Life of Automobile, The

by Parissien, Steven

  At General Motors, the seat-of-the-pants salesmanship of Billy Durant was inexorably giving way to a cooler, more professional approach to company management. Legendary GM boss Alfred Sloan’s subsequent assessment of Durant was that, while he recognized that Durant ‘had created and inspired the dynamic growth of General Motors’, he judged that Durant ‘was too casual in his ways for an administrator, and he overloaded himself. Important decisions had to wait until he was free, and were often made impulsively.’ Undoubtedly, by 1920 Durant’s reliance on intuition rather than consultation maddened senior GM board members – most notably Pierre Samuel DuPont.

  DuPont was a shy, retiring man who preferred balance sheets to people. A scion of the Wilmington-based industrial giant, E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company – founded as long ago as 1802, and which now embraced chemicals, armaments and steel – Pierre graduated from MIT with a major in chemistry and duly worked his way up the corporate ladder, becoming president of the family firm in 1915. He had already been invited on to the General Motors board by the bankers’ trust and had brought along with him his financial wizard, John J. Raskob, who subsequently became vice president for finance of both GM and DuPont.

  A DuPont efficiency expert judged in 1920 that Durant ‘has complete charge of all the planning and dictates largely the policies’, and that ‘in a great many cases there seems to be no one else in the organization that is the final arbitrator for the various plans for new developments’. His conclusion was: ‘There is no system similar to our work order system for making suggestions, or no central engineering organization. There is, I think, also a certain lack of cooperative spirit between the different plants, [which] are practically independent as regards their purchasing, accounting and other organization, [with] no central organization directing them, except in the most general way.’

  Durant’s impulsiveness had led to his summary firing of Cadillac’s Henry Leland early in 1917, ostensibly over the issue of the war. The pro-British Leland had wanted to make aircraft engines for the RAF, while Durant viewed the war simply as a distraction from car making in the US. Now in his mid-seventies, Leland financed a wholly new auto factory and began to produce luxury cars on the Cadillac model, which he named after ‘the greatest American’, Abraham Lincoln. In 1922 Leland finally retired and sold the Lincoln marque to Ford.

  Meanwhile, DuPont continued put more money into GM,1 while becoming increasingly worried about the company’s increasing debt and mounting stocks of unsold cars. During the postwar slump of 1919–20, as GM’s share price plummeted, Durant resorted to his accustomed panacea of personally buying up company stock, using borrowed money. But Durant was rapidly approaching personal bankruptcy. In November 1920, after he had admitted launching a wholly unredeemable $34 million stock issue using promissory notes, DuPont promised a further cash injection for GM only if Durant resigned as president. DuPont, Raskob and the bankers from J. P. Morgan raised the $27 million necessary to shore up GM in the short-term; DuPont loaned Durant $1.7 million to pay off his pressing personal debts, and also offered him a share in GM’s new holding company (over which he would have no control). Morgan’s bankers made no secret of their belief that Durant was unfit to run an automobile company and that GM’s founder had no option but to walk the plank. On 1 December 1920, Durant resigned from General Motors.

  This time there was to be no Hollywood-style comeback. In April 1921 Durant launched yet another new car maker, Durant Motors, which he financed with $5 million of GM stock. But, after initial successes, the company foundered in 1931. (GM eventually bought its deserted factory in Lansing.) Durant himself went into semi-retirement, supported only by his GM pension after he lost most of his money in the Wall Street Crash of 1929. He put much of his declining energy into building a mock-castle residence in northern Michigan, which mysteriously burnt down just before he and his wife were due to move in. (Rumours of arson have subsequently pointed the finger at a number of candidates, from the United Auto Workers’ union to GM itself.) Felled by a stroke in 1942, Durant managed a bowling alley in Flint until his death in 1947.

  Over in Dearborn, it soon seemed as if Henry Ford might follow Durant’s example and be ousted (once again) by his own board. Ford liked to think of himself as a lonely genius, who needed no one’s advice. However, in the 1920s he was to be proved spectacularly wrong in two key areas: the company’s model range (or lack of it), and its expansion into Europe.

