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 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.

After this initial success, Ford left Edison Illuminating and, with other
investors, formed the Detroit Automobile Company. During this period, Ford
used raced his vehicles against those of other manufacturers to show the
superiority of his designs. He personally drove to victory in a race against
Alexander Winton, a well-known driver and the heavy favorite, in his
Quadricycle on October 10, 1901. The Detroit Automobile Company, however,
went bankrupt soon afterward.

Ford Motors

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 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. (Henry
Ford is often attributed as saying that his customers could get a Ford car
in any color they liked—so long as it was black. There is no evidence
that he ever actually spoke these words. However for ease of mass
production, black was the only color which the Model T was available in
directly from the factory.)

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 hour. The pay rate increased to $6 an hour 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. 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.

By the mid 1920s, 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 developed the body design. Edsel also managed to prevail over his
father's initial objections in the inclusion of a hydraulic brake system and
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.

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. 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 Motors 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.

The 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 (Gro§kreuz 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.

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 final days

At the end of the war, the elder Henry, in ill health, ceded the presidency
to his grandson on September 21, 1945 and went into retirement. He passed
away at the age of 83 at Fair Lane, his estate in Dearborn, and is buried at
the Ford Cemetery in Detroit.