The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (Vintage) (68 page)

Rogers' humorous commentary on Ford reached its apex in “The Grand Champion,” a 1929 essay appearing in the
American Magazine.
He satirized the vogue for success in the 1920s and the public's fascination with wealth, noting, “Why, the rich is getting so common now that it's almost a novelty to be poor.” Rogers focused on champions, however, a category he defined as being the best at any one thing, whether it was Bobby Jones and golf, Houdini and magic, or Al Smith as a second Columbus because “he discovered 14 million Democrats in this country when it was thought the race was practically extinct.” Rogers nominated as grand champion, however, a man who had influenced the world more than anyone: “our plain old friend, Mr. Henry Ford.”

The choice set off a landslide of Rogers one-liners. Ford, “along with Brigham Young, is the originator of mass production.” Ford was responsible for more building in the United States than any other man, since garages and filling stations now outnumbered schools and churches. Ford's cars “made more business for an undertaker than any other one thing, with the exception of Prohibition.” Ford created the two biggest problems in modern
America: first, “where am I going to park it,” and second, “after it's parked (and you come back and get it), how am I going to get home in it through the traffic?” Ford “has taken the Police Force of the towns off watching criminals and got ‘em standing in the middle of the streets waving their arms.” Ford had driven all levels of government into debt, since “we owe more for roads than we do for persuading the Germans to ‘please leave Belgium.’ ” Ford must be credited for the fact that there were “23,078 Ford radiators boiling over on the hills of this country every day” while there were “43,000 people just holding up the hoods of Fords looking at them, 42,598 with the same expression.” Ford had allowed thousands of entrepreneurs to get rich “by just making things that go onto Fords after they are supposed to be finished.” Ford had “caused more profanity than the Congress and Senate combined.” Rogers concluded, “A marriage certificate and a Ford car are the two cheapest things known. Both lead to an ambition for something better.” That Rogers was confident that his vast audience was familiar enough with Ford to get the jokes provided a clear sign of the industrialist's enormous popularity.
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By the late 1920s, Henry Ford had reached the pinnacle of his reputation and influence. The basis of his popularity, of course, remained the Model T, which the Ford factories continued to produce by the millions throughout the decade. In addition, Ford's activities as an industrial reformer and erstwhile political candidate, along with his image as a folk hero and success icon, made him perhaps the most esteemed private citizen in the United States. His thoughts on every conceivable topic provided grist for the journalists' mill on almost a daily basis, and his comments were a surefire attraction for readers throughout the country. Stories about him and by him appeared regularly in nearly every major magazine and newspaper in the United States.

In 1926, Charles Merz described this phenomenon as “The Canonization of Henry Ford.” “We are approaching the point where anything is all right if Ford does it,” he wrote in a magazine article. Merz pointed out that the steady stream of press releases from the Ford Motor Company was supplemented by journalists' determined solicitation of Ford's opinion, as well as his penchant for making off-the-cuff pronouncements when changing trains or attending public gatherings. Ford, Merz wrote with only slight exaggeration,

Ford was no longer just the head of an industrial empire. He had become a seer and a sage. As Merz observed, “Here he is, the man who made the Tin Lizzie, now busily interpreting Twentieth Century industrialism to itself.”
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At the very moment of Ford's triumph, however, several deep-seated problems created an undercurrent of uneasiness. Amid the chorus of praise for his unprecedented achievements, a few jeers and catcalls could be heard. A small coterie of critics questioned Ford's treatment of labor, his managerial practices, and his reputation as a reformer. As this criticism gained adherents, the suspicion arose that Ford's sterling reputation as an innovative industrialist may have rested on a shaky foundation.

Signs of a brewing storm also appeared on the practical front. After reaching new levels in 1923, sales of Ford's beloved Model T began to decline in the face of growing competition. The General Motors Corporation, under the dynamic leadership of Alfred P. Sloan, developed a modern marketing-and-organizational scheme in the 1920s. It created automobiles for consumers in every price range—Chevrolets, Pontiacs, Oldsmobiles, Buicks, Cadillacs—offering, according to its slogan, “a car for every purse and purpose.” Its research staff, led by Charles F. Kettering, developed better tires, brakes, and gears; a “styling section,” headed by Hollywood designer Harley Earl, improved the appearance of its cars. By the mid1920s, these innovations had culminated in the yearly model change, which was introduced with great fanfare by the company's advertising division. The General Motors Acceptance Corporation offered loans that allowed consumers to buy on credit. At the managerial level, Sloan developed a corporate structure of “centralized decentralization” that protected the entrepreneurial independence of its divisions while integrating them within an efficient governing structure. General Motors' sales began to soar, as did those of Chrysler, the final member of the “Big Three.” Organized by Walter Chrysler in 1925, the company developed a popular medium-priced car with a high-compression engine, purchased the Dodge Brothers Company in 1928, and presented the low-priced Plymouth that same year. Firmly grasping third place in the automobile market, Chrysler began to bite into Ford's share of the market.
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Such pressure from competitors caused an internal division in the Ford organization, wherein a determined group of managers, including his own son, pressured Henry Ford to admit the obsolescence of the Model T and develop a new model. In addition, an economic recession early in the decade
inspired a reorganization of the system by which the company distributed cars to its dealers, a move that caused bitter and lasting resentment. Meanwhile, an ambitious Ford proposal to harness the waterpower of the southeastern United States aroused growing opposition that eventually scuttled the project. This array of difficulties worked steadily, if imperceptibly, to undermine Ford's public standing.

