The Wild Wheel

SEVEN IN THE GLARE

KEEPERS of the grand tradition treated Ford’s role in politics as that of Bottom in Midsummer Night’s Dream, wearing the head of an ass, only that Bottom knew it and Ford didn’t. Still, no one could be really sure. Maybe Ford did know it. He might have been president. If it was a spell it broke suddenly, and he saved himself by turning his back on the whole business, with no word of explanation, to the dismay of an idolatrous retinue and a great following that was anxious to get itself counted in favor of standing government on its ancient head.

It began when President Wilson asked him to stand in Michigan for the United States Senate. Mr. Wilson was a Democrat and Ford was a Republican, but only, as he said, for the same reason that he had ears, namely, that he was born that way. He was for the League of Nations, and that was why the President wanted him in the Senate.

He expected to be nominated by both parties. The Republican party refused to have him, which obliged him to accept nomination on the Democratic ticket. His opponent was Truman H. Newberry, who belonged to Detroit’s aristocratic clan and had been in Theodore Roosevelt’s cabinet.

A political machine was something that Ford knew nothing about, and for once his theory of the value of ignorance betrayed him. He made no campaign at all. Yet he was so sure of victory that he celebrated it with a dinner of the innocents before the votes were counted.

He was beaten. This made him very bitter, because he believed the Republicans had bought the result, which was apparently true. Besides making a great outcry about it, blaming his defeat on the league of wickedness in Wall Street, he turned out what he called his gang to explore the crime. It produced a great mass of damaging evidence, on which Newberry was indicted, tried and found guilty of spending more money than the law allowed. It was a celebrated case. A man who was to be in years to come successively Justice of the United States Supreme Court, Republican candidate for president against Wilson and then Secretary of State, Charles Evans Hughes, took Newberry’s case to the Supreme Court, on the ground that the law under which he had been found guilty was unconstitutional, and won. A Democratic Senate refused to unseat Newberry after that; but when the Republicans got control of the Senate in the next election and threatened to reopen the case, he called it enough and icily resigned.

2

THE habits of political bees are not too well known. We observe only the reactions of those who get stung. How, for example, did the presidential bee know that the time to sting Ford was when, with his exulting friends, he was celebrating his election to the United States Senate before the votes were counted? You might think any rational bee would have known better; would have waited at least until the sting of the senatorial bee had worn off. But this bee was right. It was at that dinner, so far as anybody can remember, that Ford for president was for the first time seriously proposed, in a toast by Harvey Firestone, who said he would give half his fortune to see it. True, the Michigan delegation to the Republican National Convention in 1916 had mentioned his name, and so had the Nebraska delegation, but nobody had thought this to be more than gesturing; even Ford passed it off lightly when reporters asked him, not too gravely, what he had to say.

He said he supposed running a government was like running a factory, or that it ought to be if it wasn’t.

But now there was no mistaking the omens that appeared in the Ford firmament nor the direction of the winds that moved on the waters beneath. Ford-for-President Clubs took a definite form. The first one at Dearborn was seed for one hundred and fifty all over the country. The seven thousand Ford dealers began to get campaign material.

In the Dearborn Independent Cameron wrote: “The next President of the United States will be a man who can read a blueprint and who understands the problems of production and how to keep men employed.”

To all who went to and fro it was evident that the mind of the Ford Motor Company had turned its surplus energy to the exciting business of amateur president making. Topside executives began to dream of cabinet titles, such as Mr. Secretary this and Mr. Secretary that, and pinned them to one another playfully. Allan L. Benson, who did a book entitled The New Henry Ford, tells that at a lunch one day Ford pointed to one of his staff and said, “That’s the kind of man I would appoint Secretary of the Navy.” Benson was then doing a series of articles on what people might expect if Ford were president.