  By 1923 it was obvious to most automotive experts that Ford’s obsessive concentration on just one model was beginning to turn sour. Sales of the Model T were flagging and the car, even with a variety of bodywork changes, was beginning to look old and antiquated in the face of new competition from GM’s multi-marque line-up. In 1924 the Model T was finally made available in colours other than black: Empire Grey, Orriford Lake or Cobalt Blue. But underneath the bonnet the Model T was intrinsically the same car that Ford had launched in 1908. Chevrolet’s new closed-body K sedan of 1925, available in a rainbow of DuPont’s new Duco lacquer colours, made the Model T seem dull and obsolete. And while Ford spent almost nothing publicizing the Model T, GM was spending an average of $10 per car advertising the Chevrolet K. Meanwhile, Highland Park and ‘the Rouge’ (as the Rouge River colossus was popularly known) were losing workers to GM and other Detroit-based rivals, as Ford’s wages slipped significantly below the US industrial average.

  In 1927 the decision was finally made to end production of the Model T and to switch to a more modern product, the Model A. However, with just one car being produced by Ford’s titanic factories, this necessitated a complete shutdown of all Ford plants while $45 million worth of Model T machine tools were junked and replaced with a similar value of new tools – including remarkably advanced electric welding machines, the ancestors of the assembly-line robots of the 1980s – for the new Model A. Ford’s plants were shut for six months, during which sixty thousand people were thrown out of work. Meanwhile, Ford’s hard-pressed dealers had to eke out the supplies of outmoded Model Ts they already had on their forecourts. Ford took years to recover from this setback, and seven decades to regain the ground it lost to its principal competitor, General Motors.

  Ford also shot himself in the foot in Europe. Ford Motor Company’s senior British representative, Percival Lea Dewhurst Perry, had come from humble English working-class stock. In 1896 he had left the Birmingham lawyer’s office where he worked as a clerk to seek his fortune in London. There he became attracted to the glamorous if precarious world of the automobile makers, and by 1906 had become managing director of Ford’s British agency, the Central Motor Company. When in 1911 Henry Ford sought to establish a car factory in Britain, at Trafford Park in Manchester, the amenable, dependable Perry was the obvious choice to head the operation. While Ford pursued his doomed pacifist agenda, Perry astutely volunteered his British factory for the production of munitions and military cars, and was made deputy controller of mechanical warfare at the Ministry of Munitions in 1917, for which work he received a knighthood. However, his adept handling of Ford’s notoriously militant pacifism, together with his insistence that the Model T needed to be adapted for the European market, merely enraged his boss. In 1919 Ford summarily sacked him.

  Ford’s loss was Slough’s gain. From 1920 Perry began to build up what became the largest trading estate in Europe at Slough in Buckinghamshire,1 and in 1923 he persuaded André Citroën to build cars there, thus helping the French firm to evade the draconian McKenna duties on vehicles imported into Britain. Meanwhile, bereft of Perry’s sure hand, Ford’s British operation went rapidly downhill. Against cheaper and more technically advanced small cars such as the Austin Seven and the Bullnose Morris, Ford had no answer. Ford’s British market share plummeted and it looked as if the firm would be permanently eclipsed by its home-grown rivals.

  In an unparalleled admission that he may have been wrong, Henry Ford finally swallowed his pride and made two spectacular policy U-turns. In 1927, as we have seen, he final
ly admitted that the Model T was no longer viable. And in 1928 he crossed the Atlantic to ask Percival Perry back to run Ford of Britain.2 It was Perry who decided that Ford needed a brand-new plant nearer to the capital and close to Europe’s principal shipping lanes, and in 1929 not only bought a large tract of Thames-side marshland for that purpose but also persuaded the London County Council to build rented housing for twenty-five thousand families nearby. Henry Ford’s son, Edsel, was present alongside Perry at the groundbreaking ceremony for the new Dagenham works in 1932, but only as a substitute for Perry’s new friend, the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VIII.

  In 1938 Percival Perry was made Baron Perry of Stock Harvard, named after the charming Essex village where he now lived. And in the immediate postwar years the impressive capacity of the Dagenham factory – now under the control of Perry’s successor, the rumbustious Irishman Sir Patrick Hennessey – proved its worth, as Ford’s sales in Britain surged. The Dagenham-made Ford Eight of 1932 and Ford Popular of 1935 set the European standard for basic, no-nonsense family cars, a tradition Ford continued in the postwar years with Dagenham’s Anglia, Cortina, Escort and Fiesta.

