October 23, 2023 • 38 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, we hear the story of the man who made the claim to have invented the modern age.
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Speaker 1 (00:13):
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American People.
To search for the American Stories podcast, go to the
iHeartMedia app, to Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Our Next story is about the man whose legacy sits
(00:35):
in your garage. Our storyteller is Richard Snow. Snow worked
at American Heritage magazine for nearly four decades and was
its editor in chief for seventeen years. He's the author
of I Invented the Modern Age, The Rise of Henry Ford.
Let's take a listen.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
Henry Ford is among the strangest, in some ways the
least appealing of great men. He spent a great deal
of the latter part of his life building on some
empty acreage in Dearborn, Michigan, a vast museum devoted to
American history. Now it's an endlessly fascinating place. Ford collected
(01:22):
on the grandest possible scale. He revered Thomas Edison all
his life. I don't think he admired any living person more.
And he brought Edison's laboratory up from Menlo Park, New Jersey,
along with the rooming house that Edison's assistants had lived
in and seven car loads of New Jersey dirt, so
(01:46):
the buildings could literally sit on their native soil. And
when he went, when he went to get the Right
Brothers cycle shop, he also brought the pretty little Queen
Anne house the brothers had grown up in, and it
was a wooden building stood on stone foundation. He had
the mortar knocked out between the stones and reed grounds
(02:07):
so it would be on its same cement. This tells
a good deal about his immense capacity for taking pain.
Speaker 3 (02:14):
So the whole museum tells a lot about the man.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
It's like walking through Henry Ford's brain, and that's a
very interesting place to be. He loved mechanisms of all kinds.
He loved watches, so in the village there are three watchmakers.
But there's no attorney's office. There's no nice little country bank,
because he thought lawyers and bankers were all leeches. And
(02:40):
there's something else about that place, I felt. When Ford
was a young man, and all the time he was
working to establish himself, he had a magical ability to
draw people to him, to trust him, to make them
work for him and do it happily. One of his
early friends called that the magneties and asked Henry, and
(03:01):
he's got the magnet. And I felt a dim tug
of that magnet's pull all the time I was in
his museum, and that's what made me want to write
a book about him. But of course I started the
book with considerable trepidation. Probably only Abraham Lincoln has been
(03:23):
written more about Henry Ford, and this wasn't help. When
I told a friend what I was going to be
writing about, and he said, isn't that story about as
well known as the Nativity? That's certainly what I'd been
worried about. But after I spent a while with him,
I began thinking that maybe the story wasn't also well
(03:44):
known after all, or actually, rather that it was so
well known that we don't even realize it was his story.
What I mean is that everybody knows the name, and
the comment about history being made that he built a
lot of cars, but the true of his accomplishment is
now so much a part of the world we inhabit,
(04:05):
that is influences around us like the air we breathe,
and as invisible. Every century or so, our republic has
been remade by a new technology. One hundred and seventy
years ago it was the railroad, and in our time
it's the microprocessor. These technologies do more than change our habits.
(04:27):
They change the way we think. Thorreau, listening who saw
the railroads come in? Listening to the trains steaming past,
walden Pond wrote, have not men improved somewhat in punctuality
since the railroad was invented? Do they not talk and
think faster in the depot than ever they did in
the stage office? And of course anyone over the age
(04:48):
of twenty younger than that. And it's simply your environment
knows what the computer and the internet are doing now.
Well in between the steam, locomotive and mac came Henry
Ford's model T. And when Ford was quite quite quite elderly,
he was speaking with a dearborn high school boy who
(05:12):
was doing a article on him for the high school newspaper.
And Ford got very sentimental about the one room schoolhouse
and square dancing and started to talk about how wonderful
these old days were.
Speaker 3 (05:26):
And the.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
Boy wasn't an easy sell on this, and he said, well,
that's all very well, mister Ford, But we live in
the modern age. Lord said, young man, don't tell me
about the modern age. I invented the modern age. Now
(05:49):
you'll notice he didn't say I made a hell of
a lot of cars. He's said basically he had fashioned
the world he and the boy were living in. And
it's it's a crazy, preposterous, megalomaniac claim, and I've come
to think it's very largely true. There is a mystery
to him. Certainly his close associates felt so. Almost every
(06:12):
one of his high lieutenants is interesting. Reading them one
after another, they'd all say, well, we worked on this,
and we were very close on that. But I never
really understood him. I never understood mister Ford. Nobody called
him Henry. The Reverend Samuel Marquis, who spent years working
with Ford, wrote, in spite of a long and fairly
(06:32):
intimate acquaintance with him, I have not one mental picture
of which I can say this is the man as
he is, or as I know him. There are in
him lights so high and shadows so deep that I
cannot get the whole of him in proper focus.
