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) (26 page)
He kept looking at it. He'd tip his head this way and that and look at it…. I said, “Is there anything more I can …?” “No,” he said. “I'm going over and look at the new car.” He kind of smiled….
He had his hands in his pockets and he walked around that car three or four times, looking at it very closely. It was a four-door job and the top was down. Finally, he got to the left-hand side of the car that was facing me, and he takes his hands out, gets hold of the door, and bang! One jerk, and he had it right off the hinges! He ripped the door right off! God, how the man done it, I don't know!
He jumped in there, and, bang, goes the other door. Bang, goes the windshield. He jumps over the back seat and starts pounding on the top. He rips the top with the heel of his shoe. He wrecked the car as much as he could…. Mr. Ford was in there, and his hands were going, and his feet were going, and you talk about cussing! It was the first time I had ever heard Mr. Ford cuss, and oh, the other fellows were just taking it in. He was going to it.
After a furious Ford finished demolishing the new model, he ordered all production plans halted and all contracts canceled. With this angry outburst, he had made his position clear. The Model T alone would define the destiny of the Ford Motor Company, and anyone who questioned its status did so at his own risk.
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A few years after this remarkable display, another incident dramatically demonstrated that Ford not only revered the Model T but understood its social and cultural impact. His advertising staff approached him with a new
slogan they had crafted over the previous weeks. Taking their cue from Ford's many public pronouncements about bringing a sturdy vehicle to the ordinary person at a modest price, they hit upon an ideal phrase: “Buy a Ford and Save the Difference!” When they showed it to Henry Ford, however, he took a pencil and crossed out one word, replacing it with another. His revised slogan read “Buy a Ford and
Spend
the Difference!” Saving money was good, Ford explained, but if carried too far it would strangle American industry. Spending, rather than saving, now held the key to happiness, and it “is the wiser thing to do,” Ford insisted. “Society lives by circulation, and not by congestion.”
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This incident, in concert with his destruction of the prototype a few years earlier, revealed worlds about Henry Ford's keen grasp of the age in which he lived. Perhaps better than anyone, he understood that, whereas thrift and self-control had been the hallmarks of success in an earlier age, spending and self-fulfillment were becoming the cultural lubricant that kept the mass society of the new century moving ahead smoothly. With his fierce loyalty to the Model T and his successful association of it with a new ethos of buying and enjoyment, Ford made his name and his car synonymous with the deepest instincts of an emerging consumer America.
Producer
Those who saw the sight never forgot it. Tens of thousands of Model T's began appearing as if by magic from Henry Ford's marvelous new factory at Highland Park. Lined up wheel to wheel in the huge clearing lots outside the assembly buildings, they stretched nearly as far as the eye could see, a sea of automobiles waiting to be loaded onto railcars to meet their purchasers. Highland Park had lurched to life like a giant mechanized octopus with its grasping tentacles extending in every direction, drawing in great chunks of raw material and exuding finished Fords. But, far from presenting a gruesome or unsavory spectacle, this sparkling new factory made industrial manufacturing into a modern art form. It offered unprecedented economies of scale and employed thousands of workers. It brought acres of production area under one roof. An example of the most innovative industrial design, this monument to American productivity with its massive windows and glass-encased roof was dubbed the “Crystal Palace.”
Then, in 1913, Highland Park upped the ante even more. Adopting a novel manufacturing technique called the “assembly line,” Ford and his managers installed a system that sent production soaring to unimaginable heights. In the assembly line's first year of operation, output of Model T's shot up from 82,000 to 189,000. By 1916, it stood at 585,000. In 1921, Ford produced one million automobiles; by 1923, two million. Highland Park had become the site of a miracle. Like the New Testament story of the loaves and fishes, Ford seemed to be creating material sustenance for thousands of people by a superhuman process. His fellow citizens responded with a kind of worship, and his assembly line, much like the Model T it produced, became a symbol of modern America and its prosperity.
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In fact, Henry Ford employed religious imagery to describe his company's stunning technological and organizational achievements. Mass production, he declared, had so improved the lot of human beings that it could
only be described as a gift from God. In an article entitled “Machinery, the New Messiah,” Ford explained how the intelligent use of technology had made goods available and affordable for popular consumption while also lifting the physical drudgery of hard labor from the shoulders of factory workers, farmers, and housewives. Organized machine production had provided the means by which a consumer utopia of prosperity was being realized. In Ford's words:
Human demands are increasing every day and the needs for their gratification are increasing also. This is as it should be. Gradually, under the benign influence of American industry, wives are released from work, little children are no longer exploited; and given more time, they both become free to go out and find new products, new merchants, and manufacturers who are supplying them…. Machinery is accomplishing in the world what man has failed to do by preaching, propaganda, or the written word.
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Yet Highland Park also performed an important cultural function by alleviating anxiety. The new consumer world so skillfully shaped by Ford and others inspired, even thrilled, millions of Americans in the early twentieth century. But it also unsettled them. To a population raised on Victorian proprieties, the new consumer values of self-fulfillment, material comfort, and leisure raised unnerving moral quandaries, unfamiliar dilemmas, and challenging questions. Ford's highly publicized productivity, in subtle yet profound ways, salved people's fears. It reassured Americans that productive effort brought rewards, and that labor was a form of virtue. In so doing, he tapped the wellsprings of the Protestant ethic, an American tradition insisting that work was morally meaningful, even while twisting the work ethic into new shapes that would eventually become nearly unrecognizable. Appearing the defender of producerism as well as the disciple of consumerism, Henry Ford demonstrated that work still mattered.
