The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (Vintage) (49 page)

Ford believed that profits generated by his company should be reinvested in the company to create even greater production, which would lower prices even more for consumers. As he explained to the court, his company was “an instrument of service rather than a machine for making money. If large profits are made—and working to serve forces them to be large—then they should be in part turned back into the business so that it may be still better fitted to serve, and in part passed on to the purchaser.” He admitted that his philosophy did not agree with the usual business view. “I do not want stockholders in the ordinary sense of the term—they do not help forward the ability to serve.” As he declared vehemently from the witness stand, “I'll fight it through to the highest court in the land, if my contract as president of the Ford Motor Company is to be interpreted as requiring me to squeeze every cent I can out of everybody.”
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The decision in the Dodge lawsuit was not rendered for nearly a year. Ford lost. The judge of the circuit court came to a decision favorable to the Dodges and ordered the Ford Motor Company to stop its expansion project and pay a special dividend to its stockholders of a little over $19 million. This decision was announced on October 31, 1917, and Ford immediately appealed. After another year and a half of litigation, the state superior court modified the lower court's ruling. The higher court overturned the ban on Ford Motor Company expansion, noting that judges should not be posing as business experts. At the same time, it upheld the ruling that Ford had acted unreasonably in withholding dividends from his stockholders and ordered that the special dividend, with interest, be distributed in an amount exceeding $20 million. A disappointed Ford agreed to pay, but vowed in private never again to be tied to the desires of stockholders, a determination that bore fruit in a few years.
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Though the legal verdict went against him, Ford once again triumphed in terms of public reputation. His denunciation of idle stockholders, his insistence on the value of productive labor, and his definition of the modern corporation as an instrument of service struck a responsive chord with the public. The Dodge suit burnished his reputation as a businessman who had the common man's interest at heart. Newspapers asserted that this lawsuit revealed a contrast between Ford's philosophy of service to the public with that of businessmen such as the Dodges, who were “not so much concerned with lessening the cost of production in the future as they are in seizing the profits of the present.”
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Some observers placed Ford in a favorable light by interpreting the
Dodge suit as a ploy by powerful economic interests to control him. The Detroit
Journal
reported that Ford's expansion plans included building a steel smelter for processing iron ore, and thus the “steel kings” were backing the Dodges in their legal action. According to an insider in Detroit banking and manufacturing circles, the implementation of Ford's plans would have undermined big steel manufacturing. “It would do much to shake loose the grip the trust has upon the throat of the industrial world,” he noted. Thus portrayed as a victim of “the steel barons” and the “trust,” Ford reaffirmed his populist credentials as a defender of the little man.
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Public sentiment seemed to embrace him as the symbol of a new, enlightened age of corporate behavior, in contrast to the Dodges, who represented an archaic model of big business. As an editorial in the New York
Evening Mail
argued, a great injustice would occur if the Dodges prevented Ford from “working out the great corrective ideas he has inaugurated in the realm of big business in America.” He had become too valuable:

Ford had played a huge part in creating an American economy of consumer abundance and demonstrated that both business and labor could flourish when productivity and wages were maximized. He was a national hero, this editorial concluded, because “he, more than any man of great wealth the world has ever seen, interprets the dream of democracy.”
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So, though Henry Ford lost the Dodge lawsuit, he won a much larger prize—the hearts of ordinary American citizens. And the Ford legend, enhanced in a Detroit courtroom, gained even more brilliance from being showcased in another typical American setting—the great expanses of nature.

Henry Ford liked to tell an amusing story about an incident that occurred on one of his camping trips. While he was in the wild regions of northern legend
Michigan with some friends, the group parked their automobile and camped in the woods a short distance from a farmhouse. When they drove to the house to purchase some provisions, they found the farmer in his barn tinkering with a large automobile that was not a Ford. Without disclosing his identity, Ford inquired about the problem with the car and then helped the farmer get it running. He identified the problem, assisted with repairs, and even contributed some new spark plugs and tools to the project. When they were finished, the farmer turned to Ford and said, “What's the charge?”

Ford replied, “Nothing.”

“But I can't let it stand that way,” said the farmer. “You have not only given your time, but you have also given me spark plugs and tools. Here's a dollar and a half. I insist you take that much.”

“No,” said Ford. “I can't do it. I have all the money I want.”

The farmer looked him up and down and drawled, “Hell, you can't have that much and drive a Ford.”
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This incident reflected not only the omnipresence of Ford's modest Model T, but another topic that fascinated many Americans in the years after World War I. In the late 1910s, the public became entranced with news about Henry Ford and his regular camping forays with a group of high-profile companions: Thomas Edison, Harvey Firestone, and John Burroughs. The adventures of the “Four Vagabonds,” as they called themselves, became a proven news generator with stories about their encounters with the wilderness. This “gathering of geniuses” around a campfire seemed to connect with something basic in the collective American psyche. Like Benjamin Franklin, the learned scientist who had cavorted through the salons of Paris dressed in Quakerish garb and fur hats, or Mark Twain, who masked his worldliness with a persona of provincial shrewdness, Ford and his fellow campers enhanced their technological achievements by seeking inspiration and amusement in the great natural spaces of the United States.

