RISE AND FLOWERING
IN the calendar of American economic life, 1955 was the Year of the Automobile. That year, American automobile makers sold over seven million passenger cars, or over a million more than they had sold in any previous year. That year, General Motors easily sold the public $325 million worth of new common stock, and the stock market as a whole, led by the motors, gyrated upward so frantically that Congress investigated it. And that year, too, the Ford Motor Company decided to produce a new automobile in what was quaintly called the medium-price range--roughly, from $2,400 to $4,000--and went ahead and designed it more or less in conformity with the fashion of the day, which was for cars that were long, wide, low, lavishly decorated with chrome, liberally supplied with gadgets, and equipped with engines of a power just barely insufficient to send them into orbit. Two years later, in September, 1957, the Ford Company put its new car, the Edsel, on the market, to the accompaniment of more fanfare than had attended the arrival of any other new car since the same company's Model A, brought out thirty years earlier. The total amount spent on the Edsel before the first specimen went on sale was announced as a quarter of a billion dollars; its launching --as Business Week declared and nobody cared to deny--was more costly than that of any other consumer product in history. As a starter toward getting its investment back, Ford counted on selling at least 200,000 Edsels the first year.
There may be an aborigine somewhere in a remote rain forest who hasn't yet heard that things failed to turn out that way. To be precise, two years two months and fifteen days later Ford had sold only 109,466 Edsels, and, beyond a doubt, many hundreds, if not several thousands, of those were bought by Ford executives, dealers, salesmen, advertising men, assembly-line workers, and others who had a personal interest in seeing the car succeed. The 109,466 amounted to considerably less than one per cent of the passenger cars sold in the United States during that period, and on November 19, 1959, having lost, according to some outside estimates, around $350 million on the Edsel, the Ford Company permanently discontinued its production.
How could this have happened? How could a company so mightily endowed with money, experience, and, presumably, brains have been guilty of such a monumental mistake? Even before the Edsel was dropped, some of the more articulate members of the car-minded public had come forward with an answer--an answer so simple and so seemingly reasonable that, though it was not the only one advanced, it became widely accepted as the truth. The Edsel, these people argued, was designed, named, advertised, and promoted with a slavish adherence to the results of public-opinion polls and of their younger cousin, motivational research, and they concluded that when the public is wooed in an excessively calculated manner, it tends to turn away in favor of some gruffer but more spontaneously attentive suitor. Several years ago, in the face of an understandable reticence on the part of the Ford Motor Company, which enjoys documenting its boners no more than anyone else, I set out to learn what I could about the Edsel debacle, and my investigations have led me to believe that what we have here is less than the whole truth.
For, although the Edsel was supposed to be advertised, and otherwise promoted, strictly on the basis of preferences expressed in polls, some old-fashioned snake-oil-selling methods, intuitive rather than scientific, crept in. Although it was supposed to have been named in much the same way, science was curtly discarded at the last minute and the Edsel was named for the father of the company's president, like a nineteenth-century brand of cough drops or saddle soap. As for the design, it was arrived at without even a pretense of consulting the polls, and by the method that has been standard for years in the designing of automobiles--that of simply pooling the hunches of sundry company committees. The common explanation of the Edsel's downfall, then, under scrutiny, turns out to be largely a myth, in the colloquial sense of that term. But the facts of the case may live to become a myth of a symbolic sort--a modern American antisuccess story.
THE origins of the Edsel go back to the fall of 1948, seven years before the year of decision, when Henry Ford II, who had been president and undisputed boss of the company since the death of his grandfather, the original Henry, a year earlier, proposed to the company's executive committee, which included Ernest R. Breech, the executive vice-president, that studies be undertaken concerning the wisdom of putting on the market a new and wholly different medium-priced car. The studies were undertaken. There appeared to be good reason for them. It was a well-known practice at the time for low-income owners of Fords, Plymouths, and Chevrolets to turn in their symbols of inferior caste as soon as their earnings rose above five thousand dollars a year, and "trade up" to a medium-priced car. From Ford's point of view, this would have been all well and good except that, for some reason, Ford owners usually traded up not to Mercury, the company's only medium-priced car, but to one or another of the medium-priced cars put out by its big rivals--Oldsmobile, Buick, and Pontiac, among the General Motors products, and, to a lesser extent, Dodge and De Soto, the Chrysler candidates.
Lewis D. Crusoe, then a vice-president of the Ford Motor Company, was not overstating the case when he said, "We have been growing customers for General Motors."
The outbreak of the Korean War, in 1950, meant that Ford had no choice but to go on growing customers for its competitors, since introducing a new car at such a time was out of the question. The company's executive committee put aside the studies proposed by President Ford, and there matters rested for two years. Late in 1952, however, the end of the war appeared sufficiently imminent for the company to pick up where it had left off, and the studies were energetically resumed by a group called the Forward Product Planning Committee, which turned over much of the detailed work to the Lincoln-Mercury Division, under the direction of Richard Krafve (pronounced Kraffy), the division's assistant general manager. Krafve, a forceful, rather saturnine man with a habitually puzzled look, was then in his middle forties. The son of a printer on a small farm journal in Minnesota, he had been a sales engineer and management consultant before joining Ford, in 1947, and although he could not have known it in 1952, he was to have reason to look puzzled. As the man directly responsible for the Edsel and its fortunes, enjoying its brief glory and attending it in its mortal agonies, he had a rendezvous with destiny.
IN December, 1954, after two years' work, the Forward Product Planning Committee submitted to the executive committee a six-volume blockbuster of a report summarizing its findings. Supported by copious statistics, the report predicted the arrival of the American millennium, or something a lot like it, in 1965. By that time, the Forward Product Planning Committee estimated, the gross national product would be $535 billion a year--up more than $135 billion in a decade. (As a matter of fact, this part of the millennium arrived much sooner than the Forward Planners estimated. The G. N. P. passed $535 billion in 1962, and for 1965 was $681 billion.) The number of cars in operation would be seventy million--up twenty million. More than half the families in the nation would have incomes of over five thousand dollars a year, and more than 40 percent of all the cars sold would be in the medium-price range or better. The report's picture of America in 1965, presented in crushing detail, was of a country after Detroit's own heart--its banks oozing money, its streets and highways choked with huge, dazzling medium-priced cars, its newly rich, "upwardly mobile" citizens racked with longings for more of them. The moral was clear. If by that time Ford had not come out with a second medium-priced car--not just a new model, but a new make--and made it a favorite in its field, the company would miss out on its share of the national boodle.
On the other hand, the Ford bosses were well aware of the enormous risks connected with putting a new car on the market. They knew, for example, that of the 2,900 American makes that had been introduced since the beginning of the Automobile Age--the Black Crow (1905), the Averageman's Car (1906), the Bug-mobile (1907), the Dan Patch (1911), and the Lone Star (1920) among them-- only about twenty were still around. They knew all about the automotive casualties that had followed the Second World War--among them Crosley, which had given up altogether, and Kaiser Motors, which, though still alive in 1954, was breathing its last. (The members of the Forward Product Planning Committee must have glanced at each other uneasily when, a year later, Henry J. Kaiser wrote, in a valediction to his car business, "We expected to toss fifty million dollars into the automobile pond, but we didn't expect it to disappear without a ripple.") The Ford men also knew that neither of the other members of the industry's powerful and well-heeled Big Three--General Motors and Chrysler--had ventured to bring out a new standard-size make since the former's La Salle in 1927, and the latter's Plymouth, in 1928, and that Ford itself had not attempted to turn the trick since 1938, when it launched the Mercury.
Nevertheless, the Ford men felt bullish--so remarkably bullish that they resolved to toss into the automobile pond five times the sum that Kaiser had. In April, 1955, Henry Ford II, Breech, and the other members of the executive committee officially approved the Forward Product Planning Committee's findings, and, to implement them, set up another agency, called the Special Products Division, with the star-crossed Krafve as its head. Thus the company gave its formal sanction to the efforts of its designers, who, having divined the trend of events, had already been doodling for several months on plans for a new car. Since neither they nor the newly organized Krafve outfit, when it took over, had an inkling of what the thing on their drawing boards might be called, it became known to everybody at Ford, and even in the company's press releases, as the E-Car--the "E," it was explained, standing for "Experimental."
The man directly in charge of the E-Car's design--or, to use the gruesome trade word, "styling"-- was a Canadian, then not yet forty, named Roy A. Brown, who, before taking on the E-Car (and after studying industrial design at the Detroit Art Academy), had had a hand in the designing of radios, motor cruisers, colored-glass products, Cadillacs, Oldsmobiles, and Lincolns.* Brown recently recalled his aspirations as he went to work on the new project. "Our goal was to create a vehicle which would be unique in the sense that it would be readily recognizable in styling theme from the nineteen other makes of cars on the road at that time," he wrote from England, where at the time of his writing he was employed as chief stylist for the Ford Motor Company, Ltd., manufacturers of trucks, tractors, and small cars. "We went to the extent of making photographic studies from some distance of all nineteen of these cars, and it became obvious that at a distance of a few hundred feet the similarity was so great that it was practically impossible to distinguish one make from the others.... They were all 'peas in a pod.' We decided to select [a style that] would be 'new' in the sense that it was unique, and yet at the same time be familiar."
While the E-Car was on the drawing boards in Ford's styling studio--situated, like its administrative offices, in the company's barony of Dearborn, just outside Detroit--work on it progressed under the conditions of melodramatic, if ineffectual, secrecy that invariably attend such operations in the automobile business: locks on the studio doors that could be changed in fifteen minutes if a key should fall into enemy hands; a security force standing round-the-clock guard over the establishment; and a telescope to be trained at intervals on nearby high points of the terrain where peekers might be roosting. (All such precautions, however inspired, are doomed to fail, because none of them provide a defense against Detroit's version of the Trojan horse--the job-jumping stylist, whose cheerful treachery makes it relatively easy for the rival companies to keep tabs on what the competition is up to. No one, of course, is better aware of this than the rivals themselves, but the cloak-and-dagger stuff is thought to pay for itself in publicity value.) Twice a week or so, Krafve-- head down, and sticking to low ground--made the journey to the styling studio, where he would confer with Brown, check up on the work as it proceeded, and offer advice and encouragement.
Krafve was not the kind of man to envision his objective in a single revelatory flash; instead, he anatomized the styling of the E-Car into a series of laboriously minute decisions--how to shape the fenders, what pattern to use with the chrome, what kind of door handles to put on, and so on and on. If Michelangelo ever added the number of decisions that went into the execution of, say, his "David," he kept it to himself, but Krafve, an orderly-minded man in an era of orderly-functioning computers, later calculated that in styling the E-Car he and his associates had to make up their minds on no fewer than four thousand occasions. He reasoned at the time that if they arrived at the right yes-or-no choice on every one of those occasions, they ought, in the end, to come up with a stylistically perfect car--or at least a car that would be unique and at the same time familiar. But Krafve concedes today that he found it difficult thus to bend the creative process to the yoke of system, principally because many of the four thousand decisions he made wouldn't stay put. "Once you get a general theme, you begin narrowing down," he says. "You keep modifying, and then modifying your modifications. Finally, you have to settle on something, because there isn't any more time. If it weren't for the deadline you'd probably go on modifying indefinitely."
