by John Brooks
THE origins of the Edsel go back to the fall of 1948, seven years before the year of decision, when Henry Ford II, who had been president and undisputed boss of the company since the death of his grandfather, the original Henry, a year earlier, proposed to the company’s executive committee, which included Ernest R. Breech, the executive vice-president, that studies be undertaken concerning the wisdom of putting on the market a new and wholly different medium-priced car. The studies were undertaken. There appeared to be good reason for them. It was a well-known practice at the time for low-income owners of Fords, Plymouths, and Chevrolets to turn in their symbols of inferior caste as soon as their earnings rose above five thousand dollars a year, and “trade up” to a medium-priced car. From Ford’s point of view, this would have been all well and good except that, for some reason, Ford owners usually traded up not to Mercury, the company’s only medium-priced car, but to one or another of the medium-priced cars put out by its big rivals—Oldsmobile, Buick, and Pontiac, among the General Motors products, and, to a lesser extent, Dodge and De Soto, the Chrysler candidates. Lewis D. Crusoe, then a vice-president of the Ford Motor Company, was not overstating the case when he said, “We have been growing customers for General Motors.”
The outbreak of the Korean War, in 1950, meant that Ford had no choice but to go on growing customers for its competitors, since introducing a new car at such a time was out of the question. The company’s executive committee put aside the studies proposed by President Ford, and there matters rested for two years. Late in 1952, however, the end of the war appeared sufficiently imminent for the company to pick up where it had left off, and the studies were energetically resumed by a group called the Forward Product Planning Committee, which turned over much of the detailed work to the Lincoln-Mercury Division, under the direction of Richard Krafve (pronounced Kraffy), the division’s assistant general manager. Krafve, a forceful, rather saturnine man with a habitually puzzled look, was then in his middle forties. The son of a printer on a small farm journal in Minnesota, he had been a sales engineer and management consultant before joining Ford, in 1947, and although he could not have known it in 1952, he was to have reason to look puzzled. As the man directly responsible for the Edsel and its fortunes, enjoying its brief glory and attending it in its mortal agonies, he had a rendezvous with destiny.
IN December, 1954, after two years’ work, the Forward Product Planning Committee submitted to the executive committee a six-volume blockbuster of a report summarizing its findings. Supported by copious statistics, the report predicted the arrival of the American millennium, or something a lot like it, in 1965. By that time, the Forward Product Planning Committee estimated, the gross national product would be $535 billion a year—up more than $135 billion in a decade. (As a matter of fact, this part of the millennium arrived much sooner than the Forward Planners estimated. The G. N. P. passed $535 billion in 1962, and for 1965 was $681 billion.) The number of cars in operation would be seventy million—up twenty million. More than half the families in the nation would have incomes of over five thousand dollars a year, and more than 40 percent of all the cars sold would be in the medium-price range or better. The report’s picture of America in 1965, presented in crushing detail, was of a country after Detroit’s own heart—its banks oozing money, its streets and highways choked with huge, dazzling medium-priced cars, its newly rich, “upwardly mobile” citizens racked with longings for more of them. The moral was clear. If by that time Ford had not come out with a second medium-priced car—not just a new model, but a new make—and made it a favorite in its field, the company would miss out on its share of the national boodle.
On the other hand, the Ford bosses were well aware of the enormous risks connected with putting a new car on the market. They knew, for example, that of the 2,900 American makes that had been introduced since the beginning of the Automobile Age—the Black Crow (1905), the Averageman’s Car (1906), the Bug-mobile (1907), the Dan Patch (1911), and the Lone Star (1920) among them—only about twenty were still around. They knew all about the automotive casualties that had followed the Second World War—among them Crosley, which had given up altogether, and Kaiser Motors, which, though still alive in 1954, was breathing its last. (The members of the Forward Product Planning Committee must have glanced at each other uneasily when, a year later, Henry J. Kaiser wrote, in a valediction to his car business, “We expected to toss fifty million dollars into the automobile pond, but we didn’t expect it to disappear without a ripple.”) The Ford men also knew that neither of the other members of the industry’s powerful and well-heeled Big Three—General Motors and Chrysler—had ventured to bring out a new standard-size make since the former’s La Salle in 1927, and the latter’s Plymouth, in 1928, and that Ford itself had not attempted to turn the trick since 1938, when it launched the Mercury.
