The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (Vintage) (86 page)

He assured readers that a single word pointed the way to economic salvation: “Work!” Owners of businesses and factories, Ford urged, “have to go back in and run them. They have to think about getting ahead…. They
have to go on improving things and making them work.” But he offered no specifics as to
how
bankrupt or capital-starved entrepreneurs should do this. To those out of work, Ford served up reassurances. “The way to stop unemployment,” he asserted, “is to give these people something in place of relief. That will stop relief entirely. They'd get along.” As to
how
they were to get along with no income, he simply said, “People know how to get along in a country like this. Nobody's going to starve in America.” He dismissed the suggestion that desperate citizens might resist the abolition of relief, suggesting, “Oh, that's just revolution talk. Just give them a chance at making a living and see how quick they'll grab it.”

Ford made the astonishing claim that present conditions offered great prospects for the small businessman. “You have to start your own business and look after it yourself,” he instructed. “Where there was one opportunity when I was a young man, there are thousands now.” He even seemed to think that failure offered opportunity. “Why, those homeless boys, those homeless boys riding around in box cars … Why, it's the best education in the world for those boys, that traveling around,” he observed of the thousands of hobos tramping about the country. “They get more experience in a few months than they would in years of school.” Ford's conclusion underlined the mindless quality of his optimism. “It's all right,” he assured readers, “things are all right, but people have to start working again—and most of them will have to be self-starters.” For millions of Americans unable to find jobs or driven from their homes in despair or struggling to find their next meal, such nostrums must have appeared surreal.
²¹

Throughout the Great Depression, Ford continued pushing the same solution of production, self-help, work, and village industries. His muddled reading of this catastrophe reflected the old-fashioned aspects of his ideology. Obviously, his loyalty to traditional nineteenth-century values had remained strong even as he developed novel notions of mass production and consumerism. Ford's traditional mind-set also produced another important consequence. Observing the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt after 1933 and his innovative use of the national government for social and economic engineering, Ford bridled. The New Deal, he decided quickly, violated fundamental American values. With a typical combination of stubbornness and conviction, Ford dug in for a protracted battle with advocates of activist government.

In 1933, Henry Ford stood nose-to-nose with the new administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt. One of the chief executive's new agencies had tried
to impose a code of competition on the automobile industry. Ford, unlike other automakers, refused to cooperate and vigorously defended his right to conduct business in a free, unencumbered market. The administration retaliated by threatening to withhold the symbol of national cooperation, the Blue Eagle, from display at Ford plants or on Ford automobiles. “Hell, that Roosevelt buzzard!” a fuming Ford responded. “I wouldn't put it on the car!” This reaction typified Ford's increasingly bitter opposition to the New Deal and his fervent defense of an older set of ideals glorifying individual initiative and enterprise.
²²

Ford's opposition to Roosevelt's administration and programs did not take long to develop. In the immediate aftermath of the President's inauguration in March 1933, he publicly wished the new government well and adopted a wait-and-see attitude regarding its policies. Privately, he was less sanguine. When Ford and a group of company executives listened to FDR's inaugural address on the radio in Edsel's office, some expressed tentative approval of the President's promises to take vigorous action against the Depression. But their leader looked skeptical. “The boss didn't say anything,” William Cameron remembered. “He just shook his head.” Within six months, expressions of goodwill vanished: the administration moved to regulate the production and sale of automobiles, and Ford resisted. As the New York
Times
noted of the Ford-Roosevelt standoff, “The world is about to witness the first and critical test between the old ‘rugged individualism’ which spread this nation across the map and the new ‘robust collectivism’ with which it is now proposed to keep it there.”
²³

