The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (Vintage) (79 page)

In fact, Ford's anti-Semitism, called to account in the late 1920s, did not vanish. Instead, it retreated to the private realm. Understandably reluctant to discuss his views after the Sapiro trial, Ford occasionally let his real feelings slip. A couple of years after his apology, Liebold suggested that he sell the presses from the idle
Independent,
but Ford objected. “No, don't sell them,” he said. “I made a deal with these Jews and they haven't lived up to their part of the agreement. I might have to go back after the Jews again.” By the mid-1930s, Ford had resurrected the old charge that Jewish financial interests were maneuvering the world toward war. In public interviews he attributed rising tensions in Europe to the nefarious activities of “international financiers” and “money lenders.” Once in a while he dropped the euphemisms and spoke frankly, as he did in 1940, when he leaned over and said to Dave Wilkie, the automobile editor of the Associated Press, while looking at a new army pursuit airplane, “I still think this is a phony war made by the international Jewish bankers.”
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Most notoriously, in 1938 Ford accepted an honor from the German government of Adolf Hitler. According to Liebold, the German Embassy contacted him to inquire whether Ford would accept “The Order of the Grand Cross of the German Eagle.” Liebold asked his boss, who replied, “You tell them that I'll accept anything the German people offer me.” Thus, on July 30, he became the first American citizen to be decorated with this award, the highest bestowed upon a foreigner by the Reich, in a ceremony held in his Dearborn office. After two German consuls hung the beribboned cross and star around his neck, according to the Detroit
News,
they read “a congratulatory message from Reichsfuehrer Adolf Hitler felicitating Ford on his seventy-fifth birthday and citing him as a pioneer in making automobiles available to the masses.” Present at the ceremony were Ernest Liebold and William Cameron.
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Henry Ford's anti-Semitic crusade of the 1920s started a long slide in his public career. To be sure, he had endured many earlier controversies, such as the Peace Ship, the sociological department, and the Chicago
Tribune
trial. But Ford's personal popularity had always sufficed to overcome difficulties. Now, however, his mindless bigotry against Jews indelibly stained his reputation and raised questions about his moral and ideological character that would linger for the rest of his life. When combined with the crisis in the Ford Motor Company regarding the decline of the Model T, the debacle of the Dearborn
Independent
revealed a man who had passed his peak.

On October 21, 1929, Henry Ford presided at the largest, most lavish celebration in the history of his organization. He brought his old friend Thomas Edison to Dearborn to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of one of the scientist's greatest inventions—the incandescent lamp. “Light's Golden Jubilee,” as Ford termed the event, saw many dignitaries descend upon his headquarters for a special day of celebration. President Herbert Hoover officiated at the ceremonial banquet, and Owen D. Young, chairman of General Electric, served as toastmaster. A high-profile assemblage gathered for the event, including Will Rogers, Madame Curie, Orville Wright, Jane Addams, Henry Morgenthau, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and Walter P. Chrysler.

