I INVENTED THE MODERN AGE: The Rise of Henry Ford by Richard Snow

7/28/2019 I INVENTED THE MODERN AGE: The Rise of Henry Ford by Richard Snow

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Contents

CHApTEr 1

A Homecoming . . . 1

Saving the arm, then saving the entire past; between the

steam engine and the Apple; nobody knew anything about cars;Fordism.

CHApTEr 2

My oys Were All ools . . . 11

Te boy who hated arming; McGueys new green world; steamand clockwork; a house without a mainspring; the biggest event in

those early years; into Detroit.

CHApTEr 3

Clara . . . 25Hes a thinking, serious person; winning a dead mans job;

electricity; a baby and a seventh home; the Christmas Eve engine.

CHApTEr 4

Working rom the Ground Up . . . 39Making a car in a world without any; a colorless, limpid,

innocent-appearing liquid; the Bagley Avenue woodshed;

Americas frst car race; Henry Fords frst car.


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CONENSxii

CHApTEr 5

What Edison Said . . . 61Fords frst sale; Teres a young ellow who has made a gas car;

Fords frst company; a winter drive with civilizations latest lisp;

dissolution: Henry wasnt ready.

CHApTEr 6

Glory and Dust . . . 81

We had to race; Smiling Billys Worlds Championship

Sweepstakes; Ford vs. Winton: A thin man can run aster than

a at one; the Henry Ford Company; Te materialization o a

nightmare.

CHApTEr 7

Te Seven-Million-Dollar Letter . . . 101

Malcomsons gamble; rom a toy printing press; the Dodge brothers;

the Ford Motor Company; Tis business cannot last; the ( frst)

Model A; BOSS OF HE ROAD.

CHApTEr 8

Ford Finds His Greatest Asset . . . 121

Who in hell are you?; Couzens bosses the boss; the cars get

shipped; the importance o dealers; an earthquake proves the

Model A; parasites; who was Malcomson?


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CONENS xiii

CHApTEr 9

Inventing the Universal Car . . . 141Who wanted it?; Sorensens locked room; steering wheel on the

letorever; new experts, new engine, new steel, new car;

Without doubt the greatest creation in automobiles ever placed

beore a people.

CHApTEr 10

Te Man Who Owned Every Carin America . . . 153

Selden fles a patent on all gas-powered automobiles and sues their

makers; the court fnds or him; most carmakers give in; Ford wont

pay grat money; a second trial; One o the greatest things Mr.

Ford did . . .

CHApTEr 11

Te Model akes Over . . . 171

New York to Seattle on thin ice; learning to drive the Model ;

birth o a dealer; the armer and the car; caring or your Model; the perils o starting it; Funny Stories About the Ford; fve

thousand accessories; remaking the nation in a decade: Ill go

without ood beore Ill go without my car.

CHApTEr 12

errible Eciency . . . 197

Te Crystal Palace; taking the work to the worker; speeding up; the

twentieth centurys only industrial revolution; the workers hate it.


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CONENSxiv

CHApTEr 13

Te Five-Dollar Day . . . 211Couzens and his conscience; Its a good round number; Ford bids

against himsel; every worker a potential customer; Ford at his

zenith.

CHApTEr 14

Simple Purposes . . . 231

elling workers how to live; ugly enough to be a minister; war;

Ford on the American soldier: Lazy, crazy, or just out o a job;

Couzens quits; GREA WAR O END CHRISMAS DAY:

FORD O SOP I; rom peace angel to Vulcan.

CHApTEr 15

Te Expert . . . 253

Te Rouge rises; the Dodge brothers sue; we dont seem to be able

to keep the profts down; sandbagging the shareholders; probing

Fords ignorance in court: Did you ever hear o Benedict Arnold?

CHApTEr 16

Te International Jew . . . 269

Te problems o civilization traced to their source; the

DearbornIndependent; Liebold; LES HAVE SOME

SENSAIONALISM; Jewish Degradation o AmericanBaseball; two U.S. presidents ask Ford to stop his campaign;

he carries it on or ninety-one issues o theIndependent; Ford

apologizes, saying he had no idea what was in his newspaper.


