The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (Vintage) (7 page)

For the next few years, Henry Ford led a kind of mixed existence, with one foot planted in the agricultural past and the other stepping toward the industrial future. He operated his sawmill in the winter months, and in the summer labored for the Buckeye Harvester Company, where he had been hired to set up and service its Eclipse portable farm engines. But much of his interest and energy focused on a new project.

Increasingly, Ford was bringing up a topic in conversation with his family: building a “horseless carriage” that could transport people about with its own power. One evening, while talking with Clara, he excitedly drew a sketch of his idea for such a contraption on the back of an old piece of sheet music. The big problem, of course, was developing an engine that was lightweight yet powerful. In 1885, Ford had been called to repair one of the new Otto engines from England, about which he had read during his apprentice days in Detroit. “No one in town knew anything about them,” he related. “There was a rumor that I did and, although I had never been in contact with one, I undertook and carried through the job.” Drawn to the unique potential of gasoline engines as an alternative to heavy, unwieldy steam engines, he became obsessed. He spent spare time in the shop behind his house building his own version of the Otto model: a one-cylinder, four-cycle internal-combustion engine that ran on gasoline. “The little model worked well enough,” Ford observed; “it had a one-inch bore and three-inch stroke, operated with gasoline, and while it did not develop much power, it was slightly lighter in proportion than the engines being offered commercially.” This engine required a heavy flywheel, however, which made it impractical for any kind of transportation device. So Ford started a process of building, and discarding, a series of “experimental engines.”

Finally, he hit upon a new approach. “It was in 1890 that I began on a double-cylinder engine,” he recalled. “The plan of the two opposed cylinders was that, while one would be delivering power the other would be exhausting. This naturally would not require so heavy a fly-wheel to even the application of power.” Ford pondered the idea of mounting the engine on a bicycle with a direct connection to the crankshaft. Tinkering for hours in his farm workshop, he slowly built his engine and modified it by a process of trial and error. “A gas engine is a mysterious sort of thing—it will not always go the way it should,” he noted many years later. “You can imagine how those first engines acted!”
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After several years of such modest experimentation on his Dearborn farm, Henry Ford made a momentous decision. Restless with rural life and
eager to develop his horseless carriage, he looked about among his connections in Detroit for a position. Having concluded that development of the vehicle demanded a greater knowledge of electricity, he was delighted when the Edison Illuminating Company offered him a job as engineer and machinist for the handsome salary of $45 a month. After consulting with Clara, who was happy on the farm but supportive of her husband's endeavors, he decided to accept. “I took it because that was more money than the farm was bringing me and I had decided to get away from farm life anyway,” Ford explained later. “The timber had all been cut.” So, in September 1891, he and his wife packed up their belongings and departed for Detroit. Ford had finally severed all ties with the farming world of his father.
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Or had he? Many years later, in the 1930s, after spending several days with Henry Ford, a reporter for
Fortune
came to a curious conclusion about his seventy-year-old subject. “When you first meet him, you think he is a mechanic with a bent for farming,” he wrote; “later you decide that he is a farmer with a bent for mechanics.” This observer had shrewdly perceived that Ford's heart did not beat to the rhythm of his huge plant at River Rouge, where, amid the billowing smokestacks, bustle of unloading ships, and metallic clanging of an enormous assembly line, the aging industrialist oversaw, at its highest point, the labor of nearly one hundred thousand workers at a two-square-mile facility producing four thousand automobiles a day. In a wistful, revealing comment, Ford had admitted that the Rouge, the largest plant in the world, was “so big that it's not fun any more.”
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So where did Henry Ford's heart lie? As
Fortune
reported, he spent most of his time away from the industrial empire he had created, at folk dances, harvest re-enactments, experimental farms, and tractor development projects. When not immersed in these activities, he whiled away the days at Fair Lane, the rural estate he had built in Dearborn on some two thousand acres only two miles from the place of his birth, or at his seventy-five-thousand-acre plantation in Georgia, Richmond Hill. In other words, the architect of mass production in America, having amassed incredible wealth from building and distributing millions of automobiles to a grateful public, seemed happiest when he escaped the industrial city crowded with cars. He thrived in the countryside, immersed in the rhythms, smells, labor, and traditions of rural life.

This impulse flowered fully in Henry Ford's most cherished adult hobby. After achieving worldwide fame by the 1920s, he poured money and effort into rebuilding the world of his youth. In 1929, after years of preparation,
Ford opened to the public a large tourist park and museum built on 252 acres in Dearborn. Visitors could inspect a display of Americana— antiques of every imaginable variety—painstakingly collected by Ford's agents. In the enclosed buildings of the Henry Ford Museum, visitors saw an array of everyday goods from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America: farm implements, railroad engines, furniture, cookware, wagons, wood-stoves, and much, much more. Outside, in Greenfield Village, stood many architectural artifacts—a courthouse where Abraham Lincoln practiced law, Thomas Edison's laboratories, the homes of Stephen Foster and Noah Webster, a Southern plantation house, the Wright Brothers' bicycle shop, a gristmill, and a stagecoach tavern, to choose just a few examples—that had been purchased, carefully disassembled, and then rebuilt by Ford's carpenters and craftsmen.

