by Jeff Guinn
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In November 1924, voters returned Calvin Coolidge to the White House by a substantial margin. For decades afterward, magazine articles about the Vagabonds’ trips and most biographies of Ford and Edison included descriptions of their meeting with Coolidge in Plymouth Notch. The visit went unmentioned in Coolidge’s memoir.
Chapter Eleven
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Jep Bisbee Is Famous
The Vagabonds’ summer car trips ended for good on August 20, 1924, when they went their separate ways from Portsmouth, New Hampshire. At the time, Ford and Firestone didn’t realize it. Edison probably did.
A year later, Firestone called on Edison in New Jersey to tell the inventor it was time to plan the Vagabonds’ 1925 outing. He said that Ford had in mind a driving and camping trip “in the western mountains.” But as Firestone wrote to Ford immediately afterward, the seventy-eight-year-old Edison responded that “he didn’t believe he could this year.” The inventor cited mild stomach ailments and concerns “about the sales end of his business.” Firestone tried to change his mind: “I told him that we must not take too long as he was getting older and would not enjoy [camping] as much later.”
Firestone and Ford could have gone by themselves. In 1916, Edison and Firestone camped without Ford. But both Firestone and Ford recognized that, without Edison’s cheerful, comforting presence, a crucial element of the Vagabonds’ communal spirit would be missing. The more they thought about it, Ford and Firestone apparently understood that their road adventures were over.
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In 1926 Firestone published a memoir, Men and Rubber. In it, he declared that the Vagabonds had mutually decided to end their formal summer trips. Edison’s refusal to go wasn’t mentioned. Instead, Firestone explained that the reluctant decision was forced on them by insatiable public interest in what were intended by the three participants as relaxing private getaways:
While Mr. Edison and Mr. Ford are as much disposed as ever for the outdoors and would like to go as we used to go, the publicity which the trips began to gather around them eliminated their object and charm. We were never free. Instead of a simple, gipsy-minded fortnight on the road, we found ourselves in the midst of motion-picture operators, reporters and curiosity seekers. We became a kind of traveling circus and, although all of us were accustomed to a degree of publicity, it became tiresome to be utterly without privacy.
In fact, the opposite was true. On every trip, from their pre-departure announcements to their media-friendly stops, the Vagabonds welcomed and actively sought publicity. Some of the “motion-picture operators” worked for Ford. During their first outings, car travel and camping were sufficiently unusual that famous men doing it together commanded daily coverage. Ford, Edison, and Firestone were media-savvy enough to offer small, endearing scenarios to capture press—and public—attention, like Ford chopping trees, Firestone buying eggs and milk at a remote farmhouse, or Edison napping by the campfire. Then, as autocamping became more common, it was necessary for the Vagabonds to stage major events if they wanted substantial national coverage of their summer adventures—inviting Harding to join them in 1921, Ford hosting a farmers’ picnic at Wayside Inn, or visiting Coolidge in Vermont. But the possibilities for these special moments were limited—they certainly couldn’t be staged every day for two weeks—and the three learned at Camp Harding and Plymouth Notch that when presidents were involved, the Vagabonds didn’t dominate headlines or control schedules.
By 1925, Ford, Edison, and Firestone also found themselves in undeclared but constant competition for headlines with a whole new generation of American celebrities. In an era where entertainment possibilities, previously limited to modest amusements like local dances, church socials, and reading by oil lamp or candlelight, were vastly enhanced by movies and radio, the number of famous people increased exponentially. Public fascination was no longer limited to political, military, and business leaders along with a few writers and stage performers. Silent films created vast followings for Charlie Chaplin, Clara Bow, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks, and the “talkies” that debuted in 1927 further expanded the movie star ranks. Radio broadcasts of sports events besotted listeners with Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey, Red Grange, and a horse named Man o’ War. Few if any outsiders could identify even one of Edison’s laboratory assistants, but untold thousands of Americans could name the entire regular starting lineup of the 1927 New York Yankees.
Fans wanted to know everything about virtually anything that this exciting new generation of national idols did, on and off the screen or playing field, and newspapers and theater newsreels obliged. By the time Firestone published Men and Rubber, there was no longer anything deemed special enough about three friends, even such well-known men, driving and camping to warrant national attention. While there was still considerable interest in Ford and Edison as individuals, widespread public appeal of their summer trips with Firestone had run its course. A contributing factor to the end of the trips wasn’t the Vagabonds’ expectation of too much attention being paid to them, but too little.
