The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (Vintage) (72 page)

This pattern of paternal domination soon moved from the cruel to the perverse. Henry employed a favorite tactic of divide and conquer by setting other Ford managers against Edsel. The bickering, of course, reinforced his own authority. Most often, Henry chose Charles Sorensen as the foil in this twisted process. The elder Ford would maneuver his son into making a decision on some issue, and then push his tough production manager to make the opposite decision. Ford managers instinctively followed
Sorensen's directions. As one of them said, “There was an understanding that Sorensen bypassed Edsel on decisions.” The situation grew even more complex as it became obvious that Henry Ford was employing Sorensen as a role model for his own son. “Sorensen is being employed here to toughen up Edsel, and that's why Mr. Ford let Edsel go ahead and then had Sorensen stop him,” Ray Dahlinger admitted. Fred L. Black confirmed this. Henry “felt that Edsel had to be harsher, act faster, and be turned into a personality something like Sorensen's. Mr. Ford didn't think that Edsel was tough enough.”
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In fairness, Sorensen was caught in an awkward situation. On the one hand, his own position depended upon the approval of Henry and his domineering instincts pushed him to assert his authority. On the other hand, he was genuinely fond of Edsel and often defended him to his father. In his memoir, Sorensen wrote about his “fatherly feeling” toward the young heir and claimed that he dissuaded him from resigning on several occasions. “I was devoted to him, and he knew it. The only possible fault I ever found in him was that he was too kind,” he noted. “Edsel Ford was a gentleman in the finest, fullest meaning of the word.” With a rare display of sensitivity, Sorensen even grasped the essence of the older Ford's paternal failing: “What Henry Ford was unable to realize was that his son could not be a second edition of himself without being a mere copy of the original.”
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So why did Henry Ford act with such calculated insensitivity, even cruelty, toward his son? In part, his actions stemmed from the same autocratic impulse that slanted all of his professional relationships. A desire for absolute control of the Ford Motor Company had motivated Ford to buy out all other stockholders, to purge the organization of almost all of his old associates, and to pit subordinates against one another from the earliest days of the company. This same impulse now resurfaced to shape his relations with Edsel.

In fact, Ford's autocratic instincts had become so strong that many of his subordinates and associates came to see him as a victim of his success. Howard Simpson, a design engineer who worked closely with Ford for two decades, analyzed his boss's megalomania. “I think he began to get the feeling that he was infallible and his decisions were always right. He depended upon himself instead of depending on teamwork and family spirit in the organization,” he concluded. “Mr. Ford made this into such a personal corporation that he himself was the only source of authority in it.” This need to dominate, so evident in his relationship with others in the company, extended to the treatment of his son.
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But Henry's harsh handling of Edsel also reflected his sense that the
young man was too soft to survive in the rough-and-tumble world of auto manufacturing. He felt compelled to train his son “to be perhaps a little more shrewd, and a little more crafty, and perhaps a little more tricky than he was,” reported Harold Hicks. The father increasingly looked askance at Edsel's sophisticated life—the philanthropy, the art collecting, the vacations in Europe, the enthusiasm for yachting, the golfing—and morally disapproved of Edsel's occasional use of tobacco and liquor. All of this pointed to a soft, weak character, the elder Ford concluded. Henry had come to value “a brutal-type fellow,… who would haul off and smack a guy and then talk to him after,” one Ford manager explained. “He probably wished that Edsel was the same kind of fellow.” Two men who worked closely with Ford in the 1920s and 1930s, William J. Cameron and Frank Campsall, sized up the situation in nearly identical terms: Henry was disappointed in Edsel because he “wasn't tough enough in some situations” and “didn't have enough bold-ness.”
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Henry grew irate about Edsel's choice of friends. The same Detroit elites whom Henry had despised for decades constituted his son's social circle, the younger Ford moving about easily among the fashionable and wealthy in Grosse Pointe rather than the farm and village folk of Dearborn. Henry believed they encouraged the vices corroding his son's character. He complained about the cocktail parties of the Grosse Pointe set and once exploded in anger at the mention of Paul Strasburg, a wealthy young Detroiter who drove one of Edsel's racing speedboats: “Oh, that dirty rotten puke.” “Mr. Ford was always a little leery of people who helped Edsel. He had the feeling that anyone who helped Edsel was trying to work in through [him],” noted an associate. Such concerns swelled when they involved representatives of Detroit's wealthy families. In other words, Henry Ford's class resentment found a target in his own son.
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Henry's attitude toward Edsel contained many elements of tragedy— salutary intentions, flawed perceptions, unintended consequences, misplaced jealousy. Everyone, it seemed, could see this situation except him. Yearning for Edsel to show an independent, even fiery spirit, he crushed any expressions of initiative and, in the words of one observer, “never could realize that Edsel had grown up.” Suspicious of anyone who moved close to his son, he seemed unable to grasp that no father can ever be the sole mentor of a boy. Strangely, Henry seemed bent on replicating his own father's treatment of him in late adolescence, when William Ford had tried to force the mechanically inclined youth to remain a farmer. It was as if he, perhaps unconsciously, wanted his son to revolt as he had and throw off the paternal yoke. So Henry tightened his hold, and family intimates began to notice the
growing strain between father and son. In this sad situation, Henry couldn't help himself—he seemed intent on driving his only son into total acquiescence or open rebellion.
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For his part, Edsel responded to his father's stifling maneuvers with bewilderment, repressed resentment, and long-suffering pain.