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CONENS xv

CHApTEr 17

Te End o the Line . . . 283Edsel; his powerless power in the company; Evangeline Dahlinger

and her houses and horses; the executive scrap heap; how to join

it: suggest changing the Model ; sales dwindle; Edsel fghts; the

last Model ; what the car had done.

Epilogue . . . 323Te Model A; Te Rouge is no un anymore; buying every steam

engine; Maybe I pushed the boy too hard; the reluctant armorer

o Democracy; to bed by candlelight.

A Note on Sources, and Acknowledgments 337

Bibliography 341

Index 347


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In 1913 the Ford Motor Company issued this cross-section o its

world-changing creation, assuring the recipient that the better you

know your car, the better . . . you will enjoy it.


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I Invented the

Modern Age


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1

CHApTEr 1

A Homecoming

Saving the farm, then saving the entire past; between the steam engine

and the Apple; nobody knew anything about cars; Fordism.

on a summer day in 1919 a middle-aged man let his Detroit

oce and drove out to Dearborn, ten miles away, to see the

house where hed been born. It was a armhouse, long past its best

days, and any passersby who noticed him poking around it must

briey have wondered what this visitor was doing there.

He wasnt in any way amboyant, but he was obviously prosper-ous, probably wearing one o the neat, quiet gray suits he avored year-

round. A little over middle height, he stood so straight that most who

met him described him as tall. He was moderately good-looking,

but what might have been an ordinary ace had already somehow

proved impossible or painters, journalists, and even photographers to

capture satisactorily. eam sports had never interested him although

he was athletic and loved to challenge riends to ootraces; each timehe moved to another vantage point in the armhouse yard, he did it

suddenly and quickly, almost as i he were answering a starting gun.

He was not an architect, but he knew how things were put together,


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I INVENTED THE MODERN AGE2

and careully studied the window rames, the chimney, the pitch o

the roo. Tis might be his last chance to see the armstead, because

the house was about to be destroyed.Tat was largely his ault. Te ow o trac had grown so heavy

in the past decade that the Dearborn city athers had decided the road

bordering the sixty-year-old building needed to be widened. Every

second car contributing to that trac bore the mans name. Henry

Ford was making hal the automobiles in America.

Few people have the means to dey this sort o progress, but Ford

did. He had the armhouse moved two hundred eet back rom thenew road. But once the house was sae, it wouldnt let him alone. At

rst he merely had it restoredsome carpentry, resh paintbut that

wasnt enough. He ound that he wanted it urnished as it had been in

the 1870s, when he was a boy interested in machinery, taking watches

apart in his room there.

Now the tenacious perectionism o the man took over. Represen-

tative urniture, typical urniture o the 1860s, wouldnt do. It had to

be the same urniture. Hed kept warm in the Michigan winters beside

a Starlight Stove in the ront parlor. He spent months searching or

one, ound a near-perect examplebut no, it was a bit too small, it

wasnt a Model 25. Ten there was the carpeting on the stairs, a aded

rusty crimson that he remembered precisely. He had one o the ty

thousand men who worked or him go through antiques shopslocal

ones, at rst, then as ar away as Cincinnatito match it.

Te amily china: He could remember the stair carpet, but not the

plates he had once eaten of. Workers excavated where the dooryard

had been, and came up with a ceramic shard large enough to reveal the

pattern. Ford had a ull dinner service reproduced. Beds, chairs, soas

were ound and reupholstered. Fords agents got the right bureau, and

Ford specied exactly what needles and thread should stock one o

the drawers. He deviated rom utter delity with the amily organ.

It was born with a oot-pump, but Ford had the instrument electri-ednobody could see the diference, ater alland when he stepped

back into his youth he would sit at the keyboard or hours, laboriously


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A HOMECOMING 3

playing with a nger or two the rst songs hed heard: urkey in the

Straw, Flow Gently Sweet Aton.

Upstairs the beds were made with resh linen; out back stood thestacks o rewood, just as they had in his boyhood; the reservoirs o

all the kerosene lamps were ull, their wicks trimmed and ready or

the match.