Except for later, minor modifications of the modified modifications, the E-Car had been fully styled by midsummer of 1955. As the world was to learn two years later, its most striking aspect was a novel, horse-collar-shaped radiator grille, set vertically in the center of a conventionally low, wide front end--a blend of the unique and the familiar that was there for all to see, though certainly not for all to admire. In two prominent respects, however, Brown or Krafve, or both, lost sight entirely of the familiar, specifying a unique rear end, marked by widespread horizontal wings that were in bold contrast to the huge longitudinal tail fins then captivating the market, and a unique cluster of automatic-transmission push buttons on the hub of the steering wheel. In a speech to the public delivered a while before the public had its first look at the car, Krafve let fall a hint or two about its styling, which, he said, made it so "distinctive" that, externally, it was "immediately recognizable from front, side, and rear," and, internally, it was "the epitome of the push-button era without wildblue- yonder Buck Rogers concepts." At last came the day when the men in the highest stratum of the Ford Hierarchy were given their first glimpse of the car. It produced an effect that was little short of apocalyptic. On August 15, 1955, in the ceremonial secrecy of the styling center, while Krafve,
Brown, and their aides stood by smiling nervously and washing their hands in air, the members of the Forward Product Planning Committee, including Henry Ford II and Breech, watched critically as a curtain was lifted to reveal the first full-size model of the E-Car--a clay one, with tinfoil simulating aluminum and chrome. According to eyewitnesses, the audience sat in utter silence for what seemed like a full minute, and then, as one man, burst into a round of applause. Nothing of the kind had ever happened at an intracompany first showing at Ford since 1896, when old Henry had bolted together his first horseless carriage.
ONE of the most persuasive and most frequently cited explanations of the Edsel's failure is that it was a victim of the time lag between the decision to produce it and the act of putting it on the market. It was easy to see a few years later, when smaller and less powerful cars, euphemistically called "compacts," had become so popular as to turn the old automobile status-ladder upside down, that the Edsel was a giant step in the wrong direction, but it was far from easy to see that in fat, tail-finny 1955. American ingenuity--which has produced the electric light, the flying machine, the tin Lizzie, the atomic bomb, and even a tax system that permits a man, under certain circumstances, to clear a profit by making a charitable donation *--has not yet found a way of getting an automobile on the market within a reasonable time after it comes off the drawing board; the making of steel dies, the alerting of retail dealers, the preparation of advertising and promotion campaigns, the gaining of executive approval for each successive move, and the various other gavotte-like routines that are considered as vital as breathing in Detroit and its environs usually consume about two years.
Guessing future tastes is hard enough for those charged with planning the customary annual changes in models of established makes; it is far harder to bring out an altogether new creation, like the E-Car, for which several intricate new steps must be worked into the dance pattern, such as endowing the product with a personality and selecting a suitable name for it, to say nothing of consulting various oracles in an effort to determine whether, by the time of the unveiling, the state of the national economy will make bringing out any new car seem like a good idea.
Faithfully executing the prescribed routine, the Special Products Division called upon its director of planning for market research, David Wallace, to see what he could do about imparting a personality to the E-Car and giving it a name. Wallace, a lean, craggy-jawed pipe puffer with a soft, slow, thoughtful way of speaking, gave the impression of being the Platonic idea of the college professor--the very steel die from which the breed is cut--although, in point of fact, his background was not strongly academic. Before going to Ford, in 1955, he had worked his way through Westminster College, in Pennsylvania, ridden out the depression as a construction laborer in New York City, and then spent ten years in market research at Time. Still, impressions are what count, and Wallace has admitted that during his tenure with Ford he consciously stressed his professorial air for the sake of the advantage it gave him in dealing with the bluff, practical men of Dearborn. "Our department came to be regarded as a semi-Brain Trust," he says, with a certain satisfaction. He insisted, typically, on living in Ann Arbor, where he could bask in the scholarly aura of the University of Michigan, rather than in Dearborn or Detroit, both of which he declared were intolerable after business hours. Whatever the degree of his success in projecting the image of the E-Car, he seems, by his small eccentricities, to have done splendidly at projecting the image of Wallace. "I don't think Dave's motivation for being at Ford was basically economic," his old boss, Krafve, says. "Dave is the scholarly type, and I think he considered the job an interesting challenge." One could scarcely ask for better evidence of image projection than that.
Wallace clearly recalls the reasoning--candid enough--that guided him and his assistants as they sought just the right personality for the E-Car. "We said to ourselves, 'Let's face it--there is no great difference in basic mechanism between a two-thousand-dollar Chevrolet and a six-thousand-dollar Cadillac,'" he says. "'Forget about all the ballyhoo,' we said, 'and you'll see that they are really pretty much the same thing. Nevertheless, there's something--there's got to be something--in the makeup of a certain number of people that gives them a yen for a Cadillac, in spite of its high price, or maybe because of it.' We concluded that cars are the means to a sort of dream fulfillment. There's some irrational factor in people that makes them want one kind of car rather than another--something that has nothing to do with the mechanism at all but with the car's personality, as the customer imagines it. What we wanted to do, naturally, was to give the E-Car the personality that would make the greatest number of people want it. We figured we had a big advantage over the other manufacturers of medium-priced cars, because we didn't have to worry about changing a pre-existent, perhaps somewhat obnoxious personality. All we had to do was create the exact one we wanted-- from scratch."
As the first step in determining what the E-Car's exact personality should be, Wallace decided to assess the personalities of the medium-priced cars already on the market, and those of the so-called low-priced cars as well, since the cost of some of the cheap cars' 1955 models had risen well up into the medium-price range. To this end, he engaged the Columbia University Bureau of Applied Social Research to interview eight hundred recent car buyers in Peoria, Illinois, and another eight hundred in San Bernardino, California, on the mental images they had of the various automobile makes concerned. (In undertaking this commercial enterprise, Columbia maintained its academic independence by reserving the right to publish its findings.) "Our idea was to get the reaction in cities, among clusters of people," Wallace says. "We didn't want a cross section. What we wanted was something that would show interpersonal factors. We picked Peoria as a place that is Midwestern, stereotyped, and not loaded with extraneous factors--like a General Motors glass plant, say. We picked San Bernardino because the West Coast is very important in the automobile business, and because the market there is quite different--people tend to buy flashier cars."
The questions that the Columbia researchers fared forth to ask in Peoria and San Bernardino dealt exhaustively with practically everything having to do with automobiles except such matters as how much they cost, how safe they were, and whether they ran. In particular, Wallace wanted to know the respondents' impressions of each of the existing makes. Who, in their opinion, would naturally own a Chevrolet or a Buick or whatever? People of what age? Of which sex? Of what social status? From the answers, Wallace found it easy to put together a personality portrait of each make. The image of the Ford came into focus as that of a very fast, strongly masculine car, of no particular social pretensions, that might characteristically be driven by a rancher or an automobile mechanic. In contrast, Chevrolet emerged as older, wiser, slower, a bit less rampantly masculine, and slightly more distingué--a clergyman's car. Buick jelled into a middle-aged lady--or, at least, more of a lady than Ford, sex in cars having proved to be relative--with a bit of the devil still in her, whose most felicitous mate would be a lawyer, a doctor, or a dance-band leader. As for the Mercury, it came out as virtually a hot rod, best suited to a young-buck racing driver; thus, despite its higher price tag, it was associated with persons having incomes no higher than the average Ford owner's, so no wonder Ford owners had not been trading up to it. This odd discrepancy between image and fact, coupled with the circumstance that, in sober truth all four makes looked very much alike and had almost the same horsepower under their hoods, only served to bear out Wallace's premise that the automobile fancier, like a young man in love, is incapable of sizing up the object of his affections in anything resembling a rational manner.
By the time the researchers closed the books on Peoria and San Bernardino, they had elicited replies not only to these questions but to others, several of which, it would appear, only the most abstruse sociological thinker could relate to medium-priced cars. "Frankly, we dabbled," Wallace says. "It was a dragnet operation." Among the odds and ends that the dragnet dredged up were some that, when pieced together, led the researchers to report:
By looking at those respondents whose annual incomes range from $4,000 to $11,000, we can make an ... observation. A considerable percentage of these respondents [to a question about their ability to mix cocktails] are in the "somewhat" category on ability to mix cocktails.... Evidently, they do not have much confidence in their cocktail-mixing ability. We may infer that these respondents are aware of the fact that they are in the learning process. They may be able to mix Martinis or Manhattans, but beyond these popular drinks they don't have much of a repertoire.
Wallace, dreaming of an ideally lovable E-Car, was delighted as returns like these came pouring into his Dearborn office. But when the time for a final decision drew near, it became clear to him that he must put aside peripheral issues like cocktail-mixing prowess and address himself once more to the old problem of the image. And here, it seemed to him, the greatest pitfall was the temptation to aim, in accordance with what he took to be the trend of the times, for extremes of masculinity, youthfulness, and speed; indeed, the following passage from one of the Columbia reports, as he interpreted it, contained a specific warning against such folly.
Offhand we might conjecture that women who drive cars probably work, and are more mobile than non-owners, and get gratifications out of mastering a traditionally male role. But ... there is no doubt that whatever gratifications women get out of their cars, and whatever social imagery they attach to their automobiles, they do want to appear as women. Perhaps more worldly women, but women.
Early in 1956, Wallace set about summing up all of his department's findings in a report to his superiors in the Special Products Division. Entitled "The Market and Personality Objectives of the ECar" and weighty with facts and statistics--though generously interspersed with terse sections in italics or capitals from which a hard-pressed executive could get the gist of the thing in a matter of seconds--the report first indulged in some airy, skippable philosophizing and then got down to conclusions:
What happens when an owner sees his make as a car which a woman might buy, but is himself a man? Does this apparent inconsistency of car image and the buyer's own characteristics affect his trading plans? The answer quite definitely is Yes. When there is a conflict between owner characteristics and make image, there is greater planning to switch to another make. In other words, when the buyer is a different kind of person from the person he thinks would own his make, he wants to change to a make in which he, inwardly, will be more comfortable.
It should be noted that "conflict," as used here, can be of two kinds. Should a make have a strong and well-defined image, it is obvious that an owner with strong opposing characteristics would be in conflict. But conflict also can occur when the make image is diffuse or weakly defined. In this case, the owner is in an equally frustrating position of not being able to get a satisfactory identification from his make.
The question, then, was how to steer between the Scylla of a too definite car personality and the Charybdis of a too weak personality. To this the report replied, "Capitalize on imagery weakness of competition," and went on to urge that in the matter of age the E-Car should take an imagery position neither too young nor too old but right alongside that of the middling Olds-mobile; that in the matter of social class, not to mince matters, "the E-Car might well take a status position just below Buick and Oldsmobile"; and that in the delicate matter of sex it should try to straddle the fence, again along with the protean Olds. In sum (and in Wallace typography):
The most advantageous personality for the E-Car might well be THE SMART CAR FOR THE YOUNGER EXECUTIVE OR PROFESSIONAL FAMILY ON ITS WAY UP.
Smart car: recognition by others of the owner's good style and taste.
Younger: appealing to spirited but responsible adventurers.
Executive or professional: millions pretend to this status, whether they can attain it or not.
Family: not exclusively masculine; a wholesome "good" role.
