Henry Ford’s Big Flaw

PEOPLE OFTEN WRITE ABOUT HENRY FORD AS IF HE WAS A VERY ODD DUCK unlike the rest of us—an odd duck who had so much money he could get away with things. I think of him as a very ordinary duck, the difference being that after his early years he had so much money that he could act out impulses that we all may have but can’t possibly obey. I think his very similarities to us make it instructive to follow Henry Ford through some of his history.

If you look at pictures of early Ford factories—the Mack Avenue plant, opened in 1903, and the larger Piquette Avenue plant, opened the following year—you’ll find that they were very typical for their time. Ford was making cars like everyone else, at stationary work stations to which parts and materials were brought for a host of different operations. But by 1914 Ford’s team had radically transformed the stationary Piquette Avenue process into the now world-famous moving assembly line, where each worker did a single task while the emerging car moved past the work station. The change took about eight years, from 1906 through 1914. Those eight years represent one of the great creative revolutions in technological history. Why did it happen at Ford?

It happened there in great part because Henry Ford assembled an extraordinary team of engineers. Their ferocious work habits look like a form of play. They routinely ran big risks, changed their minds, debated one another, all because they were reaching for a production system that would solve a problem they had created for themselves—the immense popularity of the 1908 Model T.

The Model T is probably the most successful single technical design in American history. The T’s design fit the context of its time almost perfectly. In 1904 only 7 percent of the roads in the United States were paved. The other 93 percent were basically impassable after a hard rain and deeply rutted when dry again; that meant a car had better be lightweight and extremely durable and have a high center of gravity. Also, since there was virtually no infrastructure of service stations or auto mechanics, the car had better be simple enough for most users to repair. The T was famous for precisely these qualities.

In his early years Henry Ford fought with stockholders about what kind of car to make. The conventional wisdom held that the primary market for cars must be the well-to-do, such as doctors, politicians, and successful clergymen. Ford wanted to build a cheap car, which would have a small profit margin but sell to a very broad range of people. And sell it did. After three extraordinarily successful initial years, the Ford team stopped trying to preplan annual sales, assuming instead that they would sell every T they could make more or less as fast as they could make it, a situation that held into the twenties. That gave Ford both a tremendous incentive to manufacture more quickly and the resources to invest in the production process.

The creation of the moving line took six years because the Ford team worked and reworked the moving line’s most bedeviling problem—materials handling. A moving assembly line can move at a constant speed only if every component that goes into it pours in at that same constant speed. When the product is a precisely assembled machine with thousands of subcomponents, the challenge of integrated flow becomes enormous.

By 1910 they had moved into the huge Highland Park plant, a factory where logistical arrangements became the benchmark for future manufacturing. Highland Park had four-story manufacturing centers alternating with one-story machining centers, rail yards where they brought in materials, and an elegant executive office building. But even more elegant than the office was the power plant housing the gas turbines that generated electricity for the factory. For Henry Ford, the power plant was clearly a work of art. Enormous plate-glass showroom windows faced Woodward Avenue; everything inside—tile floor, brass fixtures, massive dynamos—was kept spotless.

Ford’s celebration of this workaday facility provides a clue for understanding technical genius not only at Ford but wherever it occurs. You can think of it as having three major components. The first looks inward. Ford engineers paid close attention to the technical problems they would have to solve to achieve the moving line, in terms of machine-tool design, materials handling, and so on. Any time anyone has ever designed a technology well, part of what they have had to do has been to get the internal workings right. In any research and development, there must come a point where you stop debating about your goals, close the doors on distractions, and work on getting the design right.

The second component is where the showcase power plant comes in. Good engineering requires a capacity for pride in the beauty of technical achievement, a sense that the internal design work just mentioned is worth displaying to the world. The celebration that accompanies really good engineering is crucial because it puts the engineer’s imagination in touch with the larger societal context within which every technology ultimately operates. Design work that is cut off from its host society quickly loses the creative touch.

