The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (Vintage) (32 page)

Ford's victory inspired an avalanche of public acclaim. Over one thousand telegrams from ordinary citizens as well as figures such as Charles E. Duryea, the automobile pioneer, and Harvey S. Firestone, the tire manufacturer, congratulated Ford on his great victory against “trust methods.” At a victory dinner held in New York City's Hotel Rector on January 13, testimonials to Ford's fortitude flowed as abundantly as the fine food and libation. Friends, associates, and employees of the Ford Motor Company vied with one another in congratulating the victor and applauding his strength of character. Unexpected recognition of Ford's newly won stature came from a special guest, Alfred L. Reeves, director of ALAM, whose generous words took his former opponents by surprise. “Henry Ford is the greatest man in the automobile world; the Ford plant is the greatest automobile plant in the world; and the Ford organization is the greatest automobile organization in the world,” he declared.
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The press, however, played the largest role in proclaiming Henry Ford's virtues. Trade publications such as
Horseless Age
and
Motor World
praised him as a great individualist, a heroic opponent of monopoly, and a dominant force in the automobile industry. The Detroit
Free Press
ran an editorial entitled “Ford the Fighter.” The struggle against ALAM, the newspaper opined, had revealed Henry Ford to be “a man of backbone” who single-handedly took on a powerful opponent in defense of his convictions. It was “a spectacle to win the applause of all men with red blood.” The Detroit
Journal
declared the victor to be a genuine American hero. “It would have been considerably to Mr. Ford's personal advantage, in dollars and cents, had he compromised with or capitulated to the Selden patent holders years ago,” it wrote. “But for more than seven years now he has
fought on, almost alone, against huge odds—for a principle. He believed that his own rights were imperiled and the rights of every American citizen who is entitled to the rewards of his enterprise, industry, and brains.” Many other newspapers followed suit in praising Ford's struggle against the forces of economic privilege.
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The positive effects of the Selden suit victory reverberated for years. About a decade later, in
My Life and Work,
Ford speculated, “Perhaps nothing so well advertised the Ford car and Ford Motor Company as did this suit. It appeared that we were the underdog and we had the public's sympathy.” Many years later, he was still trading on the popularity that he accumulated during the Selden struggle. On the
Ford Sunday Evening Hour
of January 6,1935, W. J. Cameron, Ford's spokesman in this period, told a national radio audience that a single automaker's struggle against the forces of monopoly a quarter-century earlier had guaranteed competition in the auto industry. Through this action, Cameron argued, Henry Ford “liberated the entire industry,” and the American people were the beneficiaries.
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Ford's impressive victory in the Selden suit greatly elevated his stature in the public eye. It was, however, only the beginning. With the runaway success of the Model T becoming evident around the same time, Ford's national image assumed larger and larger proportions. More than just an inspiring curiosity—the businessman as antimonopolist—he began to appear as a homegrown folk hero.

In the early 1910s, flattering portraits of Henry Ford appeared in journalistic venues all over the country. They created an image that was curiously mixed: a common man of the people who was, at the same time, larger than life. It rapidly became the stuff of legend, for the mythic Ford taking shape in the public mind was America personified.

Journalists were delighted to discover a traditional American success tale. Ford, they wrote, provided a modern update of an old ideal of the self-made man. Of modest background, he had relied upon diligence, hard work, and unwavering commitment to a new idea to climb to an eminent position. Headlines proclaimed this up-by-your-bootstraps success: “Henry Ford in Fifteen Years Rises to Be, in Point of Income, One of the Richest Men in the World.” Stories detailed his rags-to-riches story and concluded that his achievements made him “at once one of the world's marked men, entirely aside from his enormous wealth.” They attributed his success, in the best American tradition, to a relentless, self-directed individualism.

According to one magazine article, Ford had achieved so much because “he was determined to make the kind of automobile he wanted in the way he wanted it, and for the price he wanted. He was determined to do the thing he liked best without interference.”
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A sign of Ford's new prominence came in the summer of 1914, when President Woodrow Wilson summoned him to the White House for discussions about the sluggish national economy. Ford assured the President that everything would be fine and encouraged patience. Stories on this conference carried a picture of Ford and described him as “A New Adviser to the President.” He was described as “a self-made man … unassuming, of the utmost simplicity of character.”
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In fact, some of these favorable stories adopted a highly romanticized tone. In 1913, an interviewer asked him about the future of the auto, and then offered readers a description that could have been lifted from a popular novel of the day:

