October 21, 1929: The Henry Ford Museum Opens

October 21, 1929: The Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation and Greenfield Village opens, outside Detroit in Dearborn, Michigan. The timing couldn't have been worse: The Great Depression was about to begin.

Ford, founder of the museum, as well as the founder and chairman of the Ford Motor Company, said:

I am collecting the history of our people as written into things their hands made and used... When we are through, we shall have reproduced American life as lived, and that, I think, is the best way of preserving at least a part of our history and tradition.

The centerpiece of the nation's foremost automotive-themed museum is a replica of Independence Hall in Philadelphia. It contains the fascinating, including early cars and bicycles, Ford's 1st car (his 1896 "Quadricycle"), Igor Sikorsky's prototype for the helicopter, the bus Rosa Parks was riding in when she refused to give up her seat to start the 1955-56 Montgomery Bus Boycott (Parks lived in Detroit from 1957 until her death in 2005), and a Buckminster Fuller "Dymaxion house."

It also contains the macabre, with the seat Abraham Lincoln was supposedly sitting in when he was assassinated at Ford's Theater in Washington (the theater owner was no relation to Henry); and the seat, and the rest of the car as well, that John F. Kennedy was definitely sitting in when he was assassinated, the 1961 Lincoln Continental convertible limousine he was riding in through downtown Dallas.

Next door to the museum is Greenfield Village, which Ford imagined as a kind of historical park, a more modern version of Colonial Williamsburg – that is, celebrating what was, in 1929 when it opened, considered modern American life, including a reconstruction of the Menlo Park, New Jersey laboratory of his good friend Thomas Edison. Ford and Edison were both friends of rubber magnate Henry Firestone (whose tires certainly made Ford's cars easier to make), and Firestone's family farm is reconstructed on the site.

The three men were such close friends that, in 1923, they invited the President at the time, Warren Harding, to go camping with them. A silent newsreel camera captured highlights.

Left to right: Ford, Edison, Harding, Firestone

Edison died in 1931. Firestone, definitely not to be confused with later playwright and actor Harvey Fierstein, died in 1938. Ford died in 1947.

I am not excusing Henry Ford's control-freak attitude toward his employees' private lives, nor his despicable anti-Semitism, nor his failed union-busting in the 1930s. To be fair, he did give his black auto workers the same pay and benefits as his white ones.

But I am recommending the museum. It's a tribute to the role of technology, including the automobile, in American life, not to the man himself. 

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October 21, 1929 was a Monday. Baseball season had ended a week earlier, with the Philadelphia Athletics beating the Chicago Cubs in the World Series. Football was in midweek: Television was still mainly a concept at this point, and the NFL was certainly not big enough to stage Monday Night Football, not even on radio. The NBA hadn't been founded yet. And the NHL season was nearly a month away from starting. So there were no scores on this historic day.