Driving with the Devil

by Neal Thompson

  From the start, Ford insisted—despite early investors' demands— that his cars were not simply rich folks' playthings but for everyday use by “real people.” It was as if Ford created his vehicles with the isolated, overworked farmer in mind—although even his own father the farmer at first refused a ride in one of his son's prototypes. Often working without sleep, once for two days straight, Ford would wake his wife, Clara, in the middle of the night so she could watch him drive down their cobblestone street in a pouring rain only to return, soaked to the skin, pushing his silenced vehicle.

  By 1900, Ford's experiments had attracted the notice of the local press. A Detroit newsman wrote that the “chuck! chuck!” of Ford's gas-powered vehicle was the sound of a new era. “Not like any other sound ever heard in this world,” the writer gushed. “It must be heard to be appreciated… civilization's latest lisp, its newest voice.”

  To distinguish his creations from those of the dozens of other Detroit automakers, Ford decided—with remarkable foresight—to start racing. In 1901, he entered a race at the fairgrounds in Grosse Point. Detroiters on their bicycles came by the thousands to watch Ford and one of his strange experimental models face off against Alexander Winton, an acclaimed racer, record holder, and one of America's first carmakers.

  Winton, a “fiery Scotsman” and the odds-on favorite, roared ahead and into first place in his specially built “Bullet,” and for most of the ten-mile race, Ford lagged behind, with Winton spraying dust and dirt into his face. But Ford slowly gained, and on the eighth of ten laps around the mile-long dirt oval, he passed Winton and crossed the finish line first. The seven thousand fans, having never seen anything travel so fast— forty-five miles an hour!—went wild. “Boy I'll never do that again,” Ford said. “I was scared to death.”

  In 1902, Ford went looking for someone else to drive a ghastly looking prototype racer called the “999.” He enlisted the roguish bicycle racer Barney Oldfield, who in his first-ever car race handily beat three other competitors in Ford's 999. Jubilant fans broke down fences and carried Oldfield from the suburban Detroit track on their shoulders.

  Those victories helped attract financial backing for Ford to begin mass-producing his cars, and they taught him a lesson: fast cars are viewed—rightly or wrongly—as well-made, desirable machines. Racing therefore became the best way to advertise the Ford name. Ford hired Oldfield and others to race his cars on the hard-packed beaches of Daytona Beach, Florida, and atop frozen Michigan rivers, where in 1904 a Ford car set a world speed record of ninety-one miles an hour. A newspaper writer of the day chastised Ford for aligning himself and his company's future with “fast speed freaks.”

  In his heart, Ford concurred. He considered racing to be an improper use of the automobile. It offended his pragmatic nature. “I never really thought much of racing,” he once said. But Ford also knew that “winning a race on a track told the public something about the merits of an automobile.” This very same sentiment would one day lure Ford Motor Company and other carmakers to NASCAR. They'd coin a phrase for the quid pro quo of speed: Win on Sunday, sell on Monday.

  And so, said Henry Ford, “if an automobile were going to be known for speed, then I was going to make an automobile that would be known wherever speed was known.” These were prophetic words indeed, since the Fords of Raymond Parks's day would become very well known to those for whom speed was crucial.

  Ford Motor Company was created in 1903 and quickly earned a reputation for quality that brought unprecedented profits, which Ford poured back into his factory. In time, Ford's passion became the art of mass production, a concept borrowed from the bicycle factories of his day. As his company passed its tenth anniversary and Ford handed the duties of car making over to a growing workforce, he would stalk the factory aisles, always carrying a notebook, scribbling notes and ideas on how to improve the production process. He memorized bons mots from Emerson's “Self-Reliance” and nudged workers to become “sober and honest and hardworking”—like him. He'd bark, “Get a move on” and “Get production!” But the workers didn't mind. To them, Ford's factory was “a wonderful place” where thousands of parts of all sizes and materials were assembled “to make a magical whole.”

  A job with Ford was like “being on hand at the creation of world,” Upton Sinclair wrote. Love-struck factory workers named their kids Henry or Ford. The creation that inspired both worker and customer was the Model T, which Ford unveiled in 1908 and would continue to produce for two decades, and at increasingly unprecedented rates.

