by Jeff Guinn
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There was to be no official Edison memoir—years earlier, the inventor and Samuel Clemens discussed collaborating on one, but couldn’t agree on whose name should come first on the cover. Edison’s respect for Ford was such that he would allow the carmaker top billing, but so far as the inventor was concerned, no one else, even the author renowned as Mark Twain, merited that privilege. Edison felt too poorly to attempt writing the book on his own. The inventor blamed “gases formed during digestion” for uncharacteristic listlessness and, for the last few years of his life and at his own insistence, subsisted entirely on milk, at first a pint every three hours, later seven glasses a day. Kidney failure hastened the end. Edison died on October 18, 1931, and by President Hoover’s request, on October 21, the day of his burial, at 10 p.m. the nation turned off its electric lights for one minute.
Edison’s family held a lingering grudge against the surviving Vagabonds. Mina Edison always believed that Ford took advantage of her trusting husband, and Edison’s daughter Madeleine, who was along on the aborted 1914 excursion into the Everglades, declared in a 1972 interview (she was by then in her eighties) that the inventor never wanted to go on the subsequent Vagabonds trips: “He would let himself be taken on these things.” While her mother resented Ford, Madeleine specifically accused Firestone, claiming that the tire maker organized the summer trips as personal “publicity stunts.” It was a particularly unjust charge. As dozens of letters and telegrams at the Benson Ford Research Center and Thomas Edison National Historical Park make clear, Firestone was the organizer but never the initiator of the Vagabonds’ trips. In every instance, either Edison (the earliest years) or Ford (the later ones) suggested a trip; then it fell to Firestone to contact the other one to gauge interest, agree on a destination, and coordinate dates convenient to Ford’s and Edison’s schedules. During the trips, Firestone was responsible for purchasing supplies, soothing John Burroughs during the cranky old naturalist’s frequent tantrums, and serving as a constant buffer for Ford and Edison with townspeople and the media. He did this by sublimating his own ego; Firestone was eminently successful in his own right. Ford gave America a car for the multitudes, but Firestone was among several innovative manufacturers who developed the tires that allowed Model Ts and other cars to travel further with fewer blowouts and much smoother rides. As a member of the Vagabonds, he uncomplainingly accepted his secondary role, respecting two friends who were greater, though not necessarily better, men. On February 7, 1938, sixty-nine-year-old Harvey Firestone suffered a coronary thrombosis and died in his sleep.
Henry Ford lived to be eighty-four, and his last years were difficult. Ford’s opposition to unions and his employees’ increasing dissatisfaction with company work rules (no talking or sitting, only one fifteen-minute break each work shift that must be used for lunch, increasing verbal and occasional physical harassment by supervisors) inevitably led to conflict, culminating in a 1933 clash between police, recently laid-off workers, and outside agitators that left several men dead and dozens injured. The media described the bloody melee as “the Dearborn Massacre.” It took another eight years before Ford reluctantly allowed employees to unionize, and then only after the U.S. courts ruled that workers could not be fired for participating in union activities.
Ford’s antisemitic past continued haunting him. Adolf Hitler praised Ford in his polemical Mein Kampf (a title that translates to My Struggle): “Every year [the Jews] manage to become increasingly the controlling masters of [America]; one great man, Ford, to their exasperation still holds out.” On July 30, 1938, his seventy-fifth birthday, Henry Ford became the first American recipient of the Grand Service Cross of the Supreme Order of the Golden Eagle, an award invented by Hitler to honor distinguished foreigners. In January 1940, just months after the Nazi blitzkrieg across Europe, Ford privately considered sending personal emissaries to Hitler with a request to halt hostilities. “I think I just may have [Hitler’s] respect [and] the door may be open,” he told future biographer James Newton. But Ford never followed through, and during World War II, as he had during the earlier world war, he converted his factories to the manufacture of war matériel. Ford’s reputation as an antisemite still lingers. In 2014, the mayor of Fort Myers withdrew a proposal to name a city bridge for Ford when the director of a local Jewish organization protested.
Ford’s last few years were especially difficult. Frustrated by being allowed only a figurehead role by his father in running Ford Motor Company, Edsel Ford planned to resign. Before he could, he was stricken with cancer and died on May 26, 1943. Henry and Edsel Ford had not been close—the father considered the son to be too soft—but Ford was devastated by Edsel’s death all the same. Ford named himself as his son’s replacement; that apparently meant no real change, since Ford already controlled the company anyway. But Ford’s physicians detected signs of dementia in him, and in September 1945 an increasingly impaired Ford resigned in favor of his grandson Henry Ford II. With no company to run, and with few real friends remaining after the deaths of Edison and Firestone, Ford spent hours wandering Greenfield Village, increasingly unable to distinguish between past and present. One observer recalled Ford “standing in the middle of [Edison’s] laboratory floor, with a wan smile on his lips, like a lost child, and a faraway expression in his eyes.” The end came from a cerebral hemorrhage. With Clara by his side, Henry Ford died at home on April 7, 1947.
