How a Massachusetts-made car upended a 1909 car race from New York City to Seattle

Support for WBUR comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink Software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at mathworks.com. WBUR Podcast, Boston. This is up next. I'm Sharon Brody. If you love a good underdog story, then here's one from the Massachusetts Archives. In 1909, a cross-country car race began in New York City and finished in Seattle. It was a big deal for up-and-coming car manufacturers at the dawn of the automotive age. The six competitors included Ford from Detroit and Shammat from... Stoneham, Massachusetts. The author Eric Jared Moskowitz explores the saga in his new book, The Hardest Longest Race, Henry Ford and the Cross Country Contest That Changed America. Hi, Eric. Hi, it's great to be here. Thank you for having me. Bottom line up front, it's right there in your book title. In a nutshell, how did this event change America? Well, this event gave Ford really a launching pad for the Model T. The Model T has come out in the fall of 1908. They have shipped a few hundred, then a few thousand cars by the time Ford signs up for this race. But it is not something that everybody knows about. There is no way that they have any vision that they're going to one day sell. 15 million Model T's. This is going to be the car that changes America, changes the world, puts the world on wheels. They're really hoping to do something nobody had ever done before, which has sell 20,000, maybe even 25,000 cars before, and demonstrate that a lightweight affordable car could also be durable, which would mean an affordable car for the first time is a car middle class people would want to spend their money on. Now, another company in this event. The small, little-known outfit in Stoneham, Massachusetts, Shamet, in brief, what is the Shamet car story? So the Shamet car story is representative of a vanished world of Massachusetts automaking that I knew nothing about. Massachusetts, New England, and New York were the center of automaking in the first years of the auto industry. By about 1905, that has shifted to the Midwest to Michigan and Ohio, but they're still very important in 1909. But the things that they're doing here are different than they're doing in the Midwest, and you still had very... very small companies here that are trying to build luxury cars in handcrafted fashion for what they would consider gentlemen's clientele. And that was what Shammat was trying to do. They had an incredible amount of money pumped in by a collection of Brahmins, and they really were trying to make the most exquisite motor car they could and then scaled into a business. What is the quick version of what happens in the 1909 car race from New York to Seattle? So the quick version is that Shawmut enters this race because just as they're starting to break through, their factory burns down.

And so they need a Hail Mary play to save the business. Even these Brahmin benefactors are not going to pump money into a business with nothing to show for it but an ash heap after three years. So they hear about this race coast to coast to coast from New York City to a world's fair in Seattle. And they think if we win this thing somehow, we will get the publicity and the money to rebuild. They have a factory site lined up in South Boston. They have a plan to expand. They go for it. And like against all odds, they are in the mix right up until the very end, except Ford. Cheats to win, engages in a lot of subterfuge, foul play, and a Model T crosses the finish line first in late June 1909 in Seattle. And for the Schama, they really have nothing left to the company, so they file an appeal, and it takes months, but they gather an incredible amount of evidence, and they're able to prove that Ford had cheated to win this race. They're the rightful winners. They get awarded the prize money and this massive gold and silver trophy in the fall of 1909, but by then the world's attention has moved on. If the outcome of this race had been different, what do you think that could have meant for greater Boston and for Massachusetts? I think absolutely Boston would have become an automaking town. It was not anymore in 1909. There was automaking happening in New England on the periphery, but you would have had a Shawmut factory that got built in South Boston, would have employed hundreds of people. That doesn't mean that Shawmut would survive today. The kinds of companies that were doing what Shama did best, they almost all vanished from landscape by the 1920s. And the consumers who'd want to buy a car that is that luxurious have really shrunk. And then they're... sort of wiped out by the Depression. So I think shamut would have been lost in the 1920s or 30s, but you would absolutely have a huge shaman depreciation society. You'd have people who are collectors fawning over their shamuts. And instead, there were only a couple of shamats. They went to the scrap heap. There's almost no record of the company. And also Boston has an automaking town basically was sort of wiped out in 1909 as opposed to perhaps enduring into the 20s or beyond. Eric Jared Moskowitz is the author of the book The Hardest Longest Race and a former Boston Globe journalist. Eric, thank you. Thank you so much for having me, Sharon. It's really a pleasure.