Colonel Sanders and the American Dream

by Josh Ozersky

  COLONEL SANDERS AND THE AMERICAN DREAM

  Mark Crispin Miller, Series Editor

  This series begins with a startling premise—that even now, more than two hundred years since its founding, America remains a largely undiscovered country with much of its amazing story yet to be told. In these books, some of America’s foremost historians and cultural critics bring to light episodes in our nation’s history that have never been explored. They offer fresh takes on events and people we thought we knew well and draw unexpected connections that deepen our understanding of our national character.

  Josh Ozersky

  COLONEL SANDERS

  AND THE AMERICAN DREAM

  University of Texas Press

  AUSTIN

  Copyright © 2012 University of Texas Press

  All rights reserved

  Printed in the United States of America

  First edition, 2012

  Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to:

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  The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/ NISO Z39.48-1992 (R1997) (Permanence of Paper).

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Ozersky, Josh.

  Colonel Sanders and the American dream / Josh Ozersky. — 1st ed.

  p. cm. — (Discovering America series)

  Includes index.

  ISBN 978-0-292-72382-5 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-292-73720-4 (e-book) — ISBN 978-0-292-74285-7 (individual e-book)

  1. Sanders, Harland, 1890—1980. 2. Restaurateurs—United States—

  Biography. 3. Kentucky Fried Chicken (Firm)—History. I. Title.

  TX910.5.S25O95 2012

  647.95092—dc23 [B] 2011042865

  [The Colonel]

  was not only

  our founder and

  our creator,

  he was our leader

  and the driving force

  behind KFC . . .

  He was a

  living example

  that the

  American Dream

  still exists.

  —Former Kentucky Fried Chicken president

  JOHN Y. BROWN JR.

  at Harland Sanders’ funeral service

  CONTENTS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  How to Become an Icon

  1

  “It Looks Like You’ll Never Amount to Anything”

  2

  The Coming of the Colonel

  3

  Kentucky Fried Chicken Inc.

  4

  Barbarians at the Gate

  5

  Aftermath of the American Dream

  NOTES

  INDEX

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Any book needs help to be written, but this one needed more than most. I’d like to thank my editor at the University of Texas Press, the patient and encouraging Theresa J. May; my mentor and friend Mark Crispin Miller, who brought the book project into being; Rick Maynard at KFC, whose help was invaluable; Angela Collette, the best of friends, in Kentucky; John Y. Brown, the best of interview subjects, in the same lovely state; and most of all my wife, Danit Lidor, whose hard work, research, patience, love, and above all vigorous and incisive intellect contributed the most to this book. I owe every one of the above a bucket of Original Recipe, at the very least.

  COLONEL SANDERS AND THE AMERICAN DREAM

  Introduction

  HOW TO BECOME AN ICON

  Kentucky Fried Chicken got some alarming news in summer 2010. A survey commissioned by the company found that less than 40 percent of Americans ages eighteen to twenty-five were able to recognize Colonel Sanders, the chain’s iconic founder, as a real person.1 Now thirty years in the grave, the Colonel had, for a generation of KFC customers, simply ceased to exist as a human being. He was now a corporate avatar, a brand symbol like Aunt Jemima, Mrs. Butterworth, and the Morton Salt Girl. Worse still, from KFC’s perspective, was the unmistakable inference to be drawn from these figures. If Colonel Sanders already seemed unreal to its customers after a single generation and in spite of the most strenuous efforts, what hope would it have of persuading future Americans to buy buckets? It was no abstract concern, a matter for the pondering of brand managers. There were a lot of chains in this country and overseas, and more all the time. They sold chicken too, and some of it was pretty good. The only thing separating KFC from them was the Colonel and whatever authority his image still conveyed.

  Which was what? KFC didn’t seem sure. In the thirty years since the Colonel’s death, it had run headlong from his cooking methods, put an apron on him, taken it off, and even made him into a cartoon that sold Pokemon toys and did hip-hop dances. There was much talk about his “legacy,” but it wasn’t at all clear what that meant. The legacy of Harland Sanders was more complicated than an “original recipe” for fried chicken or the image of an old man in a white suit, albeit one so omnipresent as his. One thing everybody agreed on was that whatever else he was or represented, he was surely an icon in the truest sense of the word.

