The Vagabonds

by Jeff Guinn

  The New York Times published a straightforward story describing the planned-for “vacation camping trip through the Adirondack Mountains.” The Kansas City Times preferred a snarkier approach: “Henry Ford will probably enjoy the vacation he is spending with Mr. Edison and Mr. Burroughs, there being hardly any occasion when either of those gentlemen will be likely to ask him for information on any subject.” But major newspapers assigned reporters to write about the Vagabonds setting off, while smaller publications relied on wire services. Here the travelers broke from their previous tradition of speaking to the press only during stops in towns. For the first time, a wire service reporter was allowed to spend a night in camp with them and describe in detail what was supposedly a typical Vagabonds evening around the campfire. The reporter was George R. Holmes, staff correspondent for the Hearst International News Service (INS). During the Tribune trial, Hearst newspapers had been supportive of Ford—a Hearst columnist suggested that the automaker’s supporters write him letters declaring America needed more anarchists like him. The four famous campers anticipated that the INS wire reports, reprinted in hundreds of daily and weekly papers throughout the country, would be glowing. Holmes’s initial story, published on August 9, was exactly what they wanted:

  Out of the inky blackness that hangs like a shroud over the Adirondacks these nights, there blooms nightly along some quiet mountain stream a ghost-like tented village. . . . Eight tents, almost transparent with the incandescent lamps inside them, stood out last night like so many jewels against the velvet blackness of the forest on all sides. In the center of the tiny village a campfire burned, for it is nippy in the mountains these nights.

  After setting the scene, Holmes portrayed the campers as sitting up late, discussing weighty subjects. Ford, “holding up a two-day old newspaper which he had picked up in some forgotten village,” noted that “there’s a big rumpus over the cost of living down in Washington.” As Holmes described it, Burroughs “nodded affirmatively.” Edison, dozing in a camp chair, “said nothing.” Ford declared that the real problem was national leaders who overthought such problems: “Like all things, the solution will be easy when it comes. What the world needs is men who know how to do things.” Burroughs speculated that prices rose because “nowadays everything comes wrapped up in fancy packages. That’s one reason why the cost of living is so high.”

  Ford lamented “middle men” who charged outrageously to take farmers’ products and convey them to market, as well as the excess time and trouble required of farmers to harvest their crops at all: “I know one thing that I can do to bring [prices] down. If for the next four or five years I would devote all my time to developing [a more efficient] farm tractor and put it on every farm in the United States, it will bring down the cost of living. And I’m going to do it.”

  The Vagabonds certainly staged the conversation for Holmes on the evening he was allowed to visit their camp. But they also talked around the campfire on the other nights when no press was present—it was part of the trips’ appeal that, away from outsiders, they could express themselves on whatever topics and however bluntly they chose. Sometimes an evening’s main topic had nothing to do with business or politics. One night on the 1919 summer trip there was lengthy debate over the quality of acclaimed literary classics. Edison dominated, insisting that the greatest works ever were Longfellow’s epic poem Evangeline and Victor Hugo’s novel Les Misérables. He dismissed Shakespeare’s plays, insisting they would “read better” if translated into “common everyday speech.”

  Another evening, a campfire conversation between Firestone and Edison firmly set the seventy-two-year-old inventor on the research path that consumed him for the rest of his life. Firestone recalled it in his memoir:

  I started to talk to Mr. Edison about rubber and its properties, and I was astounded at the knowledge of rubber that he had on hand. I had been working with rubber for many years, but he told me more than I knew and more than I think [my] chemists knew—although, to the best of my knowledge, Mr. Edison had never given any attention to rubber. . . . But it is that way with any subject one brings up with Mr. Edison.

  In fact, rubber had been at least occasionally on Edison’s mind since his 1915 visit to Luther Burbank’s laboratory in Santa Rosa, California. He and Burbank chatted briefly then about the latter’s efforts to breed latex-bearing plants that would flourish sufficiently in the U.S. America used the majority of rubber available throughout the world but produced virtually none of it. In his World War I tenure on the Naval Advisory Board, Edison became aware of a critical reason for America to supply its own rubber—it was always possible for rubber-producing nations to deny the product to Americans, and during wars enemy submarines could prey on rubber shipments to the U.S., in particular crippling military motor vehicles through tire shortages.

