America's Obsessives: The Compulsive Energy That Built a Nation

by Joshua Kendall

  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 contribut
ed 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.

  Heinz would put his heart into his marketing efforts. “Swing [Heinz] sign today across First Avenue,” the tape-measure aficionado proudly noted in his diary on May 18, 1878, “18 feet long by 15 feet high, lettering…Pickles, Vinegar, Mustard.… It is all made of wire and cost $40.” While the denizens of Pittsburgh were initially startled by this larger-than-life advertisement, they soon accepted it. Heinz would continue to tout his products each year at the Pittsburgh exposition; and he would serve as a vice president of the civic organization that staged it for fifteen years. His varieties were like his children, and like a proud father, he couldn’t stop talking them up. (After the birth of his fourth child, Clifford, he celebrated by launching “Clifford’s Worcester Sauce,” and a few years later, he named a brand of ketchup after his teenage son, Howard.) While Heinz could always find money for advertising, he scrimped elsewhere. In the middle of 1878, on a trip to Chicago, he plopped down only $17 for a blue suit because, as he noted, he was “trying to save.” As he also acknowledged in his diary, he typically wore his suits every day for a couple of years.

  Thanks to Heinz’s remarkable ingenuity and drive—the smooth-talking salesman, who was not averse to staying up all night to get off orders, was constantly riding the rails to open up new markets—after just a year, the F. & J. Heinz Company was worth $14,000, up nearly fivefold. Having regained his financial footing, in the fall of 1877, a few weeks after Howard’s birth, Heinz moved from Sharpsburg to a row house in downtown Pittsburgh that was close to his factory. But two years later, the neatnik would acknowledge his error and move back. “Am delighted with the change of coming to Sharpsburg,” he noted in April 1879. “It seems more like living than to be stuck into the dirt in the heart of the Smoky City.” Even though his business was now a smashing success, his anxiety level remained high. “My head feels dull, all over top of head and forehead,” Heinz wrote that same April. “Am trying not to work too hard, but fear it is almost too late.” Yet his new nervous crises would not produce boils, and he could move on to counting and measuring outgrowths of his prosperity. In early 1879, he began tallying the number of homeless men to whom he gave free meals at his firm. “I resolved to keep an account,” he reported in his diary, after noting that he had served forty-three tramps and beggars in the thirty-one days of January, “and had the girl mark 1 on a piece of paper for all that were fed.” The following year, he fixated on the dimensions of the iron safes that he bought both Irene and Clarence for Christmas—“twelve by nine by seven inches.”

  While revenues soared—in 1884, sales came to a staggering $43,000 ($860,000)—the workplace remained full of conflict. After 1880, when J. W. Ulam, one of his best employees, left to start his own pickle company, an embittered Heinz would no longer consider giving upper management positions to anyone outside the family; even so, he couldn’t make peace with either of his titular bosses, his brother John and cousin Frederick. Heinz would repeatedly lash out at John for not working hard enough. Assuming that any sensible person would share his all-consuming interest in business, Heinz accused his brother of “driving more nails in my coffin than all other cares.” He was incredulous that John wasn’t eager to be at his post at the manufacturing division when it opened at 7 a.m. (At this stage of his career, Heinz himself typically reported for work at 9 a.m., roughly the same time as his brother.) In April 1887, in a curious attempt to “encourage Brother John,” Heinz started commuting to the city on the 6 a.m. train. In response, John felt discouraged and wanted out. After Anna Heinz sided with her firstborn and put pressure on John to comply with Henry’s whims, outside arbitrators stepped in and worked out the separation agreement. In 1888, Frederick also liberated himself from Henry’s clutches and sold his share. H. J. Heinz and his company were now officially one and the same.

  Heinz also had a tumultuous relationship with his brother Peter, who was the F. & J. Heinz Company’s first “traveler” (traveling salesman). P.J., as H.J. called him, proved to be more than capable. “He [Peter] surpasses all of our agents,” Heinz noted in 1884, as his brother began selling bulk goods by wagon in Cincinnati. But despite being whisked by Heinz to temperance meetings, Peter continued to drink and chase women. In the spring of 1886, Heinz dashed off to Washington and “snatched him [Peter] away from where he was to be married. P.J. escaped.” This was not actually the first time that Heinz had unhitched his brother from a wayward woman—and not even the first time in Washington. (Nine years earlier in the nation’s capital, P.J. had shacked up with a divorced woman and her daughter above a saloon.) In an attempt to cure his brother’s ills, Heinz sent him off to Germany that spring, where Peter soon found a potential mate, Pauline Merz, of whom the family could approve. Remarkably, after all his efforts to get Peter to keep to the straight and narrow, Heinz nearly sabotaged this union. That summer, in Wiesbaden, a few days before the wedding was to take place, the impulsive and aggrieved Heinz could not resist badmouthing the groom. As soon as he met the bride’s parents, he let it rip. “I tell them plainly,” Heinz wrote in his diary, “how P.J. is so that no reflections can be made.” Fortunately, the Merzes were already aware of Peter’s past, and the ceremony went on as planned.