The three men still saw a great deal of each other, at their Florida estates during the winter, and in New York whenever business took Ford and Firestone there. Edison curtailed his travel, sticking close to his laboratories in Fort Myers and New Jersey. The inventor was immersed in research. As biographer Neil Baldwin wrote in Edison: Inventing the Century, “Patriot to the end, he wanted to find a plant that would produce ‘prolific’ supplies . . . as a contingency against the danger of curtailed foreign rubber flow due to crop disease or wartime.” In 1927 he marked his eightieth birthday by announcing the Edison Botanic Research Corporation, dedicated entirely to the discovery of latex-bearing plants that would flourish in America, and a means of extracting the latex to produce rubber at a reasonable cost. Ford and Firestone agreed to jointly underwrite the project. There is some discrepancy regarding the amounts to which they both committed. Some sources suggest $250,000 and others $50,000, with payments spread over several years, presumably to allow Edison the time necessary to achieve his goals. The press hailed Edison, who set to work, using nine acres in Fort Myers to test approximately seventeen thousand plants. Eventually Edison declared that goldenrod was the best latex source, but try as he and his assistants might, Edison couldn’t invent a cost-efficient method of extracting latex from it. That wasn’t the inventor’s only disappointment.
With the advent of the Great Depression in 1929, Harvey Firestone informed Edison that business setbacks prevented him from honoring his financial commitment. Edison, furious, called Firestone “a goddamned lightweight.” The inventor soon resumed his friendship with the tire maker, probably because Ford stepped in to make up the difference. Ultimately, Edison’s rubber research didn’t result in any definitive breakthroughs. It was not until 1942, with Edison long since deceased and World War II well under way, that American industry produced significant amounts of rubber—the Firestone Company and other major U.S. tire manufacturers were key contributors to the process.
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Ford also faced challenges. These were of his own making. For several years, he’d ignored warnings from Edsel and other Ford Motor Company executives that the Model T must be replaced—competitors were making sales headway with more colorful, eye-pleasing cars. In 1925, for the first time since its 1908 introduction, the Model T began losing overall market share. Competitors would have been thrilled to offer any model car that still commanded 40 percent of all sales, but that represented as much as a 15 percent dropoff from 1924, with even more precipitous decline imminent. Where cars were concerned, Americans previously wanted affordable, reliable transportation. Now they craved choice. Reluctantly, Ford bowed to the inevitable. He ordered that a new model Ford—only one, another car for the great multitudes—be designed, and in early 1927 Ford shut down Model T production at all his factories. Sixty thousand employees were laid off while assembly lines were rejiggered to produce a mystery car. No details were announ
ced, and the lack of advance information fueled intense press speculation and public interest. One popular, erroneous rumor had Ford naming his new automobile “The Edison.” On November 30 there was a press preview in Detroit, on December 2 showrooms opened, and Americans were finally introduced to the Model A. Ford had used the name before—there were several “alphabet” Fords before the Model T—but A, the first letter among twenty-six, was deemed appropriate to describe an automobile intended in 1927 to reassert Ford market dominance.
The Model A was faster than the Model T (top speed of 65 mph), glitzier (several different styles), more comfortable and safer (hydraulic shock absorbers, brakes on all four wheels, laminated safety glass windshields), and even came in a choice of four colors (Niagara Blue, Arabian Sand, Dawn Gray, and Gunmetal Blue). It was also more expensive. Late-era Model Ts sold for as little as $260. Model As ranged in price from about $500 to $1,200. Consumers didn’t care. Four hundred thousand were ordered within two weeks. For a while the Model A dominated car sales to the same lopsided extent as its predecessor, but by 1931 its appeal slackened sufficiently for Ford to shut down its production and, like competing car manufacturers, begin offering a variety of models that changed on an annual basis.
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Around the same time that he reluctantly shelved his beloved Model T, Ford also parted ways with the Dearborn Independent. That process began in February 1925, when Aaron Sapiro filed a libel suit against Ford and Dearborn Publishing Company. Sapiro requested $1 million for defamation of character in a series of Independent articles claiming he was part of a larger Jewish conspiracy to gain control over American farmers. (Sapiro served on the council and as a spokesman of the American Farm Bureau Federation, which represented the interests of some sixty cooperative farm associations.) Depositions took some time, and the case finally reached the court in March 1927. That resulted in a mistrial—Ford’s attorneys claimed Jews tried to bribe a juror to vote in Sapiro’s favor—but before a second trial set for September could begin, Ford capitulated. His attorneys surely advised him that he was likely to lose, and all of Ford’s attention was needed back at his assembly plants, where the first Model As were soon going into production. His settlement with Sapiro included an unspecified amount of cash and a public apology. Handing over the money was far less painful than the apology, which was released to the press on July 8. In it, Ford described himself as “deeply mortified” by his newspaper’s “resurrecting exploded fictions,” and pledged to [ask Jews’] forgiveness for the harm I have unintentionally committed by retracting so far as lies within my power the offensive charges laid at their door.” Including “unintentionally” was Ford’s face-saving excuse. He claimed that he’d been entirely unaware of any antisemitic articles printed in the Independent. Now that he knew about them, he’d see that such offensive sentiments were never expressed on its pages again.
In general, his apology was accepted. There were a few holdouts. Broadway impresario Billy Rose, born William Samuel Rosenberg, composed a biting ditty:
I was sad and I was blue
But now I’m just as good as you
Since Henry Ford apologized to me
I’ve thrown away my little Chevrolet
And bought myself a Ford coupe
Since Henry Ford apologized to me.
