The People’s Tycoon
Henry Ford and the American Century
by Steven Watts
Copyright © 2005 Steven Watts
Used by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.
640 pages
Focus
Leadership & Mgt.
Strategy
Sales & Marketing
Corporate Finance
Human Resources
Take-Aways
• Henry Ford was twentieth century America personified.
• Ford proclaimed that the virtue of thrift was no longer a virtue – he said that young
men who wanted to get ahead should spend as necessary to succeed.
• Ford preached hard work, yet did not practice it. He admired Edison for doing little.
Technology & Production
• The paragon of capitalists, he distrusted capitalism and despised his investors.
Small Business
• A champion of the common man, he hired criminal gangs to break unions.
Economics & Politics
Industries & Regions
• He was a foe of labor unions, but laborers voted to name him as the man who had
done the most for labor, ahead of Franklin Roosevelt and Walter Reuther.
Career Development
Personal Finance
Concepts & Trends
• He knew mass production needed mass consumption, but he mistrusted the credit
culture.
• Ford institutionalized the assembly line, but abhorred repetitive work and said he
could not do it.
• Against the evidence, Ford cast himself as a boy in conflict with a domineering
father. However, he was certainly in conflict with his only son, Edsel.
• Americans seemed willing to overlook Ford's faults, from media manipulation to
anti-Semitism, and to remember his finer qualities.
Rating
(10 is best)
Overall
Applicability
Innovation
Style
9
5
8
9
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Relevance
What You Will Learn
In this Abstract, you will learn: 1) Who Henry Ford really was, as revealed by his life
story; and 2) What impact he had on twentieth century American history and culture.
Recommendation
Henry Ford did not invent the automobile, but he invented something bigger – twentieth
century America. It is no exaggeration to say that without Ford’s system of production,
without his understanding of the mass market, without his Model T, that century would
have been a very different phenomenon. Ford epitomized the contradictions, complexities
and confusion of that America. Self-taught and utterly confident in what he knew, he
despised what he did not know. A radical who created an industrial cornucopia for
workers by introducing the five-dollar daily wage, he was an industrial tyrant who hired
organized criminal gangs to intimidate labor union organizers. getAbstract.com strongly
recommends this thorough biography. Author Steven Watts offers a new way of looking
at the facts, and at Ford – and does so with engaging style.
Abstract
“Henry Ford
became an
American folk
hero because
he appreciated
both the aspirations and the
apprehensions
of the American
people as they
struggled to enter
the modern age.”
“Henry Ford
certainly found
fortune and fame
in the crowded,
smoky factories
of Detroit. But
emotionally, in
many ways, he
never left his
father’s farm.”
The People’s Tycoon
In 1919, Henry Ford found himself on the witness stand being cross-examined by a
lawyer for the Chicago Tribune. Ford had filed a libel lawsuit against the Tribune for
describing him as “an ignorant idealist...an anarchistic enemy of the nation.” The lawyer
who cross-examined Ford certainly made him demonstrate the truth in the charge that
he was ignorant. He dated the American Revolution to 1812, said chili con carne was an
army and identified Benedict Arnold as a writer.
The jury ultimately found the newspaper liable for accusing Ford of anarchism, and
awarded him six cents in damages. Notwithstanding Ford’s demonstration of ignorance,
perhaps even because of it, his popularity grew. Ford achieved the status of a folk hero,
and more. A survey of American workers conducted in 1940 found that they considered
Henry Ford even more helpful to labor than union leader Walter Reuther or New Deal
President Franklin Roosevelt. Both Vladimir Lenin and Adolf Hitler expressed their
admiration for Ford.
Ford epitomized the values that dominated the American century. He recognized that
without mass consumption, mass production could not exist. He laid the foundation for
a culture of standardized leisure that saw consumption as the path to contentment. He
was a populist, an anti-intellectual, against smoking and drinking, against war, against
adultery (but, apparently, only in principle) and in favor of hard but efficient work – no
harder than it had to be.
He may not have understood other Americans’ values, motivations and fears intellectually,
but he identified with and embodied them, even to the point of rewriting his personal
history to make himself the epitome of those values. He was self-taught, not book-learned,
but full of mother wit. He was a skeptic about conventional wisdom, but he believed in
common sense. He was politically naïve, yet well-meaning. His great forays into politics,
most notably the disastrous WWI-era Peace Ship, probably did more to set his causes
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“Defining the
motorcar as a
necessity ‘that
would meet the
wants of the
multitude,’ Ford
linked his vehicle
to a larger vision
of contentment
through
consumption.”
“Ford clearly
understood that
the publicity
accompanying his
racing endeavors
would enhance
his name and
give a boost to his
efforts to develop
a commercial
automobile.”
“As news of the
Five-Dollar Day
reverberated
throughout the
United States,
newspapers
and magazines
were filled with
commentary,
feature stories,
editorials,
pictorial spreads
and publicity
releases...”
