An typically repeated city legend concerning the Ford Mannequin T has been circulating on the web for some time now, and I’m right here, predictably, to put a cease to all the enjoyable. The rumor goes one thing like this: Henry Ford wanted to “recall” some early batches of Mannequin Ts as a result of the penny-pinching industrialist used Spanish Moss to stuff the seats, however did nothing to scrub or decontaminate the stuffing, resulting in his clients getting bit within the ass by chiggers, no-see-ums, and all kinds of different nasty biting bugs.
The Spanish Moss fable is an entertaining story, one which Google’s ineffective AI search engine has picked up on as reality, however I’m right here to inform you it’s often-repeated bunk appropriate just for these Fb-downloaded memes despatched by your Me-Maw at 3 a.m. to the household group chat.
I first heard this story just a few years in the past and I used to be fairly shocked. How had I by no means heard this earlier than! It looks as if one thing {that a} automobile history-obsessed child rising up within the shadow of the Ford Motor Firm would learn about. I spent many a chilly, wet Michigan weekend absorbing Ford info from the Henry Ford Museum. I’ve learn many books about Henry Ford—actual printed pages researched by people exterior the corporate—and none recount this story.
Properly, there’s a cause for that. It appears the Spanish Moss stuffing story is a regional city legend that began by Southerners and unfold to the web. The earliest occasion I can discover of this story being recounted on-line is from a 2003 discussion board publish on Yesterday’s Tractors. The poster cites a tour group operator in Savannah, Georgia, because the supply for the data. In truth, I discovered a number of websites from the web’s early days that repeat this fable straight from some Southern tour information’s mouths, so it appears this legend has had an extended life within the South than on-line.
I may discover nothing within the Detroit Free Press archives housed within the Detroit Public Library a few sudden “recall” or sale-stopage even into the earliest days of the Mannequin T. Nothing within the Detroit society papers (principally gossip rags), nor within the New York Times both. The Ford Motor Firm’s gracious archivists turned up diddly squat about Spanish Moss, however loads of proof that Ford constructed the seats in even the earliest Mannequin T out of the identical supplies as carriage seats—horsehair and cotton batting. The archivist did discover a letter from a Spanish Moss provider out of Louisiana urging Ford to think about the fiber for his vehicles, however no motion was ever taken. Even when the letter had led to a change in seat stuffing, it could be Spanish Moss from a Southern provider who would know to correctly dry and remedy the moss to rid it of biting bugs.
Spanish Moss is a local, perennial epiphytic herb, in line with the U.S. Division of Agriculture. It’s also referred to as that drippy plant that hangs from bushes within the American South, making Louisiana swamps look much more spooky and atmospheric than they’re already. It’s been used to help human butts since Native American tribes first used it to make a course material from the curly interior fibers of the plant, weaving rugs and small cushions from moss. It later served as stuffing in all kinds of furnishings however fell out of favor someday within the Forties, in line with the Los Angeles Instances. So whereas the timing was proper for Spanish Moss to be included within the Mannequin T, there’s nonetheless no proof this ever occurred.
The precise first recall ever issued got here only a 12 months after the founding of the Nationwide Freeway Visitors Security Administration. Earlier than the Administration, there was nobody to drive firms to recall automobiles, so the timing is smart. In 1971, Common Motors recalled 6.7 million Chevrolet and GMC automobiles for harmful engine mount points.
I’m not 100% certain the place this rumor got here from, however I’ve a concept; Southerners made up the parable as a strategy to denigrate Ford and his Northern clients. Ford has a surprisingly unhealthy rap down previous the mason-dioxin line, and it’s for one of the best cause; segregationist Southerners have plenty of animosity in the direction of the Large Blue Oval due to the work the Ford Basis did throughout the Civil Rights Period.
OK, maintain on tight, this can be a bumpy and engaging trip. All of it begins with the Fund of the Republic; a company fashioned throughout the Ford Basis devoted to defending free speech and civil liberties throughout the McCarthyism period.
The Ford Basis was vastly influential within the ’50s and ’60s, turning into the first nonprofit with a billion-dollar endowment in American historical past and the wealthiest on this planet by the mid-Nineteen Fifties. To be clear, the Basis and the Ford Motor Firm are utterly separate entities, however nobody has ever blamed racists for being too nuanced in what they hate. The Ford household would finally half methods with the Basis in 1976, solely returning in 2019 when the Basis named Henry Ford III (Edsel II’s son) as a trustee.
