The Auto Didact

...It immediately revolutionized the car industry in America and, indeed, the world...

...While projecting an image of traditional morality, Ford, too, was "reveling in a culture of mental and physical abundance...

...During the second half of his life, Ford's opinionated self-confidence hardened into bigotry and egomania...

...His collecting mania then moved to farm machinery and all the artifacts of small town life in 19th-century America...

...Not really understanding them, he consistently downplayed the problems of the Depression, which he said could be solved by increased production from industry and a renewed commitment by individuals to hard work...

...When Ford was 13, his much-loved mother died unexpectedly, and a period of rebellion and discontent began for him...

...Steven Watts, professor of history at the University of Missouri-Columbia, sees Henry Ford as the man who, "perhaps more than any other person . . . created the American Century...

...This meant being a "positive thinker" and abandoning the habits of an economy of scarcity for the more self-indulgent response to the new culture of abundance...

...A year later, with Ford organizing the manufacturing process while James Couzens handled the finances, the company's first car, the Model A, was selling well...

...Keep at it...

...During the winter he studied mechanical drawing, bookkeeping, and business practices at a Detroit school...

...He always stressed his rural roots, his simple lifestyle, his disdain for elitism...

...He was widely interviewed, projecting an image of unpretentious folksiness...

...He was hailed as a progressive reformer, an enlightened industrialist...

...by 1916, the number was half a million...

...became "Buy a Ford and Spend the Difference...

...he received tens of thousands of letters of support from all over the country...

...His public image of strict self-control and decorum was not quite the whole story of his private life...

...He provided his own baby crib for the child to sleep in, and when the boy was seven, he received a racing car from the Indianapolis 500, courtesy of "Mr...

...While publicly pledging to read a chapter of the Bible every day, and supporting a move to "get the Bible back into the public schools," Ford rarely attended church and increasingly turned for inspiration to unorthodox spirituality (he believed in reincarnation) and the ideas of the New Thought movement personified by Norman Vincent Peale...

...In 1891, the young couple moved to Detroit and Ford started working for Edison Illuminating, where he would spend most of the next decade, learning more about electrical engineering and impressing his colleagues with his ingenuity and instinctive grasp of all things mechanical...

...Ford adopted an intransigent opposition to unions that led to the "Battle of the Overpass" in 1937, when Ford security men beat up the president and chief organizer of the United Auto Workers Union at the River Rouge plant, where they had come to pass out literature...

...Ford's life and career makes an even stronger case for his significance...

...The Auto Didact Inventing Henry Ford's America BY STEPHANIE DEUTSCH Henry Ford famously dismissed history as "bunk" (in one interview he called it "bunk, bunk—double bunk"), but history has been more appreciative of him...

...Ford dated the American Revolution at 1812, and admitted that he rarely read anything more than newspaper headlines...

...But Watts sees Ford as more than an automaker...

...Ford and his wife loved traditional waltzes, reels, and square dances, finding them "clean and healthful," more social than sensual, reminders of an idealized American past...

...When, in 1918, he acquired the Dearborn Independent, a local newspaper, Ford added a weekly column to his ways of communicating with the public...

...Now a new study of Stephanie Deutsch is a writer in Washington...

...Born a few weeks after the battle of Gettysburg, Ford spent his childhood in Greenfield Township, a small farming community near Dearborn, Michigan...

...He engineered her marriage to his chauffeur, Ray Dahlinger, and provided a house and, later, 150 acres of land for the couple not far from his own home...

...There he did particularly well in oral arithmetic and excelled also as a prankster and tinkerer...

...The traditional value of thrift was eased aside by the needs of the new age...

...The Model T, which debuted in the fall of 1908, was lightweight, fairly reliable, and inexpensive (initially the price was $850...

...Evange-line Coté was a charming French Canadian 30 years his junior who Ford met when she came to work as a company stenographer...