Ford had got more things than hed needed to urnish his arm-

house. He kept the overow in his oce until 1922, when one o

his tractor operations moved, leaving behind it an empty building

that covered three acres. With this repository available, the carmakersambitions expanded beyond the home o his youth to encompass the

world o his youth.

Once again his agents went out, this time in their hundreds. Tey

were, said the boss, to bring back a complete series o every article

ever used or made in America rom the days o the rst settlers down

to the present time.

Te stream began to ow in: birdcages and settees and patent

washboards; carriages, ries, apple-parers; reapers and binders and the

lunch wagon where Ford had grabbed meals when he was working

or Detroit Edison back in the nineties. Ford accumulated enough

objects, as it turned out, to entirely urnish, rom weather vane and

lightning rod to mantel clock and urnace, 107 buildings.

At the time, those buildings were living out their lives ar rom

Ford and ar rom one another. One was a courthouse in Illinois where

the young Abraham Lincoln had argued cases; two were Georgia slave

cabins, one the brick storeront where Wilbur and Orville Wright sold

bicycles while they conducted their momentous experiments.

Te homely items Ford had collected still radiated the residual

warmth o lie rom a vanished time, but the signals they sent out

were aint, difuse, cluttered. Put them in a landscape where men

and women had used them, though, and their eeble, dissonant notes

might become a powerul harmony.Beyond the airport Ford had just built in Dearbornit was 1926

nowlay a tract o land where nothing much at all had ever hap-


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pened. He would, he decided, inject these anonymous acres with

history by building on them a monument to the past: a village that

would preserve the American lie as lived o what he called a sanerand sweeter time.

Te man incubating this plan had done more than anyone else alive

to annihilate that lie; and he ound much o its sweet sanity repellent.

Everyone today knows his name, but very ew could attribute more

than one statement to him, which is that history was bunk. Te

bunk part he perceived in history may have been the sheer mass o

it, all those names you had to learn, all those treaties and tarifs andboundary disputes. Ford always liked to see the thing itsel. Years later

some o his old lieutenants would say he couldnt read a blueprint.

He could, and competently, too. But it is perectly true that he would

ar rather see the objects encoded in the cool white lines. His sense o

what was sound engineering transmitted itsel most surely through

his ngertips.

So it was with the past. Ford wanted to be able to handle it, to

walk inside it and look around. He bought the Illinois courthouse

and moved it to Dearborn, to the town he had named Greeneld Vil-

lage, ater his wies birthplace. He bought the Wright brothers cycle

shop, and moved it there, tooand, to keep it company, the carpen-

try Queen Anne house the brothers grew up in. He brought Tomas

Edisons laboratory rom Menlo Park, New Jersey, along with a dozen

reight-car loads o Jersey dirt so it could stand amid the snails and

ungi it had always known, and the boardinghouse where Edisons

hard-pressed staf hadnt slept enough.

Te Edison Illuminating Company and its dynamos took up resi-

dence near Noah Websters home. oward the end o his lie Ford

moved his armstead there, and you can walk right into it today and

see that perectly retrieved stair carpeting.

What you wont see in Greeneld village is a bank, or a law oce:

Ford had no use or bankers and lawyers. Many o them were Jews, hebelieved, and all were leeches who lived of the blood o creativity. He

had no hesitationor many years, at leastin sharing this inorma-


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A HOMECOMING 5

tion with anyone who would listen. Tis was Ford at his most inde-

pendent and least attractive, tirelessly venting the cranky certainties

that had seeped into his character even as he became amous.All was mixed together as he conjured up his village, and it remains

a place o contradictions, at least as ar as his rst expressed purpose

goes. Edison and the Wrights had not worked to preserve the agrarian

world o Fords boyhood. And neither had Ford.

As his village took shape, it turned out to be a wistul tribute not

only to the sturdy American small armer and the one-room school-

house where his children absorbed virtue along with grammar romtheir McGufeysReaders, but also to the orces that swept that world

away, the dynamo and the electricity it conjured, the airplane, and o

course the machine that Ford began building in 1903 in his Mack Ave-

nue actory, whose gray-painted board ront he careully re-created.

