Flashback, August 1919: Henry Ford Goes on Automotive Holiday with Famous “Vagabonds”

Long before Dinah Shore exhorted TV viewers to “see the USA in your Chevrolet,” automobile magnate Henry Ford and three famous friends were doing their version of the same thing, in the first high-profile linking of the car with outdoor recreation.

Unlike Shore, Ford didn’t have to resort to TV ads—newspapermen (they were almost all men then) eagerly followed him and friends Thomas A. Edison, Harvey Firestone, and John Burroughs around as the famous men roughed it, with—and it’s hard not to appreciate the irony, given the challenge from the Far East to the auto industry in the closing decades of the century—their own personal Japanese chef in tow. “The Four Vagabonds,” the reporters soon called the friends. (No, despite what you might have thought, it’s not the name of one of those bands of aging musicians that PBS trots out regularly for those fundraisers aimed at baby boomers--nor, in this case, am I referring to the actual vocal harmony radio stars of the early 1940s.)

Nowadays, as Detroit emits sounds less like a Rust Belt than like a death rattle, it’s hard to recall the period from about 1910 to 1930, when it was identified not with an arthritic industry that imperiled the environment but with vigorous young enterprises that allowed you to enjoy nature more. Its romance with the media and the public then is something akin to what Silicon Valley experiences today.

When Sinclair Lewis wanted to create a tycoon—practical, forward-looking, intelligent but not especially cultured—as his representative American amid decadent Europe in Dodsworth, he made his eponymous hero an auto-company executive from the Midwest metropolis of Zenith. For many years, until they learned better, Americans thought of Henry Ford in much the same light.

On this particular jaunt, when Ford mugged for the cameras as he enjoyed nature by day, he let loose with the ugliest of anti-Semitic tirades by night. It was a small preview of what would shock the public within a few years—and damage his reputation with historians in the years afterward.

Ford and his friends had been taking these jalopy journeys for the past five years. It was a way they could combine business with pleasure. On August 5, for instance, the group found themselves in upstate New York—specifically, Green Island, on the Hudson River, where Ford paused for a photo op: carving his initials into what became the cornerstone of one of his company’s manufacturing plants.

In his autobiography, My Life and Work, Ford recalled that these excursions were fun, “except that they began to attract too much attention.” Only one word accurately describes that observation: bunk. (Which, come to think of it, is what he labeled history.)

At this point, Ford already could use as much favorable publicity as he could get. As I mentioned in a prior post, he’d just been involved in a libel suit in which, under withering cross-examination, his abysmal ignorance of history was exposed for all to see. (Benedict Arnold was “a writer, I think,” he averred.)

Now, away from lawyers looking to make fun of him, Ford could relax—putting his feet up after long hikes in the woods, telling tall tales in his country-boy fashion—and, certain that he was among friends, giving vent to his deep, ineradicable anti-Semitic strain.

In researching Henry Ford and the Jews, biographer Neil Baldwin found, in the New York Public Library’s Berg Collection, Burroughs’ account of these campfire rants, set down in the naturalist’s pocket journal.

Ford probably didn’t think any of the other “vagabonds” would take issue with him. Edison, for instance, was something of the same type as Ford: from Midwestern Protestant stock, obsessed not just with a product but with the entire industrial infrastructure for producing it in mass quantities, and, as the years went on, increasingly eccentric. (Now in old age, he was prone to such incidents as firing an employee in the morning, then later in the day, after snapping about why he wasn’t around and being told he’d been dismissed, ordering that he be rehired.)

Something else united the two: anti-Semitism. Edison expressed his dismay about the Jewish “natural talent” for making money, in this fashion: “While there are some ‘terrible examples’ in mercantile pursuits, the moment they get into art, music and science and literature, the Jew is fine. I wish they would all stop making money.”

While not pretty, that paled next to the sheer, all-encompassing viciousness of Ford’s comments, as set down by Burroughs:

“Mr. Ford attributes all evil to the Jews or Jewish capitalists-the Jews caused the war; the Jews caused the outbreak of thieving and robbing all over the country, the Jews caused the inefficiency of the navy which Edison talked about last night.”

Two questions spring to mind upon reading that last flabbergasting sentence:

1) Why didn’t Ford--a pacifist who, during World War I, funded a “peace ship” that crossed the Atlantic--recognize the internal contradiction that Jews both caused the war and impeded the efficiency of the Navy?

2) What was the great environmentalist Burroughs doing with this creep?

The second question is easier to answer than the first. In his autobiography, Ford remembered that Burroughs had declared early on that the automobile “was going to kill the appreciation of nature.” Ford challenged him on that point, even sending him a car to test whether his proposition held up.

Once the now-elderly conservationist learned to work the controls of the Model T, he was enthralled by the new machine and became a fast friend of Ford.

That did not mean, however, that he did not see the auto exec’s faults, and as Ford prattled on, increasingly revealing his ignorance, Burroughs felt compelled to correct him. Ford finally crossed the line when he assailed railroad titan Jay Gould as a “Shylock” and the epitome of greed.

Not so, Burroughs demurred. He knew from personal experience that Gould, his childhood wrestling playmate, was a thoroughgoing Presbyterian.

In 1921, Burroughs became the first of the “vagabonds” to be claimed by death. The group survived for a few more years, even adding President Warren Harding—and the friends’ wives—on the trips. But eventually, the press of business became too much.

By that time, Ford was attracting far more unwelcome media attention. A paper he funded, The Dearborn Independent, became one of the most flagrantly anti-Semitic media outlets in the nation (a remarkable feat in a decade when the Ku Klux Klan enjoyed a renaissance). The paper even reprinted perhaps the primary anti-Semitic tract of the last century, the forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

In the 1930s, whatever lingering admiration many Americans felt for Ford vanished when goons hired by his aide Harry Bennett resorted to violence against union organizers such as Walter Reuther.