The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (Vintage) (88 page)

With Ford as his patron, Bennett rose steadily in the ranks over the next decade. After starting as the head of security at the Rouge, he played a key role in terminating the sociological department and prompting the resignation of the Reverend Samuel S. Marquis. By 1921, he was managing the Rouge employment office, and with the authority to hire and fire thousands of workers, his power grew substantially. As security chief at the Rouge, he also surrounded himself with a group of deputies who formed the core of the notorious Ford service department. This collection of street fighters, ex-convicts, underworld figures, and athletes numbered about three thousand by the early 1930s, and under Bennett's direction, they dominated daily life at the company. Spying on executives and assembly-line workers alike, intimidating employees, and keeping outsiders at bay, they carried out Bennett's orders as he sought to protect the interests of his employer. During this same period, he captured another source of power when Ford appointed him chief labor negotiator. The Great Depression saw Harry Bennett wielding authority on a par with Charles Sorensen and Edsel Ford. All the while, for those outside the company, he remained a shadowy figure about whom little was known. As late as 1938,
Forum
magazine noted that there was “a considerable body of myth built up around him, and in many minds he occupies the position that Rasputin did in Russia.”
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Bennett's style contributed to his growing aura. Though small of stature, he displayed a larger-than-life personality. Habitually clad in a jaunty suit with a bow tie and fedora, he had a florid complexion and thinning brown hair carefully combed to cover a bald spot. His cocky, wisecracking air radiated streetwise experience. Physically, he was absolutely fearless, equally at home in the mayhem of a street brawl, the challenge of a personal fistfight, or a gun battle with gangsters. Bennett raised lions and tigers at his country home and occasionally brought a cub to his office to frighten visitors. He loved guns, practicing daily in his office with an air pistol that fired lead pellets, and often demonstrated his prowess. Irving Bacon recalled, “I dropped into his office one day, and sitting down in a chair, I noticed a pistol on his desk and asked, ‘What kind of gun is that, Harry? Is it a German Luger?’ He picked it up, and handing me a pencil, said, ‘Hold it up, Bake.’ He pulled up the gun and shot the pencil in half—close to my finger—William Tell fashion.”
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His rugged charm and irreverent humor had a strange appeal. Fluent in the language of the street rather than the protocols of the boardroom, he
eschewed corporate platitudes in favor of no-nonsense language. When a reporter accused Ford servicemen of being hoodlums, he responded, “They're a lot of tough bastards, but every goddam one of them's a gentleman.” Bennett told the
American Mercury
how a gang of extortionists once fled from a meeting with him on a remote country road because they mistakenly thought he had brought the police. “They could have shot me dead, the dumb bastards,” he said, laughing, “but they were sure that I had protection.” He enjoyed his unsavory reputation. “The letters I get and the names they call me! Usually I can just read the first line and throw them away,” he told
Fortune
in 1933.”But one fellow fooled me. He wrote me a nice, polite letter for a page and a half and right at the end it said, ‘Bennett, you are a blank blank blank blank blank blank!’ ”
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Bennett's personal life came out of the same controversial mold as his career. He married three times and sired four daughters. All the while, he indulged in a continual round of parties, drinking, and carousing with cronies such as Harry Kipke, the former football coach at the University of Michigan. He loved to host rowdy events on his boat, where his favorite prank involved tripping a guest so that he fell overboard. The inebriated crowd would fish him out amid much merriment.
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Not surprisingly, Bennett lubricated his raucous lifestyle with generous applications of money. At the company, he sealed contracts by generously dispensing Ford cars, and sometimes dealerships, to influential individuals. Personally, though receiving only a modest salary, Bennett gained ample reward from a steady stream of valuable property. Ford gave him a twenty-eight-hundred-acre wilderness getaway in Clare County, Michigan, an eighty-four-hundred-square-foot cabin on Lost Lake, a valuable tract of land on the Detroit River near Grosse Ile, and a lodge on Harsen's Island on Lake St. Clair. He was especially fond of the
Estharr
(a combination of one wife's name and his), a seventy-five-foot yacht that he took on voyages with his cronies along the Huron River, onto Lake Michigan, and occasionally to the Caribbean. But Bennett's primary residence may have been the most outlandish result of Ford's largesse. Known as “The Castle,” it sat on a large tract of land in the countryside near Ypsilanti. This little boy's fantasy was a sprawling stone structure featuring towers, an underground series of tunnels, false bookcases that became doors with the touch of a secret lever, and an underground cave room with specially manufactured stalactites and stalagmites, and tiger cages. It had a huge barroom decorated to look like the interior of a yacht with portholes, nautical clocks, and navigation instruments, all of which was surrounded by a large painted seascape where ships and lighthouses glowed with tiny electric lights when a switch was thrown.
