The Vagabonds

by Jeff Guinn

  * * *

  It seemed that almost every week in 1919, Americans found themselves confronted with more staggering news, awful events piling up one upon the other, reinforcing the spreading belief that it was dangerous to trust anyone. Even the country’s beloved national pastime was tainted that year, when eight members of the losing Chicago White Sox were indicted for fixing baseball’s World Series against the unfortunately named Cincinnati Reds. (In 1953, during the Cold War and a second Red Scare, the Cincinnati club changed its name from “Reds” to “Redlegs.” It changed back to “Reds” five years later.)

  America desperately needed some kind of wholesome distraction from its troubles, and reassurance that at least a few of its most famous citizens were above suspicion. A highly publicized, widely covered car trip by the Vagabonds perfectly fit the bill—but first there was an opening act. Three years after filing a million-dollar libel suit against the Chicago Tribune, Henry Ford was finally getting his day in court.

  To everyone other than himself, Ford seemed unlikely to prevail. Even if the Tribune story stating Ford Motor Company denied leave to employees called up for National Guard duty on the U.S.-Mexico border had key details wrong, the information was furnished to the reporter in an on-the-record interview by a company spokesman, though not Ford himself. The subsequent Tribune editorial was certainly insulting, and “anarchist” was a poor description of the automaker, who plainly favored dialogue over violent government overthrow. But florid editorial overstatement was an accepted part of a free press—editorials were, after all, expressions of opinion. Finally, and perhaps most critically, every other major newspaper in the country was certain to take the Tribune’s side—a successful suit by Ford might encourage other national figures to initiate their own lawsuits.

  It was not in the nature of Thomas Edison and Henry Ford’s friendship for one to directly offer personal advice to the other. Any counsel was communicated through messages between their secretaries, so on November 12, 1918, the day after World War I officially ended, Edison’s secretary W. H. Meadowcroft sent a letter on Edison’s behalf to Ernest Liebold at the Ford Motor Company, warning that in the libel trial “the lawyers on the other side will lay a great deal of stress on Mr. Ford’s statements in the early part of the war, and the newspapers will magnify it and make the most of it. . . . Mr. Edison hopes that Mr. Ford will think the matter over carefully and inasmuch as the war is all over that Mr. Ford will call off his suit against the Chicago Tribune and let the matter drop. Will you please give this message of Mr. Edison to Mr. Ford?”

  If Liebold did, Ford ignored it. He fully expected to win. It wasn’t simply hubris—Ford beat the odds in a previous, highly publicized court case, and emerged not only vindicated but as a hero to much of the public. The risk to Ford had been far greater then.

  * * *

  In 1879, well before more than a handful of automobiles lurched along American roads, a Rochester, New York, attorney named George B. Selden made a patent application for a gas-powered car that existed only in his imagination. Over the next decade and a half Selden made periodic adjustments to the application, and when the patent was eventually issued in 1895 (there were finally enough cars in America to make it worth Selden’s while) it meant that all manufacturers attempting to build and sell gas-powered vehicles for the next seventeen years, or through 1912, legally required Selden’s permission to do so. And that would be expensive.

  Selden sold the patent rights to the curiously named Electric Vehicle Company, which in turn created the Association of Licensed Automobile Manufacturers. Carmakers who didn’t want to face legal wrath had to join the ALAM, paying a $2,500 entry fee and a 1.25 percent royalty of the total price of each gas-powered car they sold. Selden and the Electric Vehicle Company split the proceeds. Auto manufacturers grudgingly complied—it seemed they had no other option. ALAM membership was granted only to those applicants whose companies seemed likely to succeed at a level making them lucrative. When Henry Ford applied in 1903 on behalf of the newly formed Ford Motor Company, he was rejected. He’d failed with his two previous companies so ALAM had no confidence in his chances with a third.