Ford didn’t tolerate the source of his humiliation long. On December 31, 1927, he officially shut down the Dearborn Independent. During the eight years he owned it, Ford lost $5 million on the weekly—and, ultimately, significant personal pride.
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The Model A’s instant success helped raise Ford’s spirits, and by mid-1928 he had another idea that might further expunge his Sapiro capitulation from public memory. The Vagabonds should drive together again.
In July, Ford tasked Firestone to recruit Edison. Unlike three years earlier, Firestone chose not to risk a turndown in person. Instead he wrote the inventor a chatty letter that began with a report on the tire maker’s recent business trip to the West Coast: “I met and talked with over one thousand Firestone dealers and had occasion to tell them of . . . the time you were spending in research work to find and develop a rubber plant that would produce rubber in the United States, and I am sure it would please you to know the interest people take in your work. The newspapers gave considerable space to my reference to your work in the rubber field.”
As it happened, Firestone continued, his trip also took him to Yellowstone National Park. “It is wonderful. If you have never been there it would be very interesting to you.” If Edison didn’t find that destination appealing—Firestone acknowledged that “it gets pretty hot traveling through certain sections of the west”—he still “wish[ed] that we might have an outing this year, some place where it would be convenient and you and Mrs. Edison would like to go . . . [perhaps] go over our old trip down in Virginia, or in that section. I think that would be a good trip, or up in Maine.” Firestone emphasized that Mr. Ford was eager for the Vagabonds to regroup: He “suggested that we arrange something for the last of August.” But it was left to Edison to pick the time and destination—“I shall be pleased with any plan you suggest and will try to do my part to make the trip as comfortable and enjoyable as possible.”
Firestone closed by telling Edison, “Mr. Ford said he was going to Orange to see you this week and talk to you about it.”
A few days later, Edison scribbled his response in the margins of Firestone’s letter. He instructed his secretary Meadowcroft to write that “I don’t see how I can possibly make the auto trip this year.” It’s unclear whether Edison said the same to Ford when the carmaker called on him in New Jersey, or even if Ford discussed a Vagabonds trip with the inventor at all. Instead, Firestone was to be told that “Ford was here today, he says he wants me to lay [the] cornerstone of his museum in Dearborn.” With the introduction of the Model A behind him and the Dearborn Independent shuttered, a new project dominated Henry Ford’s thoughts, even at the expense of another Vagabonds trip. He’d once promised a Ford car for the multitudes. Now he’d give the American people a Ford museum of real national history, one where Thomas Edison was celebrated above all others.
Ford had been collecting Americana for well over a decade, items that to him reflected the best of the nation’s history—farm implements, one-room schoolhouse desks and writing materials, water wheels and horse harnesses, and other objects that reminded Ford of the honest ambition and hard work that made modern America possible. He’d mostly stored these in overflowing warehouses on business properties. A small percentage graced shelves at the Wayside Inn. Now Ford wished to share his entire collection, or at least most of it, with the public. In 1926, Ford selected a site in Dearborn adjacent to Ford Motor Company and hired an architect to build a singular, eye-catching structure fronted by an exact replica of Independence Hall in Philadelphia. The massive building was to be filled with memorabilia already in Ford’s collection and many more items to be acquired. An enclosed museum was only half of his plan. An additional 255 acres was designated as “Greenfield Village” (named for Clara Ford’s girlhood home), a site harking back to the late nineteenth and very early twentieth centuries with everything authentic. Visitors could literally stroll through American history, because Ford purchased such historic buildings as the Wright brothers’ bicycle shop and Logan County Courthouse, where Abraham Lincoln demonstrated his skills as a lawyer. There were sawmills, gristmills, steam engines, plows, and a working farm. Ford eventually included his own birthplace, buildings from the Firestone family farm, and Edison’s Menlo Park, New Jersey, laboratory. All the structures were torn down on their original sites, transported in pieces to Dearborn, and reassembled with obsessive care. Ford insisted that every detail must be exact, down to chair styles and brands of nails.
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The formal name of the museum was the Edison Institute, and in September 1928 Edison laid the cornerstone, scribbling his signature in wet cement. It was Ford’s intention that the museum
and Greenfield Village officially open on October 21, 1929, the fiftieth anniversary of Edison’s breakthrough discovery of the incandescent bulb. Construction wasn’t complete—the opening would be delayed until 1933—but enough was in place to host a gala event. Edison was guest of honor. Attendees included Will Rogers, Madame Curie, and President Herbert Hoover, elected in 1928 after Calvin Coolidge declined to seek another term. There was a grand dinner, and after it a program broadcast nationally on radio. Speakers praised Edison, and finally the eighty-two-year-old inventor made some brief remarks. In them, he gave public credit for the first time to all the laboratory assistants who’d been at his side: “When you honor me, you are also honoring the vast army of workers but for whom my work would have gone for nothing.” It was gracious, if overdue. The evening concluded with Edison connecting two wires and “lighting up” the Menlo Park laboratory just as he had fifty years earlier. The crowd applauded, and, high in the tower of the ersatz Independence Hall, a replica Liberty Bell clanged in the night.