On Its Way Up: "The E-Car has faith in you, son; we'll help you make it!"
Before spirited but responsible adventurers could have faith in the E-Car, however, it had to have a name. Very early in its history, Krafve had suggested to members of the Ford family that the new car be named for Edsel Ford, who was the only son of old Henry; the president of the Ford Motor Company from 1918 until his death, in 1943; and the father of the new generation of Fords--Henry II, Benson, and William Clay. The three brothers had let Krafve know that their father might not have cared to have his name spinning on a million hubcaps, and they had consequently suggested that the Special Products Division start looking around for a substitute. This it did, with a zeal no less emphatic than it displayed in the personality crusade. In the late summer and early fall of 1955, Wallace hired the services of several research outfits, which sent interviewers, armed with a list of two thousand possible names, to canvass sidewalk crowds in New York, Chicago, Willow Run, and Ann Arbor. The interviewers did not ask simply what the respondent thought of some such name as Mars, Jupiter, Rover, Ariel, Arrow, Dart, or Ovation. They asked what free associations each name brought to mind, and having got an answer to this one, they asked what word or words was considered the opposite of each name, on the theory that, subliminally speaking, the opposite is as much a part of a name as the tail is of a penny. The results of all this, the Special Products Division eventually decided, were inconclusive. Meanwhile, Krafve and his men held repeated sessions in a darkened room, staring, with the aid of a spotlight, at a series of cardboard signs, each bearing a name, as, one after another, they were flipped over for their consideration. One of the men thus engaged spoke up for the name Phoenix, because of its connotations of ascendancy, and another favored Altair, on the ground that it would lead practically all alphabetical lists of cars and thus enjoy an advantage analogous to that enjoyed in the animal kingdom by the aardvark. At a certain drowsy point in one session, somebody suddenly called a halt to the card-flipping and asked, in an incredulous tone, "Didn't I see 'Buick' go by two or three cards back?" Everybody looked at Wallace, the impresario of the sessions. He puffed on his pipe, smiled an academic smile, and nodded.
THE card-flipping sessions proved to be as fruitless as the sidewalk interviews, and it was at this stage of the game that Wallace, resolving to try and wring from genius what the common mind had failed to yield, entered into the celebrated car-naming correspondence with the poet Marianne Moore, which was later published in The New Yorker and still later, in book form, by the Morgan Library.
"We should like this name ... to convey, through association or other conjuration, some visceral feeling of elegance, fleetness, advanced features and design," Wallace wrote to Miss Moore, achieving a certain feeling of elegance himself. If it is asked who among the gods of Dearborn had the inspired and inspiriting idea of enlisting Miss Moore's services in this cause, the answer, according to Wallace, is that it was no god but the wife of one of his junior assistants--a young lady who had recently graduated from Mount Holyoke, where she had heard Miss Moore lecture. Had her husband's superiors gone a step further and actually adopted one of Miss Moore's many suggestions --Intelligent Bullet, for instance, or Utopian Turtletop, or Bullet Cloisonné, or Pastelogram, or Mongoose Civique, or Andante con Moto ("Description of a good motor?" Miss Moore queried in regard to this last)--there is no telling to what heights the E-Car might have risen, but the fact is that they didn't. Dissatisfied with both the poet's ideas and their own, the executives in the Special Products Division next called in Foote, Cone & Belding, the advertising agency that had lately been signed up to handle the E-Car account. With characteristic Madison Avenue vigor, Foote, Cone & Belding organized a competition among the employees of its New York, London, and Chicago offices, offering nothing less than one of the brand-new cars as a prize to whoever thought up an acceptable name. In no time at all, Foote, Cone & Belding had eighteen thousand names in hand, including Zoom, Zip, Benson, Henry, and Drof (if in doubt, spell it backward). Suspecting that the bosses of the Special Products Division might regard this list as a trifle unwieldy, the agency got to work and cut it down to six thousand names, which it presented to them in executive session. "There you are," a Foote, Cone man said triumphantly, flopping a sheaf of papers on the table. "Six thousand names, all alphabetized and cross-referenced."
A gasp escaped Krafve. "But we don't want six thousand names," he said. "We only want one."
The situation was critical, because the making of dies for the new car was about to begin and some of them would have to bear its name. On a Thursday, Foote, Cone & Belding canceled all leaves and instituted what is called a crash program, instructing its New York and Chicago offices to set about independently cutting down the list of six thousand names to ten and to have the job done by the end of the weekend. Before the weekend was over, the two Foote, Cone offices presented their separate lists of ten to the Special Products Division, and by an almost incredible coincidence, which all hands insist was a coincidence, four of the names on the two lists were the same; Corsair, Citation, Pacer, and Ranger had miraculously survived the dual scrutiny. "Corsair seemed to be head and shoulders above everything else," Wallace says. "Along with other factors in its favor, it had done splendidly in the sidewalk interviews. The free associations with Corsair were rather romantic--'pirate,' 'swashbuckler,' things like that. For its opposite, we got 'princess,' or something else attractive on that order. Just what we wanted."
Corsair or no Corsair, the E-Car was named the Edsel in the early spring of 1956, though the public was not informed until the following autumn. The epochal decision was reached at a meeting of the Ford executive committee held at a time when, as it happened, all three Ford brothers were away. In President Ford's absence, the meeting was conducted by Breech, who had become chairman of the board in 1955, and his mood that day was brusque, and not one to linger long over swashbucklers and princesses. After hearing the final choices, he said, "I don't like any of them. Let's take another look at some of the others." So they took another look at the favored rejects, among them the name Edsel, which, in spite of the three Ford brothers' expressed interpretation of their father's probable wishes, had been retained as a sort of anchor to windward. Breech led his associates in a patient scrutiny of the list until they came to "Edsel." "Let's call it that," Breech said with calm finality. There were to be four main models of the E-Car, with variations on each one, and Breech soothed some of his colleagues by adding that the magic four--Corsair, Citation, Pacer, and Ranger --might be used, if anybody felt so inclined, as the subnames for the models. A telephone call was put through to Henry II, who was vacationing in Nassau. He said that if Edsel was the choice of the executive committee, he would abide by its decision, provided he could get the approval of the rest of his family. Within a few days, he got it.
As Wallace wrote to Miss Moore a while later: "We have chosen a name.... It fails somewhat of the resonance, gaiety, and zest we were seeking. But it has a personal dignity and meaning to many of us here. Our name, dear Miss Moore, is--Edsel. I hope you will understand."
IT may be assumed that word of the naming of the E-Car spread a certain amount of despair among the Foote, Cone & Belding backers of more metaphorical names, none of whom won a free car--a despair heightened by the fact that the name "Edsel" had been ruled out of the competition from the first. But their sense of disappointment was as nothing compared to the gloom that enveloped many employees of the Special Products Division. Some felt that the name of a former president of the company, who had sired its current president, bore dynastic connotations that were alien to the American temper; others, who, with Wallace, had put their trust in the quirks of the mass unconscious, believed that "Edsel" was a disastrously unfortunate combination of syllables. What were its free associations? Pretzel, diesel, hard sell. What was its opposite? It didn't seem to have any. Still, the matter was settled, and there was nothing to do but put the best possible face on it. Besides, the anguish in the Special Products Division was by no means unanimous, and Krafve himself, of course, was among those who had no objection to the name. He still has none, declining to go along with those who contend that the decline and fall of the Edsel may be dated from the moment of its christening.
Krafve, in fact, was so well pleased with the way matters had turned out that when, at eleven o'clock on the morning of November 19, 1956, after a long summer of thoughtful silence, the Ford Company released to the world the glad tidings that the E-Car had been named the Edsel, he accompanied the announcement with a few dramatic flourishes of his own. On the very stroke of that hour on that day, the telephone operators in Krafve's domain began greeting callers with "Edsel Division" instead of "Special Products Division"; all stationery bearing the obsolete letterhead of the division vanished and was replaced by sheaves of paper headed "Edsel Division"; and outside the building a huge stainless-steel sign reading "EDSEL DIVISION" rose ceremoniously to the rooftop.
Krafve himself managed to remain earthbound, though he had his own reasons for feeling buoyant; in recognition of his leadership of the E-Car project up to that point, he was given the august title of Vice-President of the Ford Motor Company and General Manager, Edsel Division.
From the administrative point of view, this off-with-the-old-on-with-the-new effect was merely harmless window dressing. In the strict secrecy of the Dearborn test track, vibrant, almost fullfledged Edsels, with their name graven on their superstructures, were already being road-tested; Brown and his fellow stylists were already well along with their designs for the next year's Edsel; recruits were already being signed up for an entirely new organization of retail dealers to sell the Edsel to the public; and Foote, Cone & Belding, having been relieved of the burden of staging crash programs to collect names and crash programs to get rid of them again, was already deep in schemes for advertising the Edsel, under the personal direction of a no less substantial pillar of his trade than Fairfax M. Cone, the agency's head man. In planning his campaign, Cone relied heavily on what had come to be called the "Wallace prescription"; that is, the formula for the Edsel's personality as set forth by Wallace back in the days before the big naming bee--"The smart car for the younger executive or professional family on its way up." So enthusiastic was Cone about the prescription that he accepted it with only one revision--the substitution of "middle-income" family for "younger executive," his hunch being that there were more middle-income families around than young executives, or even people who thought they were young executives. In an expansive mood, possibly induced by his having landed an account that was expected to bring billings of well over ten million dollars a year, Cone described to reporters on several occasions the kind of campaign he was plotting for the Edsel--quiet, self-assured, and avoiding as much as possible the use of the adjective "new," which, though it had an obvious application to the product, he considered rather lacking in cachet.
Above all, the campaign was to be classic in its calmness. "We think it would be awful for the advertising to compete with the car," Cone told the press. "We hope that no one will ever ask, 'Say, did you see that Edsel ad?' in any newspaper or magazine or on television, but, instead, that hundreds of thousands of people will say, and say again, 'Man, did you read about that Edsel?' or 'Did you see that car?' This is the difference between advertising and selling." Evidently enough, Cone felt confident about the campaign and the Edsel. Like a chess master who has no doubt that he will win, he could afford to explicate the brilliance of his moves even as he made them.
Automobile men still talk, with admiration for the virtuosity displayed and a shudder at the ultimate outcome, of the Edsel Division's drive to round up retail dealers. Ordinarily, an established manufacturer launches a new car through dealers who are already handling his other makes and who, to begin with, take on the upstart as a sort of sideline. Not so in the case of the Edsel; Krafve received authorization from on high to go all out and build up a retail-dealer organization by making raids on dealers who had contracts with other manufacturers, or even with the other Ford Company divisions --Ford and Lincoln-Mercury. (Although the Ford dealers thus corralled were not obliged to cancel their old contracts, all the emphasis was on signing up retail outlets exclusively dedicated to the selling of Edsels.) The goal set for Introduction Day--which, after a great deal of soul-searching, was finally established as September 4, 1957--was twelve hundred Edsel dealers from coast to coast. They were not to be just any dealers, either; Krafve made it clear that Edsel was interested in signing up only dealers whose records showed that they had a marked ability to sell cars without resorting to the high-pressure tricks of borderline legality that had lately been giving the automobile business a bad name. "We simply have to have quality dealers with quality service facilities," Krafve said. "A customer who gets poor service on an established brand blames the dealer. On an Edsel, he will blame the car." The goal of twelve hundred was a high one, for no dealer, quality or not, can afford to switch makes lightly. The average dealer has at least a hundred thousand dollars tied up in his agency, and in large cities the investment is much higher. He must hire salesmen, mechanics, and office help; buy his own tools, technical literature, and signs, the latter costing as much as five thousand dollars a set; and pay the factory spot cash for the cars he receives from it.
