The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (Vintage) (70 page)

At the same time, however, Ford had second thoughts about the excesses of modern consumer society. Older, cherished values of hard work and self-restraint were endangered by frivolous self-indulgence in materialism. Ford believed that the purchase of consumer items, if pursued imprudently, could be socially inebriating in the same way that the undue imbibing of alcohol produced drunkenness. Ford began to promote a version of the consumer ethic that appeared archaic compared with the one galloping forward in America.

He criticized buying on credit, an increasingly popular technique in the modern consumer economy. In an earlier day, Americans had known the value of a dollar and maintained a strong sense of utility. They spent money when they could afford it and made sound decisions about buying useful, long-lasting products. But now people had fallen under “the spell of salesmanship” as “the American people seem to listen and be sold; that is, they do not buy…. Things are pushed on them.” Ford believed that the easy extension of credit facilitated this impulse and did harm by “taking up income before it is earned.” Such a practice, by saddling the consumer with debt, enriched lenders “at the expense of public benefit.”
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Similarly, he dismissed installment buying, another popular practice for
the purchase of more expensive consumer items. Allan Benson, who interviewed him at length on this topic in 1927, reported that Ford foresaw a slippery slope where unsuspecting consumers would slide into a morass of indebtedness. “Ford believes that the whole system of deferred payments, not only on automobiles but on anything else, is bad for business and bad for the country,” Benson wrote. He felt that, though installment buying brought goods to people who ordinarily could not afford them, this practice proved dangerous in the long run, because consumers “cannot buy as much as they used to when they paid cash. They cannot buy as much because they are in debt as far as they can go and part of their current income goes to pay the 'finance charges' upon what they bought last year.”
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Ford also viewed advertising, an endeavor that American businessmen increasingly saw as the lifeblood of a consumer economy, with suspicion. He drew a distinction based on utility—ads that provided information about worthy goods were desirable, whereas those that merely promoted images about unworthy goods were undesirable. “Advertising?” he replied to a newsman's query in 1921. “Absolutely necessary to introduce good, useful things; bad when it's used to create an unnatural demand for useless things, as it too often is.” “A good thing will sell itself,” Ford declared. “We must make good things in this country, and not do too much talking about them. You've just got to let people know where to get them, and that's all.” In 1926, he rejected his company's promotional campaign with an angry denunciation of advertising: “It's an economic waste and I never did believe in it!”
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Thus several fears—of debt, of unearned bounty, of the triumph of salesmanship over substance—kept Henry Ford from a full-blown endorsement of the modern consumer ethic. These concerns reflected his desire to hold on to older traditions of producerism, self-control, and hard work even while encouraging the new impulses of commodity purchase, self-fulfillment, and leisure activity. Ford Motor Company's capricious marketing policies in the 1920s reflected its leader's increasingly ambiguous attitude about American consumer values.

Its handling of advertising was consistently erratic. At Henry Ford's insistence, the company had discontinued all paid advertising in 1917, a policy it maintained for the next six years. This policy reflected the booming sales of the Model T and Ford's conviction that ads were unnecessary, but it also expressed his belief that he could generate free publicity whenever he wished and that this constituted the best kind of advertising for his car. The company, however, demanded that Ford dealers advertise at the local level as part of their contract. The majority did so throughout this period to the tune of about $3 million per year.
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Then, in 1923, the company suddenly reversed course and resumed advertising on a massive scale, becoming one of the biggest advertisers in the country over the next three years. With great fanfare, it announced the hiring of the Norton T. Brotherton agency to supervise an annual expenditure of up to $7 million. In fact, Ford would spend nearly $15 million on ads during this period. This was an attempt to bolster sagging sales of the Model T, which had failed to respond to other measures such as price cuts, nickel-plated accessories, and a palette of body colors in addition to the traditional black. Part of Ford's campaign focused on reaffirming the company's image as a national treasure. A series of double-paged advertisements in newspapers and magazines throughout the country carried the headline “A Nation's Institution Pledged to a Nation's Service.” Beneath it appeared a promise “to insure, not only for the present but for years to come, that more and more people may benefit in greater prosperity, happiness, and leisure through low-cost transportation.”
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But Ford also linked its automobile with the most modern impulse for self-fulfillment. A series of advertisements pictured the Model T as an instrument for satisfying all of the desires—for recreation, travel, adventure, social advancement, romance, style—that fueled the drive to purchase goods. The most prominent ad featured the slogan that had been personally approved by Henry Ford, urging buyers to use the money they saved on the Model T to buy other consumer products: “Buy a Ford and
Spend
the Difference.”
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Other advertisements from 1923 to 1926 suggested the emotional yearnings and social aspirations that could be met by buying the Ford product. Some ads appealed to style, stressing that the Model T sedan had become a “better looking, roomier car” with “a stylish sweep to its body lines.” Other ads conjured up visions of social mobility, such as those that pictured the Ford coupe amid sparkling images of consumer abundance in a luxurious ballroom and described it as specially suited to “the needs of the salesman and professional man.” Here was a car, the text noted, “reflecting the good taste of its driver, and fitting profitably into a wide range of activities.” Special ads appealed to a new audience for the automobile: women. Some of them invoked an older, reassuring idea of the woman as family manager by picturing the Model T as a safe, sturdy vehicle to meet the needs of mothers and children. But others were directed at emerging notions of female independence, such as the one promising “Freedom for the Woman Who Owns a Ford.” It featured two women gathering colorful sprigs of autumn leaves at the edge of the woods as their car sat in the background. “To own a Ford is to be free to venture into new and untried places,” the text said. Finally, a raft of ads appealed to the ethos of recreation,
travel, and vacations that played such an important role in the new culture of consumption. As one of them promised, “You can, literally, get 'recreation‘—be 'made over’ again, when your physical self is rested, your energy and your strength conserved by the use of this Ford Runabout.”