Arthur Brisbane began to appear, with welcome on the door mat. Brisbane was a prodigious journalist who simplified knowledge for the masses and lived in Hearst’s most expensive cage. He could see a bandwagon before it came round the bend and carried his ladder with him. He saw some that were not there. This one was there all right, the same clumsy old-fashioned vehicle it had always been, and that was what was strange about it, seeing whose bandwagon it was. Brisbane told Ford that Hearst was coming out for him, and Hearst did, predicting that Ford could have the country on a third ticket if neither of the old parties wanted him. The popular magazines began to take straw ballots and Ford’s name ran very high.

The few friends who kept their feet on the stolid earth received gay farewells. Edison’s want of enthusiasm was personal. It might not be bad for the country, or he didn’t care, but for Ford, he thought, it would be terrible. He said to Ford, “Why, you can’t even make a speech.” Well, he couldn’t. On the one occasion when he had been persuaded to look an audience in the face he behaved as you do in the dream of appearing in the public square on a holiday without your trousers. Toward documents of all kinds and long papers he felt a positive aversion, as all of his associates knew. His old partner, Jim Couzens, now a United States Senator, said publicly in Detroit that if Ford were ever elected president he would learn the meaning of the word “humiliation.”

By this time the enigma that was the Ford mind had become a matter of national concern. What was it like—not according to the myth, but in fact? Thoughtful people wanted to know. He was studied from the point of view of a psychiatrist, from that of a social reformer, from that of a political realist, and so on, and when their reports were all in the man everybody knew was a riddle still. Norman Hapgood said it was the mind of a child full of wheels. That was true. But what of it? What Hapgood did not know, or could not have explained if he had thought of it, was that for years, in the merciless struggle for advantage, that same mind had baffled the very best brains in the freest, the most competitive and the most imaginative industry ever created until then by human intelligence.

It happened one day in the Detroit Club that three members of the famous Ford alumni, men who had worked with him through stress and frenzy, sat for several hours exchanging recollections of him. One was William S. Knudsen, who had been his production manager before Sorensen and who was, next to Sorensen, perhaps the best production man in the world. They had no reason to love him. All three of them had been thought indispensable; all three had gone down the same spillway, pushed from behind. Yet they bore him no animosity.

At last one of them said slowly: “Bill, how d-i-d h-e d-o i-t?”

They all knew what it meant. A pronoun for something that has no name, no shape, no reason to be, and nevertheless acts. It was the kind of thing Ford did from which afterward you deduced the existence of an nth faculty, a mysterious gadget that worked without ticking, and produced the unexpected answer.

Knudsen said: “Even in little things. Say we are going to buy a certain part for the automobile instead of making it for ourselves, maybe the distributor head, an assembled part made up of many pieces. The samples come in. The production men, the engineers and the technicians spend days going over them, taking them apart, testing one against another, making notes and tying labels to them. Then they are all spread out on a table, maybe thirty of them, ready for Ford. He comes in, looks at them for two or three minutes with his squinted eyes, says, ‘That one,’ and walks out. It’s that one, sure enough. But how does he do it?”

Another said: “Or suppose Ford and the three of us are standing on the corner downstairs. There is a silly bet. Who can get to the opposite corner of the block first without running? There are only three ways—two ways around the block and one way through a building. We start, each taking one of the three ways, and Ford disappears. The three of us get there all at about the same time, but there is Ford already, gazing up at the cornice of a building as if he wondered what a cornice was for. How did he get there? You tell me. My guess is he wouldn’t know himself how he did it.”

That satisfied them as perfect allegory. There was nothing more to say. Thus three old hardheads who had been his shopmates, who knew his ways, his astonishing vagaries, his whimsical and sometimes puerile contradictions, could reduce themselves to a state of bemused silence by asking themselves how a child mind full of wheels could so often arrive first at the opposite corner.

What good was their testimony?

Oswald Garrison Villard, who was a leader of liberal thought in his time, wrote that in many years of political observation he had never known a candidate so unfit; if Ford got to the White House anything might happen.

Arthur Vandenberg, who was later a member of the United States Senate, bricklayer on the United Nations job and Republican leader of the country’s bipartisan foreign policy, was then editor of the Grand Rapids Herald. He fairly set the key for the conservative press when he wrote that no other citizen whom you might suppose to be responsible had to his discredit so many erratic interviews on public questions, so many dubious opinions, such bland ignorance of American history and American experience, in brief, so much political nonsense.

