The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (Vintage) (4 page)

Ford acclaimed the old-fashioned virtues of McGuffey at every opportunity. In an article in
Good Housekeeping,
he insisted, “The generations that grew up on McGuffey did better in common sense and common honesty. There is no escape from the need for moral precepts. The truths of life should be stated simply, clearly, and often to children.” In another publication, he declared flatly, “Truth, honesty, fair-dealing, initiative, invention, self-reliance—these were the fundamentals of the McGuffey Readers and they are as timeless and dateless now as they were when he assembled his texts.”
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But Ford's McGuffey mania was more than just an item for public consumption. Hamlin Garland, the best-selling Midwestern regionalist writer, became a friend of the industrialist in the 1920s, and they discovered a shared reverence for these old books from their youth. During one of Gar-land's visits, Ford

Ford and Garland engaged in a game challenging each other's knowledge and memory of McGuffey. Sitting on opposite sides of a desk, one would recite an opening stanza from a section of one of the textbooks, and the other would reply with the second stanza. They would trade lines in this fashion until one of them was stumped.
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So young Henry Ford, with the lessons of Mary Ford ringing in one ear and those of William Holmes McGuffey in the other, made his way through childhood. In a fashion that he would not fully realize until adulthood, their insistence on labor, service, temperance, and duty formed the bedrock of his character and sensibility. Victorian moral instruction made its mark. At least in most ways.

Mary Ford and William Holmes McGuffey nudged Henry Ford down a straight and narrow path, but they could not make him work. There the boy slouched to the beat of his own drummer. It became something of a standing joke among Ford family and friends that Henry could be counted on to slide away from hard physical labor. Margaret remembered her brother skipping farm chores “to go watch a threshing machine work.” A neighbor, who occasionally worked as a hired hand on the Ford farm, laughingly noted that “that little devil was the laziest bugger on the face of the earth!…Henry would work along all right until about ten o'clock in the morning, and then he would want to go to the house for a drink of water. He would go and get the drink of water, but he would never come back!”
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But the youth's behavior was less a case of laziness or rebelliousness than a principled objection to wasting physical energy. As Margaret explained, Henry believed “that there was too much hard work connected with farming” and thus sought “easier methods” and “tried shortcuts to lighten the many chores.” Henry admitted, “I have followed many a weary mile behind a plough and I know all the drudgery of it,” and “When very young I suspected that much might somehow be done in a better way.” Thus his mother's preaching about cheerful work appears in a new light— an admonishment aimed at the evasions of her eldest child. So, too, does Henry's admiration for Mary's example of the efficient handling of tasks. As Ford confessed to a reporter many years later, “My uncle once said that I am just like her in that respect.” Ironically, the man who claimed work as the cornerstone of his philosophy had little fondness for physical labor.
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But this perception of the grind of farm labor dovetailed with a prominent part of young Henry Ford's personality: his growing mechanical bent. The inefficiency of farm methods, he once stated bluntly, “is what took me into mechanics.” But this attraction to machinery also stemmed in part from
a predisposition. “My mother always said that I was born a mechanic,” Ford wrote later. Fascinated with the crude wind-up toys of his siblings, he habitually disassembled them to see how they worked and then successfully put them back together. Margaret noted that at Christmas the Ford children would surround their toys and cry out in unison, “Don't let Henry have them. He just takes them apart.”
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The boy's fascination with mechanics produced a hobby that became almost an obsession: repairing watches. Adolph Culling, a German farmhand employed by his father, first took the back off his silver watch and showed Henry how the various parts worked. At the Scotch Settlement School, the boy often whiled away the time by tinkering with classmates' watches. He made himself a set of tools by grinding a tiny screwdriver out of a shingle nail, fashioning a pair of tweezers from one of his mother's old corset stays, and gained himself a reputation as a skilled repairman. Neighbors brought him malfunctioning watches and clocks, and he set up a small workbench at home, where he delightedly spent hours adjusting and correcting their tiny mechanisms. Henry haunted local watch shops, such as that of Englebert Grimm in Dearborn, to buy and trade parts and eventually went farther, into Detroit. There he visited watch shops in search of treasures, but also ventured out to the railroad yards to observe locomotives and to “engine works” shops to examine steam engines.
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Ultimately, these threads of work-related influences—his admiration for production but disregard for hard manual labor, his mother's example of focused accomplishment, his growing appreciation of mechanical power— were interwoven to create a notable personality trait. Early on, as many observers noted, young Ford became obsessed with work efficiency. In the late nineteenth century, this determination to get maximum production out of effort expended would be codified by industrial experts such as Frederick Winslow Taylor. Their doctrine of “scientific management,” however, was second nature to this Michigan farm boy. His sister Margaret once described it clearly:

