Henry Ford
Henry Ford once wrote that any customer could have a car painted any color he wanted, so long as it was black. The line has outlived almost everything else about him. The man who said it was born on a farm in Greenfield Township, Michigan, on the 30th of July 1863, and he despised farm work. He preferred watches. By 15 he had taken apart and rebuilt the timepieces of his neighbors dozens of times. From that boy with a pocket watch came an automobile that taught a majority of American drivers how to drive, a wage that doubled what his workers earned, and a newspaper that spread one of the ugliest hatreds of the century. How did a Michigan farm boy who could not read a blueprint put the world on wheels? And why did the same man become the only American praised by name in Hitler's Mein Kampf? The answers run through engines, assembly lines, peace ships, and a libel trial in San Francisco.
In 1875, when Ford was 12, he watched a Nichols and Shepard road engine work. He later called it the first automobile other than horse-drawn that he had ever seen. The machine lodged in him. That same year his father gave him a pocket watch, and within a few years he had a reputation as a watch repairman.
Ford left home in 1879 to apprentice as a machinist in Detroit, first with James F. Flower & Brothers and later with the Detroit Dry Dock Company. He returned to Dearborn in 1882 and became skilled with the Westinghouse portable steam engine, which the company eventually hired him to service. In his farm workshop he built a steam wagon and a steam car. He decided steam was not suitable for light automobiles, because the boiler was dangerous.
In 1885 he repaired an Otto engine, and in 1887 he built a four-cycle model with a one-inch bore and a three-inch stroke. By his own account, in 1892 he completed his first motor car. It ran on a two-cylinder four horsepower motor, used 28-inch wire bicycle wheels with rubber tires, and could be shifted by a clutch lever to run at 10 or 20 miles per hour. Between 1895 and 1896 he drove that machine about 1000 miles, then began building a second car in his home workshop.
In 1891 Ford joined the Edison Illuminating Company of Detroit, and his 1893 promotion to Chief Engineer gave him the time and money to chase his gasoline engine experiments. They produced the Ford Quadricycle, which he test-drove on the 4th of June 1896. At a meeting of Edison executives that same year, Ford was introduced to Thomas Edison, who approved of his automobile work and encouraged him to keep going.
Backed by Detroit lumber baron William H. Murphy, Ford left Edison and founded the Detroit Automobile Company on the 5th of August 1899. Its cars cost more and delivered less than Ford wanted, and it dissolved in January of 1901. He and his backers tried again, forming the Henry Ford Company on the 30th of November 1901, with Ford as chief engineer. When Murphy brought in Henry M. Leland as a consultant in 1902, Ford left the company that bore his name. Leland renamed it the Cadillac Automobile Company.
Ford found a new partner in Alexander Y. Malcomson, a Detroit-area coal dealer. They contracted with a machine shop owned by John and Horace E. Dodge for over $160,000 in parts. Sales were slow, and the Dodge brothers demanded payment for their first shipment. To keep the venture alive, Malcomson would have to bring in fresh investors and offer the Dodges a stake in whatever came next.
On the 16th of June 1903, Ford & Malcomson was reincorporated as the Ford Motor Company with $28,000 in capital. The Dodge brothers, Malcomson's uncle John S. Gray, his secretary James Couzens, and two lawyers were among the original investors. Because of Ford's volatility, Gray was elected president.
The Model T debuted on the 1st of October 1908. Its steering wheel sat on the left, a choice every other company soon copied. The four cylinders were cast in a solid block, the whole engine and transmission enclosed, and the car was simple to drive and cheap to repair. It sold for $825 in 1908, and the price fell every year. Sales passed 250,000 in 1914, and by 1916, with the basic touring car down to $360, they reached 472,000. By 1918, half of all cars in the United States were Model Ts.
In 1913 Ford introduced moving assembly belts into his plants. He is often credited with the idea, but the source notes the concept came from employees Clarence Avery, Peter E. Martin, Charles E. Sorensen, and C. Harold Wills. The assembly line is also why the cars were black, since black dried quickest. Earlier Model Ts had come in other colors, including red. Production ran as late as 1927, reaching a final total of 15,007,034 cars, a record that stood for the next 45 years.
In 1914 Ford astonished the world by offering a $5 daily wage, more than double what most of his workers earned. He announced the program on the 5th of January 1914, raising minimum daily pay from $2.34 to $5 for qualifying male workers. A Cleveland, Ohio newspaper said the announcement shot like a blinding rocket through the dark clouds of industrial depression. James Couzens may have been the one who convinced him to adopt it.
