The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (Vintage) (34 page)

But although Ford sincerely supported an ethic of public virtue, there were self-serving elements also at work. He not only sensed that publicity had the power to spread his fame and to promote his company, but he began to enjoy the attention. This convergence of influences pushed him to manipulation of his public image. He encouraged company advertising to focus on his biography while he eagerly seized every opportunity to talk about his regard for common people. In a philanthropic venture such as building the hospital, he made sure that Detroiters knew about it by announcing a contest to choose a suitable name for the institution. Increasingly, Ford kept one eye trained on public opinion in nearly everything he did.

Insiders at the company knew that their boss was more than a simple mechanic who only wanted to make cars and avoid crowds. Charles Sorensen wrote with characteristic candor. “No, Henry Ford was not modest…. He pretended to be humble when with people who did not know him. But I knew this was an act…. He sought publicity…. He wanted to be observed.” E. G. Pipp, managing editor of the Detroit
News
and Ford's informal public-relations counselor by the mid-1910s, claimed that Ford's great skill as a “publicity getter” had one goal: “self-glory.” Fred L. Black, a longtime advertising and public-relations man at the company, probably came closest to the truth. His boss, he argued, was basically a bashful man who acquired a taste for, and a skill at generating, publicity. According to Black, “Nobody made Henry Ford from a publicity standpoint except himself…. The rest of us just merely helped…. It was a very strange combination; he was a very shy man with this amazing sense of publicity values.”
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Perhaps the most penetrating analysis of Ford came from Samuel S. Marquis, the family minister, who joined the company in 1915 as director of its social programs. Marquis became a friend and adviser to the industrialist
and had occasion to observe him closely and speak with him intimately. His reading of Ford's nature, published in a book in 1923, carries a special weight. Marquis believed Ford's folk-hero image was partly genuine and partly contrived, accurate in its essence yet self-consciously magnified.

To Marquis, it was clear that Ford truly identified with the life of the common man. Wealth and fame had but small impact on his tastes, values, and style of life. He lived relatively simply, enjoyed the seclusion of family life, and pursued quiet pleasures, such as bird-watching, that he had learned as a boy in rural Michigan. “Since becoming rich Henry Ford has acquired no expensive tastes, formed no costly habits,” Marquis noted. “His personal habits and pleasures remain very much as they were in the days of his obscurity. Wealth has simply lifted the lid, and that which is coming out …was always there.” The reverend liked to tell a story about Ford's modest taste. The automaker once explained his aversion to servants: “I still like boiled potatoes with the skins on, and I do not want a man standing back of my chair at table laughing up his sleeve at me while I am taking the potatoes' jackets off.”
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But then, Marquis asserted, in the mid-1910s a different side of Ford began to emerge, one that did not shun the public gaze or avoid reporters. Increasingly, he seemed to fall in love with creating publicity about himself. As Marquis put it, Ford “suddenly faced about, hired a publicity agent, jumped into the front page of every newspaper in the country, [and] bought and paid for space in which he advertised what were supposed to be his own ideas.” In a chapter of his book entitled “The Art of Self-Advertising,” Marquis argued that Ford became addicted to creating publicity after learning the important lesson that “from the self-advertising point of view, a sensational attempt is almost always as valuable for immediate purposes as a sensational achievement.” Ford's theory became “It is a good thing to keep people talking about him, no matter what they say.” Thus, by the mid1910s, a new person had emerged who “would rather be the maker of public opinion than the manufacturer of a million automobiles a year.”
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It seems clear that in many ways Henry Ford was exactly what he seemed: an extraordinary man with ordinary tastes. At the same time, however, he clearly came to savor the role of celebrity in the modern world. He had sought attention years earlier with automobile racing, but Ford made a quantum leap in this regard in the Model T era. He understood the lesson that publicity translated into sales. But he also seemed to grasp a more profound point: his folk-hero image provided a kind of comfort for ordinary Americans come face to face with a rapidly urbanizing, bureaucratizing, and modernizing society. They found it reassuring to know that a simple, honest, rural-raised entrepreneur was making their automobiles and leading
them into a strange new future. Workaday citizens
wanted
to believe in Henry Ford, folk hero, and he helped them do it.

