The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (Vintage) (60 page)

ABOVE
:
Union organizer Richard Frankensteen being beaten by Ford thugs at “The Battle of the Overpass” in 1937

BELOW
:
Harry Bennett and Henry Ford in 1939

ABOVE
:
President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Henry Ford, and Charles Sorensen during FDR's visit to the Willow Run bomber plant in 1942

BELOW
:
A 1943 family photo taken a few weeks before Edsel's death. Seated left to right: Charlotte Ford, Clara Ford, and Henry Ford. Standing left to right: Henry Ford II, Eleanor Ford, Katrina Kanzler, Anne Ford, Josephine Ford, and Edsel Ford.

Like many women from respectable families, Clara cultivated an interest in education and self-improvement. When the Fords moved into their new Edison Avenue home, she began accumulating a library of her favorite books, and continued the practice when they moved into Fair Lane in 1915. She particularly favored the traditional masterpieces of English literature, and publishers such as Scribner's and Houghton Mifflin regularly sent her purchase lists of appropriate titles. She read aloud to Henry, catering to his tastes by selecting books such as
Bambi
or, in later years,
The Yearling.
She subscribed to a number of women's magazines
—Good Housekeeping, Garden Magazine, Ladies' Home Journal, Vogue
—and by the 1920s and 1930s, she had become a regular moviegoer and a devoted fan of humorous radio shows such as
Jack Benny
and
Amos ‘n’ Andy.
¹⁸

Like Henry, Clara also loved music. In the 1890s, the Fords purchased a player piano, while they lived at Bagley Avenue, and upon moving into the Edison Avenue house bought a Steinway mahogany grand piano, a Themodist-Metrostyle player piano, and a Victrola record player. The Fords added a pipe organ when they occupied Fair Lane. They listened to music on many evenings on the player piano or the Victrola, and Clara enjoyed exercising her musical talents by singing and playing the organ. A journalist who interviewed Mrs. Ford in 1927 wrote, “She plays very well and sings in a soft, ingratiating voice; her slender hands bespeak the musician.”
¹⁹

But Clara Ford's unassuming personality found its truest expression in the hobby that became a passion during her adult life—gardening. She had loved flowers and plants since her youth. At Edison Avenue, she supervised a program of extensive landscaping and the building of a greenhouse. Henry's niece Catherine Ruddiman, who spent several months there in 1909–10, described her aunt's extensive garden with its phlox, roses, water lilies, ferns, geraniums, heliotrope, and a bright specimen known as the red-hot poker. At Fair Lane, Clara ordered three large greenhouses and began designing extensive landscaping schemes that culminated in her fabulous rose garden. Extending off to the north of the residence for some five hundred feet, it contained a pergola perched at one end and a series of small oval ponds, and held some ten thousand rosebushes. Clara spent several hours a day with her gardens, and this enthusiasm led to her election to the presidency of the Dearborn Garden Club in the 1920s.
²⁰

By the late 1920s, her horticultural interests had prompted involvement
in a public project—roadside vegetable and fruit markets. Convinced that most farmers needlessly wasted excessive produce every year, and considering the increase in automobile travel, she saw roadside markets as a logical way to meet the needs of each group: they would provide better, cheaper vegetables and fruit to motoring consumers while bringing cash to the farmer. Clara designed an inexpensive roadside structure of whitewashed boards with neat shelves, a green roof, and a small porch. She displayed it at the North American Flower Show in Detroit and stocked it with produce from the Ford farms, along with homemade jelly and apple butter. She urged farmers nationwide to establish such structures along nearby roads and highways. “I am sure people will buy more quickly in the country provided they can do so from neat, well-kept markets where they receive courteous attention,” she contended.
²¹

Clara's interests quietly expanded along with her husband's growing fame and fortune. By the mid-1910s, she had gradually stepped outside the domestic realm to embrace a number of charitable, philanthropic, and reform projects. Like Henry, she held strong antiwar views, and in 1915 donated $10,000 to the Women's Peace Party to help finance a national campaign. A convert to the cause of women's suffrage, she was elected vice chairman of Dearborn's Equal Suffrage League and worked diligently in the successful 1918 campaign to gain the vote for women in Michigan. Clara had never been political, but an advocate for the female vote told her that just because she was fortunate enough not to need the vote there was no reason to deny it to women who did. Clara's response typified her unpretentious nature: “She was right. Her arguments for it were so convincing I became deeply interested in the cause.”
²²