Ford called this welfare capitalism, meant to cut a turnover so heavy that some departments hired 300 men a year to fill 100 slots. Profit-sharing went to workers of six months or more who lived as his Social Department approved. The department used 50 investigators to frown on heavy drinking, gambling, and men who abandoned their families. The intrusion was controversial, and by his 1922 memoir Ford was writing about it in the past tense, admitting that paternalism has no place in industry.
Ford also cut the workweek. The decision was made in 1922, and on the 1st of May 1926 the company's factory workers switched to five 8-hour days, a 40-hour week, with office workers following that August. He argued it was high time to rid ourselves of the notion that leisure for workmen is either lost time or a class privilege. More leisure, he reasoned, also gave workers time to buy and consume more goods.
Ford called labor unions the worst thing that ever struck the earth. He laid out his reasoning in Chapter 18 of My Life and Work, arguing that union leaders restricted productivity and had a perverse incentive to keep crises going to hold their power. To fight organizing, he promoted Harry Bennett, a former Navy boxer, to head the Service Department, which used intimidation to quash union activity.
On the 7th of March 1932, during the Great Depression, unemployed Detroit auto workers staged the Ford Hunger March to the Ford River Rouge Complex to present 14 demands. Police and Ford security guards opened fire, causing over sixty injuries and five deaths. On the 26th of May 1937, Bennett's men beat United Automobile Workers members, including Walter Reuther, with clubs while the supervising police chief looked on. Photographs of the injured ran in newspapers the next day, an event remembered as The Battle of the Overpass.
Edsel, the company president, believed Ford had to reach a collective bargaining agreement, but his father refused, keeping Bennett in charge precisely so no deal would be struck. A UAW sit-down strike in April 1941 closed the River Rouge Plant. Sorensen recalled that Ford nearly broke up the company rather than yield. His wife Clara told him she would leave him if he destroyed the family business, and he complied. The contract was signed in June 1941, and overnight Ford went from the most stubborn holdout to the maker with the most favorable UAW terms. About a year later, Ford told Reuther that getting the UAW into the plant was one of the most sensible things Harry Bennett ever did, since now they could fight General Motors and Wall Street together.
In 1920, Ford wrote that if fans wished to know the trouble with American baseball, they had it in three words: too much Jew. Two years earlier, in 1918, he had purchased his hometown newspaper, The Dearborn Independent. In early 1920 he obtained a copy of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a fabricated antisemitic text, and instructed his editors to adapt it for American audiences.
The paper ran a series claiming a vast Jewish conspiracy across 91 issues. Every Ford dealership nationwide had to carry and distribute it. Ford bound the articles into four volumes titled The International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem, which sold more than 500,000 copies and was translated into multiple languages. With around 700,000 readers, Ford became a spokesman for right-wing extremism and religious prejudice.
The reach extended to Germany. In Germany the book was published by Theodor Fritsch, a member of the Reichstag. Heinrich Himmler in 1924 called Ford one of our most valuable, important, and witty fighters. Ford is the only American mentioned favorably in Mein Kampf. Speaking to a Detroit News reporter in 1931, Hitler said he regarded Henry Ford as his inspiration and kept a life-size portrait of him behind his desk. At Nuremberg, Hitler Youth leader Baldur von Schirach testified that Ford's book made him antisemitic. On the 1st of February 1924, Ford received Kurt Ludecke, a representative of Hitler, at home, introduced by Siegfried Wagner and his wife Winifred.
A libel suit by San Francisco lawyer Aaron Sapiro led Ford to close the Independent in December 1927. His apology, written by others, was well received, with four-fifths of the letters sent to him that July coming from Jews. Yet Ford allegedly never signed the retraction, his signature forged by Harry Bennett, and in 1940 he said he hoped to republish The International Jew again some time. In July 1938 the German consul in Cleveland gave Ford the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, the highest medal Nazi Germany could give a foreigner, on his 75th birthday.
By 1932, Ford was manufacturing one-third of the world's automobiles. His philosophy aimed at economic independence for the United States, and his River Rouge Plant grew into the world's largest industrial complex, integrated so far it could produce its own steel. Yet Ford also believed international trade led to peace, and he built abroad to prove it.
