The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (Vintage) (57 page)

That Clara had remained a mystery figure—even amid the explosion of publicity accompanying her husband's involvement with the Model T, the Five-Dollar Day, the Peace Ship, and the Chicago
Tribune
trial—revealed much about her character and her values. So, too, did the fact that her national debut came in the pages of a popular magazine devoted to the home life of American women. For she clearly shared the values of her husband regarding the appropriate female role. If Henry embodied the attributes of the Victorian “Christian Gentleman” and appeared as the hardworking breadwinner who deferred to the authority of his wife in the home, Clara represented those of the “True Woman,” the morally pristine figure who loyally supported her husband's worldly endeavors while managing domestic and familial affairs. She was, to use the affectionate title that Henry had bestowed upon her many years before, “The Believer.”
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Born on April 11,1866, Clara Bryant grew up on a farm along Monnier Road, a few miles northeast of the Ford homestead. She was one of ten children. As a girl, Clara attended Greenfield Township District No. 3School, a one-room schoolhouse with eight grades, where she absorbed the virtues taught in the
McGuffey Readers.
As the eldest daughter in the family, she bore much responsibility at home for cooking, cleaning, and caring for her younger siblings. Clara graduated from the eighth grade in 1883, at age seventeen. Like many young people in the Dearborn area, she liked to attend dances at inns and roadhouses that sat along the main highways. On one of these occasions, the 1885 New Year's dance held at the Martindale Four Mile House, she met Henry Ford, a young man some two years her senior. He made no particular impression, but when they met again a few weeks later at another dance, Clara was struck by his demonstration of his special watch, which showed both standard time and sun time. As she would tell friends later in life, this serious young man seemed “different.”
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Clara and Henry began to keep company at the social events typifying rural life—husking bees, dances, picnics, church socials. She also was friends with Henry's sister Margaret, through their participation in the Bayview Reading Circle in Greenfield. A pretty, petite young woman, Clara charmed her suitor with a quiet, proficient, yet friendly manner and particularly impressed him when she visited a work site where he was pulling tree stumps with a steam engine and they sat side by side on the huge machine as he worked. Their mutual attraction grew steadily, and they became engaged on April 19, 1886. On Valentine's Day before this happy occasion, Henry wrote a love letter that adorned his own awkward prose and inventive spelling with a sprig of poetry:

The couple was married on April 11, 1888, Clara's twenty-second birthday, at her parents' home.
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They spent the first year of their marriage in an old farmhouse on property owned by William Ford, Henry's father. Meanwhile, Henry, who at this time was cutting and milling lumber from a piece of family land, began work on what became known as the Square House. Built with the help of a finishing carpenter, and from his own lumber, this charming one-and-a-half-story dwelling with a wraparound porch was designed by Clara. In 1889, the Fords moved in, and the young wife enjoyed not only her flower and herb gardens but the small pump organ Henry bought so she could play the simple music that they both loved.
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In the late summer of 1891, however, this idyllic rural scene changed dramatically. Henry informed Clara of his growing belief that a gasoline engine could be used to power a horseless carriage, and explained that he needed to learn more about electricity and mechanics to advance this project. He did not tell her he had already accepted a job working at a substation of the Edison Illuminating Company in Detroit. Clara patiently listened to Henry's plans and agreed to move to the city. She would tell a confidante years later that the decision to leave the farm and their lovely little house “almost broke my heart.” She also confided that, though she did not understand Henry's horseless-carriage project, “if he said such things could be done this was sufficient for her. She had complete confidence that he could do them.” It was at this time that a grateful husband dubbed her “The Believer.”
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The move to Detroit launched a period in the Fords' lives that must have tested the resolve of even the most devoted believer. Over the next decade, the couple lived in a series of eight apartments and small houses in Detroit while Henry pursued his mechanical studies, built a prototype of the horseless carriage, tried unsuccessfully to start two automobile companies, and dabbled in automobile racing. Though they were never poor, the
strained finances and succession of residences must have been trying for Clara, the conscientious young woman who was burdened with managing the Ford household. She never complained, although she confessed in later years that when she went to the bank to withdraw money to pay for Henry's automobile parts, “she wondered many times if she would live to see the bank balance restored.” Clara's unquestioning support reflected her strength of character, but it also expressed the Victorian female ideal she had learned as a girl—a wife provided emotional support and domestic stability for her husband when he retreated to the domestic scene exhausted and bloodied from the battles of the marketplace.
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Clara fulfilled another great injunction of Victorian femininity when she became a mother on November 6, 1893, with the birth of her only child, Edsel Bryant Ford. Dr. David H. O'Donnell, a young physician who came to the Ford house on a bicycle because he could not yet afford a horse and buggy, delivered the baby, and later described Clara as “a wonderful patient.” “Mrs. Ford didn't give me any trouble at all. She never complained,” he wrote. He received payment of $10 for the service. The first photograph of Clara and Edsel, taken several months later, in the spring of 1894, showed a proud young mother dressed in a crisp, high-collared dress of dark cloth, smiling gently as a pudgy, wide-eyed Edsel sat on her lap.
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Clara proved as devoted to her son as to her husband, and she held the young family together throughout the decade as Henry's career progressed by fits and starts. She demonstrated a warm, sure touch with children. Helen Gore, a neighbor child, recalled later that Clara did all of the cooking for her family and would patiently supervise the activities of her son and his playmates while Henry was gone during the day. “Edsel used to have a little table in the kitchen and we used to have great fun when she would make soup. She used to put the alphabet in it. That was how I learned the alphabet. We used to pick out the letters,” Gore recalled. Mother and son were close, sharing a host of activities, many of them involving the Bryant family. Surviving pictures show the two-year-old boy posing in his father's vest and hat in 1895 on the front stoop at the Bagley Avenue residence as his laughing mother steadies him; Edsel sitting on a rocking horse surrounded by Clara, her mother, and two sisters at the Bryant farm in 1896; Edsel dressed in a sailor suit at the Ford farm surrounded by family members; Edsel and his cousins, along with the Bryant sisters and their mother, at a Belle Isle picnic in the summer of 1902; Edsel mugging for the camera at the Bryant farm as a straw-hatted Clara stands behind him preparing to fire a pistol into the distance.
