New environments called for new visions. However, there was not much additional innovation once the new visions were in place. Recently, I returned to the same restaurant (El Tovar) at the Grand Canyon where I had been served 60 years before as a teenager in a Harvey restaurant. The same kind of service was being delivered, and the Harvey Girls were still offering this service.
In essence, Fred Harvey had placed a protective shield over the Wild West, which he had helped to domesticate. He left this shield in place for many years. After all, this is part of the good and bad of a community of heart: once established, it often doesn’t change much over the years. The traditions that serve as a foundation for the engagement of Heart remain in place, with continuity of habit being critical to the maintenance of this community. Once established, Collective Worth is protected at all costs.
Abiding belief is to be found in the community regarding human progress and a sense of greater purpose in life: Fred Harvey was a man of God – or at least a man who believed in his vision (and embraced manifest destiny) with religious zeal. Those working in his organization were expected to be similarly aligned with God and Fred’s religion (the Harvey method). Like many of the entrepreneurs aligned with other religions (such as Latter-Day Saints/Mormons), Fred Harvey was being guided by God to find the new Zion in the American West. He was to bring chastity and good manners to a world that he saw as Godless and needing a good bath and religious cleansing. While the Cabots of New England might have been the only ones to speak to their Puritan God, Fred Harvey believed he had direct access to a divinity that resided in the West.
Once again, we discover that Habits of the Heart are often founded on traditions that do not readily change. We find what the noted social theorist, Talcott Parsons (1970), identified as a critical societal function called Latent Pattern Maintenance in the close association of gospels with an American community. It is important to unpack the latent pattern maintenance term to fully appreciate the power held by this function in the American West of Fred Harvey and his restaurants. The word “pattern” refers to the actions being frequently repeated during a single day. These are the “habits” first identified by de Tocqueville and more recently reintroduced by Robert Bellah (a student of Talcott Parsons). These patterns (habits) are maintained by the enforcement of strong social norms and introduction of rituals (such as Sunday religious services) that reinforce and remind people of the important role played by these norms (“without these norms, the center will not hold!”).
There is a third word in this phrase that is particularly salient regarding Fred Harvey’s world. This word is “Latent.” While the norms are explicit and reinforced by ritual, there is eventually no need for explicit and reinforced norms. How one behaves is simply the way things are done and the way things have always been done (established through a revisionist history and compelling narrative). The habits become subconscious (“latent”) and are learned by the newcomers through the modeling of “proper” behavior by those members of the community who are already fully socialized. As I noted in a previous essay in this series, control is internalized. We monitor our behavior under conditions of internalized control rather than relying on external monitoring and enforcement.
This is where the previously mentioned training and mentoring of new Harvey Girls becomes so important. The new girls don’t just put on the standard uniform, they also incorporate (internalize) the standard way of perceiving and behaving in their work world. It is through this internalization process that the world of work becomes all-encompassing for the young women employed by the Harvey restaurants – and for the young women laboring in the mills of New England.
