurant in the U. S. House of Representatives,” Journal of Negro Education 35, no. 1 (Winter 1966): 77-82; “House Forced to Act on Negro Dining Issue as De Priest Petition Gets 145th Signature,” New York Times, March 24, 1934, 17; Louis Lautier, “Jim Crow in the Nation‟s Capital,” Crisis, April 1940, 107. 1389 John A. Jackle and Keith A. Sculle, Fast Food: Roadside Restaurants in the Automobile Age (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 74-75. 1390 “28 Flavors Head West,” Life, September 6, 1948, 71. 1391 Susan Sessions Rugh, Are Where There Yet? The Golden Age of American Family Vacations (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2008), 85. 446

1945, a black staff director at Howard University sued the same Elizabeth, New Jersey, Howard Johnson‟s restaurant for being denied service and an all-woman jury awarded him $100.1392 A decade later, a different Howard Johnson‟s location refused service to another important figure: the Finance Minister of Ghana, K. A Gbedemah, a man considered to be the second most powerful person in Ghana. Along with his African American private secretary, Gbedemah stopped by a Howard Johnson‟s in Dover, Delaware, on his way to an event where he was the guest of honor. When the two men asked to purchase some orange juice, the waitress gave them the drink to go, informing the Minister that “colored people are not allowed to eat here.” The girl then called over the manager, who repeated the statement and refused to serve Gbedemah, even after he provided identification of his position. Gbedemah paid for the orange juice, left it sitting on the counter, and departed the restaurant.1393 The incident was an international embarrassment for the United States and made the front-page news of the Washington Post. Journalists speculated about the extent of “the harm done to America‟s prestige and influence” in nations populated by people of color, and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles conveyed his regret, worrying about the future significance of the event on foreign policy.1394 The State Department issued a public statement condemning the actions of the franchise, and the U.S. Ambassador to Ghana, Wilson C. Flake, disingenuously asserted that the discriminatory action was “an exceptional and isolated incident that does not reflect the view of the United States

1392 “Branch News,” Crisis, July 1945, 201. 1393 “Ghana‟s Finance Minister Is Ejected By Restaurant Catering to Whites,” Washington Post, October 9, 1957, A1; “Restaurant Bars African Leader,” New York Times, October 9, 1957, 20. 1394 “Color and Caste,” Washington Post, October 10, 1957, A14.

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Government, nor of the vast majority of the American public.”1395 Mr. Gbedemah, who had hosted Richard Nixon in Ghana in March 1957, revealed that he “intend[ed] to demand an apology from the Howard Johnson chain” and surmised, “If the Vice President of the United States can have a meal in my house when he is in Ghana, and if Adlai Stevenson can come into my home, then I cannot understand why I must receive this treatment at a roadside restaurant in America.”1396 American representatives offered few convincing answers. Howard Johnson, the president of the company, claimed he had attempted to contact Mr. Gbedmah to apologize personally and “to assure him that the organization‟s policy was to serve everyone without discrimination”; additionally, Johnson reportedly reprimanded the operators of the Dover franchise unit, brothers Harry and Jack Cooke, and reminded them that “the organization‟s policy was to serve everyone without discrimination.” Jack Cooke, though, who had explained away the incident by stating that it was “the custom of the area” not to serve black patrons, offered a less-than-convincing gesture when he reported, “I believe we [the Cooke brothers] will extend a written apology to the gentleman,” and then refused to decide whether they would change their discrimination policy until consulting his brother, who was out of town.1397 Apparently, this response was inadequate because the next day, a spokesman for the franchise said that this particular restaurant would change its policy in the future. Victor Nelson, the vice president and general manager of the Howard Johnson Company also refused to acquiesce to the proposition of barring discrimination in all Howard Johnson‟s

1395 Morrey Dunie, “Snubbed Ghana Visitor Gets Bid To Breakfast With President, Nixon,” Washington Post, October 10, 1957, A1. 1396 “Restaurant Bars African Leader,” 20; “Ghana‟s Finance Minister Is Ejected,” A1. 1397 Dunie, “Snubbed Ghana Visitor,” A20 (emphasis added). Newspaper accounts spell the brothers‟ surname both as “Cook” and “Cooke.” 448 restaurants, including franchises, instead allowing, “We do not dictate that type of policy. We might have to in the future.” He also added, “It shouldn‟t be necessary after all this publicity.”1398 Even though restaurant leaders were facing international scrutiny over their policies of racial discrimination, the pressure apparently was not enough to make them modify their guiding principles.

President Eisenhower (whom some suspected had at one time invested financially in a Howard Johnson‟s franchise) intervened at this point in an effort to smooth out the situation, calling the Minister to apologize and inviting him for breakfast at the White

House.1399 At a morning meal of bacon, eggs, toast, and coffee, with orange juice conspicuously absent, Eisenhower tried to lighten the importance of the racial snub by telling Gbedemah that “little things like that happen all over the place and you don‟t know where they‟re going to blow up, or when.”1400 Although Gbedemah accepted the president‟s apology, others were a little less forgiving. Democratic Congressman from Michigan, Charles C. Diggs, Jr., appreciated Eisenhower‟s gesture, but remarked, “such humiliation is experienced frequently by numerous Negroes in practically every city in the north,” adding, “if the President sits down to eat with every Negro who is refused service in an American restaurant, he may as well move his office into his dining room.”1401 Diggs‟s quip was on target in pointing out that one high-ranking effort to repair a newsworthy instance of racial discrimination glossed over the everyday prominence of the bigoted practice.

1398 “Ike‟s Breakfast Soothes Visitor,” Washington Post, October 11, 1957; Dunie, “Snubbed Ghana Visitor,” A20. 1399 Peter Kihss, “President to Be Host to Snubbed Ghanan,” New York Times, October 10, 1957, 1; Dunie, “Snubbed Ghana Visitor,” A1. 1400 “Ike‟s Breakfast Soothes Visitor,” A12; “Eisenhower Apologizes for Snub to African,” Los Angeles Times, October 11, 1957, 16. 1401 “Ike Effort In Delaware Case Praised,” Washington Post, October 12, 1957, A2.

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Indeed, the statements made by representatives of the Howard Johnson‟s Company belie the official policies outlined by the company at its first annual Management Seminar, held at Cornell University just seven months earlier. At that meeting, Professor John Sherry addressed the attendants with a speech titled, “Legal Aspects of the Restaurant Industry.” Sherry‟s advice, as an official agent of Howard

Johnson‟s, is worth quoting at length to demonstrate the company‟s financial investment, ironically, both in maintaining African American patrons and refusing them service. “[R]estaurants have been privileged to pick and choose their customers,” Sherry explained to his audience of Howard Johnson‟s operators:

The only limitation upon this right, and it is a very important limitation, is that there shall be no discrimination upon grounds of race, creed, or color in states which have enacted so-called „Civil Rights‟ laws….You have to be extremely tactful, patient, and understanding, as a Howard Johnson‟s manager, in dealing with this issue in those sections of the country where it affects you. The reason is obvious. Howard Johnson‟s is a national institution. Howard Johnson is doing business in the North as well as the South…and if you offend the traveler…in one part of the country, he will carry the grievance back home, and nothing, nothing, travels faster…than bad publicity….If by local custom or local law, you feel compelled or constrained to decline service to a patron because of his color, do so with courtesy and tact. Make the patron sense that you intend no offense.…Ask him for his understanding and in nine cases out of ten, you shall have a friend, instead of an enemy; a friend, who when he comes North, where his patronage is welcome and acceptable, will speak well of you and of Howard Johnson, because he was treated with genuine sympathy, even though you refused to serve him.1402

Not only did Sherry instruct Howard Johnson‟s managers in the “art” of discrimination, but his claims also counter Johnson‟s response after the fiasco with Minister Gbedemah,

1402 John Sherry, “Legal Aspects of the Restaurant Industry” (presented at Howard Johnson‟s First Annual Management Seminar, School of Hotel Administration, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, March 6-8, 1957). 450 where the restaurant leader and company president insisted “the organization‟s policy was to serve everyone without discrimination.”1403 Racial discrimination was an accepted and persistent practice among Howard Johnson‟s restaurants, including franchises and those owned by the company (each of which operated about fifty percent of the total), even in the years following the Ghanaian debacle.1404

Remarkably, the affront against Ghana‟s Finance Minister was not the first time a restaurant in the United States had discriminated against a foreign dignitary by “mistaking” him for a “Negro.” Just two years earlier, Gaganvihari Lallubhai Mehta,

India‟s Ambassador to the United States, passed through Houston‟s airport on his way to Mexico City. Although Texas law at the time dictated that whites and blacks be seated in separate public dining rooms, Houston‟s airport contract with the Federal government explicitly forbade discrimination based on race. According to witnesses, Mehta and his private secretary entered the restaurant and the supervisor, Mrs. Mary Alley, directed them to a small room behind the cashier station because “she thought they were Negroes,” snipping at one customer who questioned her behavior with the statement, “the law is the law.1405 (Two days later Alley tried to cover up her “error” by explaining she had guided the men to a private dining room because “she had recognized Mr. Mehta as an important person.”1406 Witnesses countered this claim.) Embarrassed on an international scale, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles issued a hasty apology to Mehta, and the State Department also released an official “expression of regret.”

1403 Kihss, “President to Be Host,” 1. 1404 Dunie, “Snubbed Ghana Visitor,” A1. 1405 “Houston Restaurant Bans India Ambassador to U.S.,” Los Angeles Times, August 23, 1955, 26; “Incident in Houston,” New York Times, August 28, 1955, E2. 1406 “Denies Segregation,” New York Times, August 25, 1955, 23.

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Houston‟s mayor apologized “in [sic] behalf of every citizen of Houston.”1407 Editorials poured into leading American newspapers critiquing the incident as a slight to the international power of the United States, whose “prestige” would be discredited among non-white peoples of the world, especially when word spread that Mehta had “politely” refused an invitation to the Houston mayor‟s home.1408 Yet this highly-visible and widely-reported example of the pervasiveness of racial prejudice and inequality in the United States did not prompt the Federal government to pursue legal changes. Instead, individuals, inspired by the “holes” in the discrimination rationale, used these examples as motivation to break past the barriers of segregation and discrimination in restaurants. African American individuals tried to counter the practice of racial discrimination in Howard Johnson‟s and other restaurants by “passing” as foreigners to infiltrate the establishments. Revealing the instability of race as a demographically-defining category, African Americans throughout the twentieth century postured as foreign visitors, since white Americans differentiated between American citizens of color and foreign nationals. Ironically, foreigners had more rights in U. S. restaurants than non-white taxpaying American citizens. In 1917, the renowned African American author Charles Chestnutt was traveling through Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, with his family when they stopped at a restaurant to eat. Although they were seated without incident, Chestnutt noticed the manager scrutinizing them first and then heading in their direction. Promptly, Chestnutt began conversing with his daughters in French, and the manager, who assumed they were

1407 “Segregation of Indian Brings U.S. Apologies,” Washington Post, August 24, 1955, 6; “Houston Color Line Is Studied By C.A.A.,” New York Times, August 28, 1955, 82; “Envoy Is Victim of Segregation,” New York Times, August 24, 1955, 4. 1408 “The Color Line,” Washington Post, August 24, 1955, 26; “A Note for Mr. Mehta,” New York Times, August 26, 1955, 18; “India‟s Envoy Declines Invitation to Houston,” Los Angeles Times, August 25, 1955, 34; “Envoy Rejects Invitation,” New York Times, August 25, 1955, 23.

