The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (Vintage) (14 page)

Although rain had threatened, October 10 dawned clear and dry. In the morning, large crowds gathered to observe a long parade of some one hundred assorted motorized vehicles—steam, electrical, gasoline—winding its way through Detroit. An equine-preferring journalist sourly described their arrival at the track as an “invasion of the temple.” “The horse was forgotten,” he wrote. “Outside along the fence, where usually are found tally-ho's and coaches with gay parties, were long rows of those things instead.” What one newspaper described as a “Blue Ribbon Crowd” of about eight thousand packed the grandstand and congregated along the rails, waiting expectantly for the festivities to start. Finally, in early afternoon, the first events began, and the excitement deflated almost immediately. The early races were slow, with the winner in the “steamer” class of vehicle going about thirty miles per hour, and the victor in the “electrical” class scoring with an
excruciating fifteen miles per hour. The pace of this last group was so slow that the Detroit
Journal
described, with some amusement, how the two lead drivers actually conducted a conversation as they puttered around the track side by side. The crowd grew so restless that one of the promoters, Metzger, convinced Winton to placate them by attempting to break the world's speed record for the mile in a special exhibition. The obliging driver took to the track and roared off for a three-mile test ride. When his time was announced—the second mile had been completed in 1:12, for a new world record—Detroiters roared their approval.
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For the day's biggest race, disappointment once again threatened as mechanical difficulties kept most of the entries from even starting the contest. It was announced that only two drivers would compete in the championship race, Winton and Henry Ford. Though initially the crowd groaned, in a curious way the reduced field worked to heighten the drama of the event. Spectators saw unfolding before them a one-on-one match race between two automobile manufacturers, one the clear favorite as national champion and world-record holder, the other an upstart local figure. The ensuing battle between this mechanized David and Goliath more than lived up to expectations.

One could feel the atmosphere at the track grow charged as Winton and Ford sat behind the wheels of their “big express-train racers” as they rolled onto the track, each with a mechanic clinging to a perch on the running board. According to the Detroit
Tribune
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The race began with Winton taking the early lead and using his superior driving skills to keep his vehicle hugging the inside fence. Ford seemed to go faster on the straightaways, but then struggled to control his racer on the curves as it veered toward the outer fence, and he steadily lost ground. As one journalist described, “E. S. Huff, Ford's mechanic, hung far out in his efforts to ballast the car, but she swung wide at every turn.” To enhance
his control, Ford even tried shutting off his power entirely on the curves, so that, as he later told reporters, “two-fifths of the time …his machine was simply coasting.” At the end of three miles, Winton held a fifth-of-a-mile lead, but then Ford's handling of his car improved and he began to make up lost ground steadily. On the sixth lap, the Detroiter “shot up perceptibly, and the crowd cheered frantically.” With Ford closing the gap, the race reached its decisive point during the seventh lap, when a bearing box in Winton's car began to overheat under the strain of the competition. A thin line of blue smoke rose from the rear of the machine, and it grew into a cloud as Winton's mechanic, still clinging to the running board, frantically freed one of his hands to pour oil on the box in an attempt to cool it. But this maneuver was ineffective, and the car lost speed. In the words of the Detroit
Free Press,
“Mr. Ford shot by them as though they were standing still. Down the stretch he came like a demon, and the crowd yelled itself hoarse.” He lengthened his lead over the last three laps and won by a full three-quarters of a mile as spectators exploded in a frenzy of celebration.
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Clara Ford, who witnessed the race from the grandstand, wrote her brother a description of the race as her husband won his shocking victory. “I wish you could have seen him. Also have heard the cheering when he passed Winton. The people went wild. One man threw his hat up and when it came down he stamped on it, he was so excited. Another man hit his wife on the head to keep her from going off the handle.” Detroit newspapers proudly affirmed Clara's judgment that her husband had succeeded in “covering himself with glory and dust.” Ford “ran a marvelous race and defeated his Cleveland rival by a good margin,” wrote one. According to another, “Henry Ford broke into the front ranks of American chauffe[u]rs by the wonderful performance of his machine yesterday.” With his unlikely victory, the automobile maker with the checkered past had emerged as a local hero.
