The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (Vintage) (80 page)

Ford pursued an erratic course in his antique-purchasing. He would pay tens of thousands of dollars for a colonial highboy, and then refuse to spend a hundred dollars on a historically significant item. Harold Cordell found a rare wooden cane from colonial New England with a knob on one end and a small hole drilled in the other to hold a feather. When parishioners fell asleep during a long church service, a deacon would tickle women with the feather or whack men on the back of the head with the knob to awaken them. Cordell discovered one for $200, but Ford refused to pay. Cordell secretly purchased it, however, and eventually put it on display. Years later, when Ford saw the cane and read the placard describing it, he was fascinated. Thereafter, he always took visitors to see it, apparently not realizing it was an item he had rejected earlier. The Americana collection became a great source of pride for him. He liked to play tour guide for guests. “He had favorite spots and pieces all picked out, and would lead them from one to the other, and gave them a little dissertation on this one and that one, and they would go away perfectly happy,” Edward Cutler reported.
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The hundreds of objects streaming into Dearborn began to pile up, first in Ford's office in the engineering laboratory, then in nearby nooks and crannies, and finally in various outbuildings. He secured a storehouse when a factory nearby fell vacant, and throughout the 1920s the three-acre site became the receptacle for this swelling collection of Americana. It also housed a workshop where craftsmen repaired and refurbished some of the
thousands of items in the growing collection. Ford's hobby, however, developed into something much bigger, and he began to contemplate a permanent venue for displaying his artifacts.
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He first mentioned building a museum in 1919, on the way home from the Chicago
Tribune
trial. He had been embarrassed on the witness stand when his scanty knowledge of American history was exposed, but later grew angry about the unfairness of the examination. Ford believed that history, as taught in the schools, was a distorted, even irrelevant subject that dealt only with politics, wars, and wealthy elites. It failed to show how people had actually lived, which for Ford was the essence of history. “I'm going to start up a museum and give people a true picture of the development of the country. That's the only history that is worth observing,” he told Ernest Liebold. “We'll show the people what actually existed in years gone by and we'll show the actual development of American industry from the earliest days.”
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From this germ of an idea, Ford decided to build a museum in Dearborn to house his collection. In 1926, he and Edward Cutler chose a site on a tract of land sitting adjacent to the Ford Engineering Laboratory in Dearborn and only a couple of miles from the Fair Lane estate. Ford secured the services of a Detroit architect, Robert O. Derrick, who suggested a copy of Independence Hall in Philadelphia. Ford loved the idea and secured drawings and measurements of this historic structure from the city of Philadelphia. Derrick planned to correct mistakes in the building that threw things off center, but Ford wouldn't hear of it. “Oh, no!” he exclaimed. “Make it exactly the same, put in all the mistakes.” Derrick drew up plans for a large exhibition hall that included balconies to display artifacts and a basement to contain storage areas, labs, and workshops. Ford balked. Unsettled by the prospect of employees remaining out of sight, he declared, “I could come in and they wouldn't be working. I wouldn't have it. I have to see everybody.” He ordered his architect to revise the drawings to include no balconies and no basement.
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Derrick finally completed his plans to Ford's satisfaction. The replica of Independence Hall (complete with a copy of the Liberty Bell in its tower) was placed as the central entryway to a single-story facility with replicas of Philadelphia's Congress Hall and Old City Hall flanking it at each end of a long redbrick front façade. Behind this neocolonial façade sat a fourteen-acre exhibition hall under one roof, with the whole supported by dozens of pillars placed at strategic locations. In a small ceremony on September 27, 1928, Thomas Edison stuck a spade into a wet concrete cornerstone for the building, left his footprints, and then wrote his name. Over the next few months, the building was staked out, and construction began in earnest in April 1929. By the dedication of the Edison Institute at Light's Golden
Jubilee, the Independence Hall entryway had been completed, along with much of the front façade. Construction of the museum continued well into the following decade; portions of the teakwood floor were not completed until 1938.
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When the museum opened to the public, the huge building was filled with displays that often resembled the world's biggest rummage sale. Ford's staff packed every inch of available space with practical items from daily life in the past. The museum, in the words of one visiting journalist, presented a dream of history “as might have come out of ‘Alice in Wonderland.’ ”

For Ford, this vast assemblage of material served to educate. In 1929, he announced that his museum would be a gift to the American people, the intent of which would be “commemorative and, above all, educative.” “Improvements have been coming so quickly that the past is being lost to the rising generation, and I think it can be preserved only by putting it in a form where it may be seen and felt,” he argued. “At least that is my idea of one side of education and the reason behind this collection.” More specifically, Ford believed that seeing the actual material that had provided the stuff of American development, rather than just reading about it, would make a greater impact. “It helps a student to see with his eyes the practical story of progress,” he explained.