  An icon, after all, doesn’t mean a familiar face or symbol; Peter Frampton isn’t an icon because he was hugely famous in the ’70s. An icon, historically speaking, is an image that everyone can recognize, even if they can’t read. Icons began as Byzantine religious figures and eventually became self-sufficient symbols that didn’t require further explanation. That’s why so many bars and restaurants have names like The Blue Parrot and The Spotted Pig—because they were originally named for the signs that hung over them. Later still, as applied semiotics became a cottage industry in the twentieth century, a number of imaginary persons were created who are still around today: Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben (no relation), the Jolly Green Giant, Ronald McDonald, Mr. Clean, and the rest. Created from whole cloth and wholly malleable by their authors, these commercial “mascots” do their jobs well, soldiering along on behalf of their makers, decade after decade, until they are either retro-fitted or summarily dismissed from service. But none of these has the universal weight, or power, of Colonel Sanders, for the simple reason that only Colonel Sanders, among the world’s great global icons, was an actual person.

  And he wasn’t just an actual person; this was a complicated man who lived a very long, varied, and eventful life—a life that said much about three centuries in American history. Born in the rural hinterlands in what amounted to frontier conditions, coming into adulthood in the machine age, living long enough to appear in commercials shown during Magnum, P.I. breaks, he now exists as an image visible from space, a postmodern construct, a language all his own. Colonel Sanders was born in the nineteenth century, in a place that might as well have been the eighteenth, lived deep into the twentieth century, and continues to be a larger-than-life presence in the twenty-first. He took a food that was especially resistant to commercialization on a big scale and made it as common as hamburgers—an astounding feat, given the long backstory and cultural freight of fried chicken and the physical difficulties of the dish itself. (Forget eleven herbs and spices; just making it well at all in a restaurant still is almost impossible for reasons I will explain later.)

  The Colonel, as he was universally known, was not an accidental hero, a man who fell into a moment of history and was made immortal. No, through a mixture of ambition, showmanship, and dogged endurance, along with an intuitive grasp of what was then being called “mass culture,” he found a way to make himself something bigger than just Harland
Sanders and even bigger than a fast-food mogul. More than almost anyone in the hagiographic literature of American business, he truly lived the American Dream, as his friend and eulogist John Y. Brown Jr. rightly observed. His story paralleled the American Dream and in some way personified it. But what does the American Dream mean? Often it is used to describe hard work leading to fortune, but there is nothing especially American about that; that is the Protestant work ethic wrapped in a flag. The phrase “American Dream” was coined specifically to describe a state of egalitarian opportunity, a novus orbis where a man might transcend his roots and create himself as he saw fit. The historian James Truslow Adams, who is given credit for coining the phrase in his 1931 book The Epic of America, defined it thus:

  The American Dream is that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement. . . It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.2

  It was not, in other words, merely the chance to climb the social ladder; it was the chance to transcend who one was. Certainly, Harland Sanders came from a very low place on the social scale, although not as low as he might have; he was, after all, a white Protestant and a man, among other things. His belief in betterment as a moral calling was absolute and was underscored for him by his escape from rural poverty not once but several times. While he wasn’t literally born in a log cabin, he might as well have been; late in the nineteenth century he came into the world of rural subsistence farming not much different from the one in which his pioneer forefathers lived. He embraced the gospel of business as ardently as any Babbitt and might have been portrayed as a buffoon by Sinclair Lewis or Sherwood Anderson. (To the end of his life he was an enthusiastic Rotarian, repeating the “Four Way Test” of good business and good morals.) His fortunes were made once with the rise of the railroad, once with the rise of the auto, and once again with the advent of corporate fast food and modern mass media, which took with one hand as they gave with the other. His posthumous history as the most prized asset of a great corporation tells the continuing story of that dream, too. After his death, his image was the soul of a vast global enterprise, torpid and somnolent in the ’70s and then folded into the most infamously buccaneering corporations in the late ’80s. In the 1990s it settled into the bosom of a vast and stable monopoly before spinning off again, this time as the vanguard of globalist expansion. Through a freak of history, Harland Sanders bridged the cultural history of three centuries of American striving; he personifies it in some special, unrepeatable way. There can never be another one like him.

