The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (Vintage) (99 page)

The combined impact of senility and strokes pushed Ford into an obvious spiral of decline. He had lost “his usual physical ability and mental alertness,” noted Herman Moekle, the chief auditor for the company. Other longtime associates noted that on occasion Ford was unable to recall their names and had to ask them to identify themselves. “It seemed that he was rapidly becoming confused and dull,” Irving Bacon observed. “His facial expression was changing. The keen-eyed, searching look was fading away.”
¹²

Even Ernest Liebold, never a paragon of human sympathy, was struck by the poignancy of Ford's mental decline around 1940. He witnessed his boss, increasingly stoop-shouldered and with a noticeably slower gait, struggling to communicate with his subordinates. “Sometimes situations arose when it was difficult to understand just what he was driving at or just what his reasons were,” Liebold said. Ford would drop by the office in the morning to talk but could not remember the subject. He became confused about instructions he had given. Liebold was saddened by the spectacle. “It
was just appalling to observe a man who had created something and had your greatest and highest respect, watching and seeing the thing going down in inches,” he said. Like everyone else who encountered Ford's behavior, Liebold found his annoyance giving way to pity. “How can you hold a man responsible when his mind isn't functioning?” he decided. “He was no longer able to comprehend, he couldn't analyze things any more. Everybody here knew that.”
¹³

Yet, for all his growing mental and physical impediments, Ford still exhibited signs of liveliness and humor that delighted those close to him. On a trip to visit Richmond Hill in the early 1940s with Clara and several associates, Ford and his group traveled in two cars, one driven by Rufus Wilson, the other by Robert Rankin. Several hundred miles from their destination, Ford separated from his wife to ride in Wilson's car. Beset by an ornery urge, he persuaded Wilson to drive faster and faster as Rankin (and Clara) struggled to keep up. Hurtling down the highways at eighty-five miles an hour, the breathless group arrived at Richmond Hill several hours early and surprised the staff, who had nothing prepared yet. When Clara chastised her husband for driving so fast, he replied, “Callie, that Rankin was right on our tail. We were trying to get out of his way all the time!” Ford laughed about the incident for days afterward.
¹⁴

But his declining mental and physical state became evident in his struggles to come to terms with a growing international crisis. By the late 1930s, the rise of fascism in Europe was raising the specter of war, and Ford, the old pacifist with a yen for publicity, could not stay on the sidelines. Following his heart rather than his head, he stumbled into controversy.

As tensions mounted and European nations edged toward war under the pressure of Nazi German expansionism, Ford resurrected his pacifist, populist principles. But his physical and mental deterioration complicated matters. “Ford was in bad health and worse morale. His memory was failing as rapidly as his obsessions and antipathies increased,” Charles Sorensen reported. “Any mention of the war in Europe and the likelihood of this country's involvement upset him almost to incoherence.” Ford tried to dampen enthusiasm for war at every turn. In a United States where many citizens still felt burnt by national involvement in World War I and were determined to avoid future foreign entanglements, Ford's commentary initially found an appreciative audience. Many approved his insistence that America stay free of any military involvement in the affairs of Europe.
¹⁵

To those who recalled his comments during World War I, Ford's position
was familiar. In conversation with friends, he insisted that war was the product of greedy financiers who sought profit in human destruction. He accused these conspiratorial elites of maneuvering European countries into armed conflict and trying to do the same with the United States. In 1939, he claimed that attacks on American merchant ships by German submarines were in fact acts of sabotage to fulfill “a scheme by financial war-makers to get this country into war.” He remained obsessed with the Du Pont family, arguing that it was one of the leading “warmongers” who manipulated governments behind the scenes to make money. He praised English Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain for his peace efforts but claimed he was “running up against a bunch of war profiteers.” He even became convinced that the declarations of war in September 1939 were a fraud to promote the selling of armaments. He refused to believe there was an actual shooting war in Europe until he was shown pictures of a Ford plant in England that had been bombed.
¹⁶

In a 1940 article entitled “An American Foreign Policy” published in
Scribner's Commentator,
Ford despaired about the “work of destruction such as we see now in progress in Europe and threatening to spread to other parts of the world.” The peoples of Europe had been “duped by the greedy financial groups seeking to extend their domination,” he argued, and the United States “should NOT meddle in the affairs of other people.” Several weeks later, he gave a long interview to the press at Richmond Hill, where he denounced both the Axis powers and England as oppressors of common people. The best result would see the combatants fight “until they both collapse…. There is no righteousness in either cause. Both are motivated by the same evil impulse, which is greed,” Ford declared. “It is not the little people who are doing the fighting and the suffering who are the greedy ones. They are innocent of that.” When both sides collapsed, Ford hoped, the United States could step in to broker a just peace and construct a world federation.
¹⁷

Ford concocted fantasies of intervening to stop the European conflict. Forgetting the hard lessons of the Peace Ship debacle, he entertained the idea that he could somehow influence Hitler to halt the war. In January 1940, he summoned a young friend, James Newton, and another young man, and asked that they serve as his emissaries to Berlin. “I have an idea of how the hostilities might be stopped before they escalate. Of course, the key to it is Hitler. I think it's possible he might listen to my suggestions,” Ford told them earnestly. “You know, he's following my example of producing a car for the millions. He got his engineers to come up with a cheap ‘people's car’—Volkswagen. I think I just may have his respect, the door may be open.” He offered his services as mediator and agreed to finance an expedition
for the two men to feel out the German government. Wiser in the ways of the world than their patron, the two understood the futility of this naïve scheme and never followed up on the offer.
¹⁸