The man charged with mobilizing an Edsel sales force along these exacting lines was J. C. (Larry) Doyle, who, as general sales-and-marketing manager of the division, ranked second to Krafve himself. A veteran of forty years with the Ford Company, who had started with it as an office boy in Kansas City and had spent the intervening time mainly selling, Doyle was a maverick in his field. On the one hand, he had an air of kindness and consideration that made him the very antithesis of the glib, brash denizens of a thousand automobile rows across the continent, and, on the other, he did not trouble to conceal an old-time salesman's skepticism about such things as analyzing the sex and status of automobiles, a pursuit he characterized by saying, "When I play pool, I like to keep one foot on the floor." Still, he knew how to sell cars, and that was what the Edsel Division needed. Recalling how he and his sales staff brought off the unlikely trick of persuading substantial and reputable men who had already achieved success in one of the toughest of all businesses to tear up profitable franchises in favor of a risky new one, Doyle said not long ago, "As soon as the first few new Edsels came through, early in 1957, we put a couple of them in each of our five regional sales offices. Needless to say, we kept those offices locked and the blinds drawn. Dealers in every make for miles around wanted to see the car, if only out of curiosity, and that gave us the leverage we needed. We let it be known that we would show the car only to dealers who were really interested in coming with us, and then we sent our regional field managers out to surrounding towns to try to line up the No. 1 dealer in each to see the cars. If we couldn't get No. 1, we'd try for No. 2. Anyway, we set things up so that no one got in to see the Edsel without listening to a complete one-hour pitch on the whole situation by a member of our sales force. It worked very well." It worked so well that by midsummer, 1957, it was clear that Edsel was going to have a lot of quality dealers on Introduction Day. (In fact, it missed the goal of twelve hundred by a couple of dozen.) Indeed, some dealers in other makes were apparently so confident of the Edsel's success, or so bemused by the Doyle staff's pitch, that they were entirely willing to sign up after hardly more than a glance at the Edsel itself. Doyle's people urged them to study the car closely, and kept reciting the litany of its virtues, but the prospective Edsel dealers would wave such protestations aside and demand a contract without further ado. In retrospect, it would seem that Doyle could have given lessons to the Pied Piper.
Now that the Edsel was no longer the exclusive concern of Dearborn, the Ford Company was irrevocably committed to going ahead. "Until Doyle went into action, the whole program could have been quietly dropped at any time at a word from top management, but once the dealers had been signed up, there was the matter of honoring your contract to put out a car," Krafve has explained. The matter was attended to with dispatch. Early in June, 1957, the company announced that of the $250 million it had set aside to defray the advance costs of the Edsel, $150 million was being spent on basic facilities, including the conversion of various Ford and Mercury plants to the needs of producing the new cars; $50 million on special Edsel tooling; and $50 million on initial advertising and promotion. In June, too, an Edsel destined to be the star of a television commercial for future release was stealthily transported in a closed van to Hollywood, where, on a locked sound stage patrolled by security guards, it was exposed to the cameras in the admiring presence of a few carefully chosen actors who had sworn that their lips would be sealed from then until Introduction Day. For this delicate photographic operation the Edsel Division cannily enlisted the services of Cascade Pictures, which also worked for the Atomic Energy Commission, and, as far as is known, there were no unintentional leaks. "We took all the same precautions we take for our A.E.C. films," a grim Cascade official has since said.
Within a few weeks, the Edsel Division had eighteen hundred salaried employees and was rapidly filling some fifteen thousand factory jobs in the newly converted plants. On July 15th, Edsels began rolling off assembly lines at Somerville, Massachusetts; Mahwah, New Jersey; Louisville, Kentucky; and San Jose, California. The same day, Doyle scored an important coup by signing up Charles Kreisler, a Manhattan dealer regarded as one of the country's foremost practitioners in his field, who had represented Oldsmobile--one of Edsel's self-designated rivals--before heeding the siren song from Dearborn. On July 22nd, the first advertisement for the Edsel appeared--in Life. A two-page spread in plain black-and-white, it was impeccably classic and calm, showing a car whooshing down a country highway at such high speed that it was an indistinguishable blur. "Lately, some mysterious automobiles have been seen on the roads," the accompanying text was headed. It went on to say that the blur was an Edsel being road-tested, and concluded with the assurance "The Edsel is on its way."
Two weeks later, a second ad appeared in Life, this one showing a ghostly-looking car, covered with a white sheet, standing at the entrance to the Ford styling center. This time the headline read, "A man in your town recently made a decision that will change his life." The decision, it was explained, was to become an Edsel dealer. Whoever wrote the ad cannot have known how truly he spoke.
DURING the tense summer of 1957, the man of the hour at Edsel was C. Gayle Warnock, director of public relations, whose duty was not so much to generate public interest in the forthcoming product, there being an abundance of that, as to keep the interest at white heat, and readily convertible into a desire to buy one of the new cars on or after Introduction Day--or, as the company came to call it,
Edsel Day. Warnock, a dapper, affable man with a tiny mustache, is a native of Converse, Indiana, who, long before Krafve drafted him from the Ford office in Chicago, did a spot of publicity work for county fairs--a background that has enabled him to spice the honeyed smoothness of the modern public-relations man with a touch of the old carnival pitchman's uninhibited spirit. Recalling his summons to Dearborn, Warnock says, "When Dick Krafve hired me, back in the fall of 1955, he told me, 'I want you to program the E-Car publicity from now to Introduction Day.' I said, 'Frankly, Dick, what do you mean by "program"?' He said he meant to sort of space it out, starting at the end and working backward. This was something new to me--I was used to taking what breaks I could get when I could get them--but I soon found out how right Dick was. It was almost too easy to get publicity for the Edsel. Early in 1956, when it was still called the E-Car, Krafve gave a little talk about it out in Portland, Oregon. We didn't try for anything more than a play in the local press, but the wire services picked the story up and it went out all over the country. Clippings came in by the bushel. Right then I realized the trouble we might be headed for. The public was getting to be hysterical to see our car, figuring it was going to be some kind of dream car--like nothing they'd ever seen. I said to Krafve, 'When they find out it's got four wheels and one engine, just like the next car, they're liable to be disappointed.'"
It was agreed that the safest way to tread the tightrope between overplaying and underplaying the Edsel would be to say nothing about the car as a whole but to reveal its individual charms a little at a time--a sort of automotive strip tease (a phrase that Warnock couldn't with proper dignity use himself but was happy to see the New York Times use for him). The policy was later violated now and then, purposely or inadvertently. For one thing, as the pre-Edsel Day summer wore on, reporters prevailed upon Krafve to authorize Warnock to show the Edsel to them, one at a time, on what Warnock called a "peekaboo," or "you've-seen-it-now-forget-it," basis. And, for another, Edsels loaded on vans for delivery to dealers were appearing on the highways in ever-increasing numbers, covered fore and aft with canvas flaps that, as if to whet the desire of the motoring public, were forever blowing loose. That summer, too, was a time of speechmaking by an Edsel foursome consisting of Krafve, Doyle, J. Emmet Judge, who was Edsel's director of merchandise and product planning, and Robert F. G. Copeland, its assistant general sales manager for advertising, sales promotion, and training. Ranging separately up and down and across the nation, the four orators moved around so fast and so tirelessly that Warnock, lest he lose track of them, took to indicating their whereabouts with colored pins on a map in his office. "Let's see, Krafve goes from Atlanta to New Orleans, Doyle from Council Bluffs to Salt Lake City," Warnock would muse of a morning in Dearborn, sipping his second cup of coffee and then getting up to yank the pins out and jab them in again.
Although most of Krafve's audiences consisted of bankers and representatives of finance companies who it was hoped would lend money to Edsel dealers, his speeches that summer, far from echoing the general hoopla, were almost statesmanlike in their cautious--even somber--references to the new car's prospects. And well they might have been, for developments in the general economic outlook of the nation were making more sanguine men than Krafve look puzzled. In July, 1957, the stock market went into a nose dive, marking the beginning of what is recalled as the recession of 1958. Then, early in August, a decline in the sales of medium-priced 1957 cars of all makes set in, and the general situation worsened so rapidly that, before the month was out, Automotive News reported that dealers in all makes were ending their season with the second-largest number of unsold new cars in history. If Krafve, on his lonely rounds, ever considered retreating to Dearborn for consolation, he was forced to put that notion out of his mind when, also in August, Mercury, Edsel's own stablemate, served notice that it was going to make things as tough as possible for the newcomer by undertaking a million-dollar, thirty-day advertising drive aimed especially at "price-conscious buyers"--a clear reference to the fact that the 1957 Mercury, which was then being sold at a discount by most dealers, cost less than the new Edsel was expected to. Meanwhile, sales of the Rambler, which was the only American-made small car then in production, were beginning to rise ominously.
In the face of all these evil portents, Krafve fell into the habit of ending his speeches with a rather downbeat anecdote about the board chairman of an unsuccessful dog-food company who said to his fellow directors, "Gentlemen, let's face facts--dogs don't like our product." "As far as we're concerned," Krafve added on at least one occasion, driving home the moral with admirable clarity, "a lot will depend on whether people like our car or not."
But most of the other Edsel men were unimpressed by Krafve's misgivings. Perhaps the least impressed of all was Judge, who, while doing his bit as an itinerant speaker, specialized in community and civic groups. Undismayed by the limitations of the strip-tease policy, Judge brightened up his lectures by showing such a bewildering array of animated graphs, cartoons, charts, and pictures of parts of the car--all flashed on a CinemaScope screen--that his listeners usually got halfway home before they realized that he hadn't shown them an Edsel. He wandered restlessly around the auditorium as he spoke, shifting the kaleidoscopic images on the screen at will with the aid of an automatic slide changer--a trick made possible by a crew of electricians who laced the place in advance with a maze of wires linking the device to dozens of floor switches, which, scattered about the hall, responded when he kicked them. Each of the "Judge spectaculars," as these performances came to be known, cost the Edsel Division five thousand dollars--a sum that included the pay and expenses of the technical crew, who would arrive on the scene a day or so ahead of time to set up the electrical rig. At the last moment, Judge would descend melodramatically on the town by plane, hasten to the hall, and go into his act. "One of the greatest aspects of this whole Edsel program is the philosophy of product and merchandising behind it," Judge might start off, with a desultory kick at a switch here, a switch there. "All of us who have been a part of it are real proud of this background and we are anxiously awaiting its success when the car is introduced this fall.... Never again will we be associated with anything as gigantic and full of meaning as this particular program.... Here is a glimpse of the car which will be before the American public on September 4, 1957 [at this point,
Judge would show a provocative slide of a hubcap or section of fender].... It is a different car in every respect, yet it has an element of conservatism which will give it maximum appeal.... The distinctiveness of the frontal styling integrates with the sculptured patterns of the side treatment...."
