Drive. Story atbecame the that point in their lives. Susan how did the idea come to you for telling the story at this time . Jeff when i try to do when i write nonfiction books is to go everywhere where the people i write about went. I always use my car. Id rather drive and that way you really get a sense of place. Somewhere along the line in the 30,000 or so miles i drive every year i started wondering how we got to be a country, a culture where we take for granted and we can get in a car and go anywhere we want to. I thought it would be a good idea to write a book about that and as always happens when you look into history, theres more to it than you ever expected. Susan your book begins and ends with someone thats a minor character, jeff bixby. Who was he and why was he interesting to you . Jeff one of the things that struck me as i researched the book was the vagabonds and edison and whoever may be with him on that trip could literally change the lives of anyone they met. They were considered magicians for everything they brought to our culture and people expected they could work miracles. Sometimes they did. Jeff bisby was an elderly country fiddler working out of paris, michigan, playing barn dances and so forth, and that was pretty much the height of his musical career. He was listed in local archives as a shoemaker. Henry ford had heard about jeffs music and unexpectedly in 1923, jeff bixbys wife opens the door in this little tiny, isolated town and there stands henry ford asking to meet her husband, can he play for ford. Ford hating jazz which, of course, was going to send america into ruin. He loved folk music. He was enthralled with jeff bixbys playing on his fiddle and Thomas Edison, equally so. He promptly offered him a contract recording in his new jersey studios. Bixby went and recorded his music and this was covered by all of the major papers of the day. Suddenly this little old man, this very traditional american musician becomes in parts of the country a household name. So much so that when he died a decade later, the New York Times ran his obituary and to the end of his life, he said no one would have known me, but mr. Ford and mr. Edison, and i thought that was a great example of how during these trips out in the country away from the big cities, they really did touch the lives of ordinary americans and changed them in wonderful ways. Susan we want to listen to just a little bit of jeff bixbys music so people can get a sense of what interested ford and edison. Susan just a little bit of the music. Would a lot of americans be listening to music of this type of this era . Jeff very much so. Edison invented the phonograph which first brought music into americans homes. And edison was one of those people that if hes recording it you must be someone special. With the jazz, which was considered the heavymetal music of his era, started to bother a lot of Older Americans who thought it was sinful and leading young people into criminality and nonvirtue. Going back to old american folk tunes, it simply was refreshing and it was Something Different and it was endorsed by edison and so people listened. Susan what are the parallels between the time period that youre writing, about which is 1914 to 1924. America in that age and any parallels of the time that were going through . Jeff that is what astonished me most when i was writing the book and the more i write about history the more i see its cyclical. We really dont learn from things in the past. America, 1914 to 1924 is an america in transition. Its in transition because of invention, because of technology. Things people never would have thought of 20 or 30 years earlier are now part of everyday lives. Modern times, lets think about the cell phone. It was something very few people had a phone they carried around and all of a sudden it seemed as though everyone did. In america, 1914, for the first time cars are becoming something that are part of your life if youre an ordinary american. Henry ford introduced the model t in 1908 and the first affordable car for the working class so people can get in the car and go places. Even if they are only of ordinary means. Even edison with electric light and electric power. You can read if you want to late into the night, instead of a candle making your eyes tired. Edison has moved movie theatres really into creation because for the first time a lot of people can sit in a darkened room and watch on a screen. So young people can listen to music and they can dance in ways they hadnt before, but at the same time you have older folks saying, wait a minute, this is getting away from the way americas supposed to be and one of the reasons henry ford becomes so popular is because he seems to represent to the people who dont want america to change, the way things have always been and should be, a good, sturdy, conservative protestant place where yes, there are all these inventions, but you dont let them take over your lives and dominate. Susan how often did you see parallels between henry ford and donald trump . Jeff i could not stop. I guess the first moment was this, henry ford thought about running for president in 1916, came very close because he was a pacifist and didnt want america going into world war i. Chose not to run because wilson kept us out of war and became a wilson supporter because of the league of nations afterward. Doesnt think about running in 1920, but 1923, 1924, hes a very viable candidate and in a New York Times, the section of what the coming race may mean, theres president harding and most people dont know anything about. Henry ford would have the support, it was believed, of voters in Middle America. Hes maligned in newspapers and all of the main media on the coasts constantly. Hes an idiot. He doesnt know what hes talking about. Hes a bumbler, and he wanted to become president so he could throw a wrench in it. He did not have any particular ideas except he told everyone theyre all crooks and idiots and we want a businessman to go in. The thought