Neither the left, nor the appropriate actually trusted the Ford Basis. Began by Henry Ford’s son Edsel with an endowment of $25,000 in 1936, right-wingers discovered the Foundations actions through the fund as un-American (the Fund of the Republic truly confronted questioning from the Crimson-Scare Period Un-American Actions Committee of the Home of Representatives) whereas these on the left discovered the Basis undemocratic. One factor was for certain although; supporting Civil Rights was a menace to segregationists within the deep South. A 1956 Time journal article describes the attitudes of some Southerners in the direction of firms that “help Negro Equality,” and Ford appears to bear the brunt:
In components of the Deep South, Ford, Falstaff and Philip Morris have been nicknamed “The Three Fs” and made the targets of a rare whispering marketing campaign and financial boycott. The cost: they’ve aided the reason for Negro equality. However the boycott motion goes far past the phonetic Fs and, as practiced by each whites and Negroes, has unfold to almost a rating of different firms. Many of the affected firms are reluctant to debate the topic. Says the final supervisor of the Coca-Cola bottling plant at Birmingham: “I may inform you an entire lot about it, however I’d simply slightly not say something.” Says an official of the Kraft Meals Co. (which was criticized for sponsoring a tv exhibiting of Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones’): “When you begin preventing, you simply give these idiots a dignity they don’t deserve.”
Most of the boycotts are unorganized, word-of-mouth affairs. Some crop up in a single day and wither as swiftly. Others final for weeks or months within the ebb and stream of their effectiveness.
The Figuring out Smile. Of all the businesses, Ford has most likely been essentially the most affected. It’s blamed for the civil rights spending of the Fund for the Republic—over which the corporate has no management.
An Alabama supplier says his gross sales are off 50%, attributes a part of that drop to the boycott. Says he: “If anyone says one thing about it—even a buddy—and also you deny it, they simply smile at you.” Provides W. M. Turner, a supplier in Selma, Ala.: “The criticism of the whites—and I’m sur prised at a few of the clever individuals concerned—hurts, and we haven’t bought the Negro commerce, so you may see how it’s.” Ford efforts to fight the criticism have been lower than profitable. The Memphis meeting plant, for instance, started pasting its automobile home windows with stickers, studying: “Constructed within the South by Mid-Southerners.” One end result: the slogan led to such gutter parodies as: “Inbuilt Africa by Apes.”
Oof, that’s some ugly stuff. And it retains getting uglier. In 1960, an segregationist group known as the Members of the Residents’ Council of Larger New Orleans issued flyers alerting residents to not purchase Fords as a result of firm’s “tax free foundations.” Undeterred, the Ford Basis solely elevated funding to organizations just like the NAACP because the Civil Rights Motion gained steam. From the Basis’s web site:
Between 1965 and 1970, Ford Basis grants regarding African-Individuals elevated from 2.5% of whole home programmatic outlays to a staggering 40%. This dramatic shift in grant funding coincided with new management on the high, however there was additionally a rising push amongst Ford’s program employees to help racial justice grantees extra overtly.
One such Ford program officer was Christopher Edley, a Harvard-educated lawyer who had served on the U.S. Fee on Civil Rights till 1963, when he joined Ford. He was the muse’s first African-American program officer. In 1965, with the Civil Rights Act newly on the books, Edley argued that the Ford Basis had the truth is finished little to deal with the nation’s racial points head-on, and that Ford ought to be doing extra to help the implementation of the Act.
Edley started with a trademark of philanthropic programmatic planning: he surveyed the sphere of organizations working on this space — figuring out potential grantees.
The irony is, in fact, that many activist take into account the Ford Basis as partaking in what is named “Company Seize.” Radical Black Energy thinkers like scholar Robert L. Allen thought the Basis was co-opting Black individuals’s struggles with a purpose to make the motion simpler to swallow however finally much less efficient. Certainly, within the Sixties, the NAACP shifted its focus from preventing the horrors of lynching to schooling reform—one of many Basis’s primary priorities. The Ford Basis describes itself as favoring “rational” and “constructive” packages over “the person on the street” wants throughout this time.
This soup appears, to me, to be excellent for cooking up a fable that enables the complete South to drag one over on the haughty Ford and his son’s meddling, do-gooder Basis. The parable uniquely combines an absence of widespread sense about native Southern issues on the a part of the Northern industrialist with the bodily comedy of Ford clients actually getting bitten within the ass by a logo of the South for the transgression of shopping for a Ford. It’s precisely the type of info flotsam repeated by tour guides and on web varieties the world over till it turns into a enjoyable reality, that was by no means a reality in any respect.
I suppose we’ll by no means actually know the place the Ford Mannequin T/Spanish Moss fable got here from, however keep in mind: don’t consider every thing you learn on the web.