Henry
Ford
Henry Ford (July 30, 1863 - April 7, 1947) was the founder
of the Ford Motor Company and one of the first to apply assembly
line manufacturing to the mass production of affordable automobiles.
This achievement not only revolutionized industrial production,
it had such tremendous influence over modern culture that many social
theorists identify this phase of economic and social history as
"Fordism."
Background
Ford
was born on a prosperous farm in Dearborn, Michigan owned by his
parents, William and Mary Ford, immigrants from County Cork, Ireland.
He was the eldest of six children. As a child, Henry was passionate
about mechanics. At 12, he spent a lot of time in a machine shop,
which he had equipped himself. By 15, he had built his first internal
combustion engine.
In 1879 he left home for the nearby city of Detroit to work as an
apprentice machinist, first with James F. Flower & Bros., and
later with the Detroit Dry Dock Co. After completion of his apprenticeship,
Ford got a job with the Westinghouse company working on gasoline
engines. Upon his marriage to Clara Bryant in 1888 Ford supported
himself by running a sawmill.
In 1891 Ford became an engineer with the Edison Illuminating Company,
and after his promotion to Chief Engineer in 1893 he had enough
time and money to devote attention to his personal experiments on
internal combustion engines. These experiments culminated in 1896
with the completion of his own self-propelled vehicle named the
Quadricycle, which he test-drove on June 4th that year (this was
also the first automobile he ever drove).
After this initial success, Ford left Edison Illuminating and, with
other investors, formed the Detroit Automobile Company. The Detroit
Automobile Company, however, went bankrupt soon afterward because
Ford continued to improve the design instead of selling cars. Ford
raced his vehicles against those of other manufacturers to show
the superiority of his designs. With the interest in his race cars,
he formed a second company, the Henry Ford Company. During this
period, he personally drove his Quadricycle to victory in a race
against Alexander Winton, a well-known driver and the heavy favorite
on October 10, 1901. Ford was forced out of the company by the investors,
including Henry M. Leland in 1902, and the company was reorganized
as Cadillac.
Ford Motor Company
Henry Ford, with eleven other investors and $28,000 in capital,
incorporated the Ford Motor Company in 1903. In a newly-designed
car, Ford drove an exhibition in which the car covered the distance
of a mile on the ice of Lake St. Clair in 39.4 seconds, which was
a new land speed record. Convinced by this success, the famous race
driver Barney Oldfield, who named this new Ford model "999"
in honor of a racing locomotive of the day, took the car around
the country and thereby made the Ford marque well-known throughout
the U.S. Henry Ford was also one of the early backers of the Indianapolis
500.
The Model T
In
1908, the Ford company released the Model T. From 1909 to 1913,
Ford entered stripped-down Model Ts into races as well, finishing
first (although later disqualified) in an "ocean-to-ocean"
(across the USA) race in 1909, and setting a one-mile oval speed
record at Detroit Fairgrounds in 1911 with driver Frank Kulick.
In 1913, Ford attempted to enter a reworked Model T in the Indianapolis
500, but was told rules required the addition of another 1,000 pounds
(450 kg) to the car before it could qualify. Ford dropped out of
the race, and soon thereafter dropped out of racing permanently,
citing dissatisfaction with the sport's rules and the demand on
his time by the now booming production of the Model T.
Racing was, by 1913, no longer necessary from a publicity standpoint—the
Model T was famous, and ubiquitous on American roads. It was in
this year Henry Ford introduced the moving assembly belts into his
plants, which enabled an enormous increase in production. By 1918
half of all cars in America were Model Ts. The design, fervently
promoted and defended by Henry Ford, would continue through 1927
(well after its popularity had faded), with a final total production
of fifteen million vehicles. This was a record which would stand
for the next 45 years. Ford said "Any customer can have a car
painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black."
Ford's Manufacturing Philosophy
Henry
Ford had very specific thoughts on relations with his employees.
They were expected to work an eight-hour day, and in 1913 were paid
a handsome $5 per day. The pay rate increased to $6 per day at the
peak of Model T production in 1918; such a sum for laborers was,
at the time, almost unheard-of. Ford also offered his employees
an innovative profit-sharing plan.
Conversely, Ford was adamantly against labor unions in his plants.
To forestall union activity, he hired Harry Bennett, titularly the
head of the Service Department, who employed various intimidation
tactics to squash union organizing. The most famous incident, in
1937, was a bloody brawl between company security men and organizers
that became known as The Battle of the Overpass. A sit-down strike
by the United Auto Workers union in 1941 finally admitted collective
bargaining at some Ford plants, but it was not until Henry Ford
and Harry Bennett left the company for good in 1945 that it would
fully unionize.
On January 1, 1919, Henry Ford turned the presidency of Ford Motor
Company over to his son Edsel, although still maintaining a firm
hand in its management—few company decisions under Edsel's presidency
were made without being approved by Henry, and those few that were,
Henry often reversed. Also at this time, Henry and Edsel purchased
all remaining stock from other investors, thus becoming sole owners
of the company. This began a period of decline for Ford Motor Company,
since the stock buyout caused them to borrow heavily just before
the postwar recession hit the country.
In about 1920, Ford purchased a vast tract of land in Brazil, Fordlândia
to grow rubber for his car tires. It proved a financial disaster
and by the time he sold it in 1945, he had lost a fortune.
By the mid 1920's, sales of the Model T began to decline, in part
because of the rise of consumer credit. Other auto makers offered
payment plans through which consumers could buy their cars, which
usually included more modern mechanical features and styling not
available with the Model T. Despite urgings from his son Edsel,
the company president, Henry Ford steadfastly refused to incorporate
new features into the Model T or to form a customer credit plan
(the former to keep prices low and affordable, the latter because
he believed such plans were bad for the economy).