452 foreigners, backed off because “foreigners” were not subject to the same discrimination policies as African Americans.1409 During the debate over integrating the House of Representatives restaurant in the 1930s, a Howard University history professor dined there with several white colleagues. The management asked if he were a foreigner, in which case he could remain with his party. When the professor admitted he was not, employees ordered him to leave.1410 A decade later, a black clergyman proudly shared with the African American community that his rental of a turban from a costume shop had successfully allowed him to pass as a foreign dignitary and to dine at a restaurant in

Mobile, Alabama, from where he had been turned away in 1943 when wearing his clerical collar.1411 These kinds of instances motivated the editor of the St. Louis Argus to send out two black men on assignment to a local Howard Johnson‟s restaurant decked in “turbans, berets, goatees, foreign accents, and a chauffeured Cadillac limousine.” Their goal: to gain admittance to the restaurant on the pretense that they were dark-skinned foreign diplomats, similar to Mehta and Gbedemah. Claiming to be representatives of Liberia, the two men seated themselves only to have the embarrassed hostess haltingly explain, “You all are from Washington and maybe you don‟t know about these things. But…this restaurant is located in a colored neighborhood. So when news got out that we served colored people, well, then there would be an influx of colored people in the restaurant, and that would be just terrible.” When the men asked her why black patronage would be “terrible,” she offered, “Well, you would not understand. But I can‟t make any

1409 Mark S. Foster, “In the Face of „Jim Crow‟: Prosperous Blacks and Vacations, Travel and Outdoor Leisure, 1890-1945,” Journal of Negro History 84, no. 2 (Spring 1999), 141. 1410 Rudwick, “Oscar De Priest,” 79. 1411 “Negro Wears Turban, Feted in Alabama,” Washington Post, November 17, 1947, B9.

453 exceptions. You might be better than they are, but you all look alike.”1412 The deeply- rooted bigotry expressed in the hostess‟s off-handed comments exposed the problems that all people of color faced when trying to secure a meal while traveling through unfamiliar cities and states. Howard Johnson‟s restaurants continued to face accusations of racial discrimination through the early 1960s. In 1959, an African American attorney employed by the Internal Revenue Service filed federal charges against a Howard Johnson‟s in Alexandria, Virginia, for refusing to serve him on April 20, 1958. The U.S. District Court dismissed the case, but the plaintiff, Charles E. Williams, appealed, arguing his case based on two factors: 1) because the state furnished licenses to restaurants to operate, the State was “burdened with the positive duty to prohibit against unjust discrimination in the use and enjoyment of the facilities; and 2) because the restaurant was located next to an interstate highway, the discrimination was in violation of interstate commerce laws. The U.S Court of Appeals affirmed the judgment of the District Court and dismissed the case. Then, in 1961, the State Department fielded another complaint from a foreign diplomat— this time, it was Dr. William Fitzjohn of Sierra Leone—who reported that a Howard Johnson‟s in Hagerstown, Maryland, had refused to serve him. Once again, the president of the chain, Howard Johnson, issued a rather empty apology that claimed his restaurants‟ policy of refusing service to persons of color would be reversed.1413 Not surprisingly, based on the company‟s track record, just five months later an African American man filed a complaint with the State Department stating that he and his children had been turned away from the same Hagerstown Howard Johnson‟s. At this point, the government

1412 “Turbans Fail to Budge Bias,” Jet, November 14, 1957, 8-9. 1413 Albert Woodruff Gray, “Discrimination in State-Licensed Restaurant,” Restaurant Management, December 1959, 46; Lloyd Garrison, “Negro Lays Bias To Johnson Chain,” New York Times, August 17, 1961, 51. 454 agency exerted more pressure on Johnson, and in December 1962, the company issued a letter to all of its managers stating that Howard Johnson‟s restaurants would no longer operate under guidelines that excluded African Americans as customers. An important caveat remained. Johnson maintained that franchises, which constituted 359 of the 656 Howard Johnson‟s restaurants nationwide, did not fall under these same restrictions, since the “[t]erms of these agreements do not give company control over racial policies.”1414 In essence, Johnson cited his legal agreements with the franchise units to skirt the company‟s stated commitment to integrating its restaurants.

The great extent to which restaurants throughout the United States discriminated against African Americans and other customers based on race and ethnicity is a widely- accepted fact of U.S. history. Howard Johnson‟s restaurants found themselves in the national spotlight because of their prominence along the country‟s highways and their overall popularity among American consumers.1415 The discriminatory practices of other, lesser-known restaurants are not as carefully documented in the popular media, but they were prevalent nonetheless, even among restaurants operated by people who faced their own forms of discrimination. In 1934, the San Francisco branch of the NAACP sued a restaurant operated by an Italian proprietor on the grounds that he had refused service to a black woman. Yet during the trial, “the Italian tried to pose as a Negro (merely temporarily!) but the lawyer for the plaintiff quickly exploded that attempted change of racial identity.”1416 Whether the Italian thought the judge would sympathize more with

1414 “Restaurant Cities Integration Gain,” New York Times, December 7, 1952, 27; “Howard Johnson Cities Desegregation Record,” Washington Post, December 8, 1962, A4. 1415 Howard Johnson‟s was not the only popular chain accused of discrimination. A black journalist who was denied service at a White Tower restaurant on Highway 40 near Baltimore filed a lawsuit against that well-known chain in 1961. See Alfred Woodruff Gray, “Legal Briefs,” Restaurant Management, March 1961, 36. 1416 Daisy Lumpkin, “California Campaigns for N.A.A.C.P.,” Crisis, July 1934, 211.

455 him as a “fellow” African American than as an Italian is unclear, but the plaintiff won the suit for $250. In North Carolina in the 1950s, Robert Seymour, Jr., a white Southern pastor, recalled taking a black friend visiting from Cameroon to dinner at the Ranch House in Chapel Hill, which was a popular restaurant operated by a family of refugees from Vienna. Although the hostess seated Seymour and his guest, fellow customers began to stare down the party, and the waiter, after taking their order, never returned. An hour later, Seymour and his friend left the restaurant hungry.1417 Another case of a restaurant owner who, as a target of discrimination himself, still refused to serve African American customers occurred in Houston, Texas. Felix Tijerina, owner of an independent group of restaurants in the city and an active civil servant, operated a handful of Felix Mexican Restaurants throughout the greater Houston area beginning in the 1930s. Tijerina, a Mexican-American whose own citizenship was questioned by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) in the 1950s, upheld a policy in his restaurants that instructed employees in detail how to refuse service to “Negroes”: “It is against the policy of the Felix Mexican restaurant to serve Negroes,” Tijerina‟s typewritten statement declared on official company letterhead. “If a Negro enters the Felix Mex. Restaurant, the proper thing to say is, „I‟m sorry, we cannot serve you.‟” After further instruction, Tijerina advised calling the police, even if the potential patron did not “become noisy or demonstrative,” in order to have him arrested for trespassing. “Explain to the police that, according to the law, we have the right to select our customers,” Tijerina asserted. “Remember, we are operating a private business, not a „public place.‟”1418 Tijerina, who had worked hard to gain standing among the white

1417 Robert E. Seymour, Jr., “Whites Only”: A Pastor‟s Retrospective on Signs of the New South (Valley Forge, PA: Judson Press, 1991), 82. 1418 “Felix Tejerina Offers Proof of U.S. Birth,” Houston Press, February 15, 1956, 10; “Negroes,” ca. 1950s, Felix Tijerina Family Papers, Houston Public Library. 456 community in Houston, especially powerful white politicians and civic leaders, had little patience or identification with African Americans pursuing similar causes. “Let the Negro fight his own battles,” Tijerina told the Houston Chronicle in 1958; “His problems are not mine. I don‟t want to ally with him.”1419 Tijerina‟s situation, while complex on its own, still did not convince him that his own struggles for acceptance among whites translated into a need to accept and treat other people of color with equality. For Americans who faced the possibility of discrimination based on their apparent race or ethnicity every time they stepped into a new or unfamiliar restaurant, mainstream dining guidebooks failed them as “indispensable,” “valuable and vital” accessories for traveling around the United States.1420 On a number of occasions, minority groups and individuals voiced their frustrations to protest the lack of assistance offered by popular dining guides. For instance, in 1958, the Jewish Labor Committee asked the American Automobile Association (AAA) to withdraw listing for any restaurant or other accommodation that followed a policy of racial or religious discrimination. (A representative from AAA declined to comment.)1421 An African American who stopped with his wife at the Hagerstown Howard Johnson‟s in 1960 was denied service and recalled his complaint voiced to the waitress in terms of his travel memberships and guidebooks: “My polite assertions that we were very hungry; that we were U.S. citizens; strangers in the vicinity; that we had a Diner‟s club card; we were able to pay; we had

1419 Felix Tijerina quoted. in Thomas H. Kreneck, Mexican American Odyssey: Felix Tijerina, Entrepreneur and Civic Leader, 1905-1965 (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 2001), 207. 1420 Gourmet‟s Guide to Good Eating, one of the popular guidebooks compiled by the editors of Gourmet magazine, called its dining handbook a “valuable and vital accessory for every motorist and traveler” in the 1948 edition; the 1957 edition declared the guide an “indispensable handbook [that] supplies the motorist, the traveler, and the lover of good food with complete information about each restaurant” (Gourmet‟s Guide to Good Eating [1948], title page; Gourmet‟s Guide to Good Eating [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1957], cover page.) 1421 “AAA Asked Not to List Biased Motels, Hotels,” Jet, June 19, 1958, 6.

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Standard Oil and Texaco credit cards; are members of AAA, and they recommend Howard Johnson cafés to us…all of this brought firm and positive answers that we or no other colored people would be served in this Howard Johnson café.”1422 Discriminating guidebooks assumed a different meaning for minority travelers than for the directories‟ white readership.

By recommending restaurants designed around themes that objectified people of color based on insipid stereotypes, guidebooks refracted the pervasiveness of white Americans‟ belief in racial inferiority. The racist stereotypes on which numerous restaurants based their design schemes were so embedded in white American culture as to be unremarkable to white readers of mainstream guidebooks in the mid-twentieth century. Chapter Two details how plantation-themed restaurants recreated life in the Old

South, whereby white, middle-class customers could imagine themselves as part of the white Southern aristocracy in a revival of the slave plantation hierarchy. Other themed restaurants throughout the United States also modeled their decorative motifs on exaggerated and derogatory representations of black people. One of the most offensive and well-established of these racially-charged restaurants was the nationally-recognized Coon Chicken Inn.