With such pledges to revive weary businessmen or enhance opportunities for women, Ford advertising drew connections between the Model T and a modern life of abundance, leisure, travel, health, and personal fulfillment. The company recognized that an ethos of immediate gratification inspired the process of consumption. To those who hesitated at participating in this cultural bonanza, Ford counseled abandoning restraint. “Delay invites disappointment. Why wait? Buy now!” urged one ad. “Now Is the Time!” said another. “You who have been promising yourself a Ford car, saying it was ‘only a question of time’—should buy NOW!”
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Despite such full-blown appeals to consumer values, sales of the Model T continued to slide, and Henry Ford decided in 1926to abandon advertising once again. In an attempt to save money and lower the price of his car, he abruptly killed the advertising budget even while competitors such as General Motors and Chrysler poured additional resources into theirs. Ford told his dealers to fund any advertising they wished to advance. “What Will Take the Place of Advertising in Ford's Marketing Scheme?” asked
Printers' Ink,
the advertising journal. Ford provided the answer—“a price concession to the public is the very best kind of advertisement.” Thus Ford reverted to his old logic of fear, figuring that such promotional appeals wasted company funds and encouraged bad habits among consumers at the same time.
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As with advertising, the company's policies regarding credit and installment buying followed an uneven, foot-dragging course. It refused to offer a time-payment plan to Model T buyers for many years because, in the words of a company spokesman in 1921,“Ford products sell so readily.” In 1923, however, the company responded to popular credit programs offered by competitors by establishing the “Ford Weekly Purchase Plan.” Consumers could choose a Ford model from a dealer, pay a set amount of money every week, and have it deposited in a local bank to draw interest. When sufficient funds were accumulated, the sale would be consummated and the consumer would pick up the automobile. Although promotional material claimed that the Ford Weekly Purchase Plan “opens the way for millions of wage-earners and their families to enjoy the benefits and advantages of automobile ownership,” such was not the case. Clearly, it was a savings plan rather than a time-payment plan, because it did not allow the buyer to possess the car until it was fully paid for. Not surprisingly, consumers responded unenthusiastically. Many Ford dealers, frustrated by the company's failure to establish a genuine installment program, set up their own credit policies by
working through local banks. The Ford Motor Company lagged behind its competition in developing this key mechanism in a modern consumer economy.
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The company was obviously falling out of step with the march of modern American consumer culture, and Henry Ford's statements only underlined that fact. In 1928, he ventilated his ambivalent, cranky attitude toward modern consumer values in an article entitled “When Is a Business Worth While?” Writing in the
Magazine of Business,
Ford celebrated the opening of a new age of consumption. For millennia, people had struggled to provide the staples of existence—food, shelter, clothing—but in recent decades, that picture had fortunately changed. “Automobiles, bathtubs, and telephones are now simple necessities,” he observed. “Buying begets buying, if the things are there to buy.” In modern America, incomes were rising, purchasing power was growing, and new buyers were entering the market daily, while those already there were moving up into higher brackets. This trend obliterated the old notion of limited consumer dollars for which businessmen must compete. “There is no consumer's dollar,” Ford pointed out. “Thinking of consumers as having definite incomes is only going back to the old days when the saturation point for goods was supposed to be fixed.” Besides, traditional values that restrained buying habits and desires were disappearing in the mobile, fluid society of the modern United States. As Ford explained, “In former days a new kind of article was opposed just because it was new, but now it is likely to be welcomed just because it is new.”

Yet he was deeply worried about consumer excess. Though recognizing that manufacturers must meet the expectations of the public, he resisted selling mere images or catering to the whims of buyers. Instead, he wanted attention to focus on producing basic products in quantity to keep prices low for consumers. Providing such “service” was more important than flashy marketing. Ford's words clearly reflected a stubborn, old-fashioned loyalty to substance over style. “Changes in the design of articles … are not lightly to be undertaken,” he wrote. “The greater pressure for change comes always from the salesmen who are trying to resell old purchasers instead of going out for new purchasers. That pressure has to be resisted.”
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This tension between forward-looking consumerism and concern about modern buyers' self-indulgence became a central issue in Ford's company by the late 1920s. More than abstract theorizing was at stake. Ford's ambivalence colored the anguished, increasingly angry debates in the Dearborn headquarters about the fate of the Model T. It also influenced— indeed, infected—one of the most important relationships in Henry Ford's life.

“Henry Ford's greatest achievement was changing the face of America and putting the world on wheels,” Charles Sorensen once declared. “His greatest failure was his treatment of his only son, Edsel.” Many others who observed the relationship between father and son over the years agreed. Edsel, a sensitive and diligent boy, idolized his father as he rose through the ranks of the Ford Motor Company to assume its presidency in 1919. But Henry, jealous of his own prerogatives and suspicious of his son's “softness,” sought to toughen up his offspring by undercutting his decisions and fomenting rivalries. Growing tension between Henry and Edsel became entangled with the question of replacing the Model T with a newer model as the two Fords lined up on opposite sides. The result was a personal as well as professional crisis.
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