TWENTY-SEVEN

OCTOBER 10, 1901

Henry Ford drives his own car to victory in a motor race that helps to establish his name as a particularly talented manufacturer of the horseless machine. In the early years, Ford is adventurous and open-minded, and in partnership with James Couzens, he builds a reliable, affordable, and mass-producible car. The more successful he becomes, the more arrogant, suspicious, and peculiar he grows. His dislike for bankers morphs into virulent anti-Semitism, which earns him an approving remark in Hitler’s manifesto, Mein Kampf. Couzens leaves to pursue his political ambitions.

In the end, there were only two entries for the big race of the afternoon. One was Alexander Winton, a bicycler-turned-car mechanic who built his own cars, driving “Bullet.” The other was Henry Ford, who was trying to raise funds to build more cars. He had named his machine “Sweepstakes.” The race covered twenty-five miles, and Winton took a clear lead in the first few laps—Ford, who was not used to racing, took the corners far too sharply. Each driver had a mechanic on board, to assist and to act as ballast. After seven miles, Winton had opened a half-mile lead, which included one mile covered in one minute and twelve seconds, a world record. But then Winton’s car started to slow down and to trail smoke; as his mechanic poured oil on the engine in hope of preventing a complete burnout, Ford passed Winton to cross the finish line victorious.1 When he climbed out of Sweepstakes, Ford is said to have muttered, “Boy, I’ll never do that again. I was scared to death.”²

Around ten thousand people turned up at the Grosse Pointe racetrack that day to watch a series of motor car races, billed as the “First Big Auto Race Meet of the West.”3 First raced the steam cars, next the electric cars, and finally, for the climax of the day, the gas cars, which were clearly the fastest. Ford’s victory in this race is often described as the turning point in his career, the moment when he received recognition for his engineering skills and gave investors the confidence to back him. Perhaps so, but next day’s report in the Detroit Free Press focused predominantly on Winton and his world record. The paper noted that the crowd was primarily interested in the obstacle race, where the cars had to manoeuver their way around tightly spaced barrels. The bookmaker apparently did a brisk business on the later races of the day. Street cars ran from the city every three-quarters of an hour to the racetrack, and one writer proved himself prescient by wondering if the event “denoted the approach of the horseless age.”⁴

In later life, Ford would complain that he did not care for motor sport: “I never thought anything of racing, but the public refused to consider the automobile in any light other than as a fast toy.”⁵ In fact, there is no evidence that he was interested in sport of any kind. His real interest turned out to be the construction of a reliable car that could be sold in volume at a low cost. But he needed financing to start production, and winning races generated buzz, which in turn convinced investors that the product would sell. Ford had already seen one venture fail: the Detroit Automobile Company, founded in 1899, folded because the investors couldn’t see sales materializing quickly enough.⁶ It was in this period that he came to develop his hatred for finance and banking, which would later merge with his anti-Semitism. In 1901, the victory at Grosse Pointe garnered the needed publicity, and a group of backers provided $30,000 to start the Henry Ford Company. It may come as a surprise, considering the now-iconic status of that business name, but this venture quickly failed as well. The shareholders believed the race had sufficiently proven the technology, and they expected the rapid production and sale of a great many cars, generating quick and handsome returns. Ford, however, thought there was still work to be done, and he first wanted to develop another racing car. Following an acrimonious settlement, Ford kept his name, his patents, and a small payoff, while the investors put Henry Leland in charge of the renamed company—the first car the company produced was called the Cadillac.⁷

In 1902, Ford partnered with a cyclist to produce his second racer. Tom Cooper, born just outside Detroit, was a champion cyclist of the 1890s. He knew how to take corners, and he taught Henry Ford—it appears that the pair became good friends.8 Cooper, a celebrity in his own right, may even have advanced money to Ford, and he considered driving one of the two racing vehicles that Ford produced, the “999” and the “Red Devil.” However, when Cooper and Ford realized how difficult and in fact frightening the vehicles were to drive, they decided to hire someone else to risk his life. That man, Barney Oldfield, another cyclist attracted to the new motor sport, would become one of the great names of early motor racing.⁹