And on and on Judge would rhapsodize, rolling out such awesome phrases as "sculptured sheet metal," "highlight character," and "graceful, flowing lines." At last would come the ringing peroration. "We are proud of the Edsel!" he would cry, kicking switches right and left. "When it is introduced this fall, it will take its place on the streets and highways of America, bringing new greatness to the Ford Motor Company. This is the Edsel story."
THE drum-roll climax of the strip tease was a three-day press preview of the Edsel, undraped from pinched-in snout to flaring rear, that was held in Detroit and Dearborn on August 26th, 27th, and 28th, with 250 reporters from all over the country in attendance. It differed from previous automotive jamborees of its kind in that the journalists were invited to bring their wives along--and many of them did. Before it was over, it had cost the Ford Company ninety thousand dollars. Grand as it was, the conventionality of its setting was a disappointment to Warnock, who had proposed, and seen rejected, three locales that he thought would provide a more offbeat ambiance--a steamer on the Detroit River ("wrong symbolism"); Edsel, Kentucky ("inaccessible by road"); and Haiti ("just turned down flat"). Thus hobbled, Warnock could do no better for the reporters and their wives when they converged on the Detroit scene on Sunday evening, August 25th, than to put them up at the discouragingly named Sheraton-Cadillac Hotel and to arrange for them to spend Monday afternoon hearing and reading about the long-awaited details of the entire crop of Edsels--eighteen varieties available, in four main lines (Corsair, Citation, Pacer, and Ranger), differing mainly in their size, power, and trim. The next morning, specimens of the models themselves were revealed to the reporters in the styling center's rotunda, and Henry II offered a few words of tribute to his father.
"The wives were not asked to the unveiling," a Foote, Cone man who helped plan the affair recalls.
"It was too solemn and businesslike an event for that. It went over fine. There was excitement even among the hardened newspapermen." (The import of the stories that most of the excited newspapermen filed was that the Edsel seemed to be a good car, though not so radical as its billing had suggested.) In the afternoon, the reporters were whisked out to the test track to see a team of stunt drivers put the Edsel through its paces. This event, calculated to be thrilling, turned out to be hair-raising, and even, for some, a little unstringing. Enjoined not to talk too much about speed and horsepower, since only a few months previously the whole automobile industry had nobly resolved to concentrate on making cars instead of delayed-action bombs, Warnock had decided to emphasize the Edsel's liveliness through deeds rather than words, and to accomplish this he had hired a team of stunt drivers. Edsels ran over two-foot ramps on two wheels, bounced from higher ramps on all four wheels, were driven in crisscross patterns, grazing each other, at sixty or seventy miles per hour, and skidded into complete turns at fifty. For comic relief, there was a clown driver parodying the daredevil stuff. All the while, the voice of Neil L. Blume, Edsel's engineering chief, could be heard on a loudspeaker, purring about "the capabilities, the safety, the ruggedness, the maneuverability and performance of these new cars," and skirting the words "speed" and "horsepower" as delicately as a sandpiper skirts a wave. At one point, when an Edsel leaping a high ramp just missed turning over,
Krafve's face took on a ghastly pallor; he later reported that he had not known the daredevil stunts were going to be so extreme, and was concerned both for the good name of the Edsel and the lives of the drivers. Warnock, noticing his boss's distress, went over and asked Krafve if he was enjoying the show. Krafve replied tersely that he would answer when it was over and all hands safe. But everyone else seemed to be having a grand time. The Foote, Cone man said, "You looked over this green Michigan hill, and there were those glorious Edsels, performing gloriously in unison. It was beautiful.
It was like the Rockettes. It was exciting. Morale was high."
Warnock's high spirits had carried him to even wilder extremes of fancy. The stunt driving, like the unveiling, was considered too rich for the blood of the wives, but the resourceful Warnock was ready for them with a fashion show that he hoped they would find at least equally diverting. He need not have worried. The star of the show, who was introduced by Brown, the Edsel stylist, as a Paris couturière, both beautiful and talented, turned out at the final curtain to be a female impersonator--a fact of which Warnock, to heighten the verisimilitude of the act, had given Brown no advance warning. Things were never again quite the same since between Brown and Warnock, but the wives were able to give their husbands an extra paragraph or two for their stories.
That evening, there was a big gala for one and all at the styling center, which was itself styled as a night club for the occasion, complete with a fountain that danced in time with the music of Ray McKinley's band, whose emblem, the letters "GM"--a holdover from the days of its founder, the late Glenn Miller--was emblazoned, as usual, on the music stand of each musician, very nearly ruining the evening for Warnock. The next morning, at a windup press conference held by Ford officials.
Breech declared of the Edsel, "It's a husky youngster, and, like most other new parents, we're proud enough to pop our buttons." Then seventy-one of the reporters took the wheels of as many Edsels and set out for home--not to drive the cars into their garages but to deliver them to the showrooms of their local Edsel dealers. Let Warnock describe the highlights of this final flourish: "There were several unfortunate occurrences. One guy simply miscalculated and cracked up his car running into something.
No fault of the Edsel there. One car lost its oil pan, so naturally the motor froze. It can happen to the best of cars. Fortunately, at the time of this malfunction the driver was going through a beautifulsounding town--Paradise, Kansas, I think it was--and that gave the news reports about it a nice little positive touch. The nearest dealer gave the reporter a new Edsel, and he drove on home, climbing Pikes Peak on the way. Then one car crashed through a tollgate when the brakes failed. That was bad.
It's funny, but the thing we were most worried about--other drivers being so eager to get a look at the Edsels that they'd crowd our cars off the road--happened only once. That was on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. One of our reporters was tooling along--no problems--when a Plymouth driver pulled up alongside to rubberneck, and edged so close that the Edsel got sideswiped. Minor damage."
LATE in 1959, immediately after the demise of the Edsel, Business Week stated that at the big press preview a Ford executive had said to a reporter, "If the company weren't in so deep, we never would have brought it out now." However, since Business Week neglected to publish this patently sensational statement for over two years, and since to this day all the former ranking Edsel executives (Krafve included, notwithstanding his preoccupation with the luckless dog-food company) firmly maintained that right up to Edsel Day and even for a short time thereafter they expected the Edsel to succeed, it would seem that the quotation should be regarded as a highly suspect archaeological find.
Indeed, during the period between the press preview and Edsel Day the spirit of everybody associated with the venture seems to have been one of wild optimism. "Oldsmobile, Goodbye!" ran the headline on an ad, in the Detroit Free Press, for an agency that was switching from Olds to Edsel.
A dealer in Portland, Oregon, reported that he had already sold two Edsels, sight unseen. Warnock dug up a fireworks company in Japan willing to make him, at nine dollars apiece, five thousand rockets that, exploding in mid-air, would release nine-foot scale-model Edsels made of rice paper that would inflate and descend like parachutes; his head reeling with visions of filling America's skies as well as its highways with Edsels on Edsel Day, Warnock was about to dash off an order when Krafve, looking something more than puzzled, shook his head.
On September 3rd--E Day-minus-one--the prices of the various Edsel models were announced; for cars delivered to New York they ran from just under $2,800 to just over $4,100. On E Day, the Edsel arrived. In Cambridge, a band led a gleaming motorcade of the new cars up Massachusetts Avenue; flying out of Richmond, California, a helicopter hired by one of the most jubilant of the dealers lassoed by Doyle spread a giant Edsel sign above San Francisco Bay; and all over the nation, from the Louisiana bayous to the peak of Mount Rainier to the Maine woods, one needed only a radio or a television set to know that the very air, despite Warnock's setback on the rockets, was quivering with the presence of the Edsel. The tone for Edsel Day's blizzard of publicity was set by an ad, published in newspapers all over the country, in which the Edsel shared the spotlight with the Ford Company's President Ford and Chairman Breech. In the ad, Ford looked like a dignified young father,
Breech like a dignified gentleman holding a full house against a possible straight, the Edsel just looked like an Edsel. The accompanying text declared that the decision to produce the car had been "based on what we knew, guessed, felt, believed, suspected--about you," and added, "YOU are the reason behind the Edsel." The tone was calm and confident. There did not seem to be much room for doubt about the reality of that full house.
Before sundown, it was estimated, 2,850,000 people had seen the new car in dealers' showrooms.
Three days later, in North Philadelphia, an Edsel was stolen. It can reasonably be argued that the crime marked the high-water mark of public acceptance of the Edsel; only a few months later, any but the least fastidious of car thieves might not have bothered.
DECLINE AND FALL
THE most striking physical characteristic of the Edsel was, of course, its radiator grille. This, in contrast to the wide and horizontal grilles of all nineteen other American makes of the time, was slender and vertical. Of chromium-plated steel, and shaped something like an egg, it sat in the middle of the car's front end, and was embellished by the word "EDSEL" in aluminum letters running down its length. It was intended to suggest the front end of practically any car of twenty or thirty years ago and of most contemporary European cars, and thus to look at once seasoned and sophisticated. The trouble was that whereas the front ends of the antiques and the European cars were themselves high and narrow--consisting, indeed, of little more than the radiator grilles--the front end of the Edsel was broad and low, just like the front ends of all its American competitors. Consequently, there were wide areas on either side of the grille that had to be filled in with something, and filled in they were --with twin panels of entirely conventional horizontal chrome grillwork. The effect was that of an Oldsmobile with the prow of a Pierce-Arrow implanted in its front end, or, more metaphorically, of the charwoman trying on the duchess' necklace. The attempt at sophistication was so transparent as to be endearing.
But if the grille of the Edsel appealed through guilelessness, the rear end was another matter. Here, too, there was a marked departure from the conventional design of the day. Instead of the notorious tail fin, the car had what looked to its fanciers like wings and to others, less ethereal-minded, like eyebrows. The lines of the trunk lid and the rear fenders, swooping upward and outward, did somewhat resemble the wings of a gull in flight, but the resemblance was marred by two long, narrow tail lights, set partly in the trunk lid and partly in the fenders, which followed those lines and created the startling illusion, especially at night, of a slant-eyed grin. From the front, the Edsel seemed, above all, anxious to please, even at the cost of being clownish; from the rear it looked crafty, Oriental, smug, one-up--maybe a little cynical and contemptuous, too. It was as if, somewhere between grille and rear fenders, a sinister personality change had taken place.
In other respects, the exterior styling of the Edsel was not far out of the ordinary. Its sides were festooned with a bit less than the average amount of chrome, and distinguished by a gouged-out bulletshaped groove extending forward from the rear fender for about half the length of the car. Midway along this groove, the word "EDSEL" was displayed in chrome letters, and just below the rear window was a small grille-like decoration, on which was spelled out--of all things--"EDSEL." (After all, hadn't Stylist Brown declared his intention to create a vehicle that would be "readily recognizable"?) In its interior, the Edsel strove mightily to live up to the prediction of General Manager Krafve that the car would be "the epitome of the push-button era." The push-button era in medium-priced cars being what it was, Krafve's had been a rash prophecy indeed, but the Edsel rose to it with a devilish assemblage of gadgets such as had seldom, if ever, been seen before. On or near the Edsel's dashboard were a push button that popped the trunk lid open; a lever that popped the hood open; a lever that released the parking brake; a speedometer that glowed red when the driver exceeded his chosen maximum speed; a single-dial control for both heating and cooling; a tachometer, in the best racing-car style; buttons to operate or regulate the lights, the height of the radio antenna, the heaterblower, the windshield wiper, and the cigarette lighter; and a row of eight red lights to wink warnings that the engine was too hot, that it wasn't hot enough, that the generator was on the blink, that the parking brake was on, that a door was open, that the oil pressure was low, that the oil level was low, and that the gasoline level was low, the last of which the skeptical driver could confirm by consulting the gas gauge, mounted a few inches away. Epitomizing this epitome, the automatic-transmission control box--arrestingly situated on top of the steering post, in the center of the wheel--sprouted a galaxy of five push buttons so light to the touch that, as Edsel men could hardly be restrained from demonstrating, they could be depressed with a toothpick.