Thus Ford became one of the most famous men in the United States. He was not only wealthy, but an admirable figure who seemed to represent all that was best in the American character. A proponent of hard work and honesty, a down-home genius who outdistanced the sophisticates, an up-by-the-bootstraps success who remained loyal to his roots, an innovative inventor and engineer who respected fellow citizens of even the most modest means, Ford appeared as a new kind of industrialist who sought to serve the public. But his adventures with the Selden suit, the Model T, and the public print proved to be just a prelude to bigger things. Early in 1914, he made an announcement that sent him into the highest orbit of public approval.

In early 1914, the Ford Motor Company announced that it was immediately doubling the standard wage of automobile workers. This startling news generated tremendous publicity and fervent debate. For months Americans seemed to talk of little else, as labor leaders praised it, business magnates denounced it, politicians cautiously tested the wind, and newspapers endlessly debated its merits and dangers. The Five-Dollar Day, as it soon became known, would forever be linked with the name of Henry Ford.

With this policy, Ford overturned the older robber-baron image of the American big businessman, whose instincts for profit and power rode roughshod over the public good. He came forward as a new kind of business leader, who sought to share the wealth and prosperity generated by his company. He represented an unfamiliar yet inspiring social type: the businessman as reformer. It was an image that made him, perhaps, the most admired man in the United States.

On January 5, 1914, Henry Ford and James Couzens summoned representatives from the Detroit press to Highland Park. They handed out a two-page typed statement announcing several new policies. Couzens read the news release aloud in his office as Ford stood by quietly, looking out the window. First, the company was reducing the workday from nine hours to eight; second, it was establishing three daily work shifts instead of two, so that the factory would be operating continuously. The third new policy, however, left reporters startled. Ford Motor Company vowed that within one week it would establish a basic pay rate of $5.00 per day for its workers, an amount that roughly doubled their existing paychecks.

The announcement's tone reflected its astonishing content. “The Ford Motor Co., the greatest and most successful automobile manufacturing company in the world, will, on Jan. 12, inaugurate the greatest revolution in the matter of rewards for its workers ever known to the industrial world,” it began. The statement then explained that 90 percent of Ford workers would receive the bonus rate immediately and the other 10 percent would be able to qualify shortly. After listing details of the plan, it ended with another stunning pronouncement: “It is estimated that over $10,000,000 will be thus distributed over and above the regular wages of the men.”
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After a brief discussion with Ford and Couzens, reporters sped from Highland Park to file stories for the late edition of city newspapers. Headlines announced the Ford action. “HENRY FORD GIVES $10,000,000 IN 1914 PROFITS TO HIS EMPLOYEES” was on the front page of the Detroit
Journal;
“NEW INDUSTRIAL ERA IS MARKED BY FORD'S SHARES TO LABORERS,” said the Detroit
Free Press.
Within hours, news of the Ford action was spreading around the country—indeed, the world. “FORD AGAIN STAGGERS THE WORLD” appeared in
Motor World;
“FORD FACTORY HAS A HEART,” in the Keokuk, Iowa,
Gate City;
“HENRY FORD, WHO MADE 26,000 EMPLOYEES HAPPY,” in the New York
Sun;
“CRAZY FORD, THEY CALLED HIM, NOW HE'S TO GIVE AWAY MILLIONS,” in the St. Louis
Post-Dispatch.
New York papers devoted fifty-two front-page columns to the story over the next two weeks. Dozens of editorial endorsements appeared, while a raft of cartoons illustrated the popular impact of Ford's new policy. One pictured a frustrated farm boy exclaiming to his father, “I want $5 a day for eight hours work or I'll quit right now an' go to Detroit, I will!”
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Moreover, the company was swamped by a deluge of mail from job seekers. Within one week of the announcement, nearly fourteen thousand such letters had arrived at the company's employment office; two months later, it was still receiving some five hundred letters a day. Even more astonishingly, within twenty-four hours of the announcement a crowd of men began gathering at the Highland Park gates hoping for employment. The shortening of the workday and the expansion of work shifts had opened up about four thousand jobs. These were filled quickly, but eventually ten to twelve thousand workmen descended on the factory—“anxious men, some ragged and unkempt, others seemingly prosperous,” according to one news-paper—and stood in line in the bitter cold. At first, the situation was jovial, as the men built fires from scrap lumber and tree limbs and cheered Henry Ford at every opportunity. Soon, however, the situation became tense: tempers fraying, the men destroyed a wooden barrier, began pushing against
metal fencing that had been erected to protect the Highland Park entrance, and refused to let company employees enter the facility. Detroit police tried to contain the crowd peacefully, and when that failed they resorted to drenching them with fire hoses. At this point a riot erupted, demonstrators hurling bricks, swinging crude clubs, and bombarding the factory with any debris at hand. Several agitators were arrested when the police finally gained control of the situation.
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Although the public reaction inspired by the Five-Dollar Day was easily understood, another question lingered. What prompted the company's decision to create this groundbreaking new policy? Friendly observers credited Henry Ford's genius or beneficence, but skeptics claimed that it was a shrewd maneuver designed to get free publicity. In fact, a number of practical labor problems at the Highland Park plant had provided the impetus for this new wage standard.

