Ford, Henry

Ford, Henry (1863–1947), automobile manufacturer.Born on a farm near Dearborn, Michigan, Henry Ford as a young man held various jobs in Detroit, including machine‐shop apprentice, traction car operator, and engineer for the Edison Illuminating Company. Tinkering with internal combustion engines in his spare time, he produced his first prototype automobile in 1896. His racing cars gained national attention, and in 1903 he formed the Ford Motor Company and began commercial production. In the turbulent world of early automobile manufacturing, Ford initially stood out primarily for his race cars and his 1911 legal defeat of George B. Selden, who had tried to gain a monopoly over automobile manufacturing by taking out a series of patents in 1895.

Three contributions coalesced to assure Ford's worldwide reputation and his iconic status in the pantheon of U.S. heroes: the Model T, the moving assembly line, and the five‐dollar day. The 1908 Model T was a remarkable match of technical design and social context. Well‐built and inexpensive in contrast to its competitors, the Model T succeeded despite terrible roads and primitive repair facilities thanks to an exceptionally strong frame, high wheel clearance, and a fix‐it‐yourself simplicity. Growing demand led to production breakthroughs between 1908 and 1915 that came to be known collectively as the “Assembly Line” or simply “Fordism”. But Ford's integrated handling of materials and machine‐tool specialization also involved an authoritarian management style that led to high worker turnover. In response, Ford in January 1914 not only announced completion of the moving assembly line, but also approximately doubled daily wages, to five dollars a day, and shortened the workday from nine to eight hours. This combination of technical achievement and beneficence dramatically enhanced Ford's image and brought him international fame.

In 1916, at a price of $316 each, Ford sold 730,000 Model Ts. Sales faltered by the mid‐1920s, however, as rival General Motors offered a range of attractively designed models in color. (The boxy Model T came only in black.) After a period of retooling, Ford introduced the smart Model A in 1928. The innovative V–8 engine came in 1932, but the company never regained the market dominance it had once enjoyed.

For Ford himself, fame took its toll, as his eccentricities and prejudices became increasingly evident. In an abortive effort to end World War I through arbitration, he chartered a “peace ship” in December 1915 to sail to Europe. Ford's newspaper The Dearborn Independent, distributed in the 1920s through Ford dealers, disseminated a virulent anti‐Semitism. Confronted with a libel suit by a Jewish attorney, Ford issued a retraction and halted publication in 1927. Adolf Hitler quoted Ford with approval in his 1924 manifesto Mein Kampf.

Increasingly autocratic, Ford drove away creative lieutenants; bought out stockholders; and enforced employee conformity, on the job and off, with spies and sometimes brutal company police. His bitter anti‐unionism led to outbreaks of bloody labor violence at Ford plants during the Great Depression. Only in 1941 did Ford sign a contract with the United Automobile Workers union.

In later life Ford increasingly withdrew from the day‐to‐day operations at his company's massive River Rouge plant, and lived reclusely on his two‐thousand‐acre Dearborn estate, Fairlane, where he pursued various pet projects and philanthropies, including Detroit's Henry Ford Hospital (which initially excluded Jewish physicians). Ford's agents scoured Great Britain and the United States for artifacts relating to the history of technology, which after 1929 he housed in a museum near his estate, called the Edison Institute. The museum was also a fully accredited school, where students from kindergarten through twelfth grade could study amid physical reminders of technological progress. Nearby stood Greenfield Village, Ford's replica of a bucolic preindustrial community. An elusive figure, Ford shunned visitors but roamed the grounds alone at night. He also restored the Old Wayside Inn in Sudbury, Massachusetts, immortalized by the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Ford's obsession with these projects and his growing aversion to work‐a‐day management reveal a man caught in the classic ambivalence of the modernist technological aesthetic. He exulted in the march of inventive progress on display in his museum, while in Greenfield Village he nostalgically invoked a world untroubled by change. The paradox of Ford's attachment to his premodern fantasy world coupled with his heroic stature as a technological innovator helps explain his enduring grip on the American imagination.

The Ford Foundation, established by Henry Ford and his son Edsel in 1936, ultimately received many millions in nonvoting Ford Motor Company stock, making it one of America's wealthiest foundations.
See also Automobile Racing; Automotive Industry; Congress of Industrial Organizations; Industrialization; Mass Production; Motor Vehicles; Peace Movements; Reuther, Walter.

Bibliography

Allan Nevins with and Frank E. Hill , Ford, 3 vol., 1954–1963.
Anne Jardim , The First Henry Ford: A Study in Personality and Business Leadership, 1970.
David L. Lewis , The Public Image of Henry Ford: An American Folk Hero and His Company, 1976.
Stephen Meyer III , The Five Dollar Day: Labor, Management and Social Control in the Ford Motor Company, 1908–1921, 1981.
Robert Lacey , Ford: The Men and the Machine, 1986.
Donald Finlay Davis , Conspicuous Production: Automobiles and Elites in Detroit, 1899–1933, 1988.

John M. Staudenmaier