“This provided
a kind of free
advertising, just
as Henry Ford
had hoped.”
back than to advance them. But he wasn’t a man to find fault with himself. When the
Peace Ship bills came due, he consoled himself that the endeavor generated publicity that
was worth a million dollars.
Ford was to business what Theodore Roosevelt was to politics, what Will Rogers was to
entertainment, what Babe Ruth was to sports. He was a celebrity – famous and interesting,
not only for what he had done, but also rather for what kind of a man he made himself
seem to be. He used the press artfully. At almost every stage of his life, he was a skillful
puppeteer pulling the strings of mass media and culture. Although at one time he was
the world’s richest man, he managed to present himself as a common man, a friend not
of Wall Street, but of Main Street.
Ford had a dark side, as American populism also can have a dark side. He was a virulent
anti-Semite and a “bigot.” His hostility to organized labor extended to hiring thugs to
beat union organizers. In 1928, he proclaimed that thrift was no virtue – yet he professed
dismay at the growth of credit-fueled consumption. If he did not invent the industrial
capitalist organization, he pioneered it – yet the bureaucratic fruits of his invention
appalled him. In his softer moments, he seemed to shrink from modernity. He looked
back at his family’s farm with some nostalgia. The principles he claimed to believe were
in deep conflict with the principles upon which he acted.
The Man and His Machine
Born on July 30, 1863, near Dearborn, Ford grew up in Michigan, then very much a
frontier state, still heavily forested and settled by a few farmers. The Erie Canal provided
a link to the East Coast. Commodity production – timber, fishing and mining – anchored
the state’s economy. Ford attended a one-room schoolhouse, where he proved to be a
mediocre scholar, although he had excellent mechanical aptitude. He and his schoolmates
built a small dam on the nearby creek and added a waterwheel. Ford later led a group in
an effort to build a steam engine, which worked for a while and then exploded, leaving
Ford with a permanent facial scar.
Ford’s mother was his major educational influence. She taught him to read from the
McGuffey Reader. But the moral influence she exercised was more important than her
literary skill. Ford put her on a pedestal and referred to her example throughout his adult
life. She was, it seemed, a Victorian frontier saint.
Ford never expressed much fondness for his father and, in fact, probably exaggerated the
amount of conflict in that relationship. His father was a farmer, and Henry didn’t care
for farm work. Neighbors and hired hands recalled that he was tireless in his quest for
opportunities to get away from it. Ford never denied his aversion to hard work; in fact
he later professed admiration for Thomas Edison precisely because the great inventor
never did any more work than absolutely necessary. But Ford was not merely slothful.
When he slipped away from the field, he often went to tinker in the farm workshop. Once
while traveling in a wagon with his father, he saw a steam engine moving alongside the
road, jumped off the wagon and peppered the engineer with questions about how the
mechanism worked. Ford later said that this experience launched him on the path to
automotive fame.
In 1878, when he was 16 years old, Henry Ford left the farm and moved to Detroit. He
mythologized his exodus, presenting it as the climax of a great conflict with his father,
part escape, part grand gesture of defiance – the young man setting forth boldly to make
his own way in the world. As a matter of fact, though, his father helped him make the
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“For Ford,
industrial and
mental progress
went hand in
hand, and war
was the enemy
of both.”
“His denunciation
of idle stockholders, his
insistence on
the value of
productive labor,
and his definition
of the modern
corporation as
an instrument of
service struck a
responsive chord
with the public.”
“He criticized
buying on credit,
an increasingly
popular technique
in the modern
consumer
economy.”
“Yet, however
vehement Ford’s
opposition to
smoking, it
was perhaps
surpassed by his
disapproval of
another American
habit that had
drawn the ire
of reformers
since the early
nineteenth
century: alcohol
consumption.”
move, arranged for him to stay with relatives, and may have pulled strings with his good
friend James Flower to get Henry his first job in Detroit – at the Flower family’s machine
shop.
After about nine months there, Ford moved on to the Detroit Dry Dock Company,
accepting a pay cut to get a job in the engine works of the city’s largest shipbuilding
factory. He spent evenings working with a jeweler who cleaned and repaired clocks and
watches. One evening when the owner was absent, Henry took it on himself to repair some
watches. The owner’s alarm on discovering the boy’s work turned to admiration when
he examined it, and he gave Ford the responsibility for much of this work. Ford began
planning the mass production of cheap watches, thinking in terms of 2,000 watches per
day to keep costs down to approximately 30 cents apiece. But he dropped the idea. This
was characteristic – friends said he was always coming up with ideas for new inventions
and experiments. He frequently began projects but failed to complete them because a
new idea distracted him.
In 1882, Ford returned to the farm. Soon, he was maintaining a steam engine for a nearby
farmer. He earned $3 a day traveling from farm to farm, using the engine for hauling,
cutting corn, grinding feed and other chores. Ford began to experiment with making his
own engine, using a recycled mowing machine. He learned that the critical issue was to
find a fuel that would allow the engine’s weight to be low relative to its power.
