The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (Vintage) (62 page)

In 1918, Frank Parker Stockbridge, a journalist writing for
World's Work,
was surprised to hear a heartfelt outburst of sentiment from Henry Ford. Stockbridge had visited Highland Park, observed complex assembly lines and huge machines, seen thousands of laborers at work, and talked at length with the man who directed this extensive operation. Thus he was surprised when Ford stopped in front of the farmhouse he had lived in as a boy and declared emotionally, “I belong here. I am a farmer. I want to see every acre of the earth's surface covered with little farms, with happy, contented people living on them.” Some years later, a reporter for
Forbes,
after spending considerable time with the master of River Rouge, felt a similar pang of cognitive dissonance. Ford's personality, he concluded, “is almost altogether rural. When you first meet him you think that he is a mechanic with a bent for farming; later you decide that he is a farmer with a bent for mechanics.”
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These writers had discovered the great irony that the central designer of the modern American industrial order was in love with the virtues of rural life. This was no sudden development. Although Ford had physically fled the countryside as a youth to pursue mechanics, part of his heart remained behind. During his adulthood, this emotional attachment became steadily more evident. After spending time with Ford in 1912, Elbert Hubbard wrote, “Instinctively he is a farmer, a lover of the great out-of-doors, and is on good terms with the birds, bees, butterflies, flowers and trees.”
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In 1916, John Reed was similarly struck by Ford's rural sympathies. When the sociological department discovered that Russian immigrants were saving money to return to the motherland and buy farms, Ford was delighted. “That's fine!” he replied. “I wish they'd all do that. I'd like to get two-thirds of the population of the earth back on the land.” Moreover, Ford himself seemed a product of Midwestern rural stock and was fully imbued with such values: “puritanical narrowness, individualism run rampant, boundless energy, and a naïve political idealism.” Reed noted that Ford avoided Detroit's sophisticated social circles and preferred “sitting on a neighbor's back porch of an evening and talking things over with the farmers.”
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Around the same time, Ida Tarbell was astonished to hear Ford describe his dream for the eighteen thousand men working at his Highland Park plant. “I'd like to move them all out onto the land right now,” he declared. “If they could have two weeks of out-of-doors planting this spring, two or three weeks more in haying time, help in harvesting next fall, they would be better workmen, better men, and there would be more food raised at cheaper prices.” Tarbell toured Ford's thousands of acres of farmland in the Dearborn area and listened as he extolled the virtues of rural life. She concluded, “Whatever else Henry Ford might be, inventor, organizer, manufacturer, his real motive power was love of the soil.”
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By the 1920s, Ford was consistently promoting rural life in interviews and public statements. “The farmer … lives amid conditions that make for sanity of mind,” he told
Success
magazine in 1923.”He lives under the sky, he deals with the soil, he knows the flawless and beautiful order of nature's law.” Many farm journalists made a pilgrimage to Dearborn during these years to visit Ford on his estate and discuss agricultural issues. Magazines such as
Farm and Fireside, Successful Farming,
and the
Farm Journal
sent writers to interview Ford, and they returned with stories describing his rural childhood, love of the land and its products, and determination to assist farmers in leading fuller and more prosperous lives. This image of the industrial magnate as “country boy” became an integral part of the Ford legend.
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Sentiment constituted part of Ford's veneration of farm life. In a tradition dating back to Thomas Jefferson and the earliest days of the United States as a nation, he proclaimed the farmer as the backbone of the American republic. For Ford, rural America was the real America. As he told the Chicago
Tribune,
cities like New York and Chicago did not really represent the United States: “America is out there among the old village sites, the small towns, and the farms.” But an economic rationale also informed Ford's veneration for farming. He argued that, although agriculture, transportation, and manufacturing complemented one another in sustaining American prosperity, “the origin and sustenance of all is agriculture.” Ford's 1922 message to company sales representatives reiterated this position: “Farming is and always will be the foundation on which the economic growth of our nation depends.”