  1

  “IT LOOKS LIKE YOU’LL NEVER AMOUNT TO ANYTHING”

  Harland Sanders, the oldest of three children, was born in 1890 to Wilbert and Margaret Ann Sanders of Henryville, Indiana, a farming community in the southernmost part of the state. They were not very poor by the standards of their time and place, a community of farmers laboring on hundred-acre plots for what amounted to basic sustenance. Wilbert Sanders died five years later, leaving two sons and one daughter in the care of his wife, a stout-hearted, fatalistic, devoutly religious woman in the unenviable position of being widowed, at thirty, with three young mouths to feed, in the rural Indiana of 1895. No one can fully appreciate the Colonel’s life and character without understanding both how desperate and how unexceptional was his mother’s situation. To be a relatively secure farmer in that time and place meant, at best, a level of desperation and privation that most Americans can barely imagine. The Panic of 1893, the worst depression the Unites States had yet faced, wrecked the nation’s economy, and farmers, arguably, took it hardest: they were subject to ruinous usury by banks, outright theft at the hands of real estate speculators and railroads, and little hope of getting either credit or hard currency. But the Sanderses weren’t even on that level; the family was struggling to survive on a basic subsistence level not far from life as it had been lived in frontier days—a period barely three generations removed. (Indiana was admitted as a state in 1816.)

  Margaret Ann Sanders considered her position. She was a respectable Christian woman with a good reputation. She had eighty acres of productive land but couldn’t farm them herself while raising three small children. She did own the property outright, so she could have “let it out,” allowing somebody even poorer to work it in exchange for some portion of the proceeds, but it wasn’t big enough to sharecrop. Her situation was tenuous. Still, farm communities like Henryville’s were cohesive, and people tended to support each other since nobody else was going to, and so she was able to get by for a couple of years by sewing and doing housework for neighbors—an indignity she no doubt bore with the stoic patience of her Protestant forebears. In 1897, when Harland was seven, though, a steadier financial stream was needed, and so she went to work in a local canning factory. This is the first time in the Sanders story that the family’s arc intersects with modern times; up until this moment, nothing had happened that would have been cause for comment during James Madison’s administration. Nor, for that matter, would Margaret’s solution of what to do with the kids surprise any poor, single mother struggling in the twenty-first century: she put her oldest in charge of his younger brother and sister and hoped for the best. The Colonel, for his part, loved telling the story about the first time he took over the kitchen, baking a loaf of bread in a hot wood stove and proudly presenting it to his mother at the canning factory. The other women on the line all hugged and kissed the boy, a story he would retell decades later as an old man being showered with the country’s adoration.

  The early life of Harland Sanders, though, was for the most part a depressing one. No one would want to make it into a TV movie. His mother sent him off to clear brush and scrubwood for a neighboring farmer—the kind of dull, relentless, lonely work that one tends to associate with chain gangs. He was ten. His biographer John Ed Pearce, a Louisville Courier-Journal reporter, points out that “it was not particularly hard work” and says, as the Colonel did, that the main problem with the assignment was that Sanders goofed off instead of bending himself to his work. “There was no one to keep him to his task,” Pearce writes, “and he took to spending a lot of time lying on his back looking and listening to the sounds of nature.” Nature is not long in punishing such indolence, and the lesson came quickly when the ten-year-old was fired and told by the neighbor, “You’re not worth a doggone, boy.”1

  The shame of his failure he seems to have carried with him for the rest of his life. He dreaded having to go back to his mother and tell her that he had failed both her and his helpless little brother and sister. Nor was his dread misplaced: “It looks like you’ll never amount to anything,” the Colonel remembered her saying. “I’m afraid you’re just no good. Here I am, left alone with you three children to support, and you’re my oldest boy, the only one that can help me, and you won’t even work enough so somebody will keep you. I guess I’ll never be able to count on you.”2