Nevertheless, the Ford men felt bullish—so remarkably bullish that they resolved to toss into the automobile pond five times the sum that Kaiser had. In April, 1955, Henry Ford II, Breech, and the other members of the executive committee officially approved the Forward Product Planning Committee’s findings, and, to implement them, set up another agency, called the Special Products Division, with the star-crossed Krafve as its head. Thus the company gave its formal sanction to the efforts of its designers, who, having divined the trend of events, had already been doodling for several months on plans for a new car. Since neither they nor the newly organized Krafve outfit, when it took over, had an inkling of what the thing on their drawing boards might be called, it became known to everybody at Ford, and even in the company’s press releases, as the E-Car—the “E,” it was explained, standing for “Experimental.”
The man directly in charge of the E-Car’s design—or, to use the gruesome trade word, “styling”—was a Canadian, then not yet forty, named Roy A. Brown, who, before taking on the E-Car (and after studying industrial design at the Detroit Art Academy), had had a hand in the designing of radios, motor cruisers, colored-glass products, Cadillacs, Oldsmobiles, and Lincolns.* Brown recently recalled his aspirations as he went to work on the new project. “Our goal was to create a vehicle which would be unique in the sense that it would be readily recognizable in styling theme from the nineteen other makes of cars on the road at that time,” he wrote from England, where at the time of his writing he was employed as chief stylist for the Ford Motor Company, Ltd., manufacturers of trucks, tractors, and small cars. “We went to the extent of making photographic studies from some distance of all nineteen of these cars, and it became obvious that at a distance of a few hundred feet the similarity was so great that it was practically impossible to distinguish one make from the others.… They were all ‘peas in a pod.’ We decided to select [a style that] would be ‘new’ in the sense that it was unique, and yet at the same time be familiar.”
While the E-Car was on the drawing boards in Ford’s styling studio—situated, like its administrative offices, in the company’s barony of Dearborn, just outside Detroit—work on it progressed under the conditions of melodramatic, if ineffectual, secrecy that invariably attend such operations in the automobile business: locks on the studio doors that could be changed in fifteen minutes if a key should fall into enemy hands; a security force standing round-the-clock guard over the establishment; and a telescope to be trained at intervals on nearby high points of the terrain where peekers might be roosting. (All such precautions, however inspired, are doomed to fail, because none of them provide a defense against Detroit’s version of the Trojan horse—the job-jumping stylist, whose cheerful treachery makes it relatively easy for the rival companies to keep tabs on what the competition is up to. No one, of course, is better aware of this than the rivals themselves, but the cloak-and-dagger stuff is thought to pay for itself in publicity value.) Twice a week or so, Krafve—head down, and sticking to low ground—made the journey to the styling studio, where he would confer with Brown, check up on the work as it proceeded, and offer advice and encouragement. Krafve was not th
e kind of man to envision his objective in a single revelatory flash; instead, he anatomized the styling of the E-Car into a series of laboriously minute decisions—how to shape the fenders, what pattern to use with the chrome, what kind of door handles to put on, and so on and on. If Michelangelo ever added the number of decisions that went into the execution of, say, his “David,” he kept it to himself, but Krafve, an orderly-minded man in an era of orderly-functioning computers, later calculated that in styling the E-Car he and his associates had to make up their minds on no fewer than four thousand occasions. He reasoned at the time that if they arrived at the right yes-or-no choice on every one of those occasions, they ought, in the end, to come up with a stylistically perfect car—or at least a car that would be unique and at the same time familiar. But Krafve concedes today that he found it difficult thus to bend the creative process to the yoke of system, principally because many of the four thousand decisions he made wouldn’t stay put. “Once you get a general theme, you begin narrowing down,” he says. “You keep modifying, and then modifying your modifications. Finally, you have to settle on something, because there isn’t any more time. If it weren’t for the deadline you’d probably go on modifying indefinitely.”