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Bennett's easy way with substantial amounts of cash was evident to his
friends. One evening in early December, Irving Bacon, Bennett, and Harry Kipke were relaxing at a lake near The Castle. After drinking much champagne, on a lark they crossed the lake in a canoe. A drunken Bennett fell into the frigid water and was pulled to shore by Kipke. To Bacon's astonishment, Kipke then went back out onto the lake. But, as soon became clear, he was paddling about and gathering up a large number of $20 and $50 bills that had been dislodged from Bennett's pockets and were now floating on the lake surface.
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But Bennett was not just a calculating roughneck who took advantage of a wealthy patron; he displayed talent in unexpected areas. A disciple of physical fitness, he exercised regularly and rode horses. He loved painting as much as fighting, and filled The Castle with his work, which ranged from nude studies to the seascape mural in his barroom. He also dabbled in sculpture and music. He was proficient on the saxophone and clarinet, playing the latter instrument to accompany his daughters on the piano and the former in the Shrine Band of Detroit, which performed occasionally at dances, concerts, and parties.
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For the most part, Bennett exercised power at the Ford Motor Company not through talent and personality but through fear. From his corner office in the basement of the administration building at the Rouge, he directed an army of henchmen in systematically creating an atmosphere of physical intimidation. The service department, filled with “hoodlums” and “punks,” created a reign of terror at the Rouge. Anyone summoned to Ben-nett's office saw a number of these thugs lounging about waiting for orders, and ignored the obvious message at his peril. Some servicemen paraded along the assembly lines enforcing discipline and looking for slackers. Others fanned out among the workforce, temporarily taking real jobs so they could spy for Bennett and report any suspicious behavior or dissenting ideas. As the head of this repressive organization, Bennett gained a fearsome reputation among Ford workers. As one journalist noted, “They speak of him privately as if he were a combination of Dracula and J. Edgar Hoover.”
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That same fear spread to Ford managers. Bennett's elaborate system of spies spread from the factory floor to executive offices, and he seemed to know everything that was said at the Rouge, who said it, and when he did so. He developed files on the personal transgressions—drinking, gambling, womanizing—of even the highest-placed executives. If Bennett couldn't get the goods on someone, he would try to lure the person into misbehavior. Lawrence Sheldrick reported how Bennett tried to talk him into going on a special railcar with representatives from the Budd Manufacturing Company on a trip to Chicago. But Sheldrick refused, sensing “one of his typical
tricks, to get me off on this trip and then build up this story to the boss about me being wined and dined and getting drunk with our suppliers, and turn Mr. Ford against me.” Indeed, Bennett encouraged disloyalty in the subordinates of the most powerful men in the company. He courted Russell Gnau, Charles Sorensen's executive assistant. “I know just about every time Mr. Sorensen went to lunch, Mr. Gnau would get up and go over to Ben-nett's office and the two of them would go some place for lunch,” reported one observer.
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Bennett carefully cultivated an ethos of violence to enhance his mystique. Many in his organization were armed, and if a special alarm went off in his basement office, men with shotguns would appear almost immediately. Bennett bragged constantly about his underworld connections, and dark-suited characters with bulges under their coats were always loitering about his office. In fact, his mobster connections were so good that he was able to assist the police in solving several high-profile kidnapping and murder cases around Detroit. He enjoyed threatening violence to, or performing it on, anyone who blocked him. During a dispute, he once burst into Sorensen's office and threw off his coat to attack its occupant when Roscoe Smith, Sorensen's burly assistant, grabbed him from behind. “I learned a trick in the Navy of how to escape such a hold,” Bennett described gleefully. “I relaxed. This caused Roscoe to relax. Suddenly I broke loose, turned, and pushing my left palm under Smith's chin, I slugged him with my right and broke his jaw.” When this happened, Sorensen bolted for the door yelling, “Let me out of here! There's a madman loose!”