Speaker 1 (06:49):
At the same time, and you're listening to one heck
of a story as told by one heck of a storyteller,
Richard Snow telling the story of Henry Forward. When we
come back, more of the man who invented the Modern Age.
Here on our American Stories. Plea habibe here the host
(07:33):
of our American Stories. Every day on this show, we're
bringing inspiring stories from across this great country, stories from
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(07:56):
Go to Auramericanstories dot com and give and we continue
with our American Stories and with Richard Snow. He's the
author of I Invented the Modern Age. The Rise of
(08:18):
Henry Ford. Let's pick up where we last left off.
Speaker 2 (08:23):
A reporter who met him in nineteen fifteen was harsher
about this duality of nature. There's a fascinating little illusory
trick which may be played with one of the Ford
portraits photographs. If one side of Ford's face is covered,
a benign, gently humorous expression dominates. When the other side
(08:43):
is covered, the look is transformed into one of deadly,
malevolent calculation. This ambiguous effect is created by Ford's heavy,
hollow eyes, the pale eyes one would associate with a
visionary or a killer visionarian killer. Ford was full of
contradictions right from the very start, well whatever his mysteries.
(09:08):
By the time that reporter wrote that nineteen fifteen, a
great many people were trying to figure him out. He
was on his way to becoming the richest American, and
once Theodore Roosevelt died in nineteen nineteen, he was easily
the most famous. Now, this man who lived to read
(09:29):
about the atomic bombs falling on Japan was born three
weeks after the Battle of Gettysburg July eighteen sixty three,
on a farm in Dearborn.
Speaker 3 (09:40):
His father had been born.
Speaker 2 (09:42):
An Irish tenant on an Irish tenant farm, and he
always seems to have felt a sort of grateful surprise
that he now owned not only a farm of his own,
but a prosperous one. Henry fell a little differently. He
loved everything about the farm except the farming. He said.
My ear recollection is that, considering the results, there was
(10:04):
too much work on the place. That is the way
I still feel about farming. There are clouds of folklore
about Ford's boyhood. A lot of them sent up by
Ford himself, but it does seem clear that he was
very early interested in shifting onto machinery burdens that people
had borne since biblical times. He said, even when I
(10:27):
was very young, I suspected that farm work might somehow
be done in a better way. That is what took
me into mechanics. Although my mother always said I was
a born mechanic. He very early began taking things apart
to see how they would work, and he always got
them back together. But what he took apart and got
back together often ran better. A neighbor said that every
(10:52):
clock in the Ford household shuddered when it saw it coming.
But he did more harm than good with the clocks,
and by the time he was twelve he was repairing
neighbors watch is now.
Speaker 3 (11:01):
The next year, when he was thirteen, his mother died.
Speaker 2 (11:05):
And he expressed the loss in you know, the best
way he knew how. He said the house was like
a watch without a mainspring, and it was perhaps the
nearness of her death that made him particularly sensitive to
the impact of what he called the most important, biggest
event of my early years. His father was driving him
(11:29):
into town in his wagon family wagon when they came
upon a steam farm engine moving their way. Here is
how clearly Ford described it sixty years later. I remember
that engine as though I had seen it only yesterday,
for it was the first vehicle other than the horse
drawn that I had ever seen. It was intended primarily
for driving threshing machines and sawmills, and was simply a
(11:51):
portable engine and boiler mounted on wheels. I had seen
plenty of these engines hauled around by horses, but this
one had a chain that made a between the engine
and the rear wheels. The engineer was very glad to
explain the whole affair.
Speaker 3 (12:05):
He was proud of it.
Speaker 2 (12:06):
He showed me how the chain was disconnected from the
propelling wheel and the belt put on to drive the machinery.
He told me that the engine made two hundred revolutions
a minute, and that the chain pinion could be shifted
to let the wagon stop while the engine.
Speaker 3 (12:21):
Was still running.
Speaker 2 (12:23):
And here Ford, so much of whose early youth is elusive,
makes a clear and plausible statement of the moment his
life took a course that would change everyone else's. This last,
he means the engine running in neutral while not driving
the wagon is a feature which is incorporated in the
modern automobiles. It was not important with steam engines, which
(12:47):
are easily stopped and started, but it became very important
with the gasoline engine. It was that engine which took
me into automotive transportation. Ford followed that farm engine for
the rest of his life. My toys were all tools,
he wrote. When he was in his sixties, he added,
and they still are. But of course, as a teenager
(13:09):
he had to learn to use those tools, and he
couldn't have found himself in a better place to do that.
