Jerry Wittkop was looking for a Monroe Hydraulic Lift to add to the Monroe County Historical Society’s display of Monroe Auto Equipment Company (MAECO) products. He had contacted a seller on eBay, and that seller put me in touch with Jerry. That was in early 2015, and our meeting opened a whole new world. Jerry, who spent his entire career as an automotive engineer with MAECO, had taken it upon himself to preserve the history of this company, which is at the heart of the Farm Jeep story. For the next five years, until his death in 2020, Jerry provided firsthand knowledge of MAECO and the McIntyre family, who owned and ran the company. Until it came to talking about Newgren or Bantam.

Jerry was still in touch with members of the McIntyre family. He said they didn’t like to be reminded of that dark period when they almost lost their entire company because of the lawsuits. I promised him that I just wanted to tell the story about what happened and not judge the family. Jerry began sharing documents, including those written by family members. This chapter attempts to keep that promise, to tell the story as best we can, despite the unknowns.

The Mass-Produced Lift: Performance vs. Utility

Fellow historian Clint Dixon and I have written extensively about Monroe. The stories we tell about the company won’t be found elsewhere. All traces of the Monroe Hydraulic Lift have been erased from the company’s history. The McIntyre family saw it as a blot on an otherwise sparkling corporate history. We see it as a key part of the Farm Jeep story.

Monroe’s primary goal for developing an implement lift was to create a high-volume outlet for the hydraulic and rubber molding technologies they had refined during World War II. According to Jerry Wittkop, following the war, Monroe’s engineers met regularly to discuss possible new products. Jerry’s museum display includes everything from golf balls to tractor seats. But the McIntyre family’s real interest in the Farm Jeep started with a simpler reason. The McIntyres were cattle farmers, too.

Like Sorensen, the McIntyre family had a large farm in Michigan. But they also had a 5,000-acre experimental cattle farm in Georgia, near Warm Springs. A young member of the family had contracted polio in 1945. She was being treated at the facilities made famous by Franklin Roosevelt. The family, wanting to be near the child, purchased thousands of acres of spent plantation land and turned it into a cattle farm, something that hadn’t been tried in Georgia before. They hired family members of other patients being treated at Warm Springs, giving them much-needed employment.

The company wanted more than the shock absorbers on the Jeep’s four corners. They wanted to replace the Newgren lift with one that would better match their farming needs. A lift that more closely matched the Ford-Ferguson system. Their solution — the Monroe Hydraulic Lift — was a robust unit designed for mass production. But this design introduced a fundamental conflict in the Jeep’s identity: to ensure superior tractor performance and down-pressure, Monroe placed the lift mechanism directly in the Jeep’s bed. This severely hampered the vehicle’s Farm Utility capabilities by occupying valuable cargo space. Monroe’s marketing claimed the lift was “easily removable,” but many farmers remained skeptical. For a demographic that valued multi-purpose tools, a semi-permanent fixture in the bed felt like a step backward from the “under-the-bed” Newgren designs.

As we have seen, the ties between Monroe and Willys were always strong. The Willys-Overland board of directors elected Brouwer D. McIntyre, president of Monroe, to its membership on January 21, 1947. So, when Monroe wanted to go in on the Farm Jeep, Willys was more than willing to oblige. Monroe began manufacturing a hydraulic lift unit for the Universal Jeep in December 1947.

Monroe would need a source for implements. Clint Dixon has written that Willys announced in October 1947 that it would be a nationwide sub-distributor for Ferguson farm implements. Clint also writes that early ads for the lift show them with Ferguson-type plows. But Harry Ferguson must have pulled out of the deal, since it never happened. Ferguson was fighting with Ford and about to introduce his own tractor. He would have seen the Farm Jeep as another tractor competitor. Monroe would have to look elsewhere.

Monroe simply acquired Newgren. The company would stop production of the Newgren lift and replace it with the Monroe Lift. Newlin and Green would continue in their roles. Green would become an active participant in improving the new lift. (See Clint’s articles in the “Deep Dive” section for more information.)

The Pleasantville “Infomercial”

Monroe went into this new venture with a zeal unlike anyone at Willys or Newgren had ever seen. Charles S. “Chuck” McIntyre III, Brouwer’s son, was extremely active and innovative in selling the new lift. He demonstrated the Monroe Lift system across the country and later served as Area Sales Manager for Newgren, promoting the use of Monroe equipment with Willys Jeeps.

In 1948, Monroe launched a national marketing campaign that was based on Willys’ “‘Jeep’ Caravan” shows. Called the “Revolution in Farming,” it featured traveling teams that gave demonstrations of the Farm Jeep in a circus-like environment. There was even a movie shown in a large outdoor tent.

Monroe produced “Revolution in Pleasantville,” a 26-minute film that functioned as an early infomercial. By screening this film in rural communities, they bypassed traditional print advertising and instead demonstrated the Monroe-equipped Jeep in a scripted, idealized farm setting. It was innovative, persuasive — the perfect infomercial. Google will tell you that the first use of the term “infomercial” was in 1981. But the film, which was shown on Cincinnati TV on a Sunday afternoon in February 1949, was way ahead of its time in terms of marketing.

The beauty of the film is that it was a complete, stand-alone package that could be used by local dealers, shown at county and state fairs, and even by youth groups. It could be combined with live demonstrations when the weather permitted.