  There was also a dark side to Henry Ford’s character, one that became more pronounced as he grew older and richer. Ford mass-produced not just Model Ts but also venomous anti-Semitic propaganda, which he channelled initially through a newspaper he had acquired in 1918 to further his gubernatorial campaign, the Dearborn Independent. Ford’s notorious article of 22 May 1920, ‘The International Jew’, cheerfully repeated the calumnies of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a tsarist tract of 1903 alleging a worldwide Jewish conspiracy, which had already been revealed as a forgery by the London Times in 1921. This malicious piece presaged weekly diatribes in the Dearborn Independent detailing the corrupting effect of Jews on American life, tirades that denounced jazz, short skirts and inflation as the inevitable results of the international Jewish conspiracy. Ford seemed to have forgotten that the architect of his world-famous automobile plants, Albert Kahn, was a Jew – as, indeed, were a large proportion of his own workforce.

  Ford’s anti-Semitic rants of the 1920s proved a significant inspiration to a little-known rightwing activist on the other side of the Atlantic. Adolf Hitler frequently cited Ford as an early inspiration; indeed, several passages from his incoherent apologia, Mein Kampf, appear to have been adapted from Ford’s writings. Henry Ford was certainly the only American to be cited in the pages of that lengthy harangue. (Hitler wrote how ‘only a single great man, Henry Ford’ had resisted the Jews’ attempts to make themselves ‘the controlling masters’ of America.) In 1922 Hitler installed a life-size portrait of Ford behind his desk in his office at the Munich Nazi party headquarters, while his waiting room carried multiple copies of Ford’s series of pamphlets, The International Jew, translated into German. He even offered to lend Ford some of his storm troopers to support his presidential ambitions. In return, Hitler hoped for funding from the wealthy car magnate for his fledgling Nazi movement. It is uncertain whether this was forthcoming, although we do know that in 1939 Ford sent Hitler a cheque for $50,000 on his birthday. However, on laying the foundation stone for Ford’s new Köln factory in 1929, Henry Ford happily declared: ‘What Europe needs is leaders’ – a statement that most listeners took to mean dictators in the mould of Italian strongman Benito Mussolini and, in hindsight, totalitarians such as Adolf Hitler. Significantly, after 1933 the leader of the pro-Nazi German-American Bund, a deeply unpleasant proto-fascist named Fritz Kuhn, was maintained on the payroll at Dearborn, although there is scant evidence to show that he ever did any work there.

  By the mid-1930s Henry Ford was finding it politic to deny in public that he was anti-Semitic. He had shut down the Dearborn Independent as early as 1927, and ordered all unsold copies of The International Jew to be destroyed, not because he regretted its message but because he realized that its notoriety had ruined his bids for senatorial and presidential office. Yet on his seventy-fifth birthday, on 30 July 1938, months after Hitler’s Nazi government had ordered 3,150 V-8 trucks to be built by Ford’s plant at Köln, Henry Ford proudly received the Grand Service Cross of the Supreme Order of the German Eagle from the German consul in Detroit, for ‘making autos available to the masses’. This award had been personally created by Hitler as ‘the highest honour given by Germany to distinguished foreigners’. Its first recipient had been Mussolini; Ford was only the fourth. Two years later, in an unguarded moment, Ford told an American reporter that ‘international Jewish bankers’ had caused the outbreak of war in Europe – rather than his friend and ally, Adolf Hitler.

  By the end of the 1930s, as Henry Ford’s grip on reality was slipping, he still refused to give way to a younger generation. From the time of his sixtieth birthday, in 1923, Ford kept hinting that he would soon retire from the company, but it soon became clear that he was not serious. His only child – the easy-going, patient, diligent Edsel, who collected luxury cars and worked hard to try and infuse Ford’s models with a little more class and style – remained obediently in the wings, bullied and marginalized by his tyrannical father. Henry’s programme of ‘toughening up’ his son involved undermining all of Edsel’s key decisions and achievements behind his back, a cruel policy which merely added to his son’s levels of stress. Robert Lacey tells how a new series of coke ovens that Edsel had commissioned for the Rouge River plant were torn down on Henry’s orders ‘within days of their completion’, just so Edsel would be reminded who was boss.

