The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (Vintage) (89 page)

Finally, Ford proved susceptible to Bennett's shameless sycophancy. The latter skillfully manipulated the aging founder, convincing him at every turn of his utter devotion. When a friend once remarked to Bennett that he would tear down the Rouge's administration building if Ford told him to, the security chief replied, “You bet your God-damned life I would!” Bennett charmed Ford with his tough-guy demeanor and rough camaraderie, and went to great lengths to prove his eagerness. Harold Hicks once observed Bennett run from a room upon receiving an instruction from Ford, and then slow to a walk as soon as he was out of his sight. Such stratagems succeeded. As an old Ford family friend commented, it reached a point “where one couldn't tell what Mr. Ford wished and what Harry Bennett wished.”
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Bennett's manipulation extended to subverting his rivals. Sometimes he gave Ford unfavorable information about them, garnered from his network of spies in the service department. More often, he used innuendo. He mastered the technique of dropping offhand remarks to Ford about other powerful men in the organization that called their judgment into question or disparaged their conduct. “Half of the injustices that took place around here were due to Bennett's whispering in the old man's ear,” Lawrence Sheldrick contended. After planting suspicions, the subordinate would wait patiently for Ford to chime in with a negative comment about an individual, and then use this as an excuse to act. By the 1930s, Bennett had a stranglehold on the organization because of his control over hiring and firing, transfers, payroll, travel vouchers, and security. He had the power to hurt rivals, and he never hesitated to do so.
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As the Great Depression unfolded, Bennett's authority expanded further when he became the company's chief labor negotiator. In Bennett, Ford saw the perfect figure to lead his crusade against the union movement. As usual, the security chief said just what his boss wanted to hear. Organized labor, Bennett proclaimed, would never bully the company, because for every man in the Rouge who might want to strike “there are at least five who
want their job and don't want a strike.” He publicly denounced the primary autoworkers' union as “irresponsible, un-American, and no goddam good.” When asked to explain the Ford position on unions, he did so with typical flair: “The Ford Motor Company will never make any agreement with any union, anytime, anywhere.”
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Thus Harry Bennett occupied a strategic position regarding the company's growing labor problems. Enjoying the full confidence of his boss, and the loyalty of hundreds of thugs in his service department, he was confident of success. But events did not cooperate. Bennett's blustering, bragging persona and heavy-handed methods helped launch a bloody labor struggle that crippled the Ford operation throughout much of the Depression decade. It would not be resolved until matters teetered on the edge of disaster.

On May 26, 1937, Walter Reuther, president of a United Auto Workers local, and Richard T. Frankensteen, chief organizer for the UAW in Detroit, went to the River Rouge facility. Accompanied by a number of union organizers who sought to hand out leaflets entitled
Unionism, Not Fordism,
as well as some teachers, clergymen, reporters, and photographers, they mounted the overpass leading to the main gate of the factory. The contingent was about halfway across when a group of company toughs dressed in suits and hats appeared, and one of them barked, “Get the hell off here, this is Ford property.” The organizers halted, uncertain what to do.

At this point, two of the Ford men grabbed Frankensteen, pulled his overcoat forward over his head to pin his arms, and began expertly to administer a severe beating. Some punched him in the face and head, while others kicked him in the groin, knocked him to the ground, and stomped on his stomach. Others were assaulted as well. “They would knock us down, stand us up, and knock us down again,” Frankensteen said later. Reuther tried to get away, but he was seized, punched, and thrown down the concrete steps of the overpass, with Frankensteen bouncing right behind him. When photographers snapped pictures of the assault, the Ford deputies grabbed most of the cameras and stripped them of film. A few photographers escaped to their automobiles, however; one of them was chased at breakneck speed by Ford hoodlums until he took refuge in a police station. Back at the Rouge, a melee ensued, and dozens of union supporters were attacked and beaten. Within fifteen minutes, the Ford forces had swept the area of union sympathizers.

