The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (Vintage) (84 page)

Ford disavowed any impulses of nostalgia in building the Dearborn museum and village. “I have not spent the twenty-five years making these collections simply to bring a homesick tear to sentimental eyes,” he declared in 1932.”Its purpose is serious, not sentimental.” Nonetheless, a nostalgic celebration of the past often influenced his public statements. In
Today and Tomorrow,
Ford claimed that our ancestors “knew how to order some parts of their lives better than we do. They had much better taste; they knew
more about beauty in the design of commonplace, everyday things.” In
Looking Forward Through the Past,
he expressed his hope that citizens would realize that “something solid and vitally valuable in the past has escaped us—and that we must strive back toward it at all costs.”
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This sentimental regard for bygone days often appeared in “Mr. Ford's Own Page,” his ghostwritten column in the Dearborn
Independent.
In essays entitled “The Small Town” and “The Old Ways Were Good,” he condemned the crowded, noisy, nerve-wrenching nature of the modern city and claimed that “in small communities the better qualities of our nature have a chance.” To those who mocked the backwardness of the past, he countered with praise for “the old industry, the old thrift, the old preference of the necessary rather than the unnecessary.”
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Another
Independent
essay, however, let slip a disturbing aspect of Ford's nostalgia. In a piece entitled “Change Is Not Always Progress,” he contended that newness, in and of itself, did not always represent an advance. Then Ford took an unsettling step. “The trouble with us today is that we have been unfaithful to the White Man's traditions and privileges,” he stated. “We have permitted a corrupt orientalism to overspread us, sapping our courage and demoralizing our ideals. There has always been a White Man's Code, and we have failed to follow it.” Here, of course, Ford linked his sentimental regard for Greenfield Village to the anti-Semitism that inspired his crusade against the Jews and to the prejudice against non-Anglo cultures. Thus nativism as well as nostalgia shaped Ford's vision of the “real” history of the common man in America.
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All in all, Ford's passion for Greenfield Village, the Henry Ford Museum, and the dances of his youth suggested an underlying uneasiness with the industrial world that he had created. Unquestionably, he was proud of the modern society of consumerism and mass production his automobile had helped launch. Like most Americans, he wanted to believe that technological change brought progress without destroying the simpler, enduring values of the past. But Ford was haunted by a fear that, in many ways, such had not been the case. History helped calm that anxiety. The village and the museum, embodying Ford's populist, technological interpretation of the past, helped assuage his personal sense of loss by locating the past and present in a single, upward trajectory in which ordinary people created extraordinary advances. This stabilizing vision connected dizzying change to older traditions and values along a continuum. At the same time, Ford's history projects offered another kind of emotional satisfaction by providing a
temporary
escape from the intensity of modern life. He could immerse himself periodically in the warm feelings of Greenfield Village—he could play and pretend—while always returning to the material comforts made possible by
the River Rouge. Ford strolled the streets of his little town and then rode home to Fair Lane in his chauffeured automobile.

Thus, as he entered the last period of his life, Henry Ford turned history to his own social and personal purposes. But in the end he was not able to escape modernity. Not long after Light's Golden Jubilee, the stock market crashed and the Great Depression slowly brought the consumer economy of the United States to its knees. Amid this disaster appeared a growing problem with industrial laborers who, desperate to defend their vulnerable positions, sought union protection. Confused and increasingly resentful, Ford struggled to deal with a situation never imagined by the simple, virtuous inhabitants of his mythical Greenfield Village.

In 1933,
Fortune
magazine offered the most in-depth analysis of Henry Ford and his company ever published by the press. Its reporters spent several weeks in Dearborn, interviewing the automaker and his managers, surveying the scene at the River Rouge plant and the Ford Engineering Laboratory, touring the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village, and inspecting various agricultural projects. They also assembled an accurate, detailed reconstruction of company finances over the past decade.

In the resulting twenty-page article,
Fortune
reported that the Ford Motor Company's financial prospects looked bleak—a loss of $20 million in 1933, losses of $140 million from 1931 to 1933, and the likelihood of greater losses in the future. “Declining sales have changed Mr. Ford from one of the greatest U.S. money-makers to one of the greatest U.S. money losers,” it observed. The company's domination of the automobile market was a thing of the past, for both General Motors and Chrysler, Ford's rivals among the “Big Three,” had surged ahead and were showing a profit. The numbers were sobering. In 1933, according to Department of Commerce statistics, General Motors sold over 650,000 passenger cars and controlled 41 percent of the market. Chrysler sold 400,000 and had 25 percent of the market. Ford checked in with 325,000 and 21 percent. This situation, as
Fortune
reporters discovered, caused many observers of the industry to wonder if the Ford Motor Company was washed up.
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Fortune
also noted a peculiarity that was reflected in the article's title: “Mr. Ford Doesn't Care.” Henry Ford seemed unconcerned about his company's falling sales and declining revenues. “Through this din of whispering, Mr. Ford, at seventy, remains undisturbed, indifferent,” the magazine observed. When pressed about the decline of his company and the advance of General Motors, he repeated his mantra that producing a good car would solve all problems. The “Chevrolet people,” he admonished his own managers,
were trying to “get you fellows' minds off your work. And they seem to have succeeded mighty well.” Such incidents painted a clear, if unsettling, picture—while his company floundered, Henry Ford assumed a posture of benign neglect.

