Business & Finance: Old Fight

Old Fight

In 1931, at “88 years of age, on the threshold of the exitfrom life, ready to meet my Maker,” Henry Martyn Leland was still fighting Henry Ford. When the founder of both Cadillac Motor Car Co. and Lincoln Motor Co. died the next year his cause passed into the hands of his son and his grandson. For a decade this “Grand Old Man of the automobile industry,” who had made rifles in the U. S. Springfield Arsenal during the Civil War and Liberty motors in his Lincoln plant during the World War, tried to make Henry Ford acknowledge an obligation not to himself but to the creditors and stock-holders of Lincoln Motor Co., which Mr. Ford bought at a receiver’s sale in 1922.

Last January the grandson, Wilfred Chester Leland Jr., walked uninvited into an “old times party” at the Ford Laboratory in Dearborn and slapped into the lean hands of Henry Ford a long-delayed subpoena ordering him to appear and testify in a suit brought by a onetime Philadelphia Lincoln agency. Henry Ford never testified, but he and his son Edsel furnished depositions in which they denied, as they have always done, any agreement to pay off Lincoln’s former creditors and stockholders. Last week an eleven-man jury (one was dismissed for expressing his opinion of Henry Ford ) ordered Ford Motor Co. to pay Sweeten Automobile Co., now in receivership, $100,000.

Though Henry Ford will probably appeal the verdict, it was the first Leland victory in the ten-year fight. Originally Ford sued Sweeten for $6,800 in unpaid notes and interest, but the agency promptly filed a counter suit for $160,000. Sweeten claimed that Henry Ford had promised to maintain exclusive Lincoln agencies in 75 cities, that this was soon cut to 40 and Ford dealers began to sell Lincolns. The more Lincolns the Ford dealers sold, the less Sweeten and other Lincoln dealers sold. Henry H. Rudolph, a former Sweeten vice president, swore that when he told Henry Ford that they had dropped $196,000. Mr. Ford had put his arm around his shoulders, saying: “Never mind. Rudolph, we will see that you get it all back.”

The most willing witness was Wilfred Leland Sr. One night, he testified, Edsel Ford had summoned him for a conference on the Lincoln sale. Son Edsel told him to come by a back road and enter the Ford mansion through a side door. During the conference Mr. Leland confided that he was dickering with Manhattan bankers and Henry Ford thereupon promised to buy the company. But Mr. Ford shrewdly advised Mr. Leland that he “should continue to negotiate, however, and should dress shabbily, go unshaven for two or three days, so as to appear poor and discouraged about the affair.”

Sweeten Automobile’s attorney moralized last week: “His [Ford’s] purpose, of course, was to make the Lincoln company appear to be a worthless enterprise so that Ford himself would appear justified in making a low bid. . . . From that day on there was wickedness and willfulness in the heart of Henry Ford.”