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Even more, Ford was convinced that layers of rich meaning lay embedded in material objects waiting to be extracted. As William J. Cameron once noted, his boss read machines the way other people read books. They “were
like a library to him. He could read in an old machine what the man had, what idea he had when he started it, what he had to work with,” Cameron noted. Ford described how he could examine an object and discover “what the man who made them was thinking, what he was aiming at.” Learning to see the charm and grace in utilitarian objects was part of education. “There's beauty in machinery, too,” he asserted. “A machine that has been run fifteen years tells its own story.”
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Amid his mountains of Americana, however, Ford reserved special affection for one category—fiddles. As a boy, he had learned to play a few tunes on an old fiddle, but he had given up the hobby when he departed for Detroit to study machinery and engineering. By the 1920s, the search for antiques had revived his interest in violins and he began to collect them. Ford's collection became one of the best in America, perhaps the world. Worth approximately $500,000, it included two Stradivarius violins, an Amati, a Guarnerius, a Bergonzi, and a Guadagnini. These instruments were supplemented by a dozen lesser models. All were kept in a steel vault and regularly taken out, treated with a special preservative mixture, and played by a symphony violinist. But Ford treated these priceless instruments with astonishing casualness. He regularly took one home to scratch out a few old melodies—“Turkey in the Straw” and “Home, Sweet Home” were among his favorites—for his own enjoyment. Even more shocking, he loaned out these rare and expensive instruments, on a whim, to anyone who caught his fancy. The recipients of his largesse ranged from skilled concert violinists to amateur musicians who, as guests in his home, might mention their admiration for one of his violins. “Want to take it home and try it? Go ahead,” Ford would likely respond.
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His love of violins also inspired a burst of activity in the realm of country fiddling. In 1923, he crowned eighty-year-old Jep Bisbee, a champion fiddler from Michigan, as “King of the Country Fiddlers” at a contest held in Detroit and awarded him the Henry Ford Gold Cup. An elderly snow-shoe-maker from Maine, Mellie Dunham, next caught Ford's attention. Complete with his flowing white hair and beard, rustic manners, and colorful quotes—“I came to make some money and I make no bones about it, since me and Ma have had honor enough”—Dunham traveled to Dearborn amid much publicity to perform at a dance hosted by Ford. He played one of Ford's Stradivarius violins, with dozens of reporters and photographers covering the event. Using Ford's sponsorship, he went on to became a minor national celebrity as a fiddling craze swept the nation.
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But Ford's personal touch extended into many areas of the museum. Several artifacts from his own life found their way into the collections. Visitors could inspect a steam engine that had been used to run a
threshing machine on William Ford's farm, which Henry had repaired in his youth. There was an old horse-drawn “bandwagon” that had transported Dearborn musicians, including Ford's fife-playing uncle, about the countryside in the late nineteenth century to perform at public celebrations. On the other hand, his pacifism disallowed the display of any weaponry or mementos associated with war.
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Ford's personal involvement extended into all areas of decision-making. Referring to the project as “my Smithsonian Institute,” he wandered through his piles of antiques carrying a light, choosing what to keep and what to discard according to his own iconoclastic hunches and desires. After choosing, Ford would direct the specific placement of these objects on the museum floor. He also made many of the broader decisions about the museum, such as the choice of teakwood rather than oak for the flooring. He was particularly interested in the restoration of old cars. It became a dictum among the staff that Ford's personal opinions ruled the museum. “Mr. Ford had his own ideas of how he wanted things done, and you were liable to get into difficulty if you tried to use your own judgment,” one of them explained.
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In fact, Ford seemed determined to reject altogether any notion of system. He maintained a staunch lack of interest in attempts to classify exhibits. The museum was a “plaything,” and he happily mandated a haphazard arrangement of its antiques. In the formative stage of the project, Harold Cordell visited other museums to survey their organizational schemes and drafted a plan to govern the displays and the nature of future purchases according to thematic categories. Ford ignored it. He also buried a proposal from a curator of the University of Michigan museums—it was endorsed by Edsel—to set up a system of fellowships for graduate students in museum studies to work at his Dearborn institution. In Black's words, Ford “was afraid of bringing in experts whose opinions might run counter to his.” The personal meaning of the relics for Ford was more important than upholding standards of the museum profession.
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Indeed, the museum assumed a central role in Ford's life. By the early 1930s, he seldom came to the Rouge plant and “actually put more hard work into the Museum than he did into the Ford Motor Company,” according to Charles Sorensen. “The Museum was to be his monument.” When Harold Hicks once urged Ford to complete the project, he replied, “Oh, no, I don't want to hurry up and get that done. If I get that done, I'll never have anything to do on this earth. When you don't have anything to do, then you're ready to die.” A reporter from the New York
Times
saw firsthand the industrialist's affection for the museum's artifacts. “Henry Ford looked almost lovingly at the molds in which men made a half dozen candles at a
time and when he turned to point out the good features of a covered wagon,” he wrote.
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As Ford embraced the American past via his museum of everyday life, he contemplated an even more dramatic project. It would involve not just antiques to be savored, but an active re-creation of past life that would present visitors with a feast for all the senses and draw them into fuller participation. It also would provide a form of useful recreation that dovetailed happily with the new leisure culture of tourism in the early twentieth century.