Thus the Ford Motor Company showed serious signs of strain at the moment of its greatest ascendancy. External criticism of its emperor was mounting while internal problems in his organization were festering. The discrepancy between Ford's towering reputation and brilliant success of his company, on the one hand, and the malignant problems in his empire, on the other, were becoming harder to ignore. Before long, the resulting tensions reached a crisis point.

The influence of the Ford empire extended widely by the mid-1920s. The Model T provided its foundation, of course, and in 1923 the company reached its highest point of production by making and selling two million automobiles. The addition of trucks and tractors drove total sales figures well above that number. Looking at the numbers from another perspective, since about 1918, Ford had controlled at least 40 percent of the American automobile market, and that figure generally held steady throughout the first half of the 1920s.
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The booming market in the United States was augmented by the internationalization of the Ford product. Sales of Ford vehicles outside the United States climbed steadily after World War I, from fifty thousand in 1919 to ninety-one thousand in 1925. Even more important, the Ford model of mass production, high wages, low prices, and widespread consumption, or “Fordismus,” had become all the rage in Europe by the mid1920s. In Germany, an infatuation with Ford influenced the public discussion. The German translation of
My Life and Work
sold rapidly, and at least a dozen books on Ford and his industrial innovations appeared. German engineers and government officials visited the Highland Park and River Rouge plants and departed awestruck by their scale, efficiency, and order. A vigorous debate over the merits of Fordismus sprang up in the German industrial sector, with both supporters and opponents agreeing that this system, whatever its merits, stood at the cutting edge of modern economic life. Similar public discussions, although less intense in nature, also took place in France, Britain, and Italy.
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The most striking instance of Fordismus, however, appeared in Russia. The Bolshevik philosophy of Lenin and the capitalist philosophy of Ford may have seemed miles apart, but in fact their interests and ideologies intersected at several points. At the outset of the decade, the Soviet government ordered a shipment of Fordson tractors to help address the crop failure and famine that were devastating the economy. Over the next few years, it would purchase about twenty-five thousand tractors, and Russian peasants came to see the Fordson as a magical machine. In addition, the Soviet government viewed Ford as a revolutionary figure who had overturned tradition and transformed the industrial process. His “Fordizatsia” was a system that could bring inexpensive, durable goods to the masses. The Soviets sent dozens of engineers and technicians to be trained at Ford factories in Detroit, unsuccessfully tried to entice Ford to build a tractor factory in Russia, and eventually lured the company into a cooperative venture. Ford consultants spent several months in Russia in the late 1920s overseeing the construction of two large factories in the cities of Nizhni Novgorod and Moscow to build Ford cars and trucks. Ford managers also assisted with upgrading several Soviet tractor and automobile factories.
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The importation of thousands of Model T's further spread the Ford name, and translated versions of
My Life and Work
and
Today and Tomorrow
were devoured by the Russian public. By the mid-1920s, Henry Ford had become a household name and emerged as a kind of popular hero. When a writer for the magazine
Outlook
traveled to Russia in the summer of 1927, he was startled to see signs of Ford's popularity everywhere. “The most popular word among our forward-looking peasantry is Fordson,” Leon Trotsky stated in a speech. “The peasant speaks of the Fordzonishko (dear little Fordson) gently, lovingly.” At a village wedding along the Volga, the reporter observed the gaily costumed bride, groom, and wedding party sitting in a cart as they were pulled along to the celebration by a Fordson tractor. When the villagers discovered the journalist was an American, they bombarded him with questions: “Who was this man Ford, anyway? Where and how did he live? Was everyone in America as clever as he?” An Englishwoman touring Russia in 1926 observed Ford's name on large banners carried by workers in parades.
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In the United States, the powerful expansion of the company, along with the tremendous publicity surrounding Henry Ford, reached new highs in the 1920s. There were fawning articles in popular magazines such as
Good Housekeeping
and
McCall's,
and admiring treatments in technical journals such as
Industrial Management.
Business magazines like
Forbes
and
Nation's Business
surveyed his management practices; journals of opinion such as
The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, The Nation, Cosmopolitan, Current Opinion,
and
The Literary Digest
debated the merits of his social and political views. Ford gained praise as an educator because of the Henry Ford Trade School in Dearborn; his purchase of an Atlantic freighter to convey vehicles to Europe—of course, he doubled the existing pay scale for the crew— attracted attention as a revolutionary move. Besides the large numbers of readers who bought Ford's
My Life and Work
and
Today and Tomorrow,
millions more encountered them excerpted in
The Saturday Evening Post.
His opinions, business philosophy, social commentary, and assessment of the future pervaded the public arena. As Charles Merz noted, “Henry Ford is our most quoted citizen.”
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But signs of trouble had appeared. Sales of the Model T had begun to dip. After the two-million mark in 1923, company production slipped to 1.87 million vehicles in 1924 and 1.675 million in 1925. In 1926, despite two substantial cuts in price, the number fell to 1.465 million. And the competition was gaining. In the same year, despite a price
increase,
the General Motors Chevrolet model nearly doubled its sales. The Ford share of the American market shrank noticeably, to about 33 percent, and the falling sales trajectory predicted a drop to 25 percent the following year. This decline raised fears among managers that its famous car was losing its appeal among American consumers. Though the notion was nearly impossible to comprehend, the Model T seemed in danger of becoming a relic.
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