Henry Ford

Henry Ford was born on July 30, 1863, on a farm in what is now Dearborn, Michigan. As a boy he showed a gift for machinery, a talent for leadership, and a preference for learning by trial and error. At sixteen he left the farm to find work in Detroit. In 1888 he married Clara Bryant, and in 1891 they moved to Detroit, where he became an engineer for the Edison Electric Illuminating Company — the only steady job he ever held. In his spare time he built his first car, the Quadricycle, in 1896: four bicycle-style wheels, a tiller instead of a steering wheel, and two forward speeds with no reverse. He sold it for $200 and used the money to build another.

Ford’s first two car companies failed. In 1901 his racing car beat the era’s top driver, and on June 16, 1903, a new group of investors founded the Ford Motor Company; its first Model A sold on July 23, and by October the company had turned a profit. Ford wanted “a motorcar for the great multitude,” and on October 1, 1908, he introduced the Model T — simple, durable, built of light, strong vanadium steel for rough roads, and easy to operate and repair.

To keep up with demand, Ford adapted methods from other industries and in 1913 introduced the moving assembly line at his Highland Park plant, eventually cutting the time to assemble a Model T chassis from 12.5 hours to 1.5. Workers hated the endless, repetitive labor, and turnover soared. Ford’s answer, in January 1914, was his boldest move: the Five Dollar Day, double the existing factory wage, for a shorter eight-hour day. The day after it was announced, some 10,000 people lined up outside his employment office. The policy stabilized his workforce and let his workers buy the cars they built. By 1925 his factories turned out a Model T every ten seconds, and some 15 million were sold before production ended in 1927. In 1917 he began building the River Rouge complex, which became the largest integrated factory in the world, with its own steel mills, glass factory, and power plant.

Ford idealized small-town, rural life even as his factories transformed industrial America, and he blamed immigrants for the problems he associated with cities. He was a pacifist: in 1915 he chartered a “Peace Ship” to Europe in a failed attempt to end World War I, and he opposed American entry into World War II. He was also fiercely anti-union and held out against the United Auto Workers until 1941.

Ford used his fame to spread antisemitism. After the failure of his Peace Ship, which the press mocked as a “Ship of Fools,” he blamed Jews for the war. In 1918 he bought a weekly newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, and from May 1920 it ran a series called “The International Jew,” drawing on the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion to claim a Jewish conspiracy to control the world. Ford dealers were required to distribute the paper, and it was reissued as books translated into more than a dozen languages. After a libel suit by a Jewish lawyer, Aaron Sapiro, ended in a mistrial in 1927, Ford signed a public apology and closed the paper — but the books kept circulating. Adolf Hitler praised him in Mein Kampf, and in 1938 the Nazi government awarded him the Grand Cross of the German Eagle. His long resistance to unions also brought years of conflict with his workers.

In 1919, after battles with his stockholders, Ford bought them out so that his family controlled the company. After his son Edsel died in 1943, the elderly Ford returned as president until his grandson Henry Ford II took over in 1945. Ford died in 1947. His Model T and assembly line made the automobile part of everyday American life; his museum and Greenfield Village in Dearborn preserve his collections. His antisemitic writings, however, are still in circulation today.