The Vagabonds

by Jeff Guinn

  Edison was in a fine mood on the afternoon of Thursday, August 2, as his chauffeur whisked him and Mina through Pennsylvania on the way to Ohio. Reporters in towns where they stopped made much of the automobile they rode in, a gleaming new Lincoln touring car given to them by Ford. Edison, apparently feeling especially warm toward Firestone, directed the journalists’ attention to the wheels. Firestone had recently launched a brand of “balloon tires,” which were inflated with more air to reduce jarring. “We came on balloons,” Edison joked with a reporter in Reading. “This car is equipped with Firestone balloons, [his] new tire. It works like a charm.” As usual, a crowd gathered around the inventor, and although Edison refused to give a speech, “with a smile that covered his entire face . . . rais[ed] his forearm to his hat . . . saluted and called back a pleasant good-bye.”

  The inventor was still cheery a few hours later when the Edisons checked in to the Penn-Harris Hotel in Harrisburg. He and Mina took “a suite of rooms” on the second floor and settled in for the night. Soon afterward, Harding’s death in San Francisco was announced, and reporters gathered in the Penn-Harris lobby, sending messages up to Edison’s suite requesting that he come down and make a statement. Edison didn’t appear all night. On Friday morning, an intrepid journalist bounded up the stairs and knocked on Edison’s door. He was greeted by Mina, who said that she’d ask her husband if he would talk for a few minutes. Mina explained that Edison had been up all night, making and receiving phone calls about Harding’s death. Edison granted the reporter a brief interview, making an official statement to be used by him and the rest of the assembled press. Beyond expressing his grief, Edison seemed to send a thinly veiled warning to Ford:

  I was very much shocked and grieved at the news of President Harding’s death. The last time I saw the President was about two years ago when we were camping near Hagerstown, Maryland. He was a wonderful man. The presidency seems to be a very dangerous position considering the history of our presidents.

  Edison didn’t mention that the last time he saw Harding was also the first time he met him, or that he and the other Vagabonds had found the president to be a less than wonderful man. So far as the general public was concerned, Harding’s death immediately erased all the qualms about him—the corruption among his cabinet and cronies, the lack of any substantial legislative achievement during his two and a half years in office. There would be additional, more salacious Harding scandals made public in the years ahead: the Teapot Dome scandal (members of his administration selling oil leases in return for pieces of the financial returns), an illegitimate child, White House couplings with a lover that allegedly included a tryst in a closet while Secret Servicemen stood guard on the other side of the door. But for a period of time, beginning with the announcement of his death and extending into the foreseeable future, the president’s demise transformed him into a near-faultless martyr who, in the overwrought words of Theodore Roosevelt Jr., “gave his life for the service of our country as truly as anyone in our history.” In fact, Harding hadn’t been well for some time, but insisted on an otherwise unnecessary trip to Alaska and the West Coast to bolster his shaky public image. As Francis Russell wrote in The Shadow of Blooming Grove, his epic biography of Harding, “As the first dismay at the news of Harding’s death became absorbed by grief . . . ordinary Americans became suddenly aware—although they would soon forget—how much they loved their white-haired President with the face of a Roman senator.” (Historians would conclude that Harding’s chief attribute as president was how much he looked the part.) Ordinary Americans also comprised Henry Ford’s political base. He’d planned to base his campaign on their dissatisfaction with the incumbent. So far as his presidential aspirations were concerned, Harding couldn’t have died at a more inconvenient time.

  For business reasons as well as preserving whatever remained of Ford’s political hopes, the Vagabonds had no option other than to publicly demonstrate the same grief as the rest of America, and to a greater degree—after all, the suddenly saintly Warren G. Harding had been their personal friend and a boon camping companion. They offered no correction to stories claiming Harding had often joined them on their trips, or that the only reason he wasn’t going on the current one was the administrative necessities that demanded him to make his ill-fated Western trip instead. Ford, Edison, and Firestone announced that they would postpone their 1923 excursion so that they could attend Harding’s August 10 funeral in the late president’s hometown of Marion, Ohio.

