The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (Vintage) (98 page)

But Ford was delighted with Cameron's efforts. Indeed, he was so pleased by the
Ford Sunday Evening Hour
talks that he paid to have them published, both as booklets and in several book-length collections. In his private box at the Masonic Temple along with Clara, he could be seen nodding in agreement as Cameron elaborated upon his dearest principles. Ford and “The Radio Pastor of Dearborn,” as one magazine described Cameron, enjoyed a special relationship. Over the years, he came to appreciate the writer's ability to frame his own intuitive, often inchoate ideas into compelling, even eloquent forms. Cameron, perhaps more than any other individual, helped shape the positive aspects of Ford's image during the 1930s. Drawing upon comfortable populist aspects of his boss's worldview, he avoided extreme elements and did not directly attack Jews, FDR, or Wall Street. He prodded the process of evolution by which Ford became a national oracle whose thoughts, if not always endorsed, at least received respectful attention.

But Henry Ford was not destined to remain an elderly innovator dabbling in education, crop experiments, and radio entertainment. By the onset of a new decade, a looming crisis in the world forced him onto the public stage for a final performance. No one foresaw that it would be a tragedy. With his faculties failing, and betrayed by a long-standing family controversy, he stumbled deeper into a morass that threatened to engulf him. Eventually, the Ford family and key associates stepped in to avert disaster, but not before this King Lear of the automotive world had been brought low.

In late August 1943, as the United States found itself engaged in global conflict during World War II, the Washington columnist Drew Pearson suggested in a radio broadcast that eighty-year-old Henry Ford's declining health might force the federal government to take over operation of his company. Ford reacted instantly and angrily. “I do not know how old or young this Pearson person is,” he told reporters. “But tell him I'll meet him in any contest. I can lick him in anything he suggests. I never felt better physically in my life.” He challenged the forty-six-year-old columnist to a footrace, a bicycle race, or a jumping contest to decide whose health was superior. The Detroit Retail Merchants Association sensed an opportunity and immediately offered to sponsor such a contest. It promised to clear a stretch of Woodward Avenue during its upcoming war-bond program and to provide judges and police protection for a physical competition.

Pearson good-naturedly accepted the challenge. Graciously noting that Ford would be a “formidable adversary,” he promised to meet him “on foot, astride a bike, in a Model T, or in a contest of horseshoe pitching.” With tongues slightly in cheeks, Michigan groups began lining up behind the Detroiter as a sentimental favorite. The Crack Pot Club of Grand Rapids, a businessmen's group, suggested that Pearson should start his training by “running a few preliminary heats with centenarians and gradually working up to the first team.” The Detroit
Free Press
noted that, if a race did occur, “we would wager more than an apple on our home-town lad.” Within a few days, Pearson realized the futility of either beating or losing to an eighty-year-old man in a physical contest. Ford, he asserted in another broadcast, had convinced even the most skeptical that “no one needs worry about the energetic way he is running his war plants.” “My hat's off to him for his spunk,” he noted, and backed away from the challenge.
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This commotion underlined the public perception of a vigorous Henry
Ford as he finished his eighth decade of life. Seemingly full of physical and mental energy, he delighted the press with his provocative statements and kept his hold on the public by dispensing nuggets of wisdom. On his eightieth birthday, he repeated many of his favorite maxims: industry would overcome poverty, money was good only for exchanging goods more easily, and industry and farming needed to be linked in common purpose. Ford reassured reporters about his excellent health and optimistic spirit. “If I felt any better,” he remarked, “I'd have to run.”
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But appearances deceived. Ironically, Pearson had been right in his original assertion. As his family and many colleagues knew all too well, Ford's physical and mental health were failing steadily. Since the late 1930s, he had been beset with various maladies, while his powers of perception and reason had slipped noticeably. He appeared increasingly unfit to meet the pressing challenges that bore down on his company in a tense, conflict-ridden world, and seemed equally unfit to resolve a personal struggle with his son. Those who cared about his welfare or depended upon his professional judgment were more and more worried about him.