  At first, cars were built like houses: in one place, with all materials delivered to that place. One of the many ways in which Ford revolutionized car making was to perfect the assembly-line concept, which had been introduced at General Motors but which Ford took to a new level. Instead of building the car in one spot, the assembly-line process was reversed, with the car chassis pulled by rope along a line of workers, who stayed put. Each worker had a sole responsibility—installing seats, tires, doors, and such—and the workers' materials were stacked beside them, within easy reach. With his stopwatch and notebook, Ford refined the process and slashed the time of assembling a car from twelve and a half hours to one and a half hours.

  The southern novelist Erskine Caldwell once visited Detroit and dubbed it “Eight-Finger City,” a place where workers were being maimed by Ford's machinery and where “fingers, hands, arms, legs and crushed bodies” were commonplace. Caldwell's obvious exaggeration was based on the realities of dangerous factory work. Still, Ford's unprecedented $5-per-day pay scale, unveiled to much mayhem in 1914— equivalent to a six-figure salary in 2005 dollars—seemed worth a few amputations, as did the revolutionary product that rolled by the tens of thousands from Ford's factory doors.

  The stately Model T, looking like a top hat on wheels, was sold for about $850 at bicycle shops and hardware stores and was an instant rage: a tough, affordable car that could manhandle the dirt roads of a prepaved nation. Ford found that each time he dropped the price, sales rose wildly. By 1914, the year of Raymond Parks's birth, Ford was churning out two hundred thousand Model Ts a year, selling each for $500 or less. Heavy sales in the South prompted Ford to open a massive plant on Ponce de Leon Avenue in downtown Atlanta. The car earned affectionate nicknames such as “flivver” and “tin lizzy,” and by the 1920s, two-thirds of America's cars were Model Ts. Ford and car had become synonyms.

  John Steinbeck wrote that the Model T “was not a car … it was a person—crotchety and mean, frolicsome and full of jokes.” But some people weren't laughing and instead warned about the dark side of this new age of mechanized mobility. An Atlanta newspaper editor complained that by putting the automobile “within easy reach of everybody,” Henry Ford had “inadvertently created a monster that has caused more trouble in the larger cities than bootleggers, speakeasies and alley bandits.” Indeed, Ford cars became wonderful tools for a new generation of criminals.

  For southern moonshiners, the mass manufacturing of Fords came just in time, colliding as it did with an antialcohol campaign that, after simmering for a century, had finally erupted.

  Efforts to prohibit alcoholic consumption in America gained a strong following through the 1800s. Puritans such as Frances Willard, founder of the Women's Christian Temperance Union, pushed schools to teach that alcohol was “a colorless liquid poison.” Abraham Lincoln spoke out against such prohibition efforts, saying that such a law “strikes at the very principal upon which our Government was founded.” But as America matured into the twentieth century, the forces of abstinence had become an army. Its soldiers included the Anti-Saloon League, Bible-thumping Baptists, and firebrands such as Billy Sunday, Lemonade Lucy, and hatchet-wielding, tavern-smashing Carry Nation. The American Medical Association denounced alcohol, as did Georgia baseball great Ty Cobb, and even the Ku Klux Klan, which stoked southerners' fears by claiming that alcohol fueled the lasciviousness of southern blacks. Throughout 1918, state after state voted in favor of Prohibition, which
became law once Nebraska finally voted on January 16, 1919, becoming the thirty-sixth state to say no to liquor and providing the required three-fourths consensus.

  Prohibition banned “the manufacture, sale or transportation of intoxicating liquors.” A year later, with passage of the Volstead Act, violations became punishable by imprisonment. Billy Sunday sang praise that “the reign of tears is over.” He predicted that without mind-addling alcohol, the jails and prisons would actually be closed and turned into factories, and “the slums will soon be a memory.”

  “Goodbye forever to my old friend booze,” satirist Ring Lardner lamented, and W. C. Fields fretted that he'd be “forced to live for days on nothing but food and water.” But they needn't have worried. The nation's police departments were hardly prepared to fight America's ingrained thirst for alcohol. And proponents of Prohibition did not anticipate Henry Ford's unintended complicity with southern moonshiners.

