The Book of the Dead

Two years later Ford left to set up his own business. In 1903 he personally broke the world land-speed record in a car called the 999, reaching 91 miles per hour on the frozen surface of Lake Saint Clair near Detroit. Impressive though this was, the “motor car” was easily dismissed as a plaything for the well off, expensive to make and to buy. But Ford had other ideas. His invention of the assembly line simplified the manufacturing process, keeping costs down and radically reducing production times. But the real stroke of genius was to do this while also keeping down the price to the buyer. Every worker was a potential customer and the profits would come from volume. It worked. In 1908 the first Model T Fords began rolling off the line, priced at $825 dollars. By 1914 the price had fallen to $360 (equivalent to a very affordable $7,000 at today’s prices). By 1918 half the cars in America were Model Ts, and when production finally stopped a decade later, 15 million had been produced—more than any other car except for the Volkswagen Beetle.

Ford had managed this through some bold innovations, all of them designed to centralize control. The eight- hour shift allowed three sets of workers to keep the production line running twenty-four hours a day. In 1913 the introduction of the first conveyorbelt-driven “moving production line” reduced the time it took to produce the car’s chassis from six hours to just ninety minutes. At the same time, a network of Ford dealerships was established, which not only made the dealers themselves wealthy, but also meant Ford cars were visible in every American city, helping to create yet more demand. At the other end of the supply chain, Ford looked to buy—or form strategic alliances with—the companies producing parts, glass, and rubber, to improve consistency of delivery and drive production costs down further. This was to become the template for the modern manufacturing corporation, and Ford did it all without accountants. He didn’t like employing people who weren’t directly involved in making or managing—in his lifetime, the Ford Motor Company was never audited.

Ford’s other major innovation was to do with staff. In 1914 he introduced a minimum wage of $5 a day, a huge leap from the previous rate of $2.34. It was an instant success, attracting thousands of highly motivated workers to Detroit and ending the high staff-turnover problem overnight. But there were conditions. To qualify for the minimum wage meant conforming to Ford’s social vision: no heavy drinking, no smoking, no divorce, no union talk. He set up a Social Department under the ex-boxer and tough guy Harry Bennett. Bennett had a team of fifty investigators gathering information about the personal lives of the workforce. Anyone who failed to meet the standards of the Ford Motor Company forfeited their right to the minimum wage. Bennett also made sure union activity was disrupted at every turn, employing thugs and ex-criminals under the guise of a crime rehabilitation program. He was the ultimate fixer and he enjoyed Ford’s complete trust, picking his boss up and dropping him home every day for more than twenty years. Once, when a newspaper suggested to him that he would paint the sky black if Ford asked him to, he replied:

I might have a little trouble arranging that one but you’d see 100,000 workers coming through the plant gates with dark glasses on tomorrow.

The Social Department hints at the darker side of Ford’s character. He was an autocrat who couldn’t bear dissent. Bennett himself captured this perfectly. Practically the first thing Ford said to him was “Harry, never try to outguess me.” “You mean never try to understand you?” replied Bennett. “That’s close enough.” Those that tried to defy him, including his own son, Edsel, and his grandson Henry Ford II, found themselves overruled or expelled. This ruthlessness was one of the reasons that Hitler kept a life-sized picture of Ford next to his desk. (He would later claim that the Ford Service Department inspired him to set up the Gestapo, just as the Model T had influenced the Volkswagen Beetle.) And this wasn’t all that Hitler had in common with Ford. In the 1920s, he was the proprietor of the Dearborn Inquirer, a newspaper that had published a series of anti-Semitic tracts, including the notorious (and fake) “The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.” Ford later disowned the paper and claimed he was unaware of its racist content, but all the evidence points to these apologies as window dressing. Even in his final weeks he was still grumbling about Jewish bankers having caused World War II.