Maxon Lester Graham, who began his career as an automobile distributor at the age of 16, opened the first Coon Chicken Inn in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 1924.1423 Based

1422 Rugh, Are We There Yet, 86. 1423 Speidel, You Can‟t Eat Mount Rainier, 54. Most secondary sources list 1925 as the restaurant‟s founding year, including an account written by Graham‟s grandson, Scott Farrar, posted to the “Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia” website hosted by Ferris State University. However, one of the restaurant‟s promotional picture postcards states that the Coon Chicken Inn had been “Established since 1924,”and Speidel‟s restaurant guide also cites 1924 as the opening year for the restaurant. See Scott Farrar, “The History of the Coon Chicken Inn,” Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia, http://www.ferris.edu/news/jimcrow/links/chicken/; postcard for Coon Chicken Inn, ca.1930s, Shoreline Historical Museum. 458 on the success of the Salt Lake City unit, Graham opened another location in Seattle in 1929, followed by a third restaurant in Portland added in 1930. Depicting as its logo an oversized “Coon” distortion of a black man‟s face with an exaggerated wink, the Inn played up associations between the U.S. South, black people, and chickens. From the days of minstrel shows in the nineteenth century, whites caricatured black men by perpetuating an image of “zip coon,” an exaggerated figure of a carefree black man adorned in gaudy, nonsensical clothing.1424 Graham adopted this racially-charged icon to launch his “nationally famous” restaurant. All of the accoutrements of the Inn—from the menus to matchbooks and coffee tokens—were adorned with the “Coon” image. Seattle‟s African American residents protested the logo, charging racial defamation, and a judge ordered Graham to discontinue use of a black face in association with the restaurant‟s name. Graham skirted the legal restriction by painting the “Coon” face red, replacing the black background with blue paint, and removing the word “Coon” from the teeth of the smiling caricature; otherwise, his advertising remained the same, countering Graham‟s disingenuous claim that “colored people were as welcome as others” to the Inn. To maintain a sense of personal connection to his white patrons, Graham circulated a house magazine called “Clucks,” where he updated customers on the goings-on and future of the Coon Chicken Inns.1425 Graham was a member of the National Restaurant Association, an affiliation confirmed by the inclusion of all three Coon Chicken Inn locations in the NRA‟s Guide

1424 Patricia A. Turner, Ceramic Uncles and Celluloid Mammies: Black Images and Their Influence on Culture (New York: Doubleday, 1994), 18-19. 1425 “Citizens Protest Against „Coon‟ Chicken Inn,” Enterprise , September 18, 1930, 8; “Coon Chicken Inn to Change Advertising,” Enterprise, September 25, 1930, 8; “Files Protest Against „Coon Chicken‟ Inn,” Northwest Enterprise, July 16, 1931, 8; “Chicken Inn Dodges Suit with Blue Paint,” Northwest Enterprise, March 17, 1932, 6; “Why Wait?” American Restaurant, May 1939, 52.

459 to Popular Restaurants (1940), and the restaurant industry held Graham and his business success—especially in the midst of the Great Depression—in high regard. In 1939, When Graham announced his plans to open a fourth location in Spokane, Washington (an intention that appears never to have materialized), the American Restaurant magazine praised Graham for his “spirit…which is helping the restaurant industry to pull out in front these days to the head of the parade of progress.”1426 Graham‟s contributions to furthering the restaurant industry in the Western United States were rewarded in 1942 when he was elected president of the Washington State Restaurant Association.1427

Both Psyche Williams-Forson and Catherine Roth call attention to the historical and social significance of the Coon Chicken Inn, especially in contextualizing the racial bigotry that persisted outside of the U.S. South and in the Pacific Northwest during the

Jim Crow era. As Roth observes, one of the most telling factors about the restaurant‟s popularity among white patrons is the infrequency with which African Americans were mentioned in the descriptive copy of the restaurant‟s advertising. This “conspicuous silence,” Roth argues, “speaks to just how uncontroversial the Coon image was for most [white] Seattlelites.” The image formed the backdrop to restaurant‟s tasty chicken and entertaining atmosphere. Similar to commercially-published photographs of automobile travel in the 1930s, the images of the Coon Chicken Inn situated black people “as objects for visual consumption rather than participants” in world of restaurant dining.1428 Guidebooks that recommended all three locations of the Coon Chicken Inn to business

1426 Guide to Popular Restaurants, 77, 89, 91; Menu , Coon Chicken Inn, Seattle, Washington, ca.1943, MOHAI; Advertisement, Coon Chicken Inn, Washington State Restaurant, Tavern and Tobacco News, June 1941, 21; “Why Wait?” 52. 1427 “M.L. Graham Elected Association President,” Washington State Restaurant and Tavern News, July 1942, cover. 1428 Gudis, Buyways, 43-44. 460 travelers and vacationing motorists reflected this disinterest in the restaurant‟s racist motif.1429 In the 1938 edition of Adventures in Good Eating, Duncan Hines‟s included the Portland, Oregon, location of the Coon Chicken Inn as one of the book‟s answers to the “distinct public demand throughout America: to the question, “where will we find a place to dine or lunch that will suit our personal tastes?”1430 Located along “the main road to the Columbia River Highway,” the restaurant was “[m]aybe a handy spot to stop,” considered Hines, adding, “As its name implies, [it] specializes on [sic] chicken.” In line with Roth‟s observation about the “conspicuous silence” surrounding the racialized iconography at the Seattle branch, Hines‟s entry did not include a photograph and made no mention of African Americans or the oversized three-dimensional “Coon” head through which customers walked to enter the restaurant.1431 Although Hines conceded in the introduction to this edition that “a few places are listed more as a matter of convenience rather than serving outstanding food,” apparently the Coon Chicken Inn was not one of these restaurants because it continued to gain recognition in guidebooks over the next decade, as increasingly more good-quality restaurants emerged onto America‟s dining stage.1432

Hines‟s competitors were even more enthusiastic about the Coon Chicken Inn. Best Places to Eat (the guidebook compiled by the president of the Illinois Automobile

1429 Psyche A. Williams-Forson, Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, and Power (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 66-72; Catherine Roth, “The Coon Chicken Inn: North Seattle‟s Beacon of Bigotry,” Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project, University of Washington, http://depts.washington.edu/civilr/coon_chicken.htm. Roth completed her original research and composed this essay as an undergraduate at the University of Washington, Seattle, and this essay won the 2008-2009 York Mason Award for outstanding undergraduate essay on African Americans in the West. 1430 Hines, Adventures in Good Eating (1938), viii. 1431 Hines, Adventures in Good Eating (1938), 196. 1432 Hines, Adventures in Good Eating (1938), xi. 461

Club and found to have plagiarized from AIGE) endorsed all three branches as “best places to eat” in 1942. Accompanying the record for the Portland location was a photograph of the interior with its plain, rustic booths; no indication of the racist material symbols for which the restaurant was known appear in the write-up or the image. The restaurant was described as “[a]nother link in the Northwest‟s fine group of chicken- cooked-as-chicken-should-be-cooked dispensaries. Clean, airy….The Coon Chicken Inns have gained wide popularity in this section of the country as is evidenced by their large patronage.”1433 Photographs of the inside of Seattle‟s branch reveal a similar design scheme devoid of the “Coon” logo, which was plastered all over its material objects, such as menus, placemats, matchbooks, and coffee tokens, but not the walls, booth dividers, or other structural elements of the restaurant interior. In Seattle, instead of bare wood, the interior was blanketed in a polka-dot design, which covered the walls, tables, and partitions. One possible explanation for this incongruency is that rather than modeling the interior after a chicken coop (in the vein of Topsy‟s restaurant in San Francisco) or (more disturbingly) slave quarters, both of which would have kept with the restaurant‟s “theme,” Graham decided to represent a more “homey,” country-style atmosphere. The interior portrayed a substitute “home,” while the dining accessories implied that black people were merely objects to be consumed or possessed as “mementos,” supported by the souvenir matchbooks, children‟s menus shaped like fans, and paper placemats depicting a dandified “Coon” holding a sign that read, “Take Me Home as a Souvenir.”1434

1433 Carl A. Barrett, Best Places to Eat (Chicago: Vacation Land, Inc., 1942), 443. 1434 Matchbooks, coffee token, fan-menu, and photographs, Coon Chicken Inn, Seattle, Washington, ca. 1930s/1940s, Shoreline Historical Museum; Placemat, Coon Chicken Inn, Seattle, Washington, ca. 1930s/1940s, MOHAI. 462

While Best Places to Eat included an interior shot of Portland‟s Coon Chicken Inn, the entries in Seattle and Salt Lake City were accompanied by photographs of the restaurant‟s exterior, including the massive, caricatured head of a black male with the name of the restaurant spelled out on his teeth. Yet, no reference to African Americans or the thematic motif is present other than an innocuous reference to the “originality” of the restaurant. “The same fine products you enjoy in Portland and Seattle are served here,” read the Salt Lake City blurb, “in the same unique type of atmosphere. The chicken liver plate, chicken and noodles, and baby coon special (large portion of chicken with an inviting accompaniment of trimmings) are most in favor at this spot.” Likewise, in the Seattle section, Barrett gushed that the Coon Chicken Inn was “one of the most unique places I‟ve seen in a long time and the best chicken (any style) one could wish for is served at this popular restaurant.”1435 Ironically, Barrett pointed out that “homemade pastries and plenty of fresh vegetables, plus a long list of appetizing sandwiches adorn the Coon Chicken Inn menu,” without ever calling attention to the racist iconography plastered all over the menu, too.1436 Best Places to Eat was not the only guidebook to recommend all three Coon Chicken Inn locations. Where to Eat: Dartnell’s Vest-Pocket Guide to America’s

Favorite Restaurants included endorsements for all branches of the restaurant without ever broaching the subject of race or even “atmosphere.” The Portland site could seat 250 people and served “specialty chicken.” Utah‟s operation seated 200 customers, included an orchestra, and also offered “specialty fried chicken,” although—unsurprisingly in a state with a prominent Mormon population—the restaurant had “no bar.” Seattle‟s

