One Summer: America, 1927 (34 page)

Ford also, it must be said, employed a great many disabled people—including (in 1919) one man who had no hands, four who had no legs or feet, four who were blind, thirty-seven who were deaf, and sixty who had epilepsy (at a time when epileptics were scorned). He also employed between four hundred and six hundred ex-convicts, and he hired black men, though he nearly always gave them the hottest, dirtiest, and most exhausting jobs. (Black women in 1927 were never hired.)

Who deserves the credit for Ford’s success has been a matter of dispute since that success began. Many have suggested that the real brains of the operation was James Couzens, Ford’s Canadian-born partner. Couzens had started his working life as a clerk in a coal yard, but joined Ford early on and showed an extraordinary flair for business. Couzens set up and managed Ford’s finances, sales, distribution network, and
advertising. Henry Ford attended almost exclusively to production. By this view, Henry Ford gave the company a name and an ethos, but Couzens made it a global colossus.

Ford and Couzens constantly squabbled, sometimes bitterly, and success only made matters worse. Ford began to resent Couzens’s $150,000 salary. He didn’t think Couzens was worth it and essentially drove him to leave. Couzens sold out in 1915 and went into politics, eventually becoming a U.S. senator for Michigan, where he made himself famous by attacking Andrew Mellon for favoring the rich (an irony appreciated by many since Couzens was believed to be the richest man in Congress).

Couzens’s departure was a source of immediate worry for many at Ford. “There was something of a feeling that while Ford was a great mechanic he wasn’t much of a businessman,” a Ford insider named Edwin G. Pipp wrote in 1926, “and there were fears of what would happen to the company if Couzens left.” What happened in fact isn’t certain. Without Couzens, Ford carried on much as before. Though the company did go into a gradual decline, it is impossible to say to what extent that was a reflection of Couzens’s departure. What can be said is that all the real innovations at Ford happened when Couzens was there and none of lasting consequence happened after—at least not until the summer of 1927, and those were by no means unalloyed successes.

By the late 1920s, one American in six owned a car—which was getting close to a rate of one per family—and many people were finding the automobile an essential part of life. The sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd, in their classic study of middle America,
Middletown
, published in 1929, found to their surprise that more people in the anonymous town of the title (which in fact was Muncie, Indiana) had cars than bathtubs. Asked why, one woman replied simply: “Because we can’t go to town in a bathtub.”

Unfortunately, and increasingly, the cars Americans loved were not Fords. Other makers were producing cars of superior quality and value.
General Motors (GM) supplied as standard such devices as speedometers and shock absorbers that Ford was slow to supply at all. GM moreover produced a range of cars to fit every pocket, from Chevrolets at the basic end to Cadillacs at the top. (Cadillac was such an exclusive division that it maintained a showroom in Manhattan where, as its ads boasted, “Sales are neither made nor discussed.” Visitors could admiringly inspect the latest models but had to go elsewhere for the sordid business of making a purchase.)

Under the enterprising leadership of Alfred Sloan Jr., General Motors constantly restyled and refined its cars, adding new colors and features to stimulate interest and excitement. By the late 1920s, GM was well on its way to perfecting the annual model change, a practice that was essentially needless but magnificently effective as a marketing tool. Also racing up from behind was the new Chrysler Corporation, which was formed out of the old Maxwell Motor Company and named for Walter Chrysler, its dynamic head. By the late 1920s, Chrysler was doing so extraordinarily well that he could afford to build a magnificent monument to himself. The result was the fabled seventy-seven-story Chrysler Building, which was the world’s tallest building upon completion. (Not for long, however. Eleven months later it was superseded by the Empire State Building.)

All this combined to make Ford look increasingly old-fashioned and flat-footed. Ford’s last really good year was 1923. Between then and the end of 1926, total production at the company went down by four hundred thousand vehicles. During the same period production went up by an almost equal amount at Chevrolet—a division that had been developed by William Knudsen, a brilliant former Ford engineer who had been driven into the arms of General Motors by Henry’s autocratic methods.

