When one thinks of the early twentieth century America, one may picture a Model T automobile. It was not the first automobile in existance but it was the most widely used before WWI. This article is about Henry Ford the man who created that car. To do so Ford pioneered the system of mass production by using an assembly line. This would become the standard for years to come and shape the very nature of American manufacturing, and it would spread world-wide for use in various industries.

His Boyhood

In 1863 the US was in the middle of a civil war. This did not stop people from having children. In fact the author of this article had a Grandfather ¹ born in Cayuga County, New York that year. Meanwhile in the (then) farming town of Dearborn, eight miles west of Detroit, Michigan Mary Litogot Ford, the wife of a prosperous farmer William Ford, gave birth to the second of eight children on 30 July. On 2 January 1871 Henry was due to appear at the one room Scotch Settlement School in Dearborn, but because the weather was so cold and the snow so deep that week, his mother held him back until 9 January. One of his favorite teachers John Brainard Chapman allowed young Henry to tinker with watches during class as long as he did not make noise doing so. Henry had no love for farm animals but did seem to like the almanacs and their pictures of american products.
As he grew up he was always dreaming of the day when machines would take some of the workload. His sister once scolded him for taking toys apart to see how they worked. In 1870 his father took him to see the locomotives in the railroad roundhouse. Then when Henry was almost thirteen, his mother suddenly died. When he thought back on the time after her funeral he said "the house was like a watch without a mainspring."

In 1879 Henry left the farm and took up lodging with an aunt. He got a job at a firm that built streetcars. However he got fired almost the same week for daring to fix something the older workers couldn't. He remarked later "I learned then not to tell all I know." He then went to work in a foundry running a small milling machine. That job lasted less than a year. He returned to help his dad get the harvest in and then found anothr job. By the age of nineteen Henry had mastered most of the mechanical inventions of his day and read publications like "World of Science" or "Scientific American" for new ideas. Among the places he worked was the Edison Illuminating Company where he met Thomas Edison. Ford and Edison would later become close friends.

During the late nineteenth century Michigan was a state with lots of wood, while coal had to be imported from other states. In 1882, one of his neighbors John Gleason bought a steam engine to use threshing and sawing timber. Henry was hired to run it. Paid three dollars a day he traveled from farm to farm using the engine.

In 1883-1884 Henry entered business school and learned about keeping books, and learned to speak like an accountant. He was a good student and learned to thread his way though the intricacies of high finance.

Tin Lizzies Anyone?

In 1903 with 28,000 US dollars, and twelve stock holders, Henry Ford started the Ford Motor Company. He had to either invent things like spark plugs and carburetors or find someone to do it for him. A man named George Seldon had filed a patent on gasoline powered automobile engines. the group which bought this patent started an exclusive association to license such vehicles. As the Association of Licensed Auto manufacturers (ALUM) would not grant Ford a license, this put an initial crimp in Ford sales. After an eight year legal battle² a Michigan Appeals Court ruled that Ford was not infringing on this patent.

Ford had planned for cars that were just alike, and all painted black³. These would be built by a line of workers each doing a specific part of the job and no other. In this system both parts and those making them were easily replaceable. The Model T would be a car, well built, and within the price range of the normal workman. On a sixty acre site in Highland Park Ford put up his factory. In it each man stood in one spot while the conveyor belt brought the job to him and then took it to the next man. By this method a new car rolled off the assembly line in less than three hours. Riding on 30 inch vanadium steel wheels it was well suited for rough or muddy roads and on a smooth road the 177 cubic inch engine could easily make the car go 25 miles an hour. By the end of 1913 they had sold half a million of them and Ford was a millionaire.

Fordism

In 1914 The plant shifted to having three eight hour shifts and raising the wage of every man working there to five US dollars so they could afford to buy the vehicles they were building. To get this kind of wage, an employee had to exhibit proper behavior, not only at work but also at home. Ford even had a Sociological Department full of inspectors to conduct inspections of his employees homes. This system of standardized lines and incentives to fit in the system became known as Fordism. Ford at one point stated

Power and machinery, money and goods, are useful only as they set us free to live. They are but means to an end. For instance, I do not consider the machines which bear my name simply as machines. If that was all there was to it I would do something else. I take them as concrete evidence of the working out of a theory of business, which I hope is something more than a theory of business—a theory that looks toward making this world a better place in which to live.