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Yet, amid the cheers and adulation accompanying this glorious episode in Henry Ford's life, a question lingers uncomfortably. Why did he seemingly abandon his life's work of creating a serviceable commercial automobile and divert his creative energy into this relatively frivolous, albeit exciting, endeavor? According to some observers, he had contracted an infectious disease. Oliver Barthel claimed that Ford had come down with “what was termed by many of his friends, racing fever.” Galvanized by the promise of public acclaim and the thrill of competition, “He talked mostly about wanting to build a larger and faster racing car.”
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Indeed, Ford provided evidence of feverish enthusiasm in a letter of this period. On January 6, 1902, several weeks after his great victory over
Alexander Winton, he wrote to his brother-in-law, Milton D. Bryant. Clara's brother had expressed an interest in becoming involved in Ford's new career in a managerial capacity by setting up races. In a short missive, the new champion revealed his eagerness to meet the record-holding Frenchman Henri Fournier in a contest. “If I can bring Mr. Fournier in line, there is a barrel of money in this business,” Ford burst out to Bryant. “I will challenge him until I am black in the face.”
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But excitement and the promise of quick cash had its limits. Ford was a serious and calculating man, and never one to be caught up completely in frivolity. While racing must have provided a kind of visceral thrill that he seldom, if ever, experienced in his lifetime, sensation-seeking was never a deep-seated impulse in his personality. A deeper motivation—the sense that the new entertainment form could generate enormous publicity—clearly lay at the bottom of this career move. In some instinctive way, Ford sensed that racing would get his name before a mass audience in a dramatic way, and that this, in turn, would promote his larger plans. Years later, he explained rather matter-of-factly his strategy in 1901:“I never thought anything of racing, but the public refused to consider the automobile in any light other than as a fast toy. Therefore …we had to race.”
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In fact, Ford's judgment on this matter was probably shrewder than he fully realized at the time. Instinctively, he had tapped into a powerful trend in American life. In the years around the turn of the new century, the United States was witnessing the first flowering of a cultural revolution in its morals and manners. Victorian standards from the nineteenth century had mandated behavior characterized by emotional self-control, genteel propriety, and hardworking producerism. For those in respectable society, entertainment and leisure, whether formal dances or lectures or concerts, were cast in the mold of moral uplift. Taverns, roughneck sports, and bawdy melodrama were the purview of the uneducated working class. But with the evolution of an economy increasingly oriented toward consumerism by 1900, managers of mass culture perceived new forces at work. The explosive growth of an urban society with its corporate bureaucracies, white-collar workers, and organized industrial workforce had created a new audience, eager, in the words of one historian, to purchase “instant pleasure and momentary release.” Under such pressures, Victorian tradition began to crack and buckle. The 1890s saw the first stirrings of a new culture of entertainment that bowled over old-fashioned notions of self-restraint. Vigorous, rowdy, competitive sports such as prizefighting, baseball, and football began attracting large followings, while, musically, exuberant forms such as the cakewalk and ragtime emerged from African American communities to be
commercialized for a larger, mass audience. Amusement parks, of which New York's Coney Island was the largest and most spectacular, sprang up all over the country and drew enthusiastic crowds. Even more spectacularly, movies outgrew their early accommodations in penny arcades and nickelodeons to become a national pastime.
