One Summer: America, 1927 (33 page)

The Canada trip proved tragically eventful. On the Fourth of July, while the rest of America was celebrating, Lindbergh flew to Selfridge Field in Michigan, where a squadron of military planes was waiting to escort him onward to Ottawa. The plan in Ottawa was for Lindbergh to land first while the others circled above. Unfortunately, two of the escort planes clipped wings and one went into a nosedive. Lieutenant J. Thad Johnson jumped free of the crashing plane but lacked the height to get his parachute open. He struck the earth with a sickening thud close to where Lindbergh had just landed, and died instantly. The incident rather spoiled the day for many people, but Lindbergh accepted it calmly. In his world, death was an occupational hazard.

Immediately after Ottawa, Lindbergh returned to Long Island and moved into Falaise, a French-style château on the Guggenheim family estate at Sands Point on the Gold Coast, a dozen miles from the Mills property where Benjamin Strong and his fellow bankers were concurrently holding their talks. The Guggenheims’ end of the Gold Coast was fractionally more bohemian than the rest and was popular with people from Broadway and the arts. Florenz Ziegfeld, Ed Wynn, Leslie Howard, P. G. Wodehouse, Eddie Cantor, George M. Cohan, and, for a time, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald all had homes there, as did a few more louche types, like the mobster Arnold Rothstein. This was the world of
The Great Gatsby
, published two years earlier. Sands Point, where the Guggenheims clustered in three substantial houses, was the wealthy East Egg of the novel.

Working in a bedroom overlooking the sea, Lindbergh scribbled out his life story, using Carlyle MacDonald’s draft as a guide. In a little under three weeks he completed a manuscript of about forty thousand
words—an impressive achievement in terms of output if not literary merit. The book, called
We
, was coolly received by critics. Lindbergh, as noted earlier, gave only passing mention to his childhood, and devoted just seven pages to his historic flight. The rest was mostly about barnstorming and delivering airmail. One reviewer drily observed, “As an author Lindbergh is the world’s foremost aviator.” The buying public didn’t care.
We
was published on July 27 and went straight to the top of the bestseller list. It sold 190,000 copies in its first two months. People couldn’t get enough of anything Lindbergh did.

And now the attention that he so little enjoyed was about to get not only much worse but also at times quite dangerous.

17

For a man who changed the world, Henry Ford traveled in very small circles. He resided his whole life within a dozen miles of his birthplace, a farm at Dearborn, Michigan, just outside Detroit. He saw little of the wider world and cared even less for it.

He was defiantly narrow-minded, barely educated, and at least close to functionally illiterate. His beliefs were powerful but consistently dubious, and made him seem, in the words of
The New Yorker
, “mildly unbalanced.” He did not like bankers, doctors, liquor, tobacco, idleness of any sort, pasteurized milk, Wall Street, overweight people, war, books or reading, J. P. Morgan and Co., capital punishment, tall buildings, college graduates, Roman Catholics, or Jews. Especially he didn’t like Jews. Once he hired a Hebraic scholar to translate the Talmud in a manner designed to make Jewish people appear shifty and avaricious.

His ignorance was a frequent source of wonder. He believed that the earth could not support the weight placed on it by skyscrapers and that eventually cities would collapse in on themselves, as in some kind of biblical apocalypse. Engineers explained to him that a large skyscraper typically weighed about sixty thousand tons while the rock and earth excavated for the foundations would weigh more like a hundred thousand tons, so that skyscrapers actually reduced the burden on the earth
beneath them, but Ford was unpersuaded. He seldom let facts or logic challenge the certainty of his instincts.

The limits of his knowledge were most memorably exposed in 1919 when he sued the
Chicago Tribune
for libel for calling him an “ignorant idealist” and an “anarchist.”
^*
For eight days, lawyers for the
Tribune
entertained the nation by punting through the shallow waters of Ford’s mind, as in this typical exchange regarding his familiarity with the history of his own country:

Lawyer: Did you ever hear of Benedict Arnold?

Ford: I have heard the name.

Lawyer: Who was he?

Ford: I have forgotten just who he is. He is a writer, I think.

Ford, it transpired, did not know much of anything. He could not say when the American Revolution was fought (“In 1812, I think; I’m not quite sure”) or quite what the issues were that provoked it. Questioned about politics, he conceded that he didn’t follow matters closely and had voted only once in his life. That was just after his twenty-first birthday, when, he said, he had voted for James Garfield. An alert lawyer pointed out that Garfield was in fact assassinated three years before Ford reached voting age.