Detroit had standing timber all around. There was lake shipping,
there was iron ore, and the city took advantage of
all of this. When Henry Ford turned seventeen and left
home to go, there already had one hundred and twenty
thousand residents, ten railroads feeding it, and it was home
(13:32):
to a thousand different manufacturing businesses, machine shops scattered everywhere.
Ford spent a few months in business school there, and
that was the only time in his life when his
handle writing was legible. But his real education came from
the machine shops. He held jobs in several of them
and impressed everyone he worked with. He had an almost
(13:54):
instinctive sense of machinery. Even at the end of his life,
he could look at ten identical carburets laid out on
a bench and point to the one that had something
wrong with it. Yeah, and he loved being among machines.
But a few years later he was back in Dearborn
on the farm. He'd been lured there by his father
with the promise of forty acres of land and his
(14:15):
eighty acres. His father still hoped Henry would become a
farmer too. Ford didn't want the farmland, but he went
because he did want to be perceived as a more
stable citizen. And the reason he cared about that was
because he'd fallen in love with an eighteen year old
named Clara Bryant. He'd met her at a New Year's
Eve dance. He loved dancing all his life, and he
(14:38):
married her in eighteen eighty eight, and she turned out
to be a great choice. She was steady and staunch
and brave and had such complete faith in him that
he took to calling her the Great Believer. And being
married to Henry cannabin easy for her at first, because
over the next ten years they lived in ten rental houses,
and all during that time, Ford was experimenting with creating
(15:01):
with a machine that would do what the steam traction
engine had, which was drive itself. He knew all about
steam engines by now and decided they were simply too
heavy to power what he had in mind, so he
began to look to gasoline and the internal combustion engine.
He started building a car in the woodshed behind his
rented house. Woodshed makes it sound like too modest a think.
(15:24):
It was actually a rather substantial little brick building. You
can see it or a replica of it today in
the Greenfield village. It was a lonely and frustrating job
because everything had to be built from scratch. When Ford
needed a carburetor, he had to invent one. He didn't
even have a name for it. The word hadn't come
into the language yet. And he worked on his first
(15:46):
car for months and felt it was finally ready in
June of eighteen ninety six. And it gives a good
idea of the intensity of purpose with whichy, the concentration
with which he worked that it was only when he
was ready to take it out on its trial row
that he discovered it was too big to fit through
the woodshed door. While he fixed that with an axe
and got his car started and coaxed his two cylinder
(16:10):
engine into life, and drove off into his future.
Speaker 3 (16:13):
And hours.
Speaker 2 (16:21):
The car worked, and he improved it and finally got
it running well enough to convince Detroit lumber tycoon to
finance what Ford called the Detroit Automobile Company. And I
think it's worth remembering how courageous it was to stake
everything on building automobiles in those days. Years later, Ford
(16:41):
said a very interesting thing about it. He said, of course,
there was no demand for an automobile. There never is
for a new product.
Speaker 1 (16:53):
And you've been listening to Richard Snow tell the story
of Henry Ford. My toys were all tool, he recalled.
They still are, and my goodness they were. And Detroit
at the turn of the century we're talking about the
eighteen nineties and the time that Ford went there and
started to work there, there were one hundred thousand plus citizens.
(17:15):
Ten railroad lines fed the city, and there were all
kinds of manufacturing shops and concerns. And of course, Ford,
while this is living large, being amongst all of those people,
making all of those machines, and it's interesting the first
ten years of his marriage, ten separate rentals, working on
(17:36):
his car for months, and as he put it, of
course there was no demand for the automobile. There never
is for a new product, and he was cutting new ground.
Speaker 3 (17:47):
Henry Ford.
Speaker 1 (17:48):
When we come back more of the story of the
man who invented the Modern Age here on our American stories,
and we continue with our American stories, and Richard Snow,
(18:12):
the author of I Invented the Modern Age, The Rise
of Henry Ford, Let's pick up where we last left off.
Speaker 2 (18:21):
And I think it's worth remembering how courageous it was
to stake everything on building automobiles in those days. Years later,
Ford said a very interesting thing about it. He said,
of course there was no demand for an automobile. There
never is for a new product. That run's totally countered
(18:43):
to the old saw about invention being the in the
necessity being the mother of invention, and this very often
it's exactly the other way around. Invention being the mother
of necessity. Is you know, nobody wanted an iPhone until
they had one in their hand. Anyway, Ford got his
start company started and seems instantly to have lost interest
(19:04):
in it. I just wandered away, wouldn't show up. Nobody
knows why. Perhaps he wasn't quite ready to manufacture cars.
