"His waitresses lived in company housing and kept curfew."

The Wall Street Journal’s Jonathan Eig has published a smart book review of Stephen Fried’s Appetite for America. The book examines how Fred Harvey’s chain of lunchrooms–America’s first national chain of any kind–which grew up around railroads in the Old West beginning in the 1870s, helped to tame that still-wild region of America. Harvey served surprisingly good food, offered a warm environment and imported an all-female waitstaff (“Harvey Girls“) to attract single men looking for brides.

For a formerly poor New York immigrant pot scrubber to have accomplished so much, Harvey had to run a tight ship. An excerpt from the review about his strict business practices:

“He ran his railroad-restaurant business, operating along the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe lines, like a military operation. His waitresses lived in company housing and kept curfew. On and off the job, they were expected to follow rules: ‘Have a Sincere Interest in People’ was the first on a list that Mr. Fried reprints. Another reminded employees that ‘Tact is an Asset and HONESTY is still a Virtue.’ Harvey’s decrees didn’t necessarily apply to Harvey: A newspaper in 1881 reported that when he fired the manager of a train-station restaurant in Deming, N.M., Harvey threw the man out the front door onto the train platform ‘and the dining room equipment followed after him in quick order.'”