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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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I INVENTED THE MODERN AGE4
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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I INVENTED THE MODERN AGE6
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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I INVENTED THE MODERN AGE8
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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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.
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Manufactured in the United States of America
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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.