That’s the point of the third component, which I call “backand-forth consciousness.” The same people who focus inward must also open outward to the larger world. As I mentioned, Ford’s engineers designed the T in response to poor roads and a weak infrastructure, but it could also be argued that Henry Ford’s insistence on a cheap car for the masses flowed from a very sophisticated intuition about what we now understand as the American love affair with the automobile. In 1900 only about four thousand cars were sold, yet many of the short popular films of the period treat automobiles as the fulfillment of powerful fantasies. Ford grasped, perhaps better than anyone else of his time, how cars excited people. We see, in short, a very healthy technological aesthetic at the heart of the Model T and assembly-line achievement between 1906 and 1914. It blended precise reasoning with intuition about the larger world. Gradually, however, the balance required to hold these elements together deteriorated. The trouble began at the height of Ford’s accomplishment, in 1914, when events conspired to turn Henry Ford from a successful engineer into a symbolic hero, almost a god figure. The first event was the completion of the moving line. Much more important on the symbolic level, however, was the introduction of what came to be known as the five-dollar day.

During the first decade of the century the United States was absorbing more than 800,000 immigrants each year into a population of about 80 million. They came mostly from Eastern and Southern Europe, with scant industrial skills and what most Americans of the time felt were strange religions and customs. How to blend this flood of cheap but untrained labor into a sophisticated production process? The Ford team radically restructured work assignments, simplifying the great majority of them so that new workers could be trained in as short a time as possible. The moving line not only sped production, it also reduced the worker’s role to repeating a single set of actions over and over. Immigrant workers, together with more highly skilled American workers, hated the moving assembly line as a mind-numbing and nerve-racking ordeal. “Forditis” became a name for the miscellaneous ailments that resulted. In 1913, as the line neared completion, worker turnover at Ford reached the astonishing rate of 370 percent.

The Ford people addressed the problem head-on and announced, in January of 1914, that the workday would be shortened from nine to eight hours as the company hired new workers and moved to three 8hour shifts, and the workers’ daily wage would double from an average of roughly $2.50 to $5.00.

It is hard to convey the awe with which Ford was treated by the press when this happened. In effect he was saying, “I am not being a fool and simply raising wages; I am sharing the profits of a very profitable enterprise, because you can’t make a car for the masses when the masses can’t afford the car, and there’s no point in having a work force that is ground down and dirt poor.”

Doubling wages while cutting work hours was the main way the Ford people responded to that 370 percent turnover of 1913, but they did another, less publicized, thing too. In 1914 Ford founded the Ford Sociological Department. A worker could qualify for the five-dollar day only after his or her home was inspected by a member of the Sociological Department. The inspectors came with an interpreter, because the worker usually didn’t speak much English, and they examined the home for cleanliness. They checked whether the employee was legally married and whether he kept boarders, which was frowned on. They checked on whether the employee was in debt, whether he drank too much, and on and on.

Why was that? Was that part of Henry Ford’s technological aesthetic? Did he have to do that to stop the turnover of workers? No. If you shorten the workday and double the salary, that ought to be plenty. But he had some other feeling that I think came partly from his sense of what it must be like to be an immigrant. There were loan sharks out there. Immigrants didn’t know how the country worked and had to learn English. Ford had English-language schools full of immigrant workers. So did many other companies.

Henry Ford wasn’t alone in intruding into people’s lives to tell them how to live and how to be American; that was common enough around the United States at that tumultuous time. But it may have been especially easy for Ford as he grew to heroic stature in the public eye. Amid the enormous success of the Model T and the moving line and the five-dollar day, he and his team were shifting their consciousness.

They focused more and more intently on the technological genius they had already shown—particularly in materials-handling and production processes—and spent less and less of their energy reading the changing character of their time and their society. They were losing that back-and-forth between the technology itself and the larger cultural context. They were going into a phase of technological obsession with something truly beautiful and magnificent. The obsession was embodied by the most famous of Ford’s factories, begun during World War I, River Rouge.

By the late 1920s Ford’s River Rouge factory encompassed more than a hundred buildings sprawled over two thousand acres. Boats came into a turning basin to unload their goods. Scores of miles of rail lines crisscrossed the property. Henry Ford envisioned an integrated system that controlled access to all the components of the automobile and brought them together at the Rouge. The Ford Motor Company bought 400,000 acres of hardwood forests in upper Michigan, built its own lumber-processing plants there, and bought its own boats to ship the lumber. It bought iron mines in upper Michigan and made its own steel. It bought a rubber plantation in Brazil to produce its own rubber. It made its own glass. And so on.

