The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (Vintage) (18 page)

Ford's image as a strong yet approachable figure was enhanced by his love for horseplay and practical jokes. His tomfoolery at the Mack Avenue plant became legendary. Ford liked to wrestle, for example, and he would leap into a grappling contest with one of his men at the slightest show of interest. “He had just a little neck on him, but he could throw a very big man,” reported Frederick Strauss. “Henry had some kind of way that he could get you around the back and trip you.” His compulsive practical-joking came from the same sensibility, and many of his antics were aimed at Dick Kettlewell, a particularly somber and gullible pattern-maker, who never seemed to catch on to the drift of these tricks. Once, Ford arranged for a loaded cigar to be given to Kettlewell, which, when lit, exploded and singed his eyebrows. Another time, with the assistance of Spider Huff, Ford fixed a lever on one of the Model A's so that when moved it triggered a small explosion in the car's muffler. It was arranged for poor Kettlewell to sit in the car and adjust the lever, and the resulting boom frightened him so badly he nearly fell out of the vehicle. Ford, with his accomplices, was lurking behind a partition and “laughing his head off to think that he scared Dick so.” Perhaps Ford's most memorable trick occurred when, along with Harold Wills, he hot-wired the urinal in the men's toilet and waited patiently until Kettlewell went in during the day to relieve himself. The switch was thrown, and when the stream of urine made contact, the resulting shock produced an outburst of hilarity. “Dick just gave one yell and came running out of the toilet before buttoning up his pants,” reported a witness; Ford and his workers collapsed in laughter.
¹⁶

As the company expanded and prospered, its leader's public image also began to grow. Calls and inquiries after Henry Ford mounted as his new secretary, Myrtle Clarkson, scrambled to locate her energetic boss roaming the factory. “He came and went at his own sweet will, observing no office hours,” she noted. The area around his office often became congested, with
car dealers seeking contracts and visitors clambering to see the successful manufacturer. Letters also poured in. One of them, according to Clarkson, was Ford's first fan letter. From a young woman who lived in the Western part of the United States, it described her recent encounter with a picture of Ford as he sat behind the wheel of one of his cars. Smitten, she offered to marry him sight unseen.
¹⁷

As the Model A began to sell steadily, production and profits both mounted. But success brought new and unforeseen problems. It became evident that the Mack Avenue facility was being swamped by the volume of sales. On April 1, 1904, responding to the need for increased output, the company secured a larger factory site on Piquette Avenue, conveniently located near several railroad lines. The new facility consisted of a three-story brick building measuring some 402 by 56 feet. The plant featured special fire walls and sprinkler systems and relied upon a one-story powerhouse to provide electrical power. By the fall of 1904, this structure, almost ten times the size of the Mack Avenue plant, neared completion. The company shifted its manufacturing operations there in late 1904 and early 1905, and within a short time it was employing some three hundred.
¹⁸

During this early spurt of growth from 1903 to 1905, Henry Ford assembled a group of associates who would play prominent roles in developing the company's earliest automobiles. Harold Wills, assisted by J. C. Smith and Harry Love, specialized in experiment and design; Gus Derenger and P. E. Martin supervised the assembly process. Fred Seeman, with the help of Charles E. Sorensen, directed the pattern-making efforts; and a trio of engineers—Joseph Galamb, Oscar C. Bornholdt, Carl Emde—came to play important roles in tool design and model development. Frank Bennett and Fred Rockelman were in charge of the motor-testing room— at that time a rather perilous operation, because of ineffective ventilation for carbon-monoxide gas. But Henry Ford oversaw the entire production process. No important decisions were made without his approval. “His was the final say,” one employee emphasized. “The other people did the work, but when it came to ‘shall we put this here or there?’ Mr. Ford would say, ‘we'll put it here,’ and that was the end of that.”
¹⁹

On the business front, however, Ford's contributions faded. In fact, in matters of finances, billings, payments, and sales they disappeared almost completely. During the company's first, occasionally precarious few years of existence, another figure proved to be particularly valuable and influential. Alex Malcolmson, up to his elbows in various business ventures, had overextended his credit by 1903 and wished to hide his adventures in the automobile industry from his bankers. So he transferred his chief clerk from the
Malcolmson Coal Company to a position of authority in the automobile company. This able young man was put in charge of the partnership's business operations. No one could have predicted the influential role that this brilliant, methodical young clerk would come to play in the fortunes of Henry Ford and his company.

James Couzens knew nothing about automobiles. Occasionally he would go for a ride with Malcolmson, who would adjust a control on the dashboard of his Winton and explain that he was changing the mixture. “I thought he meant that he was mixing water with the gasoline, and continued to think so for a long time,” Couzens confessed, not understanding about gasoline and air. But he did know about business. In the late summer of 1903, the Ford Motor Company had sold a few cars and had others ready for shipment, but Henry Ford was delaying, offering the familiar excuse from his earlier days as a manufacturer: his automobile was not yet as good as he could make it. This time, however, someone intervened. “I urged H.F. to get the cars out and get the money for them, regardless of whether he could improve them,” Couzens noted. “We had but a small working capital and it was getting low.” To make sure that the automobiles went out to buyers as planned, he personally helped transport them to the railway, crate them up, and nail shut the doors of the railcars.
²⁰

Here was Couzens in a nutshell—smart, tough, blunt, willful, and self-confident. A man with an incredible capacity for work, a volcanic temper, and an attention to detail, he overflowed the official confines of his position to emerge as a powerful force in the early Ford Motor Company. Joining forces with Henry Ford, who quickly and favorably sized up this talented new associate, he dominated the business operations of the growing enterprise. Couzens' prodigious talents and powerful personality made him a man to reckon with, and his contribution to building the company ranked second only to that of Ford himself.