And so it went, day after day. The world was so delighted and enthralled with Ford’s ignorance that one enterprising man sold hastily printed copies of Ford’s testimony for 25 cents each day outside the courthouse, and bought a house with the profits. (Eventually the jury found in Ford’s favor, but the jurors—twelve stolid Michigan farmers who clearly believed they had better things to do with their time—awarded him damages of just 6 cents. The
Tribune
never paid.)

Whether Ford was stupid or just inattentive has fueled debate among historians and other commentators for nearly a century. John Kenneth Galbraith had no doubt about the matter. Ford’s life and career, he maintained, were “marked by obtuseness and stupidity and, in consequence, by a congeries of terrible errors.” Allan Nevins and Frank Ernest Hill in a generally sympathetic biography of 1957 called him “an ignoramus outside his chosen field [but] an ignoramus of sense and integrity.” That was about as warm a tribute as Henry Ford received from those who knew him well or considered him carefully. He was not, in short, a terribly bright or reflective human being.

Yet against this must be set his extraordinary achievement. When Henry Ford built his first Model T, Americans had some 2,200 makes of cars to choose from. Every one of those cars was in some sense a toy, a plaything for the well-to-do. Ford changed the automobile into a universal appliance, an affordable device practical for all, and that difference in philosophy made him unimaginably successful and transformed the world. Within just over a decade Ford had more than fifty factories on six continents, employed two hundred thousand people, produced half the world’s cars, and was the most successful industrialist in history, worth perhaps as much $2 billion, by one estimate. By perfecting mass production and making the automobile an object within financial reach of the average workingman, he wholly transformed the course and rhythm of modern life. We live in a world largely shaped by Henry Ford. But in the summer of 1927, Henry Ford’s part of that world was beginning to look a little rocky.

Henry Ford was born in July 1863, the same month as the Battle of Gettysburg, and lived into the atomic age, dying in 1948 just short of his eighty-fourth birthday. His earliest conviction was that he didn’t want to be a farmer, for “there was too much work on the place.” For the first half of his long life, he was little more than an accomplished mechanic. After leaving school at sixteen, he worked in various machine and engine shops in Detroit, eventually becoming chief engineer of the Edison Illuminating
Company. In the 1890s, he quit that to pursue a fixation with building the best possible motorcar. According to Morris Markey, writing in
The New Yorker
, Ford was at a car race one day when a French driver crashed and was mortally injured. While others rushed to the stricken driver, Ford rushed to the car, which had survived better than he thought possible. Taking a hunk of chassis away with him, he discovered it was made of vanadium steel, a strong but lightweight material. Vanadium steel became the foundation metal for every car he made henceforth. However true or not that story, it is certainly the case that Ford didn’t rush into production until he had worked out every detail of production and composition. He was forty years old before he founded the Ford Motor Company in 1903 and forty-five when he produced his first Model T five years later.
^†

The Model T, like Ford himself, was an unlikely candidate for greatness. It was almost willfully rudimentary. For years the car had no speedometer and no gas gauge. Drivers who wanted to know how much gas they had in the tank had to stop the car, get out, and tip back the driver’s seat to check a dipstick located on the chassis floor. Determining the oil level was even trickier. The owner, or some other compliant soul, had to slide under the chassis, open two petcocks with pliers, and judge from how fast the oil ran out how much and how urgently more was needed. For shifting, the car employed something called a planetary transmission, which was famously idiosyncratic. It took much practice to master the two forward gears and one reverse one. The headlights, run off a magneto, were uselessly dim at low speeds and burned so hot at high speeds that they were inclined to explode. The front and rear tires were of different sizes, a needless quirk that required every owner to carry two sets of spares. Electric starters didn’t become standard until 1926, years after nearly all other manufacturers included them as a matter of routine.

Yet the Model T inspired great affection. It was the source of many
loving jokes. In one, a farmer whose tin house roof had been mangled in a tornado sent the roof to the Ford factory hoping they could advise him how to restore it. The message came back: “Your car is one of the worst wrecks we have ever seen, but we should be able to fix it.” For all its faults, the Model T was practically indestructible, easily repaired, strong enough to pull itself through mud and snow, and built high enough to clear ruts at a time when most rural roads were unpaved. It was also admirably adaptable. Many farmers modified their Model T’s to plow fields, saw lumber, pump water, bore holes, or otherwise perform useful tasks.