More likely, he resented working for anybody. He never liked
having a boss, and shed something that He then went
on to ruin a second company, and he was still
(19:26):
able for a third throw of the dice to find
a circle, smaller but a real circle of investors for
his next enterprise, which he found in nineteen three with
twenty eight thousand dollars capital paid in. This one bore
his own name, the Ford Motor Company, and it would
last now. His investors not unreasonably wanted the Ford Motor
(19:48):
Company to build expensive cars. In nineteen seven, the Packard
gray Wolf sports car, though that term wouldn't exist for
another forty years, cost ten thousand dollars, and a nice
suburban house might go for eighteen hundred dollars.
Speaker 3 (20:03):
Now, work that calculation out.
Speaker 2 (20:05):
Today, and if prices have stayed relative, the house would
cost maybe one point two million, and a Dodge Viper
would cost six million dollars. So, of course it was
more desirable to sell something worth thousands of dollars than
something worth hundreds of dollars, Ford leaved exactly the opposite.
Speaker 3 (20:24):
Make the car cheaper.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
You'll do better selling lots of low priced cars to
farmers and shop clerks than you will a few costly
ones to billionaires. And the way to achieve this, he said,
he told one of the backers of his new company,
is make one automobile like another automobile, just as one
pin is like another pin when it comes from a
pin factory, or a match like another match when it
(20:47):
comes from a match factory.
Speaker 3 (20:50):
But how to do it? How to do it?
Speaker 2 (20:52):
The car should be simple and durable, useful to farmers.
Ford might have hated farming, but he loved the farm life,
or rather the virtue shoes of loyalty and steadiness that
he ordered.
Speaker 3 (21:03):
That he saw in it.
Speaker 2 (21:05):
The car would be fundamental enough for any farm boy
to understand and repair, rugged enough to negotiated the truly
dreadful roads at the time, versatile enough to be hooked
up to a band, a fresher, or a pump. Now
by nineteen four he was a success, but he saw
it hidden inside every car he built, the ghost of
a much greater car, And in nineteen eight he called
(21:27):
together as most trusted executives and started designing one in
a sealed off room in his factory. And here his
genius played as strongly and steadily as it ever would,
and his inherent contradictions deployed themselves only to a creative
end of contradictions, because the car he was building would
(21:47):
be at once as perfectly simple as he could make
it and yet immensely sophisticated. It would, for instance, have
four cylinders, when no inexpensive car had more than two,
and the engines in multi celder cars tended just to
be fussy, complicated, hard to repair, hard to maintain. Ford
wanted his engine machined out of a single block of metal,
(22:09):
and while his helpers were trying to figure out how
to do this, Ford had another thought, slice off the top.
That is, have the engine in a single casting with
its four cylinders wholly accessible, and then fit the cylinder
head on top of it like a hat and bolt
that down. And that's how car engines are built to
this day. The steering wheel and American cars and all
(22:33):
cars was almost always on the right of ancient tradition
on that because the steam locomotive engineer sat head end
right hand in his cabin Ford.
Speaker 3 (22:43):
Thought it belonged on the left, put it.
Speaker 2 (22:45):
There, and there it stays, unless you're English. The materials
in the body would be cheapest he could make them,
but the chassis would be made of vanadium steel, which
was a light, tough, very expensive alloy, quite new to
the United States. And he'd run through the alphabet from
his first Model A and now is currently selling the
Model S.
Speaker 3 (23:05):
So we named the new car.
Speaker 2 (23:08):
The Model T and put it on the market in
October of nineteen eight. Very briefly, in eighteen seventy nine,
a Rochester patent attorney named George Selden looked at a
gasoline engine and thought, hey, this could make a wagon go,
and drafted a patent said that it would be attached
to the wheels of the car, though he didn't say
(23:29):
how that would happen, and then he sent it into
the patent office. But in those days you could put
off a patent for seventeen years by making tiny modifications
to your wording and stuff. And he kept it alive
basically until the automobile was becoming a feasible thing, and
then incredibly he got a patent on the idea of
(23:53):
the automobile, and he got money backing him and started
to exact ransom from all the car makers, even the
young General motors finally rolled over, and only Ford foughtum
fought on, fought them alone. Patent litigation was extremely expensive,
but Ford was spending two dollars a car on the
(24:13):
but he stuck it out right to the end and
he won, and that and that there he got.