  Faced with giving up and folding his company or fighting, Ford fought. He built and sold his cars anyway. Ford’s publicists pointed out in numerous newspaper ads that one reason his cars were cheaper was that no “patent royalty” was included in the price. Ford proclaimed himself an underdog in the ongoing squabble, a small-business owner brave enough to defy a corporate giant. It played well with consumers, especially after an ALAM ad in Detroit papers warned that anyone even “using [nonlicensed cars] . . . will be liable to prosecution for infringement.” Ford’s response ad promised that his company would “protect” its customers “against any prosecution for alleged infringements of patents,” adding that “no court in the United States” would rule in favor of ALAM. It was an obvious dare for the Electric Vehicle Company and ALAM to bring suit against Ford.

  Soon afterward, they did. The case dragged on for years. ALAM had Selden’s 1895 patent, good through 1912, and Ford had public opinion, plus his argument that he’d been building experimental gas-driven vehicles before Selden’s patent went into effect. The machine Selden finally patented was barely functional. It could hardly be called the model on which superior gas-powered cars were based. But in 1909, a federal court found in Selden and ALAM’s favor. Ford refused to accept the verdict and filed an appeal. In the interim, most of the other car manufacturers who’d sided with Ford gave up and joined ALAM. That was fine with Ford—it only embellished his role as the brave, lonely businessman who had the courage to take on a conglomerate. But now the stakes had changed for Ford. In 1903, he was trying to get his company started. In 1909, Ford’s Model T was the rage among American motorists, and if his appeal was lost, millions of dollars would be awarded by the court to ALAM, possibly bankrupting Ford Motor Company.

  Ford’s gamble paid off in January 1911, when an appellate court reversed the federal court’s verdict, essentially ruling that Selden’s patent was insufficient and no carmakers were required to pay licensing fees because of it. Every auto manufacturer in America benefited, but none as much as Ford, particularly when ALAM decided not to appeal and eventually disbanded. Just as he had with the utilitarian, inexpensive Model T, Ford had defied the odds and prevailed. Once again, his instincts were right and everyone else’s wrong. In 1916, cautioned from all sides that continuing his libel suit against the Chicago Tribune was sheer folly, Ford relished the opportunity to prove his doubters wrong again. Even before May 12, when the judge gaveled the first day of testimony into order, Ford worked to ensure that every possible aspect would be in his favor.

  It began with the trial’s venue. The Tribune wanted the case tried in a major city’s court, where the majority of the juror pool would, presumably, be sophisticated enough to recognize the right of the media to express editorial opinion. Ford and his legal team wanted a rural venue, where Ford’s man-of-the-people appeal would seem in stark contrast to a big-city newspaper’s elitist name-calling. Ford’s team of lawyers prevailed here—after much debate, the trial was set in Mount Clemens, Michigan, a modest town not far from Detroit, and where the jury was comprised mostly of farmers.

  By now Ford mistrusted big-city media as much as he did Wall Street bankers, and he realized that the only daily coverage likely to emanate from Mount Clemens would be generated by major newspapers like the Tribune and the increasingly ubiquitous national wire services, mostly based out of New York City and Washington, D.C. All across the nation, small-town dailies whose readers wanted news of the trial could rely only on what Ford expected to be biased coverage by news outlets intent on supporting their fellow print heavyweight. But for the past six months, Ford had his own newspaper, and now he put the Dearborn Independent to work on his behalf. From the outset, Ford and the experienced editors he’d hired, mostly from Detroit newspapers, realized that they must completely refurbish the Independent’s editor
ial and art content if it was to attain the kind of circulation necessary to equal (and eventually surpass—Ford never aimed low) that of nationally influential papers like the New York Times. Ford even broke unspoken protocol to directly request that Edison look over the Independent and make suggestions for improvement. Edison, for once feeling free to tell Ford exactly what he thought, responded bluntly. He described the Independent as “a dreary proposition” for most readers, with “very poorly executed illustrations”—readers wanted to look at pictures as well as read—and with potential subscriber appeal limited by too many editorials espousing Ford’s personal beliefs and otherwise “not a lot of interesting things.” Edison stressed that his intention wasn’t to offend Ford—“I am anxious that [you] shall make the paper one that everybody wants.” If his friend would “get on to the style of the stuff the public wants, [you] will gradually bring [the] paper around to a point where its power for good will be immense.”

