Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,388

This is the grave of Howard Johnson.

Born in Boston in 1897, Johnson grew up fairly poor. His father had a cigar business, but I gather he wasn’t doing super great with it because he made his son drop out of school after elementary school to work in the factory. Or maybe he just didn’t care about educating his children. Anyway, he grew up, joined the military in World War I, and served in Europe. By the time he returned, his father and died and left him the business, which was massively in debt. He tried to run it until 1924 and then finally gave up.

The next year, Johnson bought a soda shop outside Boston. This was a time when the quality of American sweets really did vary from vendor to vendor. Most of the time, I mean, it just flat out wasn’t as good as it would be today. One point to consider that matters about Johnson’s life a lot is that there was never some time when Americans ate high quality homemade food and bought local and knew where their eggs and dairy and whatever came from before Big Food came along and destroyed it. That’s a total myth, one that serves present food movements quite well, but one as completely mythological as visions of the 50s that spouses slept in separate beds like on TV shows of the era. Sure, of course there was good food around. But a lot of it was not. The struggle to create caramels made from milk instead of paraffin in the late 19th century, for example, massively raised the quality of the things, but most of them were absolute crap by any later standard.

Well, this was the way of soda fountains too. How good was the ice cream at these places? A lot of it was very bad! But some people did figure things out. Johnson found a guy, just a street vendor, who was one of those guys. Johnson didn’t know how to make ice cream. But he did know how to pay someone for a recipe who could use the money. He paid that ice cream vendor $300 for his recipe. The key was using more butterfat and not adulterating the ice cream with what the hell ever to increase short-term profit at the cost of quality. This doesn’t seem like it would be some brilliant innovation, but hey, someone had to do it. Now, it turns out that people liked their ice cream to taste good. Who knew! And this ice cream actually did taste good. Johnson’s business went gangbusters.

Pretty soon, Johnson decided to expand his burgeoning ice cream business. He kept it pretty simple at first. Hamburgers and hot dogs were becoming increasingly popular low-price foods for young people. So he did that. Worked out well enough. He opened a bigger restaurant in Quincy. Expanded the menu a bit. Went pretty well. So he started to build it out. Interesting story (perhaps somewhat apocryphal) about this. So in 1929, the prude mayor of Boston, Malcolm Nichols, banned the new Eugene O’Neill play, Strange Interlude, from the city. It was a tough play, dealing with abortion, affairs, and other sexual themes that made losers squirm. So the producers decided to put it on in Quincy instead. This is all unquestionably true. The other part of the story that might be more corporate propaganda is that Johnson’s restaurant there was near the theater and after the performance, many of the Boston theater elites went there to eat and they all realized how great it was and the rest is history or something. Yeah, maybe.

Now, by the 1930s, Americans were driving more and on longer trips. Not all Americans–this was the Depression after all. But the Depression didn’t impact all Americans. Plenty were fine. The road system got better. So let’s say you were taking a little road trip somewhere. You needed to eat. Local places popped up to serve that market. But was it any good? Maybe it was and maybe it wasn’t, but you really didn’t have any way to know this. So Johnson saw an opportunity here to provide a repeatable food experience. What if he started opening the same restaurant at various locations and so when you saw the name, you knew exactly what you were going to get and it was be of a certain quality? Might not be the best quality but it most certainly would not be of the worse quality. It was a moderate quality you can handle.

So in 1935, Johnson and a partner named Reginald Sprague came up with the idea of franchising restaurants. You could buy into the Howard Johnson name and open a restaurant serving his food. He would get some of the profit and you would get some of the profit. Customers would know what they were eating. It was immediately successful. Howard Johnson’s appeared across the country. It didn’t hurt that he got the contracts to serve many of the turnpike rest areas built across the country; the successors of these contracts help explain the horrific food options of the Mass Pike and New York Thurway rest areas. He soon got quite rich. He added to his restaurant empire by opening middling-cost hotels too. Same principle as food really. You simply didn’t know what you were going to get by stopping in a random place, You knew what you would get at HoJos. The first opened in Savannah in 1954. In the 60s and 70s, this was the largest food and hotel chain in the country.