...Five years later, Ford realized his dream of creating a "universal car," one that the average American could afford...

...Early on the morning of June 4, 1896, Ford took the "Quadricycle" he had created with a few assistants out for a ride—but only after taking an axe to his workshed doorway, that, he hadn't realized, was too small for the vehicle to pass through...

...Henry made the thing work, and, as he later wrote, "getting a grip on the engine, so to speak, I got a grip on myself...

...He put great emphasis on mental energy, on visualization, on healthy (and occasionally odd) dietary choices, on physical exercise...

...He tried to promote a program of smaller factories throughout America so that people could divide their time between industry and agriculture...

...In many of Ford's actions and ideas, Watts finds an enthusiastic embrace of the modernism that he himself was at the forefront of creating, constrained by a genuine but often simplistic clinging to the values of the previous age...

...He played with the idea of running for president—although his wife put an end to that, announcing publicly, "The day he runs for President of the United States, I will be on the next boat to England...

...he sees him as a man who, to an uncanny extent, both reflected the times in which he lived and helped shape them...

...Ford won, in his wife's words, "covering himself with glory and dust" and garnering favorable publicity with this and other racing victories that helped him find partners and financial backing...

...Higher wages, Ford reasoned, would make workers more content, and would also serve the company by enabling them to afford the automobiles they were creating...

...Ford's own understanding of the world around him was limited by his meager education, by his "overweening hubris," by the very success that defined him...

...Ford created a massive new factory in the Detroit suburb of Highland Park and, in 1913, introduced there a new manufacturing technique called the assembly line...

...He had long argued against the habit of buying on credit...

...He promoted his only child, his son Edsel, who was widely liked and admired, to a position of leadership within the company, and then froze him out of important decisions and consistently humiliated him by undercutting his leadership...

...So, at 16, he left Dearborn for Detroit and an apprenticeship with a friend of his father's who had a small machine shop...

...The past as presented by the Ford Museum was dependable and safe, a comforting memory in a world of rapid cultural and physical change...

...Nowhere was Ford's ambivalence about modernism more evident than in his attitude towards history itself...

...A man of intelligence but little education (he admitted that he didn't like to read books because "they muss up my mind"), Ford based his ideas on his traditional upbringing and on hunches...

...By the 1920s he had amassed "probably the largest private collection of McGuf-feys in the entire United States...

...it fell in later years...

...A master of publicity, Ford relished this popularity, ensuring that everything he did and said was widely reported in the press, from his tightly choreographed annual camping trips with Edison (who had become a close friend), tiremaker Harvey Firestone, and naturalist John Burroughs (the Four Vagabonds, they called themselves) to his frequent pronouncements on the evils of war, gambling, drink, and tobacco...

...Many of his ideas, and not a few of his actions, are confused, repellent, contradictory...

...As Ford grew older, he neglected his gigantic automobile works in favor of Greenfield Village, where he started a model school and also held regular dances to which Ford employees were invited (and which many of them felt compelled to attend...

...you have it...

...At Christmas time his siblings used to hide their toys from their elder brother because they feared, as his sister Margaret remembered, "He just takes them apart...

...Society as a whole, he said, benefited by "circulation, not congestion...

...Ford viewed the museum as an educational gift to the American people, and while scholars criticized its lack of "intellectual coherence," the public loved it...

...The campaign denouncing perceived Jewish influence over everything from American music and baseball to the world banking system that Ford waged in the pages of his newspaper was emblematic of his fractious later years...

...An automobile was no longer a luxury but a staple of the new age, and Model Ts were sold as fast as they could be produced...

...In the obviously seminal impact of the automobile on the American lifestyle, landscape, and psyche, it's easy to appreciate Ford's significance...

...Although Watts sees the actual creation of the company's dramatic policy changes as largely the work of James Couzens...