  In May, just before the Tribune trial began, on Ford’s instructions the Dearborn Independent established a news bureau in offices across the street from the Mount Clemens courthouse. A map of the United States was hung on one wall, and in The Public Image of Henry Ford historian David L. Lewis notes that it “was bristling” with colored pins, about 12,500 blue ones representing small papers believed sympathetic to Ford and 397 yellow pins for larger, anticipated anti-Ford publications. Each day of the trial—and it turned out that there were many of them—the Independent’s newly minted “Mount Clemens News Bureau” made available to the sympathetic papers news stories of the day’s proceedings written by bureau reporters. Recipients were assured that these were objective reports, “not propaganda,” though they routinely excluded details that presented Ford poorly. The mostly small-town daily and weekly papers gladly reprinted whatever the Mount Clemens News Bureau offered, since these were free and the other national wire services charged for their stories. Ford also granted pretrial interviews to selected reporters, telling one that “history is more or less bunk. . . . We want to live in the present, and the only history that is worth a tinker’s dam is the history we make today.” It was a comment that would come back to haunt him.

  During the trial, both sides contributed to a circuslike atmosphere. The Tribune flooded Mount Clemens with Texans who took turns describing to the jury and pro-Tribune reporters how Mexican desperados had and continued to commit all sorts of depraved acts along the U.S.-Mexico border, the implication being that Ford didn’t care if fellow Americans were beaten, robbed, and raped. The Texans ostentatiously wore outsized Stetson hats and jangling spurs. Ford, in turn, imported Mexican nationals, who wore sombreros and gave every appearance of being unthreatening. But the highlight of the trial’s fourteen weeks, the only testimony that really mattered, came in July when Henry Ford took the stand.

  Ford was questioned by Elliott K. Stevenson, the Tribune’s attorney. Stevenson was from Detroit, and already familiar with the carmaker’s laconic way of expressing himself. Wearing a dark suit, Ford slouched in a wooden chair, appearing relaxed and even a little bored as Stevenson approached the witness stand. Stevenson’s first question—“What do you know about history?”—revealed the heart of the Tribune’s trial strategy, which was to expose Henry Ford to the jury, and the world, as the ignorant man it described him as being, someone deserving editorial scorn even if one canard (“anarchist”) had perhaps been misapplied.

  After some verbal sparring, Ford said he didn’t know much about history “because I live in the present.” He similarly admitted not understanding the fundamentals of American government: “It’s a long subject.” Asked to give the date of the American Revolution, Ford guessed, “Eighteen-twelve.” Stevenson followed with more questions, including who was Benedict Arnold, and what did the word “ballyhoo” mean? Ford’s responses were, respectively, “A writer,” and “A blackguard or something of that nature.” He’d never heard of chili con carne. When Stevenson theatrically wondered how anyone could remain so uninformed about so much, Ford responded that he didn’t need to personally know such things: “I could [hire] a man in five minutes who could tell me all about [them].”

  Stevenson asked Ford several times to read portions of documents out loud. Ford repeatedly declined, saying he’d forgotten his spectacles. Sensing an opening, Stevenson pounced.

  “I think the impression has been created by your failure to read some of these things that have been presented to you that you could not read. Do you want to leave it that way?”

  “Yes, you can leave it that way,” Ford replied. “I am not a fast reader and I have the hay fever and I would make a botch of it.”

  Stevenson persisted. “Can you read at all?”

  “I can read.”

  “Do you want to try it?”

  “No, sir.”

  Ford’s responses were just as clipped in response to friendly questions from his own attorney, Alfred Lucking. Was Ford an anarchist? “No, sir.” Ever personally broken the law? “Speeding, yes.” Had he ever associated with anarchists? “No.” Were, in fact, his associates Thomas Edison and John Burroughs, the naturalist? “Yes.”

