Another Fine Mess

by Tim Moore

  In 1930, the River Rouge plant laid off two-thirds of its workforce, and in the three years that followed Ford recorded losses of $125 million. Wages dropped by 60 per cent across the nation. Fifteen million Americans were unemployed, and forty-five million lived in poverty. People ate potato peelings and sold their own blood. A million transients drifted west. Henry’s beloved farmers suffered grievously: wheat fell to its lowest price since the days of Shakespeare, and by 1932 a pair of shoes cost the same as a wagon load of oats.

  But Ford, nearing seventy, was no longer the man who had once spoken favourably about universal healthcare and nationalisation. Now he said that charity was barbarous, that the unemployed were at fault for not working hard enough, that crop prices ‘could never fall too low’. He suggested that the Depression was a great opportunity to get back to basics and appreciate the simple things. ‘If you’ve lost all your money,’ breezed Henry, ‘just charge it up to experience.’ The thuggish excesses of Ford’s Service Department, captured by a newspaper photographer, dealt the fatal blow to his man-of-the-people schtick. ‘Don’t you know we are losing our farms?’ wrote one furious correspondent. ‘I will not take any lip from you.’

  But Ford wasn’t the nation’s pen pal any more. Instead, people wrote in their millions to a new saviour, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was resurrecting America with his New Deal. People blamed Ford and businessmen like him for the recession, and put their faith in the federal government to bail them out. Trump’s victory was secured by an extraordinary inversion of this belief.

  For the record, Henry Ford never forswore his pacifism. In this sense at least he remained a man of deep compassion, a fierce opponent of capital punishment, so repulsed by violence that he refused to display a single gun or even a mousetrap in his museum of American innovation. Until the day he died he carried this ‘Imagine’-esque homily, condensed from a Tennyson poem, on a card in his wallet:

  For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,

  Saw a vision of the world, and all the wonders that could be,

  Till the war drum throbbed no longer, and the battle flags were furled,

  In the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World.

  Below these words, Henry even scribbled his own ‘I’m not the only one’ addendum: ‘The Parliament of Man will be worth it all. I believe I see it coming.’ Despite the curdling of his politics, Ford would always cling to an optimistic faith in human nature. ‘I have never met a really bad man,’ he would often say. In failing to imagine Donald Trump uttering these words, ever, I wonder if I’ve unearthed small-town America’s fundamental woe. They’ll put their faith in a vengeful God, a big gun and a vindictive president. Because they’ve lost all faith in their fellow man.

  So, anyway – Henry might have gone a bit Daily Mail, but he wasn’t all bad. Right? Well, there is one other thing, and I’m afraid it’s terrible. Discover enough about Henry Ford to develop a deep admiration for the man, and you’ll find yourself putting it off and wishing it away. But the uncomfortable truth is this: the world’s best-known industrialist was a vitriolic and relentless anti-Semite.

  Ford spent eight years and $10 million propagating his viciously anti-Jewish conspiracy theories, through the pages of the Dearborn Independent – a newspaper acquired largely for this purpose and distributed in vast numbers across the nation. Some ninety-one articles from the Dearborn Independent were collated under Ford’s authorship into an anthology entitled The International Jew – The World’s Foremost Problem, which declared Jews in charge of global politics and finance, and held them accountable for everything from the Great War to fixing the 1919 baseball World Series, via prostitution and jazz (‘Jewish Jazz – Moron Music’). A German translation of this work was reprinted no fewer than twenty-nine times during the 1920s. ‘I read it and became anti-Semitic,’ a prominent Nazi named Baldur von Schirach told judges at the Nuremburg Trials. ‘In those days this book made such a deep impression on my friends and myself because we saw Henry Ford as the embodiment of success.’

  ‘Every year makes the American Jews more and more the controlling masters of the producers in a nation of one hundred and twenty million,’ wrote Hitler in Mein Kampf, ‘and only a single great man, Ford, to their fury still maintains full independence.’