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With the founding of the Ford Motor Company in 1903, and its rising
success over the next few years, Clara's domestic burden began to ease. Prosperity allowed the Fords to buy five adjoining lots at the corner of Edison and Second Avenues between 1905 and 1907. Construction of a dwelling began, and the Fords moved into the completed structure in 1908. An elegant, roomy house built in the Italian Renaissance Revival style, the redbrick structure with stone trim featured a large outdoor arbor and a garage with a second-story shop for Henry and Edsel. Clara supervised the furnishing of the house, which was far from ostentatious. Sorensen credited Clara's modest style: “It was far below what she could have had. She furnished it herself and it was not overdone.”
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By the early 1910s, the incredible success of the Model T had brought great wealth and fame to the Ford family. It also created problems. A glut of gawkers, job seekers, inventors seeking capital, and reporters lined up daily at their Edison Avenue residence. Frustration finally prompted the Fords to seek a new home. For a time they considered moving to the fashionable Detroit suburb of Grosse Pointe, but neither felt comfortable at the prospect of mingling with the city's elite. Clara pushed to settle in the area where they had grown up. “If we could build the house we want, I'd like to build out in Dearborn,” she told Henry. In 1914, construction started on a large limestone house in the middle of a two-thousand-acre tract the Fords had accumulated over the past several years on the banks of the River Rouge. They named their estate Fair Lane. The decision to remain close to family roots revealed much about Clara's, and Henry's, fundamental characters.
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Clara Bryant Ford projected a dignified, genteel air that was sweet-tempered yet reserved. According to a reporter who interviewed her in 1927, “Mrs. Ford is the most genuinely modest woman in the world.” Clara was intensely proud of her husband's achievements and fiercely protective of his interests. “Henry has been covering himself with glory and dust,” she wrote of his racing adventures in 1901. “Henry has worked very hard to get where he is.” In the early days of his business career, she served as a sounding board as he confided his plans and problems, and offered advice and encouragement. Colleagues who visited the Ford family were struck by her knowledge of company affairs and the unwavering confidence she expressed in her husband.
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But Clara's temperament also contained a streak of iron. Though ambitious for her husband and supportive of his endeavors, she stood up to him on the rare occasions when she thought it necessary. Several times during their marriage she issued ultimatums to Henry. In 1924, for instance, when he was nurturing presidential ambitions, she discouraged the move on the practical grounds that he was temperamentally impatient with restraints,
burdened with a meager education, and a wretched public speaker. Clara even made her sentiments public. At a Daughters of the American Revolution convention in Washington, delegates repeatedly described Ford as presidential timber, and one speech referred to Clara as an ideal First Lady. Obviously annoyed, she rose to her feet and addressed the assembly: “Mr. Ford has enough and more than enough to do to attend to his business in Detroit. The day he runs for President of the United States, I will be on the next boat to England.” Upon returning to Detroit, she firmly instructed Henry's lieutenants to scuttle further efforts in this direction. Years later, when the Ford Motor Company had been racked by labor conflict and an intransigent Henry refused to negotiate with the United Auto Workers, Clara intervened once again. She told her husband that if he refused to sign a labor settlement to stop the bloodshed she would leave him. Such episodes revealed that Clara, usually content to remain in the domestic sphere, stepped into Henry's world when convinced she was morally right.
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Among those privy to the Fords' private life, Clara's frugality seemed her most noted personal trait. She had been raised to believe that nothing should be wasted, and never forgot the lessons of her youth. As a young wife and mother, she managed the small family's affairs with great thrift and efficiency. Even after Henry became a millionaire in the 1910s, Clara continued her careful ways. When she heard that her husband was paying more for a haircut than she thought acceptable, she asked chauffeur and bodyguard Ray Dahlinger to monitor the situation. Even more famously, she insisted upon darning her husband's worn socks. Though appreciating the gesture, Henry detested darned socks and mounted a discreet resistance. According to close friend Harry Bennett, “Many times when he was with me, Mr. Ford would have me stop the car in front of some store and ask me to go in and buy him a pair of new socks. Then he would change in the car, tossing the pair Mrs. Ford had so carefully darned out the window.”
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Clara's careful way with a dollar was mirrored in her sense of fashion, which, like many other matters, she approached with restraint and dignity. Short of height—she stood about four feet eleven inches tall—and inclined toward plumpness by middle age, she disdained flashy clothes and jewelry, even when her husband's income would have allowed the most extravagant purchases. As a young woman in the 1880s and 1890s, Clara favored the typical garb of a modest Victorian lady: high-necked blouses or dresses of crisp linen with ankle-length skirts, and long puffy sleeves set off with a ribbon bow tie or brooch. She changed with the times, and adopted sleeker dresses with a shorter hemline, along with sweaters and jackets, by the 1920s, although she still chose dignified colors and wore minimal jewelry. Because of her diminutive appearance, Clara often wore tall hats that were exaggerated and occasionally outrageous—elaborate, elevated concoctions of feathers, ribbons, flowers, and various gewgaws. As she grew older, she became increasingly fond of furs because of their effectiveness in fighting the cold Michigan winters.
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