...His popularity was scarcely dented by his embarrassing performance on the witness stand in the lawsuit he instigated in 1919 against the Chicago Tribune after it characterized him as "an ignorant idealist . . . and an anarchistic enemy of the nation" because of his vocal opposition to the use of the National Guard to patrol the border with Mexico...

...It wasn't long before he was building his own "farm locomotive," or primitive tractor...

...Also, Ford was distracted from the manufacturing side of the automobile business because he had become obsessed with competitive racing...

...Meanwhile, despite its preeminence in the field, the Ford Motor Company was almost destroyed several times because of Henry Ford's obsessive control, combined with decreasing direct involvement as the years went by...

...Like Citizen Kane," Watts writes, "Ford became a victim of his own powerful personality...

...In the first year of its operation, the assembly line produced 189,000 cars, 20 times as many as the year before...

...Personally, too, Ford became caught up in fads and new ideas that encouraged consuming, spending, and self-fulfillment...

...And when, in early 1914, the Ford Motor Company made the stunning announcement that it was establishing new policies—reducing the workday at Highland Park from nine hours to eight, adding a third work shift, and doubling the pay for most workers by establishing a basic pay rate of $5 per day—Ford became even more popular...

...He liked to emphasize his identification with ordinary people, his belief in the value of hard work, the joy of self-sufficiency and of individual responsibility...

...In the 1940s, his mental powers declined, especially after Edsel's death from stomach ulcers at the age of 49...

...we seem to have overlooked the human side of the picture...

...Towards the end of his life Ford complained that "we have fallen into a philosophy of bigness which is not good for the American way of life...

...But Henry disliked farm life...

...His father, William Ford, had fled the Irish potato famine to join members of his extended family there, and by the time Henry, his first child, was born, he was a prospering farmer and respected member of the community...

...In the many contradictions and inconsistencies in Ford's thought and behavior—hailed as a progressive and reformer, he was also a notorious anti-Semite and union-basher—Watts sees a reflection of the deep dislocation wrought during the years of Ford's long life by the nation's transformation from Victorian, self-reliant, and rural to industrial, urban, consumerist, and modern...

...Ford became a cheerleader for the new consumer society of which the car was an essential part: At his insistence, a proposed advertising slogan "Buy a Ford and Save the Difference...

...In 1901, in a highly publicized event near Detroit, he raced Alexander Winton, the holder of the world record for a mile (a minute and 14 seconds...

...At the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village in Dearborn he created a 252-acre park that displayed thousands of items in re-creations of his boyhood home and a village full of other buildings: The birthplace of William Holmes McGuffey, a courthouse where Lincoln had argued, the Wright brothers' bicycle shop, a village drugstore...

...To Watts, this lengthy, unconventional relationship was indicative of Ford's "instinct for cultural innovation...

...He believed the New Deal was a violation of the fundamental American values of self-sufficiency and responsibility and, alone among automakers, refused to participate in the National Industrial Recovery Act, with its assertion of workers' right to organize, thereby triggering a government boycott of Ford products...

...Later that summer, he attended a professional convention in New York, where he met Thomas Edison, who was impressed with his description of the engine he was creating and, according to Ford's recollection, told him, "Young man, that's the thing...

...He even acknowledged that "in the race to see how fast and how cheaply we could produce...

...Before long he was chief engineer, with a flexible schedule that gave him time for his real passion: experimenting with the creation of an internal combustion engine that might power a "horseless carriage...

...In 1888, he married Clara Jane Bryant, the petite but strong-minded woman who would be his wife for 59 years, and settled down with her on a farm given to him by his father...

...Each year he would return to his family farm for several weeks to help with the harvest...

...Henry grew up playing with five siblings, helping his father with farm chores, being taught at home by his very efficient mother, and then trooping off to a one-room schoolhouse...

...According to Watts, Ford agreed to allow unions into his plants only after his wife threatened to leave him if he didn't...

...He started with McGuffey Readers, the books that taught reading through bright pictures and texts conveying strong moral precepts that had been used in American schools since the 1830s, and from which he himself had learned to read...