That could be true. As Cameron said, the Ford mind was a ceaseless mill that produced an enormous quantity of chaff; yet if you screened the chaff you would find something like this:

“Two things men grow tired of—meaningless poverty and meaningless prosperity. Something else has to be added. The fact is that both poverty and plutocracy are insufferably dull.”

However, none of this made the slightest bit of difference to the people who wanted to vote for Ford. They wanted to vote for him all the more. Adhering to him were such diverse elements of the citizenry as perhaps could not have united before or since on one candidate.

Labor had not yet turned against him. He was still the man who stood on the side of the worker against the selfish employer.

Farmers were for him. Had he not brought the automobile to the farm?

Pacifists were for him, remembering the Peace Ship.

There was still a pro-German element, hanging over from World War I, and that was for him.

All who hated Wall Street, the international banker and something they called the money trust, would vote for him.

The prohibitionists he had in his pocket.

Radicals and anticapitalists to whom the profit motive was anathema forgot that he was not only the greatest profit maker of his age but one of the few who had ever pushed the logic of free, competitive capitalism to its extreme conclusion; they seemed not to understand, or to care, why he denounced the profit motive; it was enough that he did it and he was their witness.

It was a curious fact that almost nobody ever thought of Ford as a rich man. He conformed to no popular image of what a rich man was. He was not money-rich. His wealth was in things. He abhorred idle things, idle money and idle people; and he produced so much more wealth than he consumed that what he consumed was as nothing.

All the soft-money ballots of the West would fall in his pile, because he had said the gold standard was a device invented by bankers to oppress the people and was at heart a greenbacker. Even his anti-Jewish crusade was not a pure liability. It was likely to make votes for him in the South and Middle West.

Lastly, millions of Ford car owners transferred to him the kind of bellicose affection they felt for Model T. Fanciful as that may sound, it was important. Model T was the little man’s car. First and last, Ford was the little man’s man.

Altogether, he was a very dangerous candidate.

Coolidge was then President, in place of Harding, who had died, and was the natural Republican candidate for the next campaign. Ford was his only formidable rival, as a Republican, as a Democrat or on a third ticket.

3

WHETHER Ford really wanted to be president, or how much, which was always debatable, there was one thing he had set his heart on. That was Muscle Shoals, the name of a thing now almost forgotten. During World War I the government started an immense hydroelectric power development on the Tennessee River at a place called Muscle Shoals, with intent to make atmospheric nitrate for explosives. Before it was completed the war to end war was won, and since there was not going to be any more war there was no further need for nitrate, except for fertilizer, and unless the government was going to go into the fertilizer business, which it wasn’t, or into the electric power business, which at that time it did not intend doing, the problem was what to do with the unfinished works at Muscle Shoals.

Ford had got from Edison a romantic notion of the possibilities of hydroelectric power. He had already been building little dams on the upreaches of the River Rouge and hitching small factories to them, hoping to create idyllic industrial villages around the native farm life. Either out of his own head or out of Edison’s came a prevision of what we now know as TV A—that is, the Tennessee Valley Authority, which was created during the Roosevelt administration in a spirit of social adventure. It has transformed the Tennessee Valley region, chained down its floods, covered it with electric light and power, and made over the lives of the people, as a demonstration of planned welfare under the hand of government.

What Ford might have done with it in place of what the government did might have been very different. No comparison is possible, however, because his plans were vague. It was something big enough to play with; it would be developed in the Ford way, service before profit—and leave the rest of it to him. That was all he would say. But he wanted it very badly. When he offered to buy it from the government, at a white elephant price, public opinion immediately divided. A great many people, perhaps a large majority at that time, were for letting Ford have it, if not quite on his own terms, then on any reasonable basis. On the other side stood an aggressive and extremely obdurate minority, led by Senator Norris, who afterward became the father of TVA. These minority people not only quarreled with the Ford terms; their political creed endeared them to public works and made them hostile to any private development of water power.

