The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (Vintage) (3 page)

Henry Ford commenced his lifelong friendship with Edsel Ruddiman, a neighbor boy, at the Scotch Settlement School. The two became nearly inseparable, and they spent much of their boyhood together. They played, walked, and talked nearly every day and carved their initials next to each other in the desk they shared. The two companions even went to church together on Sunday evenings—it was about a four-mile walk—even though neither was very religious. “It was more to be together,” Ruddiman admitted. In later years, Ruddiman became a prominent pharmacist and chemist at the Ford Motor Company. When Henry's only child was born in 1893, he named him Edsel.
⁷

Away from the school, Henry Ford spent his boyhood in the comfortable atmosphere of a bourgeois home set in a typical Midwestern village. Henry, the eldest child, had been followed by a succession of five siblings who arrived like clockwork every other year: John in 1865, Margaret in 1867, Jane in 1869, William Jr. in 1871, and Robert in 1873. Domestic life for the Fords revolved around simple pleasures. After the workday was complete, parents and children read, played card games, sang traditional songs and simple hymns around the pump organ in the parlor, attended the Christ Episcopal Church in Dearborn on Sundays, and joined in neighborhood picnics and church socials. The Ford brothers jostled and engaged in harmless antics. When their father decreed that the easiest chores would go to the boy who first got out of the house in the morning, William Jr. once filled Henry's boots with applesauce to slow him down. As an adult, Henry jotted down impressions that still remained with him from boyhood: “Remember sleigh, wood hauling, cold winters, setting sun, sleighbell, long walks, cold weather, boys and girls.”
⁸

Mary Ford, with her gentle but firm role in the household, provided the dominant influence in Henry's childhood. “Mother presided over it and ruled it but she made it a good place to be,” he told many people in later years. He elevated her to near-sainthood in later life. Henry seemed especially struck by her moral influence. “I have tried to live my life as my mother would have wished,” he told journalist Edgar Guest in 1923. “She taught me as a boy that service is the highest duty in the world.… I have tried to follow her teaching.”
⁹

Mary Ford's lessons clearly reflected the cultural values pervasive among mainstream, middle-class Americans during most of the nineteenth century. Victorian culture (as historians have termed it) forged a creed combining Protestant moralism, market individualism, the work ethic, and genteel
restraint. It found expression in a variety of venues: advice manuals for young men and women, educational tracts, magazine articles, and religious pronouncements. The Victorian ethos demanded a standard of emotional self-control in personal life. It shaped a model of “domesticity” in family life, where women were expected to nurture in their husbands and children gentility, sentimentalism, and virtue. It promoted frugality and a nose-to-the-grindstone ethic, whereby citizens were expected to labor hard to turn out useful goods as the basis for market buying and selling.
¹⁰

Mary Ford stoutly upheld this traditional moral code. She instructed Henry as to his duty to confront and complete hard work with a cheerful attitude. She did not offer sympathy when he grumbled about chores. “‘Life will give you many unpleasant tasks to do; your duty will be hard and disagreeable and painful to you at times, but you must do it,’ ” he recalled her saying sternly. “My mother taught me to work.” Mary also urged her children to practice self-control. She sent them off to school with lunch boxes containing simple, hearty food, since indulging in sweets was morally dangerous. In her words, “Let your health, not your diet, be your guide. Never eat merely for the pleasure of eating.”
¹¹

In her child-rearing practices, Mary displayed a similar sensibility. She favored the Victorian device of shaming children, rather than physically punishing them, to shape upright character. Henry was once caught telling a lie, and his mother simply expressed her utter disgust. “I was humiliated. Shame cuts much more deeply than a whip,” he recalled. “For a day I was treated with contempt and I knew that I had done a despicable thing.” Mary also provided sustained moral instruction. Many evenings, she would read aloud from the Bible,
Pilgrim's Progress,
and
Gems of Life,
a collection of inspirational essays and speeches which presented “a stirring call to service and duty.”
¹²

But two impulses in Mary Ford's nurturing struck her eldest son with special force.

First, she strove mightily to create harmony within her family, which Henry later described as “the art of being happy with each other.” “More than once I have heard her say that if we couldn't be happy here in this house, we'd never be happy anywhere else.” She gently insisted that work and play should occur in their proper proportions and that recreation was a reward for labor completed. “Fun we had and plenty of it,” Henry related of his childhood, “but she was forever reminding us that life cannot be all fun. ‘You must earn the right to play,’ she used to say to me.”
¹³

Second, Mary made a lasting impression upon her oldest son as a paragon of efficiency. Hard work was fine and good, his mother would note, but results rather than motion were what really counted. According to
Henry's sister Margaret, everyone admired “the systematic and orderly way in which her work was done.” Almost fifty years after her death, Henry recalled that “Mother believed in doing things and getting things done, not in talking about things and wishing they might be done. She was systematic and orderly and thorough, and she demanded that from us.”
¹⁴

But the matron of the Ford family provided her children with more than moral instruction and exemplary work habits. She gave large doses of love. Mary Ford seems to have successfully balanced affection with a long-range view of her children's well-being, and she earned their respect in the process. Margaret noted fondly how her mother allowed her daughters to “play ladies” and dress up in her clothes and imitate “the pictures in
Godey's Lady's Book.
” Henry often told the story of how one day he was feeding hay into the “chopping box” when his finger got caught in the sharp blades. Frightened and bleeding badly from the mangled finger—apparently, the tip was hanging by only a thread of tissue—the boy ran into the house. His mother quickly took control, calmed him, stopped the bleeding, and bandaged the wound tightly. Determined that he would not lose the finger, she checked and cleaned the wound daily and nursed it along for some three weeks, finally sharing his joy when the healing proved successful.
¹⁵

Still, Mary Ford's maternal labors received major moral reinforcement from another direction. As Henry frequently acknowledged in later years, his character was also powerfully influenced by a series of books he read as a boy. Like countless other children in nineteenth-century America, he fell under the sway of one schoolmaster and children's author from the neighboring state of Ohio. The lessons absorbed from this source would stay with him throughout his life.