In public, he always displayed the greatest respect for Henry, and throughout his career made numerous public statements expressing admiration for his father's achievements, judgments, and values. Edsel clearly deferred to his father. In a 1929 interview, he noted his great regard for Henry in the language of submission and self-deprecation:

Respectful to the point of being awestruck, Edsel refused to rebel.
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Yet he also grew despondent over his father's treatment of him. When Henry derailed one of his projects, according to one insider, “there would be sort of a woebegone expression come over Edsel's face as if to say, ‘Well, what's the use!’ ” Others at the company noticed that he never seemed to be very happy and “always looked to me as if he was wishing he was someplace else…. He didn't seem to have his heart in the job at all.” William C. Klann, who brought the bad news to Edsel that his father had ordered a halt to construction of the Highland Park office addition, reported that a stricken Edsel could only reply, “Well, Bill, you better do as you are told.” That sentence served as a sad epitaph for the son's entire professional relationship with his father.
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Edsel's personal qualities exacerbated the tense relationship with his father. His sensitivity, kindness, and deference clashed with Henry's aggressive style. Unlike the father, who sought the limelight, the son wished to work behind the scenes. When asked to appear at a celebration or public function on behalf of the company, Edsel would demur. “See if you can't get Father to do that. He likes that sort of thing. I don't,” he would say. He kept his emotions under control and presented a sober, reflective demeanor to
the outside world. Clearly, he also sought to have a well-rounded life outside of the company, once telling Fred Black, “I work for this institution, and when I put in my forty hours a week, I like to consider that I have the other time for things in which I am personally interested.” To someone like Henry Ford—an assertive manager and publicity hound who lived and breathed his work—such attitudes must have been infuriating.
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The conflict between Henry and Edsel grew more complicated as it spilled over into broader questions of policy-making at the company. Not surprisingly, the personal differences between father and son translated into a clash of managerial philosophies. Henry continued the modus operandi in place since 1903: he alone made all major decisions in the administration of the company, utility defined the essence of the Ford automobile, and low prices attracted buyers. This philosophy had launched his company toward greatness, and he saw no reason to change it. Like many others, however, Edsel believed that modern industrial corporations, with their enormous size and complex operations, demanded modern management methods. By the 1920s, he was stressing teamwork in managerial decision-making, style in making the Ford car, and sensitivity to consumer desires as the keys to inducing purchases.

This philosophical difference divided company managers. Though reluctant to cross Henry publicly, in private many of them complained about his capricious managerial procedures. Henry, as one said typically, “didn't believe in big organization. He wanted to be the whole cheese and everything had to go through his hands first.” Even Sorensen had to admit that Henry relied upon “hunches and intuition” rather than facts and logic in charting the course of the company. Henry “had this philosophy of conflict where he believed the best way to run a plant was to set the different boys against each other so the best one would win out,” Howard Simpson added. “He never got the idea of teamwork.”
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To these men, the younger Ford's vision of cooperative, team-oriented management seemed much more appealing. “Edsel reasoned out his problems after listening to and tolerating the opinions of others,” Sorensen observed. Some chimed in to approve Edsel's methods of dividing responsibility, listening to ideas, and collaborating. Others even asserted that the promise of Edsel's eventual ascendancy kept many Ford managers from quitting the company. “You always figured that there was one person who was a perfect gentleman, and that some day he was going to run the place, and it would be a fine place to work when he was running it,” Harold Hicks claimed. “You stuck around because of him.” Joseph Galamb put the matter curtly: “You could reason with Edsel…. You couldn't reason with Edsel's father.”
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But in management issues, as in all other things, Edsel invariably deferred to Henry. He told associates, “Well, after all, my father built this business. It's his business.” Often sitting silent in important meetings as Henry dominated, he created an image of meekness among many managers. “The impression I got was that the father was completely dominant over the son,” William Verner noted. “That stayed with me.” Edsel “allowed himself to be submerged by his father,” said Charles Voorhess.
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The increasingly tense relationship put a strain not only on their personal lives but on the management of the family enterprise. It became emblematic of a critical problem confronting the Ford empire by the mid1920s. As Edsel Ford and most other company operatives realized, the Model T was meeting the needs of ever-fewer American consumers. It had become an albatross, and they yearned to remove it and develop a new model. Henry Ford, emotionally wedded to his beloved flivver, resisted mightily. For once, however, the son did not back down, but engaged in a protracted struggle with his father. The result was a battle for the heart and soul of the company that, when the smoke cleared, left casualties piled up in Dearborn.

On January 20,1926, company vice president Ernest C. Kanzler presented Henry Ford with a six-page typed memorandum. Carefully prepared over several weeks, and marshaling its author's considerable intelligence and powers of persuasion, this document directly addressed a major problem facing the Ford Motor Company. Kanzler began on an elaborate note of deference that was almost obsequious: “Please, Mr. Ford, understand that I realize fully that you have built up this whole business, that it has been your battle and your creation.” He also confessed to misgivings about writing the memorandum, because “I am afraid it may change your feeling for me, and that you may think me unsympathetic and lacking in confidence in your future plans.”