The Wild Wheel

THE Great Depression had revolutionary political and social consequences, some of them irreversible, some of them still acting with unspent force. It began in 1930 and continued like a nightmare of Prometheus in chains until the nation’s energies were released again in preparation for World War II. During these ten years the relations between government and people were fundamentally altered. The welfare of people became a direct responsibility of government, whereas always before government was a responsibility of people, and the people minded their own welfare. American ways of thinking and feeling were deeply changed, to the point at which people were willing to surrender personal freedoms and abide compulsions in exchange for a sense of social security.

The song of the wild wheel died suddenly. Even the echoes of it became hateful. In place of it was heard a mighty chorus, led by the voice of the New Deal, demanding that the wheels be tamed, that their revolutions be governed and planned to produce only as much as people could afford to buy at fair prices. The delusion was that the wild wheel had caused the depression. It had produced too much, more than people could consume, thereby bringing to pass unemployment and the absurdity of want in the midst of plenty.

No man was more unbelieving than Henry Ford. The popular delusion seized a great majority of the men of business, who were willing to strike hands with government to limit production, restore prices and put competition in a strait jacket; it could not seize him. His mind rejected it completely. But what he would not or could not see was that a world was passing. The delusion was but the furore attending its eclipse; and its eclipse was bound to include him because he was its symbol.

He was still under seventy, and apparently at the peak of his unpredictable powers; nevertheless, his horizons had reversed their direction. Instead of going away they were slowly moving toward him. And as a fateful coincidence, crises in the world of the wild wheel, utterly beyond his control, were parallel in time to crises in the affairs of the Ford Motor Company.

The V-8 was his own last mechanical triumph. As it developed year by year thereafter, to meet competition in style and refinement, fewer ideas came from him and more from the organization, subject to his approval. The authority of his yes and no was final and imperious to the end, but only when it was exercised, and many things went around him. More and more he relied upon Sorensen, the Magnificent Dane who began as a pattern maker in the Ford shop at three dollars a day and became the great production genius of his time.

It was Sorensen who walked with the rope that pulled the first motorcar assembly line at Highland Park.

It was Sorensen who went to California to see how they made airplanes there, because the Ford Motor Company was going to make them, too, for World War II, and said: “I don’t understand this bird’s next method.” They asked him what he meant by that. He said: “First you build the plane and then you drag everything into it through little holes.” They asked him how he would do it. He took the print of a plane and bisected it with lines. “I’d build it in sections, like that,” he said, “then stuff the sections and bring them together.” That changed the method of airplane construction.

It was Sorensen who said: “You never can forge enough cylinders for the airplanes you want.” They asked him how he would make them. He said: “I’d cast them.” They said: “That proves what we already knew. Automobile people can’t make airplanes. You can cast the cylinders of a motorcar engine but an airplane engine is different.” What they were talking about was the lining of an airplane engine cylinder, fitted in the piston well like a membrane that grew there—an exquisite, jewellike thing to look at, absolutely perfect and very slightly tapered because it will expand more at the spark plug end than at the other, which causes it to be precisely true when the engine gets hot. Sorensen went back to the River Rouge plant and cast some sample cylinders. They were tested under hydraulic pressure which would rise until they were crushed. The forged pieces buckled first and crumpled up; the cast cylinder, when it did buckle, went down like an accordion hat. After that airplane cylinders were cast, else, as Sorensen said, there could hardly have been enough of them, because the forging process is very slow.

And it was Sorensen who built the famous Willow Run plant, to produce a bomber an hour, which was the largest single thing the Ford Motor Company ever did.

2

THE V-8 was brought out in the third year of the Great Depression. That was bad enough. The obstetrical event was long and painful and entailed a kind of engineering crisis. This in turn led to a crisis between the Ford Motor Company and its unhappy dealers, who again for a long time had nothing to sell and began to give up.

Ford’s complacency at this time astonished his associates. If he thought the superiority of the new car would sweep the market back to him he was disappointed. Although the V-8 was successful as a car, the most it could do was to hold the Ford Motor Company in third place, whereas it had been first. Now it had become one of the Big Three. The other two were General Motors, in first place, and Chrysler in second, who by this time knew as much about automobile making as Ford knew, even more. They were beating him in style and meeting him in price.

Each of his competitors had a line of cars, suited in price to the size of your pocketbook—that is, a low-priced car for the many, a more expensive middle-class car, and then one for the rich. Before the V-8 there had never been anything but a Ford car. When it was the Model T it was the Model T and nothing else. When it was the Model A it was the Model A, take it or leave it. A Ford was a Ford was a Ford.

“No factory,” Ford had said, “is large enough to make two kinds of product.”