  Though he’d certainly considered rubber-related research before, Edison’s 1919 campfire interaction with Firestone apparently made his mind up—the means of producing American rubber would be his next great focus. It would require not only extensive study of how to get the necessary plants to grow in some part of the country, but also the development of new methods of extracting latex in the most efficient, economical way. Besides the national benefit—tires and other rubber products had become increasingly necessary—inventing the means of mastering rubber production, and establishing companies that did it, would also boost Edison’s personal finances. He was far from a poor man, but his wealth was considerably less than might have been expected of a man whose imagination and hard work had brought countless popular products to consumers. Press speculation pegged the overall value of Edison-related goods and the industrial firms manufacturing them at an astronomical $15 billion, but not much of that accrued to the inventor himself. Time and again, he’d invented things with long-term market appeal only to lose interest or miscalculate what form of his inventions consumers wanted to buy. Examples were plentiful.

  Edison invented the phonograph and his company was first to bring it into stores, but for nearly a decade after that he focused on other projects while competitors built and marketed their own phonographs, over time depriving the originator of what could have been an Edison-dominated business. Edison not only invented the incandescent bulb, he created the most efficient generator systems to light them. Edison’s company was poised to power every major city, and by 1919 almost half the households in America had electricity. But Edison didn’t financially benefit. Years earlier, he sold his power interests to competitors. They eventually formed General Electric, and GE rather than Edison raked in substantial profits.

  Edison Company films were huge hits during the early years of motion pictures. Popular Edison titles included The Great Train Robbery and Uncle Tom’s Cabin. All were two-reelers; the longest was twenty-five minutes. But moviegoers soon wanted longer films, and four-reelers became the norm. Edison, though, liked two-reelers better, and wouldn’t produce anything longer. Ticket sales for Edison films declined precipitously, and by 1918 he’d sold off all of his film interests. The same was substantially true for recorded music. For years, Edison recordings dominated. But Americans began enjoying jazz, and wanted those records. Edison hated jazz. He insisted that his company release only recordings of more traditional music, especially the symphonies and operas that he personally preferred. Predictably, competitors’ recordings soon outsold Edison’s, and by 1929 Edison’s companies no longer produced “entertainment” records.

  Edison’s Vagabond friends lamented his business judgment. Ford said, “Edison is easily the world’s greatest scientist. I am not sure that he is also not the world’s worst businessman. He knows nothing of business.” Firestone agreed: “Mr. Edison thinks almost wholly creatively and does not give the same thought to commerce that he gives to creation.” When Edison evinced interest in exploring means of growing latex-bearing plants and manufacturing rubber in America, which would provide him with new opportunities not only to invent, but to make money, both Ford and Fi
restone enthusiastically encouraged him to do so, and promised to invest in his efforts.

  * * *

  While Edison pondered the possibilities of rubber, Ford spent much of the 1919 trip frolicking. He was certain that he’d emerge triumphant in the Mount Clemens trial, and he expressed his high spirits in a Firestone-related prank. Ford ordered the camp cooks to slice thin strips off wooden tent stakes, then boil them into soup served to Firestone, who gagged on them. Firestone responded by bedecking Ford’s shiny new kitchen and equipment trucks with signs reading “Buy Firestone Tires.”

  Burroughs, as usual, was the grumpiest among the group. Though the naturalist found some things to like about Vermont—“The view of the White Mountains . . . very impressive. These great rocky peaks shouldering the sky. . . . Simply stupendous!”—Burroughs wasn’t impressed with upper New York state, especially since their route north was almost exactly the same as the Fordless Vagabonds had followed in 1916. He noted in his journal, “Coming from New England . . . into New York is stepping down to a lower level.”