  After his marriage, Peter reestablished himself as a leading salesman. But while he no longer was seducing stray women, he continued to drink. In 1899, Heinz got a letter from a top company executive who stated that out “of all the cases [of alcoholism] that he has ever had in his life time, P.J. surpasses them all” and urged that “action should be taken to save our business.” In the fall of 1900, after a Pinkerton detective, hired by Heinz, had followed Peter around as he went barhopping in Manhattan, his brother was forced to retire at the age of forty-nine.

  Heinz’s 1886 European trip was part medical vacation, part Protestant pilgrimage—he would sit in John Wesley’s house in London and visit Martin Luther’s church in Wittenberg—and part a return to his roots. In his father’s hometown of Kallstadt, he would visit a myriad of uncles, aunts, cousins, nieces, and nephews, “a total of over 100 relatives,” as he would dutifully count (and then recount in his journal). But business was never too far from his mind. Upon his arrival in Liverpool, Heinz systematically examined the windows of all the grocery shops and “saw no pickle displays.” “I have learned little,” the disappointed entrepreneur noted after his three-day visit, “in this city which I can utilize in America to advantage.”

  England’s capital would be a different story. After taking the family to see the major sites, including the Houses of Parliament (which he described as “a beautiful structure and very large”—too large, no doubt, to measure the numbers), Buckingham Palace (“a plain structure”), and Regent’s Park (“alive with people”), he enjoyed making the rounds of the pickle, glass, and vinegar factories. And then on Friday, June 18, 1886, at the end of his first week, Heinz made history. Decked out in his best tail coat (made by a British tailor in Philadelphia) and top hat, the supersalesman paid a call to Fortnum and Mason, the still-vibrant British grocer that has been catering to the royal family out of its Piccadilly Street store since 1707. Armed with a Gladstone bag containing “seven varieties of our finest and newest goods,” he strode through the front door rather than through the service entrance, as was customary for English salesmen of the era. “Resisting the temptation to take out the tape measure (but the Georgian doorway was so beautifully proportioned),” as a British chronicler, attuned to his quirks, has put it, Heinz asked to see the head of grocery purchasing. Tasting the samples—the horseradish, the ketchup, and chili sauce—the head couldn’t resist, stating, “I think, Mr. Heinz, we will take all of them.”

  “1ST SA
LE IN ENGLAND,” reported a jubilant Heinz in his diary.

  English exports initially constituted only a small fraction of his business. And the massive four-story Farrington Road Heinz headquarters, opened in 1898, hemorrhaged shillings for several years. But by 1906, led by baked beans, which Heinz himself loved to devour, English sales reached a quarter of a million dollars. Americans had first learned of beans during the Civil War, and the Heinz Company began mass-producing them in the mid-1890s. Its clever “beans and toast” campaign would forever revamp the morning meal throughout the British Empire. “At breakfast or dinner,” ran a 1910 ad that circulated widely in England’s northern factory belt, “see that your plate is filled with Heinz Baked Beans with Tomato Sauce. It builds up brain, body and muscle. The bean is Nature’s most nourishing food.” The Brits, who had once assumed that beans were meant for horses, were now largely convinced that they were the invention of a European company. In the twenty-first century, the United Kingdom still consumes more canned beans per capita than any other nation in the world.

  A century before globalization, Heinz figured out that the future of his business rested on ringing up foreign sales. “I was the only one,” he reflected toward the end of his life, “who had any faith in the future development of the 57 through a branch house in England.” “Our market is the world,” ran Heinz’s “Important Idea Number Four.” Between 1890 and 1915, he would take a long European trip every year but four. And by the start of the Great War, the compulsive world traveler would have agencies up and running on every continent but Antarctica. His advertising wouldn’t be limited to America; countless Germans would gaze daily at his massive thirty-eight-foot-by-sixty-nine-foot sign over the Rhine River. Long before Starbucks, McDonald’s, or even Coca-Cola, Heinz would reign as the most recognizable brand on earth. As Sebastian Mueller, Heinz’s brother-in-law and trusty deputy for decades, once put it, Heinz products were sold wherever there were “civilized people.”