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In 1925, Andrew S. Wing, editor of
Farm and Fireside,
captured Ford's affection for American farm life. After a series of lengthy interviews with Ford, he informed readers that “at heart he is still a Michigan farm boy. I am convinced that he has a great affection for country life and all that goes with it.” Wing toured the Ford farm, inspected its dairy herd, flock of sheep, and ponies, and talked to those who worked its thousands of acres under cultivation.
He noted the presence of a lovely old barn and witnessed “five teams of horses plowing corn in one field.” Ford concluded the interview in a manner that revealed his deep rural attachment. He asked Wing if any old numbers of his magazine were available. “I'd like to get hold of a bound volume of some of the old issues,” he explained. “I used to read
Farm & Fireside
when I was a boy.”
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In the early 1910s, Ford inaugurated old-fashioned “neighborhood threshing bees” that first convened at the farm of his cousin John Ford in Dearborn. Then they progressed to the adjoining farms of longtime friends and neighbors. Large work crews of Ford employees would labor all day at the harvest, and then join together at threshing tables for convivial meals. Henry himself often joined in this harvesting activity. Orla Ford, a male relative who also participated, described how the Ford farm crew would use its harvesting equipment and then pause for lunch. “Just before the meal, a limousine was sent to the various nearby farms to pick up the wives of the working crew, and they too were treated to the same hearty meal. Henry often would be there at that time to meet his friends.” Ford seemed to have a natural affinity for farm folk.
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During the 1900s, Ford began accumulating thousands of acres of forest and farmland in the Dearborn area. Entitled the Henry Ford Farms, this operation was managed by Ray Dahlinger with much direction from Ford himself. Grain, especially wheat, provided the major crop, although there was also a sizable dairy operation. In 1917, the success of the Ford Farms prompted construction of a large grain elevator in Dearborn, and three years later the Ford Flour Mill was built nearby. It not only milled flour for commercial distribution but sold flour directly to employees of the Ford Motor Company.
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Ford's sentimental attraction to the land seemed odd in light of his championing the industrialized society of mass production and consumption that had undermined it. His populism explained part of his motivation. As numerous statements made clear, he idealized farm life as a counterweight to urban financial power. Drawing upon the traditional language of nineteenth-century populism, he told John Reed that he wanted to help farmers gain control over their land and liberate themselves from debt. “What I want to do is make the farmer as independent as I am; independent of the trusts, independent of the banks, the railroads,” he declared. Throughout the 1920s, Ford continued to insist that agriculture and finance were diametrically opposed, “one productive and the other manipulative, pulling separate ways. One lives off increase, the other off interest.” Ida Tarbell, who probed his ideas on such matters in 1927, reached a clear conclusion about his populist sensibility. “He began with the soil and he has
never lost his conscious connection with it…. It was the farmer, not the banker in the cities, in whom he was interested.”
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For all of his affection, however, Ford wanted to reform rural life. In the same spirit with which he built the assembly line at Highland Park, his desire was to revolutionize its work processes. As Andrew Wing observed, “He thinks of farming primarily in terms of efficiency, and his standards of efficiency are industrial standards.” In short, Ford was an unabashed advocate of power-farming.
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Throughout the 1920s, Ford proselytized for agricultural mechanization. To Judson C. Welliver of
The American Review of Reviews,
he talked at length about the need for the farm to keep pace with technological advances. “My father bought a harvester in 1881,” Ford said, “and I bought one last year. There was no difference except father's was rather better.” He showed Welliver how farm implements such as plows and disk harrows were being tested at the Ford Farms. The Model T, in Ford's mind, had opened new horizons and “given the farmer a chance to get acquainted with the world, to see what is going on around him, to become a social being.” If the Model T had liberated the farmer from the isolation of place, more sophisticated agricultural machinery would liberate him from the drudgery of toil.
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In
My Life and Work,
Ford stressed this theme. On the subject of the traditional American farm, he argued, “Power is utilized to the least possible degree. Not only is everything done by hand, but seldom is a thought given to logical arrangement.” In contrast, the Ford Farms used machinery, pursued the efficient organization of labor, and saw productivity rise markedly. “We are not farmers—we are industrialists on the farm,” Ford explained. Mechanization would dramatically improve the farmer's life by decreasing the amount of physical labor. “Power-farming is simply taking the burden from flesh and blood and putting it on steel,” Ford wrote. Since hours of labor could be reduced dramatically, the rest of a farmer's time could be spent in other kinds of productive activity or in leisure. “Farming is too seasonal an occupation to engage all of a man's time,” he believed.
