Jordan Motor Car Company

• 1. Introduction

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  The Jordan Motor Car Company entered the American automobile market in 1916 with a declaration that would set it apart from every other manufacturer of the era: "Cars are too dull and drab." That line came from Edward S. Jordan, known to everyone as Ned, a former advertising executive who believed the people buying cars cared just as much about how those cars looked as how they ran. His reasoning was simple: since people dressed smartly, they were willing to drive smart-looking cars as well. So he built a company around that idea, in Cleveland, Ohio, and ran it until 1931. The Jordan Motor Car Company never made the parts that went into its cars. It bought them from other manufacturers and assembled them into finished vehicles with striking names, adventurous color options, and advertising that read more like poetry than product copy. One ad, published in the Saturday Evening Post in June of 1923, featured a flapper in a cloche hat racing a cowboy and the clouds somewhere west of Laramie. It became one of the most talked-about pieces of automobile advertising ever written. How did a company built on borrowed parts and borrowed prose carve out a place in automotive history? And what finally brought it down?

• 2. Cleveland Origins

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  Ned Jordan came to Cleveland from Thomas B. Jeffery Company of Kenosha, Wisconsin, where he had worked as an advertising executive before deciding he could build a better car business than the ones he had been writing copy for. He planted his factory east of downtown, at 1070 East 152nd Street in the Collinwood neighborhood, right along the Nickel Plate Railroad tracks. That location was not an accident. The railroad gave Jordan direct access to suppliers outside the region and a reliable way to ship finished vehicles to buyers across the country. Construction moved fast. The first building, 30,000 square feet, was started on the 5th of April 1916 and finished roughly seven weeks later. A second addition followed within months. By the end of that first production year, Jordan had sold over one thousand vehicles, a figure that demonstrated real demand even before the advertising machine was fully running. The suburban neighborhoods of Cleveland Heights and Shaker Heights would later serve as backdrops for Jordan's advertising photographs, with the cars posed in front of the grand mansions along Overlook and South Park Drives.

• 3. Assembled, Not Invented

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  Continental engines powered the Jordan cars. Timken axles carried the load. Bijur starters turned the engines over, and Bosch ignitions fired them. Jordan bought all of these components from outside vendors, making the Jordan what the industry called an assembled automobile. The bodies themselves were a mystery even to Jordan's biographer, James Lackey, who noted that the early sourcing was unclear. The factory could paint bodies, attach them to chassis, and finish the interiors, but it could not fabricate the bodies from scratch. Later production bodies were shipped in from manufacturers in Ohio and Massachusetts and were made from aluminum. What Jordan lacked in vertical integration, however, he made up for in refinement. The cars featured one of the first cowl fresh-air ventilation systems, an unusual innovation for an independently assembled vehicle. Jordan also moved to all-steel construction in the mid-1920s, a full ten years before Buick made the same switch and eight years before Chrysler introduced its Airflow models. The engine lineup evolved steadily over the company's life: the 1917 Series 60 Limousine ran a 303.1-cubic-inch six-cylinder Continental, and by 1926 the Line Eight and Great Line Eight models were offering eight-cylinder power.

• 4. The Language of Color

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  While Henry Ford was famously restricting buyers to Japan Black lacquer because it dried fast enough to keep the assembly line moving, Ned Jordan was handing customers a palette. Jordan automobiles came in three shades of red alone: "Apache Red", "Mercedes Red", and "Savage Red". Beyond those, buyers could choose "Ocean Sand Gray", "Venetian Green", "Briarcliff Green", "Egyptian Bronze", "Liberty Blue", "Chinese Blue", or standard black. The four-passenger Sport model pushed the concept furthest: it could be ordered in "Submarine Gray" with a khaki top and orange wheels. The names were as carefully chosen as the colors themselves. Jordan was among the first automakers to give his models evocative, personality-driven names rather than numbers or plain descriptors. The Playboy, the Tomboy, and the Sport Marine each carried a distinct character. The Sport Marine was advertised as "essentially a woman's car", with "fashionably low" 32x4-inch wheels. Jordan had originally wanted to call one model the Doughboy, borrowing the World War I term, but he settled on Playboy instead. In 1920, the company issued the Friendly Three coupe, with a slogan that read: "Seats two, three if they're friendly".

• 5. The Laramie Advertisement

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  In June of 1923, the Saturday Evening Post ran an advertisement for the Jordan Playboy that opened with these words: "Somewhere west of Laramie there's a bronco-busting, steer-roping girl who knows what I'm talking about." The ad, with art by Fred Cole, showed a flapper in a cloche hat hunched behind the wheel, racing a cowboy and the clouds. The prose went on to describe the car as "a brawny thing - yet a graceful thing for the sweep o' the Avenue", and it ended with an image of a girl riding "lean and rangy, into the red horizon of a Wyoming twilight." No price was mentioned. No specifications were listed. The car was sold entirely as a feeling. This was a departure from everything else being published in automotive advertising at the time, and it cemented the Jordan name as something beyond the machinery behind it. Another Jordan ad, called "Port of Missing Men" and also published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1920, had an unintended consequence. It showed a Jordan Playboy parked outside a seaside cottage in winter, with a light glowing red in an upstairs window. The suggestion was clear enough that Jordan received a complaint from the Post's editor. Jordan wrote back: "We regret that our recent advertisement has offended your high moral sense... perhaps had we placed lights in the downstairs windows as well, the suggestive implications would have been minimized."

• 6. Decline and Last Years

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  In 1927, Jordan introduced what turned out to be its most damaging product: the Little Custom, a luxury compact. Buyers ignored it. The financial drain from that misstep was severe enough that bankers took over the Jordan Motor Car Company, leaving Ned Jordan with only the title of head of the company he had founded. The following year, both Jordan and his wife began selling off their remaining interests. The company outlasted the stock market crash of 1929, but it was operating in a market crowded with competitors and was carrying the weight of Ned Jordan's personal difficulties alongside its business problems. Production ended in 1931. The last Jordan built was the Model 90, powered by an eight-cylinder engine producing 85 horsepower. Total production figures are contested: some sources place the number above 100,000 units, others as low as 30,000. The Standard Catalog of American Cars, third edition, shows annual figures that sum to 78,780 units over the company's production life, with the peak year being 1921 at 8,913 cars and the final year, 1931, at just 263.