  Lucking saved a key question for the end. He and Ford acknowledged that prior to America’s entry into the European war, the automaker vigorously opposed U.S. participation.

  “When the government got into the war, you cooperated?”

  “Yes.”

  Stevenson objected to the question—anything Ford had done after the Tribune editorial ran on June 18, 1916, ten months prior to the U.S. entering the war, was immaterial to the trial.

  Lucking shot back, “The leopard does not change his spots, Mr. Stevenson.”

  * * *

  On August 14, the case went to the jury. Ten hours later, their verdict was announced in Ford’s favor—the Tribune had libeled him. But instead of the $1 million requested by the carmaker in damages, the jurors awarded Ford six cents. Both sides claimed vindication. It was the unanimous conclusion of most major publications on both coasts and in big cities throughout the U.S. that Ford had been humiliated and might never recover in public opinion. The New York Times compared Ford’s witness stand quizzing to a history test in school, and “he has not received a pass degree.” The Nation concluded that “the unveiling of Mr. Ford has much of the pitiful about it, if not the tragic. We would rather have had the curtain drawn, the popular ideal unshattered.” The San Jose Mercury Herald, previously gung ho for Ford during his 1915 visit to the Panama-Pacific Exposition, predicted that future mention of Ford “will be to the accompaniment of laughter and ridicule . . . the great problems affecting mankind are not to be understood by the ignoramus.”

  But rank-and-file Americans, particularly in Midwestern and Southern states, thought quite the opposite. Ford received thousands of letters with the general message that if he were an anarchist, then America needed more of them. Ford was the son of a Michigan farmer, and like most rural Americans of the time his formal education was limited to a few years in local schools and teachers who themselves had often not graduated high school. Then he had to leave school to make a living. Like Ford, many of his countrymen read only with difficulty, if at all. Their understanding of American history was limited, but like him they knew they loved their country, though they had suspicions about its leaders similar to Ford’s. They, too, might not remember the exact date of the American Revolution, but they knew that Henry Ford introduced the $5 workday and a car that ordinary people could afford. They identified with Ford so strongly that newspaper attacks on him were taken as insults directed at them. More than ever after the trial, wrote historian Reynold M. Wik, “Reality became confused with legend [and common] people . . . visualized Ford as they thought him to be, not as he was.”

  One way or the other, all America was fascinated by Henry Ford, and this put many major newspapers in a contradictory position. Having done their best during and immediately after the Tribune trial to convince readers that Ford wasn’t worthy of attention, t
hey still were obligated to continue covering his every public statement and act—people wanted stories about Ford. That these stories continued giving Ford a platform for his frequently outrageous pronouncements, and free publicity for his cars, mattered less to his critics in the press than selling newspapers. Even before the Tribune trial was over, the same papers blasting Ford editorially also printed upbeat stories about the Vagabonds’ latest trip, which commenced immediately after Ford stepped down from the witness stand, and almost two weeks before the jury returned its verdict.

  * * *

  On July 1, Edison received a telegram from Ernest Liebold informing him that Mr. Ford hoped for an “Adirondack motor trip . . . July twenty-fifth or shortly thereafter. Please advise.” Edison replied that the plan was satisfactory—“We can look in Adirondacks and part of Vermont.” On the night of August 4, with the Mount Clemens trial still ten days away from jury resolution, all four Vagabonds camped just outside Troy, New York, at Green Island, where Ford planned to build a tractor plant. The carmaker completely reoutfitted the group’s camping gear with new tents, a lazy Susan table, and two specially crafted vehicles. Firestone described these as Car A—“As fully furnished a kitchen and pantry as could be devised. On the running board was a large gasoline stove fed from the motor tank, and inside the car was a built-in ice box and compartments for every kind of food that we needed”—and Car B—“compartments for each tent and bed and everything needed to make camp. It was mounted on a truck chassis.”