YANKEE ROLLS
“Yankee Rose so true, how we all love you, and we’re proud to say you belong to the U.S.A.,” crooned the First Lady of Radio, Vaughn De Leath, alongside Sam Lanin and his Famous Players in a New York City studio in January 1927.
Meanwhile, across town at the Brewster & Co. coachbuilding line in Long Island City, workers fitted a custom body to the just-released Rolls-Royce Phantom I flagship that had been driven some 140 miles from a factory in Springfield, Massachusetts, as nothing more than a bare chassis and its mechanical underpinnings.
Although the Phantom I was a new entry into the Rolls-Royce lineup, American manufacturing of English luxury machines had already been happening for nearly a decade.
Rolls-Royce Motor Cars, founded in 1904, had only been up and running for 15 years when it set its sights on the lucrative American market. Despite literally hundreds of small-time automakers in existence in the U.S., Rolls’ reputation was already well established when it went looking for a manufacturing site in the northeast. America, despite purchasing fewer than 100
