Flashback, August 1896: Henry Ford Meets Thomas Edison

When the obsessed 33-year-old tinkerer Henry Ford met Thomas Edison for the first time in mid-August 1896, he found encouragement from the older businessman for his gas-powered enterprise—planting the seeds for friendship that lasted to the death of “The Wizard of Menlo Park.”

Perhaps the most famous public instance of their interaction was their 1921 road trip, when they were joined for part of the way by President Warren Harding—an event depicted in Mark St. Germain’s 1995 play, Camping with Henry and Tom.

But I became far more fascinated by their mutual admiration society—and each man did to create and maintain it—while reading Edmund Morris’ 2019 biography Edison.

The occasion for their first encounter was the annual meeting of the Association of Edison Illuminating Companies, an organization founded by Thomas Edison and associates in 1885 to encourage research and the exchange of technical information, ideas and solutions.

Already employed for the last five years at the Edison Illuminating Company in Detroit, Ford first approached his hero surreptitiously, snapping a picture of the straw-hatted inventor asleep on the porch of the meeting’s venue, the Oriental Hotel in Brooklyn’s Manhattan Beach (now the location of the Kingsborough Community College’s Marine and Academic Center Building).

Later that night, he seized his chance for a more open encounter as more than 40 business executives, drinking and puffing cigars inside at a banquet, were conferring about the possibility of electric-powered vehicles. This represented a natural new area of interest for Edison, who was already changing society with, among other innovations, the electric light bulb and the electric power plant.

At one point Alex Dow from Detroit Edison pointed out Ford, his chief engineer, to the great man, and said, “There’s a young fellow who has made a gas car.”

Two months, a drive through the streets of Detroit with his new "Quadricycle" had already demonstrated Ford’s gift for self-promotion. He further evidenced it as he sat by and laid out his plan to the hearing-impaired Edison.

Despite his own interest in a storage battery for horseless carriages, Edison recognized the practical of the proposal he was hearing, telling Ford, “Keep on with your engine. If you can get what you want, I see a great future.”

It wasn’t until 1912, though, that their friendship became closer, when Ford, flush with his burgeoning success with the “Model T,” invested $1.2 million into the Edison Storage Battery Co. as a potential triggering device for automobile self-starters.

A few years later, Edison invited him down for a visit to his Fort Myers, FL, winter home, and for more than a decade the two went off on cross-country auto excursions, usually in the company of tire magnate Harvey Firestone and/or the naturalist John Burroughs.

What drew the two men into a closer friendship. The most obvious commonality, present in their first encounter, was a Midwestern plain-speaking style. But Morris also points to their “shared disdain for Ivy Leaguers, alcohol, and haute cuisine; driving energy, graphic thinking, and delight in anything new.”

They differed in subtle ways in their relationships with families, and more significantly in how they viewed politics.

While Edison maintained a complex, often demanding, even bumpy relationship with his sons, Ford was positively abusive to Edsel, publicly humiliating his ideas in front of other employees and subjecting him to so much stress that he suffered for years from severe ulcers before finally dying from stomach cancer at age 49.

And, while the workaholic Edison often neglected his two wives (and even disclaimed knowing anything about women at all), Ford, many biographers believe, engaged in adultery with his secretary, a relationship that may have resulted in a son out of wedlock.

Furthermore, although Edison expressed the sporadic anti-semitic remark, he employed Jews and other religious and ethnic minorities in his labs. 

In contrast, Ford was not content to vent virulent attitudes on camping trips with Edison and other friends, but through distributed a paper he bought, the Dearborn Independent, circulated through his company’s dealership a 91-part series based on the vicious and fraudulent Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

When Ford passed along this material to his friend, Edison sent back a note acknowledging the gift, Morris notes, while being careful not to endorse its views.

From the mid-1920s on, even as many ordinary Americans began to eye Ford more critically than when he had been a rising folk hero, the auto magnate led the nationwide celebration for Edison as the grand old man of American inventive genius. In October 1929, he and President Herbert Hoover attended "Light's Golden Jubilee," a ceremony marking the 50th anniversary of Edison's incandescent lamp.

Ford paid homage to his friend that day by announcing the Thomas Edison Institute, an initiative in which he bought, dismantled, and reassembled hundreds of historic buildings and artifacts—including, notably, the legendary Menlo Park lab complex.  

Now Greenfield Village, it continues to give tourists and students, together with the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation, a vivid sense of the worlds that these two industrial giants left behind and created.

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.

This Day in Legal History (Henry Ford’s Libel Suit Begins)

May 12, 1919—In a courtroom in Mt. Clemens, Mich., the $1 million libel suit filed by Henry Ford against the Chicago Tribune began. When it was over, a few months and more than 2 million words in the public records later, the most innovative and admired industrialist in the U.S.—the Steve Jobs of his day—stood exposed as an ignoramus. It was the first step in the sharp ratcheting down of his reputation.