  Each trip, Burroughs had specific complaints. On this one, it was the meals. Ford had along his personal chef, and the new kitchen/refrigerator truck ensured that fine ingredients were always on hand. But Burroughs found fault with food temperature and serving times. “It is the same old story—dinner at 8 or 9 p.m.,” he wrote. “I have just told Mr. Ford I must have a warm dinner in the middle of the day or I quit. . . . Mr. Ford says I shall have the warm dinner. I will not live on cold snacks.” The inventor came in for criticism, too: “Edison is a dictator. He shuns all the good state roads and hunts up rough, hilly dirt roads.”

  Even so, in his public and private writings Burroughs generally praised Edison and Ford. To some extent, self-interest was involved. As with Firestone’s tires, Burroughs’s books increased in public appeal through his presence on the Vagabonds’ trips. But Burroughs’s admiration for the pair seems genuine. He wrote of Edison, “He is a great character, and we are all devoted to him.” The old man’s praise of Ford was even more lavish: “Not withstanding his practical turn of mind and his mastery of the mechanic arts . . . he is through and through an idealist. This combination of power and qualities makes him a very interesting and, I may say, lovable personality.”

  * * *

  But one night’s 1919 campfire conversation, probably early on the trip and without INS correspondent Holmes on hand to eavesdrop, partially convinced Burroughs that Ford was less than lovable and Edison unworthy of absolute devotion. As they digested their dinners, the two famous men took turns regaling each other, Firestone, and Burroughs with reasons that Jews were the scourge of mankind. Their joint diatribe apparently began after Edison complained about the rampant problems he’d perceived during the war while dealing with the Navy. That set Ford off. According to Burroughs, the carmaker “attribute[d] all evil to the Jews or Jewish capitalists—the Jews caused the war, the Jews caused the outbreak of thieving and robbery all over the country, the Jews caused the inefficiency of the navy which Edison talked about.” Ford even had a specific culprit in mind, railroad speculator Jay Gould, whom he scornfully described as a Jewish “shylock.” Here Burroughs interrupted, explaining that, as it happened, he and Jay Gould had been childhood friends, and the Gould family was Presbyterian. After that, Burroughs retired to his tent, leaving Ford and Edison to continue the conversation on their own, and troubled that Edison seemed in complete agreement with Ford. Burroughs failed to describe Firestone’s reaction, and neither the tire manufacturer or the naturalist ever mentioned the incident in their public writings about the Vagabonds. They apparently accepted that antisemitism was an unfortunate flaw among the many positive attributes of their two famous friends.

  Despite Burroughs’s and Firestone’s efforts to conceal it, Ford’s antisemitism would soon become common knowledge. In the century since, historians have tried to determine its root cause. Some point to Ford’s childhood, where his limited formal education was based in part on the McGuffey readers, popular tomes for children setting out moral guidelines and relegating Jews to the role of swarthy villains opposed to white, moral Christians. Others point to Ford’s reflexive belief in plots and cabals, particularly involving international banking and finance, which many (Ford included) believed were controlled by Jews. Possibly through Ernest Liebold, his secretary and primary Ford Motor Company confidant, Ford was familiar with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a malicious manifesto of Jews conspiring to gain control of the world through infiltration of business and government. Protocols had long been revealed as a clumsy forgery, but Liebold and Ford persisted in believing every word because it reinforced their own prejudice. The carmaker himself sometimes said that he truly learned to mistrust Jews during the Peace Ship effort—Rosika Schwimmer was the obvious culprit.

  All these factors certainly had some effect on Ford, but identifying any as the single key factor in his antisemitism ignores a simpler, more common influence. In the early twentieth century (and, it can be argued, ever since), America was the domain of white Protestant males who automatically considered anyone else inferior, and, if in any position of even potential influence, a threat to the right way of doing things. Ford in some ways was more enlightened than most of his white male peers. He hired blacks at his companies, where some attained management positions. There were a few individual Jews whom Ford considered friends. He didn’t openly oppose the suffragist movement, and he held his wife, Clara, in high regard, valuing her advice in both business and his private life. But in his mistrust and loathing of the Jews as a race, he was typical of his times.