Speaker 3 (24:17):
You know, he.
Speaker 2 (24:17):
Actually got headlines that read things like God bless Henry Ford.
Speaker 3 (24:23):
Now the bottle t is no longer any.
Speaker 2 (24:26):
Sort of force in our lives, but I think it
refuses to look placid or quainter to acquire that glass
of appeal that the that time puts on. So many
ugly things that high on lovely frame and pugnacious snout
still flaunt the boxy antiques power to change a world.
(24:47):
The car was tall because the ruts were deep, thanks
in part to the vanadium steel. It was both tough
and light, only eleven hundred pounds, and it could scramble
over marshy terrain that would mobilize heavier cars for what
became so ubiquitous an American fixed her.
Speaker 3 (25:03):
It had many eccentricities.
Speaker 2 (25:05):
Beginning moved forward called a planetary transmission collector. Friend of
mine who owns a model T told me once that
you could leave it parked anywhere. Nobody would ever steal
it because nobody could figure out how to drive it.
Three pedals sprouted from the floor. One on the right
was to break the one in the middle put the
car in the reverse. The one on the left made
(25:25):
it go forward, and low gear went pressed to the floor,
and then high gear when released. The driving gears were
all engaged by bands that these pedals either tightened or loosened.
But with all those pedals on the floor, not one
was an accelerator. That was a lever on the steering wheel,
which you thumbed downward to feed more gas.
Speaker 3 (25:43):
To the engine.
Speaker 2 (25:44):
And when you wanted to know how much more gas
you had to feed, you left to feed. You stopped,
climbed out, lifted off the front seat cushion, unscrewed the
gas cap beneath it, and puked in the tank with
a wooden stick marked like a ruler, but with gallons
instead of inches. But for all the fussing the car required,
(26:06):
it went, it went, and it was as dependable as
a cast iron stove.
Speaker 1 (26:11):
And you're listening to Richard Snow, who's the author of
I Invented the Modern Age, The Rise of Henry Ford.
Go and buy this book. You won't put it down.
And the importance of Ford's courage can't be underestimated. No
one understood the man. That's true, he probably didn't understand himself,
but few would describe Ford as anything but courageous. And
(26:35):
he had the courage of his convictions, no doubt. As
to entrepreneurs throughout history, the Right Brothers, we learned from
David McCullough, had that same kind of courage, and not
that manufacturing excellence. By the way, mass marketing and mass
manufacturing airplanes was not in the wheelhouse of the Right Brothers.
(26:55):
And by the way, he did what nobody was thinking
about back in those early days of automobiles. Generally everyone
was just trying to make expensive cars, and here's Ford
trying to make them affordable. And though the Model T
had many eccentricities, it worked and it was as dependable
as a cast iron stove. When we come back more
(27:19):
of the remarkable story of Henry Ford. Here on our
American stories, and we continue with our American stories and
(27:40):
the story of Henry Ford let's pick up where we
last left off with Author Richard.
Speaker 2 (27:46):
Snow Ford liked to tell everybody a joke. He told
it the President Wilson when he met him about the
farmer making out a will instructing his lawyer to have
him buried in his Modelty and the lawyer no reason
for this, The man said, because I ain't in a
hole yet that it couldn't get me out of. And
(28:07):
when it was time to stay put and do some
farm work, you could take off a rear wheel and
hook it up to a thresher sawmill.
Speaker 3 (28:13):
The owner was.
Speaker 2 (28:14):
Expected to know how to do that, and indeed to
maintain the car generally. Midwestern man named Alfred Stevenson, who
owned the succession of Model Ts in the twenties, wrote
about this.
Speaker 3 (28:25):
He said, the whole car was simple, accessible.
Speaker 2 (28:30):
In the evening, you could tighten the bands, look at
the timer, clean the plugs. A weekend would do nicely
to re line the bands, or grind the valves and
clean the carbon, or maybe tighten the rods.
Speaker 3 (28:40):
A four day vacation was plenty to overhaul the engine
or the rear end.
Speaker 2 (28:44):
If any of these jobs was a bit beyond your experience,
you had merely to ask your neighbor, who not only knew.
Speaker 3 (28:49):
But would come over and help there.
Speaker 2 (28:53):
Ratifications of this were far reaching and frequently unexpected. In
the Second World War, for example, German tanks were often
superior to their American counterparts, but that advantage was canceled
by how quickly a disabled sherman could get itself prepared
and back into action, and the Germans were baffled and dismayed.
