The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (Vintage) (29 page)

As the Ford Motor Company began to push its way into the national automobile market, many noted the close relationship between Ford and Wills. At the time of the crisis resulting in Malcolmson's ouster, Ford's steadiest ally did not come from among the board of directors. “A man who had no stock at all was the closest to Mr. Ford. That was Mr. C. H. Wills,” noted Charles H. Bennett, one of the original stockholders. “He and Mr. Ford were great friends and got along very well together.” Fred W. Seeman, a pattern-maker who worked closely with both men during the early years of the company, affirmed their close relationship. “I think Mr. Wills and Mr. Ford got along about as well as any engineering pair I've run across in my life,” Seeman stated, “and I've run across a lot of them.”
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Wills' importance to the early Ford Motor Company, however, far exceeded his friendship with its founder. On any number of fronts, he played a key role in developing the automotive product. As chief engineer, he made design contributions to Ford automobiles that were basic to their creation. In the simple words of pattern-maker Fred Seeman, “Most of the ideas for the cars came from Mr. Wills and Mr. Ford.” In fact, Wills worked so closely with Ford that their contributions were indistinguishable in developing the first wave of automobiles (Models A, C, F, and B) as well as the more sophisticated prototypes that emerged a bit later (Models N, R,
and S). His influence was not limited strictly to engineering. Acutely interested in production, he strongly supported Walter Flanders' reorganization efforts. His longest-lasting influence, however, came when the company began searching for a trademark. He remembered that as a teenager he had earned spending money by printing calling cards using a crude, home-printing set. He recalled that its graceful script had featured a particularly striking “F” similar to that in Henry Ford's own signature. So he dug the old set out of his attic and used it to letter the familiar, flowing Ford logo that would be affixed to millions of automobiles and advertisements in the decades to come.
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Wills' professional profile was enhanced by a striking appearance and forceful personality. When he was a young man, his handsome demeanor— tall, with dark hair, strong facial features, including large brown eyes, and outfitted in impeccably tailored suits—had turned many heads. In later life, he would move toward baldness and add weight to his frame, but the powerful presence remained. Wills struck all who worked with him as headstrong, confident, persuasive, and rather high-strung. Some perceived a kind of selfish arrogance. One colleague observed that the engineer “was all for Mr. Wills, not so much for the Ford Motor Company or somebody else.” But most found his tough-mindedness to be tempered by kindness. Fred Rockelman described Wills as a “great educator” who constantly taught the young mechanics; Charles Sorensen, whose temper and ambition were already producing clashes with his peers, conceded that Wills was “a very pleasant man to work with.”
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In fact, many co-workers described a man whose professional kindness leaned toward extravagance. Sorensen reported that Wills had negotiated a special agreement with Henry Ford wherein his regular salary would be supplemented by a percentage of company profits and special dividends. As the company grew, so did Wills' bonuses and his generosity. “I always knew when Wills got one of these dividends. He would look me up and also [P. E.] Martin and present us with a nice little check,” Sorensen wrote later. “The first one I remember he gave me was for $100. After that, as his income increased, he did the same with Ed and I. The last one I remember was for about $1000.” Irving Bacon told a similar tale. As official photographer for the company and “court painter” for Henry Ford by the 1910s, he made a decent, if undependable, living. Wills admired Bacon's work and once used one of his bonus checks to grant the artist a stipend of $2,500a year so he could paint unencumbered by other responsibilities. “Now, you paint anything you care to,” Wills told him. “When you get through, I will pick out what I want [from among your paintings], and you can keep the rest.” Sitting on top of the world financially, Wills once quietly bought a farm for an
old shoemaker he had known as a boy when the old man failed to save enough money to realize his lifelong dream.
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Wills' lavish style spilled over into his private life, where he embraced the new consumer ethic of leisure and consumption. He converted his first $1,000 bonus into dollar bills, brought them home in a suitcase, and tossed them in the air like confetti before his delighted wife and children. A few years later, after divorcing his first wife and marrying a much younger woman, he purchased a waterfront house on Jefferson Avenue. He acquired a fine yacht, as well as several smaller craft, and was noted for hosting friends on weekend boating trips and duck-hunting excursions. He also had a weakness for gems, showering them on his new wife and even carrying them in his pockets to display to admiring friends. At one point, to the surprise of the pugnacious recipient, he presented a diamond finger ring to Sorensen.
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Despite his extravagance, Wills was no frivolous playboy. A highly intelligent and competent engineer, he demonstrated an independence of mind that occasionally created tension at the company, particularly with its chief. He kept his own schedule, often coming to the factory at 11 a.m., rather than 8 a.m. with the rest of the managers. Because of his long familiarity with Henry Ford, he refused to bend automatically to the founder's ideas. Wills would engage in lengthy arguments with his boss over the best procedures and designs, and occasionally would alter agreed-upon designs to suit his own ideas. As Sorensen once noted:

