The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (Vintage) (33 page)

Such assertions became a key feature of Ford ads over the next several years. Merging with a swelling stream of news stories, company efforts steadily raised Henry Ford's stature in the early 1910s.
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The company's promotional literature to its dealers and sellers also encouraged this cult of personality. A 1909pamphlet prominently featured a photo of Henry Ford and described him as “the pioneer automobile manufacturer of this country.” Another pamphlet claimed that Ford made a quality car at half the price of other manufacturers. “That's a statement that would appear to be out of reason if Henry Ford did not have five years of continuous success,” it added. “Henry Ford has built more automobiles than any other manufacturer and he has never designed or built a failure.”
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Similar portrayals became a staple of company newspaper and magazine advertisements in this era. Sometimes they featured his personal success story, as in the 1910ad claiming, “Henry Ford has been the greatest factor in the development of the automobile industry, greater than any other man in the world.” Other ads stressed Ford's character. “The mechanical genius of Mr. Henry Ford enabled the Ford Motor Co. to produce a car so perfect in construction and so low in price that it has sounded the death knell of the Trust,” read an ad released during the Selden suit. Some advertisements played upon the founder's growing prestige, noting that Henry Ford “stands out independent and alone, clear and strong, as the most dominant factor in the automobile industry of today.” Finally, of course, Ford's loyalty to the common people featured prominently in its advertisements. A 1912 advertising pamphlet entitled
The Woman and the Ford
acclaimed “Mr. Henry Ford's determination to build an automobile for the people…. He has stricken the motor car from the list of luxuries, and made it a commodity, within the reach of all.”
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A particularly interesting use of Henry's image played off the growing impersonality of modern big business. Company publicity liked to stress that its founder, unlike many tycoons in this age of incorporation, personally directed his company's affairs. A pamphlet entitled
Ford Motor Cars
(1912) reassured readers that Ford was an old-fashioned, hands-on businessman rather than a paper-pushing bureaucrat:

The convergence of advertising and journalism to shape Ford's folk-hero status could be seen in the efforts of Elbert Hubbard. He had been a leading American promoter of the Arts and Crafts movement in the 1890s, which sought to revive traditions of craftsmanship to counteract modern dissipation caused by technology, urban luxury, and bureaucratic work. Hubbard became the editor of
The Philistine,
an iconoclastic magazine that playfully mixed literary assaults on the genteel tradition, quasi-socialist political rants, and Arts and Crafts encomiums. A few years later, in 1908, he founded
The Fra: Exponent of the American Philosophy,
a more intellectual journal that promoted his new message of human brotherhood through enlightened capitalism and business prosperity. Hubbard saw Henry Ford as a paragon of the new American businessman who would lead the country to prosperity, and he did his best to publicize the automaker in the early 1910s.
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In 1912, Hubbard's enthusiasm for Ford earned him access to a company publication. His article, entitled “A Little Journey to the Workshop of Henry Ford,” which appeared in
Ford Times,
presented its subject as an heir to the democratic creed of Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln. Ford, Hubbard insisted, was a manufacturer with many other talents and virtues: hard worker, teacher, manager, leader, farmer, nature lover. This businessman had proved his merit by writing “a Declaration of Independence for the automobile business” with his triumph during the Selden suit. In the author's simple conclusion, “Henry Ford is a Public Servant.”
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Ford's greatest display of virtue, according to Hubbard, came in his business practices. “Henry Ford is not the typical American businessman,” Hubbard asserted. “He is more than that.” Rather than merely pursuing
profit, he sought to make a quality, affordable product while maintaining a respectful relationship with his employees. He shouldered personal responsibility for the performance of his automobiles. Moreover, he saw business as a means to “human betterment” and became the “man who made it possible for all humanity to ride in motor cars.” In fact, the Model T mirrored the qualities of its creator. “A Ford automobile looks like Henry Ford,” Hubbard wrote. “It is light in physical weight, strong in every part, well-balanced, safe, effective, and thoroughly efficient.”
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The following year, Hubbard offered another Ford-as-folk-hero piece. In November 1913,
The Fra
published an article that polished the industri-alist's image to a bright sheen. In modern America, Hubbard asserted, “the theme is Henry Ford. You hear it in barber shops, barrooms, smoking-rooms, ad-clubs, Sunday Schools, sewing-circles.” There were several reasons for his popularity. Ford produced a sturdy, economical car; he was a brilliant businessman who directed a massive yet highly efficient organization; he had pioneered techniques of standardization that transformed industrial manufacturing. But even more, Hubbard argued, Ford displayed a variety of attractive personal qualities that connected him to ordinary Americans:

As the author summarized, “Here is a new kind of millionaire.”
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Hubbard's promotion of Ford reached its apex with the publication of what was probably the first biography of the car manufacturer. In a brief hagiography of twenty-nine pages, Hubbard analyzed his achievements as a master of standardized production, unfolded his life story as a tale of success, and compared his public influence to that of Thomas Jefferson. “As an inventor, creator, manufacturer, humanitarian, and public servant, the name of Henry Ford will endure,” Hubbard concluded. “He will live in his-tory…as one of the Makers of America.”
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Thus, by the mid-1910s, writers, journalists, advertisers, and everyday citizens had joined forces to make Henry Ford one of the most famous and publicized figures in the United States. But what of the man himself? Were the virtues enumerated in dozens of articles genuine, or just a public-relations ploy? Was he really devoted to stewardship, common taste, and his fellow man, or was this simply a strategy to sell more Model T's? Like the questions, the answers were complex.

