The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (Vintage) (43 page)

Henry Ford's most enthusiastic support came from the ranks of progressive reformers, who saw their own principles of efficiency, expertise, and good citizenship mirrored in his program. Beginning around the turn
of the century, centrist progressives in both major political parties had sought to tame, regulate, and rationalize corporate capitalism through strategies of social engineering. They believed that humans were fundamentally rational, so American citizens, if properly informed and empowered, would pursue the public good. They assumed that social-science experts were discovering the causes of the nation's social problems in various environmental causes and were working to shape solutions. Mustering a powerful moral energy, often Christian in character, they directed it toward obliterating social ills and reconstructing a purer, more ethical, and equitable life for all citizens. Prodded by thinkers such as Herbert Croly, John Dewey, and Walter Lippmann, progressives embraced bureaucratic planning and the expertise of disinterested professionals, planners, and technocrats. They strove to ensure abundance and security for American citizens through rational planning, management, and cooperation between capital, labor, and government in the public sphere. To many such progressives, Ford's sociological department appeared as an inspiring example of intelligent, efficacious reform.
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Within the company, of course, Samuel S. Marquis advocated a progressive vision of capital-labor cooperation, intelligent planning, and good citizenship. He presented the sociological department as a kind of welfare agency devoted to uplift of workers, with the investigator taking the role of caseworker. “The environment of a man must be right if you expect him to come clean and strong out of it,” he explained. “If conditions are not right in the home, we set ourselves the very first thing to the task of making them right.”
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Perhaps the most famous progressive supporter of the Ford social plan was Ida Tarbell. She admired the emphasis on mass production and endorsed the Five-Dollar Day as a boon to workers, of course, but she praised with equal enthusiasm the sociological department. Terming it “a thoroughly worth-while and deeply human method,” Tarbell lauded the company and its investigators for their determination to add to what they were doing for the making of men inside of the factory a thorough overhauling of the men's lives outside. “There were certain things that were laid down as essential. You had to be clean—cleanliness had played no part in the lives of hundreds of these men…. Ford's men must be clean. Already it had made an astonishing difference in the general look of the factory. And this cleanliness was carried by the sociological department into the home. The men must be kept clean, and the women must do their part. Many of the women, as well as the men, were discovering for the first time the satisfaction of cleanliness.”
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Here was a species of reform that pleased many progressives—clean, cooperative, efficient, character-building.

Tarbell especially admired the sociological department's efforts to combat alcohol abuse, which she viewed as a scourge of working-class families in industrial America. Company investigators, she explained, went to extraordinary lengths to help employees overcome drunkenness—medical treatment, moral pressure, wage incentives, family counseling. She spoke with one young man who had been put on the path to sobriety by a determined Ford investigator, and his words reaffirmed her approval of the company social program. “Lady,” he said, “if, when I was a boy somebody had talked to me as these people have, if there had been anybody to be interested in me like they are, I'd have money enough laid up to live without working. I'm a good worker, always was when I was sober, but generally I was in the gutter.” Such testimonials convinced Tarbell that Ford was on the right path to rational, humane reform. In her words, “The truth is the Sociological Department at Ford's seems to hate to give up a man as much as the Sales Department hates to give up an order.”
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John R. Commons, the labor historian and economist at the University of Wisconsin, had been at the forefront of progressive reform in that state since the early 1900s, where he advised Governor Robert La Follette and served on a commission on factory-working conditions. In a long article entitled “Henry Ford, Miracle Maker,” he detailed the automaker's profit-sharing scheme and its sociological apparatus. Because the plan focused on the way a worker lived his life as a whole, Commons concluded, “It ought to be called a citizenship fund, a community-developing fund, a homemaker's fund…. It is based upon the value of the individual in citizenship and in society.” He approved of the sociological department's basic principle: “The idea is that every man wants to be a sober, capable, industrious citizen, and that such a man is the best investment the company can make.”
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Commons believed that Ford's social programs—not only the investigators but the company's medical department, legal department, English School, and bank—demonstrated a genuine concern for workers' wellbeing and a desire to show them the way to responsible citizenship. “It is just old-fashioned industrial autocracy tempered by faith in human nature,” he concluded. Though the autocratic element may have troubled some, Commons decided that Ford's insistence on counseling workers rather than firing them, his trimming of foremen's power in the factory, and his establishment of an advisory committee to handle difficult employees removed any prospects of abuse. In his words, “It all goes back to faith in people and ends in a trouble department to make repairs where something goes wrong in the exercise of faith.”
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Within a few years, the experiment in social reform ended. By 1920, Henry Ford saw that the sociological department, with its list of moral
requirements, had outlived its usefulness, and he instigated a bonus and investment plan for workers to replace the older system. Within a short time, there were only about a dozen operatives left in the department, and by mid-1921 they had been incorporated into the medical department. There were several reasons for the demise of the program: resistance from production managers finally wore down its adherents, it became increasingly expensive to support, and the company's growth made it impractical. Perhaps the most important factor, however, was Henry Ford's change of heart. He grew weary of answering the sociological department's critics. “There were objections to the bonus-on-conduct method of paying wages. It tended toward paternalism,” he admitted in
My Life and Work.
“Paternalism has no place in industry. Welfare work that consists in prying into employees' private concerns is out of date.”
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Henry Ford's social program reflected his loyalty to old-fashioned Victorian values of self-control, sobriety, and bourgeois respectability. Yet it also embodied his more modern, managerial determination to pursue “the making of men” with the hope that, like axles and camshafts, they could be perfectly reproduced by the thousands. The resulting tension between the archaic and the visionary, the cultural and the economic, the paternal and the modern, doomed Ford's sociological experiment. But the impact on his career was minimal. By the late 1910s, his interests were turning elsewhere. Ever restless and increasingly unconstrained, he began looking at issues that stretched far beyond the horizon of industrial production. The results would make him a much more visible—and even more controversial— public figure.