is if henry ford got his partys nomination, hed lose the popular vote because the coasts were most populated, but because hed dominate Middle America at the western states in much of the south he would probably win in the Electoral College and become president. It was that close. Henry ford could have become president , and i promise you, the things we are seeing now, a lot would have happened then. Susan you were right, that he was disdainful of people who read books. Jeff oh, very, very much. He did not like people who wrote books. He didnt like the media. He sued the Chicago Tribune at one point for a Million Dollars for character defamation and when reporters would come out to cover the vagabonds trips, hed lecture them that they had to tell the right news and the right stories that presented america the way it should be. He certainly would have been hollering about fake news as loud or louder as the current incumbent and he would attract the same kind of following. Susan i want to spend time with the two major protagonists because theyre the vehicle if you pardon my pun for telling this story. We have a video that we found in the ford archives. Jeff yes. Susan we should talk about the ford archives because theyre extensive. Jeff theyre amazing. Susan is this something that henry started to preserve in the legacy or was it a later on addition . Jeff henry ford understood the value of publicity and a lot of the vagabonds trips, besides getting out and having fun, is that you get your way in the newspaper every day and your products are obviously going to benefit. And so he would hire cinematographers to come up on the trips and have news available to be shown in movie theaters. He wanted america to see how much fun you can have traveling in a car, and at the same time, if the names ford and edison made you go buy something, even better. Susan this is a film that the company produced in the 1950s to tell the story, lets watch a little bit of it. The cars began coming off the Assembly Line at the rate of one every 40 seconds. And what henry ford had foreseen happened mass production of the assembly of the model t down to 300 dollars. Now everybody could have one susan some statistics to understand the magnitude of this cheap production of cars. What are some of the things that you found out about america before the model t and after . Jeff 1900, when there is no model t at, just heavy, expensive cars only the rich can afford, 800 passenger cars in all of america. 1908, henry Ford Introduces the model t, in 1910, there are now half 1 million cars on the roads. Half of those are model ts. By 1920, there are 8 million passenger cars in america, 4 million model ts and over half the people who own cars now use them for leisure travel, besides going to and from work. It happened that quickly, it would not have happened without henry ford. The Assembly Line, turning out cars in 40 seconds, was the work of a mastermind. It took about two hours per car for his competitors. And you know the joke, you can only get the model t in black. There was a reason for that. Ford insisted on black paint because it dried faster. That meant you saved a few cents on every car going through the line; he passed it on to the consumer. Susan he was also responsible for where Steering Wheels are today, i found out. Jeff he was a visionary theres a lot of things about henry ford that are not admirable. But if you get in an american car today, the Steering Wheel on the left, that was ford, he was the first one to perceived that the people in cars, the passengers, were going to change. They were the property of men only for a long time, because it was so hard to drive and the roads were so rough. But ford saw that more women were going to be in cars. Of course, the men would still drive, because thats the role of men, they take control. But the ladies in their nice dresses would be seated nearby, and roads were still dirt and mud and everything else. With americans driving on the righthand side of the road, if the Steering Wheel was on the left, ford believed, that meant you could pull up to the curb, and the lady could step out on the sidewalk and not get their shoes and clothes dirty. And it seems like a very sexist thing, and of course it is, but it still is the reason to this day that the Steering Wheel is on the lefthand side, before that it could be wherever the manufacturer put it. More often, on the right then the left. Susan just to understand how profound the change was in society, you write in the book, prior to the introduction of the automobile, most americans never ventured more than 12 miles from their home. That was a shocking statistic to me. Logical when you think about it, but shocking, how closed and small peoples worlds were. Jeff very much so. And the whole idea of driving anywhere, up until cars became popular, thanks to ford, was difficult, because 90 of american roads were referred to as wish to god roads, as in people would wish to god they could drive over something besides dirt, stone, and mud. Tires blew out every hundred yards or so, and were hard to repair. Rocks tore up cars, and they were so expensive to repair. Ford built his model t out of a lighter metal, the model t weighed 1200 pounds, compared to twice that much for competitors cars. That meant even when the road was rough, the model t road higher and lighter and could go farther over the roads. So yes, for the first time, you could get into a car, you could go 100 miles to visit grandma for sunday dinner, and you didnt have to worry as much about having to change the tires eight times and getting hundreds of dollars worth of repairs on the car afterwards. 