The American Automotive Industry Between WWI and WWII: The Independents, the Rickenbacker, and the Jordan

 images from Detroit Public Library Digital Collections

The Independents

            To place the entire focus of the discussion on Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler would distort the nature of the automobile industry’s history during the 1920s, for there were many other automobile manufacturers during the decade. The industry was not quite yet mature, and consequently entry was still possible, and a number of marques were both innovative and popular. A shakeout would take place with the onset of the Great Depression, but even during the grim 1930s a number of smaller prodders hung on. The following chart lists a number of American car manufacturers⁴⁴, although two electric car manufacturers – Detroit and Rauch & Lang, are excluded.

Auburn	Franklin	Peerless
Buick	Gardner	Pierce Arrow
Cadillac	Hertz	Pontiac
Case	Hudson	Reo
Chandler	Hupmobile	Rickenbacker
Chevrolet	Jordan	Roamer
Chrysler	Kleiber	Rolls Royce
Cunningham	Lincoln	Star
Davis	Locomobile	Stearns
Diana	Marmon	Studebaker
Dodge Brothers	McFarlan	Stutz
DuPont	Moon	Vehie
Elcar	Nash	Wills St. Clair
Erskine	Oakland	Willis Knight
Essex	Oldsmobile
Falcon-Knight	Overland
Flint	Packard
Ford	Paige

 

            Given the complexity of the automobile market during the 1920s, it is impossible here to discuss the corporate histories of each of these firms. However, case studies of a few of these “orphan” marques may be instructive.

Innovation at the Periphery:  The Cracker Jacker, Rickenbacker

View of Eddie Rickenbacker posing with Rickenbacker car. Two unidentified men sit in car; spectators watch from grandstand in background. "AAA Contest Board" painted on side of car

            The Rickenbacker automobile, advertised as “a car worthy of its name,” was manufactured in Detroit between 1921 and 1927.⁴⁵ Named after Captain Eddie Rickenbacker, America’s “ace of aces” during World War I and the commander of the “Hat in the Ring” squadron, the Rickenbacker was designed along the lines outlined by former auto racer “Captain Eddie’s” specifications. In 1919 Rickenbacker decided that he would build a car that incorporated such race-proven advanced features as a rigid frame, 4-wheel brakes, and a high standard of construction. Envisioned as fitting in the market somewhere between the low-end Ford Model T and the far higher priced Cadillac and Packard, it was to be affordable to white-collar workers, prosperous farmers, and “women of taste.”

            Rickenbacker sold his ideas to Maxwell executive Harry L. Cunningham, who subsequently recruited an impressive management team. Among the new firm’s executives were coach builder Barney F. Everitt and Walter E. Flanders, formerly the production manager at Ford. With Cunningham as Secretary and Treasurer and Rickenbacker as Vice President and Sales Manager, the Rickenbacker Motor Company was initially well positioned.

            During 1921 a six-cylinder prototype was built and tested, $5 million worth of stock was sold, and a plant with a 12,000 unit capacity was acquired. Three Rickenbacker models debuted in 1922 – a Tourer, Opera Coupe, and Closed Sedan – and more than 3,700 cars were sold, resulting in a 5 percent stock dividend.

            Rickenbacker six- and eight-cylinder models gained a reputation for innovative technology and enhanced safety features. For example, while not the first American automobile to offer 4-wheel brakes, the Rickenbacker was the first moderately-priced car to do so. Other advances not found in less expensive models included a low vibration flywheel engine, ignition and transmission locks, and an ingenious system to purify engine oil and avoid crankcase dilution, a carburetor air cleaner, and automatic windshield washer. The proud owner of a Rickenbacker could sing along to the popular tune “Merrily I roll along and there’s nothing wrong . . . in my cracker jacker, Rickenbacker.”⁴⁶

            But in fact storm clouds soon passed over the fledgling firm, and it began to experience production and financial difficulties. By then, Walter Flanders had died the result of an unfortunate accident. Handicapped with small profit margins, Everitt cut prices without consulting dealers and stockholders. Marginal dealers went bankrupt, stockholders and management squabbled, and in 1926 Captain Eddie resigned. Everitt was now on his own and on borrowed time, and the company closed its doors in February 1927. Its machinery and engines were later sold to German industrialist J. A. Rassmussen, who used Rickenbacker engines in his Audi Dresden Sixes and Zwickau Eights between 1928 and 1932.

