The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (Vintage) (23 page)

In 1928, on the twentieth anniversary of the launching of the car that made him famous, Henry Ford created controversy over his comments during an interview with the Associated Press. When asked for his advice about how to become successful in modern America, he said that traditional injunctions to work hard and save your money—such advice had been a staple of American success writers from Benjamin Franklin to Horatio Alger—were wrong. He insisted that, though hard labor was still a good idea, thrift was fruitless. “No successful boy ever saved any money,” Ford declared. “They spent it as fast as they could for things to improve themselves.” Almost immediately, an uproar ensued over Henry Ford's “gospel of spending,” as one publication termed it.

Denunciations of his position appeared immediately. The Detroit
Free Press
sniffed, “We are old-fashioned enough to believe that …the philosophy of Poor Richard is more salutary than that attributed to Mr. Ford.” Chicago's
Journal of Commerce
insisted that, even if exceptional individuals might prosper from Ford's advice, saving was “the only hope for people of
mediocre ability.” It added pointedly, ”For all men, exercise in self-denial is a wholesome experience.”

Significantly, however, the dissenters were overwhelmed by publications that lined up in support of Ford's injunction to spend. The New York
Herald Tribune
praised his intelligent position and opined that youth needed to enjoy life because fun was worth “a treasure far greater than any fortune which could be built by counting pennies and dimes.” Another publication lauded Ford for raising the question of “how money may be spent wisely, and that is quite as much a test of success as earning it.” The Asheville, North Carolina,
Citizen
supported him for downplaying the miserly aspects of business and stressing its “adventurous” qualities. “He who nurses the nickels misses the knockouts,” declared this paper. “He probably will have enough to live on, but no sculptor will get a fee for making a statue of him when he is dead. The world belongs to the audacious.”
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Ford's “gospel of spending,” in fact, had captured a new sensibility in turn-of-the-century America. Since the 1890s, many citizens had been endorsing an ethos of consumption, pleasure, and self-fulfillment. The Model T, a universal car for the people, became an influential vehicle for spreading the consumer gospel throughout modern America.

As this new, lightweight car burst into the American market, Ford consistently defined its appeal in consumer terms. To be sure, he delighted in praising the Model T's utilitarian features, but the pleasure and contentment to be derived from this vehicle also played prominently in his assessments. His enticing descriptions of the universal car prompted newspaper headlines informing readers that “Henry Ford Says Comfort His Aim.” His public announcement of the Model T was awash in the rhetoric of leisure and enjoyment, emphasizing his vision of the vehicle not as a luxury item for the elite but as a pleasurable necessity for the masses.

Defining the motorcar as a necessity “that would meet the wants of the multitude,” Ford linked his vehicle to a larger vision of contentment through consumption. In
My Life and Work,
he dismissed some businessmen's
fears of overproduction and market saturation with a utopian vision of consumer abundance:

A few years later, in 1926, Ford used a second autobiographical volume,
Today and Tomorrow,
to point out that America's consumer values had created among its citizens a happy problem of how to spend leisure time. The eight-hour day and five-day workweek was creating all of the manpower production required by the nation's industry. “What is really bothering most people is how to put in their spare time,” Ford observed. “That used to bother only what was called the ‘leisure class.’ ”
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Ford's notions of consumer prosperity caught the crest of a wave of historical change sweeping over early-twentieth-century America. Whereas citizens in the Victorian nineteenth century had lived by a creed of hard work, self-control, and delayed gratification, shifting socioeconomic realities were pushing forward leisure, material abundance, and emotional self-fulfillment. As one historian has described, from the 1890s on American society became “preoccupied with consumption, with comfort and bodily well-being, with luxury, spending, and acquisition…. Different kinds of people and groups—cultural and non-economic, religious and political—

… worked together to create what merchant John Wanamaker called the ‘land of desire.’ … Merchants cooperated with educators, social reformers, politicians, artists, and religious leaders to bring into existence the new economy and culture.”
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Henry Ford, perhaps more than any other American industrialist and businessman of the early twentieth century, grasped the essence of this cultural shift. He instinctively appreciated the allure of consumer abundance; in fact, he shared the dream. Though far too busy building Ford Motor Company to articulate a coherent philosophy before 1920, he eventually formulated his thoughts into a basic creed stressing consumer demand, peo-ple's desires, and the critical importance of leisure. He dropped nuggets of advice at every opportunity. In an
American Magazine
interview with Bruce Barton, a journalist who would become one of the great boosters of American consumerism as a popular success writer and advertising man, Ford insisted that satisfying the American desires for material goods lay at the
heart of modern commercial life. “Well, say, we're creating new wants in folks right along, aren't we? And we no sooner get those wants satisfied in one class of society than another class bobs up to present its needs and demands,” Ford declared. “The wants keep right on increasing, and the more wants the more business, isn't that so?”
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Ford infused his published writings and interviews with aphorisms about how the importance of business began with the consumer:

