The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (Vintage) (36 page)

Correspondingly, Ford freely criticized American elites in these magazine forums. He took a swing at Wall Street financiers: “We never let a contract to a company owned by absent capitalists and managed by a hired hand. We do business only with a man who owns and conducts his own business.” In typical populist fashion, he also disparaged intellectuals who criticized his new wage plan. Professors and writers who had never earned a living by the sweat of their brow, in his view, had no business opposing his attempt to help working people.
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To the journalists who interpreted his words, Ford looked like a genuine man of the people. As one of them put it, “By a very fortunate miracle Ford had got rich without being spoiled—without the time to forget that he, too, had been very poor, and had never been paid what he earned when he worked for others.” Others observed, “Faith in the everyday man, exalted faith, is an integral part of the Ford character,” or commented ironically that many did not know how to react to “Mr. Ford's monstrous way of treating everybody alike.” Perhaps the most striking confirmation of Ford's populism, however, came in
Everybody's Magazine.
It disclosed that Detroit newspapers and the Ford Motor Company had been inundated with verses written by people who were grateful to Ford for the Five-Dollar Day. “Most of it was very bad as poetry, but touching for what it meant, written by men and women, some of whom could hardly spell, let alone set words into feet.”
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Ultimately, Ford's populist rendering of the Five-Dollar Day drew nourishment from his personal image. To many American citizens and consumers, this wage policy dovetailed neatly with his folk-hero image as a man of the people. Some two weeks after the public announcement, the San Francisco
Bulletin
carried a prominent article entitled “Millionaire Ford's Tastes Are Worker's.” It featured a photograph of Ford with a caption reading, “Prefers Giving to Spending: Henry Ford, the rich man with a poor man's tastes.” The article described him as the same unassuming person that he had been two decades earlier, who wore modest clothes, tinkered with mechanical problems, and enjoyed quiet evenings at home with his family after a hard day's work. “Personally there is not much outward difference between Henry Ford, maker and dispenser of millions, and many of his workmen,” the article concluded. “Money has not made the slightest difference in his habits, his manner of life, or his friendships.”
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But Henry Ford and his populist notions did not stand alone in shaping the Five-Dollar Day. In fact, they received powerful support from another quarter. Unexpectedly, the hard-driving business manager of the company proved to be Ford's strongest ally in formulating this revolutionary labor policy. For those who had encountered his tightfisted protection of company funds over the previous decade, his support for handing over $10 million must have seemed surprising.

James Couzens stood at center stage in the dramatic press conference announcing the Five-Dollar Day. After reading aloud the statement doubling workers' salaries at the company, he commented at length on the significance of this move. “It is our belief that social justice begins at home,” he declared. “We want those who have helped us to produce this great institution, and are helping to maintain it, to share our prosperity. We want them to have present profits and future prospects.” Over the next few months, Couzens emerged as a strong advocate of the Five-Dollar Day and a man of powerful progressive principles and reformist sympathies. Observers of the Ford Motor Company, and particularly of its relentless business chief, must have been startled.
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As manager of company financial affairs since the founding in 1903, he had kept a close eye on its costs, wages, and profit margins. But much evidence suggests that Couzens, rather than Henry Ford, should be credited as the architect of this new wage policy. In several meetings of top managers in December 1913 and January 1914, Couzens spoke strongly on behalf of raising workers' pay. “When you get down to the wage scheme which we started at the Ford Motor Company,” he wrote a correspondent in 1915, “I will say that I, personally, am responsible for it.” But he also acknowledged that Ford's stamp of approval had been essential to the plan's success. “It was quite natural that Mr. Ford should be credited with this project, because he was the head of the company [and] a majority stockholder,” Couzens wrote. Ford gave it “a personal touch which was greatly beneficial in an advertising way.” But, whatever the origin of the idea, Henry Ford and James Couzens agreed on the Five-Dollar Day and worked together to promote it.
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In the months after the announcement, Couzens made a series of public statements that rivaled Ford's in their enthusiasm for the new wage policy. Full of reformist rhetoric, they framed the Five-Dollar Day as the kind of measure that would save modern industrial society. In making this argument, Couzens pursued three primary themes.

First, he confronted head-on the problem of class conflict in modern
industrial society, confessing that capitalist businessmen had not given workers their fair share of profits. He declared that “a division of earnings between capital and labor is unequal” and that industry must “arrive at the point where we will divide more equitably between capital and labor.” Couzens also took a swipe at Wall Street financiers. In good populist fashion, he insisted that the reason many large businesses failed was that “they are managed from Wall Street and other financial centers. The heads of the concerns are absent landlords, and absent ownership never pays.”
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Second, Couzens argued that high wages and humane treatment of workers were, in fact, good business. It was a fallacy for factory owners to believe that they were saving money by paying low wages. On the contrary, men worked harder and more efficiently when well paid, and the result more than made up for the higher cost of wages. “I am talking sound business as I understand it. It is my experience that it pays to pay good wages. It pays because a workman is a human being and will work harder to make a high wage than a low wage,” he observed. In fact, high wages were necessary to the very survival of business. Couzens believed that low wages and mistreatment made for “an industrial system that fails to protect the men engaged in it against want, temporary or permanent, against unemployment, against sickness or against old age. That is the kind of an industrial system that breeds discontent and unhappiness and strikes all manner of wasteful wars between capital and labor.”
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Third, Couzens became most passionate in contending that respect for the dignity and humanity of common people demanded measures like the Five-Dollar Day. He told the press that the standard industry practice of laying off workmen in slack periods grated against his conscience. It ignored the “human element” in industrial production. Manufacturers considered machines, markets, materials, transportation, management, efficiency, and many other factors before “the needs, feelings, health, and happiness of their men.” He offered a maxim: “If you are going to get the best possible service from a wage worker you must remember he is a man and treat him as a man.”
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Couzens believed that the Five-Dollar Day embraced the humanity of Ford workers.