  Although Ford was known to despise alcohol and tobacco—even blaming booze as the real cause of World War I, with “the beer-drinking German taking after the wine-drinking Frenchman”—he would profit nicely, if ironically, from the popularity of his vehicles among bootleggers such as Raymond Parks.

  Southern bootleggers—initially named for the practice of hiding liquor in a boot, but also known as whiskey trippers, rumrunners, transporters, and blockaders—adored Henry Ford and his no-nonsense workhorse vehicles. Beginning around the 1920s, bootleggers became folk heroes as they stealthily drove jars of whiskey out from the mountain hollows and down into the thirsty cities of Atlanta, Asheville, Memphis, Greenville, Knoxville, and Charlotte. They punished Ford's cars as no one had, and the cars rarely failed them; like a loyal dog, a Ford Model T eagerly complied with its master's orders. In the black of night, across rutted and muddy lanes, through cornfields and down switchbacked mountain roads, bootleggers drove as fast as Ford's engines would take them. And, like Robert Mitchum in the film Thunder Road, they did it all with a heedless calm, driving one-handed with a cigarette dangling from their lips.

  Henry Ford's plan to use speed and racing victories to sell cars certainly made an impression on the speed demons of Dixie. But it must have galled him to learn that his cars had become the primary method of delivering whiskey to the Prohibition-era South.

  Ford's well-known revulsion for alcohol was possibly inspired by his Irish father's destructive love of whiskey, or maybe it was just prejudice against those who didn't share his views on abstinence. When his wife, Clara, and son, Edsel, visited relatives in the South, he wrote to them, “Do they carry whiskey jugs in their blouses in Kentucky?” Ford was known to smash the liquor bottles of his son and enforced sobriety among his workers. When he was ceremoniously handed a jar of moonshine while visiting Asheville, North Carolina, Ford huffily refused even a sip.

  If Ford was aware of the symbiotic relationship between his cars and whiskey tripping, it did not affect his efforts to rid America of what he called “addictive poisons.” In fact, in his own small way, Ford helped instigate the national ban on alcohol. Andrew Carnegie, Pierre du Pont, John Rockefeller, and other superpowers of the day also supported Prohibition, largely because they thought a ban on alcohol would lead to a safer, more productive workforce. But Ford's distaste for spirits went beyond that. He presciently claimed that the increasing speed of automobiles and growing intricacy of modern machinery could be dangerous when combined with the numbing effects of liquor. In time, he became a prominent supporter of the Anti-Saloon League.

  Started in 1893 by an Ohio minister, the ASL had gained power through the early 1900s with aggressive lobbying campaigns and moralistic slogans such as “You can't drink liquor and have strong babies” or “Can you imagine a cocktail party in heaven?” The league's spokesman was Wayne Wheeler, a savvy Washington lobbyist who amassed large financial donations from Ford and other industrialists.

  Ford could afford such investments. Prohibition and the 1920s coincided with enormous growth and financial success at Ford Motor Company. As Ford continued to perfect his assembly-line process, he became obsessed with time-and-motion studies, feeling that any slight tweak in the production process might lead to increased productivity and profit. As production increased, allowing him to keep dropping prices, Ford's sales and revenues boomed. A $2,500 investment placed in the company in 1903 was worth $29 million by 1920.

  Ford didn't want liquor to muck up that successful formula and had long banned drinking by his workers, both on and off the job. He demanded that employees be “living wholesomely,” and he fired unrepentant drinkers. To regulate workers' morals, he created a nest of spies, euphemistically named the “sociological department” and later the “service department,” which sought out not only drinkers but union agitators. Ford even once suggested that the U.S. military enforce Prohibition. He also occasionally let slip darker, weirder concerns about liquor, once claiming that American Jews conspired to prevent Prohibition “because they wanted America drunk.” In Ford's paranoid, anti-Semitic mind, whiskey was part of a Jewish plot to take over the world, a scheme to disseminate “liquor to befuddle the brains of Christian leaders.”

  In truth, despite his best efforts, it was Ford who indirectly enabled the spread of liquor.