...By the time of the Wall Street crash, however, Ford was sounding more like a reactionary, railing against the dangers of "the promise of quick profits in speculation...

...He settled out of court, and issued a statement that "articles reflecting upon the Jews" would never appear in his paper again (although he was willing, in 1938, to accept the honorary Order of the Grand Cross of the German Eagle from the Hitler government...

...he once built a crude turbine steam engine that exploded, setting the school fence on fire and leaving Ford with a lifelong scar on his cheek...

...The man who described as "bunk" the effort to teach history through a recounting of key events of the past was a passionate collector of historic artifacts...

...Ford visited every day, showered attention and gifts on Evan-geline, and, according to Watts, "evidence suggests" that the son she bore in 1923 was Ford's...

...The man whose name is synonymous with the American automobile is credited with profoundly changing the country by making cars available to the masses and is seen as a pioneer in the development of modern industry...

...Fortune has called him the "businessman of the century," while a poll of academic experts has named him the greatest of American entrepreneurs, ahead of John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and Bill Gates...

...He developed an intense personal antipathy to Franklin Roosevelt, and described government and finance as two "parasites" determined to "suck the lifeblood" out of the American economy...

...As he collected books reflecting the values of a bygone era, and tools from a rapidly vanishing rural America, an America he himself had fled, Ford was, in Watts's view, struggling with "an underlying uneasiness with the industrial world that he had created...

...Never an enthusiast for physical labor, Ford didn't care for farming, but he was fascinated by all kinds of tools and machines...

...Henry Ford died in 1947, after a stroke...

...Watts notes that Ford's view of history, muddled as it was, was surprisingly modern: "History is being rewritten every year from a new point of view," he declared, "so how can anybody claim to know the truth about history...

...A year later Ford had created a second prototype car that was dependable enough to drive out to the family farm in Dearborn, where he enjoyed explaining the mechanical details to his younger brothers and, according to one of them, "scaring the life out of his sisters...

...Ford's initial interest in employee welfare grew out of a genuine desire to share the extraordinary wealth he was generating, and also a recognition of the demoralizing nature of modern factory work...

...Ford's early efforts to form a company to manufacture automobiles were failures, at least in part because of his insistence on totally controlling every endeavor he was part of...

...Later in the decade he paid to have the readers reprinted and distributed in American schools...

...To Ford, real history was how people lived, the tools they used to help them in their work and play...

...The people who flocked to Greenfield Village, many of whom worked in Ford factories and dealerships and drove there in their Ford motorcars, shared this anxiety...

...Yet the American public, for the most part, forgave him...

...He resisted the notion that it was time to replace or update the Model T: Once, with his hands and the heel of a shoe, he broke to bits a prototype new model his staff had created as a surprise for him...

...Proving him ignorant turned out to be, as Watts writes, "easier than anyone had ever imagined...

...He also got a job with Westinghouse traveling from farm to farm repairing machines of all kinds...

...He became, perhaps, the most widely admired man in America, his handsome, tall figure instantly recognizable...

...With the Model T and the assembly line, Ford achieved not only tremendous personal wealth but also an unprecedented level of fame and popularity...

...And yet, as this long, occasionally repetitive, but always fascinating study makes clear, Ford's creativity and energy were very much at the heart of the American Century...

...She combined coquetry with a lively personality (she was the first woman in Michigan to earn a pilot's license), and she captivated Ford...

...For ten years, he railed against the Jews, and only stopped after a libel suit...

...In June 1903, the Ford Motor Company was incorporated with support from a small group of investors who put up $28,000 in cash...

...There a critical event took place when a neighbor asked Henry's help with a portable steam engine he planned to hire out to other farmers for use with threshing machines and saws...

...He had adopted a modern, even a postmodern, understanding of history, as Watts writes, "not as the empirical recovery of absolute truth but as interpretations of the past...