Read The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (Vintage) Online
Authors: Steven Watts
The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (Vintage) (104 page)
Ford explained the ideals by which he had lived. He contended that the body must be nourished by “proper diet and exercise,” the mind by “practical education,” and the soul by “full acceptance of the individual's moral responsibility toward his fellow man.” He reiterated his old belief in abundance. “The earth is a luxuriantly bountiful place. There is plenty of everything for everybody,” he maintained. “We have not begun to find all that it holds for us nor how to make the best use of all it affords.” He reaffirmed his loyalty to the land and argued that people must return to rural areas as new and productive ways to work the soil were discovered.
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In a particularly interesting passage, Ford acknowledged that pride in “the machine age” and “mass production” had produced a society of concentrated industrial production and impersonal cities. “We have fallen into a philosophy of bigness which is not good for the American way of life,” Ford wrote. He acknowledged his own complicity. “In the race to see how fast and how cheaply we could produce these things we seem to have overlooked the human side of the picture—at least some of us have. We didn't do this knowingly,” he wrote. “By increasing wages and making available more conveniences at lower and lower prices, we probably thought we were doing all we could for people.” His solution, of course, lay in the plan he had been promoting for the last fifteen years: factories in the countryside or in small towns, where people could work both industrially and agriculturally.
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Ford concluded on an idealistic note. He said that “some form of religion exists in every man” as an impulse seeking “the principle of right and wrong, the power of good in the world.” Moreover, religion and education must work as partners in the “teaching of moral law and the training of conscience.” For Ford, the ultimate expression of morality and spirituality would be a “world organization” to ensure peace and prosperity. This “parliament of man,” in Ford's view, would represent people from around the globe, mediate their differences, and guarantee order and abundance.
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According to Thompson, Ford tried to publish “Thoughts for the Future.” Wartime restrictions on paper and political sensitivities, however, persuaded him to postpone publication, although he did have a few copies
run off at the print shop in Greenfield Village. Ford's final stroke aborted the project, and it never found an audience, lying buried among his papers. Nonetheless, this simple declaration of philosophy opened a window into the mind of one the most influential figures in the making of modern America and illuminated his last thoughts. Within a short time, that window would be closed forever.
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The Sage of Dearborn
The end came thick with irony. Almost eighty-four years earlier, in the summer of 1863, Henry Ford had been born by candlelight in a bedroom of his family's farmhouse. Now, during the first weekend of April 1947, torrential rains flooded the Dearborn area, knocking out electrical and telephone lines and forcing inhabitants once again to light candles for illumination. The clock also turned back in another way, as Ford showed some flashes of his old spirit on this Easter weekend. On Monday, April 7, he greeted family and friends, made several small jokes, and enthusiastically traveled about the area with his driver. As Robert Rankin noted with surprise, “He was just like his old self that day.”
1
Ford began his day in usual fashion with a good breakfast. Because of the electricity outage, Mrs. Rankin had prepared a meal of oatmeal, bacon, toast, prunes, and coffee and sent it with her husband for the Fords. After eating, Henry summoned Rankin to go for a ride to see the impact of the flooding. As they departed, he told his driver, “Your wife makes the best oatmeal that I've ever tasted in my life,” and then joked that she should, because of her husband's Scottish ancestry. They briefly visited Greenfield Village, stopped by Ray Dahlinger's office, and then continued to the Rouge plant, where Rankin mistakenly turned into a one-way driveway. When he tried to turn around, Ford said mischievously, “Let's go anyway and see what will happen.” He chuckled as people began yelling for them to go back—until they saw the passenger in the car. From there Rankin drove Ford to a small Congregational church, where Ford, who was wearing bedroom slippers and did not want to get out on the wet ground, talked briefly with the minister through the car window. Ford then visited the boat dock on the River Rouge, where he saw his two yachts, the
Benson Ford
and the
Henry Ford.
2
As they drove through Dearborn looking at the flood, Ford was fascinated by its impact. At one point he joked, “Yeah, the water must be going down. You can see the tops of the cars now.” The pair finished their tour by driving through the town's Catholic cemetery, where Ford identified a number of old friends and distant relatives, and then stopping for a longer period at a small graveyard on Joy Road. Ford looked out at the headstones for a while, and then said, “Rankin, this is where I'm going to be buried when I die. In among the rest of my folks here.” Upon returning to Fair Lane, Ford walked to the powerhouse to consult with Charles Voorhess. The generators had been knocked out by the flood, but while they were there the lights flickered on briefly. “Well,” Ford kidded Voorhess, “I'm going up and tell Mrs. Ford that I've been down here and fixed it.” The engineer noted that his boss “looked to be in the best condition I'd seen in a long time.” Then the lights went out again; they would stay out for the next two days. Voorhess and John McIntyre were unable to reach the coal bin but managed to keep heat going for the house by stoking the furnace fire with logs handed in through the window.
