The Arsenal of Democracy: FDR, Detroit, and an Epic Quest to Arm an America at War

by A. J. Baime

Henry’s Peace Ship proved an international embarrassment and failed to save a single life. After reaching Europe, he realized that his mission was misguided. He turned around and headed home. The press called him “God’s fool” and “a clown.” His Oskar II was “a loon ship.”

  Henry didn’t bear the biggest brunt of the criticism, however. Edsel did.

  When Woodrow Wilson asked Congress for a declaration of war on Germany on April 6, 1917, Edsel was twenty-three years old—draft age. Henry mobilized his lawyers to keep his son out of it. Edsel received his exemption on March 11, 1918, on the grounds that he was more valuable to the country at home building military equipment in Ford’s factories. In Europe, he would stop one bullet. At home, he could contribute more. Still, he became the target of every saber-rattler in the nation.

  “Young Ford should take his medicine just like the rest of the boys,” declared Detroit Saturday Night. While young men stood “ready to pay with their lives for the honor and the interest of the American people,” said former president Theodore Roosevelt (whose four sons all served, one losing his life), “the son of wealthy Mr. Ford sits at home in ignoble safety.”

  Edsel was stuck between his father’s will and his own integrity. For the first time, he understood the isolation and impotence that came with his position.

  “I want no stay-at-home appointment,” he said. “I will accept none. I don’t want to don a uniform with the assurance that I will be expected to do nothing but sit in a swivel chair. There is one job in this war I do not want and will not take, and that is the job of a rich man’s son.”

  Everywhere Edsel went, he saw judgment in people’s eyes. He could not escape the ignominy. Throughout the war, he helped build military boats, helmets, and Liberty aircraft engines. But the effort was not enough to erase the smear on his reputation. “All his life he will be singled out as a slacker and a coward,” one reporter said of him.

  Was Edsel a coward? Henry Ford’s prodigal son? One of the most idolized young men in America suddenly had everything to prove.

  4

  Learning to Fly

  More than electric lights, more than steam engines, more than telephones, more than automobiles, more even than the printing press, the airplane separated past from future. It had freed mankind from the earth and opened the skies.

  —STEPHEN E. AMBROSE, The Wild Blue

  AT 11:00 AM PARIS time on the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, World War I ended with the Allies victorious. A little more than one month later, on New Year’s Day in 1919, Detroit’s prince was crowned.

  Henry announced his retirement and named Edsel the president of Ford Motor Company, a job he would hold until the end of his life. Edsel’s face appeared in newspapers all over the globe next to headlines quoting his salary at an amazing $150,000 a year. At twenty-five years old, he was the top man of the world’s most influential corporation. His first move on the job was to give 28,000 employees a 20 percent raise, from $5 to $6 a day. He was now so famous that couples named their baby boys after him. In the 1920s, Edsel Fords were born in Georgia, in Alabama, in Michigan.

  Quietly, behind the scenes, Edsel negotiated to buy out all the stockholders. It cost him $105 million. When Henry got the news, he shrugged and said, “Well, if Edsel has bought it, I can’t help it.” In private, he danced a jig around a room. The Fords owned their family empire outright.* At his height with Standard Oil, John D. Rockefeller owned no more than 27 percent. The Ford stock was split 55 percent to Henry, 42 percent to Edsel, and 3 percent to Clara.

  Then, one chilly May morning in 1920, a crowd gathered at the Fords’ new River Rouge factory. Years in construction, the almighty Rouge was complete, a city of brick buildings and thick stacks rising off the Rouge River’s bank. Entering at Gate 4 on Miller Road, reporters and dignitaries stared wide-eyed at their surroundings—the inner sanctums of the world’s largest factory. If Ford Motor Company was a family religion, this was its Vatican.

  Once again, the Ford plant was envisioned to function with all the precision of a timepiece. Only it was part man, part machine. Picture a timepiece filled with laborers as well as self-propelled mechanical pieces. And then picture that timepiece as big as a metropolis, with 100 miles of interior railroad, 330 acres of windows, and an electric power plant big enough to power all the homes in Chicago. When it was fully operational, the River Rouge plant would churn out 4,000 Model Ts every day.

