America's Obsessives: The Compulsive Energy That Built a Nation (10 page)

But Henry Heinz had no interest in remaining his “father’s little helper.” In 1869, he became his own man by forming two new partnerships. Getting out of the brick business for good—though he didn’t discard his lifeline, his trusty tape measure—he started a food company with a contemporary, L. Clarence Noble. (For Heinz, business and family were always intertwined; his first son, Clarence, born in 1873, was named after Noble.) The first product in Heinz and Noble’s new Anchor Brand—a name selected for its biblical meaning of hope—was Anna Heinz’s recipe for bottled horseradish, which Heinz manufactured in the basement of his father’s former house. That September, he also married Sarah (Sallie) Sloan Young, a Pittsburgh-born Presbyterian whose parents had come from Northern Ireland. Deeply religious like his mother, the devoted and self-sacrificing Sallie—during his lean years, she churned out butter that she sold for thirty-five cents a pound—would provide Heinz with just the kind of emotional support he needed.

As Heinz’s family grew, so too did his new business venture, which Clarence Noble’s younger brother, E.J., joined in 1872. Acquiring 160 acres of farmland along the Allegheny River, Heinz, Noble and Company, as the firm was now called, kept adding new products, including celery sauce and pickles. “I am now,” Heinz would note in his diary a few years later, “in the pickle business.” Heinz and his two partners also leased a four-story office on Second Avenue in downtown Pittsburgh, which served as both a factory and a retail outlet. Initially, even the Panic of 1873, which came on the heels of the failure of the nation’s biggest bank (Jay Cooke and Company) and the ensuing stock market crash, couldn’t stop the firm’s steady growth. By 1875, Heinz, Noble and Company had warehouses in both St. Louis and Chicago, and its 170 employees were capable of producing 15,000 barrels of pickles and 500,000 barrels of vinegar a year. That year, with little fanfare, the company also rolled out a prototype of modern-day ketchup, based on Anna Heinz’s recipe. Called catsup, this luxury version of the product hardly sold at all; Heinz wouldn’t turn his attention to a mass-produced tomato paste for a couple more decades.

By early 1875, Heinz, Noble and Company was no longer immune to the effects of the nationwide recession that was driving up the unemployment rate to 14 percent. “Hard times,” Heinz noted that January in his diary, “money tight.” Heinz had a tougher and tougher time meeting his payroll. “I fear I shall break down,” he worried on July 1, “if times don’t soon change.” They didn’t, and he did. By early December, overrun by a series of painful boils, a devastated Heinz couldn’t get out of bed. On Wednesday, December 15, 1875, when he failed to pay some creditors, he was arrested.
TRIO IN A PICKLE
, the
Pittsburgh Leader
headline reported the next day,
HEINZ, NOBLE
&
CO. CHARGED WITH REMOVING THEIR GOODS TO DEFRAUD CREDITORS
. The charges were false and Heinz would eventually be exonerated, but restoring his name would be a grueling process. With assets of $110,000 and liabilities of $160,000, the company had to file for bankruptcy. Heinz felt that he had let down the entire family, especially his own parents, who, at his request, had mortgaged their house. As his father and mother attempted to sell it along with all their furniture, Heinz “never went near as I could not well bear it.”

On Christmas Day, with Sallie unable to stop crying, a despairing Heinz, who couldn’t afford any holiday gifts, wrote in his journal, “I feel as though people were all pushing us down because we are bankrupt. Such is the world.” His mother offered a prayer in the form of a printed card reminding him that “the Lord will provide,” which moved him deeply. At his urging, his heirs would continue to recite its words for decades to come every Christmas. But except for the immediate family, Heinz received little support. To avoid running into familiar faces, he and Sallie decided to switch churches. “A man,” he observed on December 30, “is nowhere without money.” In early January, overhearing her parents talk of their misfortune, the four-year-old Irene, as an embarrassed Heinz discovered, told a family friend that she was planning to “sell one of her curls for five cents to give to Papa…[who] lost all his money.”

