PROLOGUE
OCTOBER 12, 1915
When the story broke, it shoved the European war dispatches into a subordinate position in newspapers all over the world. In London as well as in Copenhagen, not to mention New York, Chicago, St. Louis, and Los Angeles, this was true. The newspapers in Detroit put out extras with big headlines:
COUZENS LEAVES FORD!
Days afterward, from one coast of the United States to the other, the press continued to feature special commentaries and so-called “inside” stories about the man who left Ford.
There were stories, too, about the reasons (true, speculative, or imagined) for the startling separation that concerned the world’s most conspicuous industrial enterprise—the Ford Motor Company of Detroit, U.S.A. If Henry Ford himself had quit, or had even simply disappeared, the sensation could scarcely have been greater.
“But none of the stories, then or later, of why it happened, came within one and one-half percent of the truth.” So, years after, said John C. Lodge, the venerable ex-councilman and ex-mayor of Detroit. He was one of the very few people in all the world who knew both principals in the stories well enough to call the one “Jim” and the other “Henry.” And Lodge believed that he at least had heard the “whole truth” from the lips of both “Jim” and “Henry”—but he wasn’t telling, for he had been “pledged” not to tell.
Yet the whole truth was that no one really had told the whole truth—not “Jim” and not “Henry,” not even when they had in fact tried to unburden themselves of the full story to old John Lodge. This is not strange. In such matters, the truth is almost always linked with, and enveloped in, motives and aspects deeply psychological, things usually veiled—veiled most of all, perhaps, from the principals themselves. They can tell of the incident itself, the “what” of the occurrence. But they are not able to tell of all that really lay behind it—the “why.” Such, clearly, was so in the case of James Couzens and Henry Ford—without either of whom the company that bore the name of Ford would never have been of interest to anyone outside of Detroit.
The “what”—the bare facts—may be pieced together briefly.
On the evening of October 11, 1915, Charles A. Brownell, who uneasily wore the title of advertising manager, had stepped, just before closing time, into the office of the Vice President, Treasurer, and General Manager of the Ford Motor Company.
Brownell, usually the opposite of a timid man, made his entrance with the attitude of caution and wariness customarily adopted by nearly everyone who went into that office. For Brownell had come to see “Jim”—though, to be sure, he did not refer to the Vice President, Treasurer, and General Manager of the Ford Motor Company as “Jim,” but rather as “Mr. Couzens.” His mission was to get Couzens’ approval of the page proofs for the next issue of the Ford Motor Company magazine, the Ford Times. He was acting in accordance with a rule that everyone in the Ford organization understood in those days—that Mr. Couzens had to approve everything (or nearly everything) the company did, and of late this had applied especially to articles in the Ford Times.
Brownell handed Couzens a set of the proofs. In his characteristically quick way, Couzens thumbed through them, while Brownell held his breath. Nothing objectionable to Couzens turned up—until his eyes fell upon one particular article.
The effect on him of glancing at this article was an almost instantaneous—and characteristic—reddening, first of his neck and then of his face—danger signs that all who knew him well understood.
The article that produced this redness contained the substance of remarks previously published in the Detroit Free Press and credited to Henry Ford, remarks concerning the war in Europe and the “preparedness movement” in the United States.
The tenor of these remarks was distinctly “pacifist”—of the kind that led a little later to Ford’s being persuaded to sponsor his celebrated Oscar II “peace ship” venture.
“You cannot publish this,” Couzens told Brownell.
“But Mr. Ford himself—”
“You cannot publish this! Hold it over.”
“But Mr. Ford said—”
“These are Mr. Ford’s personal views, not the views of the company. This is the company paper. He cannot use the Ford Times for his personal views. I will talk to Mr. Ford tomorrow.”
Brownell withdrew without saying anything more. He knew a decision had been made at the Ford company—when Couzens had made it.
After Brownell had departed, Couzens turned his swivel chair away from his flat-top desk and shut violently the roll top of his “aft” desk.
These two desks formed the nerve center of the Ford Motor Company. To them came the reports from the 6,700 Ford agents, the thirty-five Ford branches, the twenty-six Ford assembly plants, the forty-eight American banks, and the two foreign banks in which the Ford company millions were deposited. From these desks came the decisions that guided the company’s affairs throughout its already vast empire in the United States and abroad, every place, in fact, except in the main shop and in the laboratory (Mr. Ford’s particular bailiwicks)—and sometimes in these places as well.
Couzens got up briskly. He walked over to his clothes rack and planted a black derby firmly on his prematurely gray head. For a moment he stopped before the mirror over the wash basin to adjust his necktie knot to a precisely correct position in his high, stiff collar, flicked away some dust that may or may not have been on his jacket sleeves, thriftily turned off the office lights, and, in an instant, with his usual quick gait, left the office of the Ford Company for his home.
His movements that evening, down to the last gesture, were all routine for him. He had gone out of the Administration Building that same way night after night since it had been built. But, after arriving home, he went to bed earlier than usual that night, explaining to his wife, Margaret, that he had one of those headaches which his doctors called “migraine.”
At ten o’clock the next morning, Henry Ford came into Couzens’ office. “He was perfectly good-natured. He sat and visited awhile,” Couzens later described the meeting.
The two “partners,” as they were known, talked of Couzens’ recent trip to California, of Ford’s plan to attend the San Diego Exposition there with Thomas A. Edison. Then Couzens said to Ford, “I held up the Times because of your article in it about the war.”
Suddenly, as if a match had been touched to gunpowder, the calm and friendly atmosphere in the office exploded.