Of the four lines of Edsels, both of the two larger and more expensive ones--the Corsair and the Citation--were 219 inches long, or two inches longer than the biggest of the Oldsmobiles; both were eighty inches wide, or about as wide as passenger cars ever get; and the height of both was only fiftyseven inches, as low as any other medium-priced car. The Ranger and the Pacer, the smaller Edsels, were six inches shorter, an inch narrower, and an inch lower than the Corsair and the Citation. The Corsair and the Citation were equipped with 345-horsepower engines, making them more powerful than any other American car at the time of their debut, and the Ranger and the Pacer were good for 303 horsepower, near the top in their class. At the touch of a toothpick to the "Drive" button, an idling Corsair or Citation sedan (more than two tons of car, in either case) could, if properly skippered, take off with such abruptness that in ten and three-tenths seconds it would be doing a mile a minute, and in seventeen and a half seconds it would be a quarter of a mile down the road. If anything or anybody happened to be in the way when the toothpick touched the push button, so much the worse.
WHEN the wraps were taken off the Edsel, it received what is known in the theatrical business as a mixed press. The automotive editors of the daily newspapers stuck mostly to straight descriptions of the car, with only here and there a phrase or two of appraisal, some of it ambiguous ("The difference in style is spectacular," noted Joseph C. Ingraham in the New York Times ) and some of it openly favorable ("A handsome and hard-punching newcomer," said Fred Olmstead, in the Detroit Free Press). Magazine criticism was generally more exhaustive and occasionally more severe. Motor Trend, the largest monthly devoted to ordinary automobiles, as distinct from hot rods, devoted eight pages of its October, 1957, issue to an analysis and critique of the Edsel by Joe H. Wherry, its Detroit editor. Wherry liked the car's appearance, its interior comfort, and its gadgets, although he did not always make it clear just why; in paying his respects to the transmission buttons on the steering post, he wrote, "You need not take your eyes off the road for an instant." He conceded that there were "untold opportunities for more ... unique approaches," but he summed up his opinion in a sentence that fairly peppered the Edsel with honorific adverbs: "The Edsel performs fine, rides well, and handles good." Tom McCahill, of Mechanix Illustrated, generally admired the "bolt bag," as he affectionately called the Edsel, but he had some reservations, which, incidentally, throw some interesting light on an automobile critic's equivalent of an aisle seat. "On ribbed concrete," he reported, "every time I shot the throttle to the floor quickly, the wheels spun like a gone-wild Waring Blendor.... At high speeds, especially through rough corners, I found the suspension a little too horsebacky.... I couldn't help but wonder what this salami would really do if it had enough road adhesion."
By far the most downright--and very likely the most damaging--panning that the Edsel got during its first months appeared in the January, 1958, issue of the Consumers Union monthly, Consumer Reports, whose 800,000 subscribers probably included more potential Edsel buyers than have ever turned the pages of Motor Trend or Mechanix Illustrated. After having put a Corsair through a series of road tests, Consumer Reports declared:
The Edsel has no important basic advantages over other brands. The car is almost entirely conventional in construction.... The amount of shake present in this Corsair body on rough roads--which wasn't long in making itself heard as squeaks and rattles--went well beyond any acceptable limit.... The Corsair's handling qualities--sluggish, over-slow steering, sway and lean on turns, and a general detachedfrom- the-road feel--are, to put it mildly, without distinction. As a matter of, simple fact, combined with the car's tendency to shake like jelly, Edsel handling represents retrogression rather than progress.... Stepping on the gas in traffic, or in passing cars, or just to feel the pleasurable surge of power, will cause those big cylinders really to lap up fuel.... The center of the steering wheel is not, in CU's opinion, a good pushbutton location.... To look at the Edsel buttons pulls the driver's eyes clear down off the road. [Pace Mr. Wherry.] The "luxury-loaded" Edsel--as one magazine cover described it--will certainly please anyone who confuses gadgetry with true luxury.
Three months later, in a roundup of all the 1958-model cars, Consumer Reports went at the Edsel again, calling it "more uselessly overpowered ... more gadget bedecked, more hung with expensive accessories than any car in its price class," and giving the Corsair and the Citation the bottom position in its competitive ratings. Like Krafve, Consumer Reports considered the Edsel an epitome; unlike Krafve, the magazine concluded that the car seemed to "epitomize the many excesses" with which Detroit manufacturers were "repulsing more and more potential car buyers."
AND yet, in a way, the Edsel wasn't so bad. It embodied much of the spirit of its time--or at least of the time when it was designed, early in 1955. It was clumsy, powerful, dowdy, gauche, well-meaning --a de Kooning woman. Few people, apart from employees of Foote, Cone & Belding, who were paid to do so, have adequately hymned its ability, at its best, to coax and jolly the harried owner into a sense of well-being. Furthermore, the designers of several rival makes, including Chevrolet, Buick, and Ford, Edsel's own stablemate, later flattered Brown's styling by imitating at least one feature of the car's much reviled lines--the rear-end wing theme. The Edsel was obviously jinxed, but to say that it was jinxed by its design alone would be an oversimplification, as it would be to say that it was jinxed by an excess of motivational research. The fact is that in the short, unhappy life of the Edsel a number of other factors contributed to its commercial downfall. One of these was the scarcely believable circumstance that many of the very first Edsels--those obviously destined for the most glaring public limelight--were dramatically imperfect. By its preliminary program of promotion and advertising, the Ford Company had built up an overwhelming head of public interest in the Edsel, causing its arrival to be anticipated and the car itself to be gawked at with more eagerness than had ever greeted any automobile before it. After all that, it seemed, the car didn't quite work. Within a few weeks after the Edsel was introduced, its pratfalls were the talk of the land. Edsels were delivered with oil leaks, sticking hoods, trunks that wouldn't open, and push buttons that, far from yielding to a toothpick, couldn't be budged with a hammer. An obviously distraught man staggered into a bar up the Hudson River, demanding a double shot without delay and exclaiming that the dashboard of his new Edsel had just burst into flame. Automotive News reported that in general the earliest Edsels suffered from poor paint, inferior sheet metal, and faulty accessories, and quoted the lament of a dealer about one of the first Edsel convertibles he received: "The top was badly set, doors cockeyed, the header bar trimmed at the wrong angle, and the front springs sagged." The Ford Company had the particular bad luck to sell to Consumers Union--which buys its test cars in the open market, as a precaution against being favored with specially doctored samples--an Edsel in which the axle ratio was wrong, an expansion plug in the cooling system blew out, the power-steering pump leaked, the rear-axle gears were noisy, and the heater emitted blasts of hot air when it was turned off.
A former executive of the Edsel Division has estimated that only about half of the first Edsels really performed properly.
A layman cannot help wondering how the Ford Company, in all its power and glory, could have been guilty of such a Mack Sennett routine of buildup and anticlimax. The wan, hard-working Krafve explains gamely that when a company brings out a new model of any make--even an old and tested one--the first cars often have bugs in them. A more startling theory--though only a theory--is that there may have been sabotage in some of the four plants that assembled the Edsel, all but one of which had previously been, and currently also were, assembling Fords or Mercurys. In marketing the Edsel, the Ford Company took a leaf out of the book of General Motors, which for years had successfully been permitting, and even encouraging, the makers and sellers of its Oldsmobiles,
Buicks, Pontiacs, and the higher-priced models of its Chevrolet to fight for customers with no quarter given; faced with the same sort of intramural competition, some members of the Ford and Lincoln-Mercury Divisions of the Ford Company openly hoped from the start for the Edsel's downfall.
(Krafve, realizing what might happen, had asked that the Edsel be assembled in plants of its own, but his superiors turned him down.) However, Doyle, speaking with the authority of a veteran of the automobile business as well as with that of Krafve's second-in-command, pooh-poohs the notion that the Edsel was the victim of dirty work at the plants. "Of course the Ford and Lincoln-Mercury Divisions didn't want to see another Ford Company car in the field," he says, "but as far as I know, anything they did at the executive and plant levels was in competitive good taste. On the other hand, at the distribution and dealer level, you got some rough infighting in terms of whispering and propaganda. If I'd been in one of the other divisions, I'd have done the same thing." No proud defeated general of the old school ever spoke more nobly.
It is a tribute of sorts to the men who gave the Edsel its big buildup that although cars tending to rattle, balk, and fall apart into shiny heaps of junk kept coming off the assembly lines, things didn't go badly at first. Doyle says that on Edsel Day more than 6,500 Edsels were either ordered by or actually delivered to customers. That was a good showing, but there were isolated signs of resistance. For instance, a New England dealer selling Edsels in one showroom and Buicks in another reported that two prospects walked into the Edsel showroom, took a look at the Edsel, and placed orders for Buicks on the spot.
In the next few days, sales dropped sharply, but that was to be expected once the bloom was off.
Automobile deliveries to dealers--one of the important indicators in the trade--are customarily measured in ten-day periods, and during the first ten days of September, on only six of which the Edsel was on sale, it racked up 4,095; this was lower than Doyle's first-day figure because many of the initial purchases were of models and color combinations not in stock, which had to be factoryassembled to order. The delivery total for the second ten-day period was off slightly, and that for the third was down to just under 3,600. For the first ten days of October, nine of which were business days, there were only 2,751 deliveries--an average of just over three hundred cars a day. In order to sell the 200,000 cars per year that would make the Edsel operation profitable the Ford Company would have to move an average of between six and seven hundred each business day--a good many more than three hundred a day. On the night of Sunday, October 13th, Ford put on a mammoth television spectacular for Edsel, pre-empting the time ordinarily allotted to the Ed Sullivan show, but though the program cost $400,000 and starred Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra, it failed to cause any sharp spurt in sales. Now it was obvious that things were not going at all well.
Among the former executives of the Edsel Division, opinions differ as to the exact moment when the portents of doom became unmistakable. Krafve feels that the moment did not arrive until sometime late in October. Wallace, in his capacity as Edsel's pipe-smoking semi-Brain Truster, goes a step further by pinning the start of the disaster to a specific date--October 4th, the day the first Soviet sputnik went into orbit, shattering the myth of American technical pre-eminence and precipitating a public revulsion against Detroit's fancier baubles. Public Relations Director Warnock maintains that his barometric sensitivity to the public temper enabled him to call the turn as early as mid-September; contrariwise, Doyle says he maintained his optimism until mid-November, by which time he was about the only man in the division who had not concluded it would take a miracle to save the Edsel.