The
Fortune
article examined a final odd twist in the troubled company. On the one hand, its chief seemed to have lost much interest in the actual functioning of his enterprise and spent almost all his time with his historical hobbies and agricultural experiments. “Mr. Ford says that the Rouge is so big that it is no fun anymore,” the magazine explained. On the other hand, he maintained an iron grip on his authority within the company. As the article concluded, “The first point to make again and again is that only one man runs it and he is Henry Ford.” Refusing to share his decision-making power even as he stepped away from direct engagement in company affairs, Ford functioned by the mid-1930s as a kind of absentee landlord.
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None of this came as news to those inside his organization. During the first half of the 1930s, everyone could see Ford's declining interest in the company as he directed his energy to the Ford Museum and Greenfield Village, pursued special projects in education and rural development, and supervised the building of a new winter residence in coastal Georgia. Insiders also experienced manifestations of Ford's arbitrary power. Company managers were denied titles, and their responsibilities were not clearly designated. Personnel, and sometimes entire operations, appeared and disappeared magically.
Fortune
repeated the famous story of the salesman who met with a member of the Ford traffic department and then called back the next day to clarify an agreement. “Oh,” said the telephone operator, “Mr. So-and-so isn't working here now.” The startled salesman asked to speak to someone else in the traffic department. “Oh,” the girl replied brightly, “we haven't got any traffic department any more.” Ford would grow suspicious of someone “and all of a sudden he would find that he had an intense dislike and couldn't stand that certain guy around the plant. Then that man would just disappear and nobody knew what happened to him.” As
Fortune
pointed out, “Like any other authority that is absolute, Mr. Ford's authority tends toward the extreme.”
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Ford's intermittent engagement during the 1930s created a trio of major problems. First, the lines of authority in the company, which had been rather haphazard since its earliest days, now became tangled into a knot. Figures such as Edsel Ford, Charles Sorensen, and P. E. Martin occupied citadels of power, but none oversaw the complete institution or enjoyed the full confidence of its chief. Adding to this instability, Harry Bennett, an energetic, untutored, bullying ex-prizefighter, emerged as a dominant force in the company under Henry's patronage. Second, Ford's
judgment on larger public issues proved to be as eccentric as his administrative decisions. Facing the grave social and economic issues of the Great Depression, he reacted with a series of platitudinous pronouncements that made him appear insulated from reality. He denounced the activist national government of President Franklin Roosevelt and engaged in a protracted battle with the New Deal. Third, Ford reacted badly to the rising discontent of industrial workers in the Depression-era economy. He helped create a series of spectacular, violent labor confrontations at the River Rouge plant that captured national headlines and sullied the reputation of his company.

This string of difficulties marked a decline in Henry Ford's career. After some three decades of groundbreaking innovations in American industry and influential interventions in national affairs, his eminent position began deteriorating rapidly. Though still respected as a leader in the making of the modern United States, he entered an inexorable spiral of decline into irrelevance. In the process, his image as a folk hero, reformer, and visionary, already tarnished by his misadventures with anti-Semitism, became even darker. In the 1930s, without ever quite realizing it, Henry Ford increasingly appeared as a problem.

In late 1929, only a few weeks after Light's Golden Jubilee, Henry Ford was invited to meet with President Hoover and other industrial leaders regarding the recent stock-market crash. The group, which included prominent businessmen such as Alfred P. Sloan, Pierre du Pont, and Owen D. Young, as well as Secretary of the Treasury Andrew W. Mellon, convened at the White House on November 21. They discussed the economic crisis that had beset the country and pondered various responses and policies. Reporters gathered to quiz the participants as they left the three-hour meeting. Since Hoover had announced his intention to issue a statement summarizing their collective conclusions, they politely muttered “no comment” or referred attention to the forthcoming declaration.

But Ford had his own idea. As the conference disbanded, according to newspaper accounts, “Mr. Ford broke through the throng in the Executive Offices” and strode through the clamoring journalists as his secretary distributed copies of a typed statement. Its contents created a sensation. First, true to his populist principles, Ford denounced the stock market as a forum for advancing “the promise of quick profits in speculation.” Its recent difficulties, though unfortunate, reflected only a collapse of inflated value, and need not harm general business, which should return to its duty of producing good inexpensive products. Second, true to his belief in modern consumerism,
Ford proclaimed the need for “increasing the purchasing power of our principal customers—the American people.” That could be achieved, he argued, by lowering prices throughout the economy and by increasing the general wage level. “To make wages better and keep prices down requires that businessmen come back into business, as many are doing since stocks came down,” he declared. After a quick lunch, Ford returned to the White House, consulted briefly with Hoover, and then released a second, dramatic statement. He announced a general wage increase for workers in the Ford Motor Company and promised that it would go into effect within ten days.

Other conferees were shocked by Ford's performance. He had not informed them of his ideas during their discussions. Indeed, the conference had agreed that the general wage scale should not be disturbed at present, and this principle had appeared in the President's summary, released after Ford's. With some understatement, newspapers noted, “Mr. Ford's colleagues, when informed of the contents of his statement, expressed surprise that such a personal utterance of policy should be made. They had expected enunciation of a policy representing the views of those at the conference only through President Hoover.”

It was vintage Ford—the willingness to go it alone, the instinct to act decisively, the keen eye for publicity. He simply stole the show. Newspapers described how he had commandeered “the center of the stage” in Washington and hijacked Hoover's industrial conference “body, boots, and breeches.” Ford's actions, garnering much favorable commentary, also demonstrated flaws that would become more pronounced as the Great Depression settled over the United States. His comments after the White House conference betrayed a superficial grasp of the complexities of the American economy. They revealed a naïve, almost obsessive belief that work and production would solve all problems in American business. Finally, Ford proved unable to keep his promise of higher wages. In little over a year, his company cut wages, as did nearly every other American business. Ford's brave façade at the White House, like much else about him during the 1930s, eroded under the onslaught of economic and social reality. He increasingly appeared as, at best, a slogan-spouting, irrelevant old man chained to the past, and, at worst, a dangerous reactionary.
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