An observer of Henry Ford's career, with considerable truth, once asserted that the industrialist “found the McGuffey readers to be the greatest intellectual influence in his life.” Ford referred, of course, to Professor William Holmes McGuffey and his legendary nineteenth-century textbooks. Formally titled
The McGuffey Eclectic Readers,
these didactic little texts, full of pithy verses and striking pictures, had taught reading fundamentals and moral principles to several generations of American children since the 1830s. (By the early twentieth century, they had sold some 122 million copies.) The McGuffey lessons, which were memorized so thoroughly that most people could recall and recite them decades later in adulthood, made a special impact on Ford.
¹⁶

Henry first encountered McGuffey at home, when Mary Ford taught
him to read by patiently leading him through the first number of these manuals. Some sixty years later, he recalled how “sitting by her side during the long fall and winter evenings he was fascinated by the pictures in the McGuffey First Reader.” The images remained vibrantly clear in Ford's mind: an ax leaning against a log taught the letter “a,” a cat lapping milk from a pan stood for “c,” a running dog for “d,” a zebra with an arched neck and vivid stripes for “z,” and so on. When he went off to the local school, the lessons continued. As his sister Margaret explained, “The lessons in our
McGuffey's Readers
taught us honor, integrity, and fair play.”
¹⁷

What was the nature of the books internalized by so many American children during much of the nineteenth century? McGuffey volumes aimed at the youngest students provided basic reading skills—learning the alphabet, sentence construction, and proper word usage. For older children, they offered pictures and exercises on enunciation, punctuation, and elocution. Final texts in the McGuffey series contained selections of literature, poetry, and philosophy for more advanced students. But all of the readers were lively, occasionally even dramatic, as they used anecdotes, stories, and vignettes to illustrate the points at hand. They also provided children, most of them far removed from centers of learning, a veneer of civilization by serving up literary dollops in the Anglo-American tradition—poetry excerpts from Scott, Byron, Gray, Shelley, Wordsworth, Longfellow, Tennyson; prose from Dickens, Irving, Cooper, and Hugo. Most important, however, the
McGuffey Readers
presented a clear moral sensibility. Their lessons dramatized the need for piety, humility, hard work, integrity, patience, kindness, and temperance. McGuffey demonstrated to children both the moral and the material bounty that would flow from proper behavior, and the disastrous consequences of thoughtless or sinful actions. As one scholar of the
Readers
has put it, they “emphasized the hard moral discipline of self-improvement.”
¹⁸

The impact of McGuffey on Henry Ford's character and principles was profound. In the 1920s, he embarked upon an avid hobby of buying old
Readers.
While sitting at home one afternoon, he and his wife, Clara, heard a group of schoolchildren as they romped past dancing and talking. “‘Hear the children gaily shout, Half past four and school is out!’ quoted Mrs. Ford, and then wondered what the rest of the piece was. We both recalled it as a McGuffey exercise,” Ford noted. A search for the exact source of this common remembrance led him to dig around for old copies of McGuffey, and as schoolboy memories came flooding back his search became almost feverish. Within a few years, Ford had amassed probably the largest private collection of McGuffeys in the entire United States.
¹⁹

Collecting old editions of this textbook, however, became much more
than an antiquarian hobby for Henry Ford. His high regard for the content, lessons, and values of the McGuffey texts inspired him to a kind of revival. Aggressively seeking to rejuvenate their influence, beginning in 1926Ford paid for the reprinting and distribution all over the United States of many thousands of sets of the
McGuffey Readers
from 1857. He also served as an associate editor for the volume
Old Favorites from the McGuffey Readers
and helped choose the 150selections in it. He wrote an article in
Colophon: A Quarterly for Bookmen,
in which he argued for the relevance of the
McGuffey Readers
for the modern world. At a 1938 meeting of the Federation of McGuffey Societies, which he had sponsored and bankrolled, Ford made one of his typically brief and simple speeches: “I am glad to join with you today in giving honor to Dr. McGuffey. He was a great American. The McGuffey Readers taught industry and morality to the youth of America.” He even established a McGuffey School near the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn and used the schoolbooks as the basis of the curriculum. Harvey C. Minnich, author of a biography entitled
William Holmes McGuffey and His Readers,
dedicated it to “Henry Ford, lifelong devotee and patron of his boyhood Alma Mater, the McGuffey Readers.”
²⁰

Ford helped bring McGuffey to perhaps his largest audience, however, in a radio broadcast of March 17,1935, on the
Ford Sunday Evening Hour.
William J. Cameron, a close colleague and spokesman for Ford, gave “talks” during the intermission of musical performances on this CBS radio show, which had developed a large audience of some ten million listeners. Cameron consulted closely with Ford, and on this evening he declaimed upon “The McGuffey Readers.” William Holmes McGuffey and his humble school readers had created a standard of character for over fifty years in the United States, he explained. In Cameron's lofty words, “The American people were made articulate, their moral ideals were elevated, their thought deepened and broadened through the influence of these tens of millions of unpretending little schoolbooks.” As for Ford, Cameron concluded, he “is probably prouder of his knowledge of the six McGuffey readers than of any other volumes in his extensive library.”
²¹