Except for later, minor modifications of the modified modifications, the E-Car had been fully styled by midsummer of 1955. As the world was to learn two years later, its most striking aspect was a novel, horse-collar-shaped radiator grille, set vertically in the center of a conventionally low, wide front end—a blend of the unique and the familiar that was there for all to see, though certainly not for all to admire. In two prominent respects, however, Brown or Krafve, or both, lost sight entirely of the familiar, specifying a unique rear end, marked by widespread horizontal wings that were in bold contrast to the huge longitudinal tail fins then captivating the market, and a unique cluster of automatic-transmission push buttons on the hub of the steering wheel. In a speech to the public delivered a while before the public had its first look at the car, Krafve let fall a hint or two about its styling, which, he said, made it so “distinctive” that, externally, it was “immediately recognizable from front, side, and rear,” and, internally, it was “the epitome of the push-button era without wild-blue-yonder Buck Rogers concepts.” At last came the day when the men in the highest stratum of the Ford Hierarchy were given their first glimpse of the car. It produced an effect that was little short of apocalyptic. On August 15, 1955, in the ceremonial secrecy of the styling center, while Krafve, Brown, and their aides stood by smiling nervously and washing their hands in air, the members of the Forward Product Planning Committee, including Henry Ford II and Breech, watched critically as a curtain was lifted to reveal the first full-size model of the E-Car—a clay one, with tinfoil simulating aluminum and chrome. According to eyewitnesses, the audience sat in utter silence for what seemed like a full minute, and then, as one man, burst into a round of applause. Nothing of the kind had ever happened at an intracompany first showing at Ford since 1896, when old Henry had bolted together his first horseless carriage.
ONE of the most persuasive and most frequently cited explanations of the Edsel’s failure is that it was a victim of the time lag between the decision to produce it and the act of putting it on the market. It was easy to see a few years later, when smaller and less powerful cars, euphemistically called “compacts,” had become so popular as to turn the old automobile status-ladder upside down, that the Edsel was a giant step in the wrong direction, but it was far from easy to see that in fat, tail-finny 1955. American ingenuity—which has produced the electric light, the flying machine, the tin Lizzie, the atomic bomb, and even a tax system that permits a man, under certain circumstances, to clear a profit by making a charitable donation *—has not yet found a way of getting an automobile on the market within a reasonable time after it comes off the drawing board; the making of steel dies, the alerting of retail dealers, the preparation of advertising and promotion campaigns, the gaining of executive approval for each successive move, and the various other gavotte-like routines that are considered as vital as breathing in Detroit and its environs usually consume about two years. Guessing future tastes is hard enough for those charged with planning the customary annual changes in models of established makes; it is far harder to bring out an altogether new creation, like the E-Car, for which several intricate new steps must be worked into the dance pattern, such as endowing the product with a personality and selecting a suitable name for it, to say nothing of consulting various oracles in an effort to determine whether, by the time of the unveiling, the state of the national economy will make bringing out any new car seem like a good idea.
Faithfully executing the prescribed routine, the Special Products Division called upon its director of planning for market research, David Wallace, to see what he could do about imparting a personality to the E-Car and giving it a name. Wallace, a lean, craggy-jawed pipe puffer with a soft, slow, thoughtful way of speaking, gave the impression of being the Platonic idea of the college professor—the very steel die from which the breed is cut—although, in point of fact, his background was not strongly academic. Before going to Ford, in 1955, he had worked his way through Westminster College, in Pennsylvania, ridden out the depression as a construction laborer in New York City, and then spent ten years in market research at Time. Still, impressions are what count, and Wallace has admitted that during his tenure with Ford he consciously stressed his professorial air for the sake of the advantage it gave him in dealing with the bluff, practical men of Dearborn. “Our department came to be regarded as a semi-Brain Trust,” he says, with a certain satisfaction. He insisted, typically, on living in Ann Arbor, where he could bask in the scholarly aura of the University of Michigan, rather than in Dearborn or Detroit, both of which he declared were intolerable after business hours. Whatever the degree of his success in projecting the image of the E-Car, he seems, by his small eccentricities, to have done splendidly at projecting the image of Wallace. “I don’t think Dave’s motivation for being at Ford was basically economic,” his old boss, Krafve, says. “Dave is the scholarly type, and I think he considered the job an interesting challenge.” One could scarcely ask for better evidence of image projection than that.