By the early 1920s, Clara was promoting several social-reform projects. She served as the primary backer of Williams House, a Detroit home for young female delinquents aimed at helping the “border-line girl—the girl who is in imminent moral danger.” This clearinghouse assisted social-service agencies throughout the city by lodging and counseling girls who were in danger of running afoul of the law while plans were being made for their futures. She became an advocate for the mentally ill, writing letters to state legislators in 1921 urging them to pass legislation “making further provision for the feeble-minded in Michigan.” A few years later, she attended a conference on social problems in Detroit sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation as a representative of the Girl's Protective League.
²³

In fact, Clara's generosity with reform groups and charitable organizations became a source of frustration for her husband, who tended to believe that hard work provided the solution for most social ills. One day the ladies
of the Detroit Community Fund visited Fair Lane and appealed for funds. Ford listened politely but remained noncommittal. “You can take a handful of coins and you can throw them at the ceiling. All that stick go to charity, and all that fall to the ground goes in someone else's pocket,” he told an associate. Typically, however, his wife reacted differently and donated $50,000.
²⁴

Nonetheless, as Clara Ford made clear in her 1923 interview, such public projects stood second to family duties. When the
Ladies' Home Journal
asked if she had ever desired a career outside the home, she responded, “No, no. Motherhood is the best career.” A woman's proper role, she insisted, should be played out on the family stage. “A woman puts her life into being a home maker,” Clara explained. “I saw to it that Mr. Ford was never bothered by anything, that his energy wasn't wasted on things that could as well be done by others…. It's part of the woman's job.” As another interviewer concluded, none of her various activities “compare with the vital job of being Henry Ford's wife.”
²⁵

Clara's views on child-rearing honored a similar tradition. Like generations of Victorian parents dating back to the early nineteenth century, she stressed the necessity of moral instruction and character building among the young, assuring the
Ladies' Home Journal
that “sometimes even a spanking is necessary” for a recalcitrant child. At the same time, however, she proved receptive to newer notions of parenting, which stressed helping, understanding, and reasoning with children while encouraging “fun” in the home. “Times are different, and manners are different, and if children are more free it is because they must be so, because they know so much more than we did,” she acknowledged in 1923. The modern world created a new atmosphere for young people, with “the automobile, the moving pictures, and country clubs,” and parents needed to realize that it had become harder to keep kids at home. “If we helped our children more with their problems, didn't scold, and didn't antagonize them, we would have more success with them.” Clara argued that being a good wife and mother now meant “being cheerful and generous and understanding of your husband and your children…having fun in the home, planning for things that will make your children want to stay home because home is so interesting.”
²⁶

Clara's loyal support of her husband was repaid in kind. “Anyone who knows the Fords knows that Mrs. Ford discusses nearly everything with Mr. Ford, reads to him a great deal, talks business matters and publicity with him, entertains reporters and correspondents at the home when they are to write about him,” reported E. G. Pipp. Charles Sorensen described them as “close-knit and devoted a married couple as I have ever seen.” She was Henry's “balance wheel,” in Sorensen's words. “When he would listen to no
one else, he listened to her.” At the same time, Clara's authority over the affairs of the Ford household stood unchallenged. She made all major domestic decisions, and her husband deferred. Henry's philosophy was “peace at any price.” Edward Cutler, who became familiar with the Fords by the mid-1920s, reported that Henry once told him, “‘I never had a fight with my wife in my life. We never had a battle.’ I kind of questioned that, but I found out afterwards
why
he never had a battle,” Cutler noted. “He always ran away, got out of the room.”
²⁷

But Henry Ford seldom failed to express his appreciation to the woman with whom he shared his life. In 1923, the
Ladies' Home Journal
asked him to explain the secret of his success. “Every great man has a great wife behind him,” he replied immediately. Sixteen years later, at age seventy-six, Henry had not wavered in this belief. He told a reporter for
Liberty
magazine that the crucial factor in his life had been “a loyal wife who had helped him every minute—a woman who had never wavered in her faith in him, with whom he had had glorious comradeship through more than half a century.”
²⁸

Clara and Henry Ford shared an old-fashioned marriage that radiated security, stability, and emotional comfort and lasted for fifty-nine years. The same old-fashioned ethos of genteel propriety that influenced Henry Ford's marriage also appeared in his personal values, which, like everything else connected to him, increasingly gained public notice. As Ford's stature grew in the 1920s, so did his determination to preach the gospel of self-regulation. He was delighted to take the public stage as a Victorian moralist, and he did so most famously as an opponent of two of Americans' favorite pastimes.