It's Friday, the day of the week when I pass along quotations intended to be uplifting or thought-provoking. Today, I have two such quotes, both from writers who helped chronicle the unsung heroes of World War II -- the people who worked in the plants that, in words of Bruce Springsteen, "built the tanks and bombs that won this country's wars."
The ones I have in mind were in Michigan, not Ohio, and the person I'm singling out wasn't a worker on an assembly line -- he was the owner of the plant.
Although our story begins in the last part of the 19th century, let's start our narrative on this very date in 1955, when a woman named Marianne Moore performed the last chore in a dubious assignment from Ford Motor Co.
Ms. Moore was a Bryn Mawr-educated intellectual who'd won a Pulitzer Prize for poetry. She was also a serious baseball fan and boxing aficionado. This combination -- felicity of expression and an affinity for mainstream American culture -- convinced Ford executives that she could help them name a new automobile they were rolling out.
They turned out to be wrong, both about Moore's aptitude for marketing and their new car. But the name associated with this car is the real story we're exploring this morning.
Ford Motor Company's overture to Marianne Moore came from the automaker's in-house sociologist (yes, you read that correctly), David Wallace.
"Over the past few weeks this office has confected a list of three hundred-odd candidates which, it pains me to relate, are characterized by an embarrassing pedestrianism," Wallace wrote to Moore. "We are miles short of our ambition. And so we are seeking the help of one who knows more about this sort of magic than we."
In 1955, the specific model they were tasked with naming was called by Ford engineers the "E-car" (for "Experimental Car") and Moore was solicited for a name that "flashes a dramatically desirable picture in people's minds." Thinking creatively, and believing she was very much in the spirit of the project, the poet submitted the following nominations on December 9, 1955:
"Anticipator," "Thunder Crester," "Pastelogram," "Intelligent Whale," "The Resilient Bullet," "Mongoose Civique," "Andante con Moto," "Varsity Stroke," and "Utopian Turtletop."
Needless to say, these goofy suggestions were rejected. Or, as literary critic Steve King wrote: "The Mooremobile was not to be, and Ford returned to its old, pedestrian route."
The proposed names that came from the traditional process included "Corsair" and "Citation" and "Ranger" and "Pacer." Those would all be the names of future vehicles, some for other companies, but not for Ford's "E-car." Its name now seems almost pre-ordained. It was the Edsel, named after company founder Henry Ford's own son.
This name is kept alive in the 21st century mainly by crossword puzzle writers who invariably use the word "flop" in the clue. Or sometimes, "lemon." The car wasn't a lemon, exactly, although it didn't perform as well as advertised and cost Ford some $350 million in losses (about $3.6 billion today). So, yes, it certainly was a flop: Ford execs badly misjudged the market.
But the name Edsel should mean more to Americans than a poorly marketed automobile. Much more.
Born in 1893, Edsel B. Ford was the only child of Henry Ford. The old man was a visionary and a gifted engineer as well as a pioneer in how to treat and motivate an industrial workforce. But he was also an autocrat and an antisemite who never really understood his son, a debonaire and artistic-minded man who had befriended Franklin D. Roosevelt long before FDR became president.
Ford Motor Company's purchase of Lincoln automobile from Henry Leland in the 1920s illustrated the gap between Henry and Edsel. On the golf course one day, Edsel Ford revealed to a friend why he favored acquiring Lincoln, and improving it. "Father made the most popular car in the world," Edsel said. "I would like to make the best car in the world."
Father and son didn't agree on politics, either. Inspired by a Dec. 29, 1940, FDR speech about the war in Europe, Edsel and Ford Motor Co. executive Charlie Sorensen met with General Motors president William Knudsen -- whom Roosevelt had tapped to oversee the manufacturing of wartime materiel -- and they agreed to build 9,000 combat aircraft engines. Upon returning to Detroit, however, they were told by Henry Ford to cancel the contract. Whether Henry was merely an isolationist or a Nazi sympathizer, Edsel was neither, and after Pearl Harbor was bombed, he transformed Ford's assembly plants. Working round the clock and employing some 35,000 workers, the Ford plant at Willow Run turned out its first bomber by September 1942, prompting a visit from the president.
By D-Day, Willow Run was turning out a new B-24 Liberator every hour. But Edsel Ford was gone by then. He'd suffered from chronic ulcers -- his family blamed them on stress -- which turned into stomach cancer. He worked long hours anyway and died on May 26, 1943, as the U.S. Navy was expanding the runways on Midway Island, so it could dispatch B-24s to bomb Wake Island. In "The Arsenal of Democracy: FDR, Detroit and an Epic Quest to Arm an America at War," author A.J. Baime portrays Edsel Ford as an unsung hero of World War II.
"Edsel could have walked away from the family business as a young man and led a life of luxury," Baime said. "Instead, despite the fact that he was dying and having to endure his father's domineering behavior, Edsel earned the respect of all who worked with him to overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles to the Allied victory."
"Edsel Ford was one of the great industrial leaders in world history," added George Cook, executive professor at the University of Rochester business school and a former Ford executive, in a 2015 interview. "And he deserves to be remembered as someone whose personal sacrifice made him an unsung hero of World War II."
And those are our quotes of the week.
