The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (Vintage) (52 page)

Ford's yen for self-promotion led him to put together an organization to publicize his views. Throughout much of the 1910s, Ernest G. Liebold, Ford's executive secretary, had authorized his boss's interviews with the press. By about 1920, however, William J. Cameron, a former newspaperman with a talent for interpreting Ford's often enigmatic ideas, had become responsible for arranging interviews, editing his off-the-cuff comments, and vetting the resulting press stories. Assisted by a team of journalists and publicity agents—these included Fred L. Black, Ben Donaldson, and Walter Blanchard—Cameron oversaw the cascade of Ford publicity that began to blanket the country. A student of Ford's public image has concluded that in the last half of the 1910s only four Americans—Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, Charles Evans Hughes, and William Jennings Bryan—received more press attention than Ford. By the following decade, that group had dwindled to one: President Calvin Coolidge. “Mr. Ford felt a news story on the front page was of more value than a paid advertising campaign,” Liebold explained.
⁵²

But Ford also aimed at loftier goals. Inspired by his experiences with the Five-Dollar Day, the Peace Ship, and his campaign for the Senate, he saw himself as a serious public figure with a historic role to play. Ford the oracle began to step forward onto the public stage.

Certain journalists and critics aided this process. Judson C. Welliver, writing in
The American Review of Reviews,
argued that Ford had emerged as a prophetic figure in a modern society characterized by technological advance, growing wealth, increased education, and spreading material abundance. Ford, according to Welliver, fully embraced this “new era.” “A genius in mechanics, a revolutionist in industry, a Napoleon in business, he has visions of the future that are not distorted by any reflections from the background of a past about which he knows little and cares less. His eye and interest are all for the tomorrows,” noted the journalist. Ford believed that the future had arrived and the new age would “see industry and enterprise operating for the greatest good of the community as a whole.”
⁵³

The New York
World
also analyzed Ford's growing public presence. He had emerged as a social philosopher in the 1910s, and by the end of the decade he had become the most quoted citizen in the United States. “There is evolving around him a whole philosophy of ideas built up partly from
casual roadside comments, partly from the books in which he has now begun to labor his ideas, partly from things which are said and thought of him by several thousand other people,“the newspaper observed. For the first time in modern American history, it concluded, a wealthy entrepreneur had blossomed not as an art collector or a horse breeder but as ”a fancier of ideas.”
⁵⁴

Ford provided a notable boost to his own oracular status in 1919. In January of that year, the first issue of the Dearborn
Independent
appeared under his auspices. A few months earlier, Ford had purchased this small, financially troubled newspaper from his hometown and proceeded to make it a national mouthpiece for his views. Carrying the extravagant subtitle
The Chronicler of the Neglected Truth,
this tabloid-sized weekly covered a variety of topics, with pieces by diverse journalists and writers. In large part, however, the Dearborn
Independent
came before the public as Ford's own personal forum, a fact reinforced by “Mr. Ford's Own Page,” an editorial appearing in every issue.
⁵⁵

Ford had come upon the idea for procuring a newspaper during his antiwar crusade, when he became convinced that a hostile press was controlled by banks and other powerful financial interests. “The capitalistic newspapers began a campaign against me. They misquoted me, distorted what I said, made up lies about me,” he declared. He went on to note, “I have definite ideas and ideals that I believe are practical for the good of all, and intend giving them to the public without having them garbled, distorted, or misrepresented.” In other words, Ford wanted to control the presentation of his ideas to the public.
⁵⁶

The Dearborn
Independent
's first editor was E. G. Pipp, a muckraking journalist who had risen through the ranks to become editor-in-chief of the Detroit
News.
Pipp was “Henry Ford's favorite newspaperman,” according to Fred L. Black, because the two men shared a strong measure of social idealism as well as friendship. Ford prohibited all advertising in the paper, instead picking up production costs himself. Leery of advertisers' control over the press, he also feared deception and “didn't want to advertise a product he didn't fairly believe in, or didn't know was absolutely what it claimed to be.” Despite this, Ford's fame immediately brought tens of thousands of subscribers to the paper, augmented as the Ford Motor Company pressured its hundreds of car dealerships to buy multiple subscriptions to distribute to customers.
⁵⁷

Ford's newspaper carried a variety of articles on topics in public affairs, science, education, popular culture, religion, industry, and agriculture. It attracted between a quarter-million and a half-million subscribers between 1919 and 1928. Unquestionably, however, Henry Ford's personal editorials
provided the most striking feature of the Dearborn
Independent.
Although appearing under Ford's name, they were ghostwritten by William J. Cameron, who talked regularly with Ford and extracted from him the epigrammatic nuggets that were refined into full-blown editorial statements. Indeed, Cameron displayed a unique talent for interpreting and expanding his boss's cryptic “intuitions,” as Ford often described them. Whereas many journalists and members of Ford's staff would come out of an interview muttering, “What in the hell did the old man mean by this?” Cameron had the ability to discern Ford's meaning. He would go through several drafts of “Mr. Ford's Own Page” each week, eventually gaining the approval of both Ford and Ernest Liebold, who maintained a veto power over its content.
⁵⁸

The opening number of “Mr. Ford's Own Page,” in the January 11, 1919, issue, established its avuncular tone. “This paper exists to spread ideas, the best that can be found,” Ford stated. “It aims to furnish food for thought. It desires to stir ambition and encourage independent thinking.” The editorial then alighted on some of the author's favorite themes: the great opportunities still existing for innovative and hardworking individuals, the need for industry to perform a useful public service as well as make money, the evils of “absentee ownership” and “speculative capitalists,” and the scourge of war. Ford struck a characteristic note of folksy wisdom in explaining his own role: “I have never pretended to be a writer or an editor, but I can talk with plain Americans in a way that we can understand each other.”
⁵⁹