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The Vagabonds are remembered to this day. Although the company he founded in 1900 was acquired by Bridgestone Corporation of Japan eighty-eight years later, Firestone tires remain one of the best-selling brands. In the 1960s and ’70s, Firestone’s name became familiar to a new generation thanks to a popular advertising jingle:
Wherever wheels are rolling,
No matter what the load,
The name that’s known is Firestone
Where the rubber meets the road.
Harvey Firestone would have considered it a fitting epitaph.
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Nearly fourteen decades after he invented incandescent bulbs and the power grid systems to efficiently and economically light them, Thomas Edison remains one of the most iconic and beloved figures in American history. At Thomas Edison National Historical Park in New Jersey, visitors can tour his former office and living quarters and, under supervision, immerse themselves in a collection of his letters and other papers. Rutgers University also boasts an exceptional collection of Edison material, much of which is available for viewing online.
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Henry Ford’s legacy is more complicated. The antisemitic taint may never be entirely expunged, and when his political ambitions are recalled at all, they are usually dismissed as the delusions of a crackpot. In fact, if Warren G. Harding hadn’t died unexpectedly in 1923, Ford might well have become America’s thirtieth president. But the Model T still reigns as perhaps the most famous, and certainly most popular, car in American automobile history. Ford Motor Company remains a major industry entity, and the justly renowned Greenfield Village and the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn are among the most popular historical attractions in America. Ford would have liked that, though he would be less pleased that the museum he named for Edison is now popularly known by his own name instead. (It still is listed on official business forms as the Edison Institute.) Even long after his death, Ford dominates relationships.
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As individuals, Edison, Ford, and Firestone created the means for the “great multitudes” to enjoy leisure entertainment far beyond what was previously imagined. As the Vagabonds, their summer car and camping trips exemplified what they had helped make possible: See what we’re doing? You can do it, too. Eventually their own participation, for a time so newsworthy, became unremarkable. But that is inevitable for the most successful trend-setters. By their example, the Vagabonds encouraged countless ordinary Americans to pursue their own dreams. This was especially true in the case of Jep Bisbee, the elderly fiddler who encountered the
Vagabonds in his tiny, remote hometown of Paris, Michigan, during August 1923.
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It had been nearly two months since the Vagabonds made their surprise call at Jep’s modest home, promising the obscure country musician a trip to New York, a recording session, and a new car. Jep, a shoemaker who fiddled at local dances less for the dollar or so he earned than for the love of playing traditional folk tunes, never previously aspired to or even imagined anything so grand. Now he did. But as weeks passed with no further word from his famous visitors, Jep and the rest of Paris’s few hundred residents began believing that the rich men had either forgotten or never meant to keep their magnificent promises.
Then on October 10, 1923, Jep responded to a knock on his front door and there stood Henry Ford and his uniformed chauffeur. Ford presented Jep’s wife, Sarah, with a box of chocolates, and her stunned husband with a shiny new Model T parked in front of the house. Ford proposed that Jep use his barn as a garage, and instructed the chauffeur to move the car in there. When the barn door proved too low and narrow for the Model T to fit through, Ford and the chauffeur took off their coats, borrowed Jep’s axes and hammers, and, in their shirtsleeves, tore down the old door, widened the frame, and built a new door along with a ramp so the car could be driven in easily. When the sweaty work was done and the old musician was invited to move the Model T into its new home, Jep had to admit that he didn’t know how to drive.
The best way Jep could thank Mr. Ford for the car was to invite his benefactor in and play fiddle for him again. After tapping his foot to a few tunes, Mr. Ford said he had to go, but he’d be back in another month or so to personally escort Jep, Sarah, and any of their extended family they wanted to invite all the way by train to West Orange, New Jersey. There the Bisbees would be guests of Thomas and Mina Edison while Jep recorded songs in Mr. Edison’s own studio. Then the recordings would be released on Mr. Edison’s label. Every August promise would be kept.
It turned out that Mr. Ford got detained and couldn’t go east with the Bisbees after all, but things worked out well anyway. The Bisbees were met at the West Orange station by Mr. Edison himself, who had in tow seemingly more reporters than there were people living in Paris, Michigan. Jep did his best to answer all the questions that they fired at him. The response that made most of the next day’s papers was Jep’s honest reply when asked what tunes he planned to record: “Oh, anything that happens to come into my old head.”
Jep made his recordings, so many that afterward Mr. Edison told the press it was the most anyone had ever made in a single day. Then, after some New York City sightseeing, the Bisbees went home. But Jep’s life was never the same, and in the best of ways. He chose not to use all the stories about him as the basis for a national concert tour—he felt he was too old and settled for that. But Jep, whose previous performances were limited to barn dances and other small local events, now accepted invitations to play in auditoriums all around Michigan. Where he’d once been thrilled to earn $5 a show, he now commanded ten times that amount, and collectors gladly paid handsome sums for his handmade fiddles. Jep kept on performing for almost a dozen years, and when he died in 1935 at age ninety-three, his obituary appeared in the New York Times. His wonderful late-life success was due to the Vagabonds, and Jep never forgot it. Though barely literate, he wrote to Henry Ford that “onley for you & Mr. Edison they would of forgotten me but now they all Know me.”
