The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (Vintage) (5 page)

Henry, however, increasingly appeared cut from a different pattern. He seemed to care little for the dignity of land ownership or the virtues of republican citizenship, and the routine of farm life inspired little beyond a growing disregard. Henry's rebellion, curiously, found focus in an aversion to horses. In the 1920s, he recalled for Edgar A. Guest how his father had assigned him the special chore of caring for the farm's horses. “I didn't like that job then and I wouldn't like it now,” he declared, because “I was never fond of horses in the way that many are. I never really made friends with them.” His grumbling had caused his mother to preach to him the necessity of self-discipline and persistence, so the boy reluctantly bent to the task. But, perhaps as a reflection of his distaste, Henry proved prone to horse-related accidents. Around age fourteen, while out riding on the road, he was thrown by a colt, caught his foot in the stirrup, and was dragged home over a considerable distance. After suffering many bruises and walking around sore for a week, Henry noted that the incident confirmed that he didn't “care much for horses.” A few years later, the Detroit
Free Press
reported, “Henry Ford driving a manure wagon was seriously injured about 4p.m. on Sunday, November 18 by the animal running away and collapsing the wagon. The horse was stopped by a fence.” Ford's later involvement with the horseless carriage, it seems clear, may have resulted as much from
equine aversion as from mechanical attraction. As he wrote triumphantly in one of his notebooks many decades later, “The horse is DONE.”
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Henry's mechanical interests were intensifying almost daily as he spent many hours in the farm workshop, handling the tools and familiarizing himself with the mechanical operation of a number of agricultural implements. Then, in midsummer 1876, a few months after Mary Ford's death, an incident occurred that revealed the tensions of the present and portended the activities of the future. William and Henry were traveling by wagon between Dearborn and Detroit when they happened upon a crude steam engine trudging along the road under its own power. The younger Ford was amazed at the sight of this steam-belching, mechanical behemoth. As he reported many years later:

This encounter became a turning point in Henry Ford's life, fostering a profound interest which would lead in new and fruitful directions. As he stated flatly many years later, “It was that engine which took me into automotive transportation.”
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This incident suggested the knot of tension that tightened between William and Henry as the years went on. Increasingly, the son chafed at the constraints of rural life and yearned to immerse himself in the mechanical innovations inundating late-nineteenth-century America. The father upheld a more traditional standard of working the land. The farmer, as William liked to point out, “was his own boss” and could be sure of several things: “a reasonably good living for his family, security, sunshine not offered to factory workers, and good clean, fresh, air.” This generational dispute, resonant with both personal and historical issues, gradually erected a barrier of misunderstanding between these two strong-willed individuals.
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Henry's version of this situation would become standard fare. In later interviews for articles and biographies, he habitually described his adolescence as a protracted struggle to overcome the backward-looking, even hostile opposition of his father. In the early 1920s, for instance, he spoke at
length with writer Allan Benson, who wrote
The New Henry Ford
(1923). The boy's heart, Benson reported, “was always in his mechanical pursuits, which his father detested.” Henry's labors in the farm workshop were not appreciated, for the youngster “worked with his tools always against the wishes of his father.” In Henry's version, William's stubborn opposition to his mechanical endeavors had poisoned their relationship. The son reported that the father, displeased by his failure to charge for the work, had forbidden him to fix neighbors' watches. Thus Henry, unconcerned with money, was forced to “wait until I thought my father had gone to sleep” and then creep out of the house secretly to pick up malfunctioning timepieces from surrounding farms. “I did not get home until 3o'clock in the morning,” Ford noted. After his mother's death, Henry continued, the Fords' new housekeeper followed William's lead by banishing the boy's work from the downstairs parlor. He fled to his bedroom, where he set up a small workbench and worked late at night in the cold, huddled up to a small lamp for light and warmth. As Henry told Benson, his favorite book as a boy was a story of paternal rejection.
Herbert Mattison: A Bound Boy
told the tale of a youthful protagonist who was “bound out” by his father to work for a neighbor until he was twenty-one years old.
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According to Henry, William's intransigence later led him to a sour disapproval of the son's venture into automaking. He reported he had proudly returned to the Dearborn farm in the mid-1890s, wife and young son in tow, riding in his first “horseless carriage.” But when he showed off the automobile prototype to the Ford family, William “got mad about it. He didn't like it at all. He thought it was something that would scare all the horses off the road.” When Henry later quit a well-paying job to manufacture these machines, William dismissed his son as “an awful fool.” Then his father declared that “I should hurry and build my automobiles or everyone who wanted one would be supplied before I got started.” Ford could not resist a rather snide postscript: “We were building 100 cars a day in 1907 when father died.”
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Henry's portrayal of his father's opposition, however, was more than a bit self-serving. Though it nicely framed a picture of his own heroic climb to success, it seriously distorted the facts. As other observers make clear, William Ford was not the man his son made him out to be. Far from being a dour, hidebound old fogy who blindly opposed his son's mechanical activities, he was a progressive farmer with a sincere interest in the dawning machine age. William, to be sure, tried to steer his eldest son toward becoming a farmer and citizen in the Dearborn community, and expressed some skepticism about his career adventures. As he once commented to a
neighbor about his sons, “John and William [Jr.] are all right but Henry worries me. He doesn't seem to settle down and I don't know what's going to become of him.” At the same time, however, the elder Ford clearly nurtured Henry's aptitude with tools and mechanisms and expressed pride in his skills.
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Margaret Ford Ruddiman provided a far different and more accurate rendering of the relationship between William Ford and his son. Henry's sister and the older daughter, she assumed an ever-larger role in running the household in the aftermath of her mother's death. She had abundant opportunity to observe sibling and father at close range, and her recollection of their relationship veered sharply from Henry's often repeated themes. Much of what the son related about the father at a later date, Margaret insisted, was simply a product of his imagination.