"In November," says Wallace, sociologically, "there was panic, and its concomitant--mob action."
The mob action took the form of a concerted tendency to blame the design of the car for the whole debacle; Edsel men who had previously had nothing but lavish praise for the radiator grille and rear end now went around muttering that any fool could see they were ludicrous. The obvious sacrificial victim was Brown, whose stock had gone through the roof at the time of the regally accoladed debut of his design, in August, 1955. Now, without having done anything further, for either better or worse, the poor fellow became the company scapegoat. "Beginning in November, nobody talked to Roy,"
Wallace says. On November 27th, as if things weren't bad enough, Charles Kreisler, who as the only Edsel dealer in Manhattan provided its prize showcase, announced that he was turning in his franchise because of poor sales, and it was rumored that he added, "The Ford Motor Company has laid an egg." He thereupon signed up with American Motors to sell its Rambler, which, as the only domestic small car then on the market, was already the possessor of a zooming sales curve. Doyle grimly commented that the Edsel Division was "not concerned" about Kreisler's defection.
By December, the panic at Edsel had abated to the point where its sponsors could pull themselves together and begin casting about for ways to get sales moving again. Henry Ford II, manifesting himself to Edsel dealers on closed-circuit television, urged them to remain calm, promised that the company would back them to the limit, and said flatly, "The Edsel is here to stay." A million and a half letters went out over Krafve's signature to owners of medium-priced cars, asking them to drop around at their local dealers and test-ride the Edsel; everyone doing so, Krafve promised, would be given an eight-inch plastic scale model of the car, whether he bought a full-size one or not. The Edsel Division picked up the check for the scale models--a symptom of desperation indeed, for under normal circumstances no automobile manufacturer would make even a move to outfumble its dealers for such a tab. (Up to that time, the dealers had paid for everything, as is customary.) The division also began offering its dealers what it called "sales bonuses," which meant that the dealers could knock anything from one hundred to three hundred dollars off the price of each car without reducing their profit margin. Krafve told a reporter that sales up to then were about what he had expected them to be, although not what he had hoped they would be; in his zeal not to seem unpleasantly surprised, he appeared to be saying that he had expected the Edsel to fail. The Edsel's advertising campaign, which had started with studied dignity, began to sound a note of stridency. "Everyone who has seen it knows--with us--that the Edsel is a success," a magazine ad declared, and in a later ad this phrase was twice repeated, like an incantation: "The Edsel is a success. It is a new idea--a YOU idea--on the American Road.... The Edsel is a success." Soon the even less high-toned but more dependable advertising themes of price and social status began to intrude, in such sentences as "They'll know you've arrived when you drive up in an Edsel" and "The one that's really new is the lowest-priced, too!" In the more rarefied sectors of Madison Avenue, a resort to rhymed slogans is usually regarded as an indication of artistic depravity induced by commercial necessity.
From the frantic and costly measures the Edsel Division took in December, it garnered one tiny crumb: for the first ten-day period of 1958, it was able to report, sales were up 18.6 percent over those of the last ten days of 1957. The catch, as the Wall Street Journal alertly noted, was that the latter period embraced one more selling day than the earlier one, so, for practical purposes, there had scarcely been a gain at all. In any case, that early-January word of meretricious cheer turned out to be the Edsel Division's last gesture. On January 14, 1958, the Ford Motor Company announced that it was consolidating the Edsel Division with the Lincoln-Mercury Division to form a Mercury-Edsel-Lincoln Division, under the management of James J. Nance, who had been running Lincoln-Mercury.
It was the first time that one of the major automobile companies had lumped three divisions into one since General Motors' merger of Buick, Oldsmobile, and Pontiac back in the depression, and to the people of the expunged Edsel Division the meaning of the administrative move was all too clear.
"With that much competition in a division, the Edsel wasn't going anywhere," Doyle says. "It became a stepchild."
FOR the last year and ten months of its existence, the Edsel was very much a stepchild--generally neglected, little advertised, and kept alive only to avoid publicizing a boner any more than necessary and in the forlorn hope that it might go somewhere after all. What advertising it did get strove quixotically to assure the automobile trade that everything was dandy; in mid-February an ad in Automotive News had Nance saying,
Since the formation of the new M-E-L Division at Ford Motor Company, we have analyzed with keen interest the sales progress of the Edsel. We think it is quite significant that during the five months since the Edsel was introduced, Edsel sales have been greater than the first five months' sales for any other new make of car ever introduced on the American Road.... Edsel's steady progress can be a source of satisfaction and a great incentive to all of us.
Nance's comparison, however, was almost meaningless, no new make ever having been introduced anything like so grandiosely, and the note of confidence could not help ringing hollow.
It is quite possible that Nance's attention was never called to an article by S. I. Hayakawa, the semanticist, that was published in the spring of 1958 in ETC: A Review of General Semantics, a quarterly magazine, under the title, "Why the Edsel Laid an Egg." Hayakawa, who was both the founder and the editor of ETC, explained in an introductory note that he considered the subject within the purview of general semantics because automobiles, like words, are "important ... symbols in American culture," and went on to argue that the Edsel's flop could be attributed to Ford Company executives who had been "listening too long to the motivation-research people" and who, in their efforts to turn out a car that would satisfy customers' sexual fantasies and the like, had failed to supply reasonable and practical transportation, thereby neglecting "the reality principle." "What the motivation researchers failed to tell their clients ... is that only the psychotic and the gravely neurotic act out their irrationalities and their compensatory fantasies," Hayakawa admonished Detroit briskly, and added, "The trouble with selling symbolic gratification via such expensive items as ... the Edsel Hermaphrodite ... is the competition offered by much cheaper forms of symbolic gratification, such as Playboy (fifty cents a copy), Astounding Science Fiction (thirty-five cents a copy), and television (free)."
Notwithstanding the competition from Playboy, or possibly because the symbol-motivated public included people who could afford both, the Edsel kept rolling--but just barely. The car moved, as salesmen say, though hardly at the touch of a toothpick. In fact, as a stepchild it sold about as well as it had sold as a favorite son, suggesting that all the hoopla, whether about symbolic gratification or mere horsepower, had had little effect one way or the other. The new Edsels that were registered with the motor-vehicle bureaus of the various states during 1958 numbered 34,481--considerably fewer than new cars of any competing make, and less than one-fifth of the 200,000 a year necessary if the Edsel was to show a profit, but still representing an investment by motorists of over a hundred million dollars. The picture actually brightened in November, 1958, with the advent of the Edsel's second-year models. Shorter by up to eight inches, lighter by up to five hundred pounds, and with engines less potent by as much as 158 horsepower, they had a price range running from five hundred to eight hundred dollars less than that of their predecessors. The vertical grille and the slant-eyed rear end were still there, but the modest power and proportions persuaded Consumer Reports to relent and say, "The Ford Motor Company, after giving last year's initial Edsel model a black eye, has made a respectable and even likable automobile of it." Quite a number of motorists seemed to agree; about two thousand more Edsels were sold in the first half of 1959 than had been sold in the first half of 1958, and by the early summer of 1959 the car was moving at the rate of around four thousand a month. Here, at last, was progress; sales were at almost a quarter of the minimum profitable rate, instead of a mere fifth.
On July 1, 1959, there were 83,849 Edsels on the country's roads. The largest number (8,344) were in California, which is perennially beset with far and away the largest number of cars of practically all makes, and the smallest number were in Alaska, Vermont, and Hawaii (122, 119, and 110, respectively). All in all, the Edsel seemed to have found a niche for itself as an amusingly eccentric curiosity. Although the Ford Company, with its stockholders' money still disappearing week after week into the Edsel, and with small cars now clearly the order of the day, could scarcely affect a sentimental approach to the subject, it nonetheless took an outside chance and, in mid-October of 1959, brought out a third series of annual models. The 1960 Edsel appeared a little more than a month after the Falcon, Ford's first--and instantly successful--venture into the small-car field, and was scarcely an Edsel at all; gone were both the vertical grille and the horizontal rear end, and what remained looked like a cross between a Ford Fairlane and a Pontiac. Its initial sales were abysmal; by the middle of November only one plant--in Louisville, Kentucky--was still turning out Edsels, and it was turning out only about twenty a day. On November 19th, the Ford Foundation, which was planning to sell a block of its vast holdings of stock in the Ford Motor Company, issued the prospectus that is required by law under such circumstances, and stated therein, in a footnote to a section describing the company's products, that the Edsel had been "introduced in September 1957 and discontinued in November 1959." The same day, this mumbled admission was confirmed and amplified by a Ford Company spokesman, who did some mumbling of his own. "If we knew the reason people aren't buying the Edsel, we'd probably have done something about it," he said.
The final quantitative box score shows that from the beginning right up to November 19th, 110,810 Edsels were produced and 109,466 were sold. (The remaining 1,344, almost all of them 1960 models, were disposed of in short order with the help of drastic price cuts.) All told, only 2,846 of the 1960 Edsels were ever produced, making models of that year a potential collector's item. To be sure, it will be generations before 1960 Edsels are as scarce as the Type 41 Bugatti, of which no more than eleven specimens were made, back in the late twenties, to be sold only to bona-fide kings, and the 1960 Edsel's reasons for being a rarity are not exactly as acceptable, socially or commercially, as the Type 41 Bugatti's. Still, a 1960-Edsel Owners' Club may yet appear.
The final fiscal box score on the Edsel fiasco will probably never be known, because the Ford Motor Company's public reports do not include breakdowns of gains and losses within the individual divisions. Financial buffs estimate, however, that the company lost something like $200 million on the Edsel after it appeared; add to this the officially announced expenditure of $250 million before it appeared, subtract about a hundred million invested in plant and equipment that were salvageable for other uses, and the net loss is $350 million. If these estimates are right, every Edsel the company manufactured cost it in lost money about $3,200, or about the price of another one. In other, harsher words, the company would have saved itself money if, back in 1955, it had decided not to produce the Edsel at all but simply to give away 110,810 specimens of its comparably priced car, the Mercury.
THE end of the Edsel set off an orgy of hindsight in the press. Time declared, "The Edsel was a classic case of the wrong car for the wrong market at the wrong time. It was also a prime example of the limitations of market research, with its 'depth interviews' and 'motivational' mumbo-jumbo."
Business Week, which shortly before the Edsel made its bow had described it with patent solemnity and apparent approval, now pronounced it "a nightmare" and appended a few pointedly critical remarks about Wallace's research, which was rapidly achieving a scapegoat status equal to that of Brown's design. (Jumping up and down on motivational research was, and is, splendid sport, but, of course, the implication that it dictated, or even influenced, the Edsel's design is entirely false, since the research, being intended only to provide a theme for advertising and promotion, was not undertaken until after Brown had completed his design.) The Wall Street Journal's obituary of the Edsel made a point that was probably sounder, and certainly more original.
Large corporations are often accused of rigging markets, administering prices, and otherwise dictating to the consumer [it observed].
And yesterday Ford Motor Company announced its two-year experiment with the medium-priced Edsel has come to an end ... for want of buyers. All this is quite a ways from auto makers being able to rig markets or force consumers to take what they want them to take... And the reason, simply, is that there is no accounting for tastes.... When it comes to dictating, the consumer is the dictator without peer.
