Wheels for the World: Henry Ford, His Company, and a Century of Progress, 1903-2003, and: The American Axis: Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, and the Rise of the Third Reich (review)

In recent years the line dividing scholarly histories from popular ones has grown blurry. Changes in how books are marketed and retailed over the past two decades have whetted the appetite of general readers for history, and many academic historians, though trained to write for specialists, now seek to tap in to this audience more broadly. The commercial success of such scholars as Joseph Ellis and James M. McPherson has inspired academic historians to try to write more readable books. At the same time, journalists and other writers are producing ambitious narratives based on primary sources. Still, important differences remain between the kinds of history that academic and popular writers produce. These differences surface in interesting ways in two new books on Henry Ford.

The author of the first, Douglas Brinkley, is a professor and director of the Theodore Roosevelt Center for American Civilization at Tulane University. The Ford Motor Company handpicked him to produce a new history of the company in time for its centennial celebration in 2003. The author of the second book, Max Wallace, is a journalist who has worked on Steven Spielberg's Shoah Project and has written biographies of Kurt Cobain and Muhammad Ali. Neither author strictly conforms to his professional role, with mixed results. Brinkley, the academic historian, has written a book that will disappoint scholars but, as the latest word on the subject, will serve as the go-to reference work for general readers. Wallace has produced a work of astonishing detail, primary documentation, and provocative argument that asks—but does not fully answer—compelling questions.

Henry Ford and his company have fascinated writers for decades, resulting in a vast literature. The challenge facing Brinkley was to synthesize that literature and create an original work grounded in new research. His corporate history employs an overtly biographical approach. The first three-fifths of the book trace the life of Ford and the rise of his company, positing a direct relationship between the two. For Brinkley, as for so many other biographers, the company is a reflection of Ford's personality, the cars a literal extension of his peculiar tastes and mechanical interests. To demonstrate this synchronicity, Brinkley marches through what for Ford scholars is a familiar narrative: the early experimentation; the short-lived racing career; the Model T; the five-dollar day; the company's heyday in the 1920s; the company's long resistance to unionization in the 1930s; the involvement of the company with the production of munitions and planes for the Allies in both world wars; the sad career and premature death of Edsel Ford, Henry's only son; the nasty struggles among Ford's top executives, particularly Harry Bennett and Charles Sorensen, during the last two decades of Ford's life; the company's resurrection under Henry Ford II during the late 1940s and 1950s; the flop of the Edsel; the stunning success of the Mustang; the foreseeable disaster of the Pinto; and the new managers and executives who ran the company after Henry Ford II's retirement in the early 1980s. Brinkley covers this ground competently, if unimaginatively.

Scholars, particularly those interested in the history of the company, will find that the book fails to break new interpretive ground, for two reasons. One is grounded in Brinkley's research strategy. Two of the blurbs on the book boast of his access to newly released company records, leading readers to expect that he will quote, cite, and interpret these records. But they are rarely to be found. Aside from references to the well-trawled oral histories that Ford archivists recorded...