  In a display of solidarity, the Ford clan appeared, and the crowds applauded them: Henry, his son Edsel, and Edsel’s son, two-and-a-half-year-old Henry Ford II, who wore a beaver fur cap atop his chubby toddler face. Henry clutched his grandson in his arms as Edsel watched. Young Henry II was given a match, and with some help, he lit the coke in Blast Furnace A—igniting not just this industrial mecca but a new era. The crowds cheered, the photographers clicking away as the little boy stood “clapping his hands and shouting gleefully,” as one person present remembered.

  “The fun of playing with matches was almost too much for Henry II,” reported the Detroit News.

  Standing by watching his son perform his first rite of passage as a member of the Ford clan, Edsel beamed, the proud father playing the role that his own father had once played. All this would one day belong to Henry II, whose destiny, like his father’s, would be the Rouge.

  The factory’s sheer vastness struck fear in beholders. According to a Vanity Fair exposé, the Rouge

  could lay claim to being the most significant public monument in America, throwing its shadow across the land probably more widely and more intimately than the United States Senate, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Statue of Liberty. In hyperbole and anathema, it has been compared, lyrically, reverently, vindictively, to the central ganglion of our nation, to an American altar of the God-Objective of Mass Production.

  And the Ford family owned it all.

  By 1927, Henry and Edsel’s fortune together was estimated in the New York Times at $1.2 billion, putting them on the top of the list of the world’s richest men. At Gaukler Pointe, Edsel’s garage filled with exotic, one-of-a-kind automobiles and the walls of his house grew crowded with works by the European masters. Rare objects dated back before the birth of Christ. Edsel and Eleanor Ford’s collection of art pieces, rare Chinese objects, rugs, and sculptures would soon become renowned, worth over $4 million (the equivalent of over $70 million today).

  The Edsel Fords became the nucleus of a moneyed social set. Throughout Prohibition, they kept a well-stocked bar for their cocktail parties. Through friends, Edsel met Franklin Delano Roosevelt for the first time in the early 1920s. Roosevelt had recently come down with polio and lost the use of his legs. Unprompted, Edsel wrote a check for $25,000 for a polio charity. When the future New York governor and United States president saw the check, he said, “Well, I’m just flabbergasted!”

  Henry bristled at the idea of his son as a society figure. He once declared that he would rather repair automobiles in a Detroit garage for sixty hours a week than socialize with the likes of Edsel’s friends. “A Ford can take you anywhere,” he famously said, “except into society.” The difference of opinion foreshadowed the rift that was about to tear father and son apart.

  But at the time, the two men presented a unified front to the world. They spent hours together every day conducting business. At night, their dialogue continued over a private phone line that connected Henry’s Fair Lane home directly to Edsel’s study at Gaukler Pointe.

  “My father is a great man,” Edsel told one reporter. To another, he said, “I have not worked out for myself anything in the nature of a business philosophy. I see no reason why I should for I cannot imagine a better one than my father has held.”

  Privately, like his father, Edsel felt the tug of ambition and a need for public accomplishments that would push his World War I embarrassment permanently into the shadows. The legacy of Ford Motor Company—Fordism and the Model T—belonged to Henry. So, at the age of twenty-eight, Edsel wen
t in search of a legacy of his own. It was the Roaring Twenties, a time when science was king and anything felt possible.

  When it came to the Fords, not even the sky was the limit.

  Years earlier, when Edsel was fourteen years old, he had set out to build Detroit’s first airplane, in a barn on Woodward Avenue. He was part of a small team that included a friend named Charles Van Auken, a sweeper who worked in his father’s Highland Park factory, and two other employees of his father’s. In the barn, Edsel and his friends unloaded their tools and parts and milled pieces of lumber. It was the adolescent’s answer to his father’s shed behind Bagley Avenue, where Henry built his first Quadricycle.

  Like so many boys who had read of the Wright brothers’ adventures—including the first controlled human flight, over the dunes of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in 1903—Edsel dreamed the immortal dream: to harness power and take flight. But unlike so many boys who dreamed of airplanes, Edsel had the means to build one.