In 1914, a startling story broke on news wires around the United States. Former President Theodore Roosevelt, in a public statement, complained that Henry Ford was getting too much attention. The Detroit automaker, he noted sourly, was receiving more publicity than even President Wilson. Nor did Roosevelt let up. Years later, he was still complaining that Ford had employed “an army of press agents” to keep himself in the public eye. “Henry, like Barnum, has been a great advertiser,” groused the old Rough Rider. How could Teddy Roosevelt, whose notorious love of the limelight had earned the quip that “he wants to be the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral,” complain that someone was gaining excessive public attention? This was like hearing Ty Cobb denounce fierce competition in baseball, or Lillian Gish criticize the popularity of the movies. A newspaper captured the irony. “The Terrible Teddy has so long maintained the mastery of the spotlight that he brooks with impatience any rivals,” it observed sardonically. But, as the editorial concluded, Americans were fascinated by Ford because he was “doing something for the country in general all the time and he is unusually modest about his work.”
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The Roosevelt episode revealed not only that Ford was becoming a celebrity by the mid-1910s, but that his folk-hero status was now a subject of public fascination. Newspapers and magazines commented on both the man and the growing cloud of publicity that surrounded him. Clearly, Ford's popularity had become news.

The Associated Advertising Clubs of the World, at their annual convention in Atlantic City, voted Ford “the best advertised individual in America, though at least 99 percent of his publicity comes to him without his lifting a finger to seek it.” A Detroit publication suggested that an epidemic of “Ford-osis” had swept through the United States:

The growing hoopla surrounding Ford made it difficult to judge his genuine qualities. In certain ways, his image seemed to capture his essence. At the same time, however, the motivations of a complicated man pulled in a different direction. Moreover, a process of evolution was at work. Under the pressure of escalating fame that came with the launching of the Model T and the successful conclusion of the Selden suit, Ford changed. He may have entered this era as a provincial who eschewed sophistication, clung to several deeply felt ideas, manufactured his unique car for the people, and avoided the public limelight. But, inevitably, he did not stay that way.

To be sure, in certain aspects and at certain times, Henry Ford lived the principles he espoused. Much of the time, he was indeed a man of the people, defender of the work ethic, and responsible steward of wealth who shied away from the glare of direct publicity. A genuinely shy man, Ford loathed most public appearances. The larger the crowd, the more uncomfortable he became. According to one longtime associate, “He was a very good speaker with two or three people, just sitting around a table, but with half a dozen or more he became very retiring and could not express himself as freely.” By the early 1910s, stories of Ford's woeful public appearances were becoming legendary. At a Detroit banquet in 1913, where fellow industrialist Charles M. Schwab spoke glowingly of him,
Motor Age
reported, “Ford became so embarrassed that he slid down in his chair, and before Schwab had finished, had completed a vanishing act …almost under the table.” At a 1915dinner celebrating the production of the one-millionth Model T, Ford displayed his notorious terror of public speaking. When asked to say a few words, he reluctantly stood up, said, “Gentlemen, a million of anything is a great many,” and sat down as the audience looked around in bewilderment and then slowly began to applaud.
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In his public writings, Ford displayed his homespun virtue by consistently defending the interests of ordinary citizens. In a 1916essay, he argued that the humane, wise manager remembered that workers were much like himself. “He must not make the mistake of thinking of them as units of wage earners or as being in any way different from himself,” Ford wrote. “If he is going to get their best work and effort, their interest, and consequently the best results in his business, he has got to realize that he has human
beings working for him who have the same ambitions and desires that he has.” He also insisted that businessmen should focus on service rather than profits. “If people would go into business with the idea that they are going to serve the public and their employees as well as themselves, they would be assured of success at the very start,” he asserted.
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Ford did more than just talk. In 1914, he backed up his rhetoric by launching the construction of a new hospital in Detroit with his own money. In a statement to the press, he linked this medical institution to a larger vision of enhancing the public good. Good health and the prevention of disease, he said, should be promoted by factory owners and businessmen as well as by the family. New hospitals and safe, sunny factories, he suggested, would nourish “healthy, happy living—the common sense of living, it might be called.”
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