The Vagabonds: The Story of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison’s Ten-Year Road Trip by Jeff Guinn looks at interesting friendships of alpha males.
Between 1914 and 1925, Henry Ford and Thomas Edison and Harvey Firestone (the tire guy) made many trips to various parts of the country. Until his death in 1921, the three were joined by well-known naturalist John Burroughs as they went on vacation in a very public way.
Both Edison and Ford were born poor and did not go to college, but they both lived the American dream. They were major celebrities as well as shrewd businessmen. Ford saw the trips as a way to market the automobile as a vacation vehicle and to sell more cars. Edison saw the journey as a way to get publicity for his business and to stay in the public eye.
At the beginning of their ventures, there were few cars on the road and few roads to travel. Motorists had to be able to fix their cars and bring extra tanks of gas to go anywhere since there weren’t many gas stations. By the time they took their last vacation in 1925, there were millions of cars on the thousands of miles of roads that had been built. Service status, auto parks, and motels had sprung up to meet the growing demand of motorists who took motor trips for pleasure each year.
Along the way, we learn about how Henry Ford built his company to produce millions of Model T’s, the first car that most people could afford. One car rolled off the assembly line every 2.5 minutes. The auto was half the price of other cars ($500). One size and color (black) fit all. We come to understand how Edison built his empire and what he thought the next big thing would be. Harvey Firestone, who owed his success to convincing Ford to put Firestone tires on Model T’s, organized everything as the factotum-in-chief. John Burroughs was a renowned raconteur of nature, and his articles on the flora and fauna of different parts of America were popular. Burroughs hated technology, including cars. Ford loved birds and Burroughs was a birder.
Cars were becoming a big thing in the US. In 1908 there were 200,000 registered vehicles. By 1920 there were 10 million and in 1925 there were 17.5 million cars on the road.
Besides building a lot of cars, in 1914 Ford increased wages to $5 a day, up from $2. That was a huge deal nationally; it saved money on training and hiring costs, and it increased quality. Although he did make it big eventually, Henry Ford had failed at two previous auto manufacturing ventures.
On the Road
The first trip was to the Everglades in February 1914. The wives came along for the ride. They had an entourage of cars, including Model T’s and larger Packards. They didn’t exactly rough it. They had an entourage of servants who set up luxurious tents with chef-catered meals.
The roads weren’t very good and it rained, flooding a lot of them. They crawled along and set up camp in mud. Ford shot snakes heads for fun. A major storm hit and knocked over the big tent. They cut the trip short and went back to Fort Myers. Ford and Edison considered the trip “a hoot” and wanted a redo.
Right around this time, Ford was burning out and almost sold the company, but the older Edison set the example for reinventing yourself and seeking new adventures.
The public fawned over Ford and Edison. They were media superstars who had made life better through affordable cars, electric lights, the phonograph, and movies. They had “extended the boundaries of the possible.” The war in Europe in 1914 was making people nervous and they looked forward to the diversion of following their heroes.
The next trip in 1915 was to San Francisco where Edison was to be honored at the Panama-Pacific Exposition. Ford went along because people in California wanted to meet with him, and hanging out with Edison got both of them noticed. Harvey Firestone joined the trip to market his tires and meet with distributors. This time they traveled by train.
The schedule was hectic, with lots of meetings and celebrations. The president of Stanford University, who had worked for Edison, had a meeting with him. Ford hung out at his company’s exhibit and actually worked on cars while fawning public looked on.
The boys were invited to San Diego, to participate in a smaller exposition. They decided to drive, which was a great way to publicize the fun of auto trips. Although more people were buying cars, they weren’t driving very far, usually confining their trips to around town. The Vagabonds’ road trip was a commercial for the future of auto travel. They had to stop along the way as crowds blocked the road to see them – these guys were The Beatles of their day – but they did make it to San Diego. The road trip reinvigorated the crew, and they were thinking about their next jaunt.
World War 1 was raging in 1915, and the US was doing all it could to avoid the conflict. President Wilson was reluctant to join the fray and he had an ally in Henry Ford who was against American participation. Ford pledged to spend one million dollars on anti-war efforts and became a steady spokesman against our involvement. He bankrolled various efforts to keep the US at peace, including a Peace Ship that went to Europe with activists pledged to bring the war to an end. It didn’t work, but Ford got some good press and higher visibility out of it. He flirted with running for president as a Republican – he had no party affiliation – but decided that Wilson would keep us out of war so he didn't run.
