The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (Vintage) (56 page)

Confirmation of their friendship came when Ford played one of his practical jokes on Sorensen. In the mid-1910s, as the pair was conducting an inspection trip of Ford industrial properties, Sorensen received a telegram saying that the tractor plant in Dearborn, of which he was now the supervisor, was on fire and about to burn to the ground. “I was wild. I wanted the train stopped so that I might hire a car and drive to the disaster,” Sorensen recalled later. After thrashing about and yelling for action, he was chagrined to hear from the laughing train official that Ford had paid him to send a fake telegram. Ford's regard also revealed itself in the bestowal of a nickname. Sorensen's dedication to using cast metal instead of forgings won from his boss the sobriquet that would last throughout his life, Cast-Iron Charlie. Sorensen described his association with Ford in his memoir: “We had a business relationship closer than even his family had with him, and in many ways I knew him better than did members of his family.”
⁴⁷

Throughout their years of working together, Sorensen spent much time trying to grasp what made his boss tick. He realized that the task required not reasoned analysis but gut instinct and feeling. “It was useless to try to understand Henry Ford. One had to
sense
him,” he explained. The ambitious Sorensen realized that Ford did not want a tight structure for his company but preferred a more informal system, where competition and achievement meant more than job titles. Sorensen reduced this to a dictum: “Constant ferment—keeping things stirred up and other people guessing—
was Ford's working formula for progress.” Other astute observers confirmed Sorensen's insight. As one of them put it, “It looked to me that Mr. Ford was sitting back there and letting it be the survival of the fittest.”
⁴⁸

Sorensen learned additional lessons that served him well on his drive to power. He appreciated something that other Ford lieutenants, such as Wills, Couzens, Marquis, and Hawkins, ignored. Henry Ford would not abide any rivals in gaining public attention. He “didn't want his staff to be in the public eye. No one else in the organization could stand out above him,” Sorensen pointed out. Those who did so aroused Ford's jealousy, and one by one they fell into disfavor and were eliminated. “My ability to keep out of the public eye was one reason why I stayed as long as I did at Ford while others left,” Sorensen wrote.
⁴⁹

He also understood that working mightily to fulfill Ford's vision, rather than modifying it with his own views or desires, marked the truest path to advancement. From his first days at the old Piquette Avenue plant, Sorensen was able to intuit what his inarticulate boss wanted. “I could sense Henry Ford's ideas and develop them. I didn't try to change them,” said Sorensen. “Mr. Ford never caught me saying that an idea he had couldn't be done.” By the time the new factory was built, according to one observer, Sorensen had distilled his job into “trying to build up the Rouge the way Mr. Ford wanted it to be built up.” Rivals felt that Sorensen's extreme solicitousness toward Ford made him a mere toady for the owner. “That's why he got along with Mr. Ford for so many years,” Joseph Galamb once commented. “He did everything Mr. Ford wanted. He wouldn't stand up for his own ideas.” But Sorensen shrugged off such criticism: “I pinned my flag on Henry Ford and…am proud to have had the label ‘Henry Ford's man.’ ”
⁵⁰

Sorensen made a study of his boss's quirks. After noticing early that Ford did not read blueprints easily, he made tangible models when seeking approval for future projects. His pattern-making experience proved useful for constructing wooden models of automobile parts, such as the Model T's planetary transmission, for Ford to examine. By the time of the Rouge construction, Sorensen had refined this technique to the point of making and displaying a scale model of the entire factory near his office. “I set aside a separate room with large tables on which the Rouge site was laid out to scale…[that showed] what each building would look like,” he related. “I showed the ship canal, docks, and blast furnaces on a scale of one-eighth of an inch with roads, railroads, highways, bus lines, and streetcars all fitted in to the model.” Ford loved it.
⁵¹

He repaid Sorensen's solicitous attitude with much trust and respect. Their friendship seemed genuine, and as the years went on, Ford increasingly depended upon Sorensen's management decisions. Ford liked to operate
behind the scenes, but when forced into the open, he relied upon a stock phrase: “You heard what Mr. Sorensen said.” In
My Life and Work,
Ford made no mention of men who had helped him build his company such as Wills or Couzens. Only one lieutenant was cited: Charles E. Sorensen.
⁵²

Ford appreciated Sorensen's vigorous nature and demanding style. In a 1921telegram, he jokingly advised his subordinate, “Take it easy and do not throw too many things around.” He once remarked to Joseph Galamb, “Joe, we have to have a man like Sorensen in a big organization like this, to raise the dickens once in a while.” But even with this favored lieutenant, Ford played his usual game of competitive tension by deliberately setting P. E. Martin against him. Ford would occasionally warm up to Martin, and that “would irritate Sorensen and get him on the job,” related Mead Bricker. “It was a balance that kept going up and down on either side.” Fred Black detected the same strategy, describing how Ford “would give one of the men a job to do and at a later date he would give the other a job along the same lines…. This is the way Mr. Ford pitted Martin against Sorensen.” The important point, however, was that Sorensen grasped the game, and, rather than grousing or resisting, he played it with consummate skill.
⁵³

One of the least appreciated aspects of Sorensen's relationship with Ford had little to do with issues of production. Sorensen understood his boss's central insight: the overwhelming importance of the new consumer economy in modern America. He knew that Ford had delivered the crucial message that “the wage earner is as important as a consumer as he is as a producer; and that enlarged buying power by paying high wages and selling at low prices is behind the prosperity of this country.” Wholeheartedly endorsing Ford's effort to spread material goods among ordinary citizens, Sorensen argued that the Ford Motor Company “was destined …to demonstrate the superiority of an economy of abundance over one of scarcity, and to begin the elevation of a standard of living to a height never before dreamed of.” In later years, Sorensen even went so far as to favor a guaranteed annual income for all American workers, arguing that it represented “recognition of Henry Ford's principle that the producer is also the consumer.”
⁵⁴