One central characteristic of the Model T now generally forgotten is that it was the first car of consequence to put the driver’s seat on the left-hand side. Previously, nearly all manufacturers placed the driver on the outer, curb-side of the car so that an alighting driver could step out onto a grassy verge or dry sidewalk rather than into the mud of an unpaved road. Ford reasoned that this convenience might be better appreciated by the lady of the house, and so arranged seating for her benefit. The arrangement also gave the driver a better view down the road, and made it easier for passing drivers to stop and have a conversation out facing windows. Ford was no great thinker, but he did understand human nature. Such, in any case, was the popularity of Ford’s seating plan for the Model T that it soon became the standard adopted by all cars.

The Model T was an immediate success. In its first full year, Ford produced 10,607 Model T’s, more than any manufacturer had ever made before, and still couldn’t meet demand. Production doubled annually (more or less) until by 1913–14 it was producing nearly 250,000 cars a year and by 1920–21 over 1.25 million.

The most persistent belief about the Model T, that you could have it in any color so long as it was black, was only ever partly true. Early versions of the car came in a small range of colors, but the colors depended on which model one bought. Runabouts were gray, touring cars red, and town cars green. Black, notably, was not available at all. It became the exclusive color in 1914 simply because black enamel was the only color
that would dry fast enough to suit Henry Ford’s assembly-line methods, and that lasted only until 1924, when blue, green, and red were made available.

One thing above all accounted for Ford’s competitive edge: the moving assembly line. The process was perfected bit by bit between 1906 and 1914, not so much as a progressive, systematic plan, but more as a series of desperate expedients to try to keep up with demand. The basic idea of the assembly line—or “progressive assembling,” as it was at first known—came from the movement of animal carcasses through the slaughterhouses of Chicago, which, as has often been noted, was actually a kind of “disassembly line.” Other companies used assembly-line techniques—it was how Westinghouse made air brakes—but no other manufacturer embraced the system as comprehensively and obsessively as Ford. Workers in Ford plants were not permitted to talk, hum, whistle, sit, lean, pause for reflection, or otherwise behave in a nonrobotic fashion while working, and were given just one thirty-minute break per shift in which to go to the lavatory, have lunch, or attend to any other personal needs. Everything was arranged for the benefit of the production line.

Henry Ford was always happy to take credit for the invention of the assembly-line process, but it seems he may have been generous to himself. “Henry Ford had no ideas on mass production,” Ford’s colleague Charles Sorensen once recalled. “Far from it; he just grew into it like the rest of us.”

Thanks to the slickness of operations, the time it took to produce a Ford car fell from twelve hours in 1908 (which was already good going) to just one and a half hours after 1913, when the company’s Highland Park factory opened. At the peak of production, a new car, truck, or tractor rolled off a Ford assembly line somewhere in America every ten seconds. By 1913, the company had sales of nearly $100 million and profits of $27 million. With the greater efficiencies, car prices fell, too—from $850 in 1908, to $500 in 1913, and down to $390 in 1914, before finally settling at an almost preposterously reasonable $260 by 1927.

In 1914, Ford not only introduced the eight-hour day and the forty-hour week but also doubled average salaries to $5 a day in what is often presented as an act of revolutionary magnanimity. In fact, the wage increase was necessitated by the costly waste of high employee turnover—a breathtaking 370 percent in 1913. At the same time, Ford established its notorious Sociological Department, employing some two hundred investigators who were empowered to look into every aspect of employees’ private lives—their diet, hygiene, religion, personal finances, recreational habits, and morals. Ford’s workforce was full of immigrants—in some periods as many as two-thirds of his employees were from abroad—and Ford genuinely wished to help them live healthier, more satisfying lives, so his sociological meddling was by no means entirely a bad thing. However, there was almost nothing Henry Ford did that didn’t have some bad in it somewhere, and the Sociological Department certainly had a totalitarian tinge. Ford employees could be ordered to clean their houses, tidy their yards, sleep in American-style beds, increase their savings, modify their sexual behavior, and otherwise abandon any practice that a Ford inspector deemed “derogatory to good physical manhood or moral character.” Foreign-born workers who wished to advance within the company were required to take citizenship and language classes.