The Vagabonds

by Jeff Guinn

  Burroughs spoke more kindly to the journalist about Henry Ford, whom he apparently expected to arrive along with Edison and Firestone. A while back, he said, Ford had helped him clear rocks from a Woodchuck Lodge field, the two of them in shirtsleeves working in the sun like real men should. It took two weeks, and afterward Ford took some of the rocks back home to Michigan, where he used them to build a birdhouse. In his friend’s honor, the naturalist named the cleared area “Ford Field,” and painstakingly chipped the words on a large nearby boulder. Burroughs clearly had no notion of naming anything on his property for Edison.

  When Edison, Firestone, and the rest of the party arrived at Woodchuck Lodge around five that afternoon, Burroughs directed them to a spot in his orchard. As they began to set up tents and connect Edison’s portable batteries, their crotchety host stood to the side, writing about them in his private journal:

  They camp in my orchard—an unwonted sight—a camper’s extemporized village under my old apple trees—four tents and large dining-tent and, [for] night, electric lights; and the man Edison, the center around which it all revolved.

  When everything in camp was properly arranged and the New York Times reporter had left to write his story, Burroughs had a surprise for Edison and Firestone—he’d decided not to go. When they asked why, he told them that “he was too old, and . . . he was through with journeys.”

  This was very bad news. Many newspapers were still reporting that Ford was going to join the trip. When reporters found that not only was he begging off, but Burroughs as well, subsequent stories might very well focus on why half the vaunted Vagabonds chose to stay home instead of helpfully describing to Americans how their favorite heroes were out vacationing in cars. Edison left it to Firestone to make Burroughs change his mind, and though the tire maker tried, he concluded that “there was no convincing” him.

  But they still were there, and there was nothing for it but to camp in a steady drizzle and invite their balky host at least to take supper with them in the spacious dining tent. Firestone didn’t note what his cook served, only that he “did himself extremely well that night . . . when we were through, Mr. Burroughs suddenly announced that he would join us in the morning.” Edison, who skipped the fancy meal in favor of hot milk and toast, said, “That suits me best,” adding, in Ford’s absence, that “I could live for days just on the news of Rumania joining the Allies.” It was a chilly evening. Burroughs probably slept indoors in his comfortable bed, but Edison insisted that he and Firestone had to shiver in their tents.

  It took so much time the next day to pack up and for Burroughs to get ready to go that they weren’t on the road until early afternoon. Since they were heading to Albany, that meant driving until well after dark. Though it didn’t fit in with Edison’s plan to rough it entirely, it made sense to check into a hotel rather than bumble about looking for a camping spot on the outskirts of the city. Firestone took advantage of an available telephone to call Ford in Michigan, urging him to change his mind, and to his delighted surprise, Ford indicated that he might try to join them after all. A telegram from Ford’s assistant Ernest Liebold followed: “Mr. Ford has definitely decided to leave tomorrow . . . for Buffalo and will motor with Edsel . . . direct to your camp. Where can they meet you?” After consulting with Edison, Firestone responded by wire that Ford and Edsel should drive to the Lake Champlain Hotel in Plattsburgh near the Canadian border. There was apparently further communication back and forth until it was tentatively decided that Ford might meet the other Vagabonds at Saratoga, a point somewhat further south. Edison and Firestone were quick to share the good news with reporters, who hurried to Saratoga so they could provide their readers with eyewitness details of this happy vacation reunion.

  On Thursday night, journalists and locals who’d heard the news about Ford’s imminent arrival jammed the lobby of a hotel in Saratoga. The rest of the Vagabonds had already arrived. A wire service story reported that Edison and Firestone “much against their wishes” had to stay at a hotel in town rather than camp because their equipment truck couldn’t handle its heavy load, and a sturdier vehicle had to be acquired in its place. Edison lingered downstairs awhile with the journalists, warning them he’d refuse to talk about anything not pertaining “to woods, camps, fishing or atmospherical conditions. . . . I’m on vacation.” Burroughs told the press that he was looking forward to “a hotel bed,” and that with a good night’s rest “I’ll be enjoying camp as much as I ever did.”