What inspired James Couzens' late-blooming progressivism? It was not a logical outgrowth of his earlier business career, which had seen its share of cutthroat self-interest (joining Henry Ford to drive his own mentor, Alex Malcolmson, out of the company) and the determined pursuit of profit (his notorious tightfistedness regarding production costs and raises for employees). Indeed, the source of Couzens' reformism lay elsewhere. Much evidence suggests that it had flowed from discontent in his private life, which had been caused, ironically, by his great success as a businessman. By 1914, Couzens had become a millionaire, but he had not found happiness.

This self-made man, awash in money after the stunning success of the Model T, was suffering pangs of guilt over his wealth. By 1913, signs of his prosperity were evident. Couzens hired Albert Kahn to design a large brick house for his family in one of Detroit's most exclusive neighborhoods. He bought a farm near Pontiac, Michigan, and built a sturdy clapboard house for a summer residence. He joined the board of directors of several Detroit banks as well as companies selling tobacco, salt, and real estate. He became one of the most active business figures in Detroit, a status that led to his being chosen president of the Board of Commerce. Yet he grew increasingly uneasy about the impact of his growing affluence.
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To family and friends, Couzens confessed his deep suspicion of wealth's impact on character. In the best tradition of the Protestant work ethic, stretching back to the Puritans, he agonized that luxury would undermine self-discipline and cause dissipation. He lectured his children on the importance of self-control and character development and urged them to “buck up” under the weight of duress. Couzens allowed his children only modest allowances and forbade them to flaunt the family's wealth, saying, “I am always annoyed at any sort of display and have fought against that for years.” One day, when his daughter, Madeleine, commented on a newspaper article outlining the growing fortune of the Ford Motor Company and its top managers, he turned grave. This money “doesn't belong to us,” he replied. “It's a trust. It's a responsibility, and a tough one.” In fact, the more money Couzens made, the more he seemed to retreat into an obsessive work ethic. “I am never happier than when I am working at top notch,” he wrote to a friend, “and the only reason I let down at all is to be able to work at top notch the majority of the year.”
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This growing guilt over wealth, in turn, was part of a larger midlife crisis. Couzens had turned forty in 1912, made his fortune by 1914, and, like many intelligent people, came face to face with larger questions of meaning. “You know, there comes a time when the fun of making money is all gone,” he confessed. “The battle is won; the goal is achieved; it is time for something else.” When interviewed by
Forbes
magazine, he admitted, “I got tired
of making so much money. It became a burden. It was almost obnoxious, distasteful.” Couzens grew listless, complained of mysterious physical ailments, began having trouble sleeping, and fled at every opportunity to his farm, where, as he groused to one newspaper, “my cows don't talk to me, don't ask questions, nor criticize my way of doing things.” In the summer of 1913, he even contemplated resigning from the company. “I seemed to have no interest in life for a while,” he recalled later. “I had achieved what I started out to do.”
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Weary of wealth and searching for direction, Couzens was ripe for a burst of reformism. He was desperate to see the Ford Motor Company as something more than a mere profit-generating institution. When the company laid off several hundred men that winter, he became distraught. “All winter, I sat in my office on the second floor of the Ford Building and every time I looked out the window I saw a sea of faces looking up,” he told one journalist. “There were men shivering in the cold with their coat collars turned up.” Couzens contemplated the idea of instituting a pension plan for all workers and then issued an order forbidding foremen to fire any workers until they had been tried at other jobs in the factory. On the question of wages, he arrived at a simple remedy. “Why shouldn't the Ford Motor Company take a decided lead in paying the highest wages to its workers, thus enabling them to enjoy better living conditions?” he asked. “The company was making money hand over fist and could, therefore, afford to do something worthwhile.” He brought the proposal to a sympathetic Henry Ford's attention, and Couzens argued for $5.00while Ford pushed for a lower number. Couzens finally carried the day when he noted that a “fivedollar wage will be the greatest advertisement any automobile concern ever had.” No one had to say that twice to Ford.
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In Couzens' eyes, the Five-Dollar Day emerged as a benchmark for judging the modern, humane, and progressive corporation. “The corporation that treats every employee as if he were an individual and an entity instead of a number will soon find that it has a soul, and can do things which its less intelligent competitor cannot do,” he declared throughout 1914. The progressive business concerned itself with larger issues, such as the health of a worker's family, and paid a generous wage to its employees. In Couzens' formulation, when companies “are inspired by dollars and cents alone, the human spirit is missing…. System alone is not enough in any kind of dealing with human beings.” And with reforms like the Five-Dollar Day, “the follies of socialism and the terrors of anarchy will fade away in an industrial system that guarantees to every man, rich or poor, a fair field and a square deal.”
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