William Ford, according to his daughter, spent a great deal of time with his eldest child. From the time he could walk, the boy followed his father about, watching him work and “wanting to help as all little boys do.” William himself was quite handy with tools, and he was proud that his son seemed to have inherited his knack for fixing things. “Father was quick to recognize Henry's ability in making new things,” Margaret recalled. “He was very understanding of Henry's demands for new tools for the shop, and ours was one of the best equipped in the neighborhood.” Moreover, William “never told Henry he should charge for the work he did on the neighbors' watches and clocks.” As for Henry's tales about sneaking behind his father's back in the middle of the night to do repair work, Margaret described these as “fantastic stories” and recalled that throughout their childhood Henry's “workbench was at the east window in the dining-room just inside the door. This was his and we did not disturb the tools on it.”
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William's own mechanical interests were evident. He was known for being handy with tools, and his reputation as a carpenter, craftsman, and repairer of farm equipment had spread throughout the community. According to Margaret, “our workshop was better equipped than most,” and during the busy planting and harvesting seasons “many of the neighbors came to Father when an emergency repair job was needed.” As a farmer, William “was willing to learn new methods and to purchase new farm equipment if it was practical and did an efficient job.” In fact, over the years he purchased a McCormick reaper, a mowing machine, and a mechanical hay-loader to ease the burden of farm labor. As a member of the township committee set up to consider transportation linking Dearborn with Detroit, he played a key role in replacing horse-drawn cars with a system of electric cars based on a scheme already established in Cleveland.
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Perhaps most revealingly, the same summer when he and Henry stumbled across the self-powered steam engine on the trip to Detroit, William Ford journeyed by railroad to attend the Centennial Exposition. Held in 1876 in Philadelphia to celebrate the centenary of the Declaration of Independence, this large exhibition displayed every kind of American engine and mechanical innovation imaginable. Along with a nephew and two neighbors, William planned the trip to observe “scheduled tests of the steam plows and road engines.” Like most progressive farmers, he was interested in the possibilities of steam power for agricultural work, a trend widely discussed in newspapers and magazines in the 1870s. The elder Ford had a wonderful time on the trip—he marveled at the beautiful scenery of the western-Pennsylvania mountains and visited historical sights in Philadelphia, such as Independence Hall—and returned with a perception that because of machines “changes were being made in [farmers'] way of life.” For years, Margaret recalled, William and his friends talked about “the mechanical exhibits and the wonderful things that could be accomplished by steam power” they had witnessed in Philadelphia. Henry listened avidly to these speculations.
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Later on, William's attitude toward Henry's automobile ventures was more complex than the son ever acknowledged. William did refuse to ride in Henry's horseless carriage the first time he brought it to the farm, and Margaret admitted that the father may have resented his son's success in pushing his beloved horses from the road. But it was in equal part fright, she insisted: William “saw no reason why he should risk his life at that time for a brief thrill of being propelled over the road.” On subsequent visits, after Henry explained the machine and offered assurances, his father consented to climb aboard and rode many times. Once the ice was broken, “Father was very proud of Henry's achievement. He talked about it to us at home and he told his neighbors about it.” In fact, some years later, William even offered financial assistance to his son in developing the manufacture of his automobile. According to Margaret, Henry refused.
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In other words, this generational clash was much less melodramatic and oppressive than Henry Ford ever admitted. To be sure, William was disappointed in his son's desire to leave the farm and evinced more caution about the mechanical innovations of the age that so excited the young man. But he did not crush the boy's spirit, curtail his interests, or tyrannize him. Father and son had serious discussions about the future and harbored different perspectives about the wisest course for the future, but their disagreements never exploded in acrimony. Such low-key differences of opinion, such offering and rejection of advice, characterize relations between most fathers
and sons in most times and places. As Margaret explained, William and Henry “understood and respected each other.” Edsel Ruddiman, Henry's best friend, confirmed that dissimilar ideas “didn't cause any hard feelings between father and son.”
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In 1879, Henry Ford made a key decision in his young life that he later defined as a revolt against paternal abuse. At age sixteen, he left the farm to find his future in Detroit. Without informing anyone of his plans, as he told Allan Benson, he walked the nine miles to Detroit, rented a sleeping room, and began to look for employment in a machine shop, a move that ended “the struggle …between the father's will and the son's determination.” Ford told other interviewers that he had fled to the city “against his father's commands.” According to
My Life and Work
(1922), through this brash act “I was all but given up for lost” by his father and family. Henry Ford's version of the flight to Detroit, as did earlier stories, stressed his lonely heroism and determination in the face of his father's punitive resistance.
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But, once again, he mythologized this important event in his early life. As evidence from other observers makes clear, Henry's move to Detroit came with the cooperation, not opposition, of his father. According to Margaret, everyone in the Ford family knew that at some point he would leave for the city to learn more about machinery and steam engines: “It was just a question of when.” Henry and William had discussed the matter, she claimed, and she pointed out that her brother did not walk Detroit streets looking for a room but stayed with “Aunt Rebecca Flaherty, father's sister.” And after working for only six days at the Michigan Car Company Works, which built streetcars, he quickly found employment at the Flower Brothers Machine Shop. This job, Margaret believed, was the result of “some kind of previous arrangement” with William Ford, since he and James Flower were old friends. Frederick Strauss, a young apprentice with Flower Brothers, corroborated Margaret's story. Upon arriving at work one morning and glancing into the shop office, Strauss recalled, “I saw Henry Ford's father and Henry was with him. I didn't know who they were but the next day Henry came to work.”
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