In the spring of 1917, business journalist B. C. Forbes examined Henry Ford as part of his series on “Men Who Are Making America.” Writing in
Leslie's
magazine, he reported that, although Ford had earned the admiration of the world for his achievements in reshaping American industrial life, he had recently demonstrated a troubling penchant for overreaching his talents. In Forbes' words, Ford's “intoxicating success went to his head, and he became obsessed with the notion there was nothing, human or superhuman, he and his money could not accomplish.” Some of Ford's colleagues agreed. Samuel S. Marquis, for example, wrote that the industrialist had succumbed to a temptation facing many wealthy men by “assuming that because they have made a great success and shown exceptional ability in one field of action, therefore their opinions are of equal weight in all others.” In Marquis' view, Ford had begun commenting and acting upon issues “for which he has not the special fitness that distinguished him in his own particular field.”
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This portrait of a man stretching beyond his intellectual means had been inspired by Ford's controversial entry into public affairs. With the tremendous acclaim for the Model T, the Five-Dollar Day, and the company social programs, Ford saw himself moving about on a larger stage. With the whole country taking him seriously, he felt compelled to do likewise. In the mid-1910s, Ford moved out into the public arena. Around 1915, he began to speak out on controversial issues, lend his support to political movements, and even run for public office.

Ford undertook this new endeavor as a populist reformer. He drew upon several ideological influences from his youth and early manhood that were shaped by his rural Midwestern background. Pulling together various elements of his rough populist creed—hatred of Wall Street finance, belief
in hardworking individualism, faith in ordinary citizens, suspicion of social elites and corporate privilege, pacifism—he embarked upon a political crusade. Typical of Ford, it was equal parts vision, sincerity, and naïveté. But this crusade was both energized and undermined by an additional element: hubris.

Once again, Henry Ford received an enormous amount of attention throughout the country. In his new life as a political player, just as in his earlier endeavors as a pioneering industrialist, everything he did seemed to create another headline. But palpable excitement produced only negligible results.

James Couzens was furious. On a fall day in early October 1915, Charles A. Brownell, the advertising manager at the company, had entered his office. Brownell oversaw publication of the
Ford Times,
and he had brought page proofs of its next edition for Couzens' approval. Couzens had thumbed through the proof, nodding his assent, until he saw an article credited to Henry Ford himself. Then his face began to redden and his muscles clenched. “You cannot publish this,” he exclaimed. When Brownell assured him that Ford had given his personal approval, Couzens grew even more emphatic. “This is the company paper. He cannot use the
Ford Times
for his personal views,” he burst out. “I will talk to Mr. Ford tomorrow.”

The next morning, Ford dropped by Couzens' office and the two associates chatted amiably for a few minutes about Ford's upcoming trip to California with Thomas Edison. Then Couzens noted that he had held up publication of the
Ford Times
because of the offending article. Ford's good humor vanished and, according to Couzens, he “just flew off the handle…. I was shocked, aghast.” An angry exchange ensued and Ford declared, “You cannot stop anything here!” Couzens replied, “Well, then, I will quit.” The atmosphere grew frighteningly calm, and Ford told him to think it over. “No, I have decided,” Couzens said. “All right, if you have decided,” Ford said quietly. He left the office, and a short time later Couzens, having placed on his desk a resignation letter written in longhand, walked out of the Highland Park plant. Upon departing, he told a shocked subordinate, “I decided that I had enough of this God damn persecution.” Thus ended the partnership that had brought great prominence and profits to the Ford Motor Company.
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Couzens' anger was inspired by what had become a preoccupation with Ford by late 1915—a passionate condemnation of the war raging on the European continent and a fervent opposition to American involvement in it.
Over the previous year, he had started speaking out against World War I, and his pacifism had emerged as a matter of public debate. His statements to the press made headlines, of course, and kept his views before the public. As controversy mounted, Couzens protested to Ford, fearing that a patriotic backlash might harm the company. Ford ignored him, and the use of the
Ford Times
to convey pacifist views proved to be the final straw. In one sense, however, Couzens was attempting to stem a sea change in the career of Henry Ford. At some level, Ford had decided that his views on public issues needed to be heard. The antiwar crusade, an issue about which he felt strongly, proved to be the opening stage of a larger engagement with public affairs.

Ford's denunciation of World War I was part of a national debate about the wisdom of intervention in this massive conflict. The American government, inspired by President Woodrow Wilson's aversion to warfare, pursued an official policy of neutrality. But significant segments of the public worried that defense of American commercial interests and pressure from the combatants would not allow neutrality. Notable figures holding this view, such as Theodore Roosevelt, were calling for a program of “prepared-ness”—building up the armed forces, shifting industry toward armament production, psychologically acclimating the citizenry for war—to ready the United States for an inevitable entry into World War I. Opponents of the war demanded that the country remain at a distance from the corruption and destruction of this Old World fight.