Remarkably, while this was happening Henry Ford increasingly occupied himself with other, less urgent matters. He pursued a fixation with finding industrial uses for agricultural products. He was particularly
taken with what he saw as the infinite adaptability of the soybean. He wore suits woven from soy fibers and built experimental cars made largely with soy plastics. (The car never went into production because it couldn’t be made not to stink.) He fed guests dinners that consisted primarily of soybean products—“pineapple rings with soybean cheese, soybean bread with soybean butter, apple pie with soy crust, roasted soybean coffee, and soymilk ice cream,” in the words of his biographer Greg Grandin. Ford so admired the head of his soybean research division, Edsel Ruddiman, that he named his only child after him.

To promote his personal beliefs Ford bought a dying weekly newspaper, the
Dearborn Independent
, and turned it into a general interest magazine. The
Independent
became famous for the dullness of its features and the waywardness of its views. It was produced from some surplus factory space, prompting one wag to call it “the best weekly ever turned out by a tractor plant.” Ford interfered with it extensively. One of his ideas was to bring assembly-line methods to its production. Instead of assigning each article to an individual writer, as on a conventional publication, he wanted a team of specialists to each make a specific contribution and then pass the article on. One writer would supply the facts, another the humor, a third the moral instruction, and so on. Ford was persuaded to drop that idea, but he tinkered enough in other areas to ensure that the
Independent
was always terrible. He lost hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on the magazine, and would have lost still more had he not forced his dealers to take copies to sell on to their customers—though it was a rare customer who was eager to read long articles like “Famous Frenchmen I Have Met” by A. M. Somerville Story (a writer about as obscure then as now) or “The American Merchant Marine Must Be Built by Business Enterprise and
Not
by Government Subsidy” by W. C. Cowling, a Ford executive.

Regularly, and more notoriously, the
Independent
ran strident attacks on the world’s Jews. It accused them of manipulating stock markets, working for the overthrow of Christianity, using Hollywood as a propaganda tool for Jewish interests, promoting jazz (“moron music,” as the
Independent
called it) to the masses for nefarious purposes, encouraging
the wearing of short skirts and rolled stockings, and fixing the 1919 World Series, among much else. Accuracy was not its strong suit. A 1921 article entitled “How Jews Degraded Baseball” pilloried Harry Frazee of the Red Sox on the assumption that he was a Jew. In fact, Frazee was Presbyterian.

The bulk of these essays were gathered together in a volume called
The International Jew
, which was greatly admired in Nazi Germany, where it was reprinted no fewer than twenty-nine times. Henry Ford had the additional distinction of being the only American mentioned favorably in
Mein Kampf
, Adolf Hitler’s memoir of 1925. Hitler, it was said, kept a framed photo of Ford on his wall.

Ford’s anti-Semitism seems to have been of a type peculiarly his own. For one thing, it appears not to have been personal. So far as can be told, he had nothing against Jews as individuals. He happily put the design of his factories in the hands of Albert Kahn, a Jewish émigré, with whom he had a good relationship for thirty-five years. When Rabbi Leo Franklin, an old friend and neighbor, broke with Ford over some of the accusations contained in the
Independent
, Ford was genuinely mystified. “What’s wrong, Dr. Franklin?” he inquired sincerely. “Has anything come between us?”

Ford’s antagonism was instead based on the conviction that a shadowy cabal of Jews was trying to take over the world. The source of these beliefs was a mystery to all. “I am sure that if Mr. Ford were put on the witness stand, he could not tell to save his life just when and how he got started against the Jews,” remarked Edwin Pipp, first editor of the
Independent
, who soon quit the magazine rather than print the kind of essays Ford wanted.

Ironically, it was a personal attack that got Ford in trouble in 1927. In the course of its rantings, the
Independent
libeled a lawyer named Aaron Sapiro by claiming that he was part of “a band of Jew bankers, lawyers, advertising agencies and produce buyers” who had cheated American farmers as part of a conspiracy to take control of the American wheat market. Sapiro sued for defamation, demanding $1 million in damages. The case would cast a shadow over Ford for much of the first half of the year.