Zeal, Lawsuits, and the Bantam Collapse

No sooner had Monroe purchased Newgren than it was announced that American Bantam had purchased Newgren from Monroe. Clint writes that, with the deal, Bantam acquired all of the Newgren stock from Monroe; Monroe would receive new class B stock of Bantam; and the three McIntyre brothers, Brouwer, Charles Jr., and William, were named directors of Bantam, with Brouwer as Chairman of the Board. The board quickly elected Brouwer to the position of President, William to the position of Executive Vice President, and Charles Jr. to the position of Vice President. Furthermore, on September 20th, Brouwer announced to stockholders that the Newgren Company had been moved from Toledo to Butler, PA. On October 1, 1948, Charles Jr. was elected as the new President of Newgren after the previous president, George Newlin, resigned his position as head of the company in order to pursue a career of breeding purebred Guernsey cattle. Robert Green retained his position and title. Green, however, did not move to Butler. Instead, Green would head the small training force left behind in Toledo.

It is speculated that Monroe might have approached Bantam to seek manufacturing facilities. Monroe was a manufacturing company. Newgren was a marketing and supplier operation. Monroe wanted to turn Newgren into a manufacturing organization as well. Bantam, struggling to stay solvent, had the exact factory-floor space and small-quantity manufacturing experience that Monroe was looking for. Newspaper accounts from the period seem to support this idea. By September 1948, it was reported that “production of farm implement equipment has begun at the company’s Butler plant.”

Suddenly, the McIntyre family was running and managing three different companies with very different management styles. Newgren was too small to be a problem. Bantam, on the other hand, had minority stockholders. A small number of those investors had tried to replace Bantam’s management before the Monroe deal was finalized.

The 1948 case Steinberg v. American Bantam Car Co. arose from a shareholder revolt over control of the company, not from a traditional fraud or damages claim. A group of dissident shareholders, organized as an “Independent Stockholders’ Committee,” sought to replace Bantam’s existing management and alleged that they were being unfairly prevented from doing so. Their central complaint was procedural but critical: Bantam’s leadership and transfer agent refused timely access to the shareholder list, making it nearly impossible to communicate with other investors and solicit proxies before the annual meeting. Monroe had taken on a company with extensive legal and financial problems. And more legal troubles were to follow.

Jerry gave us a document, written in 1994 by a member of the McIntyre family, that best describes the root problem: “In 1948, Monroe acquired the American Bantam Company of Butler, Pennsylvania. American Bantam, which had once produced a small car, was involved in producing trailers for Lustron Homes of Columbus, manufacturers of prefabricated homes. But the trailer business was not profitable. Monroe’s management, used to producing 50,000 shocks a day, was unable to transfer its successful marketing methods to a company that manufactured only three or four trailers a day.”

We don’t know what happened in the months following the takeover, but by April 1950, Bantam was in court filing for a Chapter X corporate bankruptcy reorganization. This action would eventually lead to the $2 million mismanagement lawsuit against Monroe and the SEC scrutiny of the company. That marked the Bantam company’s final decline.

To quote from the McIntyre document: “After American Bantam had gone bankrupt, a $2,000,000 suit charging mismanagement was filed against Monroe by American Bantam. After six months of negotiations and threat of action against Monroe by the Securities and Exchange Commission, an agreement was reached. American Bantam would drop its suit in return for $310,000 in claims and the dropping of $150,000 in claims Monroe had filed against the company.” We have found no public records documenting the suit or the settlement details.

Under mounting legal pressure, Monroe made the calculated decision to dump the entire project back onto Willys-Overland to insulate itself from further liability. Monroe quit the business and handed everything over to Willys, except the actual manufacturing of the lift. There would be no further engineering changes. At some point, believed to be around 1956 (there are no production records, and no information on the exact date has ever been found), Monroe stopped manufacturing the lift altogether, leaving the Farm Jeep once again in need of a hydraulic lift.

What We Don’t Know

The first unknown is how much the Monroe Lift impacted Farm Jeep sales? Did the improved tractor performance outweigh the loss of the bed, thus losing two of the four functions? It seems highly unlikely that it did. Even with the lift’s improvements, it remained a “light tractor” in an era where “heavy tractors” were what farmers wanted and needed.

Would Newgren have survived without becoming a manufacturer of implements, as Monroe wanted them to be? I believe they would. There is no evidence that Newgren had issues finding or sourcing implements. They were able to supply dozens of items to dealers’ lists in the “Special Equipment” catalogs.

Would Bantam have survived if Monroe hadn’t taken over? They were a small fry in the trailer manufacturing business, just as they had been in the automobile business. It was management issues, not engineering issues, that had cost them the military jeep contracts. Those same issues were there in the trailer business.

What if the stockholders hadn’t sued and Monroe had continued to be the main marketing force behind the Farm Jeep? This is a much harder question to answer. The “Revolution in Farming” was a flashy marketing effort, but without data to assess its true effectiveness, we can only speculate.

And finally, the million (perhaps billion) dollar question – what if Monroe hadn’t replaced Newgren as the lift provider? Would Green have improved the Newgren lift with a Stratton Lift-style design (as we will see in the coming chapters)? That is the question I ponder most.

The Return of Robert Green

As Monroe retreated, Robert Green — the man who had helped start the Newgren era — was brought back to Willys-Overland to help clean up the administrative and distribution mess left in the wake of the McIntyre exit. Could Green once again become the man who could save the Farm Jeep?

[pickaxe] Dig Deeper: Sources & Further Reading →