  In 1938, on his seventy-fifth birthday, Henry Ford was presented with the Grand Cross of the Supreme Order of the German Eagle: the highest honour Nazi Germany could bestow upon a foreigner. How happy he looks in the photos, beaming away in his home office at Dearborn as a Nazi official pins the medal to his lapel – a Maltese cross girdled with eagles and swastikas. Two years later, Ford told a reporter that the Second World War was the doing of ‘international Jewish bankers’. By then he’d had a stroke and was sliding towards dementia, though given his track record this was hardly a blurted moment of madness. Anti-Semitism was, of course, a more mainstream menace back then, and along with the hate-mail Ford received many letters of support. But how extremely unpalatable it is to realise that both of the most popular cars in history, the globe-changing Model T and the VW Beetle, were created by people who really hated Jews.

  Mike still had his top off, and full exposure was burning an impressive red stripe across my previously fringe-shaded forehead. But despite the sun my forearms were goose-pimpled, and autumn was setting out its stall all around. Swelling pumpkins lay strewn about like basketballs in roadside fields; ranks of wheat stubble smouldered across every rolling hillside. These bonus extra miles were there to be savoured: I could now get back in the requisite expeditionary groove, reacquaint myself with the full and thrilling import of conquering a huge landmass in a stupidly old car.

  Rural northern Oregon thoughtfully offered up a drive-thru anthology of favourite hits. Big red barns, scampering chipmunks, a rusted girder bridge. ‘GOD ANSWERS KNEE-MAIL.’ A derelict clapboard gas station; the whiff of skunk; swing-seats on sagging verandas. But the roads were busier now, and that big-country, open-plan vibe of plain, plateau, desert and prairie already seemed a distant memory. The Oregon Trail ended in these fecund hills.

  My motel in Clatskanie, hard up by the Columbia River, emphasised how far I’d come: it boasted a drive-thru ‘adult emporium’ that offered glass pipes, hookahs and bedroom novelties for the stoned pervert in a hurry. The evening was neatly familiar, though. I had a burrito over the road, then came back, turned on the telly, and saw ‘TRUMP SOWS CONFUSION’ splashed across the screen. I flicked it off and opened the map. A long exhalation: just over 100 miles left.

  CHAPTER 20

  ‘Well, it’s been real enjoyable hearing about your journey. Thank you for sharing it with me.’

  The young attendant on the Westport ferry gave me a nod and a gracious smile. How I’d miss this enthusiastic curiosity, etched deep into the American character. With the roof down, my celebrity had been elevated to a whole new level. Even Porsche drivers were waving now. I’d miss all that, too. And the enduring pleasure of procuring dreamy sighs and clasped chests by the simple expedient of opening my mouth and saying something. And being called ‘sweetie’ by old ladies and ‘pardner’ by old men. Raised palms of greeting out on a lonely road. A mentholated whiff of sagebrush and the glint of a distant corn elevator. Humptulips, Washington State; Slapout, Oklahoma; Yockanookany Nature Trail, Mississippi; Bacon Level, Alabama. Bashing the horn for company and sending a huge flock of starlings into the blue sky. The restful seaside whoosh of an aged motel air conditioner. Eight per cent sugary malt alcohol: don’t cry for me, Lime-a-Rita.

  I bumped off the little ferry and slithered up a ramp into Washington, my twenty-second and final state. Almost two-thirds of Washingtonians live in Seattle, and this side of their province had been left pretty much to its own devices: a lot of hilly forest, a few prisons. Presently I swung on to the Pacific Coastal Highway, an iconic road-trip magnet whose representative stalwarts now gaily crowded the tarmac. A shaving-foamed, can-trailing honeymoon express; a convoy of middle-aged
bikers; foreign tourists in rented convertibles. The Pacific Coastal Highway. Gulp. When the ferryman asked for my destination, it had felt extremely weird to name an end point that was almost in view, rather than a couple of time zones away. I caught a first whiff of seaweed. Salt-poisoned pine skeletons clustered a lagoon. A swathe of blue crept down from the top of my GPS screen. But the world’s largest body of water bided its time for the big reveal, hiding coyly behind a crest of Christmas trees and birches.

  It was a struggle to gather my thoughts, what with the excitable traffic and a strident chirrup that now resonated painfully up from Mike’s right front wheel. I tried to archive the journey’s defining sensations, the throbs and rattles and creaks that ran through my hands, my arse, my ears. The perma-oiled cuticles; the trousers that dare not speak their name; the once-red trainers browned with desert dust, lubricants and salsa. Blistered lips and a farmer’s tan that beat all others forearms down. Somehow I’d lost a stone: nervous energy had bested Tex-Mex, Slim Jims and a hundred fry-ups.

