The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (Vintage) (50 page)

Ford served as the main attraction for reporters and crowds that would gather in small towns to greet the group. Burroughs reported, “The crowds that flock around the car in which he is riding, as we pause in the towns through which we pass, are not paying their homage merely to a successful car-builder, or business man, but to a beneficent human force, a great practical
idealist, whose good-will and spirit of universal helpfulness they have all felt.” Such acclaim sometimes hurt Burroughs' feelings. On a stop at a local college, the nature writer expected appreciation and acclaim, only to be crushed when the president of the institution introduced Henry Ford to the crowd instead. Burroughs confessed, “My mental barometer fell from high to low on that occasion.”
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Ford as vagabond galvanized the public imagination in several ways. The camping trips reinforced his stature as a genuine, rough-hewn American folk hero. He would arrange special events for local farmers, with picnics and exhibitions of farming implements. Once, he befriended a prominent country fiddler and organized an impromptu concert and dance for the vagabonds and some of the locals that featured “the old jigs, the square dances called as they should be called, and music which none of us had heard for twenty years.”
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The camping trips also allowed Ford to display his work ethic. In Connellsville, Pennsylvania, one of the cars in the caravan broke down, and after local mechanics concluded it could not be fixed, Ford repaired the radiator and cooling fan. According to the local newspaper, “His hands were covered with grease and his new olive green suit was spotted here and there where he had placed his hands upon it.” Its conclusion appeared in an admiring headline: “Mr. Ford Demonstrates He's Not Afraid of Work; Repairs His Damaged Car.”
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Ford's demonstrations of physical vigor on the expeditions impressed his popular audience. When the group paused, Burroughs reported, Ford would “inspect the stream or busy himself in getting wood for the fire. Mr. Ford is a runner and a high kicker, and frequently challenges some member of the party to race with him. He is also a persistent walker, and from every camp, both morning and evening, he sallied forth for a brisk half-hour walk.” Firestone expressed a similar admiration. “Mr. Ford, when he is out of doors, is just like a boy: he wants to have running races, climb trees, or do anything which a boy might do,” he wrote. “He eats very little, is nearly always in first-class condition, and he likes to walk.” Newspaper headlines declared, “Henry Ford Chops Wood.”
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Publicity, of course, polished Ford's reputation as folk hero. Even as the camping trips provided an escape from the stresses and strains of the workaday world for these busy businessmen, they also became magnets for public attention. On their first trip to California, in 1915, when the group stopped so Edison could lay the cornerstone for a new building, they were unprepared for the brass band that appeared to escort them to the site. They were equally surprised by the hundreds of schoolchildren who lined the roads
and threw flowers as they passed by. By 1918, people in towns and villages commonly turned out en masse to greet the Four Vagabonds, clamoring for speeches and pleading for money to support local causes.
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The vagabonds complained about the publicity. Firestone claimed that the attention stole the trips' charm: “We found ourselves in the midst of motion-picture operators, reporters, and curiosity seekers. We became a kind of traveling circus.” Ford also complained, writing in his autobiography a few years later that “the trips were good fun except that they began to attract too much attention.” But the facts indicate that Ford not only enjoyed the attention but encouraged it. In 1918, he instructed one of his staff to gather newspaper articles from all the areas through which the party traveled. He arranged for a photographer, George Ebling, to be a regular member of the group and helped stage scenes for the camera. He allowed newspapermen to follow the group on their rambles and talked with them frequently. Only occasionally did he demur, asking the press to stay a distance from the vagabonds' campsite.
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More often, Ford's desire for publicity frequently overwhelmed his fondness for privacy. “With squads of newswriters and platoons of cameramen to report and film the posed nature studies of the four eminent campers,” wrote Charles Sorensen, “these well-equipped excursions… were as private and secluded as a Hollywood opening, and Ford appreciated the publicity.” Newsmen and photographers reported every move and utterance of the campers, and newsreel cameramen made films that were shown in theaters. It seems clear that Ford and the vagabonds, for all their complaints, appreciated, even nurtured, the public attention that accompanied their backwoods excursions.
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An unmistakable sign of Ford's desire for publicity came on the 1921 trip. He helped arrange the participation of President Warren G. Harding, hardly a maneuver designed to avoid attention. Harding joined the group at their campsite in Maryland with an entourage that included his wife, his secretary, several Secret Service men, and a bishop of the Methodist church. Not surprisingly, journalists and cameramen flocked to the site. They were especially pleased to record Harding removing his coat to chop wood for the evening fire, and then, when he tired, Ford taking over and finishing the job.
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Perhaps the most significant aspect of Ford's camping hobby, however, involved its connection to recreation. In the early twentieth century, America's new consumer society was increasingly emphasizing the enjoyment of leisure time. Recreation gradually emerged as not only a new arena for indulging in consumer goods, but a space in which hardworking, productive,
white-collar workers could escape the stresses and strains of modern corporate life. The camping trips of Ford and the vagabonds appeared as manifestations of the new recreation ethic of modern America.
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As newspaper stories and interviews revealed, much of the impetus for these backwoods trips came from the urgent wish of the three businessmen in the group—Firestone, Edison, and Ford—to escape the pressures of their work. During the 1918 expedition, Edison confided to reporters that Ford had been drained by overwork, and needed a rest because of “nerves, nerves, nerves.” One of the automaker's retinue confirmed the therapeutic effect the camping trips had on his boss. “After these trips Mr. Ford would be a changed man—noticeably refreshed and rested,” he noted. “He was just living another life…. [He was] a new man.”