Ford’s geniality changed swiftly into something else—a belligerence not usually associated with Henry Ford in those days, an attitude he had certainly never before shown so sharply to Couzens, although others in the company already knew that Ford was capable of such a transformation. As Couzens himself said some time later, “Mr. Ford just flew off the handle . . . I was shocked . . . aghast.”
Couzens did not recall in detail everything Ford said on that occasion. But he did remember Ford’s having snapped:
“You cannot stop anything here!”
“Well, then, I will quit,” Couzens replied.
Ford suddenly seemed to calm down.
“Better think it over,” he said.
“No, I have decided,” Couzens said.
“What will you tell the papers?” Ford asked.
“That we disagree about the war.”
“All right, if you have decided,” said Ford.
So these two—“Jim” and “Henry,” who had been referred to in a business publication only a few weeks earlier as “The Damon and Pythias of the Ford Motor Company”—had separated.
And it all happened in less time than it takes to set it down.1
For some time a few persons in the automobile industry had known that there was trouble between the “partners,” but no one ever assumed that matters would come to this. A Ford Motor Company without James Couzens would have then been as unthinkable as a Ford Motor Company without Henry Ford. Indeed, there were those who said that the Ford Company up to then was mainly Couzens. Of course, this was not true. Henry Ford could not be dismissed so casually. Conjecture about a Fordless Ford Motor Company is unrealistic. The Ford certainly was Ford’s car, though, to be sure, C. Harold Wills, as well as certain other mechanics and designers including the Dodge brothers, John and Horace, had contributed to its creation. Similarly, the Ford ideas of factory production were more Henry Ford’s than anyone’s else, even though Walter Flanders, the Dodges, W. F. McGuire, Wills, Charles E. Sorensen, and others contributed to their development and practice. Yet, indisputably, Couzens had played a role in the company that was decisive—as decisive as Ford’s.
It was Couzens, for example, who had been responsible for the five-dollar-a-day wage plan which electrified the world in 1914. More than anything else, this plan gave the Ford Company its first international reputation. Ford himself once wrote (or had written for him):
“Ideas are of themselves extraordinarily valuable, but an idea is just an idea. Almost anyone can think up an idea. The thing that counts is developing it into a practical product.”
And that was where Couzens figured in the Ford Company picture.
Norval Hawkins, the Ford sales manager in the halcyon days of the Model T success, once summed up the story quite accurately. “Mr. Couzens was a very remarkable man, as remarkable, in many ways, as Mr. Ford. Mr. Couzens was responsible for at least half of the success of the Ford Motor Company . . . Mr. Ford required just the type of man that Mr. Couzens was to occupy the front seat, and had Couzens been a less indefatigable worker, or a man who paid less attention to the details of that business . . . it might not have been as successful as it is today. . . .”2
Barron’s, the financial weekly, said of Couzens in 1915:
“For twelve years he was with Henry Ford and it is an open question if the reverse order of the statement might not be fairly accurate. . . . The public thought of him all the time as entitled to equal credit with ‘Henry’ for the marvelous success of the motor enterprise.”
John Wendell Anderson, one of the two Detroit lawyers who were among the original stockholders (and to whom it was worth literally millions of dollars, on the basis of a $5,000 investment, to watch the affairs of the company closely from the very start) said:
“It was due to his [Couzens’] efforts that the company became a success. The team work of himself and Mr. Ford contributed to its success to a much greater extent than either one of them could possibly have done alone.”3
Many more such statements from those who knew how the company had been created and guided in its formative years could be compiled. But such compilation was not at all necessary in 1915—the very year, incidentally, in which the millionth Model T came off the assembly line at the Highland Park plant, a production and sales record that seemed incredible at the time—for the facts about Couzens’ role in the company were widely known in the world of commerce and industry.
Then, suddenly, Couzens was out of the Ford picture.
Everywhere the question was asked: “What will become of the Ford Company?”
Some predicted that the Ford Company would go the way of hundreds of other motorcar manufacturing companies, the names of which only antiquarians in the field would now remember. Recalling what they knew (or thought they knew) of Henry Ford and his commercial views, they shuddered over what they supposed would be the future of the company. James Couzens himself, however, knew (or thought he knew) the answer to the fears expressed for the company. Just after October 12, 1915, he said:
“I hope I have assisted in so perfecting the organization of the company that my resignation will not make a pin’s worth of difference. Mr. Ford agreed that his own resignation would not make a pin’s worth of difference. The momentum of the business is too great . . .”
And this, of course, proved absolutely true. Indeed, as would be demonstrated around 1928, when Henry Ford was still clinging tenaciously to the Model T long after the public had begun to reject it, and again as demonstrated in another crisis period of the 1940’s, the company had been built on such a strong foundation that not even Henry Ford himself could wreck it.
“What will Couzens do?” was another question widely asked.
He was then only forty-three. Financially he was worth anywhere from forty million dollars to fifty or even sixty million, depending on the value of his Ford stock and on investments he had made with Ford dividends and his salary. He was energetic and intellectually alert. In this respect, in fact, he was in his prime. But he had come to the end of his road—or so he thought. It seemed clear to others, however, if not to himself at just that moment, that a man who could walk out deliberately, as he had just done, on a business that was acclaimed “The Seventh Wonder of the World,” undoubtedly would find another road, perhaps an even more rewarding and satisfying one. His role in the development of the Ford Company, important as it was, actually was but prelude for an even more important role on the stage of the modern industrial era—the motor age—which he had helped to usher into being in America.
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