  The Colonel’s second wife, Claudia Ledington (the one everybody remembers), said this speech had a formative effect on the boy, one that acted as a tonic, motivating him to his monumental exertions of later years. Like many children of single mothers, he utterly worshipped his mother’s memory and cringed inwardly at the thought of not living up to her churchly piety and hard-work nostrums. Even in his eighties, as one of the most famous people in America, he never seemed to question his upbringing or the injunctions received at his mother’s knee. He could, of course, never live up to them; though from his boyhood he had eschewed smoking, drinking, and gambling, he was afraid until the end of his days that his “cussing” would condemn him to eternal perdition. There were no mint juleps for the Colonel—only hard, unremitting self-flagellation, the very picture of the Protestant
work ethic back when the Protestant work ethic really meant something.

  A month after his dismissal he was back at work, this time as a coolie for one Henry Monk, who had a bigger farm in the southernmost part of the county. Sanders plowed the ground with a team of mules all day and then, though wobbly with fatigue, was expected to feed, water, and milk the cows, which inevitably kicked the boy, too. That was his life on Monk’s farm the summer he was eleven: up before dawn, working until 10 p.m., getting his first calluses, and learning the value of hard work. In the approving words of John Ed Pearce, speaking for old-school Kentuckians everywhere, “Harland returned home with a new sense of dignity, and more money than he had ever had. But he had learned now what it was like to be on his own, to do a man’s work, make a living. After that, school seemed childish and a waste of time.”

  It goes without saying that no modern biographer of the Colonel would take such a parental, approving tone—even if he or she felt it, which is equally unlikely. (The Colonel himself evidently felt keenly his lack of schooling and openly regretted it in later years when he struggled mightily to enter the middle class.) There was, in any case, no chance for him to get an education, given the still dire necessities of supporting his family. At the age of sixteen he was out working full time in the first of a long series of jobs that he would get, briefly excel at, and then either quit or be fired from. What all of these jobs have in common, however, is that they were urban, salaried positions a man of spirit could pick up and put down if they didn’t suit him. There was to be no more farmwork for Sanders; he was now a twentieth-century man.

  An uncle worked for the streetcar company in nearby New Albany, Indiana, so the young Harland Sanders got a job there in 1906 taking fares, making change, and exchanging his already developing line of patter with riders. But with tensions brewing in Cuba, there was a call for volunteers to head there, and Sanders joined the Army. It was both brief and dismal: his experience seems to have consisted entirely of shoveling mule feces and being seasick. He lost forty pounds from an already wiry frame. Landing in New Orleans, he caught a freight train up the Mississippi River and saw St. Louis for the first time. The feeling of riding the rails was addictive, and he gave himself over to it, traveling all around the South and eventually arriving in Sheffield, Alabama, where he had kin. Among these was an uncle who worked for the Southern Railway, and he got the seventeen-year-old Sanders a terrible job as a blacksmith’s helper. This was a railroad job that wasn’t anywhere near a train, a brutal job at best, made far worse, in the Colonel’s recollection, because the blacksmith was a mean old hack who forced his underlings to hammer metal while it was still cold. It was, nevertheless, a railroad job, and it led to other railroad jobs, all of them equally menial but none as medieval as the first. The allure of the railroad, of course, was its modernity—the freedom, the way it collapsed distance, how it roared out of nowhere to disrupt the stasis and stultification of rural life in the nineteenth century. Colonel Sanders came from a time and place in which life was so boring that people actually stood around waiting for a train to pass. As a young man of spirit it was only natural that he would long to be a part of that world, even if it was only as a section hand driving spikes into the tracks or working the yards near stations or “firing” the engine by shoveling coal into its burning belly, which at least got him on the train, if briefly. It was a signal part of his character that he thrust himself into wherever the action was hottest; were he still alive, there can be no doubt he would be funding social media startups and investing in artisanal micro-distilleries.