Independent Man: The Life of Senator James Couzens

• 14. THE FINAL BREAK
• Chapter
• Wayne State University Press
• pp. 95-100
• View Citation
• Additional Information

CHAPTER XIV

THE FINAL BREAK

The wage plan proved a good temporary palliative for the tension between Couzens and Ford. Ford enjoyed being interviewed for magazines, newspapers, even books. Both Couzens and he obtained pleasurable excitement from watching how the paternalistic side of the plan worked, and eagerly followed reports on what was being done to make certain that the workers “deserved the big envelope.”

While Couzens was in California, a glowing report on this aspect of the plan was sent to him by Klingensmith, now his assistant. “I wish you could be here [Klingensmith wrote] just to see the enthusiasm among the investigators on this welfare work. . . . You need have no fear that this branch of this work which you started will have the very best of attention. . . . Mr. Ford has been at the office practically every day . . . and is very enthusiastic over the work and puts a lot of enthusiasm into the people in realization of the possibilities of this profit-sharing plan.”¹

Especially was Couzens pleased because his predictions as to the advertising value of the plan were justified. Sales leaped upward. As a consequence, he pushed expansion plans, particularly those for Ford assembly plants in other cities. “The plans for Atlanta are practically completed. The many questions re Pittsburgh are being worked out. Indianapolis goes out for bids today. They have started the plans for Cincinnati and have gotten out a preliminary sketch for Cleveland.” So Klingensmith summarized progress.²

Once again, Couzens became the busy, absorbed executive. The attitude of other businessmen had a stimulating effect on him, for nearly all other American industrialists and financiers denounced the plan.³ Garet Garrett recalled:

The Board of Commerce was in a panic. Smaller manufacturers, outside the motor car industry, had been serving notice that they were leaving Detroit, and several of them did. The owner of the barber shop at the hotel told me that he would have to go out of business; even barbers would be wanting five dollars a day. . . .⁴

“Consternation” was the word Alfred P. Sloan of General Motors used to describe the reaction of industrialists generally.⁵ The program at Ford, they said, was bound to “disaffect the working class.”⁶ The Ford management was described as being in the hands of men who had lost their minds.⁷ Bankers issued instructions to their loan officers “to watch the credit of ‘any customers doing business with Ford.’”⁸

Couzens became even more interested in seeing it through. “This is the most interesting subject in the world to me. It is one I can spend more time and more thought on than any other thing I ever came in contact with,” he told a friend.⁹ Indeed, he became a veritable crusader for a fairer distribution of the profits of industry.

To E. D. Stair, then publisher of the Detroit Free Press, he wrote: “It is my sincere judgment that even if a company made only six per cent, it should divide three among its employees. This would follow out to the betterment of all concerned.”¹⁰

2

In the following winter, despite the prosperity at the Ford Company, Detroit was gripped by a severe depression, as a result of the war abroad. Thousands of men tramped the streets in a vain search for employment. So serious was the situation that the Board of Commerce organized a committee on unemployment.

Couzens, who a short time before had been president of the board, watched this committee with increasing skepticism. Its main purpose, it seemed to him, was not to find jobs for the men but to direct them to charity. Three days before Christmas, Couzens strode into a Board of Commerce meeting to speak his mind—

You fellows sit back, smug and complacent, and don’t give a damn what becomes of your workmen.

You go down to the Board of Estimates and ask for high-pressure systems to preserve your plants from fire; you ask for more patrolmen to guard your property; but what do you do for your workmen? . . . You kick them into the street, and that’s all there is to it. . . .

The situation is up to the employers of Detroit. These unemployed are sent to charity for assistance, when they want work. . . . It is not the man’s fault he has not had enough wages to carry him over a period like this. Many absolutely refuse to line up with those seeking charity. They are a part of commerce just as much as we are. Then what in hell have they to do with charity?

They are just as human as you and I, but they are not as well taken care of. You can’t give these men work during the summer and then discharge them in the winter while you take your golf sticks and go to California, and do your full duty. . . .¹¹

He incurred the lasting enmity of a good number of Detroit businessmen as a result of that outburst, one that anticipated by forty years the acceptance by the automobile industry, and particularly by the Ford Company under Henry Ford II, of a form of guaranteed annual wage system. The Detroit Journal referred to his as a “commercial Savonarola,” and what many Detroit businessmen called him was unprintable. But his outburst did provoke the formation of a new committee that obtained jobs for hundreds of unemployed workers.¹²

3

All this eased his relations with Ford. But, again, the easing was only temporary. True, in the fall of 1914, he told newspaper reporters that “perfect harmony” existed in the company. “Sometimes Mr. Ford will drop into my office, as he did this morning, and we will discuss things for an hour or two. Again, we may not see each other for a month. But all of the time every part of the immense organization is running smoothly in its own groove.”¹³ However, within six months after the wage plan had been put into effect, the old trouble between him and Ford came to the surface again. As put by one Ford biographer, “Relations between Mr. Ford and his general manager became more and more strained.”¹⁴ Plainly, all that was needed for a final break to occur was some appropriate “incident.”

In August 1914, it appeared that such an incident had occurred. The war in Europe had caused runs on banks and Ford began talking of withdrawing his personal funds from the Highland Park State Bank—Couzens’ bank. Couzens assured Ford that his money was safe where it was. Ford seemed to accept that assurance. He agreed not to make a transfer. But he ordered the withdrawal anyway.¹⁵ Couzens flared up, and sent the following telegram:

August 5, 1914

HENRY FORD,

HARBOR BEACH, MICHIGAN

IN THESE STRENUOUS TIMES MEN INVARIABLY SHOW THE KIND OF STUFF THEY ARE MADE OF. WE ARE MAKING ARRANGEMENTS TO TRANSFER YOUR MONEY TO THE DIME BANK.