Couzens had been born in 1872 in Chatham, Ontario, some fifty miles from Detroit, to a pair of hardworking English immigrants. He worked for his father, who had risen from workman to small-business owner, and often accompanied him on business trips in the community. The ambitious youth harbored big dreams, once chiding his mother for dampening his prospects by allowing him to be born in Canada: “I can never be King of England, but if I had been born in the United States, I could be President.” After high school, he trained as a bookkeeper at the Canada Business College in
Chatham, paying expenses by working as a news butcher on the Erie and Huron Railroad. In 1889, at age seventeen, he left Chatham to take a job as a car-checker with the Michigan Central Railroad in nearby Detroit.

For $40 a month—twelve-hour days, seven days a week—Couzens checked freight cars and affixed labels to them confirming their contents. His obsession with efficiency soon became storied, as did his steely, no-nonsense temperament and prickly personality. Couzens avoided beer-drinking and carousing at his boardinghouse, and seemed to face everything, and everyone, with the same stern gaze. He dressed impeccably, carefully clipped his hair, and wore steel-rimmed glasses, thus creating an image of self-discipline and determination. He was also known for an unpleasant but effective forcefulness as he bluntly denounced those with whom he disagreed, and often displayed a powerful temper. Seldom smiling and deadly serious, he seemed someone to cross only at one's peril.

By 1893, at age twenty-one, Couzens became supervisor of the freight office in the railroad yard and established a reputation for strictness and discipline. Unconcerned with popularity, he earned little affection but much respect from workers and railroad managers alike. He treated customers honestly yet candidly. For example, he minced no words in insisting that customers pay “demurrage” charges, a much-resented new tariff established by Michigan Central. “The way Jim Couzens talked with these patrons on the telephone, giving them holy hell, was just astounding,” said one of his associates. Couzens clashed with Alex Malcolmson, who resisted the new tariff, and the two engaged in several shouting matches. Malcolmson admired the young man's spirited defense of his employer's interest, and offered him a job.

So, in 1895, James Couzens went to work for Alex Malcolmson as a clerk and car-checker, but soon rose to the position of manager of operations in the coal company. His habits of stern attention to duty, efficiency, and dogged pursuit of profit held firm. “He had a direct, blunt way of speaking to fellow employees and to customers,” a stenographer at the company testified. “He expected to be obeyed without any question.” Couzens' strong personality was appreciated by his boss, but it also produced frequent clashes of will between the two. Once, an argument over a business matter created a heated exchange during which Malcolmson called his manager a liar. Red-faced, Couzens flung his office keys at the tycoon, shouted his resignation, and stalked out. He returned only when Malcolmson sent a contrite note asking him to resume his duties. “How Malcolmson and Couzens managed to remain affiliated is one of the mysteries of destiny,” reported Ross Schram, Couzens' secretary.
²¹

In the late 1890s, Couzens first encountered a Detroit mechanic who
worked in the electrical industry and tinkered with horseless carriages. “The first time I ever saw Henry Ford was when I asked Malcolmson who was that man with the big mustache, who was looking at some coal in our office. Malcolmson said it was Henry Ford, the Edison Company's engineer,” Couzens recalled later. “We supplied the Edison Company with coal, and Ford used to come over, every little while, to see that he got the kind of coal he wanted.” Couzens became much more familiar with Ford when Malcolmson entered into the automobile partnership.
²²

The connection, however, followed a curiously indirect route. Malcolmson was afraid, as Couzens explained to a writer many years later, that “his credit with the banks would be injured if it were publicly known that he was backing anything so risky as an automobile venture.” So a ruse was created: Malcolmson shifted Couzens to the automobile company, created a special account in Couzens' name with Malcolmson secretly providing funds for deposit, and Couzens was directed to pay Ford's bills in his own name. Thus the coal dealer was able to mask his involvement by deploying a surrogate. Couzens' task was simple—protect Malcolmson's interests and keep a tight financial rein on his boss's new partner. This he certainly did, warning Malcolmson many times as Ford's bills began to pile up.
²³

But Couzens' ambitious, forceful nature soon propelled him into other areas. He became intimately involved with nearly every business aspect of this manufacturing enterprise, and Malcolmson soon relied upon him for advice and counsel on larger questions. During negotiations with the Dodge Brothers over a contract to build the chassis for Ford cars, John Dodge demanded provisions that Couzens believed were unfair. “I won't stand for that,” he told Dodge at a meeting. The quick-tempered, bar-fighting Dodge bristled, and demanded, “Who in the hell are you?” Malcolmson quickly interjected, “That's all right. Couzens is my adviser in this.” A bit later, Couzens joined in the quest to gather investors as the new company attempted to incorporate. Telling friends that he intended to “beg, borrow, or steal” as much money as he could, Couzens scraped together $2,500 in cash, salary advances, and promissory notes to stand as one of Ford Motor Company's original investors. He also helped beat the bushes for other contributors, although the process was a discouraging one. In later years, Couzens recalled that at one point, having suffered rebuff after rebuff, he slumped down the stairs following another unsuccessful appeal and sat down on the curb, almost in tears.
²⁴

With the incorporation of the company in June 1903, Couzens was appointed as its general business manager and secretary. Malcolmson had wanted that position for himself, with his lieutenant placed in command of the coal business, but other investors, relying upon Malcolmson's experience
in the energy operation, persuaded him to stay with his original enterprise. Besides, his chief clerk had made a strong impression upon the new stockholders. As John W. Anderson noted in a letter to his father, “Mr. Couzens … is going to leave the coal business, for the present at least, and devote his entire time to the office and management of the automobile business. And he is a crackerjack.”
²⁵