  It was good copy for the reporters, and helped mitigate their disappointment when, despite a nightlong stakeout, Henry Ford never arrived at the hotel. There was one false alarm. About 9 p.m. “a spare man with grayish hair strolled in and walked about as though he was looking for someone. . . . One man finally gathered courage to ask if he was Mr. Ford. There was decided regret in the tone with which he replied that he had no claim to the name, as his . . . friends had always called him J. E. Ward.”

  * * *

  In the morning, with their new equipment vehicle secured, the rest of the Vagabonds returned to the road. They avoided towns and the press for two days. Burroughs’s mood was good enough to note in his journal how glad he was to see Edison relaxing and, with the exception of his battery-lighted tent, really roughing it with baths in creeks and tending campfires by feeding sticks into the flames. Edison even eschewed the tasty meals prepared by Firestone’s cook, continuing to subsist on toast and milk.

  It was probably on the second night that Edison, so genial in public, showed an edgier side to Firestone. After sunset the air turned especially cold, and Edison and Firestone decided that Burroughs should spend the night at a hotel in a nearby town. The naturalist was all in favor of that plan, so Firestone obligingly drove him there, leaving Edison and Firestone’s son Harvey Jr., who had come on the trip with his father, back in camp. Firestone stayed at the hotel, too. A fastidious man, so far on the 1916 trip he had reluctantly stuck to Edison’s camp rule that no one was to bathe anywhere except a creek, or to shave at all. In his memoir, Firestone admitted that “when I saw the hotel bedroom and bath I could stand the strain no longer and I struck. Not only did I have a shave and a bath, but also I spent the night comfortably in a bed.” The next morning, Firestone roused Burroughs and they returned to the Vagabonds’ camp. The tire maker perhaps expected some good-natured joshing from his inventor friend, but Edison was peeved.

  He “saw at once that I had shaved,” Firestone wrote. “He did not so much mind having me out all night, but he did not like that shave—the breaking of the rules.”

  Edison called Firestone “a tenderfoot,” and predicted that, despite their agreement to wear old clothes for the duration of the trip, “Soon you’ll be dressing up like a dude.”

  Always careful to preserve Edison’s genial reputation, Firestone noted in his memoir that the inventor “laughed” as he said this, but felt obligated to add, “Mr. Edison is seldom in bad humor.” This was one of those times.

  Edison’s irritability wasn’t entirely due to Firestone’s shave. The scheduled two-week trip was nearly half over and Ford still dithered about joining them. Newspapers such as the Kingston (New York) Daily Freeman continued speculating about the automaker, keeping their readers updated on “the Adirondack jaunt of Thomas Edison, John Burroughs, and the Messrs. Firestone and Ford, the last named of whom has not yet put in an appearance.” There was also some disappointment on the part of the press and the travelers themselves about the route being taken, with its relatively drivable roads and easy access to town amenities like hotels. Before departure, Edison had promised rugged wilderness adventures, but the region he’d chosen was already well-traveled by previous and current auto vacationists. The Freeman pointed out, “Mr. Edison will have to attain even greater heights as a discoverer if he can locate any such trackless way as he propose[d] to follow through the Adirondacks, which are no longer the wilds they were before summer vacations became popular.”

  At the approximate halfway point�
��Plattsburgh near the Canadian border—on September 5 the Vagabonds made their way to the Lake Champlain hotel where they had originally proposed that Ford meet them. They hadn’t heard from him or any of his secretaries for a few days—perhaps he would be there after all. But what awaited them instead was a telegram from Ford assistant Liebold to Edison:

  Regret very much to inform you that Mr. Ford . . . will not have time to join you. . . . However he expects to arrange for a real camping vacation sometime during the coming winter when he hopes to make up for the disappointment occasioned through his inability to go this time.