Heinz’s emotional paralysis didn’t last long. On February 14, 1876, he launched the second incarnation of his food biz, the F. & J. Heinz Company. With the Noble brothers both blaming him for mismanagement, Heinz would have nothing more to do with either of them; from now on, his business would be strictly a family affair. Under the new arrangement, his wife owned half the company—Heinz himself couldn’t become a partner as he wasn’t yet discharged from bankruptcy—and his cousin Frederick, a recent German émigré who was an expert in modern farming techniques; his brother John; and his mother, Anna, each owned a sixth. Though Heinz would call the shots, he would officially be an employee working for the modest salary of $125 a month ($2,500). That February, a guilt-ridden Heinz compiled a new list of numbers containing the amount he owed to each of his creditors. Given that he had owned three-eighths of Heinz, Noble and Company, he felt responsible for the corresponding share of the total. Even though bankruptcy would remove any legal obligation, he—in contrast to his former partners—would insist on repayment. Heinz toted this ledger, which he labeled
MO
(moral obligations), in his pocket until he wiped out all his debts three years later, a full year ahead of the goal that he had set for himself.

But in the first half of 1876, Heinz continued to struggle. That February, after noting that he had come down with his tenth boil since December, he remarked in his diary, “When a person is affected they cannot read or study with a contented mind.” By June, after Heinz noticed three new ones “on my seat,” his boil count had doubled to twenty. Seeking a fresh start, Heinz cut his hair short and removed his side whiskers for the first time in nearly seven years. On July 15, he was forced to take another desperation measure: “Bought cheap $16 horse to help us out of pinch. He is blind.”

With his back against the wall, Heinz ratcheted up his fierce ambition. This time around, he was determined not to fail. “RESOLVE,” he wrote on May 28 in his diary, “TO MAKE MORE MONEY.” Despite his cash-flow problems, he would soon develop bold new business practices that involved investing much more heavily in both new technology and advertising.

On Monday, October 23, 1876, Henry and Sallie Heinz were among the thirty thousand visitors to arrive at the Depot in Philadelphia to attend the Centennial Exposition, the World’s Fair commemorating America’s one hundredth birthday. More than 130,000 people a day were now filing into the fairgrounds near the station, and in the end, nearly ten million Americans—about one-fifth of the nation—would pay a visit. Officially called “The International Exhibition of Arts, Manufactures and Products of the Soil and Mine,” the six-month-long extravaganza featured sixty thousand contributions from all thirty-eight states and thirty-seven foreign countries, including a new gadget called the telephone, demonstrated by Boston’s Alexander Graham Bell. Taking advantage of the Pennsylvania Railroad’s specially discounted tickets, the couple had made the twelve-hour trek from Pittsburgh along with Heinz’s sisters, Mary and Maggie, Sallie’s mother and brother, George, and their neighbor, Dr. Deetrick (who had treated Heinz a year earlier when, with bankruptcy looming, his pulse had dipped to forty).

While Sallie, like his sisters, played tourist, not so Heinz. He had some urgent business to which he needed to attend. Ever since the fair’s opening on May 10, the F. & J. Heinz Company—referred to as “Heintz [
sic
], Noble and Co.” in the official catalog because Heinz had filled out the application the previous year—had been running a small booth that featured its “pickles, vinegar, sauces and catsups.” With his firm’s finances then still tenuous, that was all he could afford. In contrast, that August, Heinz had managed to mount a larger stand at a regional Pittsburgh exposition where he also passed out free samples and souvenir cards. “We hear,” he wrote on August 25, “people say it surpasses anything in [the] way of pickle display at [the] Centennial.” Now he would get a chance to see for himself exactly what food companies, including his own, were showcasing in Philadelphia.

 At the massive Agricultural Building, one of the fair’s five main sites, on the banks of the Schuylkill River, Heinz was intrigued by what he found. His company’s booth was situated next to those of sixty-six other American firms that also sold preserved meats, vegetables, and fruits as well as meat and vegetable extracts, all of which fell under Class 656 in the Exposition’s elaborate 700-point classification system. “All the goods of this class,” the fair’s chronicler, John McCabe, noted, “are displayed in the most attractive manner and constitute one of the prettiest features of the agricultural exhibit.” Studying his competitors—a few of which are still around in one form or another today, such as New York’s Charles Gulden and Chicago’s Libby, McNeill, and Libby—Heinz got ideas about new products and new marketing strategies, which he jotted down in his notebook. He also paid close attention to packaging, particularly to containers and labels. And Heinz examined the offerings of the nearly seven hundred foreign merchants in his class, in which Britain’s Crosse and Blackwell—a manufacturer of pickles, preserves, and numerous sauces, including its famous chow-chow (a relish)—held the “post of honor,” as McCabe would later put it. Heinz would soon translate his notes into action. Within a year, he rolled out several new varieties, including mustard and pickled tongue as well as his own highly successful chow-chow sauce—the Pennsylvania version was sweeter than the British.