Let’s step back from recent editorials and blog posts and remember that there once was a time, not so long ago, in America when businessmen weren’t being staked out overnight in their Greenwich homes, but were positively lionized.

The height of absurdity might have been reached in the period just before 9/11, when a large part of the public couldn’t get enough of Jack Welch, “America’s #1 CEO,” praised to the skies for leading GE “to one revenue and earnings record after another.” (He did it, this Business Week article from which I’m quoting admitted, because he “astutely moved the once-Establishment maker of things into services.” Along the way, he helped a country forget how to manufacture. Oh, well…)

Before him, though, we even had the names of businessman floated for public office—even major-party tickets. There was Ross Perot, who in 1992 won 19% of the popular vote—the highest for a third-party candidate since Teddy Roosevelt; Lee Iocacca, who, after leading Chrysler back from the brink of bankruptcy, trailed George H.W. Bush by only three percentage points as Presidential polls heated up in the mid’80s; and even Donald “short-fingered vulgarian” (in the brilliant description of the late magazine Spy) Trump, who inspired numerous fantasies about what he might do in government after he managed to get the Wollman skating rink remodeled after the Koch administration had abysmally failed to do so.

But the man who got there first was Ford, the farm boy who won Americans’ hearts and dollars with his knack for tinkering—and who lost their affection eventually because of his dictatorial business practices and insane prejudices.

The libel suit established with nary a doubt that the industrialist was a fool of a client, but it wouldn’t have gotten to this point, if you ask me, if Ford didn’t have a fool for a lawyer—and, before it or not, it wasn’t himself.

Maybe Ford’s chief counsel, Alfred Lucking, thought they had a pretty good shot at punishing the Trib’s reactionary publisher, Robert McCormick, for questioning the businessmen’s patriotism because of a mistaken news report. (The Trib thought erroneously that company workers would not be guaranteed their regular wage if they were called to serve in National Guard units sent to catch Pancho Villa.)

But Lucking forgot that the courtroom can become, in the right circumstances, a Bermuda Triangle for the unwary. And he didn’t make anything easier for his client by:

*arguing, preposterously, that Ford was not a public figure—at least, not for purposes of this suit;

*=trying the patience of the judge in the case by spending a whole day on this point; and

* broadening the scope of the libel suit away from McCormick’s ridiculous claim that Ford was an anarchist to a more general claim that the entire article ruined his reputation.

The latter claim in particular opened the door to MCormick’s lead attorney, Elliott Stevenson of Detroit, to subject Ford to a grueling six-day cross-examination. By the time Stevenson was done, he’d revealed vast canyons of ignorance in Ford about the American Revolution (which, the automaker thought, was in 1812), and about Benedict Arnold (“a writer, I think”).

Ford demonstrated why he thought history was "more or less bunk": he knew so little about it. If, by some miracle, he had ever gotten into the Oval Office, it seems like a safe bet to say that no other occupant would have known so little about the country he was to lead.

The jury’s verdict was reminiscent of the one in the novel and TV-series QB 7, by Leon Uris: i.e., the plaintiff won, but the ridiculously low damages (in this case, only six cents!) testified to jurors' opinion of his true worth.

By the end of his life, Ford, a onetime business icon, came to be loathed by many for his anti-Semitism and anti-labor activity.

This Day in Business History (Ford’s Model T Goes on Sale)

October 1, 1908—Henry Ford’s Model T went on sale, creating the automobile industry as we know it, launching a revolution in American mores and culture, and leaving the nation a far different place.

Paul Ingrassia’s Wall Street Journal article this weekend sums up the impact of this bit of technology very well. But there is one aspect that he did not comment on: how the popularity of his machine made Ford, at least for awhile, the prototype of the businessman-folk hero that became increasingly prominent in the last century, and even into our own.

At one point, Ford’s star had risen so highly that he was even talked about as a possible Presidential candidate. Never mind that, for all his technical prowess and business know-how, that Ford’s social beliefs (including anti-Semitism) were positively antediluvian, or that in later years he would even be willing to hire thugs to break the unions he detested.

Probably until the rise of Dwight Eisenhower, success on the battlefield was the best means for a non-career politician to move upward politically. As wars became less popular and winnable, the vogue of the soldier-politician waned. His place was filled by the businessman-politician.

The belief, evidently, was that a success running a big corporation would translate into success running the big enterprise of government. This year, attention has focused on Republicans Mitt Romney and Mike Bloomberg (okay, Bloomberg is now an independent) as examples of this, but Democrats have also had Senate examples of this phenomenon, including Herbert Kohl of Wisconsin and the late Sen. Howard Metzenbaum of Ohio.