By 1906, Ford was suffering a happy problem. As he told a reporter for
Motor Age,
his company was five months behind on orders and struggling to keep up with the growing demand for the Ford Model N. A few months later, the Detroit
Journal
carried a front-page story confirming progress on this front. The Ford Motor Company, it announced, had decided to purchase the grounds and racetrack of the old Highland Park Hotel, on the northwest edge of Detroit, as the site of its new automobile factory. The
fifty-seven-acre tract stood at the intersection of two thoroughfares, Woodward and Manchester Avenues, and offered convenient access to the Michigan Central, Grand Trunk, and Detroit Terminal Railroads snaking in from the north. Design work and planning began in 1908, and construction of the new facility continued through the next year. The company moved from Piquette Avenue to Highland Park at New Year's 1910, even though the factory would not be completed until 1914.
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Noted architect Albert Kahn had designed the Highland Park plant. Ford had summoned him in 1907 after rejecting the original design for the factory. “I don't like it, and they think that the kind of building I want is impossible,” Ford complained to Kahn. “I want the whole thing under one roof. If you can design it the way I want it, say so and do it.” He gave a rough verbal sketch of his plan. Kahn agreed to try, and drew up designs, which Ford modified. This process went on for months until the automaker was satisfied. “All I ever did was to take his instinctive hunch and reduce it to a working formula,” the architect described later. Kahn, a German immigrant, was a pioneering figure in factory design. Most of his fellow architects believed that the creation of museums, libraries, monuments, and mansions stood on a more dignified, elevated plane than meeting the utilitarian demands of industrial enterprise. Kahn disagreed, and his innovative design for the Packard Motor Car Company factory brought him to Henry Ford's attention. His creation at Highland Park was so astounding that it launched his career, making him the most famous and accomplished industrial architect in the world.
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The factory born from Henry Ford's imagination and Albert Kahn's blueprints was unlike anything yet seen in industry. Instead of the traditional design, in which separate functions were performed in separate buildings, an entire industrial complex was placed under one roof. The proportions were enormous. The main, four-story structure fronted Woodward Avenue and stretched to a length of 865 feet and a width of 75 feet. Another, one-story edifice, with a sawtooth roof, 140 feet wide and 840 feet long, paralleled the main building and was connected to it along the entire length by a huge glass-roofed craneway for the transfer of materials. Over the next few years, more parallel structures were added, along with a host of support buildings—power plant, foundry, engine house, underground tunnel system, and administration building—until the sixty acres were filled. All of the structures were built of steel and reinforced concrete, with minimal use of bricks except on ornamental bastions at the corners. The most notable feature of the Highland Park factory, however, was its fifty thousand square feet of glass windows (nearly 75 percent of the wall area), an expanse of transparency that was supplemented by skylights and glass roofs in the
craneways. This created the impressively light and airy atmosphere of the Crystal Palace.
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Highland Park's rationalization of automobile manufacturing dwarfed all previous efforts in the field. The first floor of the main building was divided into compartments, each of which focused on machining various parts of the Model T chassis, such as camshafts, crankshafts, axles, transmissions, and connecting rods. Across the craneway in the one-story machine shop, several departments worked on the power elements—machining cylinders and cylinder heads, piston rings, differential gears and gear cases, and assembling the motor. The fourth floor of the main building witnessed the construction of large metal components of the Model T body, such as fenders, radiators, hoods, and fuel tanks. It also housed the upholstery operation. On the third floor, Ford workers in one large area busily fashioned the car's wheels, tires, lamps, and floorboards, while those in another painted and trimmed the car's finished body. The second floor housed a great variety of activities, including body assembly, stock areas for repair parts, and the shipping department. The experimental department, drafting room, and pattern department sat in the front areas of the second floor and had direct access to the administration building sitting at the front of the complex.
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This careful organization according to function aimed at maximum efficiency in production, and it was enhanced by several operational principles mandated by Henry Ford and his managers. These entailed the skillful use of machinery. First, Highland Park deployed an enormous power source—a 3,000-horsepower gas engine turning huge generators—to distribute electrical power throughout the facility. Within a few years of the factory's opening, an additional, 5,000-horsepower gas engine increased the power potential. Second, from its inception, when P. E. Martin and Charles Sorensen used layout boards to create an overall plan, the new Ford factory deployed its machines in a logical progression that matched the sequence of production for the Model T. This encouraged a smooth flow from beginning to concluding processes. Third, the factory became noted for its close grouping of machines, something allowed by the abundant sunlight and ventilation. With tightly placed machines discouraging the accumulation of work in aisles, a continuous flow of production from site to site became the norm. Fourth, because of Henry Ford's decision to produce only one chassis model for all his company's automobiles, Highland Park relied heavily upon single-purpose machines. Machines, such as the large apparatus in the engine department that drilled forty-five holes in the side of the engine block at one time, greatly increased efficiency of production.
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But Highland Park encompassed more than machines and flowcharts.
Within two years of its opening, the factory employed some fifteen thousand workers. Yet here, too, the Ford devotion to organization and efficiency shaped significantly the configuration of human labor. “System, system, system!” was the accurate conclusion of a reporter for the Detroit
Journal
who visited Highland Park soon after it opened in 1910. That ethos pushed Ford managers to create labor systems that encouraged maximum productivity. In the subassembly of various components, for instance, such as the engine or the rear axle, workers labored at stations where they were provided easily accessible bins filled with appropriate parts for the task at hand. Then, in the general assembly of the Model T, a line-production system held sway: a skeletal chassis was placed upon a stand, or “horse,” as teams of workers, each specializing in a specific task, added sections of the car. Supplied with the necessary components, these teams followed one another sequentially, moving from horse to horse, until the automobiles began to emerge. When the wheels had gone on the car, it would be rolled along from station to station until its completion. The smooth operation of this system demanded the timely delivery of parts and the careful orchestration of assembly teams.
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