Once, stopping at a house he was planning to move, where he had

spent a good deal o time as a boy, Ford made a discovery. I ound

some marbles, put a ew o them in the palm o my hand, and as I

applied pressure, they disintegrated. Lie, change, had gone on.

Not in Greeneld Village. As building ater building arrived, as the

automobile actory rose near the smithy, it became increasingly clear

that this town was a concrete representation o Henry Fords mind,

the things he missed, the things he took pride in, his ability to banish

the things he disliked.

It was a monument not only to the agrarian youth o the nation,

but also to the vehemently nonagrarian youth o Henry Ford.

Greeneld Village is a place unlike any other because its creators

youth was unlike any other. Walking its streets as dusk ell, or going

through the enormous museum he built next to it, Ford could retrieve

that youth. And such was the strength o his engaging, elusive, inu-

riating personality that more than sixty years ater his death, so can

you and I.

He would have wanted that. His willul egotism only grew strongeras he aged, but it never got strong enough to blind him to the act that

the rst hal o his lie was by ar the better hal.


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Tose were the years beore an improvident libel suit had brought

him into a nationally publicized trial in which the prosecution set out

to prove his ignorance; beore his bigotry boiled over and he was tor-mented into making insincere public retractions; beore he was scared

o his workers; beore he got at odds with his only son and, in the view

o his grandson Henry II, literally badgered him to death.

No, theres none o that in Greeneld Village. Passing by its yards

and alleys its ounder would have caught spectral glimpses o his

mother, dead when he was thirteen, o his rst car jittering trium-

phantly through the vacant streets o two-in-the-morning Detroit, othe Grosse Pointe racetrack in 1901, where the pennant o blue smoke

rom the engine o Alexander Wintons ar more powerul automo-

bile signaled Ford that he was about to win a career-saving victory,

and o the day not long ater his mothers death when he and his

ather went into town. Teir wagon came upon a steam-powered arm

engine heading toward a job. Tere was nothing unusual about that,

but rather than attaching it to drat horses, the owner had thought

to attach it to itsel. Hissing and smoking right there in the everyday

road, the engine was moving toward the enchanted boy under its own

power.

Every century or so, our republic has been remade by a new technol-

ogy: 170 years ago it was the railroad; in our time its the microproces-

sor. Tese technologies do more than change our habits; they change

the way we think. Henry David Toreau, hearing the trains passing

Walden Pond, wrote, Have not men improved somewhat in punctu-

ality since the railroad was invented? Do they not talk and think aster

in the depot than they did in the stage-oce? And o course anyone

over the age o twenty (younger, and its simply the air you breathe)

knows what computers and the Internet are doing to us now.In between the steam locomotive and the Apple came Henry Fords

Model . One day toward the end o his lie its maker was talking


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A HOMECOMING 7

with a local high school boy named John Dahlinger, whose ather

had helped lay out his village, and they got onto the subject o educa-

tion. Ford spoke o the virtues o the McGufeys Reader era, and thissounded pretty usty to Dahlinger. But, sir, he protested, these are

diferent times, this is the modern age and

Young man, Ford snapped, I invented the modern age.

Te claim is as preposterous as it is megalomaniacal. It is also

largely true.

Sometime early in 1908 a knot o workmen stood peering up at the

ceiling in a building on Piquette Avenue in Detroit. A ew years later,

these men would have been drenched in daylight in a new actory so

lavishly windowed that it was known as the Crystal Palace. But this

was just like any other big actory, and the object o their attention

glinted dully above them in the perpetual industrial dusk.

A new kind o engine, swaddled in more rope than the task

demanded, was inching its way down toward the chassis o a new

kind o car.

Te descending engine began to swing heavily in its slings, and,

accompanied by impotent shouted instructions, started to revolve,

slowly and then aster, until it tore loose and plummeted down

through the car body to the actory oor.

A worker named James OConnor remembered the moment o

horrible silence that ollowed ended when the two men superintend-

ing the mounting o the engine got into a heated disagreement about

which o them had been responsible or the catastrophe.

I know more about cars than you will ever know! one yelled.

His colleague came back predictably with, I know more about

cars thanyouwill ever know!

