The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (Vintage) (100 page)

After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the subsequent German declaration of war on the United States, Ford abandoned all support for neutrality and lined up behind the war effort. He pledged his company to the manufacturing of armaments and published a statement repudiating anti-Semitism. In the name of “American community” and “national unity,” Ford denounced “the hate-mongering prevalent for some time in this country against the Jew” and described it as a “distinct disservice to our country, and to the peace and welfare of humanity.” He affirmed that, although war was a terrible business, “we are in it now, and the important thing is to finish it quickly, so that we can return to more useful, more serious matters.” His shift of opinion seemed heartfelt. One morning, sitting in the Martha-Mary Chapel with James Newton, Ford listened to the schoolchildren singing a hymn. “Sometimes over there at the plant I look at those weapons rolling out and I think we've gone plumb crazy, killing each other off like this,” he said. “Then I come here and watch these youngsters and I know it's worthwhile. We've got to win this war, so they can grow up in a free world.”
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The Ford Motor Company threw itself into the war effort. Though it manufactured cargo trucks, tanks and tank destroyers, aircraft engines, and gliders at its factories around the country, its biggest contribution came
with the mass production of B-24 Liberator bombers at a giant facility that arose in the Michigan countryside some twenty miles west of Dearborn. In January 1941, nearly a year before Pearl Harbor and following a request from Washington, the company had agreed to enter the field of military-airplane manufacturing. During a trip to California to inspect the factories of two aircraft companies, Consolidated and Douglas, Charles Sorensen and Edsel Ford had formulated a plan for a factory to build B-24s according to principles of assembly-line production. Henry Ford approved. By late spring, construction had begun on a plant near Ypsilanti, by a small stream called Willow Run. When it was finished, at a cost of nearly $50 million, Ford's L-shaped factory was nearly thirty-two hundred feet long, sat on eighty acres, with another hundred acres devoted to hangars, and was surrounded by seven concrete runways, each some sixty-two hundred feet long. Eventually, the factory would employ almost fifty thousand workers, studding the surrounding areas with houses, dormitories, and trailers to shelter them.
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Willow Run was really Sorensen's brainchild. On the California trip, he had sketched the first basic plan for the factory on a piece of stationery. In subsequent months, he managed the organization of the airplane's construction into nine subassemblies, oversaw the building of the facility with its mile-long assembly line, and coordinated affairs between the company and the federal government. The Willow Run project was, in Sorensen's own words, the “biggest challenge of my production career.” Getting the factory up and running did not go flawlessly. Tormented by production glitches, labor shortages, and bureaucratic delays that created controversy (and some accusations of mismanagement), Willow Run spun its production wheels during the first year of the war. By August 1943, however, it was turning out 230 Liberators a month, and by August 1944 over 425 a month. “Bring the Germans and Japs to see it,” Sorensen boasted. “Hell, they'll blow their brains out.” By the war's end, the company had made over eighty-six hundred B-24s at the Ypsilanti facility. For millions of citizens, Willow Run became a symbol of America's tremendous productive capacity in wartime.
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Ford took great pride in his company's defense plant and visited it nearly every day during the first two years America was in the war. After a stop each morning for services at the Martha-Mary Chapel, he headed out in a car equipped with a two-way radio so company managers would know his arrival time. He had hired Lindbergh to work at Willow Run as an unpaid consultant—he flight-tested the bombers, developing modifications that improved their high-altitude performance, and served as a liaison between the production people and the flight crews—and the two visited frequently. Ford's arrival always generated interest. “Sometimes he would
simply sit on a chair or desk and talk—about an engine he was developing, about the need for decentralizing factories so workmen could own a piece of land, about the effect of eating too much sugar, about his ideas for a parliament of man,” Lindbergh described. “Sometimes he would take two or three company officers with him and inspect the factory lines. He was agile and untiring on these visits.” Ford expressed great pride in Willow Run's scale of production, telling reporters, “The more we produce, the quicker it will be over and the sooner we can get back to the job of building up the country.” “Two years ago he was an earnest pacifist,”
Time
magazine stated in 1942.”Today, like the rest of the industry he is not only working for war but for war alone…. Henry Ford and his empire have converted themselves to war.”
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Such pictures of Ford's involvement in war production at Willow Run, though bolstering the company's public relations and boosting the public's morale, had little to do with the truth. In fact, his participation in the real business of wartime production was far less than the public imagined. Beyond giving vague approval to plans and procedures already formulated by Sorensen and his managers at Willow Run, Ford did little of substance except lending encouragement as he roamed the plant. “Henry Ford had nothing to do with this program,” Sorensen said of the company's conversion to war production. “With these matters in safe hands he went along as the glorified leader.”
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If anything, Ford meddled and caused problems. With his mental state fluctuating wildly, he concocted conspiracies and hallucinated enemies. In late 1942, for example, he declared to Sorensen that he could no longer stomach William Knudsen, who must be dismissed from the organization. Knudsen, of course, had left Ford Motor Company twenty years earlier. Ford told associates he was being spied on, and expressed his distrust of army and air force officers who were stationed at the plant. He became convinced that an agent of the American government would kill him. “I was astonished to find an automatic pistol in a holster under the cowl of his car,” Sorensen reported. “His chauffeur also packed a pistol.” In more lucid moments, yet jealous of his own position and prerogatives, he encouraged managerial infighting at Willow Run. He tried to set Sorensen against Mead Bricker, who managed the bomber factory under Sorensen's supervision. Once he even told Bricker to attempt to fire his superior. “God, isn't that going to be funny when Bricker tells Charley to get out of the plant,” Ford chortled to Harry Bennett. “Charley will fire him on the spot.”