In terms of public policy, Ford infuriated the American government when he reneged on an agreement to manufacture some six thousand Rolls-Royce engines for the British, saying he would do so only for the direct defense of the United States. “We are not doing business with the British Government or any other foreign government,” he declared. “We have no agreement with anybody for the production of war materials and if and when we do have one it will be on that basis and with the United States Government only.” He also publicly joined forces with prominent isolationists. In September 1940, he was named a member of the America First Committee, the leading organization of those opposing United States involvement in the conflict. “In joining the committee,” reported the New York
Times,
“Mr. Ford said he believed immediate action must be taken to check the increasing trend toward war.”
¹⁹

Ford became close friends with Charles Lindbergh, whose transatlantic flight had made him a national hero before he emerged as the leading antiwar figure in the United States during the 1930s. The two had become acquainted in August 1927, when the pilot visited Dearborn as part of his cross-country tour promoting aviation. He consulted with Ford on his “flivver plane” project (later aborted) to manufacture small, inexpensive airplanes as a revolutionary transportation move. Lindbergh had taken the industrialist up in his
Spirit of St. Louis
and the Ford Tri-Motor for the only airplane rides of his life; Ford did not like flight and found the rides to be physically and mentally unnerving. Over the next ten years, the Lindberghs stayed with the Fords at Fair Lane on several occasions when the pilot visited Detroit to see his mother. In 1939, the two men renewed their friendship as they found common cause in opposing American entry into World War II.
²⁰

Lindbergh had become an outspoken advocate of American neutrality in the 1930s and a major force in the America First Committee, for which he solicited Ford's participation and financial support. Ford admired Lindbergh and thought him one of the greatest men in the world. He took the pilot to a meeting of the Moral Rearmament movement, another antiwar group, on one of his trips to Detroit, and responded eagerly to Lindbergh's overtures. “I want you to know how much encouragement you and Mrs. Ford have given to many of us by your acceptance of membership in the America First Committee,” Lindbergh wrote to Ford in September 1940. “Your stand versus entry into the war has already had great influence, and, if
we are able to keep out, I believe it will be largely due to the courage and support you have given us.”
²¹

Ford's isolationist views, in concert with his reputation for anti-Semitism and his longtime affection for Germany, raised suspicions and prompted an attack upon his motives in the fall of 1940. Two leftist publications,
Friday
and
PM,
accused him of being not only a fascist sympathizer but a financial supporter of the Nazi movement in both Germany and the United States. In an article entitled “American Merchants of Hate,”
Friday
contended that Ford and William J. Cameron had arranged to give Fritz Kuhn, the leader of the German-American Bund, a job at the Ford Motor Company, along with an office. It published the facsimile of a letter to Kuhn from Cameron confirming the arrangement.
PM
charged Ford with a long list of transgressions: supporting publication of anti-Jewish tracts, maintaining “friendly relations with Hitlerism,” employing American Nazis in his factories, generally disseminating “the Hitlerite type of anti-Jewish philosophy,” and using “Nazi-Gestapo” methods in opposing the unionization of his workers.
²²

Ford's acceptance of the Grand Cross of the German Eagle from Hitler's government in 1938 struck many as a sign of his endorsement of Nazism. Later, others suspected that the company maintained its plants, and profits, in Germany not only during Hitler's ascendancy in the 1930s but after the declaration of war.
²³

Although Ford never answered these accusations personally, his spokesmen defended him. Cameron denounced “the defamation that is being so freely scattered” and pointed out that the letter printed by
Friday
was an obvious forgery—the letterhead stationery on which it appeared was that of a nonexistent organization (“The Anglo-Saxon Society of America”), the box it listed as a return address did not exist in the Dearborn Post Office, and the signature looked nothing like his. Cameron claimed that he and Ford had never even heard of Kuhn until reading about his Bund activities in New York. A perusal of company employment records revealed that Kuhn had worked for Ford for a few months, but had been dismissed in 1936 for failure to perform. He had been one of ninety thousand employees and never communicated at all with Ford or any other company manager. Neither Ford nor his company supported fascism around the world, Cameron insisted. Ernest Liebold also contended that “Mr. Ford had no contact with the anti-Semitic or Nazi movement in Germany.” And there is scant evidence that Ford retained authority over its German branch, Ford-Werke, during World War II or profited from its wartime endeavors. By the late 1930s, Ford-Werke was controlled totally by German interests and had
become, for all intents and purposes, a separate company. So, although Ford, like many Americans, may have been foolish in misreading Hitler and his movement, he was neither a Nazi nor a fascist. Nonetheless, the accusations provided much embarrassment.
²⁴

Despite his strenuous efforts to keep America out of World War II, Ford's support for neutrality wavered. On January 15,1940, he made clear his determination to defend the United States at the dedication of a navy training school. “During this crisis our organization wants to do everything possible to help America and the President,” he stated. “The Navy being our first line of defense, I feel that the training of these young men will vitally benefit our Nation.” He also boasted that his factories could turn out a thousand planes a day if they ever needed to. “But remember, they are to be for defense only,” he added. Privately, he expressed misgivings about the Germans and mused that the United States might be forced to help the British. According to Harry Bennett, Hitler's series of invasions in central Europe had caused Ford to declare, “He's just power drunk, like all the rest of them.” The Luftwaffe bombing of the company's Dagenham plant, outside London, caused Ford's sympathy for England to rise further. By early 1941, he was overheard remarking at lunch, “You know what we have to do, Mr. Cameron? We have to get in 100% and help the British out,” he declared. “They have to win.”
²⁵