JAMES COUZENS¹⁶

To his secretary, Henry S. Morgan, Couzens talked about resigning right then. “You may have to choose soon between continuing with the Ford Motor Company and staying on with me,” he told Morgan.¹⁷

4

Still the break did not come—this time because of a profound personal tragedy. On the afternoon of August 8, 1914, he had cut short a golf game at the Bloomfield Hills Country Club—later he felt that it was a kind of premonition that caused him to forego the full eighteen holes—and thus he was at his Wabeek residence in time to receive a telephone call that sent a chill through him. An automobile listed as belonging to the Couzens family had overturned on a road near a small lake close to Wabeek. The driver, a boy, had been pinned in the water beneath the car. With Margaret, Couzens rushed to the scene. They found their worst fears confirmed. Their elder son, Homer, was dead in the Model T Ford they had given to him on his fourteenth birthday.¹⁸

That evening, although obviously near the breaking point, Couzens insisted that the family sit at the dinner table as usual. “We must not give in to our feelings,” he said. Klingensmith called at the house, and Couzens took him in to see the body. “Wasn’t he a fine big boy? Wasn’t he a fine big boy?” he kept repeating. But there were no tears. He simply refused to let them come.¹⁹

Yet he was a man distraught, and he remained so for months. He thought a motor trip would help, and set out on one with the family, but he soon turned back. Work, endless work, was all that made any sense to him. So he clung to the Ford Motor Company, regardless of how things stood between himself and Ford.

5

But the break was not to be avoided. Ford had begun issuing various pronouncements on the war and its meaning for the United States, statements that increasingly irritated Couzens. He would never permit his factory to produce war material, not even if the United States was involved, Ford said in one statement. In another: “To my mind, the word ‘murderer’ should be embroidered in red letters across the breast of every soldier.”²⁰

Now, Couzens then was also, in a sense, a “peace advocate.” In a newspaper interview in October 1915, he said: “Mr. Ford and I are one in our desire for peace. . . . I was born in Canada, but I am absolutely neutral.”²¹ When William Howard Taft, Hamilton Holt, Alton B. Parker, and others formed a “League to Enforce Peace” Couzens joined and contributed $5,000.²² So something deeper than just Ford’s Peace views was involved.

6

Milton McRae, who was a friend of both men, tried to patch things up. He suggested to Ford that he employ “a public relations counselor,” hoping that such a counselor would steer Ford along a different path. Instead, Ford engaged a “peace secretary,” a newspaperman, who, with Madame Rosicka Schwimmer, later came up with the plan for his famous “peace ship,” the Oscar II.²³ On October 11, 1915, there occurred the conversation between Couzens and Brownell about the Ford Times. It was followed the next morning by the decisive meeting between Couzens and Ford.

7

Klingensmith described the incident as he saw it develop:

On the day that Couzens quit, I saw Ford go into Couzens’ office, and then come out, and walk down the corridor. A minute later, Couzens called me into his office. “I’ve just resigned from the Ford Motor Company. There’s my resignation, right there.”

His face was red, from anger and agitation. He pointed to a sheet of paper on which he had written his resignation from the Ford Motor Company, to take effect immediately.

He had written it out in longhand, and given it to Ford, but Ford had left it on Couzens’ desk.

“I decided,” said Couzens to me, “that I had had enough of his God damn persecution.”

Then Couzens put on his hat, and walked out of the office. He went downtown and notified a newspaper friend.²⁴

The newspaper friend was Jay G. Hayden, then secretary of the Street Railway Commission (later chief of the Washington Bureau of the Detroit News.) “About eleven o’clock in the morning,” recalled Hayden, “he came busting into the board room. I thought I was to be fired. ‘I’ve just resigned from the Ford Company and I want your help,’ he said to me.

“‘On what?’

“‘I want to give the story to the papers before Ford does, but I don’t want to give it out myself.’”

Hayden then went over to the Book-Cadillac Hotel and called the various newspaper offices.²⁵

To Louis B. Block, Ford dealer in Philadelphia, Couzens made an observation that largely explained the whole matter. “A man sometimes gets to the point where his freedom of thought and independence is greater than all else.”²⁶

8

Years later Couzens learned that Ford had come into his office that morning to provoke his resignation. As Ford himself said to E. P. Pipp, a managing editor of the Detroit News:

It’s like this. I have had a check kept on him, and he has been at the plant only 184 days during the past year. He has been in California and now plans to go to Asheville. I don’t believe in absentee control. If Jim is on the job, I’d rather have his judgment than anybody else’s judgment, but Jim’s judgment off the job isn’t as good as somebody else’s on the job. If a man has a job with us, he must stick to it. . . . I got to thinking about it, stayed home two or three days to figure it out, and came over to the plant to make an issue of it. Jim sprang the thing about the article in the little magazine. Fine, I thought, that’s a dandy way out of it, so I stood pat.²⁷

All this was merely a rationalization on Ford’s part. There never could have been any valid criticism of Couzens on the ground that he was not on the job. If anything, he had worked too hard at it. The truth was that Ford had determined to take over, to deal with Couzens as he had with Alex Malcomson, and the determination had coincided with Couzens’ own inevitable decision to be on his own.