'The People's Tycoon': Driven
By RICH LOWRY
The New York Times Book Review
September 4, 2005
HENRY FORD is one of the foremost inventors of our world. In ''The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century,'' Steven Watts portrays Ford -- convincingly -- as not just a business genius but a cultural pioneer who heralded and exploited as no one had before the rise of an America that valued mobility, consumerism, leisure and image-making. Indeed, the implicit claim of Watts's admirable book is almost inarguable -- that it's impossible to understand 20th-century America without knowing the story of Henry Ford.
He was born in 1863 on a farm near Dearborn, Mich., in the bosom of the traditional rural world he would help obliterate. Obsessed with repairing watches and with the mechanics of farm implements, he was fascinated in his teens by the sight of a self-powered steam engine, and acquired his interest in automotive transport at that moment. Significantly, he hated horses, and decades later would write with satisfaction in one of his notebooks, ''The horse is DONE.''
While working as an engineer at the Edison Illuminating Company in Detroit in the 1890's, he poured himself into his private project of building an internal combustion engine and mounting it on a vehicle. Ford's first two automobile companies were busts. A perfectionist, he thirsted for total control, which didn't make for smooth business relationships. He was forced out of the Henry Ford Company in 1902.
His third try was the Ford Motor Company. When its officers split over whether it should focus on the market for a simple, inexpensive car or build fancier models, Ford had an insight that amounted to a flash of genius. As he explained to an associate in 1903, ''When you get to making the cars in quantity, you can make them cheaper, and when you make them cheaper you can get more people with enough money to buy them.'' On this virtuous circle, Ford built his company.
The Model T was the ''universal car,'' combining, as Watts writes, ''light weight, durability and a low price tag to appeal to a mass audience of consumers.'' It initially sold for $850, and the price dropped steadily. Fifteen million would be produced in all, and in 1920 they represented almost half the cars in the United States.
Ford's success with the Model T was a testament to the power of monomania. His devotion to the car was total. In 1912, a few years after the advent of the Model T, company managers surprised Ford with a prototype of a sleeker car. He literally demolished it with his own hands.
The Model T rewired America. ''The automobile inspired street and road construction all over the country,'' Watts writes, ''stimulated suburban real-estate development and nourished the growth of new service businesses such as gas stations, tourism and roadside lodging.'' More important, it fomented a consumer revolution.
''Well, say, we're creating new wants in folks right along, aren't we?'' Ford explained. ''And we no sooner get those wants satisfied in one class of society than another class bobs up to present its needs and demands. The wants keep right on increasing, and the more wants the more business, isn't that so?'' Has there ever been a plainer expression of the dynamic of consumer capitalism?
Scandalously for the time, Ford was an advocate of unabashed spending. ''No successful boy ever saved any money,'' he said in 1928. Early on the Ford advertising team approached him with a slogan, ''Buy a Ford and Save the Difference!'' Ford scratched out ''save'' and replaced it with ''spend.'' He sensed that old-fashioned rigid virtues were giving way to the allure of self-fulfillment and leisure. ''Every day is 'Independence Day' to him who owns a Ford,'' said the company's ad copy.
The question became how to build enough. With the Ford assembly line, born in 1913, annual production promptly jumped from 82,000 cars to 189,000. It hit 585,000 by 1916, and two million in 1923. What workers lost in terms of autonomy, they gained, in Ford's view, in their ability to participate in the consumer bonanza. ''Assembly-line work meant more productivity, which brought higher wages, which provided more money for workers to enjoy material goods,'' Watts writes. Ford argued that with the famous Five-Dollar Day pay rate, announced in 1914, ''we really started our business, for on that day we first created a lot of customers.''
It didn't hurt that the wage policy was tremendous publicity. Decades before Norman Mailer, Ford knew the power of advertisements for himself. Even Teddy Roosevelt complained that the celebrity automaker was overexposed. Company marketing materials presented a well-honed image. As Watts notes, ''By the early 1910's, nearly all stories on Ford stressed his rural background, simple style and modest material desires.''
The story of Ford's rise is indeed exhilarating. The rest, perhaps inevitably, is a letdown. An inspired and playful innovator -- he once hot-wired a urinal in the company's early days to give a user an unexpected shock -- becomes a tiresome crank. On the stand in a libel suit, he said the American Revolution took place in 1812. His ignorance didn't stop him from spreading his homespun views -- often idiosyncratic, sometimes poisonous -- in books, interviews, his own newspaper and a 1918 senatorial campaign.
He did himself irreparable harm in the early 1920's by publishing articles on the ''Jewish problem'' in his newspaper. His distaste for economic elites and financiers -- he was a capitalist who hated capital -- traveled with an old-fashioned anti-Semitism. Under pressure, he recanted the articles, but maintained his belief in the nefarious influence of Jews, who supposedly promoted world wars for their own profit.
As he aged, he lost his business touch. His devotion to the Model T became sclerotic as the market moved on. He harried his well-meaning, more refined son, Edsel, nominally president of the company, into an early grave. And he lost his reputation for fostering harmonious labor relations in the 1930's when his thugs beat up union organizers and tried to keep workers from committing the offenses of talking or smiling on the job. He hated the New Deal.
There was always ambiguity in his attitude toward the changes he promoted, but by the end Ford had lapsed into full-blown nostalgia. He spent his final years until his death in 1947 accumulating objects from the 18th and 19th centuries. Watts, who has also written a biography of Walt Disney, thinks that this was part of his appeal: ''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.''
It made for an odd mix. Today, it's hard to imagine who on the right or the left would have him, a union-breaking quasi pacifist, an opponent of Wall Street and Franklin Roosevelt, an anti-Semitic promoter of the dignity of workers. The roots of his rural populist worldview have long since been washed away. Although he personally opposed it, an accommodation was reached among big industry as represented by the Ford Motor Company and unions and government. It defined American business and politics in the postwar period. That world has, in turn, been upset by new innovators in the tradition of Ford, forging a leaner, meaner capitalism in the cause of greater productivity and lower prices.
But much of what Ford created remains, most significantly the automobile, still America's most important consumer item, just as he imagined it would be. Steven Watts is intelligent, thorough and engaging -- if a touch long-winded -- in telling the story of an American who not only was influential but remains unavoidable to this day: with every contemporary advertisement promising personal fulfillment through the purchase of some new product, there breathes the spirit of Henry Ford.
Rich Lowry is the editor of National Review. |