The strengths and weaknesses of Charles Sorensen mirrored those of the mature Ford Motor Company. As an extension of Henry Ford's dominance after the buyout of the minority stockholders, the managerial master of the Rouge embodied the commitment to large-scale production that brought abundance within the reach of millions of Americans. With great flair and determination, Sorensen helped bring to life Ford's dream of democratizing consumption. At the same time, however, his absolute subservience to the owner's desires reflected the uncomfortably dictatorial
quality of Ford's management style. By the early 1920s, the Ford Motor Company was almost completely the expression of one man's views and values. Sorensen didn't care. “Sorensen would always tell me that Mr. Ford was the boss and he knows what he wants,” Harry Hanson related.
⁵⁵

Most Americans probably would have agreed with Sorensen's attitude. As Henry Ford's vision of a massive, vertically integrated production facility came to life on the River Rouge, his fame and influence were unsurpassed in American life. He held absolute control over the largest manufacturing enterprise in the world. He was incredibly wealthy yet remained to ordinary citizens a hero whose every public utterance was a source of fascination. With an image that simply towered over that of his contemporaries, Ford truly became the people's tycoon.

Yet what of the private person behind the public persona? By the time the blast furnaces were bellowing and the smokestacks pouring at the Rouge, Americans were hankering, as never before, for glimpses of Ford's life and activities. But the man's private life was bound to disappoint. His quiet, unpretentious existence appeared determinedly, even eccentrically, old-fashioned.

By the early 1920s, the first biographies of Henry Ford began to appear. They focused on his public life and industrial innovations, sketching out the notable achievements in automobile production that had made the Model T an icon of modern American life. Books such as
Henry Ford's Own Story
(1917) by Rose Wilder Lane,
The Truth About Henry Ford
(1922) by Sarah T. Bushnell,
Henry Ford: The Man and His Motives
(1923) by the Reverend William R. Stidger, and
Henry Ford: An Interpretation
(1922) by the Reverend Samuel S. Marquis told the compelling story of his career. They piqued the attention of tens of thousands of readers throughout the United States.

But these books also delved into another area that intrigued Ameri-cans—the personal life of the industrialist. Sarah Bushnell, for example, informed readers that Ford's “home surroundings were such a factor in keeping his hopes high and his determination unshaken.” Other biographers followed a similar tack. They depicted the great innovator in modern American life, the architect of the assembly line, and the prophet of consumption as a decidedly old-fashioned gentleman at home.
¹

This picture was accurate: Ford's domestic life could have been glimpsed in any middle-class home several decades earlier. He and his family presented a picture of stability and harmony shaped by the Victorian ethic of nineteenth-century America. In the best tradition of the Christian gentleman, he affirmed a personal code of self-control and hard work. According to the venerable tradition of domesticity, he viewed his wife as a paragon of rectitude and depended upon her to manage their home life. A genteel social atmosphere prevailed in the Ford household, which influenced his marriage, his relations with his son, and the general atmosphere of his private life. Edwin G. Pipp and Samuel Marquis, otherwise critics of Ford as a public figure, agreed that his personal life was beyond reproach.

Marquis stressed that Ford cherished “the quiet and seclusion of his home and family” and described his “moral qualities” as “some of the highest and noblest I have ever known grouped in any one man.” Pipp portrayed Ford as “one of the cleanest minded men I have ever known,” adding, “I don't believe America or the world has a man whose personal habits and home life are better.” Similarly, Charles Sorensen later described his boss as “puritanical in personal conduct” and a man who led an “exemplary personal life.” Thus nearly everyone who knew Ford outside the public limelight reached the same conclusion—his personal values were those of an old-fashioned Victorian gentleman.
²

Ford's own pronouncements on character, family, and self-control reinforced this image. “Marriage is a partnership in many things beside love. It is a partnership in life, and life is made up of love and other things which are just as important,” he said in a 1923 interview. “A man's work is as important; character is as important.” In the best Victorian tradition, he also insisted on the sanctity of separate spheres for home and work, women and men. Whereas men were obligated to work hard to earn a livelihood for their families, women's “natural” role lay in domestic affairs, and their “real job in life is get married, have a home, and raise a family.” Labor belonged in the public sphere of production and competition, and should be left there. The man who brought work home “neglects his family and makes human exchange impossible in the home. He defeats the purpose of a home.” A few years later, a writer for
Forbes
spent several days with Ford and noted that he “regulates himself better, I imagine, than almost any other famous man in the world. His private life is a thing apart from his industrial activities and he succeeds, pretty well, in living his own life in spite of the demands made upon him.”
³

The old-fashioned calm and decorum of Ford's personal life seemed to complement the dynamic achievements of his public activities. His private standard of propriety and gentility appeared most clearly, perhaps, in his marriage. This important facet of Ford's life moved into the public spotlight as his fame grew.

In 1923, many Americans were introduced to the most important figure in the life of the nation's greatest industrialist. Readers of the
Ladies' Home Journal
made the acquaintance of Clara Bryant Ford in an interview that detailed many aspects of their home life as well as the history of their relationship and their attitudes about marriage. As the magazine noted, “In all the millions of words that have been written about Henry Ford, there has
been the barest mention of his wife and the part she played and continues to play in his enormous success.”