William Holmes McGuffey's log-cabin birthplace occupied a conspicuous place in the village. Carefully moved from Washington County, Pennsylvania, the McGuffey cabin stood next to a log schoolhouse (now heated, lighted, and ventilated by modern methods) where children in the primary grades from the Greenfield Village school read and studied the old textbooks. Walking about the village with a New York
Times
reporter in 1936, Ford reaffirmed his reverence for this boyhood mentor. “This school house is an inspiration to us, for we are trying to produce a generation similar to that which learned its first principles under McGuffey and his type of school.”
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But there was another architectural icon at Greenfield Village, one that stood even closer to his heart than the McGuffey cabin—Henry Ford's own boyhood home, lovingly rebuilt to the blueprint of his memories, and accurate to the tiniest detail. In part, the house stood as a living monument to his mother, replicating exactly her wallpaper, room decorations, china patterns, books, woodstoves, and kitchen utensils. It also offered a rendering of Ford's youthful struggle to succeed, as in the conspicuous placement of his workbench upstairs in order to stress his lonely endeavors as a watch repairman. The house conveyed a portrait of Ford as Horatio Alger, the boy who emerged from the countryside nurtured by his mother before she was snatched away, leaving him to pursue a lonely destiny.

Greenfield Village, with its evocation of a vanished age and its displays of personal meaning, demonstrated clearly that Henry Ford maintained a deep emotional attachment to the old-fashioned, prefactory world of his youth. For all of the mechanical zealotry and frustration with farming life that had marked his life as a young man, his rural roots ran much deeper than he realized at the time.

But this place devoted to the world of Ford's youth carefully concealed
an old, unhealed wound. As is often the case, that which is missing reveals as much as that which is present. William Ford could scarcely be found at Greenfield Village. There appeared just a trace of his father's existence—a mention of his name at the homestead—and nothing about his activities and influence. The son, it seems, never forgave William for holding tight to the traditional world that he himself would come to love in later years. Well into advanced age, in fact, Henry continued to inveigh against his father. He fed stories to reporters and biographers that disparaged the older man. Privately, when he showed the old Litogot house to relatives, he angrily described it as “my mother's house—my father just walked into that place!”

But, typically for this American legend, the story was more complicated than it seemed. Henry never rejected his father as completely as he wished others to believe. All of his agriculture-tinged projects—his devoted production of tractors, his endless experiments with soybeans, his attempts to manufacture synthetic milk—emerged from the world of William Ford. Moreover, although few people knew this, William lived with or near the family of his eldest son for many years after retiring from the Dearborn farm in the 1890s. Most significantly, Henry revealed a debt to his father in a hobby he passionately pursued throughout his adult life. Perhaps reflecting the ancient childhood memory of William taking him by the hand to see the bird's nest he had carefully left alone in the field, Henry created at Fair Lane an elaborate sanctuary filled with hundreds of birdhouses, dozens of birdbaths, and abundant species of birds. Watching these feathered creatures through binoculars from his veranda, or strolling about among them on long afternoon walks through the woods and pastures of his estate, provided perhaps his keenest private pleasure. Henry Ford certainly found fortune and fame in the crowded, smoky factories of Detroit. But emotionally, in many ways, he never left his father's farm.

Thomas Edison, the great American inventor and close friend of Henry Ford, once described the carmaker as not only a “natural mechanic” and a “natural businessman,” but that rarest of types, “a combination of the two.”
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By the 1920s, when Edison offered this assessment, most observers of Ford would have agreed. But in his early career, Ford's mechanical abilities and business talents fluctuated wildly and often divergently, and they were not harnessed in tandem. His skills as a machinist, of course, were evident when he arrived in Detroit in 1891. They provided a livelihood while he worked his way up in the electrical industry and inspired an obsessive, after-hours hobby as he tried for years to develop a horseless carriage. But Ford's adeptness as a businessman grew much more slowly and sporadically. In fact, on this front he failed consistently for many years; his first entrepreneurial ventures fell flat.

Ford's halting progress in the business world was partly the result of his personality. Inexperienced in the ways of commerce and stubborn to boot, he compounded mistakes in business judgment with an unswerving determination to follow his own instincts. But his long struggle for success also became caught up in historical developments beyond his control. Swimming against the current of business evolution, which was producing ever-larger corporate bureaucracies by the turn of the century, he pursued an older, more traditional goal of individual entrepreneurship. He was determined to maintain control of an organization, to shape personally the making of his product, and to direct the course of his enterprise according to his own vision. As he labored throughout the 1890s to be both mechanic and businessman, he mirrored an anxious question on the minds of many ambitious individuals of his age: was it still possible to be a creative, independent, self-made man in the dizzying new corporate world of bureaucracy, specialized production, mass markets, and managerial expertise? Eventually, Ford
realized a hard-won answer in the affirmative. But that achievement may have been the exception that proved the rule.

Henry Ford left Dearborn with his wife, Clara, in September 1891 and journeyed up Michigan Avenue to Detroit with their household goods piled high in a haywagon. The couple took up residence in the right half of a rickety two-story double house at 618 John R Street, in a modest neighborhood inhabited by respectable working families. The Fords paid $10 a month for their half-house and settled in with their furniture and domestic goods. The John R Street house would be the first of a dozen residences they occupied over the next few years.
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