1435 Barrett, Best Places to Eat, 499, 515. 1436 See various menus, Coon Chicken Inn, Seattle, Washington, ca.1943, MOHAI. 463 version was similar to Portland‟s and also offered “dancing.”1437 The process by which the Coon Chicken Inn achieved recognition in Where to Eat likely entailed the following: according to paperwork exchanged between the Ivy House (another restaurant listed in Where to Eat) and the Dartnell Corporation, the company‟s editorial department distributed letters to restaurants under consideration for inclusion in the guidebook. The correspondence read, “You will be pleased to know that your restaurant has been recommended for inclusion in Dartnell‟s new edition of WHERE TO EAT. This is a book listing outstanding eating places in the United States which we compile, based on the votes of thousands of businessmen.” Along with this letter, the Dartnell Corporation enclosed a questionnaire for the restaurants under consideration to complete, which included the question, “If your restaurant has some unusual feature—murals, historical site, a good view, etc., what is it?” Either Graham did not see his racist “Coon” motif as an “unusual feature” or Dartnell‟s chose not to list it, but no mention of the restaurant‟s special racially-charged decorative “feature” appeared in the guidebook listings—only its chicken specials.1438 What is even more telling about the pervasiveness and acceptability of racial discrimination outside of the U.S. South during Jim Crow years is that instead of viewing the restaurant‟s racist theme as problematic or even “unusual,” Graham and others celebrated the originality of his food. The restaurant proudly obtained its chickens from its own local poultry shop. An advertisement for the Seattle Gas Company praised the Coon Chicken Inn “for its lusciously prepared chicken dinners.”1439 In another

1437 Harrison Little, Where to Eat: Dartnell‟s Vest Pocket Guide to America‟s Favorite Restaurants (Chicago: Dartnell Corporation, 1947), 228, 255, 261. 1438 Howard E. Reichardt to Ivy House Restaurant, October 2, 1950; Emily Routledge to Howard E. Reichardt, November 15, 1950, Ivy House Records, College of William and Mary. 1439 “Coon Chicken Inn Prefers GAS for Cooking Because „It‟s Speedy and Cooks Better,‟” Washington State Restaurant and Tavern News, June 1943, 7. 464 advertisement for the Seattle location upon its opening in 1930, the Coon Chicken Inn promised to introduce the Pacific Northwest to “a nationally-famous method of cookery” with “the best fried chicken you ever tasted!” The ad described Seattle‟s newest dining spot as a “novel, pleasing restaurant at which you‟ll enjoy eating….Throughout America our splendid foods have pleased the most discriminating palates. Coon Chicken Inn is not

„just another restaurant‟—it is an innovation providing a pleasurable change from the ordinary café—a new eating place whose cuisine is considered in a class by itself, head and shoulders above the average.”1440

Whether this last statement was intended to invoke the image of the gigantic caricatured black male head attached to the side of the building is a moot point; similar claims in the advertisement, including “[a]lthough you can‟t eat service, it nevertheless plays an important part in the enjoyment of your dish,” call attention to the performative gesture of whites consuming representations of African Americans as part of the restaurant‟s “splendid meal.”1441 It is this kind of “consumer cannibalism,” bell hooks theorizes, “that not only displaces the Other but denies the significance of that Other‟s history through a process of decontextualization.” Commodifying black people through the restaurant‟s material symbolism rendered them objects of consumption for whites.

Consuming these images or “eating the Other,” hooks argues, is the process by which “one asserts power and privilege.”1442 The consumption paradigm, however, was not reciprocal despite the contrasting symbolic gesture of the black mouth swallowing white

1440 “Coon Chicken Inn: Deliciously Different,” Seattle Times, August 31, 1930, 13. 1441 “Coon Chicken Inn: Deliciously Different,” Seattle Times, August 31, 1930, 13; Psyche Williams- Forson points out that white patrons‟ consumption of the “the Negro” is a “strange dialectic” coupled with the act of entering the restaurant through the “mouth” of the “Coon.” (Williams-Forson, Building Houses, 71.) 1442 bell hooks, “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance,” in Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992), 31, 36. 465 customers as they entered the restaurant. Rather, in looking at the architectural structure of each building, the company‟s trademark head is mounted much like a hunting trophy would be displayed in a lodge. The head does not threaten to “bite” white customers because it represents a souvenir of white social conquest. In 1949, Graham closed the Seattle location of the Coon Chicken Inn, and the other branches shut down by the early 1950s. Roth points out that Graham opened G.I. Joe‟s New Country Store in 1949 on the site of the former Seattle restaurant, and based on a lack of evidence to suggest that the Coon Chicken Inn folded because of “protests or objections,” she concludes that we can “only speculate” as to why the restaurant shut its doors.1443 One likely reason is that Graham identified a more profitable opportunity: feeding travelers at the airport. While the 1920s and 1930s claim the title of the

Automobile Age, by the 1950s, more middle- and upper-middle class adults and families began taking advantage of more affordable commercial airfares. Therefore, while Graham‟s roadside restaurants were making money even in the midst of the Great Depression, he likely recognized the potential in airport feeding and jumped at the chance to invest in the Seattle-Tacoma airport when it opened in 1949. By liquidating the Seattle location of the Coon Chicken Inn for $250,000, Graham could turn around and invest that money and equipment in businesses at the airport. Indeed, he followed this path, and by 1955 Graham owned-and-operated SEA-TAC‟s gift shop, barber shop, shoe shine, candy and magazine shops, cocktail lounge, and four restaurants, in addition to catering in-flight meals for airplane passengers on four different carriers.1444 Certainly, it appears that as an astute businessman, Graham‟s primary concern was the financial picture of his operations

1443 Roth, “Coon Chicken Inn,” par. 23. 1444 Speidel, You Can‟t Eat Mount Rainier, 54-55. 466 and the quality of his products, not the social significance of their racist motifs. In a similar fashion, guidebooks focused on the standards of his restaurants‟ food and dismissed the bigoted logo as unimportant to a white readership. Considering the number of restaurants throughout the United States that refused to serve African Americans during the Jim Crow era, it is not surprising to find that several of these popular establishments appeared on lists of the country‟s best-loved dining spots. Their inclusion in restaurant directories, however, erased the value of the dining handbooks for African Americans and other racial and ethnic minorities. The limitations of these mainstream guidebooks for marginalized motorists, which were apparent almost as soon as these travel and restaurant guides appeared in the 1920s and 1930s, prompted a few industrious authors to produce alternative guidebooks pointing the way for hungry travelers in search of a restaurant that would not turn them away.

TURNING THE TABLES: ROADSIDE DINING, DISCRIMINATION, AND ALTERNATIVE GUIDEBOOKS FOR MARGINALIZED PATRONS

The number of middle-class African Americans on the road in the interwar years who owned their own automobiles grew substantially, especially after World War I when black veterans sought to claim their rights of citizenship and consumer privileges based on their war service.1445 Automobile ownership not only signified middle-class status, but it also purported to offer black travelers an escape from the segregation and discrimination that characterized forms of public transportation. Yet the reality continued that “driving while black” had its own set of discriminatory policies, and not only in the

1445 Kathleen Franz, “„The Open Road‟: Automobility and Racial Uplift in the Interwar Years,” in Technology and the African-American Experience, ed. Bruce Sinclair (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 133. 467

South but throughout the United States, African Americans faced intimidation, threats, and refusal of service in gas stations, hotels, and restaurants.1446 Finding places to eat while on the road was a daunting task for African American motorists during Jim Crow. In “Sundown Towns,” which James Loewen defines as “any organized jurisdiction that for decades kept African Americans or other groups from living in it and thus was „all-white‟ on purpose,” black motorists with car troubles found themselves threatened by whites with shotguns, and “„keep moving‟ was the refrain, no matter why African Americans stopped.”1447 White drivers assumed control of the road, and they expected black motorists to yield under any circumstances; whites held black drivers responsible for any accident that occurred.1448 In the South, integrated eating took on a particularly nuanced social significance. The anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker reflected in 1939, “Eating with a person has strong symbolic value in many societies, and usually signifies social acceptance. White children may on occasion eat with Negroes, but for colored and white adults to eat together under ordinary conditions is practically unheard of.”1449 When white-owned restaurants did permit blacks to purchase food, the black customers were treated contemptuously. J. Saunders Redding, a literature professor from the North, experienced this reality in the Jim Crow South when, after a group of whites refused to share information about where he might eat, he found a “shanty” that “did not look like a restaurant, except that there was a new Coca-Cola sign painted over the sagging door.” Once inside, the waitress, who seated them begrudgingly, served him

1446 For more on the cultural significance of African American automobility, see Paul Gilroy, “Driving While Black,” in Car Cultures, ed. Daniel Miller (New York: Berg Publishers, 2001), 81-104. 1447 James W. Loewen, Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism (New York: The New Press, 2005), 4, 232-233. 1448 Hortense Powdermaker, After Freedom: A Cultural Study of the Deep South (New York: The Viking Press, 1939), 49. 1449 Powdermaker, After Freedom, 47. 468 a “hard curled rind of fried bacon and bacon grease poured over a glutinous mound of gray grits and an egg black from frying in stale grease.”1450 The difficulty African Americans had in finding accommodations while traveling was exacerbated the by the inadequacies of mainstream guidebooks. The Negro Motorist Green Book helped to even the field.

In 1932, Victor H. Green, a native New Yorker, worked as a mail carrier for the U.S. postal service. Like many of his friends and acquaintances, Green, an African American, traveled around the greater New York area and the larger United States only to encounter humiliating situations where hotels, gas stations, and restaurants refused to serve him. After hearing a number of similar tales from his black friends and colleagues, and acutely aware that white motorists had travel guides at their disposable to help them find accommodating roadside services, Green conceived of the Negro Motorist Green Book.1451 Four years later, Green‟s concept came to fruition, and the first edition of the Green Book appeared in bookstores around New York. The early editions concentrated only on sites located in and around New York, but as the popularity of the guidebook expanded, so did the areas of the country covered in its listings; by 1940, the guide included information on forty-four states as well as the District of Columbia.1452 Only a few years after the Green Book first appeared on store shelves, the United States Travel Bureau, a division established by the Secretary of the Interior in 1937 to promote national

1450 J. Saunders Redding, No Day of Triumph (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1942), 50-51. 1451 Additional accounts of the Negro Motorist Green Book and its importance to African American automobility can be found in Kathleen Franz, “„The Open Road‟: Automobility and Racial Uplift in the Interwar Years,” in Technology and the African-American Experience, ed. Bruce Sinclair (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004), 131-153; Cotton Seiler, Republic of Drivers: A Cultural History of Automobility (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), chap. 4; Rugh, Are We There Yet, 68-91. 1452 Victor H. Green, Negro Travelers‟ Green Book (New York: Victor H. Green and Co., 1956), 5; Victor H. Green, Negro Motorist Green Book (New York: Victor H. Green and Co., 1940), 3.

