Books: Long Night’s Journey into Day

FORD: DECLINE AND REBIRTH 1933-1962 by Allan Nevins and Frank Ernest Hill. 476 pages. Scribner. $8.95.

To millions around the world, Ford is a better-known name than Eisenhower. But to other millions in the U.S. during the Depression 1930s, Ford was just a four-letter word. As the past glories of mercurial old Henry and his cantankerous Model T faded, the great tinkerer ebbed into senility and the empire he created was rent by skull-smashing labor strife and long-knifed infighting among executives for shreds of power.

How the empire came to the brink and how it was saved are told engagingly and often suspensefully in this final volume of a trilogy by Historians Nevins and Hill.*

Without a Driver. The tragedy of Henry Ford is that he was ahead of his time for the first 60 years of his life, but woefully behind for the last 20. The intuitive Michigan farm boy who had “put the nation on wheels” and swung an industrial revolution with his moving assembly line had, by 1933, been displaced as the world’s biggest automaker by a nimble conglomerate, General Motors, which gave better styling (at a higher price) and believed in modern corporate decentralization instead of Ford’s autocratic one-man rule. Ford could not stomach being bested; he opposed anything that General Motors had developed first, refused to let his subordinates mention G.M.’s name. The decline of his company and of the whole U.S. economy also stiffened his opposition to labor unions. While the daring Henry Ford of 1915 had made history’s broadest advance in wages by doubling his workmen’s pay to $5 a day, the Ford of 1933 was determined never to recognize any union, thundering “I have never bargained with my men. I have always bargained for them.”

Detroit was a conservative place in the 1930s. All the auto companies, but mostly Ford, gained a sorry renown for the driving tactics of their harsh foremen and production speedups. The secret policeman, the stool pigeon and the scab nourished. When these tactics were protested by Ford’s only son, Edsel, the old autocrat gradually withdrew from him, both professionally and personally, and gave increasing powers and recognition to his devious little chief of “internal security,” Harry Bennett, a former sailor and sometime boxer.

The times were on the side of Harry Bennett. There were 16 million unemployed in the land, and hungry men were not about to protest when Ford forbade all conversations between workers in the factory, or when labor organizers were methodically kneed, blackjacked and even shot by Bennett-paid Detroit gangsters. Old Henry stood above and away from it all, refusing to believe that such abuses existed. In this vacuum of leadership, corporate cliques vied for Ford’s erratic scepter. “The sinister Bennett” was pitted against the “dynamically ruthless” production chief Charles Sorensen; the “public-spirited

Edsel,” whose very name now is symbolic of frustration and defeat, got little hearing.

To the Rescue at 25. Big blocks of customers were alienated. The Government would not buy Ford vehicles because Henry Ford refused to join the blue-eagle NRA, which would have compelled him to recognize unions. New Dealers shunned Ford’s cars because of his outspoken opposition to F.D.R., union members boycotted them for obvious reasons, and Jews did also because of his public antiSemitism. By the eve of Pearl Harbor, production was half as high as 1929’s record of 1,870,000 vehicles, and profits had been practically nil for a decade.

World War II offered something of a respite and a fresh burst of energy. The Ford works performed prodigies of output at clangorous River Rouge and the mile-long aircraft production line built on the pastureland of Willow Run. Though management unrest and labor strife remained, the company in 1941 had been forced by strikes, the Government, and consumer pressure to recognize the United Auto Workers. When in 1943 Edsel was killed by stomach cancer (compounded, say the authors, by a broken heart), the U.S. Navy discharged his son Henry II, then only 25, to return to the plant. One reason he was discharged, report Nevins and Hill, “was that high Government officials hoped that he might put an end to the growing chaos in management.” The authors clearly believe that he alone saved the company from extinction.

Me & Grandfather. Henry Ford II embodied his grandfather’s stubborn determination and his father’s simple human likability. Harry Bennett set out to cut him down, but young Henry Ford won powerful allies through the magic of his name and his own call-me-Henry magnetism. Though only one vice president among many, he stumped the country to uplift Ford’s disheartened dealers, who were immediately charmed by young Henry and his statements that his grandfather endorsed “all our programs.” In fact, old Henry had, in a secret codicil to his will, written over the company upon his death to a Bennett-dominated board of trustees; when word of this leaked to the family, the other Fords rallied around Henry II. Under pressure from his own wife and Edsel’s widow—who threatened to sell her stock and let the public in on the family company—the old man finally agreed in 1945 to change his will and turn the presidency over to Henry II. The defeated Bennett quit in a rage.

The job facing the new president was appalling. “Can you believe it,” he remarked later, “in one department they figured their costs by weighing the pile of invoices on a scale!” He estimated worker efficiency at one-third below normal. To help bring things under control, he hired a team of ten bright young Air Force statistical officers—”the Whiz

Kids”—who were later to supply Ford with six vice presidents and two presidents, including Robert McNamara and the incumbent president, Arjay Miller. “Labor unions are here to stay,” he declared, and he went on to sign an epochal annual-wage Contract with the United Auto Workers.

What followed was also daring: the Thunderbird, the Falcon, the Comet, the sale of stock to the public. By the late 1950s, Ford Motor was strong enough to weather the $350 million fiasco of the Edsel, and as of last year its net profits were $409 million.

The monument that Henry II had preserved would, of course, never have been there at all without the genius of his grandfather. For all his faults, old Henry Ford invented mass production, and made his unlikely flivver the drive-wheel of capitalism’s affluent society.

* The trilogy was supervised by Columbia University, which paid salaries to the authors (they get no royalties); Ford Motor Co. subsidized the project and opened its files, but obviously exercised no censorship over this explicit history.