In Sorensen's view, “Wills would not accept full control by anyone. He was a very independent, haughty person.”
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The culmination of Wills' early career at Ford came with his work on the Model T. He contributed to the design of the car in its development stage, working with Joseph Galamb and Henry Ford as they spent months drawing and modifying plans on the large blackboard in the experimental room. Wills was instrumental in designing the Model T's pathbreaking planetary transmission. But his biggest contribution came in terms of materials. For all of Henry Ford's later claims, it was Harold Wills who led the
way in the use of lightweight, powerful vanadium steel in the construction of the revolutionary automobile. He had trained extensively as a metallurgist, and around 1905he attended an engineers' convention in Atlantic City where he studied an exhibition of this alloy. He then spent much time with J. Kent Smith, the English metallurgist who had developed vanadium, at hislaboratory in Canton, Ohio, and supervised experiments that led to vanadium steel's use in the light yet strong gears, axles, and linkages in Ford's new automobile.
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Wills' efforts, in concert with those of many other talented figures, helped make the Model T a booming success. Knowledgeable observers recognized his role. The Dodge brothers, embroiled many years later in a bitter lawsuit with Henry Ford over the payment of stock dividends, made a point of exempting Wills from their criticism. “As a stockholder, I have no objection to the salary paid Wills,” testified John Dodge. “Mr. Wills is a very valuable man. I have always considered him the brains of the company.” Sorensen, usually a harsh critic of his fellow managers, also made an exception for Wills, whom he described as “an important factor in building the Ford Motor Company…. In my books he remains one of the greats.” In producing the automobile at the center of the consumer revolution, Wills helped bring about a subtler but equally far-reaching change.
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The assembly line churning out Model T's at the Highland Park factory impressed all who witnessed it: hundreds of workers lined up almost shoulder to shoulder, each busily tightening a bolt or adding a metal sleeve or sliding a bearing into place while a conveyor moved the growing automobile from station to station, and completed cars relentlessly emerged at the end. With its division of labor, grand scale, massive efficiency, and continuous forward movement, the assembly line reconfigured the production process. Just as important, it revolutionized the very idea of industrial labor and changed forever the traditional world of the artisan mechanic.

As none knew better than Henry Ford, the assembly line fundamentally redefined work according to several new principles. Besides “taking the work to the men instead of the men to the work,” it broke down work into the smallest possible components and eliminated all waste motion on the worker's part. As Ford explained, the assembly line brought “a reduction of the necessity for thought on the part of the worker and the reduction of his movements to a minimum. He does as nearly as possible only one thing with only one movement.” It also reduced the need for skilled labor and emphasized the rote completion of simple, repetitive tasks. The innovations
of the assembly line brought clear results, according to Henry Ford: “By the aid of scientific study one man is now able to do somewhat more than four did only a comparatively few years ago.”
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But Ford's assembly line, for all of its radical redefinition of industrial work, was not so much a completely new idea as the culmination of a decades-long process. Since the mid-nineteenth century, the rise of the factory system in the United States had inspired industrial engineers to slowly reshape and rationalize the work process. Factory managers struggled to break the hold of artisan craftsmen, with their traditions of stubborn independence, and fought to eradicate a larger “premodern” work culture, with its agricultural aversion to disciplined, time-oriented labor. They sought to construct a new model of labor, more attuned to the demands of efficiency and mass production. This movement reached a climax with the pioneering work of Frederick Winslow Taylor, the father of “scientific management.” Wielding his stopwatch as a weapon against waste and inefficiency, this engineer had conducted time-and-motion studies throughout the 1880s and 1890s that sought to reformulate and systematize industrial work tasks. Taylor hoped to eliminate all wasteful motion, redesign all tools for maximum impact, and place all decision-making in the hands of foremen rather than workmen. By the time he published his collected work in
The Principles of Scientific Management
(1911), “Taylorism” was already sweeping through American industry with its gospel of standardization and rationalization of work.
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Ford's development of the assembly line emerged from similar principles. With his visceral dislike of anything smacking of bookish ideas, he denied that his new system owed anything to systematic theories of organization, including scientific management. Though this is technically true— Ford certainly never read Taylor, and there is little to suggest that his managers did, either—much evidence indicates that the spirit of scientific management was in the air at Highland Park. The broad impulse to rationalize the labor system, to break down and reorganize its component parts, to eliminate waste motion through time-and-motion studies, and to select workers for tasks scientifically, animated Ford managers in the years when the assembly line was developed. As one scholar has commented astutely, the Ford Motor Company was “Taylorized without Taylor.”
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By 1913, before the assembly line was installed, a time-study department had been established at Highland Park, and Ford efficiency experts, stopwatches in hand, closely studied every aspect of all work tasks in the cause of increasing productivity. Once they had decided how to eliminate waste motion, foremen on the plant floor were expected to enforce their reforms. Ford management, according to engineer Harold Wibel, grew
obsessed with saving time. “They weren't interested in anything except efficiency of production,” he noted. “They wouldn't talk dollars and cents at all. They talked in terms of the minutes that the thing cost.” This drive, in the words of one observer, pushed the men “into the condition of performing automatically with machine-like regularity and speed.” Charles Madison, an assembly worker, labored at Highland Park in 1910, left for several years, and then returned in 1914. He reported that he, like all the workers,