The tone of the piece was friendly and sympathetic; the Ford Company, it seemed, had endeared itself to the Journal by playing the great American situation-comedy role of Daddy the Bungler.
As for the post-mortem explanations of the debacle that have been offered by former Edsel executives, they are notable for their reflective tone--something like that of a knocked-out prize fighter opening his eyes to find an announcer's microphone pushed into his face. In fact, Krafve, like many a flattened pugilist, blames his own bad timing; he contends that if he had been able to thwart the apparently immutable mechanics and economics of Detroit, and had somehow been able to bring out the Edsel in 1955, or even 1956, when the stock market and the medium-priced-car market were riding high, the car would have done well and would still be doing well. That is to say, if he had seen the punch coming, he would have ducked. Krafve refuses to go along with a sizable group of laymen who tend to attribute the collapse to the company's decision to call the car the Edsel instead of giving it a brisker, more singable name, reducible to a nickname other than "Ed" or "Eddie," and not freighted with dynastic connotations. As far as he can see, Krafve still says, the Edsel's name did not affect its fortunes one way or the other.
Brown agrees with Krafve that bad timing was the chief mistake. "I frankly feel that the styling of the automobile had very little, if anything, to do with its failure," he said later, and his frankness may pretty safely be left unchallenged. "The Edsel program, like any other project planned for future markets, was based on the best information available at the time in which decisions were made. The road to Hell is paved with good intentions!"
Doyle, with the born salesman's intensely personal feeling about his customers, talks like a man betrayed by a friend--the American public. "It was a buyers' strike," he says. "People weren't in the mood for the Edsel. Why not is a mystery to me. What they'd been buying for several years encouraged the industry to build exactly this kind of car. We gave it to them, and they wouldn't take it.
Well, they shouldn't have acted like that. You can't just wake up somebody one day and say, 'That's enough, you've been running in the wrong direction.' Anyway, why did they do it? Golly, how the industry worked and worked over the years--getting rid of gear-shifting, providing interior comfort, providing plus performance for use in emergencies! And now the public wants these little beetles. I don't get it!"
Wallace's sputnik theory provides an answer to Doyle's question about why people weren't in the mood, and, furthermore, it is sufficiently cosmic to befit a semi-Brain Truster. It also leaves Wallace free to defend the validity of his motivational-research studies as of the time when they were conducted. "I don't think we yet know the depths of the psychological effect that that first orbiting had on us all," he says. "Somebody had beaten us to an important gain in technology, and immediately people started writing articles about how crummy Detroit products were, particularly the heavily ornamented and status-symbolic medium-priced cars. In 1958, when none of the small cars were out except the Rambler, Chevy almost ran away with the market, because it had the simplest car. The American people had put themselves on a self-imposed austerity program. Not buying Edsels was their hair shirt."
TO any relics of the sink-or-swim nineteenth-century days of American industry, it must seem strange that Wallace can afford to puff on his pipe and analyze the holocaust so amiably. The obvious point of the Edsel's story is the defeat of a giant motor company, but what is just as surprising is that the giant did not come apart, or even get seriously hurt in the fall, and neither did the majority of the people who went down with him. Owing largely to the success of four of its other cars--the Ford, the Thunderbird, and, later on the small Falcon and Comet and then the Mustang--the Ford Company, as an investment, survived gloriously. True, it had a bad time of it in 1958, when, partly because of the Edsel, net income per share of its stock fell from $5.40 to $2.12, dividends per share from $2.40 to $2.00, and the market price of its stock from a 1957 high of about $60 to a 1958 low of under $40.
But all these losses were more than recouped in 1959, when net income per share was $8.24, dividends per share were $2.80, and the price of the stock reached a high of around $90. In 1960 and 1961, things went even better. So the 280,000 Ford stockholders listed on the books in 1957 had had little to complain about unless they had sold at the height of the panic. On the other hand, six thousand white-collar workers were squeezed out of their jobs as a result of the Mercury-Edsel-Lincoln consolidation, and the average number of Ford employees fell from 191,759 in 1957 to 142,076 the following year, climbing back to only 159,541 in 1959. And, of course, dealers who gave up profitable franchises in other makes and then went broke trying to sell Edsels weren't likely to be very cheerful about the experience. Under the terms of the consolidation of the Lincoln-Mercury and Edsel Divisions, most of the agencies for the three makes were consolidated, too. In the consolidation, some Edsel dealers were squeezed out, and it can have been small comfort to those of them who went bankrupt to learn later that when the Ford Company finally discontinued making the car, it agreed to pay those of their former colleagues who had weathered the crisis one-half of the original cost of their Edsel signs, and was granting them substantial rebates on all Edsels in stock at the time of discontinuance. Still, automobile dealers, some of whom work on credit margins as slim as those of Miami hotel operators, occasionally go broke with even the most popular cars. And among those who earn their living in the rough-and-tumble world of automobile salesrooms, where Detroit is not always spoken of with affection, many will concede that the Ford Company, once it had found itself stuck with a lemon, did as much as it reasonably could to bolster dealers who had cast their lot with Edsel. A spokesman for the National Automobile Dealers Association has since stated,
"So far as we know, the Edsel dealers were generally satisfied with the way they were treated."
Foote, Cone & Belding also ended up losing money on the Edsel account, since its advertising commissions did not entirely compensate for the extraordinary expense it had gone to of hiring sixty new people and opening up a posh office in Detroit. But its losses were hardly irreparable; the minute there were no more Edsels to advertise, it was hired to advertise Lincolns, and although that arrangement did not last very long, the firm has happily survived to sing the praises of such clients as General Foods, Lever Brothers, and Trans World Airways. A rather touching symbol of the loyalty that the agency's employees have for its former client is the fact that for several years after 1959, on every workday its private parking lot in Chicago was still dotted with Edsels. These faithful drivers, incidentally, are not unique. If Edsel owners have not found the means to a dream fulfillment, and if some of them for a while had to put up with harrowing mechanical disorders, many of them more than a decade later cherish their cars as if they were Confederate bills, and on Used Car Row the Edsel is a high-premium item, with few cars being offered.
By and large, the former Edsel executives did not just land on their feet, they landed in clover.
Certainly no one can accuse the Ford Company of giving vent to its chagrin in the old-fashioned way, by vulgarly causing heads to roll. Krafve was assigned to assist Robert S. McNamara, at that time a Ford divisional vice-president (and later, of course, Secretary of Defense), for a couple of months, and then he moved to a staff job in company headquarters, stayed there for about a year, and left to become a vice-president of the Raytheon Company, of Waltham, Massachusetts, a leading electronics firm. In April, 1960, he was made its president. In the middle sixties he left to become a high-priced management consultant on the West Coast. Doyle, too, was offered a staff job with Ford, but after taking a trip abroad to think it over he decided to retire. "It was a question of my relationship to my dealers," he explains. "I had assured them that the company was fully behind the Edsel for keeps, and I didn't feel that I was the fellow to tell them now that it wasn't." After his retirement, Doyle remained about as busy as ever, keeping an eye on various businesses in which he has set up various friends and relatives, and conducting a consulting business of his own in Detroit. About a month before Edsel's consolidation with Mercury and Lincoln, Warnock, the publicity man, left the division to become director of news services for the International Telephone & Telegraph Corp., in New York --a position he left in June, 1960, to become vice-president of Communications Counselors, the public-relations arm of McCann-Erickson. From there he went back to Ford, as Eastern promotion chief for Lincoln-Mercury--a case of a head that had not rolled but had instead been anointed.
Brown, the embattled stylist, stayed on in Detroit for a while as chief stylist of Ford commercial vehicles and then went with the Ford Motor Company, Ltd., of England, where, again as chief stylist, he was assigned to direct the design of Consuls, Anglias, trucks, and tractors. He insisted that this post didn't represent the Ford version of Siberia. "I have found it to be a most satisfying experience, and one of the best steps I have ever taken in my ... career," he stated firmly in a letter from England.
"We are building a styling office and a styling team second to none in Europe." Wallace, the semi-
Brain Truster, was asked to continue semi-Brain Trusting for Ford, and, since he still didn't like living in Detroit, or near it, was permitted to move to New York and to spend only two days a week at headquarters. ("They didn't seem to care any more where I operated from," he says modestly.) At the end of 1958, he left Ford, and he has since finally achieved his heart's desire--to become a fulltime scholar and teacher. He set about getting a doctorate in sociology at Columbia, writing his thesis on social change in Westport, Connecticut, which he investigated by busily quizzing its inhabitants; meanwhile, he taught a course on "The Dynamics of Social Behavior" at the New School for Social Research, in Greenwich Village. "I'm through with industry," he was heard to declare one day, with evident satisfaction, as he boarded a train for Westport, a bundle of questionnaires under his arm.
Early in 1962, he became Dr. Wallace.
The subsequent euphoria of these former Edsel men did not stem entirely from the fact of their economic survival; they appear to have been enriched spiritually. They are inclined to speak of their Edsel experience--except for those still with Ford, who are inclined to speak of it as little as possible--with the verve and garrulity of old comrades-in-arms hashing over their most thrilling campaign. Doyle is perhaps the most passionate reminiscer in the group. "It was more fun than I've ever had before or since," he told a caller in 1960. "I suppose that's because I worked the hardest ever. We all did. It was a good crew. The people who came with Edsel knew they were taking a chance, and I like people who'll take chances. Yes, it was a wonderful experience, in spite of the unfortunate thing that happened. And we were on the right track, too! When I went to Europe just before retiring, I saw how it is there--nothing but compact cars, yet they've still got traffic jams over there, they've still got parking problems, they've still got accidents. Just try getting in and out of those low taxicabs without hitting your head, or try not to get clipped while you're walking around the Arc de Triomphe. This small-car thing won't last forever. I can't see American drivers being satisfied for long with manual gear-shifting and limited performance. The pendulum will swing back."
Warnock, like many a public-relations man before him, claims that his job gave him an ulcer--his second. "But I got over it," he says. "That great Edsel team--I'd just like to see what it could have done if it had had the right product at the right time. It could have made millions, that's what! The whole thing was two years out of my life that I'll never forget. It was history in the making. Doesn't it all tell you something about America in the fifties--high hopes, and less than complete fulfillment of them?"
Krafve, the boss of the great team manqué, is entirely prepared to testify that there is more to his former subordinates' talk than just the romantic vaporings of old soldiers. "It was a wonderful group to work with," he said not long ago. "They really put their hearts and guts into the job. I'm interested in a crew that's strongly motivated, and that one was. When things went bad, the Edsel boys could have cried about how they'd given up wonderful opportunities to come with us, but if anybody did, I never heard about it. I'm not surprised that they've mostly come out all right. In industry, you take a bump now and then, but you bounce back as long as you don't get defeated inside. I like to get together with somebody once in a while--Gayle Warnock or one of the others--and go over the humorous incidents, the tragic incidents...."
Whether the nostalgia of the Edsel boys for the Edsel runs to the humorous or to the tragic, it is a thought-provoking phenomenon. Maybe it means merely that they miss the limelight they first basked in and later squirmed in, or maybe it means that a time has come when--as in Elizabethan drama but seldom before in American business--failure can have a certain grandeur that success never knows.
Tags: Book Summary,Investment,Management,