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Ford's preoccupation with power-farming appeared in his strong support for the production of tractors. Two youthful prejudices—his hatred of horses and his enthusiasm for steam-powered machines—made the development of a motorized farm vehicle one of his first mechanical projects. “The first thing I ever set out to build was a tractor. I never could see any excuse for the way agriculture is carried on,” Ford observed. “Nothing could be more inexcusable than the average farmer, his wife and their children, drudging from early morning until late at night.” The tractor, he believed, would relieve this exhausting routine.
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As early as 1905, while still in the Piquette Avenue plant, Ford had begun experimenting with tractors. He secured an old house and carriage barn located a few blocks from the factory and set up a development team under Joseph Galamb. Eventually, they produced three tractors with a four-cylinder engine adapted from the Model B automobile, and then experimented with a machine based on the Model T—lightweight, mobile, inexpensive, and using the flivver engine. In the early 1910s, Ford tried to integrate tractor production into the new Highland Park plant, but the board of directors was cool to the idea. In 1915, he organized a separate company, Henry Ford & Son, and set up a production facility in Dearborn, overseen by Sorensen. By 1916, a prototype, the Fordson tractor, had emerged as a compact, simple machine with a relatively light frame of chrome-carbon steel and a 20-horsepower engine.
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Production of the Fordson tractor escalated steadily. During World War I, the British sought to mechanize farming as a way both to increase agricultural production and to free up manpower for the armed forces, and Sorensen negotiated a deal for the British government to purchase eight thousand Ford tractors. In April 1918, the first Fordson tractors for domestic use were produced. Ford presented the first two to his old friends Luther Burbank and Thomas Edison. By 1920, over ninety thousand Fordsons had been built; by 1924, the company was producing 750 per day. In 1927, production figures for the year reached 650,000.
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Throughout this period, Henry Ford used the bully pulpit to promote his tractor to American farmers. This machine “will eliminate drudgery and people will go back to the farm,” he argued in good populist fashion. “I want to see the day when the country will assume the ascendancy over the city in the affairs of men.” He also appealed to efficiency. “What a waste it is for a human being to spend hours and hours behind a slowly moving team of horses when in the same time a tractor could do six times as much work,” he wrote in
My Life and Work.
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Ford's belief in agricultural modernization went far beyond machinery, however. By the 1920s, he had become a disciple of scientific advances that would transform the nature of farm production and place the farmer side by side with the industrialist as a tribune of modernity. He became an enthusiastic advocate of “chemurgy,” or the application of chemistry to develop new uses for agricultural products. “Everything that is produced from the soil can be used for some purpose,” he announced. Describing cows as “the most inefficient creatures in the world,” he charged Ford chemists with developing synthetic milk. He pioneered attempts to produce alcohol for motor fuel by distilling it from agricultural crops. He experimented with extracting rubber from nontropical domestic plants. He developed plastics
from the cellulose in cotton, wood pulp, corn, wheat, hemp, and ramie. Perhaps his most useful experiments involved the soybean. Ford scientists devoted years of research to the uses of this versatile crop and discovered scores of applications, ranging from oil to food, fertilizers to plastics, cloth to synthetic milk.
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Ford also advocated the development of waterpower for rural electrification. Generating dams would allow the country to “develop its waterpower everywhere, keep them [farmers] from monopoly and exploitation, and lay bases for an industrial revolution through electrification.” He insisted that the rivers crisscrossing the United States provided nearly limitless opportunity for producing cheap electricity in the countryside. Beginning in the late 1910s and extending well into the 1930s, Ford authorized the construction of small plants along various rivers in Michigan to supply automobile parts such as valves, headlights, carburetors, and ignition coils. “Why, we are putting nine dams in the little River Rouge here, and I don't know how many hundred horsepower it will finally produce,” he said in a 1921 interview.
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