The Model A and later
By
1926, flagging sales of the Model T convinced Henry Ford of what
Edsel had been suggesting for some time: a new model was necessary.
The elder Ford pursued the project with a great deal of technical
expertise in design of the engine, chassis and other mechanical
necessities, while leaving it to his son to develop the body design.
Edsel also managed to prevail over his father's initial objections
in the inclusion of a sliding-shift transmission. The result was
the highly successful Ford Model A, introduced December, 1927 and
produced through 1931, with a total output of over four million
automobiles. Subsequently the company adopted an annual model change
system similar to that in use by automakers today.
During the thirties, Ford also overcame his objection to finance
companies, and the Ford-owned Universal Credit Company became a
major car financing operation.
Henry Ford long had an interest in plastics developed from agricultural
products, especially soybeans. Soybean-based plastics were used
in Ford automobiles throughout the 1930s in plastic parts such as
car horns, in paint, etc. This project culminated in 1942, when
on January 13 Ford patented an automobile made almost entirely of
plastic, attached to a tubular welded frame. It weighed 30% less
than a standard car of the same size, and was said to be able to
withstand blows ten times greater than could steel. Futhermore,
it ran on grain alchohol (ethanol Alcohol fuel) instead of gasoline.
The design never caught on.
On May 26, 1943, Edsel Ford died, leaving a vacancy in the company
presidency. Henry Ford advocated the spot be taken by Harry Bennett.
Edsel's widow Eleanor, who had inherited Edsel's voting stock, wanted
her son Henry Ford II to take over the position. The issue was settled
for a period when Henry himself, at the age of 79, took over the
presidency personally. The company saw hard times during the next
two years, losing $10 million a month. President Roosevelt considered
a federal bailout for Ford Motor Company so that wartime production
could continue.
The
Dearborn Independent
Henry Ford devoted much of his semi-retirement from Ford Motor to
the publication of a newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, which
he purchased in 1919. The paper ran for around eight years, during
which it introduced to the United States a work (not written by
Ford himself) called "Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion,"
which has since been discredited by virtually all historians as
a forgery. The American Jewish Historical Society describes his
ideas during this period as "anti-immigrant, anti-labor, anti-liquor
and anti-Semitic".
Ford also published, in his name, several anti-Jewish articles for
the Independent which were released in the early 1920s as a set
of four bound volumes, cumulatively titled "The International
Jew, the World's Foremost Problem." Denounced by the Anti-Defamation
League (ADL), the articles nevertheless explicitly condemned pogroms
and violence against Jews (Volume 4, Chapter 80), preferring rather
to blame incidents of mass violence on the Jews themselves. These
articles were written by several authors, including Ford's personal
secretary of 34 years, Ernest Liebold. None were actually penned
by Ford, though since he was the paper's publisher they required
his tacit approval.
Ford closed the Dearborn Independent in December 1927 and later
retracted the International Jew and the Protocols. On January 7,
1942, Henry Ford wrote a public letter to the ADL denouncing hatred
against the Jews and expressing his hope that anti-Jewish hatred
would cease for all time. Some claim that Ford neither wrote or
signed this letter and have called the sincerity of his apology
into question. His writings continue to be used as propaganda by
various groups, often appearing on anti-Semitic and neo-Nazi websites.
Henry Ford and Nazism
There
is some evidence that Henry Ford gave Adolf Hitler financial backing
when Hitler was first starting out in politics. This can in part
be traced to statements from Kurt Ludecke, Germany's representative
to the U.S. in the 1920s, and Winifred Wagner, daughter-in-law of
Richard Wagner, who said they requested funds from Ford to aid the
National Socialist movement in Germany. However, a 1933 Congressional
investigation into the matter was unable to substantiate one way
or the other that funding was actually sent.
Ford Motor Company was active in Germany's military buildup prior
to World War II. In 1938, for instance, it opened an assembly plant
in Berlin whose purpose was to supply trucks to the Wehrmacht. In
July of that year, Ford was awarded (and accepted) the Grand Cross
of the Order of the German Eagle (Großkreuz des Deutschen
Adlerordens). Ford was the first American and the fourth person
given this award, at the time Nazi Germany's highest honorary award
given to foreigners. Earlier the same year, Benito Mussolini had
been decorated with the Grand Cross. The decoration was given "in
recognition of [Ford's] pioneering in making motor cars available
for the masses." The award was accompanied by a personal congratulatory
message from Adolf Hitler. [Detroit News, July 31, 1938.]
The Ford Foundation
Henry
Ford, with his son Edsel, founded the Ford Foundation in 1936 as
a local philanthropy in the state of Michigan with a broad charter
to promote human welfare. The Foundation has grown immensely and
by 1950 had become national and international in scope.
The foundation no longer has any association with the Ford Motor
Company, nor with the family or descendants of Henry Ford.
The final days
At
the end of the war, the elder Henry, in ill health, ceded the presidency
to his grandson Henry Ford II on September 21, 1945 and went into
retirement. He died of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 83 at
Fair Lane, his estate in Dearborn, and is buried at the Ford Cemetery
in Detroit.
Quotations
"History
is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition. We
want to live in the present, and the only history that is worth
a tinker's damn is the history we make today." - 1916
"The international financiers are behind all war. They are
what is called the International Jew -- German Jews, French Jews,
English Jews, American Jews. I believe that in all these countries
except our own the Jewish financier is supreme... Here, the Jew
is a threat." - 1920
|