Ford also displayed at an early age another managerial trait: he always took the lead in devising projects, but then stepped aside as others implemented them. “He had the ability of getting his brothers and his companions to
work for him,” Margaret noted. These basic traits would powerfully influence his career in later years.
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Many decades later, his close friend Thomas Edison would be amused at Ford's exuberant, youthful spirit. When they went on one of their camping vacations, the sixty-something automaker would cavort joyfully through the woods, running and jumping, climbing trees, and chopping logs. “At heart Ford is just a boy yet. He will never cease to be a boy,” Edison noted. But this behavior may have been a kind of emotional compensation for a painful trauma that marked the end of his childhood. His idyllic, sheltered boyhood existence was about to end abruptly. As he approached adolescence, the stable and warm atmosphere of this respectable farm family would be blown apart by a sudden emotional storm.
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In the spring of 1876, the Ford family prepared to welcome another member into its midst. Mary had become pregnant midway through the previous year, and the birth of her seventh child promised to be a happy event. She was in good health, and her previous births had been uneventful. But something went terribly wrong, and both mother and newborn child died on March 29. Young Henry Ford's world was turned upside down, and the upheaval was especially terrible because of its unexpectedness. He was emotionally devastated. The passing of his beloved mother proved to be, perhaps, the most traumatic event of his life, and he carried the emotional scars for decades. Reacting with a combination of deep grief and adolescent self-absorption, he confessed much later that “I thought a great wrong had been done to me when my mother was taken.” The boy expressed his bewilderment and pain in a revealing metaphor: “The house was like a watch without a mainspring.”
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One profound development set in motion in Henry's young life by Mary's death was the beginning of a tense relationship with his father. At some deep personal level, Henry appears to have blamed him for the death. He had always been closer to Mary than to William. As a confidant wrote years later, “While Henry respected his father, it was to his mother that he turned for love and understanding.”
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Following Mary's untimely death, a quiet but lengthy family travail began to unfold. The oldest Ford child—bright, curious, mechanically minded, and standing on the cusp of adolescence with all its emotional and hormonal disruptions—entered young adulthood riding a wave of deep pain. He careened into his father, a dignified, stubborn, but kindly authority figure. The growing tension between Henry and William also presented a
broader, historical dimension. The son's restlessness at the constraints of rural life clashed with the father's values and experiences, and this lent additional force to their arguments about career prospects and the future.

William Ford presented his own version of an American success story. Born on December 26, 1826, in rural Ireland, he had fled the poverty and desolation of famine at age twenty along with other members of his family. They joined another branch of the Ford clan, already settled in the frontier village of Dearborn. By the early 1850s, dozens of Fords lay scattered throughout the Dearborn area and stood as prominent fixtures in the community. A mid-century photograph of the male Fords—dressed in their best black suits with vests and gold pocket watches, and facing the world as solid citizens with expressions of gravity and self-assurance—suggested the fam-ily's local prominence.

Upon arrival, William found employment as a carpenter for the Michigan Central Railroad, and during the next few years saved enough money to purchase his own tract of land. Working hard as a farmer, and acquiring additional acreage whenever the opportunity arose, William climbed steadily over the next decade and a half. By 1864, the year he finally went through the formality of becoming a U.S. citizen, he owned 120 acres, and over the next decade would add an additional hundred to his holdings. He also served in a number of civic capacities: member of the local school board, road commissioner, and, by the 1870s, justice of the peace.

In the meantime, William had married Mary Litogot, the adopted daughter of a local farmer, on April 25, 1861. He was thirty-four years old, and she was twenty-one. The couple settled into a seven-room white clapboard frame house built by the industrious groom to shelter his new bride and his father- and mother-in-law.
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By the time of Henry's birth, William had prospered and become a man of substance. He had bought the first buggy to be seen in the Dearborn area. Of medium height and slender build, with a ruddy complexion, neatly trimmed mustache and beard, and large, expressive blue eyes, he presented a dignified and stern appearance. A “merry twinkle in his eye” revealed a mischievous sense of humor lying just under the surface. A strong Episcopalian, the elder Ford nurtured “a very strong moral fiber and high ideals,” qualities that flowered in his interactions with neighbors. Respected by local husbandmen and craftsmen, William had gained a reputation as a “good farmer” and someone who would help others in time of need. “Kindness and consideration of others was one of his characteristics,” one of his children later noted, and he “was well-liked among the neighbors.”
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Although reserved in temperament, William had a warm relationship with his children. He would take his sons to Detroit to deliver firewood or
pick up farm supplies, and after the day's business was completed he showed them various sights around the city. When the circus came to town, he would pile his children into the wagon and head off to see the show. His delight was so obvious that observers wondered “who enjoyed it the most, father or children.” According to Margaret, her father was a kindly, fair parent who “believed that children should obey.” At home, he combined stern expectation of work and respect with easygoing tolerance of youthful high jinks. Unlike many stricter Protestant parents of his generation, he allowed the children to play cards around the table in the evening, stopping the games only when they became too rowdy or argumentative.
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William put much stock in being a well-informed citizen, and subscribed to several newspapers. He took great pride in his ownership of property and his involvement in the civic affairs of Dearborn, viewing local offices on the school board or the road commission as a responsibility to be shouldered willingly by responsible citizens. According to his daughter, William would often acclaim “the great miracle of America … [as] a place where a man could own the land upon which he lived and worked. Here there was personal independence.” This proud tradition of the individual yeoman farmer deploying his labor and talents, of course, had deep roots in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century notions of republicanism and liberalism.
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