In international circles this philosophy was sometimes confused with Fascism⁴ , and rumors spread that Ford was the absolute dictator over his home city state and the government their took their orders from him. People completely overlooked the fact that elected officials got their offices the same way in Dearborn as in any other American city.
In 1916 over his personal objections,
the Republican Party ran Ford for President, and he actually got 32 votes at the Convention before Charles E Hughes from New York won and became the Republican nominee, narrowly losing the election in November to Woodrow Wilson. Also in 1916 Ford was concerned that the news media was overly representing the views of big bankers and so decided to start his own paper. It would accept no advertisements and have one page expressing what Ford wanted it to say. Ford wanted men who 'worked out not their ideas, but his' thus the Dearborn Independent came into being. It sold for five cents a copy and had sixteen pages per issue. President Wilson convinced Ford to run for the US Senate as a Democrat in 1918. He lost the election to the Republican Truman H Newberry. At the end of 1918 Ford resigned as president of the paper and put his son in that spot. However, He never completely let go of controlling what the paper said. In fact many of the statements made there were anti-Semetic⁵. As the twenties became the thirties and then the forties the concept of Fordism grew and was used as an example of American capitalism by the Marxist leaders in the Soviet Union. Joseph Stalin was quoted saying

American efficiency is that indomitable force which neither knows nor recognises obstacles; which continues on a task once started until it is finished, even if it is a minor task; and without which serious constructive work is inconceivable.

Aldous Huxley took this one step further satirizing the whole idea when he published in 1932 his novel Brave New World which envisioned a civilization patterned after fordism. In his book even human embryos and the resulting person would come off an assembly line.

Personal Life

On 19 April 1886 Henry became engaged to Clara Jane Bryant. They were married on 14 April 1888. On 6 November 1893 Their son Edsel Bryant Ford was born. Ford was dead set against the US entering World War One and also made comments about border skirmishes with Mexico. As a result in 1916 the Chicago Tribune called him an anarchist and an ignorant idealist. Ford sued them for libel, but it wouldn't be until July 1919 that a jury in Mt Clemens actually deliberated the case, and awarded him a judgement of six cents. Meanwhile Henry had talked his son Edsel into getting a deferrment from serving in the war. Collecting evidence of American history became one of his passions. Ford decided to build a museum to give a true picture of the past. In 1929 he opened the museum originally called the Edison Institute. Today it is know as the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village.

FINAL YEARS

Ford's passion for remembering the past continued into the thirties. Among historic sites he had restored was Fort McAllister Historic Park in the American state of Georgia. Old age was not a happy time for Henry Ford. He fought the unionization of his workers, and it happened anyway. He fought the programs of Franklin D Roosevelt but could not stop them. During World War II Ford initially fought the participation of the US in the war but changed his mind and contributed greatly to the war effort; during WWII his company made more than 8,000 four-motored Liberator bombers, as well as tanks, tank destroyers, jeeps and amphibious jeeps, transport gliders, trucks, engines and much other equipment. Ford saw the death of his son Edsel on 26 May 1943 at the age of 49. There were a few happy moments. In July 1943 there was an elaborate party for his 80th birthday. Ford lived to see the war end and then retired, watching his grandson, Henry Ford II, take over the company after the war.

In April of 1947 there was a severe storm in Dearborn. With the power out and the roads blocked there was no way for a doctor to reach him when Ford had a cerebral hemorage on that stormy evening. Henry Ford died that night, 7 April 1947, at his estate (Fair Lane) in Dearborn, Michigan.

References

To read more on his life see

• notable biographies .
• Autobiography
• Young Henry Ford, by Sidney Olsen, copyright 1963 by Wayne State University Press.
• Henry Ford and the Jews, by Neil Baldwin,copyright 2001 Public Affairs Press.
• Obituary
• NaderLibrary