Ford opened assembly plants in Britain and Canada in 1911 and soon led both markets. In 1912 he worked with Giovanni Agnelli of Fiat on the first Italian plants. German plants followed in the 1920s with encouragement from Herbert Hoover and the Commerce Department. By 1929 he had dealerships on six continents, plus plants in Australia, France, India, and Mexico. His Amazon rubber plantation, Fordlandia, failed. In 1929 he agreed to help the Soviets build their first automobile plant near Nizhny Novgorod, a deal involving $30,000,000 worth of knocked-down Ford cars and trucks.
Germans were transfixed. They debated Fordism as something quintessentially American, seeing in the Ford Works a national service. One German said automobiles had so changed American life that it was difficult to remember what life was like before Mr. Ford began preaching his doctrine of salvation. Ford modeled his global vision on a single idea, written in My Life and Work: that no matter where industry prospers, whether in India or China or Russia, there will be more profit for everyone, including us.
Ford fancied himself an engineering genius, but he had little formal training and could not read a blueprint. When flagging Model T sales finally forced a successor, a talented team designed the Model A while he supervised. Introduced in December 1927 and built through 1931, it reached an output of more than four million. For 1932 he dropped the flathead Ford V8, the first low-price eight-cylinder engine, the result of a secret project begun in 1930.
Ford's pacifism shaped his earlier years. In 1915 he funded a Peace Ship to Europe and led 170 other peace activists, though he left the ship as soon as it reached Sweden. President Woodrow Wilson urged him to run for a Michigan Senate seat in 1918, and Ford came within 7,000 votes of winning out of more than 400,000 cast. He lost to Truman Newberry. When the United States entered World War I in 1917, his company became a major weapons supplier.
The same pattern returned in the next war. Ford opposed American entry into World War II and served on the board of the America First Committee until controversy forced him out. Yet he directed the company to build a vast aircraft plant at Willow Run, where the first complete B-24 came off the line in October 1942. At its 1944 peak the plant produced 650 B-24s a month, and by 1945 Ford finished one every 58 minutes, building 9,000 in all.
Edsel died of cancer in 1943 at age 49. Strokes had already left his father debilitated, and senior executives ran the company in his name as it lost over $10 million a month. In 1945 Clara and Edsel's widow Eleanor, holding three-quarters of the shares, demanded Ford cede control to his grandson Henry Ford II. He gave in, and the young man's first act was to fire Harry Bennett. Ford died on the 7th of April 1947 at his estate, Fair Lane, in Dearborn. At his viewing in Greenfield Village, up to 5,000 people an hour came to pay their respects.
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Common questions
Who was Henry Ford and what did he create?
Henry Ford was an American industrialist and business magnate who founded the Ford Motor Company in 1903. He is credited with making automobiles affordable for middle-class Americans through the system known as Fordism, and with introducing the Ford Model T in 1908.
When was Henry Ford born and when did he die?
Henry Ford was born on the 30th of July 1863 on a farm in Greenfield Township, Michigan. He died on the 7th of April 1947 at age 83 from a cerebral hemorrhage at his estate, Fair Lane, in Dearborn, Michigan.
What was Henry Ford's five dollar day?
On the 5th of January 1914, Henry Ford announced a $5 daily wage, raising minimum daily pay from $2.34 to $5 for qualifying male workers. The move more than doubled the rate of most of his workers and drew the best mechanics in Detroit to his company.
How many Ford Model T cars were made?
Ford produced a final total of 15,007,034 Model T cars before production ended as late as 1927. That record stood for the next 45 years and was achieved in 19 years from the car's 1908 introduction.
Why was Henry Ford accused of antisemitism?
Henry Ford promoted antisemitism through his newspaper The Dearborn Independent, which he bought in 1918, and through the book The International Jew, which sold more than 500,000 copies. He is the only American mentioned favorably in Hitler's Mein Kampf, and in 1938 he received Nazi Germany's Grand Cross of the German Eagle.
What was Henry Ford's role in World War II production?
Henry Ford opposed American entry into World War II and served on the board of the America First Committee, but his company built a vast aircraft plant at Willow Run near Detroit. There Ford produced 9,000 B-24 bombers, finishing one every 58 minutes by 1945.
How did Henry Ford lose control of the Ford Motor Company?
After his son Edsel died in 1943 and strokes left him debilitated, Henry Ford was sidelined as executives ran the company in his name. In 1945 his wife Clara and Edsel's widow Eleanor, who held three-quarters of the shares, demanded he cede control to his grandson Henry Ford II.