The Tycoon

Henry Ford’s History Lesson

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The Tycoon was indignant.

Indignant that his worldview had been challenged, indignant that there were people out there who found his outlook unsavory, wrongheaded, and on a personal level, even embarrassing. Here he was, one the wealthiest and most influential men alive, a man who had changed the world in ways even influential men only ever dream of, yet still a man who was emotionally blind and oblivious to his own ignorance—and shocked that anyone sought to challenge him on any of it.

Inside the small-town courthouse in Mount Clemens, Michigan, twenty miles northeast of Detroit, the Tycoon sat unrepentant. He had sued The Chicago Tribune for running an editorial that called him “an ignorant idealist” and “an anarchist enemy of the nation.” On the stand, he sat as Tribune lawyers sought to dignify the paper’s claims. As it turned out, the Tycoon knew little at all. He proudly claimed the American Revolution had occurred in 1812, that Benedict Arnold was “a writer, I think,” that chili con carne was another way of describing a “large mobile army” and that he wasn’t really sure how the American government actually worked. When asked what the United States had been originally, he said, “Land, I guess.” When asked about his grasp of current events, the Tycoon admitted, “I rarely read anything else except the headlines.”

Still, the Tycoon won the case—The Chicago Tribune paid him six cents in damages. In editorials across America, while the elite-minded literati lambasted the Tycoon for his demonstrable lack of knowledge, the apparent absence of curiosity and more so, the arrogance with which he delivered his ignorance. Still—in letters to those same newsrooms, reader after reader poured in their support for the Tycoon for thinking like them, representing the average person, and standing up to the condescending elites who told others how to think.

It was early summer, 1919 and the Tycoon—Henry Ford—was bigger than ever. Ford was born a few months before the Gettysburg Address in 1863 and died in 1947, just a year and half after the Atom bomb ended World War II. Few time periods in history produced so much change—in no small part because of his role as the founder of the Ford Motor Company and inventor of the Model-T in 1908, which transformed and transported how humans themselves connected with the world around them. Of course, little of those considerations mattered to Ford. “History is more or less bunk,” he said once in 1916.

Although he’s often remembered for it, Ford did not invent the automobile. The Model-T, which first came on the road in 1908, was far from the first or best car on the road. However, it was affordable. Above all, Ford wanted Americans to buy his cars—which they did, creating a huge demand for bigger and better roads that went to further off places, impacting real estate markets in areas that had not previously had such demand. And in those places—on weekends without work, which had become a more regular occurrence in the 1920s and 1930s, families wanted to take those Model-T’s to those new places, creating a demand for a leisure market, leading to a boom in the construction of parks, public beaches, restaurants and recreation facilities all across America. He changed how people lived. And his company’s success made Ford one of the richest men in America.

Despite his wealth and influence at a time when many Americans were rejecting the “robber barons” who had monopolized so much of American industry, Ford was a folk hero. As a boss, he implemented a five-dollar workday along with the 40-hour work week in 1926, well before it became American law in the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1940. And the Model-T could be built in 90 minutes, thanks to Ford’s perfection of the assembly line in 1913, which revolutionized the way every industrialist in the world conceptualized how quickly things could be built.

Home and abroad, Ford was a sensation. The Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin praised Ford in his New Economic Policy proposal in 1921, declaring that “socialism equaled Soviet revolution plus American technology,” in reference to Ford’s creations. So had Lenin’s ideological opposite—the American magnate, John D. Rockefeller—who described Ford’s production model as “the industrial marvel of the age.” President Woodrow Wilson even convinced Ford to run for the U.S. Senate in 1918 in Michigan on the Democratic nomination, a race he lost nonetheless by 8,000 votes.

In Germany, Adolf Hitler, too, had been among Ford’s enthusiasts, declaring, “I shall do my best to put his theories into practice in Germany.” Indeed, beleaguered German industry had faltered after World War I, and Ford’s revolutionary industrial tactics allowed for its factories to operate as never before, in a far more efficient manner, to build not just Volkswagens but tanks and bombers.

Ford, like Hitler, believed Jewish people were among the sources of the world’s ills. To share and spread his antisemitic views with the world, Ford figured the best way was to buy his way into the world of mass media. In 1919, Ford purchased The Dearborn Independent, a failing local paper that soon became one of the largest circulated newspapers in America during the 1920s. In its first issue under Ford’s ownership, articles ran attacking Jews around the world. Soon, the paper began running a series known as The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem, which Ford had made into a book. Copies made it to Europe and certain passages further inspired Hitler’s own troubled and fascist thinking. In 1923, he said, “We look on Heinrich Ford as the leader of the growing Fascisti movement in America,” and in 1931 when a reporter asked about the large portrait of Ford that hung in his Munich office, Hitler replied, “I regard Henry Ford as my inspiration.”

On Ford’s 75^th birthday in 1938, Hitler awarded Ford the Grand Service Cross of the Supreme Order of the German Eagle, Germany’s highest honor for foreigners, for his “Humanitarian ideals” and commitment “to the cause of peace, like the Führer and Chancellor has done.” A year later, the German army would invade Poland.

By then, Ford had lost his magic. After Ford gained sole control of his company in 1919, the behemoth slowly began to fall apart under declining sales and his messy, incoherent leadership style. Other companies—namely General Motors—began to outpace Ford, using a more logical industrial structure. However, history was not done with Henry Ford even if he never had time for it. In an ironic twist of fate, current events were about to provide Ford’s company the opportunity for a comeback: America’s entry into World War II. Soon, in its desperate need for tanks and bombers, the government relied on private companies to build the planes, ships and tanks needed to win the war. In a flash, plants popped up across America—creating an Arsenal of Democracy—as American workers became an essential part of the war effort.

Within months, masses of B-24 “Liberator” bombers began appearing above German skies, dropping bombs that destroyed industrial areas across Germany where production facilities operated—including many German facilities that had been inspired by Fordism. And those American made bombers, which were crucial to win the war, were manufactured at a plant built by the Ford Motor Company called Willow Run in Belleville, Michigan—an aircraft factory created explicitly to use assembly line methods to build an astonishing one B-24 bomber every single hour.

History is not bunk.

It’s filled with ghosts that tell us stories of good and evil that fail to recognize the difference between invention and beliefs, and unless we listen to those stories and read beyond the headline, we will salute the ghosts who committed its most heinous acts.

Sources:

Steven Watts, The People’s Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/11/henry-ford-anti-semitism/675911/

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/henryford-antisemitism/

https://www.loc.gov/item/2013218776/

https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/justin-h-vassallo-world-henry-ford-shaped/