  According to the telegram, Ford’s excuse was that he needed to take an immediate business trip to the West Coast. Later, his office suggested to the press that Ford didn’t go because he was preoccupied with planning his son, Edsel’s, upcoming wedding in November. Probably Ford, embroiled in his new lawsuit with the Chicago Tribune and still smarting from press coverage of the Peace Ship, simply didn’t feel like participating in such a public outing and risking more hurtful stories.

  Whatever his reason, Ford left his fellow Vagabonds with a dilemma. They’d come for fun, but also for publicity, and now there was the very real possibility that the press might dispense with further trip coverage. Ford wasn’t coming and there were no real wilderness adventures to report. Firestone’s name was associated mostly with his tires, not with the man himself, and though Burroughs was well-known to those interested in nature, his celebrity was also limited. In reporting the Vagabonds’ arrival in Albany, a city newspaper mistakenly identified the octogenarian as “president of the Burroughs Adding Machine Company.”

  But that left Edison, and he knew how to keep the stories coming.

  * * *

  Henry Ford first gained fame as an automobile racer rather than manufacturer when in 1904 he set a new land speed record for cars at just over 91 mph. Four years later the Model T furthered his reputation, and in 1914 the $5 workday made Ford’s name a household word. Beginning in 1915, the Peace Ship and his antiwar statements kept him almost constantly in the headlines to the point where there was a legitimate groundswell of support for Henry Ford for president.

  But he still wasn’t as famous as Thomas Edison. No one in America was. If it was never suggested that Edison run for president, it was because he was considered above politics. In 1916, the inventor had been a celebrity for some thirty-eight years, ever since he introduced the phonograph in 1877 and 1878. That coup alone guaranteed Edison’s reputation. When he was invited to the White House to demonstrate his wondrous contraption to President Rutherford B. Hayes, he had to extend the visit while the First Lady summoned her friends to see (and hear) this amazing discovery, too. On April 1, 1878, the New York Graphic tried to play an April Fool’s joke on its readers by publishing a front-page story claiming Thomas Edison had just invented a machine that made food out of “Air, Water and Common Earth.” Because it was Edison, many people believed it must be true, and so did some competing newspapers that subsequently published similar stories.

  Then in 1879 came the incandescent light bulb. Bright, powerful, dangerous arc lights had been in use for some time, but it took Thomas Edison to design a bulb that would burn not only bright but long in American offices and, more important, homes. Thrilled by the promise of electric light to read by rather than smoky oil lamps or flickering candles, grateful Americans missed the point that Edison’s equally great contribution was the invention of generators that powered the bulbs economically.

  The kinetoscope followed, an important step in bringing films to a wide audience. Many assumed that Edison had actually invented the whole movie concept. But as biographer Randall Stross points out in The Wizard of Menlo Park, to a great extent Edison spent the years after 1882 trying to come up with an invention that would match the impact of the phonograph and incandescent light bulb. Always, his goal was to invent things that were of practical use. In his early years, Edison’s first patent application (out of a record 1,093) was for a telegraph-like vote recorder that, in state and national congressional chambers, could drastically shorten time needed for tabulations. What Edison didn’t realize was that politicians liked to use a lengthy balloting process to cut deals. As Stross notes, “The vote recorder was a bust, and the lesson Edison drew from the experience was that invention should not be pursued as an exercise in technical cleverness, but should be shaped by commercial needs.” Luck was also a factor in some of Edison’s eventual successes. Early on, his electric pen was intended to make duplicate messages and signatures easy. The device became a market staple—not for writing, but in slightly altered form as a needle for applying tattoos.

  Edison loved his work. Much of it was done in all-night laboratory sessions with talented assistants. Edison hired only the best and demanded excellence from them. The boss set overall goals, and the employees experimented and tinkered while he mostly supervised. Edison rewarded them with royalties when they contributed to inventions that reached the market as commercial products, but reserved all public credit for himself. It was Edison’s phonograph, Edison’s incandescent bulb. This was more important than ever as the years passed and no additional astonishing, culture-changing discoveries emerged from his laboratory. Edison’s companies manufactured a variety of products based on his discoveries, and their best advertisement was the man whose name appeared on the boxes.

