The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (Vintage) (21 page)

While Ford, Flanders, and managers and engineers revamped production at the Piquette Avenue facility, important adjustments appeared on the business side. Couzens, of course, remained, in the words of a subordinate, “what you'd call 'the man who pulled the trigger.' He was
everything.
Whatever was to go, had to pass him.” But, stretched beyond capacity, he reached out for assistance. In November 1907, Couzens hired Norval A. Hawkins as “commercial manager,” a position that encompassed the entire sales organization. This appointment proved to be as important for Ford's marketing operation as Walter Flanders was for its production. Over the next several years, Hawkins would expand and revamp the Ford sales operation throughout the country.
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As his company expanded rapidly in terms of production and structure, Henry Ford influenced its evolution with his relaxed management style. He roamed amid the growing workforce dispensing encouragement and advice and cultivating a spirit of relaxed camaraderie. Everyone called him Hank or Henry. The fact that he now tended to wear business suits during the workday did not stop him from lending a hand in the dirty work. According to one workman at Piquette Avenue:

Telling funny stories and bantering with the men, he would often pose riddles or ask peculiar questions and then, according to one worker, “laugh his fool head off to think that he had something on you that you couldn't answer right. He was pretty witty.” Ford's horseplay continued. Two of his
favorite activities were footracing with Fred Rockelman, a vehicle tester with the company—the pair would sprint, usually neck and neck, the length of the factory—and wrestling with George Holley, a young mechanic who was developing a carburetor for the Model N. According to one astonished observer, Ford and Holley would be talking and “the first thing you knew, they'd both be on the floor wrestling.”
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Henry Ford spent much time, however, in the development room at the Piquette Avenue factory, where he and a cadre of company engineers put in long hours working on the newest model innovations. It was a rather unimpressive space, with a blackboard, several drafting desks, a kitchen table, and a couple of chairs. It also featured a small couch that lay low to the ground, and Ford would occasionally be glimpsed stretched out on it, hands behind his head, eyes closed, quietly pondering the issues at hand. Among the development team, he promoted his agenda for making light, inexpensive cars and demonstrated an instinctive skill for coordinating efforts toward this larger goal. Disagreements arose, of course, over ideas involving mechanical and design issues. Ford would grease the creative wheels to keep them turning:

Ford's managerial skills, however, did not carry over into finances. In fact, his ineptness in that area became notorious. One day, shortly after the move to the Piquette Avenue plant, a young bookkeeper named Frank Klingensmith spent a long time unsuccessfully searching for an invoice. Frustrated, he finally looked into the shop, saw Ford, and inquired whether the company's chief had seen it. Ford thought for a moment, shrugged his shoulders, and suggested that the bookkeeper might check in an upstairs room by his office. Klingensmith was stunned to find the invoice there, lying in the middle of a huge pile of unopened mail. The bookkeeper filled two wastebaskets with this correspondence, carried it to his office, and spent the next two hours sorting through several weeks' worth of invoices, bills, and checks that Ford had absentmindedly set aside without opening. When Klingensmith informed Couzens of this situation, the latter blanched and
immediately issued a directive: “From now on it will be part of your job to open Mr. Ford's mail.”
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Financial acumen aside, Henry Ford established a broader reputation as production figures rose and the Model N emerged as one of the most popular motorized vehicles in the United States. Coming out as an industrial debutante on the national stage, he publicized himself and his company with an article in
Harper's Weekly
on March 16,1907, proudly explaining his company's development of new kinds of steel for Ford cars and asserting the growing primacy of the automobile industry in the United States. “American methods of manufacture and American workmanship, both of the hand and the machine, are superior to those of older countries—many hoary superstitions and beliefs to the contrary notwithstanding,” Ford declared. “European makers are studying American methods and importing American automatic machinery as fast as they can get it.” Unquestionably, the booming production and escalating sales figures from Piquette Avenue fueled this optimistic statement.
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The
Harper's Weekly
piece marked a stage in Henry Ford's life. The first five years of his company, he said years later, constituted “an experimenting period,” defined by steady movement toward producing an automobile for the American people and financial restraint. “We sold for cash, we did not borrow money, and we sold directly to the purchaser. We had no bad debts and we kept within ourselves on every move,” he observed. Ford's own energy and vision, however, clearly provided the driving force during this formative era. Charles Sorensen, who joined the company in 1905 and quickly rose into the ranks of management, related the story of a chat with Ford after a meeting regarding the start-up for Model N production. Couzens had just warned that escalating production costs were outpacing profits and severe financial difficulties lay ahead. Obviously upset, Ford confessed despair about his ability to build an inexpensive car that workingmen could afford to buy. A sympathetic Sorensen offered to help in any way he could, and this reaction seemed to galvanize his boss.