By 1945, Ford's erratic behavior and troubling mental lapses had reached a crisis point. With his company foundering, Ford proved incapable of controlling the ebb and flow of power struggles that produced widening fissures in its structure. Unable to comprehend the impact of various policies and decisions, he oversaw a process of disintegration that raised the specter of chaos in one of the country's largest and most important corporations. Finally, with the assistance of his family, Ford would be removed from power in the company he had founded four decades before. The last two years of his life saw a drastic decline, as he drifted away and his wife struggled to shelter the man she loved from the public eye. It was a sad sight. Henry Ford, the vital, innovative man who had transformed modern society, spent his last days in an uncomprehending haze.

In the early 1940s, Ford still displayed many characteristics of a creative, productive individual. Engaged in an array of activities in industry, agriculture, education, and historical collecting, he kept a schedule that would have intimidated a much younger man. Walking the grounds of Greenfield Village, inspecting the exhibits at the Ford Museum, monitoring the experimental crops on his farms, auditing classes at the Henry Ford Trade School, visiting with reporters, dropping by his offices at the engineering building or the River Rouge plant, and consulting with Harry Bennett, Frank Campsall, Edward Cutler, Edsel Ruddiman, or Edsel Ford, he sometimes seemed
in a blur of activity. He carried on a strenuous regimen of exercise, from bicycling every morning to taking long walks on his property, chopping wood, and making occasional outbursts of running that still surprised those who witnessed them. Rufus Wilson, Ford's driver, always carried an ax and a shovel in the trunk of the car, because his passenger frequently decided to “get out in the woods and whack at a log or chop down a dead tree” or dig up a piece of half-buried old farm machinery that he had spotted from the road.
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Ford continued to promote odd, and remarkably changeable, notions about diet, a tendency that polished his image as a lovable eccentric. He became convinced of the virtues of drinking warm rather than cold water, believing that the body wasted its precious energy to heat water into a usable form once it had been ingested. He had a special water heater rigged into his car so warm water would always be available and ordered a special “pollen water” from Maine for his personal use. He also grew enamored of wheat, describing it as a “divine and complete food” in its natural form. He would soak it for a day or two, until it was ready to sprout, and then eat the kernels for breakfast and throughout the day.
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Ford's lively image, however, masked deeper problems. By the 1930s, signs of failing health and a number of maladies were becoming evident. In 1932, near the age of seventy, he had surgery to repair a “strangulated femoral hernia” as well as an appendectomy. He suffered mounting tooth pain and degeneration, which demanded treatment, and he became irritable and impatient with the situation. He finally had dentures made by his dentist, James Melville Thompson, and most of those problems evaporated.
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More generally, Ford's physical activity waned along with his energy. By the early 1940s, the brisk walks had become strolls and the impulsive footraces disappeared almost entirely. Surviving letters from physicians, as well as a scattering of prescriptions and memoranda, show him inquiring about laxative products and the causes of impotence; doctors also informed him about treatments for blood pressure, excessive uric acid, and skin irritations, and about sedatives.
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Ford's odd views on health and his espousal of offbeat remedies exacerbated a worsening situation. Infatuated with the notion that diet and nutrition lay at the root of all illness, he remained suspicious of doctors and the practice of modern medicine. He had started the Henry Ford Hospital with the hope that its staff would find scientific proof for his theories, but their failure to do so caused him to lose interest. When the hospital's doctors were unable to find a cure for Clara Ford's arthritis with their scientific procedures, Henry chastised Frank M. Sladen, chief of medicine, and Roy D. McClure, chief of surgery, for failing to pursue dietary causes for the disorder.