The Four Vagabond trips developed gradually. The Ford and Edison families, along with John Burroughs, had first vacationed together in 1914, on a trip to Florida. The following year, Harvey Firestone and his wife joined the group for a journey to the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, followed by a motoring trip southward, down the coast to Los Angeles and San Diego. By 1918, the four famous men had adopted a more rustic routine. Over the next few years, Ford, Edison, Burroughs, and Firestone traveled through sparsely inhabited areas of the Mid-Atlantic region, New England, upstate New York, Pennsylvania, and the upper Midwest to camp. Eagerly followed by reporters, the exploits of the Four Vagabonds became public rituals from 1916 to 1921.
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The camping trips followed a standard format. The men would drive off for an unknown destination at the head of a caravan composed of attendants, supply vehicles, and reporters. Edison served as navigator, always choosing the route, often deciding upon one itinerary in advance and then selecting another when the group actually departed. The group seldom knew their destination and usually improvised as they went along. As Fire-stone once joked about Edison, “We never know where we are going and I suspect that he does not either.” Firestone functioned as commissary officer and general manager, securing foodstuffs and making general arrangements. Ford took on the duties of mechanical expert, repairing the automobiles on several occasions. Once on the road, the group would meander from day to day, setting up camp wherever and whenever they felt like it.
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Over the years, several traditions evolved among the Four Vagabonds. Edison forbade shaving while on the camping trips, but Firestone found it difficult to obey this edict. Being a rather fastidious man, he would occasionally sneak off to a local hotel for the night, where he could enjoy a bath and a shave. “You're a tenderfoot,” Edison would laughingly say upon his return. “Soon you'll be dressing up like a dude.” Edison enjoyed fleeing urban life and roughing it in the wild. “He is a good camper-out and turns vagabond very easily. He can go with his hair uncombed and his clothes unbrushed as long as the best of us,” Burroughs once noted. “There can be no doubt about his love for the open air and wild nature.”
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This was no small praise, since “Uncle John” Burroughs, the senior member of the group and a well-known naturalist, poet, philosopher, and writer, set the standard for communing with nature. He came from the same mold as Henry David Thoreau and John Muir. In his late seventies by the time the camping trips began, Burroughs had established a national reputation with his essays and books extolling the virtues of America's natural beauty. He had met Henry Ford in 1913, and they bonded on the basis of a shared love of nature and birds. Looking the part of the romantic rustic with his gaunt frame, weatherbeaten face, flowing white beard, and long hair often topped by a slouch hat, he would set his tent apart from the others, so that he could meander at will among the plants and woodland creatures that he loved. Burroughs' reputation even rescued the group from an occasional scrape. Once, when they set up camp on private land, an irate farmer was dissuaded from running them off at gunpoint because he recognized Burroughs as the author of some nature pieces he had read.
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While wandering through backwoods America, the Four Vagabonds typically filled their days and evenings with interesting diversions. When he wasn't taking naps or reading, Edison liked to gather rocks and break them open with a hammer to examine the mineral deposits within. Ford, Edison,
and Firestone often strolled along the banks of local creeks and rivers, calculating the drop, estimating the volume of water that was moving, and discussing how the building of dams could generate power for use in isolated areas of rural America. As Firestone noted, “I doubt if, on our trips, we ever passed an abandoned mill without Mr. Edison and Mr. Ford getting out to measure the force of the stream, inspect the old wheel, and talk about ways and means of putting the waste power to work.” Led by Burroughs, the group would take long hikes and then relax by bathing their feet in streams. The vagabonds would pick berries, stop at farms to cradle oats and rake hay, and ride on logging locomotives with Ford at the throttle.
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The four friends loved to engage in contests of physical prowess such as sprinting and tree felling. Ford won the footraces, but Burroughs excelled at cutting down trees. When the group stopped at small-town inns, at Ford's prodding they would continue the competition by trying to kick away cigars that were balanced on the edge of mantels. Or they would compete to see who took the most steps in the fewest bounds, a contest usually won by Ford. During the evening, the quartet would repose for hours around the campfire, discussing current affairs and debating the merits of literary works such as
Evangeline
and
Les Misérables
and authors such as Emerson, Thoreau, and Shakespeare. They would also exchange jokes and stories, some of them a bit risqué. As one of Ford's retinue testified, “I've never seen a bunch of fellows—you know, big guys with big money—have more fun than they did. They were just like a bunch of kids when they went on these trips.”
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Ford cut the most energetic figure on the vagabond forays, leaping into activities with boyish enthusiasm. He arose every morning around five-thirty, hiked the longest and the fastest on daytime jaunts, and chopped wood every night for the campfire. He also loved indulging in playing practical jokes. One of his most memorable came when he took several wooden tent stakes and “had a fellow saw them up in little bits of square blocks and put them in the soup for dinner, so Mr. Firestone would bite on them.” Another time, he came across a boy and girl living near a campsite, and discovered that the family's Edison phonograph had quit working and could not be repaired. Ford fetched the phonograph, located the problem, and repaired it. He got two laughs from his effort: one when he told the children's mother who he was, and another when he was able to report to Edison that he could fix the inventor's products better than his dealers could.
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