Reverse engineering: Henry Ford created the future with his eyes on the past

Washington Monthly, July-August, 2005 by Benjamin Wallace-Wells

The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century By Steven Watts Alfred A. Knopf, $30.00

Americans of extreme wealth have often come to be defined after their deaths by the monuments they leave. William Randolph Hearst left his castle near Carmel, a gargantuan, perplexing design that has made his legacy one of profound self-absorption and wacky materialism. Andrew Carnegie set out to soften the mean feeling millions of working-class Americans had for him by building libraries as intellectual anchors for small towns across America. The Duke family, tobacco millionaires from North Carolina, turned a quiet country college into a prestigious research university. The great Guggenheim family of New York, stern German-Jewish bankers, erected a batty swirl of a museum; the only Guggenheim we now remember is their Paris Hilton, Peggy. Henry Ford built Greenfield Village.

"In 1929, after years of preparation, Ford opened to the public a large tourist park and museum built on 252 acres in Dearborn," writes Steven Watts in his admirable new biography. "Visitors could inspect a display of Americana--antiques of every imaginable variety--painstakingly collected by Ford's agents. In the enclosed buildings of the Henry Ford Museum, visitors saw an array of everyday goods from 18th- and 19th-century America: farm implements, railroad engines, furniture, cookware, wagons, woodstoves, and much, much more. Outside, in Greenfield Village, stood many architectural artifacts--a courthouse where Abraham Lincoln practiced law, Thomas Edison's laboratories, the homes of Stephen Foster and Noah Webster, a Southern plantation house, the Wright Brothers's bicycle shop, a gristmill, and a stagecoach tavern, to choose just a few examples--that had been purchased, carefully disassembled, and then rebuilt by Ford's carpenters and craftsmen."

This was more EuroDisney than Disneyland, a strange and didactic mass costumed as entertainment, dropped into a culture that felt it increasingly alien. The village's main street mingled vintage-styled, small-town shops ("Village Blacksmith Shop") with the shipped-in structures of engineering labs, as if insisting through the quiet fraud of juxtaposition that 19th-century values and mechanical progress necessarily went hand in hand. Ford called Greenfield Village "my Smithsonian Institute." He hoped it would draw millions.

Like Hearst's castle, Greenfield Village makes a telling monument, a marker of the nervous tension its maker felt between the 19th century and the 20th. The automaker had been a great--perhaps the great--booster of the emerging American middle class, setting his factory wages so high and pricing his Model T so low that millions more Americans could afford the markers of what had been luxury, and becoming a hem to the flowering progressive movement in the process.

To the extent that the United States is a literary experiment, this is the nub of it: What happens when you give great wealth and social power to a group that had not been born into it? Ford was disappointed by the early returns. World War I made it clear that modernity was moving away from the automaker's version of Eden rather than back towards it. In the 1920s, it became evident to him that the new middle classes had little desire to return to Greenfield Village, and roughly zero interest in a sin-free, small-town, ballroom-dancing life, so Ford put his formidable cash and influence into trying to turn the whole damn thing back. This extended, frantic thrash against the current, the last 30 years of his life, served Ford's memory poorly; he washed up, a bigoted lump, on the wrong side of history, a monument to the tragic reactionism of self-made men.

Ford's life, in Watts's telling, seems like it was lived to flesh out precisely this question--why is it that self-made men are often more committed reactionaries than the blue bloods? Coming up was easy for Ford, and so when other working class men and women didn't match his success he blamed it, like thousands of scold-prone school principals since, on their lack of drive and disciplined purpose. Unburdened by the guilt of the born rich, Ford felt free to despise the laxity of the newly wealthy, and the evil of those institutions that encouraged it. Banks, dance halls, and car companies that sold vehicles on credit (not to mention, until reason broke through after decades, the Jews) fared poorly in Ford's public speeches and writings, and in a neat and quick flip, the ultimate progressive grew deeply anti-modern.

Ford's focus

Watts's book is not very complicated, and its virtues and flaws both stem from the author's decision to focus his work tightly on the sea change in Ford's public disposition and image, first a progressive and then a reactionary. A biographical bulimic, Watts spits out huge chunks of Ford's life without really digesting them. Beyond a little thin praise, we never get close to Clara, Ford's wife of six decades. The first 40 years of the automaker's life (most of his early career was spent as a troubleshooting engineer with a Detroit electrical utility) take up less than a fifth of the book. And Watts doesn't even tackle what is perhaps the great sociological question of the early auto industry: Why Detroit? Even though that city had no apparent advantage in 1900, as small, innovative auto shops were popping up from Buffalo to Daytona Beach, it had become by 1910 the Silicon Valley of its day, and the mechanics who ran the city's tinkering shops had turned into manufacturing legends, the Dodges, Oldses, and Fords. But Watts, whose interest lies elsewhere, doesn't offer any explanation.