In June 1916 the Chicago Tribune published an article headlined FORD IS AN ANARCHIST that claimed, incorrectly, that the company was refusing to pay employees called up by the National Guard. Ford sued and the paper was found guilty, but fined only six cents—the amount the jury thought covered the damage Ford and his company had suffered. During the trial, Ford had been cross-examined in the witness box and this had revealed some strange gaps in his general knowledge. It emerged that he thought the American Revolution had taken place in 1812 and he couldn’t define words and phrases like ballyhoo and chili con carne. He thought that the traitor Benedict Arnold was a writer. It was in defense of his ignorance that he made his often misquoted reply “History is bunk.” What he actually said was: “History is bunk as it is taught in schools….”

What distinguishes Ford from most modern CEOs is that his vision went far beyond business. He was a Utopian, convinced that technology properly managed would lead to a world without war, turning it into one happy global version of the Ford company. This helps explain his obsession with diet and personal morality—and the apparent paradox that the man whose wealth was built on the internal combustion engine was a committed environmentalist. His estate at Fair Lane, near Detroit, was powered by hydroelectric power from his own dam on the Rouge River. To control mosquitoes organically, he built hundreds of bat houses on the grounds, and while building works were going on, he paid local boys to catch squirrels so that they wouldn’t be killed when trees were felled.

As a teenager, Ford had given up hunting after shooting a meadowlark. As he and his two companions retrieved the dead bird, Ford exclaimed, “Well I’m through. When three big able-bodied men with guns will pick on a little bird like this, I’ve fired my last shot.” For the rest of his life, he was a pacifist: He wouldn’t even let his son Edsel play with toy guns.

In many ways, Ford never left the farm where he was born. He loved nature and enjoyed camping, going on regular excursions with a group of wealthy friends who called themselves The Vagabonds. They included his former mentor Thomas Edison, the tire magnate Harvey Firestone, and the naturalist John Burroughs, known affectionately as the Grand Old Man of Nature. In 1921 they were joined for a night by the then president, Warren Harding. According to John Burroughs, the campers would “cheerfully endure wet, cold, smoke, mosquitoes, black flies and sleepless nights, just to touch naked reality once more.” It was a pretty relaxed form of “roughing it,” though: Each man had his own personal tent, with mosquito nets and a separate dining marquee.

On an even folksier note, Ford helped rejuvenate traditional American fiddle playing. He had his own $75,000 instrument (a Stradivarius, naturally) but no natural talent, and he made himself cross by continually failing to play and dance a jig at the same time. To make up for it, he hired an elderly fiddler called Mellie Dunham to record traditional tunes and funded the Henry Ford Gold Cup for fiddling. The publicity generated was huge. Fiddling underwent a national revival and remains an essential part of country music to this day.

Perhaps it was inevitable that a farm boy turned technologist would end up finding a way to combine the two disciplines. In the 1930s he saw his chance: a new branch of science called chemurgy, which sought to find new uses for agricultural raw materials in industry. Ford became so interested that the Ford Motor Company began using soybeans as an ingredient of its gear knobs and car-horn buttons and, in 1934, he formed the Farm Chemurgic Council, with a national conference in Dearborn, Michigan, to which George Washington Carver (1864–1943) was invited.

Carver was a legendary figure. A former slave, in 1896 (the debut year of the Quadricycle and the word “consumer”) he had been appointed by the great educator Booker T. Washington (a former slave himself) to be the director of Agricultural Research at the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute for Negroes. His aim was to help black farmers improve their crops by means of crop rotation and by finding alternatives to cotton, which depleted the soil. It was Carver’s championing of soybeans that drew him to Ford’s attention, but peanuts were what assured his immortality. Largely due to him, over the next fifty years, peanuts became one of the dominant crops in the whole of the South.

Initially, there wasn’t much call for peanuts, so Carver set about exploring the possibilities for by-products. His ceaseless experiments produced some three hundred peanut derivatives, including evaporated peanut beverage, cheese, ink, dyes, soap, medicinal oils and cosmetics, metal polish, plastic, instant coffee, meat tenderizer, shaving cream, talcum powder, wood stains, shoe polish, peanut oil shampoo, and various cooking sauces, earning himself the nickname “The Peanut Man.” He may well have invented peanut butter, but he never patented it: He believed food products were a gift from God and therefore belonged to everyone.