Davis, Wes
American Journey: On the Road with Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and John Burroughs
W. W. Norton (New York)
2023
OUR SYNOPSIS: Wes Davis examines the relationships between and traveling adventures of capitalist Henry Ford, inventor Thomas Edison, and naturalist John Burroughs. He explores how these three influential Americans came to know each other and relates this to histories of the United States. They were brought together by a shared nostalgia for an agrarian past and associated emphasis on spending time in nature. For Ford especially, this nostalgia conflicted with his focus on industrial capitalism. Davis demonstrates this by interspersing accounts of the group’s natural excursions with analysis of Ford’s developing employment policies. He also includes cases where two of the three figures interacted, such as the time Edison and Ford spent together at the Panama-Pacific Exposition in 1915. This is an example of how the industrial and technological innovation professional emphases of Edison and Ford differed from Burroughs’s primary interests. He also emphasizes overlaps, such as Ford’s interest in exploring ethanol as a natural energy source while traveling with Burroughs. Relying substantially on Burroughs’s detailed journals, Davis recreates the road trips and other travels of this trio and the ways they engaged with the landscape along the way. For all three, journeys through nature became a valued escape from the speed and technologies of industrial life that Ford and Edison so greatly contributed to advancing.
BIG QUESTIONS:
What are the benefits and insights of considering the stories of these three Americans together?
How did World War I impact Ford, Edison, Burroughs, and the relationships between them?
What did these three Americans learn from each other over the course of their shared travels?
FEATURE QUOTES:
“Each member of the camping party had contributed to the group in his own manner. As unlikely as their friendship appeared, the men’s particular interests—nature, science, industry—in fact overlapped in ways that were already coming to define the young twentieth century and indeed the era that would follow.” (303)
PRIMARY SOURCES:
John Burroughs, The Last Harvest (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1922), 230-231, https://lccn.loc.gov/22017732.
BALTIMORE CONNECTIONS:
N/A
