Ford—an American royal family

Press, 10 January 1987, Page 19

Ford—an American royal family

Ford, by Robert Lacey. William Heinemann, 1986. 863 pp. $39.95

(Reviewed by

Hugh Stringleman)

It is somehow fitting that a biographer of Queen Elizabeth II (in “Majesty”) should turn to one of America’s royal dynasties — the Fords. In the United States the price of a sort of peerage and the undying devotion of the populace is very high — megabucks, as they say in the tabloids. Henry Ford I and II always had plenty of the folding stuff. One of the largest motor-vehicle manufacturing companies in the world was until after the Second World War owned almost completely by Henry I and his immediate family. While his grandson, Henry 11, spread the money around a bit more through a foundation, family control was firmly retained over the sometimes faltering fortunes of Ford Motor Company. What a crazy family they could be, though, and what a good job has Robert Lacey done of telling their story. His racy descriptions of the early years of Ford, and the stop-start progress of the people’s car-maker, eventually give way to the personal tragedy of Edsel, his son, and then the eventful reign of Henry 11, an unlikely successor who had to battle various ambitious dukes and lords. The complexities in the characters of the Henrys are well drawn out by Lacey but the ill-starred Edsel suffers largely in silence. His father thought he was weak and indulged in petty corporate skirmishing without any real father-and-son communication after Edsel became president at the age of 25. Finally Edsel was driven to the grave in 1943 with a terminal case of a common complaint around the old tyrant — Ford Stomach. Basically this was an advanced attack of corporate stress brought about by always trying to anticipate the wishes of the old man while at the same time trying to stay on your toes and beat the opposition, outside and within the company. Henry I had a magnificent run after coming quite late to the car business on his own account in the first decade of the twentieth century. He built a gross racing car, with four cylinders as big as powder kegs, got it moving at one mile a minute and thrust himself into national prominence as the winner of match

races. When he succeeded at his third attempt to found a car-making company (a lesson there for budding entrepreneurs) Henry still faced formidable odds. Lacey says that between 1900 and 1908 no fewer than 502 American companies were formed to make cars and while 302 dropped out or went into other business that still left 200 competitors. In 1910 nearly 300 different makes of automobile were being manufactured and as late as 1917, after many shakedowns and mergers, there were 23 car-making companies in Detroit alone, with 132 parts firms supplying them. Between 1903 and 1908, Ford had limited success with his models A, B, C, F, K, and N. Henry was a gifted motor designer, of that Lacey leaves no doubt, but his real stroke of genius was to determine to produce a cheap, durable car and to apply time and motion study to its production on an assembly line. When/Other car makers struggled to make their models more superior and expensive, Ford wrote these words in 1907: “I will build a car for the great multitude. It will be large enough for the family, but small enough for the individual to run and care for. “It will be constructed of the best materials, by the best men to be hired, after the simplest designs that modem engineering can devise. “But it will be so low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one — and enjoy with his family the blessing of hours of pleasure in God’s great open spaces.” Success on these principles was overwhelming. Ten thousand Model Ts were build in the first year of production, 18,000 in the second, 34,000 in the third, 78,000 in the fourth and by 1915, Ford’s Highland Park plant, the largest in the world, was turning out 250,000 cars a year. Ford was called the first true billionaire. At the end of the First World War nearly half the vehicles on Earth were Model Ts and 15 million of them were produced before the production line was finally stopped in 1928. The quirky car with its transverse suspension and planetary transmission (forerunner of the modem automatic gearbox) was loved and modified, but above all it was driven. When Ford found in 1913 that some mechanisation of the magneto

assembly workstation at Highland Park reduced the assembly time from 15 minutes (one man, one magneto) to five, with a corresponding reduction in the level of skill needed, stopwatches went into action ail over the plant Crude moving lines of growing cars pulled by ropes were formed but they gave way to a buzzing network of belts, assembly lines and process workers. The men quickly found what life was like in the fast lane. When Henry shocked Detroit and the rest of the United States by unilaterally doubling the average wage to $5 a day, many experienced car workers refused to join the clamour for jobs outside the Highland Park gates because of the inhuman demands of the assembly-line system. But on the day after Henry’s magnanimous wage offer, 10,000 people gathered outside in the snow for jobs. Ford could actually have paid $2O a day, according to Lacey, because the assembly line had reduced the time to complete one car from 728 minutes to just 93. Ford workers were not always treated as well, as the machine-gun ' murder of protest marchers in 1932 and the brutal beating of union officials in 1937 attested. The latter incident, labelled the battle of the overpass, was engineered by Mr Ford’s fix-it man and thug, Harry Bennett, who eventually had to be shoved out from a position of considerable power when Henry II acceded. Almost the same tactics were required 33 years later when another tough guy, Lee lacocca, attempted to grab the chairmanship off Henry 11. lacocca dominates the sixth and last part of “Ford” and the corporate manoeuvrings become at times too tortuous to follow and are probably irrelevant. Lacey’s narrative pace falters occasionally and the characters become more plastic perhaps in a parody of the cars they made. Henry II drinks and philanders his way around the world while lacocca develops a public style of conspicuous consumption worthy of the last of the Caesars. Often you wish these overgrown boys would unlock horns and take their millions home. Lacey has put a prodigious amount of effort into “Ford” and with a front page on the “New York Times Book Review” is probably assured of his millions too. And he deserves them.