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Bennett reinforced his position in the company by cultivating powerful connections in the surrounding community, in Dearborn and elsewhere in the state of Michigan. He dispensed patronage by handing out jobs, favors, and automobiles. He built a political organization in Dearborn by donating money to public officials. “I don't think there is any doubt,” noted a top Ford manager, “that Harry Bennett made and unmade the mayors and chiefs of police of Dearborn.” Bennett's stooges formed a political organization called the Dearborn Knights that pressured voters and threatened opponents. He also acquired much influence among Wayne County judges. He successfully placed Harry Kipke on the Board of Regents for the University of Michigan, pushed a friend onto the City Council of Detroit, and struck up a friendship with the governor of Michigan. As the
American Mercury
reported, “Bennett is a power in Michigan politics. He is on intimate terms with practically every official in the state.”
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For all his retainers in the service department and influential friends around Detroit, however, Harry Bennett's power at the company basically stemmed from one source—his close personal relationship with Henry
Ford. The two men had become nearly inseparable. According to Bennett, in the early 1920s Ford began meeting him at the Rouge late at night to inspect the premises and monitor the workforce. “They don't know when to look for us,” Ford said, and “that keeps them on their toes and guessing all the time.” Within a few years, he saw his security chief every day. “He usually called me the first thing in the morning, and often drove to my home to take me to work,” Bennett recalled. Ford also telephoned Bennett every evening at nine-thirty. By 1930, this close friendship had bestowed enormous authority upon the head of security.
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The bond was unbreakable. When Ford heard reports about Bennett's antics or unsavory tactics, he would say with a smile, “That wasn't my Harry, was it?” When William J. Cameron criticized the security chief, Ford replied, “You know, you can say what you want about Bennett, but I think he's a pretty good Christian.” By the 1930s, the two were seen together constantly, conversing about company affairs, discussing items in the newspaper, and laughing about the latest installment of “Iffy the Dopester,” a cartoon strip in the
Free Press
they both enjoyed. Bennett summed up their relationship many years later: “I believe that Mr. Ford thought of me as a son. He was always extremely solicitous of my health, and, I think, felt as close to me as a father might.”
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In addition to trust and camaraderie, respect flavored their relationship. Bennett admired Ford and fulfilled any request immediately and unquestioningly. But Ford also developed a very high opinion of his subordinate. He commented to friends about this ex-sailor's intelligence, and when a visiting reporter asked him to identify “the smartest guy he had ever worked with,” Ford silently nodded at Bennett, who was driving the car. Sorensen once complained about something Bennett was doing in a meeting of company executives. Fred Black described the reaction: “Mr. Ford, with an icy-cold tone in his voice and a steely look, said, ‘What is the matter, is he stepping on your toes?’ Sorensen made no reply.” When the company's production head had to steer clear of Bennett, others took notice.
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There were several reasons for Ford's embrace of Bennett. The colossal size of the company made it nearly impossible for its founder to keep tabs on its intricate operations. Harry Bennett could do it for him, and Ford came to believe that this task required a tough, ruthless personality. Once, when asked how he put up with Bennett, Ford said, “Well, what's the difference? If I put somebody else in his place, give them a few years, and they'll do the same thing.”
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Bennett also offered Ford a substitute for his son. In the 1930s, as he grew older and his energy waned, Henry wanted someone to lean on in conducting the affairs of his company, and he remained convinced that Edsel
was too soft for the job. Bennett appeared the picture of strength next to the younger Ford. Perhaps to toughen Edsel's character so he would assert himself, Henry set the security chief against his son. Bennett understood the game and maneuvered to isolate the Ford heir in the company by subtly berating him, bullying him, and freezing him out of the decision-making process. As he once noted, Edsel “was just a scared boy as long as I knew him. Mr. Ford blamed himself for this. He had always overprotected him.” The son seemed determined to prove his father's point. Rather than fighting back, even though he was president of the company and sharply disapproved of Bennett, Edsel swallowed his objections and reluctantly endured his father's favorite.
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