One of the New Deal's most significant creations, the National Recovery Administration (NRA), stood at the center of this confrontation. In June, only three months after Roosevelt took office, Congress passed and the President signed the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), often described by historians as “the keystone of the New Deal.” This measure promoted cooperation among business, government, and labor by authorizing the spending of $3.3 billion for public works, establishing a shorter workweek, and seeking to increase wages and payrolls. It also stipulated that codes of competition were to be established in all major industries, setting out wages, hours, and conditions for workers as well as prices for finished goods. Moreover, this legislation asserted the right of workers to organize and bargain collectively without retribution from their employer. The NRA was established to administer and enforce this landmark legislation. The National Automobile Chamber of Commerce drafted a code that was approved by the President and the NRA in the late summer of 1933. All automobile manufacturers agreed to sign the code but Ford.
²⁴

General Hugh S. Johnson, the flamboyant director of the NRA,
stepped into the picture with typical bravado. Having forged a reputation as head of the Selective Service during World War I, this brigadier general had become a businessman in the 1920s, before joining the Roosevelt administration in 1933.A man of tremendous energy, Johnson had devised the Blue Eagle logo for the NRA, authored its slogan, “We Do Our Part,” and created public enthusiasm through his efforts. Now he tackled the recalcitrant attitude of the nation's most prominent industrialist. Shortly after passage of the NIRA, he had secretly come to Dearborn to consult with Ford and gain his support and cooperation. Johnson talked at great length, and Ford “listened to him longer than any man I've ever known him to listen to,” noted Cameron. “After he talked about two hours explaining his plan, the boss said, ‘Well, General, you're making it awful hard for a young man to start in this country.’ ”
²⁵

Ford expressed his reservations throughout the summer, and when the automobile code finally went into effect, on September 5, he refused to sign an assent form. An angry Johnson began a campaign aimed at pressuring Ford to fall in line. When asked at a press conference if the administration intended to crack down on Ford, Johnson answered, “I think maybe the American people will crack down on him when the Blue Eagle is on other cars and he does not have one.” A short time later, Johnson announced a boycott of Ford products by the federal government. In late October, he said that if he discovered evidence that the Ford Motor Company was violating wage and hour requirements of the NIRA, he would turn it over to the attorney general. The threat of government prosecution hung in the air.
²⁶

Ford struck back with even stronger words. The company released a statement attacking the head of the NRA for “assuming the airs of a dictator.” “The public has known the Ford Motor Company for thirty years and is not dependent on Mr. Johnson for information concerning it,” the statement continued. “We suggest a code of fair publicity for Mr. Johnson's interviews.” The company also issued a statement for
Time
magazine asserting “Signing a code is not in the law. Flying the Blue Eagle is not in the law. Johnson's daily expression of opinion is not in the law.” The company sent a letter throughout the country soliciting support. It depicted Ford as an earnest supporter of recovery who endorsed certain parts of the NRA agenda. “Unfortunately, the Act includes some things which have nothing to do with recovery, and whose purpose seems to be to shift the American system of life and government over to some new and untried basis,” the letter concluded.
²⁷

Ford pursued a subtle strategy in this dispute—meeting conditions on wages and hours as set by the automobile code, refusing to sign it because of
government intrusion into business decisions, all the while conducting a public-relations campaign stressing his support for recovery. He presented himself as an advocate of workers and an opponent of government tyranny. Results were mixed with regard to public opinion: some applauded him for his principled stand, and others denounced him for impeding the fight against the Great Depression. Ford's battle with the NRA dragged on for two years, but he finally won the war. On May 25,1935, the Supreme Court struck down the NIRA statute as unconstitutional, and the power of the NRA evaporated. Ford viewed this as a victory over malevolent forces that sought to destroy the American spirit of competition. “The NRA had that for its object, so has this share-the-wealth business,” he told the New York
Times
a couple of months later. “Kill competition and the world will not progress.”
²⁸

It was not just the struggle with the NRA that hardened Ford in his opposition to the growing power of the national government, but another, personal factor as well. He grew to hate the man who had created the New Deal. Though he never expressed it publicly, Ford's intense dislike of Roosevelt became an article of faith among his friends and co-workers.