            Like the Richelieu, Saxon, Dort, Flint, Winton, King Jewett, Wills Ste. Clair and numerous other Midwestern automobile companies, the Rickenbacker could not survive competition from more highly capitalized and cost-efficient firms, even during America’s prosperity decade of the 1920s.

The Jordan and Advertising the Dream

Advertisement for Jordan cars from the Saturday Evening Post. Text reads: "Somewhere west of Laramie. Somewhere west of Laramie there's a broncho-busting, steer-roping girl who knows what I'm talking about. She can tell what a sassy pony, that's a cross between greased lightning and the place where it hits, can do with eleven hundred pounds of steel and action when he's going high, wide and handsome. The truth is -- the Playboy was built for her. Built for the lass whose face is brown with the sun when the day is one of revel and romp and race. She loves the cross of the wild and the tame. There's a savor of links about that car -- of laughter and lilt and light -- a hint of old loves -- and saddle and quirt. It's a brawny thing -- yet a graceful thing for the sweep o' the Avenue. Step into the Playboy when the hour grows dull with things gone dead and stale. Then start for the land of real living with the spirit of the lass who rides, lean and rangy, into the red horizon of a Wyoming twilight. Jordan Motor Car Company, Inc. Cleveland, Ohio." Typed on front: "Edward S. Jordan."

View of 1930 Jordan car in showroom. "Jordan" sign on back wall. Stamped on back: "Lazarnick, photographic illustrations, 230 Park Avenue, New York Central Building, New York City, Tel. Vanderbilt 3-0011-2-3-4." Handwritten on back: "Jordan, 1930."

            The Jordan automobile presents a different story but with a similar ending. The Jordon was the result of the vision and energy of Edward S. “Ned” Jordan. Born in 1881 and educated at the University of Wisconsin, Jordan’s career included a stint in advertising at the National Cash Register Company in Dayton and in a similar position with the Jeffery Automobile Company, located in Kenosha, Wisconsin. In 1916, Jordan organized his own automobile company, located in Cleveland, Ohio, with the idea that the firm’s vehicles would manufacture cars that cost not quite as much as a Cadillac but more than a Buick. Always relatively expensive and assembled from parts, engines, and bodies made elsewhere, about 80,000 units were sold between 1916 and 1931. Normally priced over $2,000, the Jordan was marketed at the well-to-do.

            The Jordon was noteworthy for several reasons. Ned Jordan had an uncanny understanding of well-to-do American consumers from the point of view of color, and from the firm’s origins, his cars could be ordered in a number of unusual shades, long before the color revolution of the late 1920s. Thus, as early as 1917 Jordan cars could be purchased in colors such as Liberty Blue, Pershing Gray, Italian Tan, Jordan Maroon, Mercedes Red, and Venetian Green. And when the “True Blue” Oakland was introduced in 1923, Jordan quickly followed with its 1923 Blue Boy model. Secondly, Jordan understood the post-WWI youth market and responded with the marque’s most famous model, the Playboy. Supposedly, the Playboy idea was the result of Ned’s dance with a 19-year old Philadelphia socialite, who quipped, “Mr. Jordan, why don’t you build a car for the girl who loves to swim, paddle and shoot and for the boy who loves the roar of a cut out?”⁴⁷ Ned would later refer to this as a million dollar idea, and the Playboy was born. Finally, Jordan was a flamboyant advertising copywriter, and it would be in his Playboy ad copy written in 1923, “Somewhere West of Laramie,” that American automobile advertising would be transformed.

While there is little doubt that twentieth century advertisements serve as important cultural documents, there is considerable debate as to their meaning.⁴⁸ In his Understanding Media (1964), Marshall McLuhan asserted that “historians . . . will one day discover that the ads of our times are the richest and most faithful daily reflections that any society ever made of its entire range of activities.” This is especially true in a capitalist economy, where consumption and persuasion are so important. Raymond Williams insightfully labeled advertising as capitalism’s “official art.” With regard to advertising, the work of Judith Williamson, Roland Marchand and William O’Barr all significantly contribute to an understanding of its meaning. Williamson’s Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertising provides the reader with a step-by-step guide in the dissection of an advertisement. Marchand’s Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity is a powerful example of how a cultural historian can employ advertising to reconstruct the past. And O’ Barr’s work, while primarily aimed at using advertising to illuminate discursive themes in social history that include hierarchy, power, relationships, and dominance, has an excellent synthetic theoretical introduction. O’Barr follows along the lines of Marchand in arguing that social and cultural values appearing in advertisements are more a refraction than a representation. The two scholars also agree that audience response, while important to copywriters, is beyond the scope of the historian, and at any rate problematic. Past audience responses are simply impossible to accurately reconstruct. In the present, there is no simple way to ascertain meaning, for meaning involves the interplay of the naive with the critical, and thus there is an ultimate variance among interpreters. The problems associated with the use of advertising, however, can be extended to many, if not all of the various manuscript, textual, visual, and oral sources used by the historian.