But now he was persuaded that the Ford Motor Company too must have a line of cars. Besides the V-8 there was a six-cylinder car at a lower price, because the dealers wanted it—and the voice of the dealers was beginning for the first time to be respected, for the Ford agency was no longer the little gold mine it had once been. And then there was the Lincoln, which became a Ford product when Ford bought the Lincoln Motor Company. “More for personal reasons,” he said, “than because we wanted it. We have no desire to make a commodity of the Lincoln.”

Nobody could have made a commodity of the Lincoln. It was in its day the finest and costliest American automobile. Only the rich could afford it. It was designed by Henry M. Leland, whose fame in the motor world was such that when he organized the Lincoln Motor Company its capital stock was subscribed in two hours. At that time Model T was already high on its way. Leland built his ideal car and it was all that he meant it to be, but its cost was so high that its market was bound to be small and it was never a success in a financial way. Ford bought it to save it from bankruptcy. One of his personal reasons may have been the desire to have an automobile of that superb quality within his domain.

The understanding was that the Lincoln Motor Company should continue as a separate province, with Leland as its vassal lord. Ford did not intend to cheapen the car, and he never did; he intended only to reform the manufacturing methods in order to reduce the cost of producing it. But when his engineers, led by Sorensen, entered the Lincoln premises and saw how men worked who had been taught never to worry about cost they were horrified; on the other side, when these engineers began to apply Ford methods to eliminate waste, Leland’s blood curdled and he retired with an embittered heart.

The Lincoln became then a Ford problem. Simply, it did not lend itself to mass production, which meant that the price could not be reduced, and if the price could not be reduced the sales could not be increased. One attempt at solution was to bring out a lower-priced car called the Lincoln-Zephyr. Then the hyphen was dropped and there was the Zephyr. Later the Zephyr disappeared and there was a new Lincoln, still a fine car but not like the old Lincoln and not so costly.

Before the Great Depression the Ford Motor Company’s amazing growth, always with its own capital, enabled it to absorb mistakes with astonishing ease. It could write off its white elephants and forget them. So it wrote off a railroad, an excursion into aviation and the Fordson tractor, to mention only three. When it became just another motorcar company, one of the Big Three and in third place, something of that reckless spirit went out of it. However, its essential character never changed. General Motors was a confederacy, Chrysler was a democracy, and both were large borrowers of capital; but the Ford Motor Company was a monarchy so long as Ford lived and a tight family possession after he died, with his grandson, Henry Ford II, on the throne seat.

3

IT WAS in the middle of the Great Depression that the transfer of economic power from the employer to organized labor took place. It took place legally, but in a curious way. The New Deal passed a law under which organized labor was free to enjoy and exercise the power of monopoly—provided it had the strength to seize it in open combat with the employer, the government to act as umpire. What followed was a series of bitter struggles on the ground of industry-wide collective bargaining. Organized labor won.

In the motor car industry, as aforesaid, Ford was the most implacable of the Big Three and for that reason the last to be attacked. He was then seventy-five. His defeat was without solace. The union won more than it asked for, and after that the Ford Motor Company was a closed shop; only union members could work there, and Ford became the collector of the members’ compulsory union dues, acting for the union treasury.

What he had lost was not just a battle with labor. He had lost his world. Never again would the wheels be wild in a Ford shop. The union would attend to that.

The significance of this change was deeper than anybody knew at the time. Although Ford never expressed it in rational terms he must have known it intuitively.

The one great justification of mass production as he had developed it, for all that might be valid in the resentments of labor, was that it did progressively cheapen the cost of satisfying human wants, so that goods, automobiles or anything else, were ever more abundant and more available, possibly to the point at which sometime they might become as cheap as water carried from the well. But in order for mass production to have that result it was necessary that management should be able to control costs, and management cannot control costs unless it controls both wages and the tempo of work and obeys the hard law of the machine. Here lies the enigma. You may do with it what you like.

In Ford’s philosophy, the benefits of mass production were intended for the consumer, which includes labor, since all wage earners are also consumers. In his scheme the consumer was more important than the producer; and if this seems a bit dialectical you may consider the fact that while you may dispense with the wage earner by putting a machine in his place, the consumer, who buys the products of the machine and makes mass production possible, is indispensable. The wage earner is more important in the aspect of consumer than in the aspect of producer, and it follows that in order to be a good consumer he must have high wages.

But when labor itself has the power to say what the wage shall be and how much it will give for the wage received, it claims for itself the first benefits of mass production; the consumer is forgotten. Thus the true economic ends of mass production are defeated, and all you have left is a method of producing goods.