  Although Edison’s prejudices remained less public, they were racist as well as antisemitic. Prejudice was part of some Edison recordings’ market appeal, including “The Whistling Coon” and “Row at a Negro Ball,” which simulated sounds of (supposedly) black men brawling before police arrived.

  In the draft of a 1911 letter, Edison attempted to qualify his mistrust of Jews, explaining that current prejudice against them was really the responsibility of earlier generations of bigots:

  The Jews are certainly a remarkable people, as strange to me in their isolation from the rest of mankind as those mysterious people called Gypsies. . . . [While] the moment they get into art, music, science & literature the Jew is fine—the trouble with the Jew [is] that he has been persecuted for centuries by ignorant malignant bigots & forced into his present characteristics and he has acquired a 6th sense which gives him an almost unerring judgment in [financial] affairs. . . . He has taken too great an advantage of it & got himself disliked by many.

  No mention of disturbing campfire conversations marred press coverage of the 1919 trip. Local papers enthusiastically described even brief Vagabonds stops in their towns. On August 11, the St. Johnsbury, Vermont, Caledonian-Record noted that the town had “the honor Sunday afternoon of entertaining for half an hour four of the country’s most famous men . . . the party got out [and] enjoyed a cool bottle of ginger ale. . . . They all looked like they were having the time of their ‘young lives.’ ” A few days after his initial report, INS correspondent George Holmes was allowed another exclusive visit to a Vagabonds camp, this time for breakfast in a field near Plattsburgh, New York. The celebrated travelers spoke in favor of the proposed League of Nations and deplored ongoing labor strikes around the country. Burroughs pointed out that nature never went on strike, and Ford declared that “strikes are all put-up jobs, anyway . . . the [strikers] themselves suffer. Strikes are senseless things.” Ford then directly addressed Holmes about the proper role of the media: “You are in the greatest business in the world. The press in this country can do more good than anything in the world if it will only print what’s right and drive home essential things.” Holmes dutifully repeated the comment in his story.

  With access to the travelers limited to a few moments during their stops in towns, other wire services and major newspapers had little option but to entertain their readers with innocuous Vagabonds
minutiae. The Kansas City Star described what they ate for lunch on August 13 in a Hartford, Connecticut, restaurant: “Mr. Ford had clam broth, spinach, apple pie and tea. Mr. Edison had apple pie, Rocquefort cheese, hard crackers and iced coffee.” When the bill of $14.25 arrived at the table, Ford deftly turned paying for the meal into an opportunity to display his appreciation of the working man. As one journalist described it, “Mr. Ford extracted a $50 bill from his pocket and handed it to the head waiter. ‘Split up the change among you,’ he remarked as he pushed back his chair and lighted his cigar.” The cigar-lighting was an obvious embellishment by the writer, since Ford didn’t smoke. Even the New York Times published a flattering photo of the Vagabonds lined up in front of their “kitchenette” car.

  Burroughs left the group that afternoon, claiming “an engagement he had made many weeks previously,” but just as likely determined to sleep in a real bed at home and have warm dinners at whatever hour he liked. The joke was on the naturalist—soon after his departure it started raining heavily, and the remaining Vagabonds chose to spend the night in a comfortable Danbury, Connecticut, hotel.

  * * *

  On Thursday, August 14, they abruptly decided to drive the rest of the way back to New York City and end the trip there. In There to Breathe the Beauty, Norman Brauer speculates that bad weather was the cause, but that same day the jury rendered its verdict in the Tribune trial. Ford was kept apprised of news from Mount Clemens throughout the trip, and on August 13 when word that the jury had retired to make its decision reached him in Connecticut he undoubtedly wanted to have immediate access to any updates. Ford was gratified by the verdict in his favor, if not the six cents in token damages awarded to him. But the coverage of the trial, both hostile and positive, brought Ford an additional bonus.