As the controversy developed the country was entertained with fantastic previews of what Ford would do with Muscle Shoals. At the very least, he would make fertilizer as cheap as dirt and bust the fertilizer trust. If that was not enough for the farmers, then, as he had brought the automobile to the farm, so he would bring hydroelectric power to all rural life. There was a silly land boom in the Tennessee Valley. Ford town sites were laid out and lots were peddled in the North. In Congress at the same time Senator Norris and his cult were calling the Ford offer the swindle of the age.

What with the Muscle Shoals kettle coming to an angry boil and the Ford bandwagon building seats higher and higher to accommodate more passengers, there was gaiety in the nation such as no later children would ever know. Something was going to happen.

Then one day President Coolidge asked Henry Ford to come to the White House. That gave the bandwagon a lurch and made a holiday for the political cynics, who said all with one voice: “It’s a trade. There is going to be a trade. Ford’s candidacy for Muscle Shoals. That sly Calvin Coolidge!” That possibility may still be mentioned in political histories.

But there was no trade. Coolidge could not have bargained to deliver Muscle Shoals to anybody. Only Congress could do that. Ford on his part was not a man to trade away his heart’s desire. It was nevertheless a strange episode.

As Ford was setting out for Washington he happened to run into Roy D. McClure and took him along for company. McClure was his doctor, his companion on many sudden excursions, and head of the Henry Ford Hospital. When they got to Washington, McClure held back. Ford said: “Come on, come on. Maybe you will learn something.” McClure therefore was present through the entire interview and long afterward he told me about it.

The President and Ford exchanged compliments and talked pleasantly on matters of commonplace interest great and small—the harvest, the farmer’s dollar, the war debts, the state of Europe, the December weather. Ford did most of the talking, as anyone who knew Coolidge might suppose. Two subjects were never mentioned. One was politics. The other was Muscle Shoals. It was not a long visit.

On their way back to the railroad station, Ford said to McClure: “There’s a man who means all right.”

At Baltimore the reporters caught Ford and overwhelmed him. What about Muscle Shoals?

“Muscle Shoals?” he said. “Where is Muscle Shoals?”

They knew it was somewhere in the Tennessee River Valley.

“Where does the Tennessee River begin?” Ford asked.

Nobody knew that.

“Muscle Shoals,” he repeated, as if it were a curious thing. “How do you spell it. Is it m-u-s-s-e-l, something that people eat, or m-u-s-c-l-e, like something in your arm?”

When they stuttered on that one he said: “See. What’s the use of discussing a thing you know so little about?”

And that was all they could get out of him.

A few days later he calmly announced that he was not a candidate. The country was safe with Coolidge. He would not think of running against him.

President Coolidge did recommend to Congress that the Muscle Shoals property be sold to private interests for private development. He almost certainly would have done that in any case, for he believed very strongly that the government ought not to compete with private business, in power, in fertilizer, or anything else. Ford never did get it. Coolidge was elected, and after him came Hoover, yet Congress did not act. In the end the New Deal got Muscle Shoals.

In three volumes of homily and autobiography written with Samuel Crowther in 1922, 1926 and 1930, Ford’s struggles with the Satan of politics are missing. They were not so important after all. On Muscle Shoals he authorized a statement in 1926, saying:

“More than two years ago we made the best bid we knew how to make. No definite action has been taken on it. A simple affair of business which should have been decided by anyone within a week has become a complicated political affair. We are not in politics and we are in business. We do not intend to be drawn into politics.

“We have been and still are deeply interested in Muscle Shoals as a national asset. That concerns every one of us as citizens. I have two main principles with regard to Muscle Shoals. First, it should be operated as a combined industrial unit; second, it should make nitrates which will serve as fertilizer in time of peace and as the basis of munitions in the time of war. The manufacture of nitrates of course would not exhaust the power. The larger part would be available for general manufacturing. Its proper utilization will give the South that industrial impulse and facility which it needs. To permit it to be exploited would be a grave error.”

After that people more or less gave up trying to understand the Ford mind, and the Ford Motor Company went back to the business of making automobiles and nothing else.