  Because he knew how to continually engage public interest—appearing occasionally, smiling and always exhibiting his quite genuine personal warmth, but only rarely saying more than a few bland words—when Edison did choose to speak out, he always commanded headlines. On the 1916 trip, he shrewdly chose the perfect topic to divert the press from Ford’s absence and the lack of any real back-roads adventures. Americans following the Vagabonds’ trip were also fixated on the looming presidential election. Would voters ultimately support or repudiate President Wilson’s policies? Edison never spoke about politics, and knew that if he did it would be a sensation.

  * * *

  On the morning after Ford failed to appear in Saratoga, Edison came down to the lobby and requested that reporters join him there. The journalists may have expected him to either admit Ford wasn’t coming or else inform them when and where the carmaker was now expected to join his friends. Instead, he offered a ringing political endorsement, but not of Ford. A year earlier in San Diego, Edison could apparently manage only “I’m solid for children” after youngsters tossed heaps of flowers at his feet. Now he waxed positively eloquent.

  “Not since (the Civil War) has any campaign made such a direct call on simon-pure Americanism,” Edison declared.

  The times are too serious to talk or think in terms of Republicanism or Democracy. Americans must drop (political) parties and get down to big fundamental principles. More than any other president in my memory, Woodrow Wilson has been faced by a succession of tremendous problems, any one of which, decided the wrong way, would have had disastrous consequences. Wilson’s decisions so far have not got us into any serious trouble, nor are they likely to. He has given us peace with honor. . . . Neutrality is a mighty trying policy, but back of it are international law, the rights of humanity and the future of civilization.

  Edison was asked if Wilson had always been his preference for president in 1916. He replied, “Roosevelt was my choice. He has had experience, and is one of the best of Americans, but the machine-controlled Republican party would not have him. Therefore I am for Woodrow Wilson.” This comment was likely intended as a subtle dig at Ford; in the past year, especially after the Peace Ship debacle, Roosevelt had frequently criticized Ford.

  * * *

  For the rest of the week, Edison, Burroughs, and Firestone enjoyed an actual vacation. They camped out as planned, avoiding hotels entirely. Various acquaintances joined them for campfire meals. There was a ferry ride, and a long morning at a county fair. Coverage of these last days of the Vagabonds’ 1916 trip was almost entirely Edison-centric: “Edison Goes Back to Nature”; “Thoma
s A. Edison Takes to Mountains for Recreation”; and, finally in the September 11 New York Times, “Edison Back From Camp,” above a story describing the inventor as “sunburned and convinced that a vacation in the open is far more attractive and beneficial than living in hotels.” With Burroughs dropped off back in Roxbury, and Firestone on his way home to Akron, the newspaper reported that Edison briefly greeted his family, then “donned working clothes, went to his laboratory . . . [and] immediately started to work on several experiments which occurred to him on the trip.” The inventor’s only concession to road weariness was an afternoon nap.

  The last line of the Times article briefly noted, “Henry Ford had planned to make the trip, but business made it impossible for him to do so.”

  Afterward, Burroughs wrote a long joint letter to Edison and Firestone, thanking them for the trip and indirectly apologizing for his initial reluctance to go on it:

  My health had been so precarious during the summer that I feared I could not stand more than two or three days of the journey, but, as it turned out, the farther I went the farther I wanted to go. . . . The doctors think that, as we grow old, there is great remedial power in mechanical vibrations. I think the vibrations of a motor car over the good state roads on a trip to the Adirondacks with such a company in it as we had beats all other appliances. . . . I am only sure that I took the most delightful shaking up—such as I had not had for forty years.”

  Burroughs and Firestone even collaborated on In Nature’s Laboratory, a privately printed memory book of the trip, including photographs and verse composed to commemorate various adventures and stopping places. Neither showed any potential as a poet, but the intended message was clear: They’d had a nice time.