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This commercialized mass culture of cabarets and sports parks, picture palaces and dance halls provided the material setting for a new leisure ethic in America. These venues offered amusements where exuberance, sensuality, physical release, pleasure, and personal self-fulfillment could flourish. White-collar and blue-collar workers alike, faced with increasingly regimented and tedious work, were eager for recreation. “Recreation and play were not luxuries but necessities in the modern city,” one scholar has stated in summarizing the new leisure ethic. “The fear of idle time as the devil's workshop gave way to a reverence for play, promoted alike by middle-class reformers and working-class organizers.” Showmen, entertainers, and sportsmen quickly grasped this new logic and began shaping public entertainment for the masses where excitement and low prices combined to attract the largest possible audiences.
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Thus automobile racing arrived on the American scene as an exciting facet of this new culture of leisure. Like baseball or Coney Island, speed contests between motor vehicles were mass events that brought big, paying crowds, excitement, recreation, and reams of newspaper publicity that created popular celebrities. Henry Ford, demonstrating an instinctive feel for the popular pulse, sensed that racing offered a rich opportunity to connect with the new zeitgeist. As he noted later, his great victory over Winton “was my first race, and it brought advertising of the only kind that people cared to read.”
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Ford clearly understood that the publicity accompanying his racing endeavors would enhance his name and give a boost to his efforts to develop a commercial automobile. Investors at the Henry Ford Company may have groused about his racing efforts, he noted in early 1902, but “they will get the Advertising and I expect to make $ where I can't make cents at Manufacturing.” Around the same time, Clara conveyed her husband's view of his racing victory over Winton. In her words, “That race has advertised him far and wide. And the next thing will be to make some money out of it.”
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At first, Ford struggled to connect his racing success directly to the engineering of a commercial automobile. With the formation of the ill-fated Henry Ford Company after the victory over Winton, he announced, “We have the fastest machine in the world. We shall …begin making commercial machines, with the best prospect of success.” But behind the scenes,
the two endeavors did not mesh smoothly. Ford's racing success and his enthusiasm for it only highlighted his painful slowness in bringing a car to production. The marked contrast between Ford the racer and Ford the manufacturer only increased tensions with his financial backers. “He seemed to be so taken up with the racing car that that is the thing which made the others dissatisfied,” Oliver Barthel observed of Ford's festering relations with his stockholders. “They merely said that he had the racing fever and they were through with him.” This situation contributed to Ford's dismissal from the Henry Ford Company in March 1902.
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Set adrift from the world of commercial manufacturing in the spring of 1902, Ford was forced to focus even more intensely on developing his race car. He set up a temporary workshop in a small brick building at 81 Park Place owned by a friend, Barton Peck, and worked on developing a larger, faster racing vehicle. More important, he gained a new supporter who shared his enthusiasm for the sport. Tom Cooper, a young, athletic bicycle-racer, had amassed a small fortune by winning road races all over the United States and Europe. He had witnessed Ford's victory over Winton at Grosse Pointe and was awed by the exciting spectacle of speedy motorcars flying around dirt tracks to the cheers of thousands. Eager to get into the game, he contacted Ford early in 1902 and decided to put up money to help him develop an even more powerful race car. As Clara Ford noted in a letter from this period, “Tom Cooper … has got the racing fever bad, he is very anxious to get a good racing car.” Within a few weeks, Cooper and her husband became partners.
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With this lifesaving injection of funds, Ford agreed to build two new race cars, one for himself and one for Cooper. Work began late in the spring of 1902. He was assisted by Cooper and his old friend Spider Huff. The talented young designer and machinist C. Harold Wills, whom Ford had first hired at the Detroit Automobile Company, also provided invaluable help in the early mornings and evenings. As the twin racers took shape, Ford painted his own vehicle red and named it “999,” after the New York Central train that had made a record run between New York and Chicago before being exhibited at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. Cooper's vehicle was painted yellow and christened the “Arrow.” In late September, an article in
The Automobile and Motor Review
described the racers at length and praised their combination of a powerful engine and a stripped-down chassis. “Built to speed, and speed alone, the new racing machines made by Henry Ford and Tom Cooper, of Detroit, are first-class examples of how an automobile may be simplified by the leaving off process,” the magazine observed.
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