  * * *

  Florence Kling Harding was receiving friends at her home when the Vagabonds and their wives arrived in Marion. Edison, Ford, and Firestone called on her. Mina Edison, Clara Ford, and Idabelle Firestone apparently chose to remain at their hotel. The three men found the Harding home virtually buried under floral tributes—all of America, it seemed, had sent flowers. Later, two arrangements were singled out for special praise by the press, the flowers sent collectively by the Fords, Edisons, and Firestones, and a massive floral display from the Ku Klux Klan (“a six-foot, ornately contrived cross of flaming red flowers on which was worked in white ‘K.K.K.’ ”). After offering their condolences to the former First Lady, the three men lounged awhile on the front porch made famous by Harding during the 1920 presidential campaign. He’d refused to campaign around the country, preferring to make occasional speeches there. Reporters noted the Vagabonds’ attire—dark alpaca coat and light trousers for Edison, dark blue business suit for Firestone, and a gray business suit for Ford. They posed for pictures and chatted a bit with the media, sharing fond memories of their camp experience with the late president, and regretting that they would never be repeated. Reporters noted that in the background, long lines of “citizen mourners” waited to walk up the steps and file past Harding’s casket on display in the parlor.

  When the time arrived for the funeral procession to begin, the Vagabonds collected their wives and received an honored place on the processional drive to the cemetery. The service was lengthy—Rev. William F. Anderson, who’d also been at Camp Harding, offered one of the benedictions. Ford, Edison, Firestone, and their wives were placed among the most prominent mourners, just behind newly sworn-in president Calvin Coolidge and the previously much maligned Harding cabinet. Some funeral planner either oblivious to past news events or possessed of a keen sense of humor seated Ford next to General John J. Pershing, now chief of staff of the U.S. Army and former commander of the Mexican expedition that had so aroused Ford’s public fury several years earlier. In between singing hymns and bowing their heads during prayers for the departed chief executive, Ford and Pershing found something to talk about—wire services reported that they “chatted,” but a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote that “Ford, the pacifist, and General Pershing, the soldier, plunged into debate. The General shakes his finger and Ford is smiling.”

  After the service, Ford and Edison told reporters that they planned to immediately commence their Vagabonds trip. It would begin the next day in Milan, where residents of Edison’s birthplace would honor him, and then proceed, Ford said, “wherever the spirit moves . . . we plan to get as far away from civilization as possible. We are seeking rest and recreation.” Then, a wire service reported, “as an illustration of recreation Mr. Ford grabbed Mr. Firestone and gave him a jerk which nearly caused him to fall to the floor.” The stories did not note Firestone’s reaction, if any.

  Ford spoke more seriously to a reporter from the New York Times, praising the same Washington officials he’d previously criticized, assuring the journalist and Times readers that Harding’s death “will not have any effect on business or polices of the government as the administration at Washington is practically the same as when Mr. Harding was president.” Ford told a Wall Street Journal reporter that the U.S. economy would continue flourishing: “Don’t worry about foreign competition. Europe is too lazy to work.” In the immediate wake of Harding’s death, journalists were apparently too respectful to bring up Ford’s presidential as
pirations, and he made no mention of them.

  While Ford talked about practical subjects, Edison was more philosophical. He mentioned that, at age seventy-six, he was experiencing constant sorrow as old friends passed away, and that he personally “was seeking after truth and had made much progress” determining what happens when “the soul after death takes flight.” Though Edison “could not say . . . that men live after death,” his studies so far convinced him that “there is a great directing head of things and people, a Supreme Being who looks after the destinies of the world . . . we know that the soul does exist after death.”