In a 1926 article in the magazine
The World's Work,
he summarized his thinking about the new culture of consumption. The old-fashioned denigration of leisure as either wasted time or a privilege of wealth, Ford said, must be abandoned once and for all. Leisure was neither idleness or shiftlessness, but an activity with “positive industrial value …because it increases consumption.” The smart businessman supported higher wages and shorter work hours, because “people who have more leisure must have more clothes. They must have a greater variety of food. They must have more transportation facilities. They naturally must have more service of various kinds.” Demand created jobs and profits because “the people who consume the bulk of goods are the people who make them. That is a fact we must never forget—that is the secret of our prosperity.” Ford viewed leisure as the lifeblood of modern consumer capitalism, coursing through the commercial arteries of the United States carrying the nourishment of desired goods and services and prompting people to buy.

Ford's Model T was the final piece of the puzzle. The automobile, he recognized, provided the linchpin in this new system of leisure, consumption,
and prosperity. It served as a commodity itself, of course, but it did much more.

Even if not portrayed fully and colorfully until some years later, an early version of Ford's consumer vision had been in place since the turn of the century and provided the conceptual foundation upon which the Model T was built. Americans grew used to thinking of Henry Ford as a pioneer of mass production because of the massive building and distribution of his universal car, but it was his endorsement of consumer abundance for the ordinary citizen that provided the impetus for the process. The Model T, he understood at some basic level, was a revolutionary event in the evolution of a modern consumer consciousness. “Nothing could be more splendid than a world in which everybody has all that he wants,” Ford once declared. This consumer ethos, the industrialist realized more clearly than anyone, was in the air of early-twentieth-century America. But, practically speaking, it usually came riding into the cities, villages, and farms of the United States in the front seat of Ford's flivver.
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As modern consumer society gradually took shape in the early twentieth century, one activity emerged above all others to bind together notions of business profit, leisure activity, prosperity, and personal happiness. Adver-tising—a long-standing endeavor in American business, dating back to the early republic—was transformed into a kind of commercial religion in the booming new consumer economy. It offered social redemption through the partaking of material goods. Like other business enterprises, the Ford Motor Company embraced this gospel and won converts by means of an inspiring advertising vision of prosperity, abundance, and self-fulfillment. These qualities were built into the Model T as surely as its vanadium-steel axles, planetary transmission, and recalcitrant cranking mechanism.

Modern advertising, as historians have pointed out in recent years, shifted significantly around the beginning of the twentieth century. Traditional advertisements in newspapers, magazines, and flyers had employed a practical palette of durability, quality, and usefulness to paint attractive por
traits of commercial goods. By the early 1900s, however, advertisers had begun using brighter cultural colors to portray commercial goods as conveyors of emotional happiness, personal desire, and private satisfactions. Advertising increasingly appeared as a kind of commercial therapy that promised varieties of self-fulfillment: fantasies of play and fun, possibilities of romance, excursions into progress and modernity, pathways to increased social status. The Ford Motor Company's efforts on behalf of the Model T reflected this transition in advertising from meeting practical needs to fulfilling desires.
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The Ford advertising operation had accelerated in 1907, as the Model N was going out to the public, when the company hired LeRoy Pelletier as its first advertising manager.
Motor World
described this colorful figure as “a brilliant, plausible, rapid-fire conversationalist” and “a clever writer” who, “in the art of ‘putting them over,’ has few peers. Even the great Barnum himself would have found him a valuable assistant.” Before coming to Ford, Pelletier had served as an advance man for a circus, a correspondent for the New York
Times
in the Klondike, the owner of a real-estate firm, and the developer of an air-cooled automobile. He affected a theatrical appearance, with a great bushy head of hair and long, flowing black ties, and impressed all who encountered him with his enormous energy and winsome style. Specializing in light, glowing, imaginative copy, he put together the major ad campaign for the unveiling of the Model N in New York City. This dynamic adman formulated the first great advertising slogan for the company— “Watch the Fords Go By”—and emblazoned it in unforgettable style on a giant, first-of-its-kind sign set atop the Detroit Opera House. Made in the shape of the Model N, it featured turning wheels, burning headlights, and the new slogan in blinking lights below the giant automobile. By early 1908, however, Pelletier had left the company to pursue other business oppor-tunities.
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