A day earlier, the Edisons and the Fords, along with a few other dignitaries, toured a special landmark. At great cost and trouble, Ford had overseen the reconstruction of the laboratory, library, and machine shop from Menlo Park, New Jersey, where Edison had worked during the late nineteenth century, when he developed the lightbulb. Edison was overwhelmed by the faithfulness of the restoration, saying over and over, “I wouldn't have believed it. It's amazing.” He was especially astonished at the attention to detail—the rebuilding of the nearby boardinghouse, the transfer of an old elm-tree stump sitting outside the lab, the transport of seven railroad cars full of “the damn New Jersey clay” that had surrounded his old facility. He grew misty-eyed and once sat down for several minutes in one of his old lab chairs, because “the memories of eighty-two years were flooding back.” For his part, Ford simply expressed great admiration for his hero and friend. As he told reporters, “We are ahead of all other countries today, simply and solely because we have Mr. Edison.”
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The day of the event presented several memorable moments. Speaking into a microphone in Berlin, Albert Einstein conveyed his congratulations
to Edison via the special transoceanic telephone circuit of the American Telegraph and Telephone Company. President Hoover praised Edison's invention and joked that the electric light relieved “the human race from the curse of always cleaning oil lamps, scrubbing up candle drips, and everlastingly carrying one or the other of them about.” Edison attempted to speak but was overcome by emotion. Regaining his composure, he thanked the assembled guests, reserving special appreciation for one of them. “As to Henry Ford, words are inadequate to express my feelings,” he said. “I can only say to you that, in the fullest and richest meaning of the term, he is my friend.”
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The high point of the event came when Hoover and Ford, along with Francis Jehl, Edison's oldest living assistant, accompanied the inventor to the Menlo Park laboratory. Every household in the United States had been asked to turn off the lights on this special evening. Then Edison and Jehl reenacted their first successful trial of the incandescent bulb. According to the breathless description of radio commentators: “You could hear a pin drop in his long room. Now the group is once more about the old vacuum pump. Mr. Edison has two wires in his hand. Now he is reaching up to the old lamp. Now he is making the connection. It lights!” At this point, electric lights were switched on all over the nation to illuminate the darkness and dramatize the impact of Edison's invention.
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Indeed, the live radio coverage of Light's Golden Jubilee played a central role in the proceedings. This event prompted tremendous publicity, and a chain of over one hundred radio stations carried the entire program coast to coast. Shortwave stations picked up the signals and broadcast them overseas. Hosted by Graham McNamee and Philip Carlin, who provided a moment-by-moment description of the proceedings, Light's Golden Jubilee was listened to by millions in the United States and abroad. The vast audience heard detailed accounts of the famous figures in attendance and the speeches of Hoover and Young, and turned on their own lights at the dramatic moment when Edison touched the two wires together.
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But this event did more than keep Henry Ford's name before the public. It also highlighted a passion in his life that had developed in old age. Light's Golden Jubilee dedicated the Thomas Edison Institute, a historical complex that aimed to recapture the American past. It included a large museum designed to hold the Americana that Ford had been collecting for the previous decade. The Menlo Park reconstruction was part of an American village being built to hold houses, farms, machine shops, and public buildings from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Henry Ford had fallen in love with a certain vision of the American past, and he was determined to bring that vision to life in Dearborn.

This project sentimentalized the America of an earlier age. More fundamentally, however, Ford's great museum and reconstructed village reflected his conviction that history was the story of technological progress. Edison's lightbulb provided an inspiring example of the history that Ford wanted to memorialize. “I want to place here for all time the actual tools and housing used in what I consider one of the greatest achievements in the interest of human progress,” he explained to the press a few days before the celebration. Engines, furniture, implements, and vehicles illustrated “the value to human progress of scientific research, unflinching persistence in the quest of the new and useful, and industry that is never discouraged by temporary failure. This is real history.” And real history, not the fanciful accounts of the past that one encountered in textbooks, was what Ford wanted Americans to appreciate.
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The irony was striking. As this pioneering entrepreneur entered the twilight of his life, he seemed to turn away from the monuments of industrialism he had labored to create over the previous decades. Within shouting distance of the Rouge plant, with its tens of thousands of workers laboring at assembly lines, Great Lakes ships unloading at the docks, and coke ovens spewing out molten steel, lay a quiet rural town filled with horse-drawn wagons, corner drugstores, and blacksmith shops. Intellectually, Henry Ford was able to connect the two. But emotionally this task proved more difficult. He increasingly preferred Greenfield Village to the Rouge, and that was where he spent most of his time.