12 miles had been the limit people would travel because thats how far a horse and wagon could go comfortably and back in one day. Henry ford gave us distance. Susan how frequently would people take train trips before that . Jeff that was how they traveled. There were two problems with that. First, of course, the rails themselves would know where the trains would go. Second was the schedule. The third was the fact that cars took to train somewhere and if you had a car which you purchased for a few hundred dollars, thanks to henry ford, you put in a couple of gallons of gasoline and 20 or 22 cents a gallon in those days, you could actually go on a trip and do it economically and you can go where you wanted and when you wanted to leave and that was impossible with trains with the economy. Susan when you hear henry ford it was outside the window of your story in 1932 and is giving advice to young men. Just so we can see and hear what they sounded like, lets watch. I support this and they greater burden than Abraham Lincoln carried. And its only common sense and i think its hardworking herbert hoover. Susan you write at the time that they turn of the century in the last couple of decades the most famous. Jeff there werent a whole lot of famous people in america. This is before radios, before movies and before television. Mostly, american heroes in the military leaders and politicians. With the advent not just of newspapers but of news wires so something could happen with the america one day and be in the newspapers and other parts of the american the next, we start to see a few more people emerge. Mark twain and so forth. But when Thomas Edison brings music into the home and when he brings films that were closer to large audiences and when it comes up with the incandescent bulb so your house and business have electric light. Edison became the most famous man in america. Everyone knew his name. Henry ford not only because of the model t, but the five dollar workday in 1914 when he doubled the salary of his employees and pretty much forced competitors to have to raise the salaries of the people they employ. He brought more money into the pockets of working americans with his car, with edison and the things he had done, there are things that you could do it that money. You could get out of your house and have some fun and things were unimaginable in a generation earlier. They were the kardashians of their day. And we had the same media at that time and some of them wouldve given them a funny name. Literally every american knew where they were and were fascinated by whatever they did or said. Susan they were both complex personalities, as you described. One aspect of it which you talk about in your book in great detail is henry ford antisemitism. Were you surprised by that with your research . Jeff we all here things about henry ford if we study history. The extent of his antisemitism came as a shock to me. The way he used the newspaper and into born independent and it was exclusively for several years used to try to publicize when he claimed was a jew plot to take over the American Economy and cause war and all kinds of things, dominate business, wall street, the works. It was terrible then and it was unforgivable then as it is now. In the context of the time, we remember ford is out of the midwest and the son of a farmer. In the midwest in the late 1800s when hes growing up in the early 1900s, anything thats not white and protestant is looked at with suspicion and catholics were considered exotic. Ford was speaking to prejudice that he felt was widespread around the country. But there were going to be enough people that felt like he did that would support whatever he was saying. The things he said seemed awful now. They were awful then, but he was speaking to a prejudice that was widespread and existed at the time. Susan this was also the time of jim crow laws and story of Race Relations at this time in American History. Did henry ford or Thomas Edison ever hire African Americans . Jeff ford, definitely. He was ahead of his time in hiring African Americans and not only that, some of them achieved management positions. I dont believe he felt that black americans, as a rule, where the equal of white americans, but he also believed in workers and quality of work and giving people a chance to come up the ladder, as long as they were not jewish. And yet he contradicted himself in this, in that he was suspicious and loathed jews as a group, but there would be individual members of the jewish faith that he would respect and think of as friends. He couldnt understand why they would be upset with him when his newspaper starts publishing all these outrageous claims. Edison also was in a certain sense antisemitic. He wasnt as overt about it as ford, but we see it in his private correspondence with ford. And some of his other letters to people on the subject. He was very much a racist in terms of African Americans. Some of the recordings of his company were based on racial prejudice. He had records out there he was selling coon ball, or fight at a colored saloon, prejudice has always been part of america, very regrettably. It was very commercial in their times. They were to some extent bigoted themselves and is reflected in their work and words. Susan anyone watching this can go online and find extensive access to henry ford and Ford Motor Company, and also with mr. Edison. How did the particular companies themselves deal with these less savory parts of their main characters . Jeff i would say that, as i was researching the book, the Ford Motor Company was very helpful, though somewhat concerned that the book might just be about some of fords less attractive believes and qualities. But if you go to the ford museum in dearborn and you go to the Benson Ford Research center there, they have right there for anyone to see who wants to, every copy of the dearborn independent with all the very unfortunate things that are in it. Their archives contain the materials that demonstrate just what an antisemite henry ford was. Thomas Edison Research park in west orange, new jersey, the same thing. The archives of their lives that had been preserved for us are very objective, and you can find in them what you look for. When im writing a book, im not trying to say one thing or the other, i am trying to give balance in context, which i hope