Apparently in an effort to woo his son away from mechanical tomfoolery and back to the
land, Ford’s father made him a gift of 80 acres of forested land. Ford bought a saw, rented
a steam engine, and went into the sawmill and lumber business. He made enough money
to marry. He and his bride, Clara Bryant, soon moved into a cottage built from Ford’s
own timber. But Ford, who was already talking about the possibility of a “horseless
carriage,” continued to experiment. He discovered that he needed to know more about
electricity, so he took a job as engineer with the Edison Illuminating Company for the
grand salary of $45 a month. In September 1890, he and Clara moved to Detroit.
Five years later, Ford overcame the engineering challenges and took his first automobile,
the “Quadricycle,” for a test drive. Although popular lore credits Ford with inventing the
horseless carriage, the Quadricycle was not the first car on the streets of Detroit. That
honor went to Charles B. King’s massive vehicle, which weighed about 1,300 pounds,
and at top speed, ran only five miles an hour. Ford’s Quadricycle was arguably the first
horseless carriage designed for motor travel. But it was not suited to mass manufacturing.
Ford sold it to an acquaintance, Charles Ainsley, for $200, to fund research and
development on a production model. In 1898, Ford’s new vehicle made its debut. Henry
Ford the inventor was about to yield to Henry Ford the entrepreneur.
Business the Ford Way
Ford used populist language to describe his conflicts with wealthy investors. He said they
were only interested in money, not in the quality of production. He presented himself as a
man of integrity. Yet he used subterfuge to deceive his investors, and once even directed
machinists to produce auto parts that would never go into a car, just to make investors
think that his factory was actually manufacturing something.
Auto racing was one of Ford’s great distractions during his early entrepreneurial years.
He understood that if his cars won races, the vehicles and their inventor would be
famous. So he set out to build cars that could win races – using the capital of investors
who thought they had set out to build cars for sale. Ford won his first race in October
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1901, going man-to-man against the most successful racecar driver in the United States,
Alexander Winton, who had set world records twice. Winton took the early lead, but Ford
gained steadily, and in the seventh lap Winton’s vehicle, unaccustomed to such intense
competition, overheated and failed. Ford won the race by almost a mile. He continued to
race only long enough to solidify his reputation as a winner.
“Ford believed
that the purchase
of consumer
items, if pursued
imprudently,
could be socially
inebriating in the
same way that the
undue imbibing of
alcohol produced
drunkenness.”
Henry Ford
had “a faith in
the redemptive
power of material
goods that too
often overlooked
questions of
social cost.”
“Henry Ford was
modern America.”
For one of the pioneers of capitalism, Ford got along surprisingly badly with capitalists.
His first venture failed, never producing a commercially viable production model. Ford
blamed his investors for insisting on a big, heavy, high-priced car – but his own incessant
design changes and equivocations were probably at least equally to blame. In 1901, after
barely 18 months, the board dissolved the corporation. Another false start occurred with
the Henry Ford Motor Company, which Henry Ford left after only three months. The
investors restarted it as the Cadillac Automobile Company. It began to produce highquality cars and, in 1904, became part of the General Motors Corporation.
But, by 1903, Ford already had started another car company. He incorporated his third
company with yet a third group of investors. He soon came to rely heavily on a manager
named James Couzens, who came from a company owned by one of Ford’s investors.
In conversations with Couzens, Ford drew a clear distinction between the two of them
and the other stockholders – whom he referred to dismissively as “those fellows.” Ford
clearly had his finger on the pulse of the public. Model after model, his cars proved to
be hits with buyers, culminating in the 1908 debut of the iconic Model T. The Model
T was the realization of Henry Ford’s dream: light, durable, affordable – it created the
American automotive culture.
The Long Goodbye
The heroic part of the Ford saga ends with the Model T. The ensuing decades saw him
extend, expand and amplify the way of working that led to that great success. The
sprawling, vertically integrated Ford enterprise had a gargantuan mass-production plant
at River Rouge, Michigan, but it merely applied the techniques that had succeeded in the
first Model T factory on a greater scale.
As Ford grew wealthier, his distractions grew less mechanical and more dangerous. He
funded a disastrous sideshow called the Peace Ship in a well-meaning but naïve attempt
to keep the world out of the First World War. Ford’s peace mongering led to a split
with James Couzens and opened an opportunity for Harry Bennett, a very questionable
character who eventually served as Ford’s security chief and the power behind the throne.
Ford’s dark side expressed itself in anti-Semitic polemics in books and in the Dearborn
Independent; in an emotionally abusive relationship with his son Edsel, his only legitimate
child; and in an apparent, decades-long adulterous affair with Evangeline Dahlberg (with
whom he seems to have fathered a son, and for whom he arranged a marriage).
Ford did not invent the automobile, but he may fairly be said to have invented and
epitomized the American twentieth century. Like America itself, he came to look with
some degree of dismay on what he had wrought.
About The Author
Steven Watts is professor of history at the University of Missouri. He is the award-winning
author of four books, including The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way
of Life and Practicing Primitive: A Handbook of Aboriginal Skills.
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