469 tourism, deemed it the Official Negro Travel Guide.1453 In 1952 Green changed the name of the book to The Negro Travelers’ Green Book signaling that it encompassed other forms of travel, such as railroad and airplane, along with the automobile. Green‟s vision was in direct response to the mainstream guidebooks for white travelers that excluded African Americans from their readership simply by recommending places that refused service to black customers. “The white traveler for years has had no difficulty in getting accommodations,” he asserted, “but with the Negro it has been different.” A 1941 review of the Negro Motorist Green Book in the PM Daily suggested that Green was also inspired by Jewish publications that printed information on businesses that did not restrict Jews from patronizing the establishments.1454 James A. Jackson, a representative of Esso service stations, who also contributed extensively to the

Green Book, reiterated the importance of the guide to the African American community by highlighting the unfair advantage of white motorists: “The segregated group in American life can no more than others be expected to know…where restaurants available to them are to be found, than can other people. Those other people have long had provided such information services. Tourist agencies and Guide publishers have been at their service for these many years.”1455 To equal the dining (and traveling) field, the

Negro Motorist Green Book attempted to fill in those knowledge gaps for African Americans, helping them use their wallets as a way of asserting their consumer citizenship, similar to the practice of mainstream restaurant guides‟ white readership.

1453 Victor H. Green, Negro Motorist Green Book (New York: Victor H. Green and Co., 1949), 1. 1454 Victor H. Green, “A Chat with the Editor,” in Negro Motorist Green Book (1949), 1; “Even Off Subways, Negroes Follow the Green Line,” PM Daily, October 22, 1941, repr. in Victor H. Green, Negro Motorist Green Book (New York: Victor H. Green and Co., 1948), 81. 1455 James A. Jackson, “Where Are You Going to Stop?” in Negro Motorist Green Book (1948), 10.

470

As a contemporary of Duncan Hines (the two published the first editions of their guidebooks in the same year), Victor Green‟s guide mirrored Hines‟s directory in several ways and also differed in its format and content for important reasons. Similar to Hines, Green asserted his credibility (and that of his entries) in the early years by personally verifying the “accuracy and conditions of places listed.” However, as the scope of the project grew, Green was no longer able to travel as frequently, so he relied on “agents in the field” to help him collect new listings.1456 Also, from the outset, the Negro Motorist Green Book solicited feedback from readers. “In the event that you are dissatisfied with the service rendered by an advertiser we would appreciate you writing us the complaint,” Green requested in the premier edition of the guide.1457 Subsequent editions asked readers to send in the names and addresses of businesses not yet included in the Guide, along with identified errors and criticisms “of any place that you feel isn‟t up to our standards of a first class business.”1458 This kind of “first class” language spoke to the largely middle-class readership and the ways in which the Green Book privileged middle-class tastes, expectations, and social values. Readers responded in turn, praising Green for a guide that “will mean as much if not more to us [African Americans] as the A.A.A. means to the white race.”1459

For approximately the first twenty years of publication, Green refused to “recommend” restaurants and other services to readers: “We have given you a selection of listings that you might chose [sic] from,” Green explained, but “under no

1456 Green, Negro Travelers‟ Green Book (1956), 6. 1457 Victor H. Green, Negro Motorist Green Book (New York: Green and Smith, 1936), 1. 1458 Victor H. Green, Negro Motorist Green Book (New York: Victor H. Green and Co., 1940), 1; Victor H. Green, Negro Travelers‟ Green Book (New York: Victor H. Green and Co., 1951), 9; Victor H. Green, Negro Travelers‟ Green Book (New York: Victor H. Green and Co., 1952), 4. 1459 Green, Negro Motorist Green Book (1940), 2. 471 circumstances do these listings imply that the place is recommended.”1460 His rationale was fairly straightforward. Green did not think it feasible for his small staff to inspect the thousands of listings in each book and then rate them, so he left it up to his reader to decide which ones were most favorable. In this way, Green placed the evaluative power squarely in the hands of his readers, whom he believed to have enough “good taste” to weed out the bad and the ugly accommodations. Although Green asserted that the book included restaurants and other accommodations that fell within a wide price range, no indication of a restaurant‟s average cost appeared in the listing. Instead, readers had to call the Green Book‟s “Reservation Bureau,” suggesting that many of the businesses were formal enough to accept reservations.1461 Green‟s trust in the cultural tastes of the readership clearly privileged middle-class preferences and aspirations, as evidenced by a number of the paid advertisements for restaurants in the guidebook that emphasized refined cuisine and atmosphere. For instance, Bell‟s Restaurant in New York City invited readers to “Come Revel in Gastronomical Luxury” at the chic restaurant: “When Epicures gather,” the ad continued, “this smart address is known for generous tasty well cooked portions it serves here; Dining and Drinking regains its alluring appeal.”1462 In Tacoma, Washington, the Monte Carlo Restaurants promised diners “Fine Foods—

Chicken and Steaks a Specialty—Enjoy the Best,” while the Green Door Restaurant in Chase City, Virginia, claimed to be “Unsurpassed for quality food and courteous service!”1463 By the 1956 twentieth-anniversary edition, though, the Green Book had

1460 Green, Negro Motorist Green Book (1940), 4. 1461 Victor H. Green, Negro Motorist Green Book, Railroad Edition (New York: Victor H. Green, 1951), 9. 1462 Victor H. Green, Negro Motorist Green Book (New York: Victor H. Green and Co., 1947), 57. 1463 Green, Negro Motorist Green Book (1951), 71; Victor H. Green, Negro Travelers‟ Green Book (New York: Victor H. Green and Co., 1962), 91. 472 begun to include a single star next to “recommended” businesses, perhaps a result of reader requests. The restaurant advertisements peppered throughout each edition of the Negro Motorist Green Book are a good indicator of the range of eateries that appealed to the guide‟s readership. In the first edition of the guidebook, Lloyd‟s in White Plains, New

York, advertised “Fine Wines and Best Food at Moderate Prices.” The Harris Tea Room in New Rochelle called itself “A Place for the Family: Good Home Cooking,” while its local competitor, Week‟s Restaurant, attracted customers with the slogan, “Where Old

Friends Meet for Southern Hospitality.”1464 Clearly, these ads appealed to a range of African American patrons, including migrants from the U.S. South, families, and gourmets in search of fine cuisine. Interestingly, the guide singled out Chinese restaurants from the other dining spots lumped together under the heading “Restaurants.” Chinese restaurant listings appeared frequently, and some establishments even paid for large advertisements, such as the White Rice Inn in Baltimore, Maryland, which invited black customers with the words, “For the Best in Chinese and American Dishes visit us. It will be our pleasure to welcome you on all your visits and endeavor to make you comfortable. Real Cantonese Family Dinners.”1465 The White Rice Inn tapped into one of the qualities that middle-class African American travelers appear to have valued highly, much like their white counterparts: restaurant service that was courteous and attentive. As important as tasty food, middle-class customers, regardless of race, ethnicity, religion, or other defining group characteristic, wanted to be taken care of in a full-service restaurant. When restaurants listed in the Green Book appealed to readers with slogans such as “We

1464 Green, Negro Motorist Green Book (1936), 10-12. 1465 Green, Negro Motorist Green Book (1949), 31. 473

Always Serve You With a Smile—Snappy Service” and “A Home Beside the Road— Panel Ray Heat—Thermostat Controlled Comfort—Courtesy—Convenience,” they knew that a soothing atmosphere and deference to the customer often resulted in repeat patronage.1466 Ultimately, the Negro Motorist/Travelers’ Green Book empowered African

American users of the guide by helping them avoid the humiliation and intimidation of restaurants that discriminated against patrons based on their race. At the same time, though, the Green Book placed a higher value on the travel experiences and dining preferences of middle-class African Americans. Along with its direct competitor, Travelguide, another guidebook for African Americans and other “discerning members of minority groups” first published in 1947, the Negro Motorist Green Book furthered the notion that claims to the rights of citizenship occurred through access to and purchase of consumer goods—economic boycott of businesses that practiced racial discrimination would be the most effective way to challenge their policies.1467 This rationale placed more authority in the hands of middle-class Americans who could more readily afford to patronize restaurants and other travel accommodations. While the Negro Motorist Green Book and Travelguide purported to “recommend only places which had no discrimination regarding race, creed, or color,” this commitment did not include businesses willing to serve openly homosexual patrons.1468 Gay customers would have to wait until the 1950s for the first restaurant guidebooks written for their convenience.

1466 Green, Negro Motorist Green Book (1949), 69; Green, Negro Travelers‟ Green Book, 1956, 45. 1467 Travelguide (New York: Travelguide, Inc., 1947), 4. Travelguide also included information on state civil rights laws. For more on the publication see Leslie A. Nash, Jr., “Ten Year Milestone For Travelers,” Crisis, October 1955, 458-463, and Seiler, Republic of Drivers,” 1091-1117. 1468 Nash, “Ten Year Milestone for Travelers,” 462. 474

Restaurants and bars as public sites of socialization have played an important role in the gay and lesbian communities since the early twentieth century. George Chauncey‟s work on restaurants as sites for gay men and women to meet and socialize calls attention to the popular and successful cafeteria chains in New York City, especially Child‟s, whose locations functioned as important social centers for homosexuals in the interwar years.1469 In the 1920s and 1930s, restaurants where gay men could socialize openly were shared primarily by word of mouth, similar to black-friendly establishments, although occasionally mainstream guidebooks subtly called attention to public dining rooms where gay men and women were known to frequent. For instance, as Chauncey notes, Tips on Tables (1935) included a listing for Stewart‟s Cafeteria, where the guidebook author casually added a veiled reference to gay customers by mentioning “the lilies of the field…that [infest] Stewart‟s.”1470 The guide also referenced Louis‟ Restaurant, whose description did not include any coded language signaling the mixed clientele but, as Chauncey explains, was well known as a popular gathering spot for gay men.1471 A less discreet description of Finocchio‟s in the guidebook, Let’s Have Fun in San Francisco (1939) invited adventurous patrons—both gay and straight—to enjoy risqué cross- dressing entertainment along with their meal: “You sit at intimate tables and wait for the floor show which is long and sensational and heaps of fun!” the book described alongside a small sketch of an illustration. “The show is perfectly innocent; a dozen lovely young men who Mrs. Finocchio speaks fondly of as „my boys‟…who do some of the liveliest turns you have ever seen…all rigged out in feminine allure. You‟ve guessed it…female

1469 George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 174. 1470 George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 167; Ross, Tips on Tables, 239. 1471 Chauncey, Gay New York, 175; Ross, Tips on Tables, 46-47.

