A hard look at Henry Ford’s road, potholes and all

The People’s Tycoon

Henry Ford and the American Century

Steven Watts

Alfred A. Knopf: 618 pp., $30

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“THE People’s Tycoon” is an energetic and altogether fascinating look at an eccentric genius who helped make modern America, helped lead it to the forefront of nations and, in part, came to embody it.

One must say “helped” and “in part” because author Steven Watts’ claims for Henry Ford’s central role in creating this country are somewhat overstated. Watts, author of a biography of Walt Disney and a University of Missouri historian, is, like too many contemporary biographers, excessively systematic in detailing his subject. As “The People’s Tycoon” progresses, you can almost hear his card file flapping over: Ford as farm boy, as mechanic, as businessman, as antiquarian, pacifist and so forth. Ford was the world leader in creating the modern assembly line, although it was in the context of a wider move toward the same end. His Model T was the first mass-produced, low-cost automobile. He created the huge River Rouge automotive plant in Dearborn, Mich., a singular example of industrial vertical integration. And he did pioneer the idea of paying his workers enough so that they could all buy the product they made. Watts shows that Ford’s tenacity in the creation of his motorcar was connected to other aspects of his character, admirable and despicable alike.

Ford was never as far from his rural roots as other tycoons of the age, like John D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan and Henry Frick. He was, though Watts does not use this term, a real honest-to-gosh American rube. Or crank, if you don’t mind getting your analogy tangled up in his famous machine’s most cussed-out part.

Ford also was anti-intellectual, suspicious to the point of paranoia, a prey to food and health fads and a notorious and vehement anti-Semite. He used his vast wealth to create a newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, to spread the notion that Jews were poisoning the world. Over his lifetime, Ford’s pride in his workmen degenerated into snarling and pernicious anti-unionism. His insistence on complete control led him to rule his vast domain with a band of thugs run by his bodyguard and close friend Harry Bennett.

From the time he was young (he was born in 1863), friends wondered whether he was a farm boy with a touch of the mechanic or a mechanic with a touch of the farm boy. This man who did so much to free humankind from the horse hated the critters, and he loathed the farm chores his father set for him as a boy.

Like many geniuses, Ford had a deep store of pure energy and was single-minded in pursuit of a goal. By the time he finally launched production of the Model T in 1908, he had overcome so many obstacles, from financing to recalcitrant elements of design, that he was as set in his ways as his car was in its. For him, the Model T was good enough; neither it nor he needed to change ways. Once when he came back from a trip his assistants presented him with a prototype of an updated, sleeker car. He tore it apart with his hands.

To say that Ford was a man of contradictions is to state the obvious. A pious preacher of what Watts calls the Victorian virtues (thrift, cleanliness, temperance), Ford nonetheless kept a mistress for 30 years -- in full view of Clara, his longtime wife and mother of his only acknowledged child, Edsel. Eve Dahlinger gave birth to a son, John, on whom Ford showered gifts and attention, but she never revealed the boy’s paternity. By contrast, Ford tormented and humiliated Edsel until the younger man’s death at 49 from what appears to have been ulcers and stomach cancer.

As Ford got older he reverted to his boyhood, devoting much money and energy to creating at Greenfield Village in Michigan and the Wayside Inn in Massachusetts idyllic farm settings reminiscent of the life he once despised and escaped from.

Neither you nor I would have enjoyed spending much time with the strong-willed, self-absorbed Henry Ford portrayed so vividly in “The People’s Tycoon.” But we live the way we do, in part, because of him.

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Anthony Day, a former editor of The Times editorial pages, is a regular contributor to Book Review.