The great business historian Alfred Chandler calls this grandiose effort the biggest single business mistake in United States history. Automobiles are far too complicated for anyone to control all their elements. An automaker ought to have healthy relationships with suppliers for a lot of those things and ought to concentrate on the main business, which is making the finished car, not making steel and glass and rubber.

Henry Ford simply became obsessed with controlling his entire environment. In 1916 a pair of stockholders sued him for keeping dividends too low while plowing the profits back into company expansion. He responded by resigning as president of the Ford Motor Company in favor of his son Edsel and announcing that he was going to start a new company, building a new car that would be better than the Model T. This threw his stockholders into a panic. He had a dummy front company set up, and it bought up all their shares. In July 1919 he became the sole owner of the Ford Motor Company. By this point he did not want to be disagreed with at all.

This was the same Henry Ford who in 1906 or 1908 had been right in the thick of a supple engineering team where they disagreed all the time and continually criticized one another and made mistakes. Something had hardened in him; what had been almost playful became obsessive. This manifested itself in many ways. For instance, the Highland Park factory, opened in 1910, faced right onto city streets, so that when the workers went to lunch the company had no say in whom they talked to—labor organizers or anyone else. River Rouge, contrastingly, sat out in the middle of nowhere with no public access. It had a fully fenced perimeter and could be entered only through guarded gates.

The entrance itself was Ford property, as was demonstrated in 1937 in the famous battle of the overpass, in which the United Auto Workers, whose tactics had just been declared legitimate by the United States Supreme Court, tried to leaflet on the stairs and were brutally beaten up by Ford’s ad hoc security police.

Why did Ford fence in River Rouge? I believe it was part of the gradual hardening of the boundary around his work. Henry Ford was no longer interested in being interrupted by people from the outside with whom he differed. He fired a host of very creative people because they disagreed with him. He had Harry Bennett, his henchman, fire one man by asking him to lie on the running board of a car and listen to the engine, then driving the car out through the gate and spinning around so the man fell off. The car roared back in, and the guards at the gate told the man, “You’re fired.” They were playing hardball at Ford.

In 1932 and 1933 the Mexican artist Diego Rivera painted his famous murals of River Rouge, in the Detroit Institute of Arts. Rivera fell in love with the River Rouge factory and admired Henry Ford. He called Ford the greatest artist in the world. While sketching at River Rouge, he said, “I thought of the millions of different men by whose combined labor and thought automobiles were produced, from the miners who dug the iron ore out of the earth to the railroad men and teamsters who brought the finished machines to the consumer, so that man, space, and time might be conquered, and ever expanding victories be won against death.”

Diego Rivera was mesmerized by the technocratic spirit he found in Ford’s production system, but he and Ford had very different approaches to it, as becomes evident if you look closely at Rivera’s work. Rivera’s large north wall panel is very sophisticated: the lines of drill presses form boundaries that divide the huge mural—thirty-five feet wide—into three areas. But these are a sort of boundary very different from Ford’s fenced perimeter. Rivera’s boundaries are continually permeated by lines of color and conveyor belts and workers who move back and forth as creative forces along with the machines. These are boundaries that give you a sense of visual order, but they’re permeable. They’re messy. They have flow running right through them.

You could say that both Ford and Rivera loved what was inside the technological box, inside the plant. But when they stepped back and perceived the border around the box, they saw very different things. By 1925 Ford had a very toueh wall. He insisted on controlling what was inside, and he even tried to reach out and control what he could on the outside. The five-dollar day was an early hint of his need to control. He didn’t just want the workers to follow orders in the factory; he wanted to make sure they behaved at home too. He had by now such a sense of his genius that he wanted to impose that genius on a larger reality.

Indeed, the more obsessed Henry Ford and his people became with their own technological genius and the beauty of their creations, the tighter they made the boundary. By the late 1920s Henry Ford had retreated wherever he could from interaction with the larger world. He even created a whole new world that he could dominate, a private world now called Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village. He began to buy antique technologies in the early twenties, and the complex was dedicated in October 1929 at a lavish celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of Thomas Edison’s first successful light-bulb experiment.

Greenfield Village with all its exhibits takes up about 85 acres, and the museum, an enormous structure, covers 12 acres. I’ve recently interviewed people in their seventies and eighties who went to work at Greenfield Village as guides in the early 1930s. One of their rules was that when Mr. Ford was around, visitors should be kept away from him. I asked one man recently what that was like. He said, “It wasn’t that hard. Mr. Ford would show up mysteriously, and he was very good at being on his own, and usually we would notice him only at a distance.”