  I arched my back and splayed my legs, as I had done fifty times a day to ease the fearsome pelvic cramp that is the lot of the long-haul antique motorist. The antique antique motorist. Because I really had aged on this journey, ravaged by its rigours and perhaps by association with ancient cars and men. I emitted a slight but perceptible groan whenever I stood up, and a grateful sigh whenever I sat down. Three hours earlier, making just such a sound as I took my ease and prepared to enjoy my final diner breakfast, the smiling waitress handed me a laminated sheet headed ‘SENIOR MENU’. I felt extremely sad until I saw the prices.

  But Mike, poor Mike, had truly suffered. For a ninety-three-year-old, this was the mother of One Last Jobs. The shriek of a dry bearing, the rasp of a fresh crack in the exhaust: every few hours a painful new voice inveigled itself into that chorus of neglect and decay. At speed, he sounded like a one-man band falling down the stairs. The cabin was a frank disgrace, bestrewn with Slim Jim sheaths, dented cans and empty quarts of Walmart oil, all laid on a bed of Sedgwick straw and a million grains of Great Sandy Desert. The windshield was so filthy that when I tried to take photos through it, the camera stubbornly fixed its focus on the grease spots. Wrath’s paw-prints still marched across that dusty bonnet.

  The sun got to work and I pulled on the High Desert Model As trucker cap Don had given me. If anyone had told me at the start of this trip that by the end I would voluntarily be wearing such a cap I might never have set off. But now it felt right on my head. Just as it felt right to say gas and sidewalk and glaaaaaaaaass of waaahdur. I was talking the talk and hatting the hat. I had become an old car guy. Albeit the kind of old car guy who pulls up the hood after a breakdown and thinks: Yeah, all these bits are definitely really hot.

  We rounded a few grubby estuaries, tracking up and down grim waterfront towns full of battered warehouses and timber-pulp processing plants. One of them was Aberdeen, where Kurt Cobain grew up. It smelled like white spirit. Here I turned left off the shore-shy coastal highway, and headed west down a 20-mile cul-de-sac that made a no-nonsense dash straight at the sea. I inched the throttle down a notch, then gripped Mike’s wooden wheel extremely hard. We were going to make it.

  ‘Henry Ford put wheels on our homes,’ said the actor and folk psychologist Will Rogers in 1923. ‘It will take a hundred years to tell whether that helped us or hurt us.’ But the thick end of a century later, it still isn’t clear.

  By the end of the Model T era, all the transformative ingredients of the automobile age were already in the mix. In 1921: the first drive-in fast-food joint, the Pig Stand in Dallas. In 1922: the Country Club Plaza near Kansas City, America’s first out-of-town shopping mall. In 1923: the Bronx River Parkway, the first urban motorway. By 1927, one in five Americans owned a car – a year when the comparable proportion in Britain was one in forty-four, and in Germany, one in 196. Cars – building them, buying them, running them, laying miles and miles of tarmac before them – absorbed the bulk of America’s private and public expenditure.

  Ford’s tractors were at the forefront of a mechanisation drive that largely killed off the small farm, and his cars gave redundant farming families an escape route. From 1926 to 1965, more than thirty million Americans moved out of farm communities and into cities, by some reckonings the greatest human migration in history. By 1940, thirteen million Americans were living in car-commuter suburbs, and the whole east coast from New York to Philadelphia had coagulated into a single band of metropolitan settlement. Homogenous ‘miracle mile’ strip malls were a common edge-of-town fixture by the late 1950s; so too were mega malls with parking for thousands of cars. By 1930, Atlanta had already lost half its downtown stores, and in the coming decades most American cities would follow Detroit’s lead: prosperous suburbs wrapped around a crime-ridden central wasteland. In reflection of the car’s omnipotence, many new residential districts were built without a single sidewalk.