He put more and more faith in Lawson B. Coulter, a local chiropractor, who visited him twice a week for several years to manipulate his spine. Coulter also composed special diets for his patron—he was especially keen on avoiding fried foods and not mixing starches with meat or fruit—and urged Ford to avoid food cooked with aluminum pans and utensils. Many were suspicious of his expertise. As William Cameron once said of the chiropractor, “He was a very ignorant man.”
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Ford's ideas on health, as they veered toward the crackpot, also posed a danger to others. One hot July evening in the late 1930s, an elderly friend fainted at one of the Fords' old-fashioned dances. F. Janney Smith, head of cardiology at Henry Ford Hospital, revived the man, took him out for some fresh air, and after a quick examination recommended that he go home until a fuller diagnosis could be made. Ford intervened and attributed the faint to the victim's drinking a glass of milk. To Smith's horror, he insisted that the old man go back into the ballroom and choose a partner for the next dance. Similarly, Ford frequently expressed skepticism when physicians diagnosed heart problems in friends. “Pay no attention to that doctor,” he would snort. “All you have to do is get out of bed and lie on the floor for half an hour twice a day, and eat celery and carrots. Then you'll be alright.”
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Ford's health theories posed a danger to himself as well. He refused to take medication unless the doctor could describe immediately the manufacturing process by which it had been made. When he felt ill, he had his chauffeur “take him for a fast ride with a little jouncing around,” because he believed that jarring his body would restore its normal function. His dietary enthusiasms swung to wild extremes, likely bringing nutritional deficiencies in their wake. His excessive reliance on a wheat diet caused a medical specialist to warn him in the 1940s that he had been “starving to death.” His suspicions about doctors took bizarre turns. In 1938, after suffering what turned out to be a stroke, Ford rejected the advice of his attending physician, Dr. McClure, and summoned his chiropractor for daily treatments.
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Ford's growing physical problems were accentuated by signs of mental deterioration. By the late 1930s, family members and colleagues had become concerned about his memory lapses, peculiar behavior, and declining analytical powers. Doctors diagnosed the onset of senility. In January 1936, Dr. Coulter was performing one of his osteopathic manipulations of Ford's spine and neck when things went awry. According to Dr. Sladen, the chiropractor put undue pressure on blood vessels in his aging patient's neck and caused “a cerebral vascular accident and consequent brain injury.” Ford suffered a facial paralysis that lasted about three weeks, but the blow to his mental capacities seemed to linger. Then, in the spring of 1939, Clara summoned Sladen again to examine her husband, whose erratic thought
processes were matched by general weakness and other physical complaints. Sladen diagnosed hardening of the arteries and “symptoms of developing senility” and said that Ford's behavior had not returned to normal after 1936. An incident in 1939 reinforced this evaluation. While attending a concert, the doctor saw the Fords in their special box and dropped by to say hello. To his astonishment, Henry angrily accused him of conspiring to keep Clara sick with arthritis. Sladen interpreted this as unreasonable irritability, a trait characterizing the early onslaught of senility. Typically, Ford refused to undergo an extensive examination, so a thorough analysis proved difficult. But Sladen noted that Clara began a subtle campaign to protect her husband and shelter him from the pressures of public life.
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Throughout this period, Ford suffered a series of strokes that contributed to his symptoms of mental failure. The 1936 episode, with its facial paralysis, exhibited certain signs of a mild stroke, and Dr. John G. Mateer, who became Ford's physician in the 1940s, concluded that it had been “a cerebral thrombosis or hemorrhage,” an indication of arterial disease. In 1938, shortly after his seventy-fifth birthday, according to Charles Sorensen, Ford had another stroke that was carefully hushed up by the family. This was the incident after which he called in his chiropractor for treatments in defiance of his doctors from the Henry Ford Hospital. Finally, in August 1941, Ford suffered a more serious stroke that left him with an unclear mind for substantial periods. In Sorensen's evaluation, after this attack his boss's opinions hardened and “occasionally flared into hallucination.” Ford became a “querulous, suspicious old man” who saw conspiracies everywhere and struggled with a fading memory.
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