475 impersonators!....Lots, lots of fun! And (whisper) rather naughty!”1472 Without a printed directory of restaurants unlikely to discriminate against them, gay customers had to cull popular guidebooks to find these occasional references or rely on individuals‟ verbal recommendations. Throughout the 1950s in particular, police frequently raided gay bars, clubs, and restaurants, especially in large cities known to house a large gay population, including New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. In 1959, police temporarily revoked liquor licenses and closed numerous restaurants, including the Monte Carlo, the Grapevine, the

Kildare, Chez Elle, and Hurley‟s Café, for “permitting homosexuals and degenerates on the premises” after finding that “a substantial portion of the patronage included lesbians and homosexuals.”1473 Guidebooks, then, could help shape a restaurant‟s clientele by steering gay customers, both out-of-town visitors and local residents, to particular locations while deterring them from others. Martin Meeker argues that the possession and dissemination of this knowledge—information about gay-friendly, and conversely, homophobic restaurants—through guidebooks provides “a compelling view into the processes through which cultural constructions of place interact with and influence the social histories of individuals as they acquire identities and the social histories of groups as they form into communities.”1474 Guidebooks created for marginalized populations

1472 Edith Shelton and Elizabeth Field, ed., Let‟s Have Fun in San Francisco: A Handbook to the City (San Francisco: Knight-Counihan Co., 1939), 79-80. The italicized reference to “Mrs. Finocchio” perhaps implied a gender-bending performance by the hostess as well. Martin Meeker‟s work, along with Chauncey‟s, pointed me toward these guidebook references. See Martin Meeker, Contacts Desired: Gay and Lesbian Communications and Community, 1940s-1970s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 202. 1473 “S.L.A. Warns Bars on Bad Clientele,” New York Times, October 18, 1959, 75; “3 Liquor Permits Lifted,” New York Times, October 24, 1959, 10; “2 More Bars Closed,” New York Times, October 31, 1959, 47. 1474 Meeker, Contacts Desired, 203. Meeker‟s chapter on gay guidebooks offers a detailed and important contribution to the history of U.S. guidebooks in general, as well as including information about little- known guidebooks for national and international gay travelers. 476 also help determine which voices emerge as knowledgeable authorities for the larger community. The first gay guidebooks appeared in the 1950s, including the Gay Girl’s Guide to the U.S. and the Western World and the Mattachine Society‟s bar guide; in 1959, Le Guide Gris (“The Grey Guide”) provided information for gay travelers venturing outside of the United States.1475 However, the guidebook with the most extensive listings of restaurants, bars, and hotels appeared in 1963 when Guy Strait published the Lavender Baedeker.1476 Strait, a resident of and gay activist in San Francisco, compiled the guidebook along with help from contributors, including Gerson Goodkind, who traveled over 11,000 miles through twenty-six states during one summer in the early 1960s, searching for restaurants, bars, and hotels nationwide that opened their doors to openly gay customers.1477 In much the same way as the Negro Motorist Green Book and Travelguide sought to turn a verbal tradition of recommendations into a useful printed directory, so too did Strait “set out to compile a list of little known places whose reputation has previously been passed by word of mouth.” Following the now-established standard for the guidebook genre, the Lavender Baedeker also solicited reader responses, asking subscribers to report “any new, interesting places [that] open up across the country” or to call attention to inaccuracies in the book.1478 Not surprisingly, the listings in the Lavender Baedeker included a number of restaurants that at one point or another were raided by police and had their liquor licenses revoked for permitting the “premises to become disorderly…[and] preventing a full view

1475 Meeker, Contacts Desired, 204-205. 1476 Guy Strait, The Lavender Baedeker (San Francisco: Guy Strait, 1963). Guy Strait was not a nom de plume. 1477 Meeker, Contacts Desired, 209-210. 1478 Strait, Lavender Baedeker, 2. 477 of the interior premises,” including the Fawn Restaurant in Greenwich Village and the Heights Supper Club in Brooklyn.1479 However, the guidebook also included a few restaurants that were popular among heterosocial, middle-class white Americans and dining spots listed in black travelers‟ guidebooks as well. This crossover suggests that some restaurants really did uphold a policy of catering to every customer who passed through their doors, while other restaurants may have tolerated a mixed clientele as long as members of a group did not call too much attention to themselves. For example, the Lavender Baedeker added the Cozy Corner restaurant on Florida Avenue in Washington,

D.C., as a recommended eatery, which was also included in the 1959 edition of the Negro Travelers’ Green Book.1480 Likewise, the Mayfair, a restaurant popular among Washingtonians since the 1930s, made an appearance in the Lavender Baedeker. Also known as the “Café of All Nations,” despite serving decidedly American-style food, the Mayfair appeared in mainstream guidebooks from the 1940s onward.1481 One likely reason for these restaurants‟ appearance in multiple guidebooks geared toward different audiences is that they were located in the District of Columbia, which ruled in 1953 that restaurants in that city were required to serve customers without discrimination.1482 However, the overall increase in crossover listings, where the same restaurant was recommended by multiple guidebooks all directed at demographically-different

1479 Robert C. Doty, “Growth of Overt Homosexuality In City Provokes Wide Concern,” New York Times, December 17, 1963; “Fawn Restaurant Regains License by Judge‟s Order,” New York Times, January 7, 1964, 39; “Restaurant Loses License a 2d Time,” New York Times, March 3, 1964, 26; Strait, Lavender Baedeker, 18. 1480 Strait, Lavender Baedeker, 10; Green, Negro Travelers‟ Green Book (1959), 13. Apparently, the Cozy Corner restaurant and its customers were not always so tolerant. In 1953, an African American woman charged two drunken white male patrons with beating her after she walked into the restaurant to get a bite to eat. See “Woman Slapped, Beaten in White D.C. Café,” Jet, November 5, 1953, 8. 1481 Strait, Lavender Baedeker, 10; Schnapper, Washington‟s Dining Out Guide, 82. 1482 “High Court Bars D.C. Restaurant Jim Crow,” Jet, June 18, 1953, 3.

478 audiences, sounded the rumblings of social change that would eventually lead to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the (legal) end to discrimination in restaurants.

RESTAURANTS’ RESERVATIONS: DESEGREGATION AND THE LAW

Most of the retrospective focus on the efforts to integrate restaurants in the United

States is placed on the sit-ins of the late 1950s and early 1960s, most notably the sit-ins at the Woolworth‟s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, which began on February 1, 1960 when four black students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College purchased school supplies at the sundry goods‟ counter and then were denied service at the lunch counter; the students refused to leave, remaining seated in protest, sparking similar events nationwide.1483 However, the restaurant industry‟s response, both on the national and local levels, is less thoroughly documented and yet is informative for understanding operators‟ nervous and socially-biased approach to integration. Restaurant operators in favor of segregation voiced their position loudly and clearly in Jim Crow America. On the other hand, restaurateurs who were not morally opposed to serving well-behaved, paying customers regardless of race, ethnicity, or religion, rarely sounded their position with such insistence. Fear over losing white patronage quieted their opinions. Instead, at the national level, restaurant organizations and trade journals used legal precedent to justify where and under what circumstances a restaurant could refuse service to a patron. For instance, as early as 1928, the American Restaurant magazine published an article asking readers, “Would You Serve a Colored Man?” After explaining that many states in the northern United States had laws

1483 Aldon D. Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change (New York: The Free Press, 1984), 188-221; Rebekah J. Kowal, “Staging the Greensboro Sit-Ins,” Drama Review 48, no. 4 (Winter 2004): 135-136. 479 forbidding discrimination based on a customer‟s race or color, the contributing attorney explained that other criteria defended an operator‟s right to turn away a patron. In practice, these justifications functioned simply as legal loopholes. For instance, courts ruled in favor of a restaurant accused of discrimination by a black customer who argued that the waitress, after taking his order, never returned with his food. After a long period of time, he left the establishment of his own accord, the court maintained; therefore the restaurant was not liable.1484 Few articles addressing discrimination in restaurants appeared in trade journals before World War II. Participation in war efforts heightened American citizens‟ focus on their civil rights, especially when those rights were denied. Beginning in the mid-to-late 1940s, more industry publications reported on the legality of refusing to serve patrons, which varied from state to state and city to city. In 1944, the Utah courts overturned a Salt Lake City ordinance banning discrimination based on the fact that no state law authorized the city to enforce such a statute.1485 In 1951, Restaurant Management published a series of legal scenarios, quizzing operators on their knowledge of restaurant law, including liability for discrimination. While a restaurant was liable for refusing service to a black customer if state law explicitly disallowed it (as in the case of

Wisconsin), a restaurant was acting within its rights if it would only seat a mixed-race party at separate tables, segregated by race. For the most part, legal representatives for the restaurant industry advised individual operators to handle “delicate situations of this kind” carefully, calling in local law enforcement whenever possible to avoid liability.1486

1484 “Would You Serve a Colored Person,” 26-27. 1485 Leo T. Parker, “Recent Higher Court Rulings,” Restaurant Management, September 1945, 66. 1486 Renzo Dee Bowers, “A Quiz on Restaurant Law,” Restaurant Management, June 1951, 50, 94; John M. Schermer, “Possible Liabilities of the Owner and Operator,” Allied Food and Beverage, March 1952, 15, 21. 480

Many restaurant association members, both in and outside of the U. S. South, remained wary of integrating, worried they would lose their white customer base. When the Civil Liberties Committee in Montgomery County, Maryland, approached restaurants in Rockville, Maryland, about voluntarily ending discrimination policies, “no restaurant operators expressed strong opposition to serving both Negro and white customers, but none wished to be the pioneer.”1487 Others faced direct opposition from their fellow restaurateurs. The Washington Restaurant Association (of which M. L. Graham of Coon Chicken Inn fame was president in 1942) asked its members in 1950 to donate money toward a $100,000 fund “to defend the practices of our industry,” which meant to uphold policies of refusing service to people of color. The drive, apparently, was not successful, and in 1953, the state amended its civil rights statute to make discrimination in restaurants based on race, color, or creed a misdemeanor crime.1488 Although restaurateurs showed reluctance to integrate over worries that white customers would protest, studies later showed that white American adults “grossly exaggerated” other whites‟ support of segregation in the 1960s. For the most part, though, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, restaurant industry representatives refused to take a firm stand discouraging segregation. Instead, they cautioned operators to follow state law and leave

“this matter of civil affairs to the civil authority.”1489 It would take the civil authority of the federal branches of government to issue the directive banning racial, ethnic, and religious discrimination in U. S. restaurants.

1487 “Rockville Café Segregation Attack Slated,” Washington Post, November 25, 1954, 60. 1488 “What the Branches Are Doing,” Crisis, June 1950, 385; John M. Schermer and J. Dimmitt Smith, “Discrimination,” Allied Food and Beverage, August 1955, 41. 1489 Hubert J. O‟Gorman, “Pluralistic Ignorance and White Estimates of White Support for Racial Segregation,” Public Opinion Quarterly 39, no. 3 (Autumn 1975), 313; Jim Betts, The Restaurant Casebook of Public Relations (White Plains, NY: Jim Betts Public Relations, 1963), 59.

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Conclusion

On the day Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated in April 1968, he had tucked into his pocket a scrap of paper with notes he had jotted down for a speech he was to deliver in Memphis. Among the phrases was a variation of the Biblical verse from Mark 8:36: “For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?”