            In the early days of automobile advertising, the features of an automobile were often emphasized. For example an ad for the new 1917 seven passenger Oldsmobile claimed that

            This light weight, eight cylinder car combines power, acceleration, speed, economy, comfort, beauty, and luxury in a measure hitherto undreamed of in alight car. The eight-cylinder motor, developing 58 horsepower at 2,6000 r.p.m., with the light weight of the car – 3,000 pounds – presents a proportion of power to total car weight of approximately one horsepower to every 51 pounds – an unusually favorable ratio. The comfort of the car is beyond description. Long, flat, flexible springs and perfect balance of chassis insure easy riding under any kind of going. The seats, upholstered with fine, long grain French leather stuffed with pliant springs encased in linen sacks, increase comfort to the point of luxury.

            This style of advertising was swept aside by the mid-1920s. In 1923, Edward S. Jordan created the most famous auto ad of all time to move his colorful Playboy Roadsters.⁴⁹ Jordan had a gift for writing advertising copy; in 1920 a Playboy ad suggested a visit to a local bordello:

            Somewhere far beyond the place where man and motors race through canyons of the town – there lies the Port of Missing Men.

            It may be in the valley of our dreams of youth, or the heights of future happy days.

            Go there in November when logs are blazing in the grate. Go there in a Jordan Playboy if you love the spirit of youth.

            Escape the drab of dull winter’s coming – leave the roar of city streets and spend an hour in Eldorado.⁵⁰

            While traveling on a train across the flat and monotonous Wyoming plains, a tall, tan, and athletic horsewoman suddenly appeared, racing her horse toward Jordan’s window. For a brief moment the two were rather close as the woman smiled at him; then she turned and was gone. Jordan asked a fellow traveler where they were: “Oh, somewhere west of Laramie,” was the desultory reply. Within minutes he composed an immortal ad that later appeared in the Saturday Evening Post. Beneath an illustration of a cowgirl racing a sporty Jordan roadster against a cowboy straining to push his fleet-looking steed to catch up with her, there appeared these words: 

Somewhere west of Laramie there’s a bronco-busting, steer roping girl who knows what I am talking about. She can tell what a sassy pony, that’s a cross between greased lightning and the place where it hits, can do with eleven hundred pounds of steel and action when he’s going high, wide and handsome.

The truth is the Playboy was built for her.

Built for the lass whose face is brown with the sun when the day is done of revel and romp and race.

Step into the Playboy when the hour grows dull with things gone dead and stale.

Then start for the land of real living with the spirit of the lass who rides, lean and rangy, into the red horizon of a Wyoming twilight.

The Playboy sold like hot cakes, and this ad galvanized the auto industry. Soon Chevrolet and Rickenbacker responded with ad lines “All outdoors can be yours,” and “The American Beauty,” respectively.⁵¹

            Previously ads mentioned the features of the car, but with the Jordan ad new parameters came into play – freedom, speed, and romance. Emblematic was the fact that the practical Model T's life had come to an end. Now it would be art and color that was the key to auto sales.

            The prosperity decade of the 1920s resulted in a remarkable restructuring of the American automobile industry and a drive towards consolidation as numerous small manufacturers dropped out of the marketplace. Given the drive towards efficiencies in production and distribution, intense pressures were placed not only on the workmen who assembled the cars, but also the consumers who bought them, increasingly on credit and after being exposed to more subtle and suggestive advertising. With more wealth and disposable income, consumers wanted more – more horsepower, more size, more colors and style, and more conveniences. The automobile was now an object of desire among all classes of Americans, and as such it transformed our personal and social habits, as well as the road and roadside.