Ford, Edison, and Burroughs Were America’s Oddest Road Warriors

In December 1912, the naturalist John Burroughs received an unexpected letter from Henry Ford. Ford had been reading Burroughs’ essays, and he wanted Burroughs to know how much he admired him. He wondered if Burroughs would like a free new Ford automobile.

Burroughs, who had turned 75 earlier in 1912, was not easily impressed by famous people. As a young man he had met Emerson and Whitman, and in 1903, he had accompanied President Theodore Roosevelt on a widely publicized camping excursion to Yellowstone Park.

Ford’s offer of a free car initially led Burroughs to wonder about his motives, but after discussing the matter with family and friends, Burroughs wrote the automaker, “If it would please Mr. Ford to present me with one of his cars, it would please me to accept the car.”

The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Henry Ford

With this exchange of letters, the unlikely friendship between Burroughs and Ford began. Their circle would soon include the inventor Thomas Edison and culminate in a series of road trips across America. These trips and the discussions that took place in them are the focus of Wes Davis’ intriguing new book, American Journey: On the Road with Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and John Burroughs.

These days when we think of classic road trips, what first comes to mind are the adventures Jack Kerouac described in his 1957 book On the Road. That road trip became the inspiration for novelist Ken Kesey and his friends, the Merry Pranksters, whose adventures Tom Wolfe captured in his 1968 bestseller, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. There was a hedonism and a long goodbye to middle-class life at the heart of both these trips, in which drugs (particularly LSD in Kesey’s case) provided added fuel.

But the closest parallel in American life to the trips taken by Ford, Edison, and Burroughs is actually the 1839 trip described by Henry David Thoreau in A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers. In that excursion Thoreau and his brother slowly made their way through nature by canoe.

On the narrow, often badly paved roads they traveled, Ford, Edison, and Burroughs moved at what today would be a glacial pace and took their time absorbing an America that was changing from a rural nation to one that would be linked by cars and new highways.

An American Journey contains no maps of the trips the three men took. That’s a shame. Maps would have complemented the brilliant use Davis makes of notebooks, letters, and newspaper reports.

The first meeting between Ford and Burroughs took place in 1913 on the 2,000 acres of farmland in Dearborn, Michigan, where Ford had a two-story bungalow. That meeting established the personal basis for future visits of the three men, which would reach their high point in a 1918 trip through the Great Smoky Mountains. “Mr. Ford pleased with me and I with him,” Burroughs wrote in his journal of their first encounter.

Ford, Edison, and Burroughs liked being out of doors and sleeping in tents, but they made no claim that they were roughing it. On long trips a supply truck and helpers followed them to minimize the discomforts that come with camping. As Edison told a New York Times reporter about their plans for a trip, “We will get away from fictitious civilization, and we expect to be happy and learn much.”

These excursions, as Davis points out, had the long-run effect of making automobile travel easier for the average driver. Edison, who had motored in France on roads built by the French government, strongly believed that the American government should become involved in the construction of the country’s main roads, and he said so.

But the primary beneficiaries of the trips were Ford, Edison, and Burroughs. When they began their trips, they were already famous. Ford’s Model T began production in 1908. Edison’s patent for the incandescent light bulb dated from 1880. Burroughs’s early nature essays were first published in the 1870s. The travels the three men took did not bring them new honors so much as give them a fresh perspective on their lives.

As a result of their travels, Ford, Edison, and Burroughs would, as Davis writes, “carry forward a sharpened image of the nation they had helped to shape and an invigorated sense of the role they might play in its preservation.” When Burroughs, the eldest of the three, died in 1921, Ford and Edison attended the funeral at Burroughs’s small farm in Roxbury, New York, accompanied by tire manufacturer Harvey Firestone, who had from time to time joined some of their trips. To them, Burroughs’ death was the equivalent of losing an elderly parent.

The civility and openness Ford, Edison, and Burroughs created for themselves on the road had its limits when it came to the life Ford would go on to lead, and in his epilogue to American Journey, Davis discusses the antisemitism that came to play such a significant role in Ford’s life.

Burroughs had disapprovingly noted the anti-Semitism when it became part of his conversations with Ford. He had corrected Ford when Ford ranted about the “Shylock” Jay Gould, the 19th-century railroad baron, who was Burroughs’ boyhood friend. Gould, Burroughs pointed out, was Presbyterian and had always been so.

By 1919 Ford’s antisemitism was, however, no longer just a private affair. It took on an increasingly public character in the Dearborn Independent, the local paper Ford bought and used to publish the articles he would soon collect in a book under the title, The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem.

The full extent of Ford’s vicious antisemitism is beyond the scope of American Journey. Davis ends his book with a quote from John Burroughs on his faith as a naturalist, and the reader is spared the story of how in 1938 on his 75th birthday, Ford accepted the Grand Cross of the German Eagle awarded him by Adolf Hitler in a ceremony conducted in Dearborn by German consular officials.

Nicolaus Mills is professor of American literature at Sarah Lawrence College and author of Winning the Peace: The Marshall Plan and America’s Coming of Age as a Superpower.

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