Ford had built the 999 for himself and the Red Devil for Cooper. But, again, race cars really weren’t his thing. A few weeks before the race, he sold the 999 to Cooper, and just before the race, he panicked and tried to dissuade Oldfield from driving it—he feared that a fatal accident was inevitable. That was exactly the kind of challenge that Oldfield relished, and he laughed off Ford’s suggestion. He knew what he was doing—the newspaper reported that Oldfield “slid around turns, tore down stretches and ripped things loose generally. The drivers gave him a wide berth.”¹⁰ The Cooper-Ford vehicle won the five-mile manufacturer’s race easily, achieving an average speed close to sixty miles per hour. Winton’s car, once again the main rival, once again broke down.

If Oldfield was the hero of the race, Ford was recognized as the creative genius, and even though he no longer owned the 999, he was able to capitalize on its success. Oldfield and Cooper would carve out fine careers for themselves over the next few years, barnstorming around the country and racing the Ford cars against all comers—and when no one came, then against each other.¹¹ Henry Ford capitalized in a different way, catching the attention of financial backers for his third company, the Ford Motor Company. Now in collaboration with James Couzens, Ford introduced his Model A, producing 1,750 vehicles between 1903 and 1904.

As he began to build cars on a larger scale, Ford didn’t forget how valuable racing was for generating publicity. In perhaps his boldest step yet, he announced at the beginning of 1904 that he would break the world record for the mile in a car. On January 12, on the frozen surface of Lake St. Clair, thirty-five miles north of Detroit, Henry Ford, driving his own car, completed a mile in thirty-nine seconds, a full seven seconds faster than the previous record. It was a remarkable achievement, one unmatched by any of his rivals in the design and manufacture of automobiles.12 While Ford made one more attempt to break the land speed record, he never participated in races again. But with his encouragement, others did, and Ford cars became dominant on the racetracks between 1904 and 1907. The fact that these racers were propelled by engines very similar to those of the Model B Ford helped him sell the road cars. By 1907, Ford cars were established as the fastest and most reliable in the country. With Ford’s reputation now shining in the eyes of the American public, he was able to more or less give up on racing—which must have come as a relief to him.¹³ In 1908, the Model T Ford started production.

Ford was by no means the only manufacturer who discovered racing as a way to generate fame and capital. Chevrolet takes its name from Louis Chevrolet, a Swiss racer, who was racing Buick cars in Detroit by 1907. As a result, he got friendly with William Durant, who would go on to found General Motors. In 1911, the two men started Chevrolet together, but they later quarreled, and Louis gave up mass-market cars in 1918—he focused on racing until his death in 1941. Manufacturers also often hired driving aces, like Barney Oldfield, to drive for them. Another early racing champion was Eddie Rickenbacker, now best remembered as an ace fighter pilot in the First World War. Before that, he raced Maxwell cars during the Chalmers era.

Despite those forays, however, the American manufacturers lagged behind the Europeans, who had begun making cars not long after Gottlieb Daimler and Karl Benz invented the internal combustion engine in the 1870s. In the United States, by contrast, the honor of producing the first American automobile is usually accorded to the Duryea Motor Wagon Company of Springfield, Massachusetts, whose first vehicle did not go on sale until 1893. Another difference between Europe and the United States was the quality of the roads. Generally speaking, roads were better in Europe, which made it easier to concentrate on speed: in the thirty years between 1898 and 1927, a European held the land speed record for all but four years and three months. Americans, by contrast, had to ensure that their machine did not break apart on their rough roads, and the longer distances made endurance a main focus: the Glidden Tour, for example, established in 1904, took competitors on a two-hundred-mile course around the Midwest.