With such puffery, it was little wonder that Americans began looking at him as a national treasure.
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The glowing Ford image particularly stressed one theme: instead of being spoiled by his success, he cherished his roots and retained a down-to-earth sensibility. By the early 1910s, nearly all stories on Ford stressed his rural background, simple style, and modest material desires. His unwillingness to upgrade the Model T with fancy accessories, his wife's hobby of darning, his preference for home cooking, and his penchant for wearing overalls on his farm were characteristics of a man who had risen to great heights but never forgot where he came from. As
Harper's Weekly
noted, Ford's advocacy of ordinary people flowed from his own status as one. It informed readers, “Faith in the everyday man, exalted faith, is an integral part of the Ford character. I have been a workingman myself, he says.” In
Ford's words, “When a man's hands are callused and women's hands are worn, you may be sure honesty is there. That's more than you can say about many soft white hands.”
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Ford's fondness for the commonplace became apparent in his attitude about money. The rapidly escalating sales of the Model T had made him a rich man. But as scores of newspaper and magazine articles made clear, Ford seemed supremely unconcerned with money. “What do I want with more money? I shall never use what I have, most likely,” he typically told journalists. As
Harper's Weekly
informed readers, Ford's conversation seldom touched on matters of profit, but focused almost entirely on the usefulness of his car and the productivity of his factory. “Money-making is only incidental to Henry Ford's work,” it concluded.
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Thus the Henry Ford viewed by Americans was a man unswayed by his growing affluence who loved his work and enjoyed nature and rural life. He did not smoke or drink and had unsophisticated tastes in music, the theater, or art. Avoiding the nouveau-riche role, he shunned gambling, horseracing, yachting, and other forms of fancy entertainment. Ford was deeply antielitist. He disparaged intellectuals, particularly those who criticized his factory: “I would like to get all the college professors in the world, bar none, and put them out in that factory, and then see what they would do with it.” He came before the American public as a Thoreau-like figure, whose deep love of nature was reflected in his hobby of bird-watching. His simple tastes in life, concluded one magazine writer, “bear incontrovertible testimony to the sincerity of his philanthropy and the glory of his self-reliance.”
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Ford's public spirit gave another boost to his status as a folk hero. In 1913, he stepped in when the city of Detroit failed to sell enough bonds to pay for several civic-improvement projects and purchased $1million worth of the bonds. Around the same time, he launched a project to help poor, wayward youth in Detroit. He ensconced several dozen of them at Valley Farm, on his Dearborn property, where they were fed and clothed, taught in the local school, and put to work at agricultural labor under adult supervision. Here was a new kind of businessman who saw “no good reason why business cannot be conducted that will add to the world's stock of good will,” opined one magazine article.
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Ford stressed his dedication to benevolence, stewardship, and goodwill in the conduct of his company. In 1915, he spoke of his belief in helping his fellow man. “You have seen two fellows on a street corner,” he told a magazine. “Both of them are down and out; but one has ten cents. With that he can buy a bun and a bed for himself. Or he can buy a bun for himself and a bun for his chum, and take chances on getting a bed. If he does that he is my kind of folks.”
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As his public image became more radiant in the early 1910s, some journalists began to dig deeper into its essential nature. Different explanations emerged. Harry Nimmo, after spending a good deal of time with Ford and evaluating his popularity, concluded that the automaker uniquely reflected the reformist spirit of the times. Ford's benevolence toward his fellow man, Nimmo argued, was the product of the popular spirit of progressive amelioration that “breathed into his soul the brotherhood of man.”
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Gerald Stanley Lee, in a 1914
Harper's Weekly
essay entitled “Is Ford an Inspired Millionaire?,” offered a more trenchant analysis. Henry Ford, he argued, had stumbled across a key dynamic in the modern world of mass production and consumption: to advertise oneself was to advertise one's product. While producing a car for ordinary citizens, Ford had discovered that this feat created “personal news to every man on this planet.” Moreover, he understood that if you wanted to get favorable publicity you needed to be interesting. According to Lee, Ford learned a fundamental lesson in the early 1910s:

Lee unearthed something fundamental. In the glare of growing media attention after the Selden suit and the Model T, Ford certainly loomed large and virtuous in the public eye. Yet this involved more than good fortune. Perceptively sizing up the situation, Ford grasped the possibilities latent in his popular image. While newspaper and magazine stories were telling his story, he simultaneously maneuvered to take advantage of this newfound personal status. Company advertising and publicity used the picture of its founder as a homespun hero. Quite self-consciously, Henry Ford set about making himself a sensation.

As early as 1908, Ford Motor Company's advertisements displayed a unique strategy. While praising the sturdy features and low price of the Model T, they claimed that its quality was guaranteed by the individual at the head of the company: