Dealers organized as car sales surged and country needed better roads

Founding NADA President George W. Browne and his Chicago-Minneapolis-Kansas City-Grand Rapids organizing board breathed life into NADA in 1917, but it took another Midwesterner to build the meat and bones of the organization.

Fred W.A. Vesper, a St. Louis Buick dealer, was selected to succeed Browne by the 138 delegates attending NADA's first annual meeting in Chicago in the winter of 1918.

Vesper wasn't one of the nine charter NADA board members elected in July 1917. But as one of the original 30 auto dealers who had gathered in Washing-ton, D.C., in May 1917 to protest a pending federal luxury tax, he was a legitimate founding father.

More to the point, Vesper was energetic, far more well-traveled than most Americans then and had been an executive for two plow manufacturers, as well as John Deere and Buick Motor Co. before becoming a major auto dealer.

And he was an organizational whiz. That's exactly what a neophyte nationwide group needed if it was to represent 15,000 independent businessmen selling 350 brands of automobiles in a 3,000-mile-wide country with shockingly bad roads.

To facilitate paying enrollment, Vesper made sure the founding bylaws were amended to allow membership for dealers who were not already enrolled in state or city associations, and to create regional NADA officers to recruit in specific territories.

He immediately moved NADA headquarters from Chicago, where it was organized, to St. Louis, where his auto retailing and cattle-breeding businesses were based. It was an abrupt move but not a startling one.

As the "Gateway to the West" on the west bank of the Mississippi, St. Louis was a centrally located river and rail hub in a sprawling country. It was a growing, modern city, then America's fourth largest after New York, Chicago and Philadelphia. Its population grew 13 percent to 773,000 between the 1910 and 1920 U.S. Census.

The 1904 World's Fair was in St. Louis, and the city was bursting with pride for the next decade. During the 1918 influenza epidemic that killed an estimated 20 million worldwide, St. Louis' casualties were lower than most other major cities because of quick action by Mayor Henry Kiel. Prompted by Dr. Max C. Starkloff, the city's health commissioner, Kiel quarantined the city by closing schools and businesses.

Vesper's immediate organizational challenges were twofold. First was the difficulty of communicating with far-flung dealers. Second was the auto industry's existential problem: a huge and growing supply of automobiles swamping the nation's primitive and overwhelmed roads.

Vesper would have had a different take on 1918 business communication, of course. From his perspective, business technology was improving so rapidly that it was now possible to organize a national trade association.

U.S. mail service was well established, with interstate mail shipped by train since the 1860s. The first U.S. airmail service started in 1917 and the first transcontinental airmail route was only two years away: a 1920 route linking Long Island, N.Y., and San Francisco used daylight-only flights through 13 airfields, cutting almost a day off the time required for train delivery.

For same-day cross-country communication there was the telegram -- though per-word rates were relatively high -- with envelopes hand-delivered by bicycle or foot messenger. In 1917, 11.7 million telephones were installed in U.S. homes and offices, about double the number just five years before. U.S. telephone companies employed 268,000 workers, mostly women manually connecting each call by hand, enabling a "talk."

The first coast-to-coast long-distance call came in 1915, a ceremonial reenactment of the 1876 original phone conversation, with Alexander Graham Bell in New York and Dr. Watson, his former assistant, in San Francisco. This time, Bell repeated his famous line, "Mr. Watson, come here, I want you." Watson, 3,400 miles of wire away, playfully retorted, "But it would take me a week now."

For Vesper, NADA and U.S. auto retailers in general in 1918, the larger challenge was the mismatch between mushrooming production of increasingly capable automobiles and a road system simply overwhelmed by surging motor vehicle traffic. Politicians were more interested in connecting farmers to local markets than in enabling travel between cities.

Most U.S. roads were gravel or dirt -- some with crushed stone or wooden planking in boggy or soft stretches -- plus a sprinkling of macadam paving on major thoroughfares. Some city roads were cobblestone or brick. The first U.S. road to be paved with concrete, a one-mile stretch of Woodward Avenue between Six Mile and Seven Mile in Detroit, was less than a decade old and was widely considered cost prohibitive by civil engineers and local road authorities.

And those dirt and gravel roads were built to handle horse traffic: saddle horses, light carriages and horse-drawn wagons filled with farm produce or light freight, typically moving at a few miles per hour. Add millions of heavy automobiles literally blowing by horse-drawn traffic -- even the plebian Ford Model T could hit 35 mph -- and most roads rapidly broke down.