The 1916 trip took them through the Adirondack Mountains of New York up through Saratoga and to Lake Champlain. They generally slept in tents set up by servants, although sometimes they couldn't resist a hotel and a shower. As usual, the press showed up and gave them great coverage. Their trips led more Americans think about buying a car.
There was no trip in 1917 since America was finally at war. Although Ford had been against our involvement, he retooled his production facilities to produce war goods, including boats and ambulances. He made no profit on anything.
In 1918 Edison worked with the Navy to design devices to help the war effort at sea. He came up with 40 ideas, none of which were accepted. He was not happy. At age 71, he felt that he was running out of time to be productive, but he did have time for another road trip.
Edison was the real star of the troupe. He had invented the incandescent light bulb and electricity delivery systems, the phonograph, and the kinetoscope, which was a motion picture camera. His factories manufactured all of these products. He never gave speeches and said very little, which added to his allure. I’m tempted to compare him to Steve Jobs, but Jobs’ genius was marketing, not inventing. Edison was a much bigger deal.
This time, the Vagabonds would “auto gypsy” through Virginia, West Virginia, Tennessee and the Carolinas. The south was a foreign land to most Americans, considered backward and inferior to the rest of the country. Ford decided to coordinate the trip with local Ford dealers along the route to get maximum publicity for his brand. He offered to pay for everything on the Vagabonds’ trip, and he brought in master chefs, better camping equipment, and nicer cars – more Packards, not Model T’s. Edison would bring along big batteries to provide power for lighting at night.
John Burroughs, the naturalist, was not happy with the destinations since he saw “nothing beautiful in the Southern landscape.” After pleas from Henry Ford, he ended up going. They took off in mid-August from Pittsburgh and, as usual, stopped a lot along the way to greet well-wishers and local officials. At one point, a bouncing rock wrecked the radiator and fan of one of the cars. The local mechanics said they couldn’t fix it and needed new parts. Ford took their tools and a soldering iron and fixed it, and they were on their way.
There were other problems. A drive shaft broke and they did have to wait for a replacement. The roads were really rough and lots of things broke down, but they did travel through the South. They had disdain for many of the people they saw that they considered mentally deficient. They saw people who dressed like they came from an earlier age.
Meanwhile, Henry Ford was running for the US Senate in Michigan. He refused to campaign or spend any money on the race, and he wasn’t great at telling the press why he was running. He ended up getting the Democratic nomination. His Republican opponent charged him with employing Germans in his factories, which of course he did – German-Americans. Given that we had just fought a war against Germany, this was an effective charge since Ford said nothing to refute it. Ford narrowly lost, and, upset at what he saw as bad press coverage of his campaign, he bought a newspaper, the Dearborn Independent.
The year 1919 was tumultuous for the US. There were 2,000 labor actions, including the Boston police strike which Governor Calvin Coolidge broke. That set him on the path to the presidency. The Great Migration of Blacks to the North fueled racial tensions. Women were demanding the right to vote. And many leaders blamed our emerging problems on Bolshevism, which came out of the Russian Revolution in 1917. Joe McCarthy would be proud.
In July the Vagabonds hit northern New York and Vermont for their summer trip. It got the usual great press coverage in hundreds of papers across the country due to the news wire services. Edison was thinking about his next great venture: rubber. He wanted to find a way to grow rubber trees in the US. After many years, he figured out that our climate wouldn’t support rubber trees. He also had some problems with the business side of his operation and sold out to what would become General Electric. As one of his friends said, he was the world’s best inventor and the world’s worst business man.
Ford and Edison were not noble men. They were both anti-Semitic and racist, which reporters around the campfire noticed. A lot of people back then held the same beliefs about Blacks and Jews, so nothing ever became public. Ford began publishing stories in his newspaper on “The International Jew” – stories which were not flattering or accurate. Circulation went up.
In 1920, the economy was dipping. Ford was selling fewer cars and Firestone was selling fewer tires. The good news was that more people were taking longer car trips and staying in “auto camps” overnight. You got a parking place, bathrooms, and maybe a restaurant. Given the downturn in the economy, the Vagabonds thought that taking a trip would be a good way to boost the country’s morale and their sales. They were off to Northern Michigan. They were getting older so they stayed at a hotel instead of camping out. They still attracted lots of reporters.
By 1921 Edison was pursuing his latest venture, the electric car. He was working to develop a battery that could power the vehicle to make it practical. That eventually ended up in the same place as the domestic rubber tree industry, off the table.