Now, in today’s world, stopping at chain restaurants or hotels for a certain class of people is a bit declassé. Many people look at McDonald’s or Taco Bell or Arby’s with disgust (not Farley though). I kinda do too, honestly, though I do have a soft spot for Wendy’s. Hotels aren’t quite that way, but the low-cost chains of my youth–the Motel 6 and Super 8–are just not places I am going to stay. I write this post from Spokane, Washington, where I am this weekend for a wedding. Naturally, we are staying at a downtown hotel that is classy and nice and fun. So this is a cultural thing that changes over time, not to mention social class (I mean, recent threads on this site have suggested that any middling professor should be able to buy a private plane on a $72,000 salary, how is owning a plane a sign of wealth????) But the difference is of course the internet, where you can figure out what you are getting, at least to some extent. It’s the same with food. Today, sites like Roadfood catalog the good food that you can get traveling the back roads of Bumblefuck, South Carolina. Now, I don’t always agree–I’ve used that site a good deal and sometimes have hit gold and sometimes that it was garbage. But the point is I can expect to have something I wouldn’t usually have and so having people who have scouted out the small town restaurants that actually are good has a lot of value. No one had this in the 30s.

None of this is per se valorizing the Howard Johnson Empire, which had its up sides and its down sides. It is just explaining it. I don’t think anyone really misses Howard Johnson’s today. But it had its time and it served its purpose and we should understand why that mattered. Johnson went very far to standardize American food, using distribution and supply chain networks that other chains would soon copy.

As for Johnson himself, he became super duper rich, but like a lot of guys who built their own businesses, he didn’t care about anything but the business. It was the second generation that goofed off, spent time on the golf course, went to Europe. He would travel around and check on the quality of his restaurants. It’s just that he did so in a Cadillac instead of a Ford. He technically left the company to his son in 1959, but that was more in name than fact since he couldn’t stay away from interfering.

Oh also, Johnson was a total racist who maintained a whites only policy. In fact, this became a real issue not only for the country but for the nation. See, when African peoples threw off their colonial changes, it meant that they sent representatives to the U.S., both as diplomatic staff and to the UN. But those representatives were subject to American racial norms. So in 1957, when a HoJos in Dover, Delaware refused to serve the finance minister of Ghana, it became a major international crisis that got the Eisenhower administration involved, though to apologize, not to desegregate. Do not underestimate the role that Cold War politics played in elite white support for moderate civil rights legislation. It was a huge influence because the Soviets played this stuff up all the time. After all, with the real fight in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, why would these nations support the U.S. if their representatives couldn’t even get food in half the country? Then in 1962, CORE took on Howard Johnson’s for its desegregation campaigns, with its leader Floyd McKissick heading up the campaign in Durham, North Carolina. In fact, Bernie Sanders helped to work up a boycott of the Cicero, Illinois Howard Johnson’s as part of the support campaign. The company completely caved in late 1962 and desegregated. Later, the company’s stores in New York City were key sites of gay rights organizing as they would serve openly gay people.

What really killed the Howard Johnson chain in the end was an obsession with cost cutting that eventually did cut into the quality and other chains simply passed it by. It probably needed to end. But it served its purpose and if we have no need to really remember it fondly, except with a hazy nostalgia about the past that the past most definitely did not earn, it certainly is a critical turning point in American food history. In any case, this was all long after Johnson’s death, in 1972, at the age of 75.

Howard Johnson is buried in Milton Cemetery, Milton, Massachusetts.

If you would like this series to visit other key figures in the history of American chain restaurants, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Dave Thomas from Wendy’s is in Columbus, Ohio and Fuzzy Raffel, co-founder of Arby’s (spit), is in Doral, Florida. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.