3
Henry and Clara had a pleasant turkey supper by candles and kerosene lamps as servants stoked a fireplace for additional heat. After the meal, McIntyre went to the house to warn the Fords that continuing problems with floodwater might keep the lights out all night. Ford had arisen from his chair in the living room and came into the hall to shake hands. Now he put his hand on McIntyre's shoulder and replied, “That's all right, Scottie. I know you will stick by me; you've always done it for years. I never worry about these things.” Henry and Clara sat before the open fire in the living room for a time, and she read to him. But the dim candlelight proved to be a strain on her eyes, so they retired upstairs about 9p.m.
4
Ford undressed and drank a glass of warm milk to aid his sleep. Emerging from his bathroom to climb into bed, he suffered a coughing fit, but recovered after a few minutes and went to sleep. Within a couple of hours, however, he awoke, breathing heavily and complaining of a headache and dry throat. As his condition worsened, Clara and the longtime maid, Rosa Buhler, sent a messenger to get Rankin from his home. Rankin found a working telephone at the Ford Engineering Laboratory and summoned Dr. Mateer. The physician rushed to the scene from Grosse Pointe as Clara sat quietly beside her husband on the bed, holding his head on her shoulder, giving him sips of water, and comforting him in the candlelight. Mateer arrived at the mansion just after midnight. Eve Dahlinger, alerted by Ford servants, had also hurried to the residence, and was with Clara when Henry Ford II and his wife arrived shortly before Mateer. They were all too late. Henry Ford had died at approximately 11:40p.m. on April 7,1947, from a
massive cerebral hemorrhage. The doctor told Clara that Henry's stooping over to untie his shoelaces had probably caused a blood vessel to break, thus triggering the coughing and then the hemorrhage.
5
Two days later, Ford lay in state at Greenfield Village as an enormous crowd gathered to pay their respects. Eventually, the mile-long line of some hundred thousand mourners filed by his open casket. The next day, Ford's funeral was conducted at St. Paul's Cathedral in Detroit before hundreds of invited guests, while a crowd of some thirty thousand gathered outside. After the service, his body was conveyed to the small cemetery on Joy Road and interred as police struggled to deal with another crowd, of around twenty thousand. Ford's headstone, a piece of white marble roughly three and a half feet by seven feet, displayed the engraving of a cross and the plain inscription:
HENRY FORD
July 30,1863
April 7,1947
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In the days following Ford's death, tributes appeared in newspapers and magazines, legislative resolutions and sermons, private telegrams and corporate news releases throughout the nation. The great majority of this commentary was favorable, noting the industrialist's huge impact on modern life. Much of it was even affectionate, recognizing his special status as a kind of American folk hero. Though some assessments, particularly in leftist and prolabor outlets, denounced Ford for his union-busting and anti-Semitic endeavors, they were buried in a landslide of praise. Most people seemed to venerate him, admire his accomplishments, and forgive his faults.
7
Over the course of a long life, Henry Ford had become an American icon. By developing methods of mass production to bring cars to ordinary citizens, he had changed their lives irrevocably. The automobile had wrought a revolution, ending the isolation of rural life, boosting suburban development, creating a road-and-highway system along with accompanying service industries, making the car industry perhaps the keystone of America's modern economy, causing an expansion of the credit system through installment buying, and changing the nature of courtship and mating patterns. Henry Ford did more than any other single individual to wrench Americans out of the horse-and-buggy days of the nineteenth century and place them in the mobile world of the twentieth.
Moreover, Ford shaped not only how Americans led their lives in the modern era, but how they thought about those lives. His vision of a liberated, experience-seeking mass of citizens
defined
standards of modern contentment.
Not just practical transportation but enriching new encounters, recreation, and enjoyment of a shiny, powerful machine itself paved the highway to happiness. Not just respectable prosperity but material abundance emerged as a sign of fulfillment. Ford's articulation of a consumer ethic helped recast popular ideas about “the pursuit of happiness” in a new mold for the modern era, and the automobile became its pre-eminent symbol. As one of political philosopher Isaiah Berlin's “hedgehogs”—unlike “foxes,” who grasp many smaller things, hedgehogs understand one big thing—Ford grasped the central dynamic of modern life earlier than just about anyone else. Charles Sorensen once remarked that Ford was able to “demonstrate the superiority of an economy of abundance over one of scarcity, and to begin the elevation of a standard of living to a height never before dreamed of.” The United States—indeed, the world—would never be quite the same.
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In leading this revolution, Ford developed a personal image that put an important modern twist on the American tradition of the self-made man. Like Theodore Roosevelt in politics, Will Rogers in entertainment, and Babe Ruth in sports, Ford attracted attention for who he was as well as what he did. With his instinctive sense of publicity, he skillfully manipulated the machinery of modern mass culture to keep his image and personality in the public eye. He used endless interviews, news releases, and a stream of ghostwritten articles and books to make sure that people remained aware of his views and his projects. The idealism, eccentricity, or reactionary quality of his ideas only enhanced his aura, as did his penchant for folksy pronouncements. With his impressive achievements inflated even larger by publicity, Ford became America's first celebrity businessman.
