The Vagabonds

The Story of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison's Ten-Year Road Trip

also Harvey Firestone and naturalist John Burrows

Jeff Guinn, CEN 917.30491 G9645v 2019

Ten road trips, ten stories with similar formats. Lots of place references that might be familiar to an East Coaster but are mostly just names to me - more anchoring with distances and region descriptions would help me understand rather than slog through. How about some maps?

Vagabonds at the Henry Ford Museum

The star of the book is Henry Ford, alternately hero and villian. Henry Ford worked as a "young engineer"? in one of Edison's Detroit factories in 1896, "Young man, that's the thing. You have it. Keep at it." Later, Ford (a wealthier and more skillful businessman) subsidized some of Edison's work.

Ford was an active pacifist (until the US entered World War 1) and an antisemite. He subsidized the Dearborn Independent newspaper and published excerpts from the fraudulent Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Ford might have run for president against Warren Harding, but Harding's death removed the opportunity. Calvin Coolidge was a relative unknown, but did not rankle Ford like Harding did.

I skimmed a lot of the book.