In Detroit, the first automobile appeared on the streets in March 1896—it had been built by Charles Brady King in his workshop on St. Antoine, just south of Jefferson and about three hundred yards west of the Renaissance Center, present-day home of General Motors. Within a decade, Detroit had established itself as the preeminent center of automobile production in North America. Detroit companies were pivotal to the invention and standardization of many of the design elements of what came to be the standard car. These included the steering wheel and gear shifts, pneumatic tires, improved suspension, canopy tops, headlamps, the throttle pedal, drum brakes, the electric starter, better spark plugs, and oil pumps. Superior materials also played a key role, especially when it came to steel. Most of these innovations were the result of individual efforts, usually patented—but during this period, Detroit manufacturers worked together on the standardization of parts in order to achieve maximum flexibility in production.14

Why did Detroit, rather than some other city, become the center of the U.S. motor industry? Given that this was a revolution that could happen only once, we will never know what exact weight we should give to each explanatory factor, but we can identify a number that were significant. By the 1890s, Detroit had developed as a medium-sized industrial center serving a hinterland consisting of Michigan and parts of Ohio and Indiana. It was a transport hub for the railroads, connecting to Chicago in the West, to the eastern seaboard via Cleveland to the southeast, and up to Toronto and Montreal in Canada to the northeast. The railroads north of Detroit connected to the mining towns of the Upper Peninsula and to the state’s farming areas. As a major port on the Great Lakes, Detroit was also a key center for transshipment: bulk goods from the region were taken to the Mississippi by rail. Transport infrastructure created transport manufacturing, and together with the Pullman Car Company, the railroad companies trained large numbers of engineers in the maintenance of engines and the construction of carriages to be hauled by the engines. In addition, the city, which by the 1880s had become a center of stove manufacturing, was full of men skilled in metal working.

The geography of the city was conducive to networking and the exchange of ideas. The railroads had formed a circle around the city, with the main artery running southwest to northeast, connecting to the upper part of Ohio, while another branch followed the riverfront. The Belt Line completed the circuit. Unlike many cities, where manufacturing districts were separated from residential ones, the two lived side by side in Detroit at that time. The network of streetcars made for relatively easy movement around the city. People tended to live among their own ethnic group, but the distances were by no means as great as they would become later.

The geographical advantages are nicely illustrated by the evolution of Ford factories. The workshop where he produced his first vehicle in June 1896 was on Bagley Avenue, just behind Grand Circus Park in the heart of the downtown.15 His first factory proper was on Mack Avenue, on Detroit’s East Side, close to the railroad and about three blocks from the modern Heidelberg Project.¹⁶ He then moved to 461 Piquette Avenue, where the factory still stands, located between Poletown, Woodward Avenue, and Wayne State. The move to Highland Park took him just a few miles up Woodward.

If any place denotes the dawn of the horseless age, it is Detroit. Perhaps oddly, then, the preeminent U.S. motor racing circuit is actually in Indianapolis. The Indianapolis Motor Speedway, constructed in 1909, is a purpose-built oval with banking on the turns, representing a conscious effort to meet the demand of a motor-racing audience. This was quite different from the Grosse Pointe racetrack, where Ford cars raced in 1901 and 1902, which was simply a repurposed horse racing track. As a journalist for the Detroit Free Press wrote, with what we must assume is some poetic license, “A mettlesome pacer, with sleek coat, high head, extended nostrils, stood uneasily in a stall at the Grosse Pointe race track yesterday. As he pawed the floor and jerked at his halter, it was easy to see that something was wrong with his equine majesty. For the first time in his career the horse was getting no attention, though a crowd stood about, and he resented it.”¹⁷

That horse would not be the last to see his status shrink. A harness track for trotting races, called Grosse Pointe, opened in 1894.¹⁸ The track was not actually in Grosse Pointe, the swish neighborhood on the northeastern limit of the city on the shores of Lake St. Clair, but on Detroit’s East Side, very close to where the giant Chrysler plant is now. Trotting, which had grown out of county fair entertainment, was a popular form of horse racing in the United States from the early nineteenth century on, and Detroit became one of the centers of the sport. In harness racing, the horses pull riders seated in a lightweight cart known as a “sulky” around a track. Quainter in look, it seemed better suited to the region’s rural history than the flat racing associated in those times with New York, Chicago, and New Orleans. Just like flat racing, however, it attracted gambling—technically illegal thanks to the Michigan law against lotteries.

