In reading about Henry Ford (the man who put America on wheels), I find much to admire about the man:
-he was a humble machinist, but built the Ford Motor Co. into a globe-spanning giant
-his adoption of the production line and standardized parts brought the famous Model T down in price, to the point that ordinary people could afford a car
-his $5.00/day wage brought a huge numer of people into the middle class
-he was a tireless advocate for technology-under him, FORD made the first mass-produced V-8 engines. He also worked with plastic bodied cars, and improved the efficiency of his factories by a factor of hundreds
On the minus side:
-he worked his people like robots, constantly increasing the speed of his assembly lines
-he hated unions, and had paid goons in his factories to sniff out any union organizers
-he made some anti-jewish comments in a Detroit newspaper (though to be fair, he did issue a complete apology)
-he browbeat his son (Edsel Ford), and alienated a lot of people
-he was reluctant to give up control of his company (Ford was not a public company ti 1946)
So, he was a genius and visionary, who brought enormous prosperity to the American middle class. On the minus side, he had a lot of characyter defects.
Dis the good outweigh the bad?
Why can’t he be both, like the late Earl Warren?
He was an asshole on the personal level but he was a singular force of modernization, ultimately that was good for the world but it doesn’t change the fact that he wasn’t a guy most of us would want to hang out with. You can be a dick and a great man, and do great things. Not all great figures from history are great human beings, in fact most of them aren’t.
I read an interesting article awhile back about how modernized the United States manufacturing sector was during World War II. The popular understanding is that WWII was a war between several super-industrialized nations that were all cranking out massive amounts of war materials. The classic story goes that the United States through its larger population and natural resources was able to just flat out out produce the Axis powers.
The truth is a lot different. Pretty much every other country involved in WWII was not running modern industrial systems. Using the manufacturing systems of Henry Ford we were rolling extremely complex systems off of assembly lines. I don’t remember the exact numbers but I believe the most complex piece of machinery pre-WWII that was being made via assembly line were cars with around 15,000 parts. By breaking down the process into thousands of different individuals actions, during WWII America was able to build aircraft with over 200,000 individual parts (not counting something like nearly a million rivets per machine) on assembly lines. If you look at how the British, Germans, and Japanese were making things it just wasn’t close. They were craft industries, master aircraft builders essentially ran shops that functioned very similar to old school guilds. You had to apprentice for years and eventually you could run your own shop. If you look at the production of some of the German machines you’ll see a shop where workers are going back and forth, working on a few different planes at once with a high level of quality and skill. There’s no denying the Germans built some high quality planes and tanks, but we were rolling ours off assembly lines while theirs were being built from the ground up, sitting stationary in workshop until completion.
Henry Ford’s mechanization had put us so far ahead that we were able to out produce the Axis pretty much by ourselves, not even counting the industrial output of the rest of the Allied nations.
(An important side note is that Henry Ford was a piss poor corporate manager. His management strategy was essentially absolute dictatorship in which he controlled every aspect of the company. His caustic personality made this difficult, he was an industrial genius but a management idiot. General Motors Alfred Sloan actually developed the modern management techniques that allowed Ford’s system to become more widespread to the rest of the corporate world.)
Point of information: this is woefully under-accurate.
Ford was directly responsible for the Protocols of the Elders of Zion gaining a significant bit of currency in America through publication and distribution. It wasn’t an issue of a few off-color comments in one newspaper.
Good!!!
Henry Ford was good, but you forgot the best reason: Henry Ford saved, refurbished, and brought together, many of our countries antiques, historical items, homes and workshops of great people, old cars, planes, locomotives, etc and put them all in Greenfield Village and Henry Ford Museum. The chair Lincoln was shot in, the courthouse Lincoln practices law in, the Wright brothers bicycle shop, Tom Edison’s workshop, etc.
Henry Ford’s creation of Greenfield Museum/Henry Ford Museum is probably the best and most extensive museum of Americana besides the Smithsoneon.
Yeah…saying that Ford made some anti-semitic remarks is like saying that Carrie Nation was a teetotaler. It’s accurate, as far as it goes…but that’s nowhere near as far as it went.
True, but it was hardly a singular position. Anti-semitism was far more prevalent and accepted than it is today. When anything is widespread people are far more prone to thinking it’s OK. It doesn’t make it less wrong, but it’s hardly like he was staking out an extreme position given the public opinion abroad at the time.
I’d be interested to get my mitts on this article. Do you happen to remember what it was?
I would really disagree with this one, and not only because the V8 thing is factually wrong (Cadillac and Chevrolet used them in the late 'teens):
The Model T was produced, essentially unchanged, from 1908 through 1927. In 1908 the T was a very innovative car, but by 1927 it was hopelessly obsolete and had been for a long time (sorry Susanann). Ford’s reluctance to upgrade it was almost entirely the result of Henry’s refusal to consider ideas from outside the company or even outside his inner circle. He had the same sort of narcissictic distain for people with actual engineering and scientific backgrounds that his friend Thomas Edison had, and while the both of them achieved great things, it was more through sheer force of will than real technological know-how.
Until he lost control of the company, Ford consistently lagged far behind the other car makers in terms of technology and were only able to compete on price (no questioning he was a genius at keeping production costs low). Though the Model A, B, and then the V8 were lightyears ahead of the T, they were pretty much in line with what other car makers were offering at that price range (and of course he proceded to make flathead V8’s for the next two decades with only relatively minor changes while the other makers moved on).
There’s certainly something to be said for favoring low costs and simplifying production, but Ford was definitenly not a technology leader during his time heading the company.