His populist ideology and style completed the iconic image. Perhaps the wealthiest man in the world, Ford cherished his ties to common folk, and remained a loyal friend and defender of ordinary citizens throughout most of his life. He supported populism's producer ethic, its desire to remain close to the soil, and its suspicion of elite, urban financiers. Disdainful of Wall Street, he served proudly as the tribune of Main Street and sought to bring common people a comfortable, abundant life. At the same time, Ford's populism had changed over time. From its positive, idealistic form in his early life, it gradually mutated into a negative doctrine that searched for enemies and subversive agents, an impulse that created a mindless anti-Semitism and a hostility to labor unions. But most Americans preferred to remember the earlier Ford. Farmers and storekeepers, mechanics and janitors, machinists and office clerks, and all manner of people who worked for a living responded to Ford's lack of pretension and his interests and tastes. They sensed that, at heart, he was one of them.
For all his impact as an agent of historical change, however, Ford eventually proved the law of unintended consequences. He created the socioeconomic vehicle of consumer capitalism that carried Americans into the modern world and enthusiastically anticipated its promises of self-fulfillment. But then he perceived the growth of shallow materialism, licentious desires, and a declining work ethic, and became fearful of degeneration. Similarly, Ford pioneered the development of modern industrial capitalism with the assembly line, vertical integration of the production process, and high wages. Yet here, too, he blanched at the subsequent appearance of rationalized corporate bureaucracy, advertising, urban population growth, and yearly model changes. Like many Americans who experienced the relentless pace of historical change in the early twentieth century, he began to yearn for the past even while embracing the future.
Ford's response, in part, revealed his limitations as a historical actor. Reluctant to abandon older loyalties to work and productivity, thrift and prudence, he built only the foundation of modern corporate, consumer capitalism, leaving to others the task of constructing the entire edifice. In a more positive sense, however, Ford acknowledged his fears in a way that strengthened his bond with the people. He sought to counteract the unforeseen degradations of the assembly line and the Rouge factory by enshrining the past in the Ford Museum, old-fashioned dancing, and Greenfield Village. This ambivalence boosted his status as a folk hero, and he somehow managed to become a living symbol
both
of progress and of respect for older values. Ford was a halfhearted revolutionary whose misgivings, by mirroring those of his fellow citizens, created a bond of endearment.
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The law of unintended consequences also had an impact in his private life. To be sure, as Ford rose to prominence by the 1910s, his personal life overflowed with interesting experiences and fascinating people, and he enjoyed no small portion of happiness. But his wealth and fame also brought an overweening hubris full of pitfalls. Increasingly isolated from anyone who would tell him no, Ford stubbornly stayed with an outdated Model T and wasted his social capital on a misguided attack on Jews. Unchallenged and unwilling to analyze his convictions, he endorsed wrongheaded labor policies that plunged his company into chaos. Convinced that his success in making cars had demonstrated a gift for solving social problems, he addressed public issues about which he was ignorant. Reluctant to share the spotlight or delegate power, he mistreated the son who sought only to honor his legacy. Like Citizen Kane, Ford became a victim of his own powerful personality and great success.
In spite of all this, however, Ford's achievement was breathtaking. As one commentator has reminded us, his ideas “have been so generally
adopted that people no longer realize how enormously original they were and how extraordinarily fruitful they have been.” Committed to mass production, high wages, consumer values, and the judgment of the people, Ford imagined modern America and drew up the blueprint for its realization. As that dream came to life, he became a symbol of the sea change that remade the United States in the first half of the twentieth century. In
Middletown
(1929), Robert and Helen Lynd reported that for the average American the automobile had become crucial “for leisure-time as well as getting-a-living activities.” In their words, “Ownership of an automobile has now reached the point of being an accepted essential of normal living.” Frederick Lewis Allen, in his popular book
Only Yesterday
(1931), confirmed that the automobile had “changed the face of America.” By the 1930s, streets and highways in every region of the country “bloomed with garages, filling stations, hot-dog stands, chicken-dinner restaurants, tearooms, tourists' rests, camping sites, and affluence.” People understood that Henry Ford had brought about this transformation.
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Ultimately, he represented both the possibilities and the problems of America's democratic culture in the modern era. On the positive side, Ford embodied its devotion to opportunity, openness to new ideas, lack of pretension, reformist idealism, veneration of productive work, desire for material comfort, and concern for the dignity and welfare of ordinary citizens. On the negative side, he displayed its narrow-mindedness that edged into bigotry, anti-intellectualism that made a pride of ignorance, a paranoid view of social dynamics that tended to blame enemies rather than analyze causes, and faith in the redemptive power of material goods that too often overlooked questions of social cost and spiritual meaning. In all of these ways, Henry Ford
was
modern America. As the people's tycoon during the formative years of the American century, he embodied most of their greatest strengths and more than a few of their greatest weaknesses.