King‟s inspired words read, “What does it profit to be able to eat in an integrated restaurant and not make enough money to take the wife out?”1490 His question spoke to the problems of equal access that persisted in the United States, even after President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the Civil Rights Act on June 2, 1964. The proposed legislation that would eventually become the Civil Rights Act of 1964 began in June 1963 with the initiative of President John F. Kennedy. After President

Kennedy‟s assassination in November 1963, President Johnson pursued the legislative action in memory of Kennedy. Following the longest congressional debate in U. S. history, the Senate eventually voted to pass the bill on June 19, 1964. The House then added its approval, and President Johnson signed it into law on July 2, 1964. Title II of the 1964 Civil Rights Act specified that “All persons shall be entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, and accommodations of any place of public accommodation, as defined in this section, without discrimination or segregation on the ground of race, color, religion, or national origin.”1491 The Senate report that explained the purpose of Title II acknowledged the moral component of the law alongside its economic justification: “Discrimination is not

1490 Margot Adler, “Belafonte Puts Rev. King‟s Notes Up For Auction,” December 10, 2008, National Public Radio, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=98010783. 1491 Transcript of Civil Rights Act (1964), Our Documents History Collaborative, http://www.ourdocuments.gov. One noticeable omission from this portion of the Act is that it does not prohibit discrimination based on sex or gender. 482 simply dollars and cents, hamburgers and movies; it is the humiliation, the frustration, and embarrassment that a person must surely feel when he is told that he is unacceptable as a member of the public because of his race or color.”1492 The right to experience dining in restaurants was about more than access to food—it was about access to the experience as recognition of social belonging and citizenship.

To help ensure that the law fell under the purview of the federal government and was constitutionally sound, the legislation was justified on the basis of the Commerce Clause, which gave the federal government power to regulate interstate commerce, rather than the Fourteenth Amendment. In many ways, then, Title II can be read as recognition of the power of mobility. Free markets depended on the ability to move goods; free spending depended on customers‟ access to goods and the seller‟s willingness to accept their money. Justice Tom C. Clark, in his opinion for the Supreme Court upholding the constitutionality of Title II of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, reiterated the causal connection between discrimination and its negative effect on the nation‟s capitalist and consumerist economy. “This diminutive spending springing from a refusal to serve Negroes and their total loss as customers has, regardless of the absence of direct evidence, a close connection to interstate commerce,” argued Clark. “The fewer customers a restaurant enjoys the less food it sells and consequently the less it buys.” In addition, discrimination discouraged interstate travel and tourism, which had become a feature of shaping American cultural identity in the twentieth century.1493 Restaurants‟ refusal to serve customers based on racial characteristics

1492 Randall Kennedy, “The Struggle for Racial Equality in Public Accommodations,” in Legacies of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, ed. Bernard Grofman (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000), 158. 1493 Marguerite S. Schaffer, See America First: Tourism and National Identity, 1880-1940 (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001), 1-6. 483

had a direct and highly restrictive effect upon interstate travel by Negroes….because discriminatory practices prevent Negroes from buying prepared food served on the premises while on a trip, except in isolated and unkempt restaurants and under most unsatisfactory and often unpleasant conditions. This obviously discourages travel and obstructs interstate commerce for one can hardly travel without eating.1494

Discrimination, in other words, was bad for business, and profitable business was good for capitalism in a “Consumers‟ Republic.”

The restaurant case that ultimately questioned the constitutional validity of Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 before the U.S. Supreme Court emphasized the importance of independent, small restaurant operators to the industry as a whole and to the social character of the United States. Ollie McClung, Sr. was the first restaurant operator to challenge the legality of Title II of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and win. The Justice Department appealed the ruling, which the Supreme Court overturned, announcing on December 14, 1964 that the act applied to Ollie‟s Barbeque and ordering the restaurant to desegregate.1495 In Katzenbach v. McClung, Ollie McClung, Sr., the owner of Ollie‟s Barbeque in Birmingham, Alabama, defended his right as a private business operator to select his customers and refuse service to African Americans (although almost seventy-five percent of his employees were black). Ollie‟s Barbeque

1494 Justice Tom C. Clark quoted in Richard C. Cortner, Civil Rights and Public Accommodations: The Heart of Atlanta and McClung Cases (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001), 176. 1495 Ollie McClung was not the first restaurant operator to challenge the legality of the public accommodations clause of the act. That recognition goes to Lester Maddox, the temperamental, bigoted owner of the Pickrick Restaurants in Atlanta. The day after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed into law, Maddox refused to serve three black students by shoving a revolver in their faces and yelling, “Get out of here and don‟t ever come back.” The NAACP filed suit against Maddox on behalf of the students. When the case went to court, the plaintiff demonstrated that the majority of food purchased for sale at the restaurant originated outside of Georgia, and the restaurant served interstate travelers. The court found in favor of the students and ordered Maddox to desegregate. Maddox refused and eventually shut down his restaurant to avoid being held in contempt of court for failure to comply. He would go on to become the governor of Georgia. Because he decided not to appeal the initial ruling, his case never went before the Supreme Court. See Jason Sokol, There Goes My Everything: White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights, 1945-1975 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), 183-187, 231-235. 484 was situated in a predominately black neighborhood and served mostly local white customers (take-out was the only option for black patrons). The restaurant stood away from any major highway, and Ollie and his son and business partner, Ollie, Jr., did not advertise with billboards on interstate travel routes—they generated business by word of mouth.1496

Ollie, Sr., a soft-spoken lay preacher who refused to serve alcohol and distributed cards to foul-mouthed customers asking them to refrain from using profanity where “ladies and children are usually present,” did not actually initiate the complaint with the federal government.1497 The Birmingham Restaurant Association hired a law firm while the 1964 Civil Rights Act was still being debated in Congress to determine the feasibility of challenging the impending law. The firm advised that restaurants clearly falling under the Commerce Clause were covered by the act, but ones that did not engage in substantial interstate commerce might fall beyond the reach of the federal government. The Birmingham Restaurant Association, which financed the legal proceedings that resulted in Katzenbach v. McClung, suggested that the firm reach out to Ollie‟s Barbeque because the restaurant did not clearly engage in interstate commerce or serve interstate travelers.1498 Ollie McClung, Sr. agreed to be the plaintiff in charges against the constitutional legality of Title II of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The Supreme Court eventually ruled that Ollie‟s Barbeque violated the act because it purchased $70,000 worth of meat from Hormel and Company, a wholesale business that sourced its meat from outside of Alabama; in addition, racial discrimination

1496 Cortner, Civil Rights and Public Accommodations, 65-66. Ollie also segregated his staff when his employees ate meals on the premises—the ten white workers ate in the dining room, while the black workers dined in a separate room (Cortner, Civil Rights and Public Accommodations, 79-80). 1497 Michael Durham, “Ollie McClung‟s Big Decision,” Life, October 9, 1964, 31. 1498 Cortner, Civil Rights and Public Accommodations, 64-68, 193.

485 in the restaurant restricted spending, which, directly or indirectly, had an adverse effect on interstate commerce. However, in pleading his case, Ollie, Sr., as a small restaurant operator, distinguished himself from the large chains by highlighting the importance of independent restaurants to the nation‟s culinary fabric. “I felt like if I were grouped with Howard Johnsons and Holiday Inn and other restaurants of that nature that I would have no opportunity at all to present my case as a local restaurant,” explained McClung. His language also placed white customers‟ dining experiences at the center of restaurants‟ social role and emphasized the importance of rules and regulations in creating an “ideal” dining environment. “We consider that we operate our business as a trust to our customers,” McClung rationalized. “We are a steward of it, and it is our feeling that they have a place to come in and eat where they will enjoy and where they will leave in a better frame of mind than when they came in, that they will get good food and good service….And to do that we feel like it is absolutely essential that we control our clientele.”1499 By holding Ollie‟s Barbeque to the same standards as Howard Johnson‟s and other interstate franchises, the Supreme Court acknowledged the power and influence of small restaurants alongside large chains on the public dining culture in the United States.

Ollie‟s Barbeque integrated without incident on December 16, 1964. Yet many restaurateurs in the south, as well as the rest of the country, complied with the 1964 Civil Rights Act as soon as it passed into law, such as Felix Tijerina who reminded his hostesses, cashiers, and waiters on July 3, 1964, that “the Civil Rights Bill has been signed into law by the President of the United States. And being good Americans we

1499 Cortner, Civil Rights and Public Accommodations, 79, 81.

486 must obey this law.”1500 Restaurants, therefore, functioned as places where Americans could display their national loyalty as good, responsible citizens. Beyond demonstrating patriotism, dining in restaurants also symbolized cultural belonging and status in a visible public setting. Social values and gendered codes of family responsibility, too, were bound up in the gesture of dining out. The inability for a man to take his wife and children out to eat was, as King‟s note implied, a threat to his masculinity and his perceived sense of self-worth as a husband, father, and “head” of household. Similarly, the humiliation of being treated as second-class customers was emotionally degrading. As one professor tried to explain to an audience of restaurant operators reluctant to desegregate, “In an economy of plenty such as we enjoy in the United States today…the biological need for food is secondary to higher human needs. The family table takes on ceremonial form, complete with ritual….Partaking of food in a social environment is a manifestation of social „belonging‟ or acceptance.”1501 Dining in American restaurants signified recognition of one‟s civic participation and national belonging. Many middle-class Americans esteemed variety and choice as particularly democratic qualities in the twentieth century. Restaurant owners quickly learned that customers appreciated variety, the stimulation of change, and the ability to decide which menu item to order, what type of restaurant to frequent, and how much to spend on a given night for a meal away from home. The president of the Texas Restaurant Association, Harry Akin, declared in 1941, “Variety and its subsequent spiciness is the keynote of all restaurant business, whether big or little, and it is this principle which

1500Cortner, Civil Rights and Public Accommodations, 187; “Notice,” July 3, 1964, Personnel and Policy Directives, Felix Tijerina Family Papers, Houston Metropolitan Research Center, Houston Public Library. 1501 John M. Welch, “Commentary: Symbolic Value of Integrated Public Dining Relates to the Growth of Self-Respect in Negroes, In Turn Brings Respect to the Restaurant Field,” Restaurant Management, August 1963, 16. 487 secures for the restaurant business its stability.”1502 Americans, more than other nationalities (or so they believed), appeared willing to eat a range of foods. Extensive dining options, especially in urban areas, reflected on the country‟s abundance and prosperity. Guidebooks that helped Americans develop “good taste” cultivated pride in the nation‟s culinary specialties and also empowered readers by encouraging them to choose a location from among the listings best suited to their dining needs. The variety of restaurant genres, from heritage- and foreign-themed to family-friendly roadside favorites, impressed upon the American dining public that an escapist adventure, a soothing atmosphere, or a break from life‟s hectic routine was only a menu away. *** With restaurants, the past really is the present. President Barack Obama acknowledged this thread of continuity in his 2009 inaugural speech: “What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility,” he declared. “This is the meaning of our liberty and creed—…why a man whose father less than sixty years ago might not have been served at a local restaurant can now stand before you to take a most sacred oath.”1503 Sixty or seventy years ago, residents of and visitors to the Washington metropolitan area might have picked up Duncan Hines‟s faithful red dining directory to find a good place to eat. In 2009, Allen Abel, a contributor to the Washingtonian magazine, picked up the 1939 edition of Adventures in Good Eating to see how many of Hines‟s recommended restaurants still existed. To Abel‟s surprise, the number was relatively high. In fact, after some research, Abel determined that roughly one in five out of the 2,000 restaurants