Meanwhile, automobiles were selling like hotcakes. In 1915, there were 2.3 million light vehicles on U.S. roads, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics calculated in a 2015 centennial study. Automakers sold just under a million vehicles that year, 1.5 million in 1916 and 1.9 million in 1917.

In 1917, 4,983,340 motor cars (including commercial vehicles) and 257,522 motorcycles were registered, federal highway engineer Andrew F. Anderson wrote in the May 1918 inaugural issue of Public Roads magazine from the U.S. Department of Transportation. He estimated the U.S. had 85 percent of the world's existing motor cars.

"There is as yet no indication that the curve for motor cars is approaching a maximum or has even reached the saturation point," Anderson wrote, identifying the problem: how to stop the growth in automobile usage long enough for the transportation network to catch up.

In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson signed into law the Federal Aid Road Act, which provided matching funds for road paving in states that had established highway departments. But for perspective, Anderson's Public Roads article noted that those 5 million motor vehicle registrations raised $37.5 million in 1917. Almost all of the revenue went to building and maintaining public roads, but it was mostly spread between 47 state highway departments.

In short, U.S. automobiles were getting better. U.S. roads were getting worse.

How bad were U.S. roads then?

Individual passenger cars often fared well. In the summer of 1916, a stock five-passenger Hupmobile with two drivers set off on a promotional tour of the capitols of all 48 states. The car completed the 19,861-mile journey, although it took 135 days, finishing in the winter of 1917.

But the poor interstate roads couldn't handle heavy loads or long-distance shipping. During World War I, the military shipped 110,000 vehicles to the American Expeditionary Force in Europe. The U.S.-built trucks, ambulances and staff cars proved their mettle on French roads and helped Allied forces hasten the end of the war.

But how did those vehicles get to U.S. ports of the Atlantic? Almost all were shipped by rail. In late 1917, with railroads jammed, the Army experimented and set off driving 30 trucks from the assembly plant in Toledo, Ohio, to the docks of Baltimore.

Traveling through snowstorms mostly along the Lincoln Highway, 29 of the 30 trucks drove the 500 miles to Baltimore -- in three weeks. And only because of mules. George H. Biles, deputy commissioner of the Pennsylvania Highway Department, later wrote he had to marshal "seven motor trucks with plows, 22 road machines, 20 drags, 105 mule teams, three tractors, and 200 men" to aid the Army convoy. As a result, the army went back to shipping the trucks by rail.

In 1916, Congress authorized creating the transcontinental Lincoln Highway, envisioned as connecting mostly existing roads between New York City and San Francisco. But the actual road was fiction. A government agency soon published a prospective route, suggesting an automobile journey might be completed "in 20 to 30 days."

In 1919, after World War I ended, the U.S. Army actually tried it. It took 62 days. A convoy of 80 Army trucks, including then-Lt. Col. Dwight Eisenhower, drove the Lincoln Highway, complete with a motorized wrecker and engineering gear. The Army's motorized vehicles worked but, again, the road system didn't. Trucks repeatedly broke through thin pavement, slid into ditches and often forded streams to avoid rickety bridges. And in Utah, the bogged-down convoy on strict water rationing was rescued by horse-drawn water wagons. 

Not surprisingly, supporting better roads was one of the first missions for Vesper. NADA enthusiastically backed the Good Roads Movement. The issue dominated the group's third annual meeting in Chicago. NADA delegates called for:

• Creating a national highway commission to study transportation needs and construct roads. 
• Constructing a national highway system. 
• Funding to build the nation's highways. 

"Here is where the NADA gets right into the middle of this picture," the minutes of the Jan. 19, 1919, event read. "We need the building up of a sentiment which will show the farmer, the laborer, the president of your university, the undertaker, the insurance man ... that somewhere in his life, in all that he has, in all that he wears, in all that he eats, the road has its part. And if the road is inefficient, so in some measure that man must be inefficient."

Vesper also kept NADA's political arm active and focused on the needs of dealer members. In its first legislative success, NADA strongly backed the 1919 Motor Vehicle Theft Act, which imposed harsh penalties, including fines and up to 10 years imprisonment, for those convicted of transporting a stolen auto across state lines. Importantly, the law for the first time legally defined "motor vehicle."

An experienced businessman and serial entrepreneur, Vesper had rapidly built his St. Louis store into one of Buick's largest dealerships by 1918. But he was acutely aware of how many auto retailers were poorly capitalized or just learning the ropes of running a business.

Hundreds of auto manufacturers were desperate to find anybody willing to sell their wares, even the major players. In 1910, Elizabethtown, N.Y., carpenter Wilbur Egglefield ordered a Model T, went to a railhead in the next county to claim crates containing his car, assembled it and drove home. After he repeated the task for two friends, Ford wrote offering a franchise.