  Through the 1920s, cultural upheaval transformed the nation. People listened to jazz, danced strange new dances, watched Hollywood stars kiss on the big screen. Women could now vote. Prohibition was ignored by drinkers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, who declared “all Gods dead.” The country was becoming so modern. Its tastes in cars changed, too, and this troubled Henry Ford, who had come to distrust too much modernization and pined for an earlier, simpler America. As Upton Sinclair said in his book The Flivver King, “There were so many things in the world that were not to Henry's tastes.” Ford complained often about the degeneration of society, something he blamed largely on Jews, Hollywood, whiskey, and also on machines. Yet Ford was doing more than any man alive to replace old America with a new, high-speed, mechanical America.

  Despite Ford's oft-repeated, stubborn refusal to change anything on the Model T, or consider a new model, he finally realized in the mid-1920s that “the modern world wanted pep, zip, chic.” Ford acknowledged that to compete with other carmakers, chiefly Chevy and its lithe and sensual designs, he'd have to make cars that weren't just boxy and utilitarian. So in 1927, at the height of Prohibition, Ford unveiled the Model A, unwittingly helping the cause of the southern moonshiner, who found it an even better delivery tool than the Model T. Revenue agents had to wonder whose side Ford was on.

  Five years later, with his aging company losing about $120 million a year, Ford created another new model: the first affordable V-8. Ford had previously named all his cars “models,” such as Model T, Model A, Model K, and so on. When he introduced the first Ford with a V-8 engine inside, he named the car simply the “V-8.”

  Ford initially resisted the trend toward anything with more juice than a four-cylinder. On his Model K, Ford tried a six-cylinder engine but didn't like it and complained that “a car should not have any more cylinders than a cow has teats.” But when other carmakers threatened Ford's dominance in the industry, he reversed himself to introduce not a six-, but an eight-cylinder engine. If the Model T was a reliable old mule and, as one writer once put it, the Model A was “like a friendly farm dog,” the V-8 coupes of the 1930s were sexy, growling panthers.

  Most car engines, like the Model T's, were four-cylinder “in-line” engines, with four pistons working in a straight line, perpendicular to the ground, churning the crankshaft and powering the wheels like a row of marching soldiers. V-8 engines crammed twice as many pistons into a “V” shape, with a set of four cylinders on either side. The balanced design created more torque, more horsepower, and more stability at high speeds. The V-8 beast and the coupe it powered seemed tailor-made for bootlegging. Incredibly, a V-8 coupe seemed to handle more nimbly the faster it went. In the South, powerful V-8s left many sheriff's deputies in the dust.
And once whiskey mechanics added extra carburetors to the engine and heavy tires and stronger suspensions to the chassis, a Ford V-8 could fly at a hundred miles an hour across jagged mountain roads.

  Criminals elsewhere in the country also found Ford's cars to be useful to their careers. Bank robbers such as John DiUinger and Pretty Boy Floyd preferred Ford V-8s as their getaway cars. Even full of bullet holes, the V-8 could carry a gangster to safety. Two months before he was killed in 1934, Dillinger wrote to thank Henry Ford for his “wonderful car. … I can make any other car take a Ford's dust.” Clyde Barrow (of Bonnie and Clyde) also wrote to tell Ford “even if my business hasn't been strictly legal it don't hurt anything to tell you what a fine car you got in the V-8.” One newspaper crime writer of the day denounced “powerful V-8 engines” as “the greatest impetus” on Depression-era crime; “75% of all crimes now are perpetrated with the aid of the automobile.” Just weeks after writing to Ford, Clyde and his murderous sidekick, Bonnie Parker, were driving a stolen 1934 Ford V-8 when they were ambushed and pumped full of bullets.

  In the South, Ford V-8s were the literal and symbolic engine behind an unprecedented period of American criminal ingenuity. The era created two new professions: the sly and resourceful car mechanic and the reviled yet relentless tax agent.

  One worked to assist the bootlegger, the other to nail him.

  Raymond Parks, with his 1925 Model T Ford, soon found himself allied with the former and an avowed foe of the latter.

  Parks's days of working for Uncle Miller occurred at a time of great change for northern Georgia. Boll weevils had decimated the region's cotton crops, leaving many farmhands in need of work. The Depression was about to decimate the South even further. Despite the national ban on spirits, hard times meant people wanted hard drink at day's end. Parks had arrived at just the right time, with just the right set of skills.