1502 Harry Akin, “The Small Operator‟s Place in the Restaurant Industry,” American Restaurant, July 1941, 32. 1503 Transcript, Barak Obama‟s Inaugural Speech, January 20, 2009, repr. National Public Radio, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php. 488 nationwide listed in 1939 is still in operation.1504 Although entries for Austin, Texas, do not appear in 1939, the 1946 edition of Adventures in Good Eating includes two recommendations: the Milam Cafeteria on Eighth and Congress, and the Spanish Village Café at 802 Red River Street.1505 Remarkably, the Spanish Village Café (now called Jaime‟s Spanish Village) continues to operate at the same location, although it garners fewer noteworthy reviews these days. Restaurants have staying power as social institutions not only because they provide a much-needed service to the public but because the shared experience of dining in a particular restaurant often leaves an individual impression, a visceral memory that gets passed on through personal anecdotes and recommendations. The challenges that restaurants face to engage and please customers, building a reputable business in the process, still exist similar to the ones faced fifty, sixty, or seventy years ago. Restaurants still offer the public variety through a wealth of dining options, including changing décor, extensive menu items, and interior environments that contrast with customers‟ lives outside of the restaurant. Restaurants still tempt customers with expectations that the temperature will be cooler, the noise level quieter, the food more difficult to prepare than its homemade counterpart with no dishes left to clean. Restaurants still blend food and entertainment with sanitation and social values, often with peculiar results. In an odd conflation of sensory stimulation, both La Madeline and Macaroni Grill, nationwide chain restaurants serving “French” and “Italian” food, respectively, provide corresponding foreign language instruction played over the bathroom loudspeakers, thereby turning the washrooms into both a site of sanitation and cultural education.

1504 Allen Abel, “Golden Oldies,” Washingtonian, May 2009, http://www.washingtonian.com/articles/restaurants/12394.html. 1505 Duncan Hines, Adventures in Good Eating (Bowling Green: Adventures in Good Eating, Inc., 1946), 260. 489

Eating in restaurants captures the American popular imagination by inviting customers to exercise privileges offered to them as culinary citizens of the restaurant: the ability to order food locally or while traveling and consume it on the premises; the option to select their food from a variety of alternatives; and the expectation to experience efficient, courteous service in a stimulating, pleasing atmosphere. Restaurants, as money-making enterprises, entice consumers with the notion that restaurant dining contributes to an ideal quality of life. To experience full-service restaurant dining is to taste the freedom of choice, the dignity of receiving service, and the affirmation of social approval.

490

Bibliographic Essay With a subject as diverse as restaurants, an extraordinary range of sources contributes to a better understanding of the topic. This bibliographic essay chronicles only a portion of the relevant and influential secondary sources that have helped shape my thinking about this project. Histories of restaurants, food, and the larger hospitality industry prior to the twentieth-century, both internationally and within the United States, gave me an important sense of precedent for this dissertation. Rebecca Spang‟s history of the restaurant‟s origin, The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern Gastronomic

Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), is indispensable for anyone working on restaurant history. Shifting to the United States, James E. McWilliams thoroughly documents the role of food in developing the country‟s newfound identity in

A Revolution in Eating: How the Quest for Food Shaped America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). Useful background on the etiquette and material culture of dining in the nineteenth-century United States comes from John F. Kasson, Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America; Susan Williams, Savory Suppers and Fashionable Feasts: Dining in Victorian America (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985); and Kathryn Grover, ed., Dining in America, 1850-1900 (Amherst:

University of Massachusetts Press, 1987). An exemplary model of scholarship and an important cultural study of the hospitality industry is by A. K. Sandoval-Strausz, Hotel: An American History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). Studies of consumerism, leisure, and public space helped me to frame restaurants within their social and cultural contexts as social institutions and sites of consumption. These texts include Elaine Abelson, When Ladies Go A-Thieving: Middle-Class

Shoplifters in the Victorian Department Store (New York: Oxford University Press,

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1989); Susan Porter Benson, Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890-1940 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986); Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Vintage Books, 2003); Lisa Jacobson, Raising Consumers: Children and the American Mass Market in the Early Twentieth Century (New York:

Columbia University Press, 2004); William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1993); Charles F. McGovern, Sold American: Consumption and Citizenship, 1890-1945 (Chapel Hill:

University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986); and Susan Strasser, Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American

Mass Market (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Books, 1989). Regarding the rise of travel and leisure as an integral part of American national identity in the late nineteenth and twentieth century, histories and theoretical work on tourism, interactive public history sites, and the automobile contributed to my analysis, especially Cindy S. Aron, Working at Play: A History of Vacations in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Warren J. Belasco, Americans on the Road:

From Autocamp to Motel, 1910-1945 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979); Catherine Cocks, Doing the Town: The Rise of Urban Tourism in the United States, 1850-1915 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Jane Desmond, Staging Tourism: Bodies on Display from Waikiki to Sea World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Catherine Gudis, Buyways: Billboards, Automobiles, and the American Landscape (New York: Routledge, 2004); Richard Handler and Eric Gable, The New

History in an Old Museum: Creating the Past at Colonial Williamsburg (Durham: Duke

492

University Press, 1997); Steven D. Hoelscher, Heritage on Stage: The Invention of Ethnic Place in America’s Little Switzerland (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998); Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991); Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1998); Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Schocken Books, 1976), especially his concept of “staged authenticity”; Karal Ann Marling, George Washington Slept Here: Colonial Revivals and

American Culture, 1876-1986 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988); Robert W. Rydell, World of Fairs: The Century-of-Progress Expositions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); and Marguerite S. Shaffer, See America First: Tourism and

National Identity, 1880-1940 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001). Much of the socialization and public culture in which restaurants participated in the early-to-middle twentieth century involved changes to and expectations of acceptable gender roles as well as standards of appearance appropriate for public display. The work by Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), is useful for situating displays of masculinity within the space of the restaurant, while Lewis Erenberg‟s study of cabaret culture, Steppin’ Out: New York, Nightlife, and the Transformation of American Culture, 1890-1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), details heterosexual socialization in urban cafés, nightclubs, and lobster palaces. For helpful works on women and beauty culture see Lois W. Banner, American Beauty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); Kathy Peiss, Hope in a Jar: The Making of

America’s Beauty Culture (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1998); and Philip Scranton,

493 ed., Beauty and Business: Commerce, Gender, and Culture in Modern America (New York: Routledge: 2001). My comparison of restaurants to home dining relied on Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (New York: Basic Books, 1983); Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books,

1988); and two works by Laura Shapiro, Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1986) and Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America (New York: Penguin Books, 2004).

Food preparation and public food service are inherently tied to developments in technology, product design, and architecture. To grasp some of the practical and theoretical aspects of the structural design of eating, two works were particularly useful:

Jamie Horwitz and Paulette Singley, ed., Eating Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004) and Philip Langdon, Orange Roofs, Golden Arches: The Architecture of American Chain Restaurants (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986). For the history of product design, I turned to Thomas Hine, Populuxe (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987) and Jeffrey L. Meikle, American Plastic: A Cultural History (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995). Thoughtful studies of everyday technologies, especially their uses for sanitation, include Suellen Hoy, Chasing Dirt: The American Pursuit of Cleanliness (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Nina E. Lerman, et al., ed., Gender and Technology: A Reader (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); and Susan Strasser, Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1999). Ideas of sanitation and clean bodies in restaurants, as well as tasteful types of food, were tied to social prejudices about immigrants and particular ethnic groups.

494

Studies that address the crossover between cleanliness and working-class immigrants along with ways that ethnic populations resisted culinary discrimination include Linda Keller Brown and Kay Mussell, ed., Ethnic and Regional Foodways in the United States: The Performance of Group Identity (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984); Hasia R. Diner, Hungering for America: Italian, Irish, and Jewish Foodways in the Age of Migration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); Donna Gabaccia, We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998); Thomas A. Guglielmo, White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago, 1890-1945; and Kristin L. Hoganson, Consumers’ Imperium: The Global Production of American Domesticity, 1865-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).

Immigrant groups were not the only ones to have a contested relationship with restaurants as an institution. African Americans were an integral part of the operation of restaurants throughout the country, yet caricatured and derogatory images of black people persisted as thematic devices in restaurant dining rooms. Useful studies that analyze the iconography of African Americans include M. M. Manring, Slave in a Box: The Strange Career of Aunt Jemima (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998); Tara

McPherson, Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003); Mark M. Smith, How Race Is Made: Slavery, Segregation, and the Senses (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Patricia A. Turner, Ceramic Uncles and Celluloid Mammies: Black Images and Their Influence on Culture (New York: Anchor Books, 1994); Laura Wexler, Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialsm (Chapel Hill: University of North

Carolina Press, 2000); and Psyche Williams-Forson, Building Houses out of Chicken

495

Legs: Black Women, Food, and Power (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). Finally, my study of restaurant culture could not succeed without the precedent of groundbreaking scholarship on food studies. Some of the most influential and informative for my project, both directly and indirectly related to restaurants, include the following:

Michael and Ariane Batterberry, On the Town in New York From 1776 to the Present (New York: Charles Scribner‟s Sons, 1973); Warren J. Belasco, Appetite for Change: How the Counterculture Took on the Food Industry, 1966-1988 (New York: Pantheon

Books, 1989); Dorothy Sue Cobble, Dishing It Out: Waitresses and Their Unions in the Twentieth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991); Matthew Josephson, Union House, Union Bar: The History of the Hotel and Restaurant Employees and

Bartenders International Union AFL-CIO (New York: Random House, 1956); Harvey Levenstein, Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in Modern America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993) and Revolution at the Table: The Transformation of the American Diet (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Viking Press, 1985) and Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom: Excursions into Eating, Culture, and the Past

(Boston: Beacon Press, 1996); and Jessamyn Neuhaus, Manly Meals and Mom’s Home Cooking: Cookbooks and Gender in Modern America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).

496

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Vita

Audrey Sophia Russek was born in Bethesda, Maryland in 1978 to Marianne M. Emerson and Frank S. Russek, Jr. After graduating from Sidwell Friends School in Washington, D.C. in 1996, she entered Pomona College in Claremont, California. In

2000, she graduated magna cum laude from Pomona College with a major in English. She entered the Graduate School of the University of Texas at Austin in August 2002 and received the Master of Arts degree in American Studies in 2005. She is the author of “„So Many Useful Women‟: The Pseudonymous Poetry of Marjorie Allen Seiffert, 1916- 1938,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 28:1 (Spring 2009).

Permanent address (or email): [email protected] This dissertation was typed by the author.

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