(29:15):
Defined that, among his many other accomplishments, Henry Ford had
created a whole generation of mechanics. But perhaps the Model
t's most profound impact, what made it the single most
significant automobile ever built, was social. In nineteen eighteen, a
Georgia farm wife for Henry Ford, your car lifted us
(29:38):
out of the mud. It brought joy into our lives.
The Model T broke the age old isolation of the
farm in less than a decade, and wherever it went
it spun out behind it a new civilization of highways
and roadside fixtures like motels and of course gas stations,
(29:58):
and a new way of thinking about base and time.
And in the nineteen thirties John Steinbeck looked back with
a sort of sardonic awe on what had done in
just half of his lifetime. Now, of course, the Model
T could never had such an effect had it not
been deployed in enormous numbers, and this, even more than
(30:20):
the car itself, is the measure of Ford's genius. A
number of car companies were turning out one hundred cars
a day during the Model t's early years, and that
demonstrates very impressive capacities of manufacture. But there is a
fundamental difference between quantity production and mass production, and it
was by inventing the latter that Ford invented the modern age.
Speaker 3 (30:43):
The Model T was a success.
Speaker 2 (30:45):
Ford could sell as many as he could make. The
way to make them, he believed, lay in precision and speed.
Precision meant part so scrupulously manufactured that one would always
fit where it belonged, without any time consuming shaping or
filing a speed lay and breaking down the manufacturing process
(31:05):
into every smaller segments. This began in the spring of
nineteen thirteen with the magneto, which generated the electricity to
fire the plugs. It took a worker twenty minutes to
assemble one. When one worker put it together put another together.
Ford separated the process into twenty nine steps, and rather
(31:28):
than one worker doing twenty nine things, twenty nine workers
would do one thing as the parts moved past their
stations on what was the first modern assembly line. Before
it had taken twenty minutes. Now it took thirteen minutes.
So with the engine, then the transmission, then the upholstery,
the axles, and the radiators, finally the whole car itself,
(31:49):
all was Ford said, Bring the work to the man,
not the man to the work. When Ford first unveiled
his Model TY, it took twelve and a half hours
to make one. More than a decade later, it took
exactly a minute before the Model T was done. A
car was coming off the line every ten seconds. Ford
made his millionth Model T in nineteen fifteen, his two
(32:11):
millionth in nineteen seventeen, and so on for a while
a million cars a year, and then in the early
twenties two million. And he always lowered the price. He
flew directly in the face of all principles of monopoly capitalism,
which of course hold that if you have a desirable
item that you alone own and other people want, you
(32:32):
raised the price. Not Ford, he said, every time I
shave a dollar off the price, I gain a thousand
new customers. So the car had begun at eight hundred
and fifty dollars and ended two decades later at two
hundred ninety five dollars. In nineteen nine, the company made
a profit of the two hundred and twenty dollars and
(32:52):
eleven cents on each car. With the moving assembly line
up and running, the profit fell to ninety nine thirty.
Speaker 3 (32:58):
Four, and that was fine with Ford.
Speaker 2 (33:01):
And then in nineteen fourteen he announced that he was
raising the base pay in his shop to five dollars
a day. This was twice the going rate for industrial work,
and it caused a sensation.
Speaker 3 (33:12):
He understood that it would be big news.
Speaker 2 (33:14):
Think he would I don't think he'd quite prepared for
the astonishing response that got. People came in from all
over the country, and in fact he finally had to
discourage him by saying he would only hire people who
had lived in or around Detroit for two years or more.
Ford's workers became his customers. No man who bolted together
a packard gray wolf could ever own one. Every Ford
(33:37):
worker who wanted to could own a Ford. So Ford
also created a modern cycle of consumerism in which we
still live. During the great Black diaspora after the First
World War, up north to Detroit, the African Americans knew
there were two shops, only two shops that were worth
(34:00):
applying to. Packard might give you a job, and Ford
probably would give you a job. And he actually had
blacks running gangs of whites with the power to fire them,
which I think was not I can't think of another
American industry in nineteen twenty four where that would have
where that would have applied at all.
Speaker 3 (34:19):
And in the end he had to give it up.
Speaker 2 (34:21):
The last Model T came off the line, probably six
or seven years later than it should have. In nineteen
twenty seven, Ford had made fifteen and a half million
of them, and when production ceased there were more than
eleven millions still on the road. And of course there
was tremendous interest in what Ford would do to follow
the Model T. In fact, next to Lindbergh's flight, it
(34:44):
was the biggest story of nineteen twenty seven.