This vicious assault created a national furor. Newspapers and magazines ran photographs of the beating that vividly portrayed a bruised
Reuther and a profusely bleeding Frankensteen. Reporters gave firsthand accounts describing peaceful union organizers suffering violent attack. The UAW reported eighteen casualties from the confrontation, including one man who required attention from a brain specialist and four women who claimed that Ford goons had kicked them in the stomach. Homer Martin, president of the UAW, denounced the company's “paid thugs and mobsters” and claimed that “the principal Fordism of the Ford Motor Company is fascism.” He characterized Harry Bennett as an “embryonic Hitler” and asserted that his “blackshirts” offered “a poor substitute for democracy and reason.” In subsequent hearings held by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), a parade of witnesses competed to present the most chilling stories of Ford violence against union men.
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“The Battle of the Overpass,” as it quickly became known, threw a spotlight on the labor controversy that had engulfed the company by the mid1930s. Bennett tried to gloss over the situation, claiming that “there were no Ford service men involved” in the beating and that the incident had been staged by the UAW. A company news release claimed that the union needed “some dramatic occurrence to cover up its conspicuous failure to influence Ford employees” and that newspapers had been demanding a “Ford strike story.” Cameron, Ford's spokesman, said that the union had sought the confrontation because it was confident of support from the NLRB, a “traveling court of inquisition.” But such claims rang hollow in light of the bloody photographs and the eyewitness accounts of Ford aggression, and the UAW enjoyed a wave of national sympathy.
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Ford took a pounding in the press. Newspapers were so negative that Cameron complained about a “legal lynching” in the public print.
Time
magazine said that “the brutal beatings” at the overpass might end up hurting Ford more than their actual victims. Describing him as “narrow, intolerant, utterly prejudiced,”
The Nation
accused him of flouting the law and called upon him “to do the right thing and end the shameful servitude of his workers to his own arbitrary will.”
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The Battle of the Overpass tarnished the reputation of Henry Ford, a man previously known as a pioneer of humane industrial reform. Whereas the Highland Park plant had appeared an Eden of harmony and high wages in the 1910s, by the 1930s Ford's River Rouge factory resembled an armed camp. According to a company manager who drove to the Rouge on a summer evening in 1937, “The only thing I could see were a lot of Ford employees with baseball bats … and lead pipes. They were on picket duty.” Henry Ford still regarded himself as an advocate of ordinary workers, but he now faced a volatile labor situation. It was fed by poverty (and fear of poverty) stemming from the Great Depression, and by oppressive working
conditions at his factories that he refused to recognize. As discontented Ford workers considered unionization, the owner responded with angry, unstinting opposition. A man whose organization had been noted for progressive attitudes toward labor now appeared as a despot who abused his workers.
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This escalating labor controversy revolved around several issues. During the Depression, employment and production at Ford automobile plants declined steadily. For those who retained jobs, the general work atmosphere became polluted by new travails. The “speed-up” accelerated the assembly line to increase production and demanded a faster pace of work. The pace became so intense that men were forbidden to talk with one another, and had no opportunity to go to the toilet except when a substitute was available. The only break consisted of fifteen minutes for lunch, a situation that inspired considerable worker creativity. Consuming a couple of sandwiches, a bottle of coffee or milk, a piece of fruit, and perhaps a hunk of cake in fifteen minutes without choking required all the planning and ingenuity of Fordism itself. According to one worker, men would sneak their lunch boxes from the racks early and hide them near their posts, so they could use every available second to eat:

The exhaustion and nervous tension created by the sped-up assembly line was exacerbated by Ford foremen, who drove workers relentlessly, constantly demanding greater and greater output. A worker described how the company, like many schools and colleges, had an official “yell” that could be heard above the noise of the machinery. Foremen kept a close eye on production numbers, constantly tallied output on an hourly basis, and “dashed back to the aisles—up one and down another—shouting ‘Let's Go! Let's Go!’ And the nearer it gets to the end of the hour the louder and more persistent becomes the yell.” A “grinder” at the Rouge explained to a reporter that the machines he tended “take up the distance of a short city block.” “By the time I'm at the last one the first machine has already stopped. The boss
is shouting at me and I have to run back there, and then back down the line again to see that the last machine doesn't stand idle for a second. Now the boss tells me they're going to give me more machines.” A maker of pinion gears reported that he had started on four machines several years earlier, then was assigned to six, and a few months earlier had become responsible for twelve. A worker on tire carriers reported that in 1925 daily shift production was 3,000 units produced by 160 men. By 1931, it was 6,970 units produced by 16.
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If such harsh working conditions were not enough, Harry Bennett's service department added more poison. Spying, harassment, and physical beating reached a crescendo of managerial tyranny by the mid-1930s. At an NLRB hearing in 1937, an ex-foreman from the Rouge plant testified that the service department maintained an elaborate espionage system whereby functionaries “snooped around,” listened to employees both at work and after hours, and were authorized to fire them at any time. “Union talk,” of course, was the worst crime, and smart workers “watched their step and kept their mouth shut” when servicemen, usually “identifiable by their cauliflower ears and broken noses,” were skulking about. Walter Griffith, a longtime machinist at the Rouge, described workers' deep resentment of Bennett's henchmen, who drew generous salaries for intimidating workmen while doing little actual labor themselves. Griffith was particularly infuriated by the situation on payday, when long lines of workers waiting for their checks had to suffer the abuse of “a big Scotsman who was supposed to keep the men in line. He got very rough, struck several men, and pushed them around.”
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Not surprisingly, this hostile atmosphere produced a deeply alienated workforce. Incidents of abuse and unwarranted firings piled one atop another. A boy sent on an office errand into the factory was fired by one of the service-department “spotters” for stopping to buy a chocolate bar at a lunch wagon. An older worker in the Ford employ for nearly twenty years was dismissed for using a piece of waste to wipe the oil from his arms a few minutes before the quitting bell rang. Not allowed to converse, workers developed the “Ford whisper”—talking in an undertone without moving one's lips while staring straight ahead at one's work—as a way to maintain human contact during work hours. But sometimes even this subtle resistance backfired. A worker named John Gallo was discharged after a “spotter” caught him “smiling” with co-workers after being warned earlier about “laughing with the other fellows.” According to Walter Griffith, such incidents caused many Rouge workers to become “very bitter” toward Henry Ford.
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Corroboration of deplorable conditions at Ford factories came from an
unlikely source. William J. Cameron publicly condemned unionization throughout the 1930s. In private, however, he offered a different view. “The Ford idea was no longer working. I know that Mr. Ford's idea and his philosophy didn't seem to be corresponded to by the practice in the shop in the later years,” he confessed. “I knew it wasn't the boss's idea, the Ford idea, to drive men.” The enterprise had grown so big that Ford could no longer control things, Cameron admitted, and the tactics of men like Harry Bennett were creating great ill will among even the most loyal workers. One longtime employee approached Cameron and recalled sorrowfully how men had been proud to bear the Ford name in the old days. “Now, Mr. Cameron, it's hell,” he said. “It's a perfect hell.”
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