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If they’d never taken their summer trips, all of America would still have known of Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and Harvey Firestone. But their adventures as the Vagabonds helped usher in a new national lifestyle, and that should be remembered, too. The country’s fascination with their travels was expressed in “The Refreshing Trio,” an uncredited poem printed in the Oakland Tribune just after the Vagabonds’ final trip in 1924:
Whenever the news is too grewsome or dull,
Whenever the reader feels bored,
There come to the rescue those three worthy pals,
Edison, Firestone and Ford.
We turn from a murder or cyclone or flood
Or the stock broker’s marks on the board,
To read what these three coots are up to again,
Edison, Firestone and Ford.
They picnic, they camp, they fish and they hike,
They talk and we all thank the Lord,
That no matter what things other fellows may do,
We have Edison, Firestone and Ford.
1 Americans couldn’t read enough about the Vagabonds and their car adventures. Edison (left) and Ford dominated press coverage, and until his death in March, 1921, white-bearded naturalist John Burroughs was almost as popular.
2 The Vagabonds’ route from Fort Myers to the Everglades in 1914 included long stretches of splashing through deep pools of water on the road.
3 On their outing in the Everglades, the Vagabonds eventually left even rudimentary roads behind and ventured into the primitive heart of the swampy expanse.
4 Though a guide rather than Henry Ford shot this turkey on the Vagabonds’ adventure in the Florida Everglades, the publicity-conscious carmaker posed with the trophy.
5 Battered by a sudden, violent rainstorm on the first night of their Everglades adventure, the Vagabonds and their guests tried to dry themselves by a small flickering fire.
6 Edison received a rapturous greeting at the 1915 Panama-California Exposition in San Diego. Organizers were determined to make his reception far more colorful and overwhelming than the one the inventor had received earlier at San Francisco’s rival Panama-Pacific Exposition.
7 Though they were the best of friends, Ford and Edison most often communicated through messages sent between Edison’s secretary, William H. Meadowcroft, and Ernest G. Liebold, executive secretary to Ford. Liebold’s message to Meadowcroft concerns Ford’s purchase of an estate adjacent to Edison’s.
8 Despite Ford’s entreaties, Edison refused to join his friend on the ill-fated “Peace Ship” mission to Europe that Ford organized in late 1915.
9 When Ford declined to join Edison, tire maker Harvey Firestone, and Burroughs for their 1916 Vagabonds trip, Edison (left, with Firestone) retained media interest in the outing with a surprise endorsement of Woodrow Wilson’s bid for reelection.
10 All over America, locals hoped to glimpse the Vagabonds’ car caravan cresting hills or crossing bridges into their towns. The group’s arrival anywhere was always cause for celebration.
11 Ford greatly admired naturalist John Burroughs. On Vagabonds trips, their car caravans would frequently stop so Burroughs could point out interesting plant, bird, and animal life to his companions.
12 The Vagabonds enjoyed elaborate camp dinners prepared by chefs who were part of the traveling company.
13 When he acquired the Dearborn Independent in late 1918 with the intent to turn the newspaper into a showcase for his personal opinions, Ford asked Edison, who had written, printed, and sold a small newsletter in his youth, to critique the Independent.
14 Edison, Burroughs, Ford, and Firestone pose alongside and atop a water wheel during their 1918 excursion.
15 The Vagabonds’ fleet often jounced along “Wish to God” roads that had ruts, rocks, and ditches alongside the road that were subject to flooding and overflowing.
16 In 1920, Ford and Burroughs staged a tree-chopping contest for the press with Firestone as timekeeper and Edison as referee. Burroughs was declared the winner, and Edison congratulated him.
17 Though he publicly denounced cigarettes as poisonous (because of burning paper, not tobacco), Edison regularly enjoyed puffing on cigars when the Vagabonds stopped to camp.
18 Despite traveling with a retinue to set up expansive tents and prepare elaborate meals, the Vagabonds tried to give the impression of roughing it, even when their camp guest was President Warren G. Harding (far right).
19 Harvey S. Firestone checks one of his namesake tires during the Vagabonds’ 1923 trip in Michigan’s Upp
er Peninsula. On every Vagabonds excursion Firestone sublimated his own ego to those of the others.
20 Idabelle Firestone, Clara Ford, and Mina Edison accompanied their husbands on the Vagabonds’ last few trips.
21 As two of the most famous Americans, Edison and Ford shared a unique bond that was strengthened by their mutual drive to excel. Throughout the Vagabonds’ adventures they remained warm friends, as here on the 1923 trip.
22 Thomas Edison famously claimed to sleep only a few hours a night during most of the year, but on Vagabonds’ trips he could often be seen napping under a tree or beside a creek.
23 In 1923, Ford purchased the Wayside Inn in Sudbury, Massachusetts, and set out to restore it. The Vagabonds used the inn as a base during the first portion of their 1924 trip.