Speaker 3 (34:46):
Car sales dropped everywhere in a.
Speaker 2 (34:49):
Boom time as people waited to see what was coming.
It took the factory, of course, several months toy tool
and when the new car, Ford had started over fresh
by calling it the Model A was announced that December.
The New York World said the excitement could hardly have
been greater had Powaw the Sacred white Elephant of Burma
(35:09):
elected to sit for seven days on the flagpole of
the Woolworth Building. It sold well eight hundred thousand in
his first year, but Chevrolet sold a million that same year,
and the Ford Motor Company would never again be making
one out of every two cars on the American road
(35:30):
in any event. That was Henry Ford. How really to
assess the true impact of this manet? It may still
be too early. We're certainly still immersed in the modern world.
Speaker 3 (35:45):
He created.
Speaker 2 (35:47):
Will Rogers many years, many years ago came pretty close
when he said to Henry Ford, with none of his
usual folksiness, it may take one hundred years to tell
whether you hurt us more than you helped us. But
you certainly didn't leave us where you found us.
Speaker 1 (36:13):
And a terrific job on the storytelling, editing and production
by our own Greg Hengler. And a special thanks to
Richard Snow What a storyteller and what a story to tell.
He's the author of I Invented the Modern Age, The
rise of Henry Ford. And there's so much to unpack here,
my goodness, the stories about World War Two that we'd
(36:35):
always heard that Americans could just get under the hood
of anything and fix it, Well this happened because of
Henry Ford. He turned America into a nation of auto
mechanics and tinkerers. I mean, to this day, that's why
there are autozones. And my goodness, the story of what
he did, bringing precision and speed to the manufacturing process,
(36:58):
the first modern assembly line and bringing the work to
the man, and of course bringing the speed with which
he could produce one of his cars from twelve hours
to one minute. Ten years later and millions and millions
rolled off the assembly line, all totaled fifteen and a
(37:19):
half million Model tees. And the thing I think most
important contribution of Henry Ford's as it relates to capitalism
and monopoly is that he did that thing no one
expected someone with such market dominance to do, which should
generally be rip off the American public and raise prices forward,
(37:40):
always working to lower the price. And at the same
time he raised the wages of ordinary workers and factory workers,
doubling their wages and turning his workers into customers. That
Will Rogers line was the best of all. It may
take a hundred years to tell whether it helped us
or hurt us, but you sure didn't leave us where
(38:01):
you've found us. The story of Henry Ford, the story
of the Modern Age, and the man who invented it.
Here on our American Stories.
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American People.
To search for the American Stories podcast, go to the
iHeartMedia app, to Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Our Next story is about the man whose legacy sits
(00:35):
in your garage. Our storyteller is Richard Snow. Snow worked
at American Heritage magazine for nearly four decades and was
its editor in chief for seventeen years. He's the author
of I Invented the Modern Age, The Rise of Henry Ford.
Let's take a listen.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
Henry Ford is among the strangest, in some ways the
least appealing of great men. He spent a great deal
of the latter part of his life building on some
empty acreage in Dearborn, Michigan, a vast museum devoted to
American history. Now it's an endlessly fascinating place. Ford collected
(01:22):
on the grandest possible scale. He revered Thomas Edison all
his life. I don't think he admired any living person more.
And he brought Edison's laboratory up from Menlo Park, New Jersey,
along with the rooming house that Edison's assistants had lived
in and seven car loads of New Jersey dirt, so
(01:46):
the buildings could literally sit on their native soil. And
when he went, when he went to get the Right
Brothers cycle shop, he also brought the pretty little Queen
Anne house the brothers had grown up in, and it
was a wooden building stood on stone foundation. He had
the mortar knocked out between the stones and reed grounds
(02:07):
so it would be on its same cement. This tells
a good deal about his immense capacity for taking pain.
Speaker 3 (02:14):
So the whole museum tells a lot about the man.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
It's like walking through Henry Ford's brain, and that's a
very interesting place to be. He loved mechanisms of all kinds.
He loved watches, so in the village there are three watchmakers.