  Barely a teenager, and just six years after the Wright brothers made their first flight, Edsel hurled himself into a wild adventure. At the time, only a few men had successfully accomplished controlled, machine-powered flight. The Brazilian inventor Alberto Santos-Dumont debuted a flying machine he called Oiseau de Proie (French for “bird of prey”). In the Parisian neighborhood of Bois de Boulogne, he flew 200 feet in 1906. Frenchman Louis Blériot, an inventor who wore a mustache like a set of wings, was active at the same time as the Wrights, pioneering a monoplane design. He made the first flight across the English Channel in the summer of 1909, moving the London Daily Express to declare that “Great Britain is no longer an island.”

  That same year, in Dearborn, Edsel and Van Auken modeled their flying machine after Blériot’s. It had a single fabric wing, a wooden skeleton, and a tricycle landing gear, the parts machined at the Highland Park Ford factory. For power, they mounted a Model T engine, drilled full of holes to lighten the weight, in the plane’s nose.

  On the day of the maiden flight, Edsel and Van Auken towed the airplane to a field behind a Ford car. Van Auken agreed to pilot the thing (Edsel was forbidden by his father). As Edsel stood by holding his breath, Van Auken motored along the grass and lifted off, sailing six feet over the earth as the Model T engine buzzed like a gnat. A gust of wind caught the aircraft sideways and sent it crashing into a tree. Van Auken got out dazed and slightly injured, having banged his head.

  “The thing did leave the ground,” Edsel later recalled, “and probably it is just as well that it did not get too high, for it might have fallen and killed somebody.”

  When a local Detroiter named William Stout launched the Stout Metal Airplane Company some years later, Edsel saw opportunity. By this time, he was president of Ford Motor Company, the boss of tens of thousands of men. Stout, meanwhile, was a wildly coiffed inventor and former Packard engineer who built the first all-metal airplane in the United States, Maiden Detroit (“Made in Detroit”). Edsel invested $2,000 in the fledgling company and tried to convince his father to partner with him and build an airfield that would lure aviators from across America. What Detroit had been for motorcars, Edsel argued, it could be in the future for airplanes.

  Henry was against it. Edsel swayed him on one condition: he would not pilot a plane himself. He would leave the flying to men who had less responsibility than the president of Ford Motor Company. Still an infant science, aviation was simply too dangerous. One example: of the first forty pilots to fly for the US Air Mail Service during those years, thirty-one died in crashes.

  Once Henry gave the venture his blessing, Edsel became a partner in the Stout Metal Airplane Company. A series of unprecedented events unfolded, with Edsel leading the charge.

  Edsel and his father cleared 240 acres and built the most modern airport in America, with a factory for Stout to build aircraft. “They were pioneering,” said William Mayo, who became Ford’s chief aviation engineer. “Nobody knew in those days just how long a runway should be.” The Fords were the first in the country to lay a concrete landing strip, the first to build an airport hotel for out-of-town flyboys (the 108-room Dearborn Inn, which is still there), and the first private company to take on a US Air Mail Service contract. They were also the first to launch a commercial airline with regularly scheduled flights, to carry cargo. (Scheduled passenger flights did not exist.) Starting in 1925, pilots flew back and forth between Dearborn, Cleveland, and Chicago. Via the first scheduled flight, Edsel sent a letter to Ford’s Chicago branch manager. “This letter is to wish you greetings by Air Mail. I am posting the letter in Detroit at 8:15 AM this morning, and it will be transported to Dearborn by motor and flown to Chicago on the first privately operated Air Mail Service flight for the United States Post Office Department.”

  When Henry and Edsel bought out Stout and built their own factory in 1925, they quickly became the top-producing airplane manufacturer in the country. Though there were many models, the Ford Tri-Motor—nicknamed the “Tin Goose,” a revolutionary flying machine due to its three engines—became the bestseller. At roughly $50,000, it was purchased by Hollywood stars, the US military, and later by nascent airlines like TWA and Pan American. Its slogan: “The Highways of the Sky.”