Ford was scheduled to give testimony in the trial on April 1, but the day before his appearance he was involved in a strange accident. According to Ford’s own account to police, he was driving home from work when two men in a Studebaker forced him from the road. Ford bounced out of control down a steep embankment and crashed into a tree on the bank of the River Rouge. The tree very possibly saved his life, for the river was dangerously swollen from recent heavy rains—the same rains that were causing the Mississippi floods farther south. Ford arrived home on foot dazed and bleeding, with a deep gash over one eye and another serious cut on the top of his head. The two men in the Studebaker were never found.

A widespread presumption was that Ford had faked the crash to avoid having to testify the next day, but the severity of his injuries seemed to belie that. An alternative theory was that Ford—who was a notoriously exasperating motorist to be stuck behind, for he drove slowly and in the middle of the road—had been overtaken by the frustrated Studebaker driver and was accidentally bumped off the road or swerved off in startlement. Whatever the cause, the effect was to stop the libel case from proceeding as planned.

A new trial was scheduled, but Ford decided not to fight. Instead, after lengthy reflection, he issued a seemingly heartfelt letter apologizing to Sapiro personally (and enclosing a check for $140,000 to cover his costs) and to Jews generally, and promised never to attack either again. The letter was dated June 30 but was made public only on July 8.

In the letter, Ford claimed that he had been unaware of the terrible things that the
Independent
had been saying about Jews. “Had I appreciated even the general nature, to say nothing of the details, of these utterances, I would have forbidden their circulation without a moment’s hesitation,” he declared in language that was patently not his own. “I have been greatly shocked as a result of my study of the files of
The Dearborn Independent
and of the pamphlets entitled ‘The International Jew.’ ” All this was a little rich, as many of the charges made against the Jews had been contained in a column signed by Ford or in interviews that he had given to other publications. Joseph Palma, a Ford official who was
closely involved with drafting the letter, confided afterward that Henry Ford had never in fact read his own letter of apology and was only loosely acquainted with its contents.

In any event, the
Independent
ceased its vituperative attacks. With the
Independent
’s circulation falling, Ford halved the cover price to a nickel, but still no one bought it, so in late 1927 he closed it. In eight years, it had cost him nearly $5 million.

Ford remained true to his word and never publicly criticized Jews again. That isn’t to say that he necessarily abandoned his beliefs, however. Just over a decade later, on his seventy-fifth birthday, he accepted one of Nazi Germany’s highest civilian honors—the Grand Cross of the German Eagle—which came garlanded with praise from Adolf Hitler. Only one other prominent American of the period was so admired and honored by the Nazis (or so openly admired them in return): Charles Lindbergh.

But in 1927 all that lay in the future. For now, with the Sapiro affair out of the way, Henry Ford could turn his attention to some other, more pressing matters. One was a mad scheme to grow rubber in South America. The other was trying to save his business.

*
The background to the case was complicated. In 1916, the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa led a raid that killed seventeen Americans in New Mexico. This inflamed American sentiment against Mexico and led President Woodrow Wilson to dispatch national guardsmen to the border. Henry Ford reportedly declared that he would not pay the wages of any employees called up by the guard and sent to New Mexico, causing the
Tribune
to criticize him and leading to the libel suit. In fact, it appears that Ford never made the assertion that provoked the libel.

†
The Model T was preceded by eight other models: A, B, C, F, N, R, S, and K, in that order. If there was a logic to that sequence, Ford failed to explain it in his memoir,
My Life and Work
.

18

In 1871, a twenty-five-year-old English adventurer named Henry Wickham moved to the steamy far north of Brazil, just below the equator, with his large extended family—wife, mother, brother, sister, sister’s fiancé, brother’s fiancée, and brother’s fiancée’s mother—and two or three other prospective adventurers who signed on as help. This unlikely group settled at Santarém, at the confluence of the Amazon and Tapajós Rivers, with high hopes of becoming rich as planters. The experience proved disastrous. Their crops repeatedly failed, and tropical fevers carried off three members of the group in the second year and two more in the third. By 1875, only Wickham and his wife remained. The other survivors had gone back to England.