"In those early days, Ford shipped the body, engine and wheels by train," recalled Dennis Egglefield, Wilbur's great-grandson and owner of Egglefield Ford. "He had to go down to the train station in Westport and assemble the car."

Dealers assembling cars lasted into the 1920s.

Small dealers needed lots of help. Under Vesper, NADA quickly adjusted to meet their business needs.

It actively encouraged dealers to adopt a uniform accounting method. And it supported automobile financing reforms.

Vesper, who preferred friends to call him by his first three initials F.W.A., was president in 1918 and 1919, but his early influence shaped what NADA would become. In the depths of the Depression, he returned to serve again as president in 1933-35. His 1946 Automotive News obituary noted his long service as NADA's treasurer.

By 1920, when H.B. Harper of Rosemont, Pa., took over as president, NADA member services had expanded to include business insurance and arranging bank credit. The St. Louis administrative staff grew to six that year, plus seven field secretaries, and the association's annual budget was $54,850.

In 1922, NADA started to study used-car prices. Increasingly, car purchasers were repeat customers rather than first-time buyers, upgrading to the latest vehicle advances. But without any data being collected, used-vehicle pricing was a mystery to both buyers and sellers.

NADA's used-car pricing research would continue to grow throughout the 1920s, a precursor of its 1933 launch of the Official Used Car Guide.

In the mid- and late-1920s as U.S. auto sales expanded past 3 million annually, most dealers prospered. After 1923 sales jumped 58 percent, NADA's 1924 membership under John Butler of Los Angeles topped 20,000. Some 2,000 delegates attended the annual meeting.

U.S. roads were beginning to catch up to the number of cars on them. The 1921 Federal Aid Highway Act provided more funding specifically for states to improve interstate highways.

In 1922, road engineers in Minnesota and Illinois proposed standard shapes for traffic signs to help motorists anticipate meanings at a distance: octagon for stop, round for railroad crossings, diamond shaped for "slow" warnings and rectangular for directional information. The idea spread quickly, and became the basis of all modern U.S. signs.

The U.S. secretary of agriculture appointed a board of state and federal highway officials in 1925 to develop a national system of highways out of existing roads, resulting in the National Highway System of 1926.

With numbered national roads and better state and federal funding, the grass-roots dream of the national Good Roads Movement started in the 1890s was on the path to largely being fulfilled.

Not immediately, of course.

In 1925, Ernest McGaffey of the Automobile Club of Southern California was still advising transcontinental motorists to bring, among other things, "spare tires and accessories; warm clothing, extra gasoline and oil, a stout tent, shovel and ax; sleeping bags; flashlights; sun goggles for desert driving; canned goods, coffee, tea, condensed milk, sugar, salt, pepper, a side of bacon, soda crackers, sweet biscuits, oranges, matches; a cooking kit and fishing tackle."

The president and general manager of the American Automobile Association decided to field-test the Lincoln Highway in August 1925. Thomas P. Henry and Ernest N. Smith stepped into their Cadillac, aiming to spell each other and drive round the clock from Washington to San Francisco in a week.

With aid from AAA affiliates they breezed along until they reached western Utah where a signboard noted the parting of the Lincoln and Victory Highway. Following the Victory trail they soon reached a hill.

"Six roads led over the top," Smith later wrote, "and each road was worse than the other." Smith finally walked a half-mile ahead of the car to find a road that went through, and then waved up Henry in the Cadillac.

Still, the duo beat their seven-day goal, reaching the Pacific Ocean in 96 hours.

As NADA grew during the late booming 1920s, it continued to evolve but retained the basic member-oriented stance Vesper had instilled in 1918 and 1919.

NADA pressed manufacturers to provide dealers with longer contracts and more favorable terms, arguing that would attract more financially stable dealers and help the manufacturer in the long term.

With more extensive dealer assistance programs to fund, NADA changed its membership structure in 1928, offering group memberships and shifting from a single fee to a graduated scale starting at $35 for dealers with less than $250,000 in sales revenue the previous year. It was capped at $250 for dealers grossing more than $2 million.

That flexibility would serve NADA through two more geographical transformations: its 1936 move to Detroit to be closer to consolidating Michigan-based automakers, and its 1941 move to Washington, D.C., to more closely work with Congress and federal regulators.

Perhaps fittingly, Vesper's 1930s return to the presidency made him the bookends on NADA's 18-year St. Louis era. The group moved there upon his 1918 first term and packed bags for Detroit after his 1935 final year.