In his diary after his first evening in Philadelphia, Heinz limited himself to a general impression. “I enjoyed the Exposition today very much,” he wrote on October 23. “It is a wonderful affair.” He commented on little else except some factoids related to a canvas that depicted the recent Paris commune, “I also saw outside the Siege of Paris, a painting 60 by 400 feet, 300 artists painted it.”

Heinz went back to Pittsburgh on Thursday the twenty-sixth, leaving Sallie and the rest of the family along with Dr. Deetrick behind in Philadelphia. After they returned a few days later, Heinz needed to defuse a couple of family conflicts. One involved a possible threat to his marriage. During his absence, as Sallie informed him, Dr. Deetrick had made a pass at her. The ever-loyal Sallie told Heinz that she considered the doctor “a fool,” and thus Deetrick’s surprising transgression ended up bringing the couple closer together. “Sallie and I,” he wrote on the twenty-ninth, “had a chat about our courtship and her old beaux, etc.…and about our duty to God and man.” The following week, his brother John insisted on going to the fair himself. Though the request was reasonable—even his mother believed that “John had just as good a right as the rest to go”—Heinz protested, claiming that the firm lacked the money. While John was a part owner, Heinz, then officially just a salaried employee, could still push him around. “John was determined,” Heinz noted in his diary, “but did not go and all was quiet.”

The overbearing Heinz did not want John, the firm’s chief engineer, to wander around the Centennial Exposition by himself. However, he did insist that his brother, who had a knack for devising new ways to mass-produce the company’s products, tinker with several new technological innovations that
he
had seen on display there. John had recently improved the crispness of pickles (fermented cucumbers) by changing the temperature in the industrial-sized boilers; and that fall, after upping his spending on glass bottles to $400 a month, Heinz asked John to consider various new bottle designs. In Philadelphia, Heinz had noticed a canning machine, and John also began producing tin cans for sauerkraut. “Sold first canned goods this day that I ever handled,” Heinz wrote the following March. At the exposition, Heinz had also purchased a new machine that sorted pickles by size; upon his return to Pittsburgh, he assigned John the task of improving its speed.

A couple of years later, Heinz received a patent for “Improvement in Vegetable-Assorters.” Thus was Heinz able to stoke the company’s first wave of exponential growth by revolutionizing the way in which producers sold pickles to grocers. While pickles had been an American staple for decades, at the time, picklers still abounded; most were local operations that sold them through wholesalers. Heinz’s automated sorting machine gave him an immediate edge over his many competitors; it was much faster and more reliable than conventional hand sorting. As the company noted in catalogs of that era, its patented Keystone Pickle Assorter “makes no mistakes. It never miscounts. Therefore we guarantee our pickles to be more UNIFORM IN SIZE and EXACT IN COUNT than any other brand of pickles in the market.” In this instance, the number fetishist did not fudge his totals; Heinz opted to sell five different size barrels, containing from 1,000 to 3,400 pickles, and thanks to his new machine, the counts came out right every time. Once Heinz convinced grocers that this certainty would mean an extra two dollars a barrel in profits, he could barely keep up with the demand for his signature product. The clever use of such new technology—“from soil to customer” was how this obsessive referred to the control his company exercised over every step of the production process—was critical in transforming Heinz into the undisputed king of the pickle business.

After his return from Philadelphia, Heinz would also steadily beef up the budget for his advertising. Waxing increasingly creative, he would not hesitate to use his sense of humor. On Monday, November 6, 1876, this lifelong Republican would mix business and presidential politics by sending a horse-drawn carriage accompanied by three wagons to participate in a Pittsburgh parade for Rutherford B. Hayes—the teetotaler liked his stance on temperance—who was campaigning against the Democratic candidate, Samuel Tilden. While three of the signs bore the company name and trademark, the other read,
TOMORROW WE WILL PICKLE TILDEN
. To create his brand, Heinz insisted on uniformity and elegance in everything that he put before the public. His wagons were all painted plum red with green trimmings, and they were driven by pricey black Percherons, his specially bred French horses. In 1884, he contributed eighteen Heinz two-horse wagons to the three-and-a-half-hour-long Pittsburgh procession for the Republican presidential candidate James Blaine. The Republicans would, in turn, be good to Heinz. In 1891, the year after the congressman (and future president) William McKinley of Ohio pushed through a law raising tariffs on imported food by 50 percent, his profits doubled.