Sorensen, who became a major figure in the company, noted decades later, “To this day, this conversation has always remained very firmly in my mind.
I always consider it as the real turning point in the Ford Motor Company's future.”
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This episode, as Sorensen sensed, symbolized a new stage in the journey of Henry Ford and his company. By 1908, he had clarified his vision of the automobile he wanted to make and consolidated a structure for realizing it. Sooner than anyone could imagine, his dream of a low-cost car for the people would burst through all existing market restraints and expand his operation on a heroic scale. In so doing, Ford would create a new world.

They were as common as horseflies and as American as apple pie. First announced in the autumn of 1908, these modest automobiles appeared for sale early the following year. Pouring out of the Ford Motor Company's Detroit factory, they reached millions of consumers among the nation's middle and working classes. Eventually, some fifteen million of these vehicles would be manufactured, and by 1920 they constituted almost half of the cars on the country roads and city streets of the United States. They were given nicknames—“tin lizzies,” “flivvers,” “rattlers,” “Little Henrys,” “mechanical cockroaches”—and for millions of Americans they became like members of the family, by turns annoying with their unruly temperaments and endearing with their loyal service. They made Henry Ford a household name and granted his company iconic status. For most Americans in the early twentieth century, the Model T was the vehicle that transported them, literally, into the modern age.

The Model T was the culmination of Henry Ford's long-standing determination to produce a light, sturdy, inexpensive car for the American people. During the first five years of the Ford Motor Company's existence, he had turned out several models, especially the Model N, that aimed at this goal. But none fully met the standard. Beginning in 1909, however, Ford presented the new, affordable, durable Model T as a truly “universal car,” and citizens of modest means purchased it in unprecedented numbers. More than any other single development, it put America on wheels in the early twentieth century.

The car culture created by the Model T would change forever how ordinary Americans led their daily lives. “Automobility,” as one observer has defined the multifaceted impact of the car, became the backbone of a new society and economy in the early twentieth century. Within fifteen years of the Model T's appearance, car manufacturing had emerged as the leading
American industry in terms of value. In turn, this enterprise became the lifeblood of the petroleum industry and a leading customer for a variety of enterprises: steel, rubber, glass, lacquers. The automobile inspired street and road construction all over the country, stimulated suburban real-estate development, and nourished the growth of new service businesses such as gas stations, tourism, and roadside lodging. This vehicle moved Americans from home to job, from work to play, and tightened connections among regions, between urban areas and the countryside. By the 1920s, as Robert and Helen Lynd noted in
Middletown,
their sociological study of Muncie, Indiana, the purchase of automobiles on the installment plan had made consumer credit a key part of everyday life. According to the Lynds, “Ownership of an automobile has now reached the point of being an accepted essential of normal living.” Only a few years later, the President's Research Committee on Social Trends offered a simple conclusion about the American love affair with the car: “The automobile has become a dominant influence in the life of the individual and he, in a very real sense, has become dependent on it.”
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Yet Ford's Model T, for all of its practical impact, represented something even larger and more far-reaching: a new vision of the good life in America. As Henry Ford made clear both in his statements and in his company's advertising, this “universal car” was intended to spearhead a new era of consumer prosperity. By the early 1900s, many Americans believed that the enjoyment of material goods brought unprecedented social harmony and personal fulfillment. And as the ability to consume became the essence of Americanism, ownership of an automobile became the quintessence of consumption. In the hands of Ford and his associates, the Model T appeared as the most common symbol of a new age of material comfort.

Thus Henry Ford, the farmer's son from Michigan, emerged as the major architect of a new value system in modern America. Though we are accustomed to think of this automaker as a pioneer of production, it was, in fact, his vision of a consumer utopia that underlaid the quest for a universal automobile. With his new car for the people, Ford certainly changed how his fellow citizens lived. But, even more significantly, he changed how they thought about what was important.

Henry Ford liked to tell a story about how he stumbled across the lightweight material that became the basis for the Model T. While attending an automobile race at Palm Beach in 1905, he witnessed a crash where in a
French race car was wrecked. After the race ended, he walked out to the site of the pileup. As he recalled, “I picked up a little valve strip stem. It was very light and very strong. I asked what it was made of. Nobody knew. I gave the stem to my assistant. ‘Find out all about this,’ I told him. 'That is the kind of material we ought to have in our cars.' ” When it was discovered to be a special kind of steel containing vanadium, Ford located an Englishman who could make this material commercially and found a small steel company in Canton, Ohio, that could run extra-hot furnaces, at three thousand degrees Fahrenheit (the temperature required for normal steel production was twenty-seven hundred), to manufacture it. Ford then authorized a series of tests that led to the use of vanadium steel in half the car's components.
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