By mid-1913, Ford and his managers were wrestling with a mysterious difficulty. The assembly line had raised expectations dramatically for production, but the actual increase, though significant, was less than planned. In 1909, the first full year of Model T production, 1,548 Ford workers, using old-fashioned methods, produced 1,059 automobiles per month. In 1913, after the installation of the assembly line, 13,667 workers turned out 15,284 automobiles per month. In other words, the productivity of Ford workers only increased from an average of .70 to 1.12 cars per worker per month, and part of this could be attributed to larger economies of scale. Ford managers had anticipated a much greater rise in productivity.
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Baffled by the discrepancy, the company turned to John R. Lee, its leading labor expert. Lee had come to the company in 1911, when it purchased the Kiem Mills in Buffalo, New York, and he quickly displayed his talent for handling personnel and labor problems. Now, called upon to explore the productivity gap at Highland Park, he conducted intensive investigations of the work process at the factory throughout 1913. Lee's studies suggested that the problem lay not with the machinery, or the plant layout, or the organizational schemes of managers. The culprit was something initially left out of the calculations: human beings. Ford assembly-line efficiency had institutionalized technological and organizational factors, but had failed to control the human element.
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Lee identified several problems among the workers who manned the assembly line: absenteeism, shoddy performance, and, most important, rapid turnover of personnel. He also discovered several causes of worker dissatisfaction—excessively long hours, low wages, poor housing and home conditions, undesirable shop conditions, and arbitrary handling of workers by foremen. What Lee did not fully understand at the time, however, was
the underlying source of this discontent. The assembly line had created pressing demands for work discipline. Men spent long, monotonous hours performing the same tasks over and over—tightening the bolt on a wheel housing, or lowering the car body onto the chassis, or attaching the gasoline tank. They were physically repetitive, emotionally deadening, and nearly devoid of satisfaction. Workers slyly resisted with several tactics. Through loafing (“soldiering”) or sometimes outright subversion, they created what Ford managers called “output restriction.” They absented themselves from work as often as they could without losing their jobs. Ultimately, droves of workers simply left the factory when they were fed up. For example, daily absences at Highland Park in 1913 amounted to 10 percent; the rate of labor turnover during that same year reached a stunning 370 percent.
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