Henry Ford's interest in commemorating the American past arose almost imperceptibly from a series of events in his personal life. His pursuit of collecting
McGuffey Readers
starting in 1914 had been followed by the restoration of his boyhood home, beginning in 1919. Over the next seven years, Ford oversaw the restoration of the home, the barn and other outbuildings, and much of the farm equipment. He ransacked the area looking for original items and searched antique shops for duplicates. He set workmen to digging around the old house, and these amateur archaeologists discovered a number of artifacts, including a rusty pair of skates that he delightedly identified as having been his as a boy. The workmen also uncovered several dish fragments that were used to reproduce his mother's china pattern. Ford was a stickler for authenticity, determinedly hunting down an exact replica of the woodstove that had sat in the parlor and searching throughout the Midwest to find a red carpet runner identical to the one that had been on the stairway.
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His burgeoning interest in antiques led Ford to the Wayside Inn, a venerable colonial building near Sudbury, Massachusetts, that once had sheltered George Washington during the Revolution. It had fallen into disrepair by the early 1920s, and after a preservation trust contacted Ford, he decided to save the historic property. In 1923, he purchased the dilapidated building and ninety acres adjoined to it for $65,000 and started an extensive renovation of the old structure. Distressed by the presence of several seedy businesses nearby, he soon bought some twenty-five hundred acres of adjoining land and cleared them away, also restoring a gristmill, two sawmills, and an old country store. Eventually, Ford's agents purchased and rebuilt several other old New England houses on the Sudbury site and paid to reroute a busy highway. All told, Ford spent a bit over $2 million on the Wayside Inn project site during the six years of renovation, from 1923 to 1929. His success inspired him to complete a similar project with the Bots-ford Inn in Michigan.
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These endeavors fed what became a full-fledged mania for antique collecting. Ford began collecting household furnishings, machinery, clothing, and vehicles from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In contrast to most antique-hunters, he sought not rare or valuable items but everyday objects. His staff of buyers fanned out nationwide as he authorized the purchase of innumerable items. In 1924, representatives of the old colonial capital of Williamsburg, Virginia, approached Ford and offered to sell him the entire town for $5 million in return for his sponsorship of a restoration campaign. He briefly considered the offer, but demurred, and John D. Rockefeller later took up the project.
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Ford put together a team of acquisition agents. William W. Taylor, an elderly New Englander, supervised the hunt for old treasures in the Northeastern section of the country; Frank Vivian, a Ford Motor Company executive, focused on the Western states. Israel Sack, an antique-dealer who specialized in furniture, sold many items to Ford throughout the 1920s. Charles Newton, a lawyer who handled many of the legal transactions entailed in Ford's historical projects, often accompanied him into the countryside to look for old pieces of farm machinery. Harold Cordell, a clerk in the Dearborn office, became the full-time bookkeeper and coordinator for the project.
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Ford's antique-buyers, fortified with their patron's unlimited funds, sent old items to Dearborn. But they were not always pleased with the result. When Israel Sack visited Dearborn, Ford greeted him, “Oh, Mr. Sack, I want to show you the wonderful job my cabinetmakers did repairing a desk. They put on sixteen coats of shellac.” The antique-dealer saw workmen sanding the finish off an eighteenth-century desk and applying varnish until
it gleamed like new. When a horrified Sack protested that the process was ruining the patina of the piece and destroying its value, Ford grew angry. But a few days later, after Sack explained in more detail, he understood and ordered a halt to such restorations.
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Ford himself often took a hand in the purchases. He would drop into antique stores and, according to an associate, “would walk around and say, ‘I want this, I want that.’ And before he got through, we'd have a carload out of that doggone place with no reference to price at all.” When something caught his fancy, he would habitually say, “Pack it up and send it.” Not surprisingly, Ford felt a particular sympathy for the small shopowner, who would often bring out his wife and line up his children to meet the famous visitor, who would buy out his whole stock. He liked to traverse the Michigan countryside looking for old engines and farm machinery. A. G. Wolfe, a family friend, occasionally went with Ford on these jaunts and witnessed his enthusiasm. Once, Ford spied a rusted old steam engine lying in the weeds in a rural area near Big Bay. He had operated one as a youth, and so decided to buy it. “I think he paid $500 for it. He should have got it for $50, but I think he wanted to help the fellow out a little bit,” Wolfe reported. “It took us about three days to get the thing on the truck; it was heavy.”
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