The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (review)

Steven Watts, author of a well-regarded study of Walt Disney, has chosen in Henry Ford a monumental example of the interaction of technology and culture. Ford, manipulator of both people and machines, organized so vast a production and sale of automobiles as to revolutionize American life. And for decades, he eagerly sought attention, not only for his cars but also for his quirky views, of which many people approved (even though they reflected an earlier time that the automobile effectively killed).

In an account that focuses on Henry Ford as a cultural force, Watts does not neglect Ford's darker side as innovator and businessman. A telling example is an incident in June 1941, four years before the frail patriarch was forced to give up his auto empire at the insistence of his wife Clara and of Eleanor, widow of his son Edsel. Charles E. Sorensen, production czar for Ford, writes in his memoirs about Ford's refusal to sign a contract with the United Auto Workers after a decade of occasionally bloody labor strife. Some weeks earlier, the exasperated workforce at Ford Motor Company had voted 97 percent in favor of a union (with 70 percent going to UAW). War was coming and the United States had begun supplying armaments to nations fighting Hitler. Ford's meeting with Sorensen and Ford's only child, Edsel, the long-suffering nominal president of the company, was an angry one. Henry said he would rather close his factories, and persisted even after being told that the government might well seize them to maintain production. He went home to his huge estate, Fair Lane, and told Clara, his wife of fifty-three years, of his decision not to sign. She responded that there would be riots and bloodshed, and she had seen enough of that. If he didn't sign, she'd leave him. He signed.

The incident recounted by Watts is a shocking example of a pioneer turned into a tyrant, swerved only by family influence. It was a glaring sign of Ford's almost incredible irresponsibility toward the enterprise he had built since 1903. Production of the Model T, archetype of the mass production of automobiles, had peaked at two million in 1923. Shortly before, Ford had bought out all other stockholders in Ford Motor, ostensibly to guarantee his freedom to keep innovating in the field of cheap transportation. But sales of the Model T faded and the stairstep array of General Motors cars moved center stage. Consumer loyalties were shifting. Yet for years Ford resisted his son, and Sorensen, and many other proponents of a new model, thus beginning his company's slide into last place among the Big Three carmakers.

Refusing all the while to give up control of his company, entrusting labor relations to a thug, and fostering quarrels among even his most productive subordinates, Ford shifted his attention almost entirely elsewhere. At Greenfield Village and other sites, he pursued his obsession with re-creating the material world of his youth, including Edison's workshop and many everyday objects that fascinated a growing stream of visitors. Unlike such great industrial organizers as John D. Rockefeller of petroleum and Andrew Carnegie of steel, Ford did not turn his business over to others before concentrating on philanthropy.

Such details of business and personality—Watts gives many—are crucial to understanding the book's main theme: Henry Ford as a celebrity, constantly in the news for more than forty years, with much appeal to a wide swath of public opinion. Ford gave an amazing performance: someone very reluctant to utter a word to a large audience made himself available to a constant stream of reporters, involved himself with books and newspapers, went on highly publicized auto-camping trips, and peddled the very nineteenth-century virtues that were being cast aside in a twentieth century of mass consumption and mobility, which he may have done more to create than any other...