  The sociological impact was overwhelming. On the downside, cars facilitated white flight and had a corrosive effect on the nation’s sense of community. As early as 1929, an LA householder was telling a researcher that all her social needs were met by car, largely ‘riding uptown to the movie theaters’. ‘I have nothing whatsoever to do with our neighbours. I don’t even know their names.’ But the freedom to make such a choice was an exhilarating novelty for women, whose lives were transformed by the car much more fundamentally than men’s. When the Model T was blessed with an electric starter in 1919, removing brute strength as a prerequisite for ownership, Ford’s marketing genius Norval Hawkins came out with a remarkably progressive campaign: ‘It’s woman’s day! No longer a “shut in”, she reaches for an ever wider sphere of action – that she may be more the woman. The car is a real weapon in the changing order.’

  As early as the mid 1920s, a car was deemed ‘a social essential’ for American teenagers. Racing and drunken joyrides became rites of passage, with the LA police reporting that nearly all of the thirty-two cars that vanished in the city on an average day in 1926 were stolen by under-eighteens. Henry Ford, rather wonderfully, is said to have squeezed the width of the Model T’s rear seat to 38 inches, hoping, in the words of auto historian James Flink, to ‘discourage the use of his car as a place in which to engage in sexual intercourse’. But instead, he threw down the gauntlet to passionate young contortionists across the nation. In 1921, the chief of the LA police motorcycle squad was complaining that country-lane ‘coupé lovers’ would ‘douse their lights and indulge in orgies’. ‘Hot pillow’ motels turned away travellers to focus on the, um, ‘couples trade’, with rooms sometimes rented sixteen times a night. The first drive-in cinema opened in Camden, New Jersey, in 1933, and as the phenomenon swept across the US, staff quickly noticed that audiences often failed to engage with the on-screen action. ‘I can look out some nights and I won’t see a single head,’ said the manager of a Georgia drive-in. ‘Not one. Everybody’s going at it.’ On a doubtlessly connected note, by the 1960s, 40 per cent of American marriage proposals were said to have been made in cars. Sociologists have bluntly pointed out that by extending the search for a spouse far beyond the small-town boundaries of old, the car added much-needed depth to certain regional gene pools.

  Ford, by then a conflicted and rather senile pacifist, lived to see automobile assembly lines win the war. Ferdinand Porsche had known as much in advance: after his tour of the mighty and relentless River Rouge factory, he warned Hitler that repurposed US car plants could churn out two planes or tanks for every one an enemy might destroy. And though Henry died in 1947, he didn’t miss much in the way of US automotive glory. After the launch of hydraulic power steering in 1951, the American motor industry settled into the cynical perfection of built-in obsolescence, leaving technological advances to the Europeans. The bigger-is-better national mentality was a handy fit for the all-powerful ‘Big Three’, Ford, Chrysler and General Motors: in the 1950s, a vast, wallowy Yank tank only cost around $300 more to manufacture than a more
humble ‘sub-compact’, but could attract a $3,000 premium in the showroom.

  The shamelessly overblown 1959 Cadillac V8 was 19 feet long and almost 7 feet wide, and though American cars wouldn’t get any bigger, they also wouldn’t get any better. Chevrolet used the same engine for twenty-four years, and the fuel economy of an average American car fell by almost half in three post-war decades. Cadillac’s 1967 flagship, the Eldorado, came with antediluvian crossply tyres and drum brakes that meant you needed 386 feet – the length of a football pitch – to stop one from 70mph. Its V8 engine returned 10mpg – less than half Mike’s average consumption on our coast-to-coast drive.

  Overseas manufacturers had by then left their American rivals distantly behind. The Eldorado’s closest European equivalent, the Mercedes 250, had drum brakes and crossply tyres, weighed over half a ton less and therefore required 100 fewer feet to stop from 70. It was powered by a fuel-injected engine that returned twice the gas mileage, and it undercut the Cadillac by $2,000. American cars had become everything Henry Ford hated: overpriced, overweight, under-engineered.

  In 1950, the US manufactured 76 per cent of the world’s motor vehicles. By 1982, that proportion had collapsed to 19 per cent. America is still in love with cars: half of US households have more than one. But they increasingly buy foreign. The US has been a net importer of automotive products since 1967. Ford currently employs 50,000 factory workers across the US, less than half the number who manned the River Rouge lines alone in the mid-1920s. Chrysler is now owned by Fiat, and over the last ten years GM has been kept afloat with $17 billion of taxpayers’ money.