Wallace clearly recalls the reasoning—candid enough—that guided him and his assistants as they sought just the right personality for the E-Car. “We said to ourselves, ‘Let’s face it—there is no great difference in basic mechanism between a two-thousand-dollar Chevrolet and a six-thousand-dollar Cadillac,’” he says. “‘Forget about all the ballyhoo,’ we said, ‘and you’ll see that they are really pretty much the same thing. Nevertheless, there’s something—there’s got to be something—in the makeup of a certain number of people that gives them a yen for a Cadillac, in spite of its high price, or maybe because of it.’ We concluded that cars are the means to a sort of dream fulfillment. There’s some irrational factor in people that makes them want one kind of car rather than another—something that has nothing to do with the mechanism at all but with the car’s personality, as the customer imagines it. What we wanted to do, naturally, was to give the E-Car the personality that would make the greatest number of people want it. We figured we had a big advantage over the other manufacturers of medium-priced cars, because we didn’t have to worry about changing a pre-existent, perhaps somewhat obnoxious personality. All we had to do was create the exact one we wanted—from scratch.”
As the first step in determining what the E-Car’s exact personality should be, Wallace decided to assess the personalities of the medium-priced cars already on the market, and those of the so-called low-priced cars as well, since the cost of some of the cheap cars’ 1955 models had risen well up into the medium-price range. To this end, he engaged the Columbia University Bureau of Applied Social Research to interview eight hundred recent car buyers in Peoria, Illinois, and another eight hundred in San Bernardino, California, on the mental images they had of the various automobile makes concerned. (In undertaking this
commercial enterprise, Columbia maintained its academic independence by reserving the right to publish its findings.) “Our idea was to get the reaction in cities, among clusters of people,” Wallace says. “We didn’t want a cross section. What we wanted was something that would show interpersonal factors. We picked Peoria as a place that is Midwestern, stereotyped, and not loaded with extraneous factors—like a General Motors glass plant, say. We picked San Bernardino because the West Coast is very important in the automobile business, and because the market there is quite different—people tend to buy flashier cars.”
The questions that the Columbia researchers fared forth to ask in Peoria and San Bernardino dealt exhaustively with practically everything having to do with automobiles except such matters as how much they cost, how safe they were, and whether they ran. In particular, Wallace wanted to know the respondents’ impressions of each of the existing makes. Who, in their opinion, would naturally own a Chevrolet or a Buick or whatever? People of what age? Of which sex? Of what social status? From the answers, Wallace found it easy to put together a personality portrait of each make. The image of the Ford came into focus as that of a very fast, strongly masculine car, of no particular social pretensions, that might characteristically be driven by a rancher or an automobile mechanic. In contrast, Chevrolet emerged as older, wiser, slower, a bit less rampantly masculine, and slightly more distingué—a clergyman’s car. Buick jelled into a middle-aged lady—or, at least, more of a lady than Ford, sex in cars having proved to be relative—with a bit of the devil still in her, whose most felicitous mate would be a lawyer, a doctor, or a dance-band leader. As for the Mercury, it came out as virtually a hot rod, best suited to a young-buck racing driver; thus, despite its higher price tag, it was associated with persons having incomes no higher than the average Ford owner’s, so no wonder Ford owners had not been trading up to it. This odd discrepancy between image and fact, coupled with the circumstance that, in sober truth all four makes looked very much alike and had almost the same horsepower under their hoods, only served to bear out Wallace’s premise that the automobile fancier, like a young man in love, is incapable of sizing up the object of his affections in anything resembling a rational manner.