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The jaunts of the Four Vagabonds underlined the role of consumer comfort in modern recreation. Far from roughing it, Ford and his friends ventured into the wild supplied with a full array of modern conveniences. The 1918trip saw the group traveling in six cars—two Packards, two Model T's, and two Ford trucks (which Ford had begun to manufacture in 1917)— accompanied by seven drivers and helpers. The following year, a veritable caravan took shape, as Ford introduced a pair of specialized vehicles that he had developed. Automobile A was a large kitchen car furnished with a pantry, a built-in icebox, and special gasoline stove mounted onto the running board. Automobile B had been constructed on a truck chassis and included an array of specialized compartments for tents, beds, and camping equipment. When Burroughs was asked by a reporter to describe his feeling about the latest camping expedition, he quipped, “I should say I am now seeking comfort in a luxurious way.”
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The vagabonds ventured into the countryside armed with all the conveniences of home. Each man had a separate spacious tent with his name monogrammed above the entrance as well as a full sleeping outfit—a folding cot, mattress, blankets, pillows, and sheets. As one of Ford's attendants confessed, it was “just like living in a hotel.” Ford developed a portable power plant with a generator and battery so the group could string up electric lights in the sleeping and dining tents. By 1921, an electric player piano was included. Perhaps most impressive, however, was the food. Ford brought Sato, a skilled Japanese cook, to prepare meals, and the group purchased fresh provisions as they meandered along. They ate well—steaks and chicken in the evenings, pies and cookies, huge breakfasts of bacon, ham, eggs, biscuits, and pancakes. They also ate in style. A large dining tent, with a round table supporting an enormous lazy Susan that rotated dishes around to the diners, made for very comfortable meals.
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Yet these trips, as newspapers were quick to note, were more than recreation.
The vagabonds engaged in practical, useful activity. Their journeys into the countryside, in the words of one paper, also involved brainstorming about projects to improve American life. Ford and Edison, for example, pondered rural water-power projects. “Each has a great deal of vision along that line; Mr. Edison as to how flowing streams may be converted into adaptable power; Mr. Ford as to what uses that power may be turned to,” noted a reporter. “Couple their talents and who knows what may be the result?”
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Around the same time as the camping trips, Henry Ford ignited an even larger explosion of publicity with his involvement in a legal confrontation that was part of the fallout from his antiwar adventures a few years earlier. Ford initiated a libel suit that went to trial in the courtroom of a small town in Michigan in the summer of 1919. It once again put him into national headlines for several months.

In May 1919, the sleepy village of Mount Clemens, Michigan, awoke with a start. Located some twenty miles northwest of Detroit, the town found its streets populated with over two dozen cowboys and ranchers from Texas who, according to one newspaper report, were “tall, tanned, and wear wide sombreros and cow punchers' high heels. They have suspicious bulges at the hip.” Other characters—detectives, investigators, clerks, publicists, attorneys—also descended upon the town and took all the available hotel rooms. As the Detroit
Times
reported, there were “mysterious comings and goings, whispered consultations on hotel verandas, on street corners, long walks over country roads, messenger boys running hither and thither carrying notes and letters and an air of secrecy pervades everything.” Meanwhile, a squad of carpenters remodeled the courtroom in the redbrick county courthouse, but left hanging a curious sign on the wall right outside the door: “If you spit on the floor in your own house, do it here. We want you to feel at home.” Outside, trucks unloaded dozens of boxes of documents and books. The cause of all this activity—Henry Ford's million-dollar libel lawsuit against the Chicago
Tribune
—was the biggest event in Mount Clemens' history.
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Once the trial began, the circus atmosphere intensified. People poured into the small town, the interurban railway running special cars from Detroit and the local taxicab business enjoying a boom. Hundreds of residents neglected their jobs to jam the courthouse and absorb every detail of the case. A powerful sulfurous smell from local medicinal waters pervaded the air; the “rheumatic rich,” as one newspaper termed them, hobbled from
the Mount Clemens health resort to jostle for seats in the courtroom. Every day, the tall, slender, striking figure of Colonel Robert R. McCormick, publisher of the
Tribune,
could be seen strolling about town accompanied by a large retinue including his wife, “a strikingly beautiful woman … [who] is followed by admiring looks wherever she goes.” Similarly, Henry Ford could be glimpsed every morning “taking a long hike over a country road or strolling along the grassy banks of the Clinton river, which runs close by his hotel.”
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This extravagant episode of legal theater had been engendered by a
Tribune
editorial on June 25,1916, denouncing Ford as an “ignorant idealist… [and] an anarchistic enemy of the nation.” The newspaper had launched this attack because its reporter had concluded that the Ford Motor Company would not hold jobs for, or assist the families of, National Guardsmen who had been mobilized to protect the border with Mexico during an upheaval in that country. Ford denied this accusation and demanded a retraction, but the
Tribune
refused. Ford's attorney, Alfred Lucking, brought the editorial into Ernest G. Liebold's office and declared, “I don't think Mr. Ford should stand for it.” A bit later, Ford came in, listened to Lucking, and said, “Well, you better start suit against them for libel.” Within a few days, he filed suit against the
Tribune
for $1million because the editorial had “sought to bring the plaintiff into public hatred, contempt, ridicule, and financial injury.”
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After over two and half years of legal maneuvering and preliminary argument, the case finally came to trial in Mount Clemens on a change of venue. The Ford forces took over the second floor of a commercial building just opposite the courthouse and established the Mount Clemens News Bureau to send out information and stories to newspapers all over the country. Fifteen thousand weekly papers and twenty-five hundred dailies were given “copy” on the trial. On the office wall the Ford team hung a large map of the United States with colored pins: blue indicating newspapers that were favorable to Ford, yellow showing hostile papers. In the words of one visitor, there were “enough blue pins in the map to make everybody around the Mount Clemens News Bureau feel pleased.” Ford also engaged some forty operatives, who prowled about the town checking on witnesses for the opposition and trying to get wind of any significant testimony.
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