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Perhaps the best reflection of Ford's marginalization, however, came with the much-publicized visit of President Roosevelt to Willow Run on September 18,1942.FDR's stopover at the bomber factory, part of a series
of war-plant visits, agitated Ford greatly. Roosevelt, who had traveled by train, was two hours late, and Ford, annoyed by the delay, had left the welcoming party to roam the plant. When Roosevelt arrived, Ford was nowhere to be found; after a search by Harry Bennett's men, he was finally located talking with workers about a new machine tool. He then joined the President and First Lady, along with Donald M. Nelson, chairman of the War Production Board, Sorensen, and Edsel, for a tour of Willow Run. Riding in a car inside the facility, Ford was wedged in the back seat between the Roosevelts, with Edsel and Sorensen on jumpseats facing them and Nelson in the front seat beside the driver. As they moved along, Sorensen explained the various operations of the plant and the Roosevelts responded with enthusiastic questions and comments. FDR talked at length with his usual charm, but Ford pouted. Sorensen described the scene. “Sitting between the Roosevelts, who were good-sized people, he was almost hidden,” Sorensen described. “He could not enter into the spirit of the event. When Edsel or I turned to look at him he would glare at us furiously.” When Willow Run workers cheered the President, Ford only grew more infuriated. Sorensen's obvious expertise in explaining the plant's operation, as well as his reference to FDR as “the boss,” did likewise. After a perfunctory goodbye in the President's private railcar, Ford sped off in his own automobile.
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Despite his minimal role, Henry Ford's wartime image as a patriotic producer reached great heights. In a cover story on March 23, 1942,
Time
magazine painted an admiring picture of the elderly industrialist as a “fighting pacifist.” Noting that the American automobile industry had become a crucial part of the “miracle of war production,” the article suggested that there was “no better sample than Henry Ford.” This “America Firster,”
Time
declared, had his reservations “bombed away at Pearl Harbor” and immediately devoted his industrial empire to winning the war. It portrayed him touring his factories and, at each stop, ordering, “Get a defense job going in there quick.” As the article concluded admiringly, in his individualism, confidence, curiosity, and productivity, “Henry Ford is more like most Americans than most Americans realize.” His wartime efforts demonstrated that “the whole U.S. nation was going to roll up its sleeves and fix Armageddon.”
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The company's wartime ad series featuring its founder's life and achievements further burnished his personal image. Ford had banned advertisements describing the company's war work—he thought such efforts were in poor taste—but he happily assented to a plan based on his own life. John W. Thompson, who joined the public-relations staff in 1942, worked with Irving Bacon to develop ads focusing on key moments in
Ford's experience that revealed “the sources from which sprang the genius and success of the Ford Motor Company.” Bacon's paintings depicted Henry as a boy building a waterwheel in the creek outside his school, repairing watches in his bedroom, having his first meeting with Thomas Edison, testing his first horseless carriage on the streets of Detroit, making a car that won the Transcontinental Race in 1909, and inaugurating the first assembly line in 1913. “Today, this philosophy and the skills developed through more than 40years experience are being applied to America's vital needs,” the ads said. “From this will arise new techniques to serve the nation even better when Ford resumes the production of sturdy, comfortable transportation, priced within the reach of the greatest number.” According to Thompson, Ford took a great personal interest in these ads and suggested improvements.
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The military output of Willow Run and the outpouring of favorable publicity, however, only modified Ford's antiwar sentiments. He remained at heart a reluctant warrior. Throughout World War II, he spoke periodically on the need to end wasteful fighting as quickly as possible and get back to consumer production. At what turned out to be his last press confer-ence—on his seventy-ninth birthday, on July 30,1942—Ford told reporters that the present global conflict was “precipitated by greed, lust for power, and financial gain; it won't end until some sense of sanity has returned to those who believe in armed might for selfish gain.” He hoped that the creation of a world federation and the renewal of peaceful production would make war obsolete. “The intensive production of the world's goods, new goods to serve human needs and legitimate desires—that is the broad highway to peace,” Ford claimed.
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Indeed, at every opportunity Ford focused attention on his hopes for the postwar era. He suggested that factories such as Willow Run could be converted to the manufacture of prefab houses, complete with air-conditioning, central heating, and modern appliances, for millions of families now priced out of the housing market. Or they might be modified to produce large multiple-engine cargo and passenger planes. Ford also suggested conversion of war plants to agricultural uses, making not only tractors and other farm tools but new goods being developed in plastics, chemicals, and food. Whatever the specifics, Ford clearly entertained a happy postwar vision characterized by renewed consumer prosperity.
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The demands of World War II put great pressures on Henry Ford. Ideologically, this global conflict challenged his long-cherished commitment to peaceful solutions to international problems. Physically, it challenged a man whose health was declining as his mental processes grew steadily weaker and more erratic. His situation was complicated further by an ongoing, troubling
personal relationship with his son. During World War II, it reached a tragic climax from which the father never fully recovered.

Edsel Ford could take it no longer. The onset of health problems, in concert with years of conflict with his father, had taken their toll. In 1943, in the middle of a war for which the Ford Motor Company was producing thousands of armaments, he determined to walk away from his work and his tormentors. Edsel decided that his situation had become intolerable following a particularly brutal confrontation with Henry. Fed up with his father's abuse and physically exhausted, after twenty-four years in the position, he decided to resign the presidency of the company that Henry had built.
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