The earliest written records of trotting races in Detroit go back to 1843, when there was a racecourse built in Hamtramck, but the practice was already in swing.19 By 1850, as many as a thousand people would turn up to watch races—not half bad at a time when Detroit’s population counted 20,000. In 1884, the Detroit Driving Club was formed to organize the sport in the city, joined in 1887 by the American Trotting Association, largely through the efforts of D.J. Campau, scion of one of the oldest families of the city.²⁰ When Recreation Park was built in 1879 as the home of Detroit’s first professional baseball team, it included a trotting track encircling the park.

Because of its association with gambling, the favors of trotting and other forms of horseracing tended to rise and fall with the political tides. During the early 1900s, horse racing came under criticism nationally, and trotting declined as motor races increased. As at Grosse Pointe, popular trotting tracks such as the State Fairgrounds were converted into motor racing tracks in the early years of the new century.²¹ In New York, thoroughbred racing weathered the storm of those years and made a strong comeback in the early nineteen teens. This was not the case in Detroit, where race cards seem to have become shorter and shorter; in 1918, the Detroit Free Press reported that the Detroit Driving Club would no longer be able to stage races.²²

Key to these developments was the ascent of the motor industry moguls into the elite ranks of Detroit society. No doubt, the local motor manufacturers and their racing teams had a vested interest in seeing the ponies decline—they had cars to sell, but they were also committed to an ethos of disciplined austerity, which ran counter to the drinking and the gambling that were par for the horseracing course. Horseracing has always been a kind of accommodation between those in the working class who like to bet on the ponies and the super-rich who can afford to maintain a racing stable, each gambling in their own way. The publication that best represented the mindset of the new industrial elite was a magazine called Horseless Age— and at the dawn of that age, those who made it their business to render the horse obsolete as a beast of burden hardly had much interest in sponsoring horse races for fun.

The Ford race of 1901 thus stands on the precipice of a new era. Back in 1899, one of the backers of Ford’s first business venture was Detroit’s mayor, William Maybury. His statue still stands on Grand Circus in downtown Detroit, scowling across Woodward Avenue at his political opponent, Hazen Pingree. Maybury not only invested in Ford on his own account, he found other investors and even awarded Ford a driving license, which in those days was not a necessity but a mark of respect.

In 1901, Maybury asked prominent Detroiters to write letters to the Detroit citizens of 2001, “for those whose good fortune it will be to live in Detroit at the opening of the 21st century.” He wrote one himself:

We communicate by telegraph and telephone over distances that at the opening of the nineteenth century were insurmountable. We travel at a rate not dreamed of then … by railroad and steam power from Detroit to Chicago in less than eight hours, and to New York City by several routes in less than 20 hours. How much faster are you traveling? How much farther have you annihilated time and space and what agencies are you employing to which we are strangers?

We talk by long distance telephone to the remotest cities in our own country, and with a fair degree of practical success. Are you talking with foreign lands and to the islands of the sea by the same method? … May we be permitted to express one supreme hope that whatever failures the coming century may have in the progress of things material, you may be conscious when the century is over that, as a nation, people and city, you have grown in righteousness, for it is this that exalts a nation.23

Perhaps the city’s current mayor should ask Detroiters to write back and ask the powers of the fin de siècle what they would have done differently had they known the path on which they set the city more than a hundred years ago.