  * * *

  The next day, birth rather than death was a much happier subject. Milan had not grown much from its five hundred or so residents when Edison was born in 1847 (his family moved when young Tom, then called Al, was seven), but everyone living there and most of those from neighboring towns turned out to pay the inventor tribute. Reporters estimated the crowd at four thousand. Edison refrained from making a lengthy speech, saying simply that it had taken him so long to return because he’d been busy. When Ford was introduced, the throng chanted, “There’s our next president.” The automaker didn’t respond directly, but did hop off the grandstand “to shake hands, and to comment on how clean the village looked.” Firestone agreed to speak, telling the crowd that “you citizens of Milan may well be proud of your distinguished son. Mr. Edison is unquestionably the greatest man of his generation.” A brass band played “Yes! We Have No Bananas,” supposedly one of Edison’s favorite tunes, and then the inventor visited a house where one of his sisters had lived. Afterward the Vagabonds’ group, which again included wives, drove on to the Fords’ home in Dearborn. On August 14 they began their delayed Upper Michigan Peninsula trip.

  * * *

  From the beginning, it was far from Ford’s description of “getting far away from civilization.” Had that really been their intention, the Vagabonds could have camped in the Southwest, where in many areas only the most primitive roads bisected sweeping swaths of sand, cactus, and snakes. The Northwest woods still contained vast tracts of forest relatively untouched by autocampers or industry. But in 1923 what Ford and Edison really wanted, with Firestone’s automatic acquiescence, was something far more controlled—camping spots well-removed from other travelers, media-friendly visits to properties controlled by Ford, the better to avoid any on-camera stumbles or controversies, and an itinerary suitably civilized for the ladies. Edison’s health was another consideration. At age seventy-six, his decades of squinting into microscopes, bending over trays on laboratory tables, and working odd hours while fueled by equally odd diets had caught up with him. In July his New Jersey physician had diagnosed neuritis, nerve inflammation in various extremities, and ordered the inventor to “keep away from the factory for a while.” Like John Burroughs before him, Edison had reached a stage of late life where even the ordinary vicissitudes of daily driving and camping were a strain on his system.

  So the trip was planned to give the appearance of roughing it without any of the inconveniences. From Dearborn they’d head north, staying in hotels on the drive up and then after arrival in the Upper Peninsula resting comfortably in cabins on land Ford owned. Several nights would be spent camped on an island reached not by car but via Ford’s luxury yacht the Sialia—they could loll in their battery-lit tents, savor chef-prepared meals, and not concern themselves with disrespectful reporters describing all the costly amenities. They could take day trips from the island, sailing on the Sialia to different Upper Peninsula ports where their caravan of chauffeur-driven Lincolns and Fords would whisk them away to see various sights, many of them located at Ford industrial operations where, again, public and press access could be rigidly controlled.

  They felt the perfect plan was in place, but from the moment they set out from Dearborn the weather didn’t cooperate. Mid-August in Michigan is traditionally hot, sometimes uncomfortably so, but rarely cool and wet. This August, it was. On the departure date from Dearborn of Tuesday, August 14, Edison had already been away from home for two weeks. It had taken its toll, and the damp, slightly chilly weather didn’t help. A cold settled in the inventor’s chest almost before the first few miles passed. The illness was clearly slight; a few days’ rest at home in New Jersey would undoubtedly have resulted in quick recovery. But Edison was a stubborn man. He was on a well-publicized vacation with his wife and friends, and entirely unwilling to have every newspaper in the nation inform readers that elderly Thomas Edison wasn’t up to a little camping in the Upper Peninsula wilds.