  Edsel became aviation’s greatest benefactor, and this more than his position at Ford thrust him into the public eye. Passenger flight, Edsel proclaimed, would soon become quotidian, just as other inventions had become part of daily life in recent years—the radio and its newscasts, the supermarket, and branded food products like Hostess cupcakes and Gerber baby food.

  “There are sound economic reasons for believing that a great epoch of air transportation is being born,” Edsel said. “A new commercial and industrial era is beginning with the airplane just as surely as new eras began with steamships, railroads, and automobiles. . . . It is truly the Age of the Air.”

  To prove that airplanes were not suicide machines, Edsel created the “Ford Reliability Tour,” which became known as the “Edsel Ford Trophy.” Pilots gathered at Ford Airport and flew to cities around the country, drumming up publicity with each stop. At its height, the Tour’s finishing ceremonies lured 175,000 spectators to Ford Airport. Edsel was also the major backer behind the expedition of US Navy commander Richard Byrd, who in 1926 became the first pilot to fly over the North Pole—in a plane named Josephine Ford, after Edsel’s young daughter. Three years later, Byrd flew over the South Pole and named a series of mountain ranges after Edsel (still called the Ford Ranges).

  On August 11, 1927, a crowd of some 75,000 spectators gathered at Ford Airport, the cars parking in the fields around the main terminal, the hangars, and the Ford airplane factory. They could see the new Sperry Beacon searchlight on the southeast corner of the hangar, which aided pilots landing by night. The searchlight produced a higher-watt beam than 9 million Ford cars, the “nearest approach to intensity of that coming from the sun yet to be produced,” Ford Motor Company claimed.

  Henry and Edsel stood on the airfield at the center of it all, and along with the crowds they craned their necks with eyes glued to the skies. There in the blue ether, at roughly 2:00 PM, he appeared—a speck in the distance, accompanied by an engine’s song. Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis came into focus, circling above the concrete runway. Amid roars and whistles from the crowd, Lindbergh came in for a graceful landing. Henry and Edsel were there to meet him.

  Just three months earlier, the pilot had captured the hearts and minds of the world by flying solo across the Atlantic, from Long Island to Paris. Entire generations looked up at the sky upon hearing of his feat, as if seeing it for the first time. “The news just saturated all the conversation, newspapers, the radios,” remembered former South Dakota senator George McGovern, who was five years old at the time and would go on to become an accomplished pilot as well as a presidential candidate. “Pictures of Lindbergh with his helmet and goggles were on the front pages. I just thought he was the most glamorous creature on God’s earth. I grew up thinking Lin
dbergh was our greatest American.”

  Now here was Lindbergh at Ford Airport, twenty-five years old, tall, slim, and blond. Together the Fords and “Lucky Lindy”—along with Lindbergh’s mother, a Detroit schoolteacher—smiled for photographers. Afterward, Lindbergh took Henry for his first airplane ride. The Spirit of St. Louis lifted off with Henry crunched inside awkwardly (there was only one seat).

  “This was the finest ride I ever had,” Henry declared upon landing. “Why, it is just like going on a picnic.”

  When it was Edsel’s turn, he climbed aboard. Cruising at over 100 miles per hour, the view from the sky was breathtaking. Detroit’s smokestacks looked like cigarettes sticking out of brick buildings. Up here Edsel rode on the wings of his lofty dreams. Up here one felt like a superman. Lindbergh himself put it best: to feel “the godlike power man derives from his machines—the strength of a thousand horses at one’s fingertips; the conquest of distance through mercurial speed; the immortal viewpoint of the higher air.”

  Upon landing, Edsel felt more certain of his destiny than ever. His future was taking flight. “I believe that 1928 will go down in history as the year in which American business accepted the airplane,” he told reporters.

  When American business accepted the airplane, Edsel believed that he would be the first man approached. If ever there was a way to live up to his father’s legacy and expectations, the airplane was it.

  5

  Father vs. Son

  For all their ambition for Edsel to make a name for himself, Father and Mother Ford never wanted their son to grow up. They wanted to keep him close to themselves and guide his every thought.

  —CHARLIE SORENSEN