The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (Vintage) (65 page)

In the spring of 1926, H. William Klare, manager of a Detroit hotel, arranged a rather unusual banquet in honor of Henry Ford. The automaker had become noted for his dietary interests, and his latest enthusiasm—car-rots—figured prominently in the evening's festivities. When the diners took their seats, the banquet hall grew dark and a spotlight shone on a figure dressed in black and orange who was standing next to Ford at the head of the table. The figure announced, “I am King Carrota! I am full of vitamins, full of iron, full of iodine, full of bottled sunshine. I have no enemy but a bad cook. I am a friend of flappers and the bald-headed, the spindly baby and three-chinned monsters, but who shall mix me with canned peas shall be consigned to outer darkness.” Following this proclamation, the lights rose and the guests dug into a twelve-course meal consisting entirely of carrot dishes: carrots à l‘orange, carrot soup Crécy mirliton, pickled carrots Greek style, carrots hors d'oeuvre, mousse of carrots, carrot loaf ravigote, carrots au gratin, carrot marmalade, carrot salad Henri Ford, carrot ice cream, and carrot tarte, the meal accompanied by large glasses of carrot juice. While the guests ate heartily, one of them, a dietitian, deflated the atmosphere of good cheer. Near the meal's end, he noted that a New York orphanage had overfed its children with carrots a few years earlier and was shocked to find that they had turned yellow. He hastily added, “The discoloration actually is not harmful, but I do know the children”—and here he paused and stressed
the last three words—“
did turn yellow.
” As the diners left the banquet hall, each one, including Ford, glanced nervously into the large lobby mirror to check his pigmentation.
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This bizarre incident reflected an important dimension of Henry Ford's adult sensibility—a preoccupation with matters of diet, health, exercise, and physical development. Like his denunciations of liquor and alcohol, Ford's interest in food reform was rooted in Victorian tradition. Since the mid-nineteenth century, reformers such as Sylvester Graham had suggested that dietary purity, like sexual propriety and emotional restraint, fostered self-control. Ford followed in this tradition, but he also transcended it. Rather than just urging reform as a matter of moral character, he preached a “gospel of health” that promoted physical revitalization as a highway to worldly success. Here he converged with the movement for “physical culture” in early-twentieth-century America.
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Ford believed that diet was a crucial factor in human development, both physical and mental. By the early twentieth century, he had become convinced that food intake determined a variety of physical, emotional, and behavioral characteristics. “Most of the ailments of people come from eating too much, or eating the wrong things,” he said in 1928. “Ailments are caused by, if not entirely due to, faulty eating.” Ford denounced sugar, excessive starch, coffee and tea, too much wheat, and red meat as harmful to the human body. He was convinced that certain combinations of food caused particular kinds of sickness. To a friend who was hospitalized with gastric ulcers, Ford said, “Too much roast beef and milk, eh? It does it every time.”
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He also linked diet to certain mental qualities. “Food specialists should try to find some food or combination of foods that will help to develop strong will-power. There are food regulations for almost every kind of physical disorder, why should there not also be a possibility of feeding a man so that he may be built up against mental or moral weakness?” he asked an interviewer. He liked to tell a story about how once he was able to assuage an angry company stockholder because he had an empty stomach. “I could prevent him from irritating me because I wasn't full of food,” Ford explained. “My mind was clear. The blood was in my head instead of my stomach and I had self-control.”
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Ford became convinced that diet produced patterns of behavior. Crime, depression, nervousness, lethargy—all were rooted in bad eating habits. “Most wrong acts committed by men are the result of wrong mixtures in the stomach,” he told
Redbook
magazine. The individual seeking to live efficiently and effectively should seek to “discover the vital connection between food and attitudes of mind, between food and the energies of mind and of
body.” In fact, social harmony depended largely on diet. “Hospitals and jails and prisons would all have less to do if people learned right feeding habits,” he said.
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People who sought mental vigor, physical vitality, and proper behavior should eat vegetables. Though not a strict vegetarian, Ford told the Detroit
News
in 1919, “the world would be better off without meat.” He also became a fan of the Hay Diet, which warned against the ill effects of combining starches, proteins, and fruit acids at one meal. Beyond these two enthusiasms, Ford's dietary advice veered wildly from one fad to another. At various times he warned against fresh dough and said that bread should be eaten only after it has sat for a day; argued that “chicken is fit only for hawks”; depicted fried pork, boiled potatoes, and oranges as unhealthy; and defined cottage cheese as nothing more than spoiled milk. For a while, he advocated that people eat nothing until after 1:00 p.m. because of likely digestive problems at an earlier hour. He sang the praises of carrots, butter, celery, and sarsaparilla, although his enthusiasms fluctuated from year to year. By the 1930s, Ford had become convinced that soybeans were a magical food for good health. Visitors to the Ford exhibit at the 1934 World's Fair in Chicago were treated to a special menu: tomato juice with soy sauce, celery stuffed with soy cheese, soybean soup with crackers made from soy flour, apple pie with soy-flour crust, and soybean milk.
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Ford's dietary views often were downright eccentric. In the 1890s, he told Oliver Barthel of his conviction that sugar was harmful because its tiny crystals would lacerate the tissue in the digestive system after being swallowed. Throughout his life he denounced the pasteurization of milk, saying that it should be drunk fresh, “before it strikes the air.” He insisted that colds came from overeating, or eating wrong combinations of foods, and recommended a forty-eight-hour fast as a remedy. To those suffering from ulcers, Ford suggested that a cure would result from “swallowing a ball of butter right down whole, once daily.” A fan of salt, he contended that it should be used for brushing the teeth and rubbing into the hair to keep it healthy and vibrant. Such odd notions struck a sour note with some experts. Dr. E. V. McCollum of Johns Hopkins Hospital, a leading authority on diet and nutrition, stated, “Henry Ford knows about as much about food as he knew about history when they had him on the witness stand [in Mount Clemens].”