Henry Ford often went to Greenfield Village alone at night. He loved repairing watches. He had three craftsmen repairing watches in the Sir John Bennett Jewelry Store, which he had bought in London and reconstructed in the Village. Sometimes in the middle of the night, the guides tell me, Ford would go up to the watch shop’s second-floor repair room and remove some watches and not tell anybody. The workers would come back the next day and they couldn’t find the watches. They were his watches. It was his place.

He prowled the grounds of Greenfield Village almost like the Phantom of the Opera. He reminds me of a dream I had as a child. I lived in a town of about twelve thousand, and we had a big department store covering a city block and three stories high. I used to imagine sneaking in there on the weekend all by myself. I’d sleep in one of the new beds, cook on one of the new stoves, using a frying pan from the housewares area and food from the grocery area, and I’d wear clothes from the clothing area and shoes from the shoe department.

Millions of us have a fantasy that we can control a universe of goods. That’s the urge that my childhood department store and today’s malls are designed to satisfy. They offer a fantasy world—hundreds of thousands of dazzling new products in an untroubled environment. People can’t make speeches in malls the way they do on street corners. In fact, a mall is a lot like Henry Ford’s River Rouge and Greenfield Village, except that the consumer, rather than Henry Ford, is king.

Henry Ford had a Cotswold cottage shipped stone by stone from England and rebuilt at Greenfield Village at a cost of a million 1927 dollars. I talked to a man who had worked there. He told me about one day when Henry and his wife, Clara, came in. Ford went to the back yard and was looking around the gardens when Clara, inside the house, looked at a hutch and said, “I don’t think it looks good where it is. Let’s move it over there.” She and the interpreter moved it across the room. A little while later she went out into the garden and Henry came in, and he asked who had moved the hutch. Then he moved it back.

The dream of a world where no one will disagree with you about anything, where you have all the resources to live out all your fantasies, is a dangerous daydream. It is, I believe, what can happen when we grow tired of the labor of creativity. The kind of environment they had at Ford around 1914, where the team was doing so much right, including that crucial thing I called back-and-forth consciousness, is a genuine technological form of beauty. It blends precision and purposefulness and focus and discipline and achievement with intuition and suppleness and what I would call interruptibility, the ability to be surprised and educated by large and small realities. That, I think, is the most healthy technological aesthetic.

As Henry Ford lost his capacity to be educated by a world larger than his own domain, his genius rigidified. He became more and more a prisoner of his own technological triumphs. Something similar can happen to sophisticated technologists today, or at any time. The supple ability to blend technical design expertise with perceptive intuitions about the larger world, as technological creativity requires, may be threatened for many people today, I think, because two of our most powerful mythologies, which made sense of American technological creativity throughout the twentieth century, have lost their relevance. The first is the myth of the empty land, the myth of the American wilderness to be shaped and filled for human purpose—bridges to be built and homes to be constructed and schools and churches and water systems and electric power utilities. As much truth as that myth has had in the past, it has become much less helpful in the last twenty-five or thirty years, since we don’t have endless resources any more. Pollution has become a far more pressing concern than settling a wideopen frontier.

The second myth is younger. It is the myth of the evil enemy, which, as we know, was born in World War II. I was five when the war ended, and I remember that I thought for a while that Stalin was Hitler’s son. The reason, of course, was that he looked like Hitler and he came after Hitler as another completely evil enemy. The idea of the pure enemy has gotten less useful too. Russia certainly isn’t that enemy any more.

In other words, myths that give us purpose and identity so that we can figure out who we are and what to do can become obsolete or, as in the case of Henry Ford, can impalpably shift into very different myths. Ford started out with a powerful conviction about what America wanted: the Model T. Then, having been so right, he forgot how to be wrong.

Certainly we always need patience, hope, imagination, humor, and a willingness to fail and to disagree, and it is always a challenge to nurture these qualities. Only some of the virtues we need—in engineering or in anything else—are those where we already know our goal and we set ourselves to achieve it with courage, energy, and clear-eyed purpose. We also need the virtues where we let ourselves receive from the larger realities around us. We all need them, and they are what Henry Ford lamentably and at great cost gave up, at the peak of his success.