That year the crew decided to visit the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, a vast wasteland that was beautiful and isolated. It was no accident that President Warren Harding was vacationing there. They arranged to meet the president for what they thought would be a leisurely few days to schmooze him on various topics of interest. Edison volunteered to set up sophisticated communications equipment. President Harding demurred; he was on vacation and didn’t want to be bothered. As it turned out, the Vagabonds got very little private time with Harding, but they did get massive newspaper coverage, so it wasn’t a total loss.
There was no group trip from late 1921 to June 1923. At that point, Ford and Edison traveled to Muscle Shoals, Alabama, to examine the property that Ford wanted to buy from the federal government to develop inexpensive hydroelectric power for a region without electricity. He never closed the deal, but in the 1930s President Franklin Roosevelt created the Tennessee Valley Authority which did bring light to the masses.
Ford was very anti-Wall Street and had picked up a lot of support among farmers. He was looking at running for president in 1924 but not sure in which party.
President Harding died in the summer 1923. The two biggest flower arrangements sent were from the Vagabonds and the Ku Klux Klan. After the funeral, the Vagabonds took off for the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. They stayed at properties controlled by Ford. That reduced the crush of people that followed the troupe. They also ditched the camping and went to motels.
After Harding died, Calvin Coolidge was the new president. Ford was still thinking about running for president but Mrs. Ford was not supportive. Edison also opposed it because he thought that Ford was better in the corporate world than in politics. Ford ended up liking Coolidge and chose not to run.
Ford was uneducated and disdained book. “Book sickness is a modern ailment.” However, he did like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s work. Ford bought and renovated the Wayside Inn in Sudbury, MA, which Longfellow had frequented. For their 1924 trip, the Vagabonds would stay at the inn and make day trips. They did go to Vermont to visit Coolidge very briefly, but they didn’t get to meet with him. Ford wanted to press the president on buying Muscle Shoals, but that didn’t happen and Ford gave up on the idea.
The End of the Road
There was no trip in 1925. Edison didn’t want to go, and everyone was getting older.
The country was finding new celebrities in the entertainment industry. Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey, and a horse named Man o’ War – all had become famous. The Vagabonds knew that they were yesterday.
Competitors were gaining on him so Ford came out with the Model A, a better car that sold well. His newspaper was being sued by a Jewish man who had been maligned in a column. Ford agreed to a big settlement and got rid of the paper.
Edison died on Oct 18, 1931. On February 7, 1938, Firestone died. Ford died at 84, on April 7, 1947.
As individuals, Edison, Ford, and Firestone created the means for the great multitudes to enjoy leisure entertainment far beyond what was previously imagined. Their summer trips showed people what was possible with a car.
Just after the Vagabonds final trip in 1924, the Oakland Tribune wrote:
Whenever the news is too gruesome or dull,
Whenever the reader feels bored,
There come to the rescue those three worthy pals,
Edison, Firestone and Ford.
That’s what they did. They illuminated life for millions of people.
Bob’s Take
This was a lot more entertaining than last week’s book on Professor Lichtman’s keys to the presidential election. I didn’t know much about any of the two people featured in this book. I knew Ford was an anti-Semite. Before WW 2 Hitler had given him an award for his anti-Semitism, the Order of the Golden Eagle. I knew very little about Edison, who also was racist and anti-Semitic, although not to the extent of Ford. A lot of people in the early 19th century were very prejudiced against “others” including Catholics, immigrants, Jews and non-whites.
On the plus side, their trips did convince a lot of people to go on the road and visit new places. It was no accident that car ownership was increasing dramatically during the years the Vagabonds were making their trips. Their journeys dominated the news coverage of the day, primarily in the newspapers which everyone read daily. People would read about these fun jaunts and see pictures of these super-heroes in action. Why not take your family on a road trip?
By the mid-1920s, many new businesses had sprung up to meet the needs of the auto traveler – Coleman stoves; gas stations and service centers; motels; and restaurants strategically located on popular roads. Governments started to build roads; for many years, the good highways were private toll roads.
Ford was a brilliant businessman. Although he didn’t invent the car, he did bring it to the mass market. Edison was a genius who had over 1,000 patents issued to him. He was always looking for the next big thing but never quite found it. Firestone pressed him to get into the emerging radio business but Edison wasn’t interested. He saw the future and was committed to inventing an electric car, but he could never make much progress on battery design and efficiency.
Firestone and Burroughs were side players but filled essential roles. Burroughs was a celebrated naturalist who explained the local topography and environmental features to the travelers. Firestone was the factotum who organized everything so that the trips went off with relatively few problems.
This was a fun read that was under 300 pages, for which Bob at the Bookshelf gives thanks.