  * * *

  Early on, they set a leisurely pace, three hundred miles in two or three days, motoring northeast toward Grand Rapids, then following an even more northerly route toward Traverse City on Lake Michigan’s east coast, where the Sialia would take the travelers across to Escanaba on the lake’s west coast in considerable comfort (the crew often numbered as many as thirty while ferries served for the cars, camp gear, and trip staff). Most of the press waited in Escanaba for the Vagabonds’ arrival—the photo opportunities would be better there. A few reporters popped up along the way to Traverse City, mostly local journalists. The only substantial coverage came at the stop in Paris, where Ford, Edison, and their wives met Jep Bisbee and the old fiddler played for them. Firestone’s car got lost—the automaker, his wife, and son Russell caught up with the others in Traverse City. Edison’s cold remained worrisome. While the others explored Traverse City, he stayed behind at the hotel. Because the press waited on the other side of Lake Michigan, Edison’s absence wasn’t widely noted. Instead, there was considerable media speculation on how long the Vagabonds would remain camped on the island—speculation ranged from two weeks to a month.

  But Edison’s illness caused a change in plans. They spent the night of August 18 aboard Ford’s yacht, where the inventor could rest comfortably. Ford visited with the waiting media by himself in Escanaba. None of the reporters asked where Edison was; instead, they queried the carmaker about whether he was now prepared to formally announce a plan to seek the presidency.

  It would have been a propitious moment—there was much national speculation about the kind of president Calvin Coolidge might prove to be, and whether he was up to the job. But Ford chose to laugh the questions off. Ford didn’t say he wouldn’t run, but stopped short of stating he would. The journalists couldn’t pin him down. A wire service reported, Ford “inferred that he was not going after the presidency, but . . . would be willing to accept the honor if it were conferred upon him.”

  * * *

  The next day, they drove from Escanaba to Iron Mountain near the Michigan-Wisconsin border. Ford had a lumber mill there, and the property offered several prime camping spots. The site chosen was described as “a grove” by the press, who were invited to visit but not stay long. The reporters were also allowed to trail along as Edward Kingsford, who ran the lumber operation there for Ford, took his boss and the rest of the Vagabonds party on a tour of the facilities. Edison felt well enough to come along. Ford lectured his guests and the media on the importance of putting every bit of material to some use. Even burned wood scraps were compressed into squarish briquets of charcoal, then packaged and sold as a fuel source for home heating and outdoor barbecues. Ford named the product “Kingsford Charcoal” in honor of his valued employee.

  The campers remained at Iron Mountain through Monday, August 20. That day, Ford briefly spoke to the media again about the presidency, this time focusing not on himself but the new White House incumbent: “I hope that President Coolidge will follow closely in the footsteps of his illustrious predecessor, the late President Harding. I know nothing about President Coolidge. I was very intimately acquainted with the late President Harding as it was only two years ago that we were on a similar camping trip to this.” Beyond his exaggerated claim of intimate acquaintance with a former president he’d only known and camped with for twenty-seven hours, Ford was being honest regarding Coolidge, who was relatively unknown to the country
beyond his ending the Boston police strike while governor of Massachusetts and a reputation for taciturnity. (Supposedly a woman once told Coolidge, “I have a bet with friends that I can make you say three words.” His reply: “You lose.”)

  If the new president was in Ford’s thoughts, Coolidge and his advisors were just as aware of Ford. On August 21, there was a wire service report that “President Coolidge has set about building up the reputation in which he hopes to be returned to the White House for a full term.” Coolidge, the story declared, would offer voters “Yankee reticence and gumption—in other words, reserve and decision.” For the present, at least, Coolidge and his team were more worried about challenges from within their Republican Party than anyone nominated by the Democrats. The man most feared by them was Senator Hiram Johnson of California, the voice of the more liberal Republican wing, and “of course Henry Ford looms big in all political speculation. . . . Every well-informed politician who is at all candid will admit that the sentiment for Ford is solid and widespread. The more candid will admit in addition that this sentiment is grounded not alone on admiration for the achievements of Henry Ford, but on disgust with the ways of all politicians of all parties.” A second wire story a week later cited Ford’s strength with voters in Middle America, the South, and West and concluded, “While Republican leaders appear to find amusement in the thought of Ford as a Republican presidential possibility, and emphatically [insist that] he could never secure [their party’s nomination], they are far from confident.”