The automaker and the President had clashed indirectly during the conflict over the NRA code, when FDR supported General Johnson in the government boycott of Ford products. Charles Edison, the son of Thomas Edison, worked for the NRA in New Jersey, and he tried to arrange a conciliatory meeting between the President and Ford. After Ford wrote a letter expressing his respect for the President, Edison read the passage to Roosevelt, who remarked with a smile, “If Henry will quit being a damn fool about this matter and call me on the telephone I would be glad to talk with him.” But Ford would not make the first move, and neither would Roosevelt. Edison urged Ford to contact the White House, noting of Roosevelt, “He is, after all, the President of the United States,” but Ford would not budge. Describing the situation as “like the famous case of the irresistible force meeting the unmovable body,” Edison confessed that as a mediator “I guess I'm something of a flop.” James Couzens, now a United States senator, stepped in to mediate and succeeded in getting Roosevelt to invite Ford to the White House. Ford, fearing that critics would interpret a visit as a ploy to renew government purchase of his vehicles, made his excuses. A meeting never happened.
²⁹

Publicly, Ford carefully avoided direct denunciation of FDR. He offered backhanded compliments, telling reporters, “The President was doing the best he could in an extraordinarily difficult situation.” Or he used ambiguous rhetoric, observing that Roosevelt was “entitled to great credit for arousing the people to think. There is more public interest in national
problems today than ever before.” In letters whose content he knew would reach the President's ears, such as one he wrote to Charles Edison in 1933, he affirmed his respect for Roosevelt but added, “I have to make sharp distinction in my mind between the President and the NIRA. I cannot conceive of him as originating or crafting the act.” Other times, however, Ford lifted the veil of diplomacy. In 1938, he told
Time
that Americans had “a leader who is putting something over on them, and they deserve it.”
³⁰

Privately, Ford suffered no such restraints. Among colleagues, friends, and family, he criticized Roosevelt freely, often, and bitterly. He denounced the President and his minions for trying to destroy the private-enterprise system and the spirit of competition that fueled it. Joseph Zaroski, Ford's barber, once kidded his patron by asking if he was going to listen to one of FDR's Fireside Chats on the radio. Ford replied with “some language you don't hear in church,” Zaroski recalled. Ford often commented to associates that “Roosevelt was too much of a sissy” ever to understand the hard-knocks, competitive world of business. He also liked to tell jokes about the President. One of his favorites had FDR fishing in a boat one day when he tipped it over and fell into the water. Two boys, fishing from the bank, threw down their poles, swam out, and pulled the victim to shore. A grateful Roosevelt informed them he was the President and promised to help them in any way he could. When one boy said his father was unemployed, FDR said he would find him a job. The other boy said his father was a businessman, and the President asked how he could help. “You can't do anything,” the boy replied nervously. “If I tell my father who I pulled out of the water, he'll kill me!”
³¹

Even after the two giants finally met at the White House in 1938, Ford's disapproval of Roosevelt persisted. Typically, FDR tried to charm his visitor. “Oh, Mr. Ford, I'm so glad to see you,” he began. “My mother was so pleased to know that you were coming. She said, ‘Franklin, I'm so glad that you're going to see Mr. Ford because Mr. Ford is not only a great man, he's a good man.’ ” Though polite, Ford resisted. During a lunch that was also attended by Edsel Ford and William J. Cameron, the President talked at length about his policies, including plans for the government to lend money to individuals to start business ventures with a repayment schedule of thirty-five years. After listening, Ford replied sourly, “You know, nobody pays a debt after thirty-five years.” Upon leaving, he told FDR, “You know, Mr. President, before you leave this job, you're not going to have many friends, and then I'll be your friend.” A few days later, Ford voiced his assessment of Roosevelt while walking through the Rouge with Walter G. Nelson, the company's manager of operations in northern Michigan. “Mrs. Roosevelt was a wonderful woman,” Ford reported, “but that man was a rascal!”
³²