You may say it another way—that the intentions of mass production cannot be realized unless management and labor are both free. So long as that freedom existed in the motorcar industry, the cost of an automobile went lower and lower until it became, pound for pound, the cheapest manufactured thing in the world, not the Ford car only but all cars; and automobile labor at the same time was the highest-paid labor of its kind in the world.

It was estimated that one year Model T generated, directly and indirectly, a payroll of one billion dollars, and that year the car sold for twenty cents a pound.

And so we became an automobile people. That could not happen again in a world of tame wheels. If the political and social conditions that now exist had existed in 1900, the American motorcar industry as we know it could not have been created at all.

4

FIVE years after Ford’s surrender to organized labor, when he was eighty, his only son, Edsel, died. Tragedy had not touched him before. For more than twenty years Edsel had been president of the Ford Motor Company, a prince regent, acting but not ruling, under the jealous eyes of the king. His story was simple enough. He was the son of a genius. His endless struggle was to get possession of his own life, handicapped by the fact that he was born without a rebellious spirit. The son could not reproduce the father, nor could he be melted down and poured again by the cunning molder who had cast the original V-8 engine block in one piece. Their sympathies were hurt by mutual frustrations of mind and character. Yet in the court of bereavement the judgment was that Edsel’s death should be the incomparable loss. Thereafter, all of Ford’s days were desolate.

The wealth of the Ford Motor Company at that time was valued at one billion dollars. Who should be president in place of Edsel? Ford was too old; the grandsons were too young. Sorensen was the natural candidate, and it is said that Ford wanted him; yet on second thought he himself resumed the title of president.

Probably the only trouble with Sorensen was that he had got too big. In any case he had got entangled in a maze of jealousies such as can be generated only within a family. Before the end of that year he joined the famous Ford alumni. Ford himself probably did not know exactly how or why it happened. His powers were failing. Harry Bennett, who was his bodyguard, says that after Sorensen was gone Ford would get into the car and say, “Take me over to see Charley,” meaning Sorensen. Bennett would say Charley wasn’t there any more. Ford would say: “Not there any more. Where is he?”

Nobody has ever been able to explain Harry Bennett’s career with the Ford Motor Company. He was a sailor and very handy with his fists. Arthur Brisbane noticed him one morning in a New York dockside brawl, admired his animal qualities, and had the whimsical notion of taking him to Ford, saying, “Here’s a man you may be able to use.” In an absent manner Ford sent him out to the Highland Park plant, where he had nothing to do and was for a while lost. Over at the new River Rouge plant the superintendent was having some gang trouble and said he needed a big tough guy to deal with it. Bennett was sent over. He introduced himself by knocking down a Polish foreman who asked him what he wanted. He was the tough guy all right, and loved trouble, and became so useful as a persuader of indocile men that he was soon at the head of the internal police. Then Ford began to employ his terrier qualities in curious and devious ways, sometimes to abate trouble and sometimes to create it, the theory of creating it being that executives ought never to be comfortable in their jobs.

In a few years Bennett began to behave as if he were Ford’s private Gestapo, as in fact he was; and there came to exist between them a singular intimacy. By exploiting it shrewdly Bennett raised himself to a position of undefined power. Everybody feared him for what he knew or for what he could tell and because his open pathway to Ford was like a secret they shared together, no trespassing allowed. As the years went by and as the shop he could at first hold in one field of vision became an empire that had to be visited, or could be visualized only through the eyes of others, the suspicious side of Ford’s nature developed morbidly. Fewer and fewer people could he trust, and the fewer these were the more he trusted Bennett, whose loyalty was exclusive and personal. So it was to the very end. Sorensen could be fired, but not Bennett, unless he fired himself. When at last the family took control, almost the first thing it did was to tell Mr. Bennett good-by and erase his fingerprints wherever they could be found.

Then it began to be said: “If only Bennett would tell what he knows, what a book he could write!” Now Bennett has written his book. Its title is We Never Called Him Henry. It is a very stupid book, except as it unconsciously reveals three things, namely: first, that Ford forged Bennett as a mindless tool and then used it with amazing deftness; second, that Bennett had no power at all except as Ford provided it day by day; and, third, that Bennett never knew what Ford was about.

The third point is accounted for by the limitations of Bennett’s understanding. If he goes to Heaven he may spend half his eternity with St. Peter and never see in him more than a ticket taker.

5

FORD was a man with no number, no place in any category, no proper explanation. We have seen him acting in the world that passed with him. Shall we leave him there? Or shall we go on to see what he did with that part of his mind which was free of wheels—if it was. At any rate, not the mechanic, not the messenger of mass production, but the man of insatiable wonder to whom everything was new because he did not know any better. For sheer curiosity, let us go on.