  In contrast to his philistine father, Edsel Ford was very conscious of the importance of aesthetics in selling cars. From 1922 he attempted to introduce elegance and panache into a Ford auto range that had previously been known just for its everyday functionalism. It was Edsel who commissioned Mexican artist Diego Rivera to paint ‘Detroit’s own Sistine Chapel’, the unmistakably socialist ‘Detroit Industry’ frescoes that Rivera painted on to the walls of the Ford-funded Detroit Institute of Art.1 And it was Edsel who was instrumental in developing the Lincoln brand into a sophisticated rival to Chrysler and Cadillac. Edsel’s liberated regime at Lincoln – an island of common sense and creativity in the increasingly oppressive Ford empire – authorized the creation of the twelve-cylinder Lincoln Zephyr of 1936, an aerodynamic gem designed by Dutch immigrant John Tjaarda and gifted ex-GM designer Eugene ‘Bob’ Gregorie, who built a close relationship with Edsel Ford at Lincoln in the pre-war years but left the company after Edsel’s premature death in 1943.2

  Instead of gradually handing over the succession to Edsel, Ford came to rely on Harry Bennett, a thuggish former sailor and ex-boxer who knew nothing about cars or the car industry. Bennett preferred to spend his office hours shooting at targets with his air pistol, and liked to bring pet lions and tigers to work to reinforce his tough-guy image. Henry Ford let Bennett do what he liked, and soon the latter’s growing band of goons, euphemistically named the Service Department, were enforcing a brutal discipline across all of Ford’s plants through a network of shop-floor spies and gangsterish heavies. Bennett’s ‘empire of darkness’ soon enveloped the whole of the Ford company. Even Edsel was genuinely frightened of him and dared not step out of line. Until 1933 Service Department apparatchiks ruthlessly enforced Prohibition legislation, which the company’s pro-temperance chairman enthusiastically supported – Henry Ford once threatened to close his factories if Prohibition was ever repealed – while simultaneously making themselves fortunes as underground bootleggers. Soon Bennett and his henchmen became inextricably embroiled in the criminal underworld, from which source Bennett often hired his new recruits.

  By the mid-1930s Ford’s plants were run on fear and had the worst reputation of any of Detroit’s car makers – none of which were exemplary employers at the best of times. In 1932 Bennett personally led his thugs out to combat the Ford Hunger Marchers and, in the subsequent standoff, a nineteen-year-old Young Communist League activist, Joseph York, was shot by Service Department goons as he tussled with Bennett,
and another three demonstrators were later gunned down.1 Five years later, on 26 May 1937, Bennett’s henchmen confronted senior union negotiators, including the respected labour leader Walter Reuther, as they crossed the Miller Road overpass to the Rouge plant, and beat them to a pulp in broad daylight.2 Fortunately for the union team, no one was killed, although one man’s back was broken. Equally fortunately, press photographers were on hand to record the incident, though many of those, too, were beaten up by Bennett’s hoodlums and their cameras confiscated. The ‘Battle of the Overpass’ represents the low point of Ford’s history and remains a lasting stain on American industrial relations. Edsel Ford was horrified by the event and pleaded with his father to recognize the unions and to fire Bennett. But his pleas were ineffectual; Bennett, secure in the unquestioning protection of Henry Ford, remained the power behind the throne. Historians have estimated that Bennett and his men removed over $1 million of Ford property from company premises during their reign of terror. Yet, basking in the president’s favour, Bennett seemed untouchable. He later wrote, with intentionally cruel candour: ‘I became [Ford’s] most intimate companion, closer to him than his only son’.

  Ford and Bennett proved themselves to be the most ruthless union-busters of an age not noted for its professional ethics or comradely ethos. While Henry Ford blithely turned a blind eye to Bennett’s semi-criminal activities, the latter did not shrink from using violence to end strikes and dilute opposition. Even after the appalling publicity garnered by the Battle of the Overpass, Bennett’s goons routinely beat up union officials and cowed the activists of the United Automobile Workers Union (UAW), which was still unrecognized at Ford, even though both GM and Chrysler had formally acknowledged it in 1937. Even Bennett’s thugs, however, could not prevent the massive strikes that erupted at the Rouge in April 1941. The ageing Ford, now with his back against the wall (and winning little sympathy from Roosevelt’s federal government), was finally persuaded by Edsel – who, for once, was standing up to his father – that the company must grant Ford workers a ballot on union recognition. Henry grudgingly agreed, his autocratic paternalism leading him to assume that his loyal workforce would reject all union blandishments and agree to keep Ford a non-union shop. Bennett, meanwhile, hoped to use his Service Department to intimidate workers into voting no. In the event, only 2.7 per cent of Ford workers voted against union membership, a result that flabbergasted Henry and seemed to drive him even more into the land of the bewildered. (Ford executive Charles Sorenson later wrote that the vote was ‘perhaps the greatest disappointment [Ford] ever had in all his business experience’, and observed that ‘he was never the same after that’.)