Henry Ford was definitely an extremist even for his time.
Not too many people behaved as Ford did in writing a book called “The International Jew” with the subheading “The World’s Foremost Problem”. Ford also supported a newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, which continually ran scurrilous articles about Jews and promoted the forged “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” to spread anti-Semitic sentiment.
Ford’s activities in promoting Nazism and helping the Nazis’ industrial effort leading up to WWII are documented in the book American Axis.
Ford leaves a very mixed legacy.
To an extent I agree with this, but I believe that the rocker in which Lincoln was assassinated has no business there, it belongs in Ford’s Theater.
I hadn’t used this line in over a year but I was going to pull it out again upon seeing the thread title.
This was consistent with corporate culture of America at the time. There have been many advances in human resources since then. In fact, this culture was (probably) modeled after FW Taylor’s scientific management theories, where employees basically should be treated as robots.
An anti-union attitude would actually be viewed a good thing in today’s auto industry.
I don’t know much about the man, but why is this on the list at all? How does it make someone a bad person if they are reluctant to give up control of a company they built from scratch. It may be bad business not to, but it really doesn’t seem like it is a moral failing.
This reminds me of an old joke. If the Americans can build something with 20 parts, the Japanese can build it with 15 parts, and the Germans can build it with 47.
I think we Americans tend to venerate successful men & women far too much. Maybe it’s our lack of royalty, or somehow stems from our relatively short national history. If a man is rich & famous then, by golly, he must be something special. but the fact remains that heros usually have feet of clay.
It should be possible to acknowledge and appreciate someone’s achievement without assigning them any degree of sainthood. The fact that a person has been successful in business, for example, does not mean that they are in any way qualified to be a political leader. A genius artist, author or musician is often a hopeless business manager. Great leaders, presidents prime ministers etc. are sometimes failures at marriage & family life.
One of my favorite examples is Andrew Carnegie. He made a huge fortune in industry and late in life gave most of it away. He endowed public libraries all across the country, many of which are still in use. A wonderful legacy, a fantastic gift to millions of people. But how did he make all that money? He did it by ruthlessly cutting down his competition, he made it on the backs of his workers, using force, even murder to break strikes and destroy the unions. He made it by having the best politicians money could buy. A saint, a sinner, or a bit of both?
I ran across this video awhile back and think it’s worth viewing.
An early movie of Henry Ford, Harvey Firestone and Thomas Edison. Three great industrialists, three flawed men. Firestone, tossing cliche’s like they’re going out of style, Ford blathering along as his straight man and poor Thomas Edison, deaf and probably senile, looking like a drunken old fool.
It’s not just that the US could produce more - what it produced was, in certain ways, better because it was mass produced.
The Tiger and King Tiger were wonderful tanks. But they were incredibly manhour intensive to make, as you point out, and, more importantly perhaps, depended on large numbers of bespoke parts. There was nothing stopping the US producing equally as complex machines, but the US chose to simplify in tanks, to all faster production and to ensure (a) relliability and (b) interchangeability. Tigers spend much of their time unusable because if anything broke down (and it frequently did) you couldn’t just cannibalize another Tiger for a replacement part.
Yes they could out shoot Shermans, and Shermans couldn’t often harm them back. But that didn’t matter so much as the overwhelming weight of numbers of operational machines, in particular when the Allies had overwhelming air superiority. Yes the Tigers were well armored, but they still could get royally fucked by rockets from a Typhoon.
Even though he brought them to the museum he “accidentally” forgot to pay the people for the houses he bought to put into Greenfield Village
The Chevrolet V8 was first offered in 1917. A Ford cost 405-$980, and the Chevrolet that had the V8 was $1,385 (more than a Buick) and was discontinued after only two years. They didn’t offer another V8 until 1955. A 1917 Cadillac cost $2240 to $3910 depending on body style.
The first Ford V8 came in 1932 and cost $495 to $650 depending on body style. The V8 provided sixty percent more horsepower and cost only $10 more than the four cylinder.
A 1932 Chevrolet was similar to the Ford. It cost $445-$640 and its six cylinder offered 60 horsepower to the Ford’s 65. But the Ford engine was smoother and was considered a “luxury” available to the masses, comparable to having a VW Beetle with air conditioning.
The Ford V8 was loved by Dillinger and Bonnie & Clyde because it was fast and light. The Ford V8 was also the singular component that gave rise to NASCAR and virtually every form of automobile racing in the USA except Indianapolis Champ cars. It’s arguably the 2nd most important engine in US automotive history, behind the 1955 Chevrolet V8. Arguably, because some might place it 1st. It was kind of a big deal.
As to Henry Ford, he founded one of the most important companies in the history of the US and the company had a profound effect in England and Germany as well. He was responsible for cementing the US auto industry in Detroit, thereby practically creating “The Rust Belt” that was the cradle of manufacturing for at least half a century. The Model T completely changed the culture in less than ten years and had a greater impact in less time than the personal computer. Had a huge role in the creation of the aircraft industry as well with the Tri-Motor. Possibly only Thomas Edison was more important.
And he was a difficult man to deal with a great deal of the time. He strongly resisted the societal revolution that he had created and longed for the simpler rural life that he had grown up in. He was both revered and hated. He was Steve Jobs before it was cool.
The 100th Anniversary of Ford was a few years ago and several books were written. I recommend Wheels for the World: Henry Ford, His Company, and a Century of Progress by Douglas Brinkley. Available on Amazon for less than $4.00 brand new.