Henry Ford's emergence as an author provided this final component of his publicity machine. With considerable fanfare,
My Life and Work
(1922) was published to an appreciative national and international audience. This book—part autobiography and part manifesto for industrial progress—had been ghostwritten by Samuel Crowther, a journalist who specialized in writing about politics and economics. He had won Ford's confidence by collaborating on projects with Thomas Edison and Harvey Firestone. The two established an unorthodox working relationship. Crowther would scour Ford's editorials, use his staff to help dig up materials, interview Ford himself to glean his thoughts directly, and then spend hours in discussion with Cameron. After composing drafts, Crowther and Cameron would consult with Ford to get his final approval.
⁶⁰

A compelling book emerged from this collaborative process. It offered Ford's version of his own life, which appeared in snippets throughout the text as a mythical tale in which hard work and perseverance triumphed. But much of the book focused on the principles upon which Ford believed modern industrial society should be based.
My Life and Work
offered his blueprint for progress, and it flowed from two basic principles: the pursuit of service over profit in business, and the necessity of serving the consumer
above all else. As Ford insisted in his introduction to the book, the modern businessman must understand that “profit must and inevitably will come as a reward for good service.” And the key to successful manufacturing, he continued, lay in “the process of buying materials fairly and, with the smallest possible addition of cost, transforming those materials into a consumable product and giving it to the consumer.”
⁶¹

My Life and Work
not only sold vigorously, but received positive reviews, with critics describing it as a “unique autobiography” combining nuggets from “a practical idealist's philosophy” with a “human narrative” of the author's life experience. As the New York
Times
noted, the presentation of Ford's philosophy was enhanced by a casual style suggesting “a man sitting near you at his ease and talking earnestly and with a curious sort of impersonal, objective attitude about his life … [and his] principles of living and working.” An adulatory review in
The Nation
praised
My Life and Work
as “one of the most significant books of this generation.” Ford, it stated, clearly explained principles of mass production and showed the wisdom of “taking the desires and the purchasing power of the consumer as the starting-point of all business planning.” He presented an enticing vision of a “Fordized America” characterized by a shorter workday, higher wages, and “a margin of leisure now unknown.”
⁶²

Thus, by the early 1920s, the Ford publicity machine had conveyed his legend into the farthest recesses of American public life. The Dearborn
Independent, My Life and Work,
and a host of newspaper interviews, magazine stories, and press releases kept his name continually before the people. Looking at this barrage of publicity, some observers concluded that a squadron of public-relations people had “made” Henry Ford by molding and publicizing an image. Though not completely inaccurate, of course, this perception missed the essence of the situation. Ford publicist Fred L. Black revealed the truth: “Any Ford legend would start with the boss himself, and it was nursed along by the newspapermen, rather than engineered by any staff at Ford's. This idea that Henry Ford was an ignoramus, and had his smartness due to his public relations men who engineered all his stuff, is
absolutely untrue.
”
⁶³

In other words, Henry Ford largely created his own legend by manipulating the mechanisms of modern publicity. The result—great stature as an oracle in the modern world—proved salutary as he prepared to embark upon a bold new project in automobile manufacturing. By the late 1910s, Ford was poised not only to consolidate his hold on the Ford Motor Company but to enlarge his already huge role in this key sector of the American economy. A new facility began to arise on the banks of the River Rouge, and with it a new prototype for modern industrial production.

In the years following the inauguration of the assembly line and the Five-Dollar Day, Henry Ford completely dominated the American automobile industry. In 1916, his company produced over 523,000 Model T's, or some 32 percent of all cars made in the United States. This was four times the number manufactured by its nearest rival, the Willys-Overland Company, and more than any six of Ford's competitors combined. Manufacturing numbers continued soaring, and in 1919 the company built some 750,000 cars, or about 40 percent of the national total.
¹

Rising production brought declining prices. In 1912, the Model T Runabout sold for $525, but the cost had dropped to $345 by 1916. Ford's competitors lagged badly in bringing inexpensive automobiles to the mass of citizens. A few companies—Willys-Overland, Studebaker, Maxwell, and Buick—offered cars in the $600–1,000 price range; the likes of Hudson, Cadillac, Chalmers, and Oldsmobile presented models from $1,000 to $2,000. Chevrolet, soon to be the low-price division of the General Motors Corporation, launched its Model 490 in the summer of 1915 at $550 to offer some competition. But such moves did little to faze Ford, who continued to manufacture Model T's in unprecedented numbers to dominate the volume end of the market.
²

Highland Park represented the perfection of the Ford system, with thousands of flivvers pouring off its assembly lines every day. By 1915, however, Henry Ford had become frustrated by the limitations of his Crystal Palace. He began to contemplate a scale of production that far outdistanced anything achieved at Highland Park—or, in fact, even imagined in modern industry. He envisioned a manufacturing complex of truly vast proportions, one that would encompass an unprecedented integration of the industrial process and make an automobile complete from raw material to finished product.

But just as he started to move on this front, Ford encountered a serious obstacle within his own organization. Two of the key stockholders in the company objected to his plans and moved to stop them. Thus, before he could create this manufacturing leviathan, Ford had to gain total control of his own company. Typically, he did so by one of the shrewdest maneuvers in American business history.