AUTOMOTIVE HISTORY – DECEMBER 4, 1915 – HENRY FORD’S PEACE SHIP
His Model T having revolutionized the auto industry, Henry Ford thought he could end the carnage of World War I by sailing for Europe on the "Peace Ship," a chartered ocean liner with a large white cross on its hull, and talking some sense into the belligerents.
It didn't go so well.
He set out a century ago on the SS Oscar II with 63 pacifists, 54 reporters and "four Chicago babies," according to Tribune reports. Three of those babies were great-grandchildren of William Bross, co-founder of the Chicago Tribune. The paper also was represented by reporter Carolyn Wilson, who painted a lively word-picture of the quixotic venture.
The peace expedition, which sailed from Hoboken, N.J., on Dec. 4, 1915, drew cheers and lots of jeers. Ford's departure was attended by a large crowd. Wilson reported: "Remarks vary from 'the poor simp' to 'the savior of peace' and 'a second Messiah.' " Someone put a cage of squirrels labeled "To the Good Ship Nutty" on the gangplank.
The peace mission got off to a sputtering start. Ford didn't have a passport, and a messenger had to rush his application to Washington. Thomas Edison and his wife came aboard to wish a bon voyage. According to the Trib's account, Ford told the great inventor: " 'I'll give you $1,000,000 if you'll come with us.' Edison smiled and shook his head."
Famed orator and former Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan and Helen Keller were invited by Ford but couldn't make the trip. Ford was deprived of another celebrity shipmate when Jane Addams of Hull House fame was hospitalized with an "undiagnosed illness." Or perhaps it was premonition. Given a warm reception at a speaking engagement, she'd said: "I thank you for your applause, for after I sail on the Ford ship I will probably never will be applauded again."
Yet if the Oscar II was "a ship of fools," as it has been called, what is the appropriate epitaph for the European statesmen who sent 11 million soldiers to their death in five years of brutal, trench warfare that rarely gave either side a battlefield victory? Pondering the appalling casualty lists, Ford proposed a straightforward solution: a general strike by soldiers of both sides. His spokesman, the head of the Chicago Peace Society, told the Tribune the theme of Ford's peace offensive was: "Out of the trenches by Christmas, never to return."
Belatedly, the idea caught on. From 1917 until the war's end, a wave of strikes and mutinies passed through the French and British armies. But in the immediate, it was greeted with derision and anger. The London Standard newspaper ran the story under a headline proclaiming Ford's expedition a "Pro-German Peace Cruise." The Brooklyn Eagle headlined it: "Junketing In The Name of Peace." The Tribune's London correspondent reported that American expats feared that Ford's peace-ship adventure "would only bring ridicule on America in Europe." (Ford's anti-Semitism would later lead him to cozy up to Adolf Hitler.)
Meanwhile, there was little peace on the peace ship. "The dove has taken flight — chased off by the screaming eagle," Carolyn Wilson wrote, only two days out of port. "The whole ship is in a pleasant uproar, stimulating after the inactivity, and the newspapermen are rushing through the corridors saying: 'Thank heaven, at last a story has broken.' "
Shipboard hostilities commenced upon the news that President Woodrow Wilson wanted to increase the U.S. Army's manpower and weaponry. The president was vehemently denounced by one passenger, who Carolyn Wilson noted, "practices several kinds of 'isms' and can be relied on to grow ardent on almost any subject." When a resolution was drafted, more moderate passengers accused the anti-president faction of trying to ram it down their throats. Refusing to sign, they said they hadn't joined up to fight totalitarianism abroad only to condone it aboard ship.
Ford, who vainly hoped for President Wilson's endorsement, was visibly shaken by the heated quarreling over a resolution critical of the president. "In the first place, he couldn't understand why anyone would refuse to sign the resolution," Carolyn Wilson observed. "In the second place, he couldn't understand the discussions."
A number of Ford's companions were unaccustomed to ocean travel. "Some of the uninitiated mistook the gulls following the ship for doves, and thought they were an omen of peace," the Tribune reported.
But novices and old hands alike spent the voyage "organizing for the work of pacifying Europe" by convening a conference of neutral nations in The Hague. Yet no one knew what reception awaited them and their proposal, until the ship landed in Copenhagen, Denmark, on Dec. 19.
"No enthusiasm was shown, eight college students being the only persons on hand to greet the delegates," Carolyn Wilson reported. By then the Oscar II was experiencing a new round of intramural fighting — this one pitting the peace pilgrims against the reporters, with the journalists accused of bad mouthing the expedition in their dispatches. "If we are going to mediate in Europe's troubles, we must first learn to mediate among ourselves," pleaded Ines Milholland Boissevain, a prominent peace activist.
Ford stayed in his stateroom, tired of a project for which he had such high hopes. The Peace Ship crusade sustained a body blow on Christmas Eve when Ford — claiming illness — skipped the pacifists' train to Stockholm and instead sailed for home on a Norwegian liner. Some of the peace pilgrims tried to keep the expedition going, Ford having committed to paying for the Oscar II, at least for a month or so, but the effort petered out.
Reportedly, the peace expedition cost Ford about a half-million dollars, and what did he get for his money? Ridicule, sure. Being called a clown, yes. Yet as one Tribune reader suggested, perhaps there is another way to remember the Ford saga.
On Dec. 21, 1915, Carl Laemmle wrote in a letter to the editor: "To me the big thing in his action is not the question of whether he will or will not stop the war, but the fact that he was willing to try."
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