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By the 1910s, Ford's interest in the human body was moving beyond diet issues, as he began to embrace doctrines of physical development. In the same way that his New Thought convictions promised increased mental vigor, he believed that devotion to exercise promised to pay physical dividends.
On this front, Ford's relationship with the early-twentieth-century “physical culture” movement proved especially revealing.

In the late nineteenth century, fears of weakness and dissipation among the genteel classes had prompted concerns about growing softness and “overcivilization” in American society. The image of the flabby, complacent, overstressed, convenience-addicted businessman began to haunt the bourgeois imagination. A number of factors—an epidemic of “neurasthenia,” or nervous prostration, among prosperous men and women; the extreme emotional repression demanded by genteel standards of conduct; growing fears of lower-class revolt caused by labor agitation and social unrest—converged to create an atmosphere of crisis. As a result, there were calls for physical regeneration in American public life. Theodore Roo-sevelt's campaign for the “strenuous life,” as well as popular movements extolling the invigorating virtues of camping, hunting, and athletics for both men and women, became part of the American cultural landscape. Building upon this foundation, Bernarr Macfadden appeared at the turn of the century as the messiah of health and bodily vigor.
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Emerging from a background of family impoverishment and illness, Macfadden became an advocate of physical fitness as a young man. Although slight of stature, he earned a livelihood as a weight lifter and professional wrestler. His enthusiasm for health and fitness, along with a love of publicity, led him to found a magazine.
Physical Culture,
first published in 1898, promoted an agenda of exercise, diet reform, and physical regeneration. With its slogan—“Weakness Is a Crime, Don't Be a Criminal”—the magazine promoted Macfadden's pet projects of vegetarianism, fasting, athletic exercise, and robust sexuality. It insisted that “sickness is a sin” and argued that such activities as calisthenics, bicycle riding, swimming, and hiking constituted obedience to God's natural laws of health. His “gospel of health,” as one scholar has termed it, combined physical revitalization, religion, self-improvement literature, and marketing into a compelling whole that lasted well into the 1930s.
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As with New Thought, Ford never formally announced his endorsement of Macfadden and the “physical culture” agenda. His actions, however, made the affiliation clear. In June 1923, an interview entitled “Smooth-Running Henry Ford” appeared in
Physical Culture.
That same month, another of Macfadden's publications,
National Brain Power,
featured several pieces on Ford. All of them were written by P. L. Atkinson, a journalist and physical-culture enthusiast, who spent several days interviewing Ford and touring his plants at Highland Park and River Rouge. Years later, Macfadden himself interviewed Ford for a pair of articles in his magazines
Liberty
and
Physical Culture.
An advertisement aptly suggested the theme of these stories. Entitled “The Story of Henry Ford—Physical Culturalist,” the ad noted that Ford's “bodily fitness can be compared only to the efficiency of his business and manufacturing methods. His clean, athletic life stands as a model lesson in keeping fit and in the fine art of living.”
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In the early 1920s, Macfadden publications portrayed Ford as a physical ideal.
Physical Culture
described him as having “an astoundingly well-knit, powerful, disease-resisting body and a physique that any physical culturalist must envy,” attributing this to the fact that he had avoided sedentary occupations and, “whenever possible, done his thinking on his feet, among the men in his shops and his factories, at their side and not behind a desk.” The author even made the ultimate comparison, picturing Ford as a man with “all the latent energy of mind and body that characterized Colonel Roosevelt.” Articles praised his regimen of outdoor exercise, which consisted of walking cross-country and jumping fences in warm weather, and ice-skating in the winter. At one point, Ford pulled a pedometer from his pocket to show Atkinson that he had covered six miles that day while performing his duties.
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In 1923,
Physical Culture
specifically tied Ford's industrial achievements to his superb physical condition. “It is but natural that a man who has so revolutionized industry by methods that show astonishing common-sense should care for his physical well-being,” the magazine noted. Years later, Bernarr Macfadden elaborated: “Mr. Ford is perhaps one of the most remarkable demonstrations we have in this country at this time of the advantage of the physical culture life in securing and maintaining the success that we all crave…. As a demonstration of the value a natural, healthful life in bringing out the talents and powers that reside in the soul of every human, Mr. Ford's career could hardly be improved upon.”
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The Ford image of robust health and physical development, however, did not just grace the pages of Macfadden's magazines. It appeared in public statements throughout his adult life. In
Psychology
magazine, Ford promoted the virtues of exercise and vigor in an article entitled “Keep Interested and Stay Fit.” “Personally, I believe in movement. I do not stay in one place very long,” Ford said. “A man who sits at a desk all day becomes logy; he is using only part of his powers. Let him get up and move around. It will be good for both his mind and his body.” He urged white-collar and blue-collar workers alike to exercise in off hours by walking, skating, doing sit-ups, any of “a multitude of things to take the kinks out of the spine.” Ford followed his own advice, pitching hay during harvest on his farm, skating during the winter, and walking daily. Years earlier, he had joined his workmen for boxing
contests over the noon hour. To the surprise of onlookers, when facing a burly opponent the slender factory-owner “was over him like a swarm of bees” and triumphed with his quickness and tenacity.
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Ford also preached the “gospel of health” to Ralph Waldo Trine and detailed his own physical regimen. He suggested that the study of diet and physical exercise was producing new knowledge that could enhance the quality and length of life. “We are already putting more mileage into the body by learning what is causing it to wear out,” Ford observed. “Man will soon be able to use his body for a much longer time, because he will discover what is necessary to do so.”
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