Henry Ford didnt nd this a productive discussion. Te slenderman in the neat suit stepped orward and gestured them to pipe down.

Teyd x the engine and try again. Hed stay around until the job


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got done. He was annoyed, o course, but not ull o ury and blame.

Tere might be time or such indulgences in the years ahead, right now

he was building his rst Model and he just wanted to get on with it.Te engine went in the next morning.

Decades later, James OConnor, looking back on the squabble

between the men in charge o the job, said, I oten think about them

saying, I know more about cars than you do. Nobody knew anything

about cars. Tat was not entirely true253 American carmakers

were in business at the time the engine ellbut it was true enough.

In 1925 an editor o the Encyclopedia Britannica, seeking a contribu-

tion on a topic still too recent to have been mentioned in earlier edi-

tions, asked Henry Ford to write an article about mass production.

Te essay appeared over Fords name. It is a lucid, concise, occa-

sionally eloquent statement that, a little more than a decade later, the

historian Roger Burlingame described as a colossal blurb that begins

In origin, mass production is American and recent; its earliest nota-

ble appearance alls within the rst decade o the 20th century, and

devotes the remainder o the article and two ull pages o hal-tone

plates [photographs] to the Ford actory.

Burlingame said Fords great one-man show suggested that mass

production had never existed in the world beore. What about Eli

Whitney, Burlingame asked, who had pioneered the idea o inter-

changeable parts or ries back in the 1790s? What about Oliver

Evans, whose ully automated our mill had pregured Fords moving

assembly line at almost the same time? And Singer, who had deluged

the world with his sewing machines a generation beore Henry Ford

ever thought o an automobile?

Burlingames ridicule did not touch on the question o the articles

authorship, although the man who actually wrote it, Fords spokesmanand explainer William J. Cameron, said he should be very much sur-

prised to learn that his boss had even read it.


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A HOMECOMING 9

Here, or example, is a passage rom the Britannicaessay that accu-

rately states a belie Ford held: Te early actory system was uneco-

nomical in all its aspects. Its beginnings brought greater risk and losso capital than had been known beore, lower wages and a more pre-

carious outlook or the workers, and a decrease in quality with no

compensating increase in the general supply o goods. More hours,

more workers, more machines did not improve conditions; every

increase did but enlarge the scale o allacies built into business. Mere

massing o men and tools was not enough; the prot motive, which

damaged enterprise, was not enough.And here is a sample o this essays putative author writing, just

a ew years earlier, on the utility o war: But the people who pro-

itt[sic] rom war must go. . . . War is created by people who have no

country or home except Hadies Hell and live in every country.

Ford wouldnt have cared about Burlingames criticisms, nor would

he have been in the least embarrassed had anyone accused him o put-

ting his name to an article hed never seen. He would have known he

was in the right. He was always sure o that.

Oten he was disastrously wrong about things, but he was not

wrong about this big one. Mass production, which reshaped America

in a decade, and which created our national prosperity in the twenti-

eth century, was Henry Fords doing.

o a degree, even the phrase itsel is. Te Britannicas editor asked

him to write about mass production, but it was the H.F. attached

to the article that planted the term in the language orever. Beore

that, people had called what it described Fordism.


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SCRIBNER

A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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New York, NY 10020

Copyright 2013 by Richard Snow

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in

any form whatsoever. For information address Scribner Subsidiary Rights Department,

1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

First Scribner hardcover edition May 2013

SCRIBNERand design are registered trademarks of Te Gale Group, Inc., used under

license by Simon & Schuster, Inc., the publisher of this work.

For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Simon &

Schuster Special Sales at 1-866-506-1949 or [email protected].

Te Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event. For more

information or to book an event contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at

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Designed by Maura Fadden Rosenthal

Manufactured in the United States of America

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012037554

ISBN 978-1-4516-4557-6

ISBN 978-1-4516-4559-0 (ebook)

All pictures are from the collections of Te Henry Ford, except the photo of Ford

with Evangeline Dahlinger, which appeared in Te Secret Life of Henry Fordby

John Ct Dahlinger.

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I INVENTED THE MODERN AGE: The Rise of Henry Ford by Richard Snow

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