But there's no attorney's office. There's no nice little country bank,
because he thought lawyers and bankers were all leeches. And
(02:40):
there's something else about that place, I felt. When Ford
was a young man, and all the time he was
working to establish himself, he had a magical ability to
draw people to him, to trust him, to make them
work for him and do it happily. One of his
early friends called that the magneties and asked Henry, and
(03:01):
he's got the magnet. And I felt a dim tug
of that magnet's pull all the time I was in
his museum, and that's what made me want to write
a book about him. But of course I started the
book with considerable trepidation. Probably only Abraham Lincoln has been
(03:23):
written more about Henry Ford, and this wasn't help. When
I told a friend what I was going to be
writing about, and he said, isn't that story about as
well known as the Nativity? That's certainly what I'd been
worried about. But after I spent a while with him,
I began thinking that maybe the story wasn't also well
(03:44):
known after all, or actually, rather that it was so
well known that we don't even realize it was his story.
What I mean is that everybody knows the name, and
the comment about history being made that he built a
lot of cars, but the true of his accomplishment is
now so much a part of the world we inhabit,
(04:05):
that is influences around us like the air we breathe,
and as invisible. Every century or so, our republic has
been remade by a new technology. One hundred and seventy
years ago it was the railroad, and in our time
it's the microprocessor. These technologies do more than change our habits.
(04:27):
They change the way we think. Thorreau, listening who saw
the railroads come in? Listening to the trains steaming past,
walden Pond wrote, have not men improved somewhat in punctuality
since the railroad was invented? Do they not talk and
think faster in the depot than ever they did in
the stage office? And of course anyone over the age
(04:48):
of twenty younger than that. And it's simply your environment
knows what the computer and the internet are doing now.
Well in between the steam, locomotive and mac came Henry
Ford's model T. And when Ford was quite quite quite elderly,
he was speaking with a dearborn high school boy who
(05:12):
was doing a article on him for the high school newspaper.
And Ford got very sentimental about the one room schoolhouse
and square dancing and started to talk about how wonderful
these old days were.
Speaker 3 (05:26):
And the.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
Boy wasn't an easy sell on this, and he said, well,
that's all very well, mister Ford, But we live in
the modern age. Lord said, young man, don't tell me
about the modern age. I invented the modern age. Now
(05:49):
you'll notice he didn't say I made a hell of
a lot of cars. He's said basically he had fashioned
the world he and the boy were living in. And
it's it's a crazy, preposterous, megalomaniac claim, and I've come
to think it's very largely true. There is a mystery
to him. Certainly his close associates felt so. Almost every
(06:12):
one of his high lieutenants is interesting. Reading them one
after another, they'd all say, well, we worked on this,
and we were very close on that. But I never
really understood him. I never understood mister Ford. Nobody called
him Henry. The Reverend Samuel Marquis, who spent years working
with Ford, wrote, in spite of a long and fairly
(06:32):
intimate acquaintance with him, I have not one mental picture
of which I can say this is the man as
he is, or as I know him. There are in
him lights so high and shadows so deep that I
cannot get the whole of him in proper focus.
Speaker 1 (06:49):
At the same time, and you're listening to one heck
of a story as told by one heck of a storyteller,
Richard Snow telling the story of Henry Forward. When we
come back, more of the man who invented the Modern Age.
Here on our American Stories. Plea habibe here the host
(07:33):
of our American Stories. Every day on this show, we're
bringing inspiring stories from across this great country, stories from
our big cities and small towns. But we truly can't
do the show without you. Our stories are free to
listen to, but they're not free to make. If you
love what you hear, go to Ouramerican Stories dot com
and click the donate button. Give a little, give a lot.
(07:56):
Go to Auramericanstories dot com and give and we continue
with our American Stories and with Richard Snow. He's the
author of I Invented the Modern Age. The Rise of
(08:18):
Henry Ford. Let's pick up where we last left off.
Speaker 2 (08:23):
A reporter who met him in nineteen fifteen was harsher
about this duality of nature. There's a fascinating little illusory
trick which may be played with one of the Ford
portraits photographs. If one side of Ford's face is covered,
a benign, gently humorous expression dominates. When the other side
(08:43):
is covered, the look is transformed into one of deadly,
malevolent calculation. This ambiguous effect is created by Ford's heavy,
hollow eyes, the pale eyes one would associate with a
visionary or a killer visionarian killer. Ford was full of
contradictions right from the very start, well whatever his mysteries.
(09:08):
By the time that reporter wrote that nineteen fifteen, a
great many people were trying to figure him out. He
was on his way to becoming the richest American, and
once Theodore Roosevelt died in nineteen nineteen, he was easily
the most famous. Now, this man who lived to read
(09:29):
about the atomic bombs falling on Japan was born three
weeks after the Battle of Gettysburg July eighteen sixty three,
on a farm in Dearborn.
Speaker 3 (09:40):
His father had been born.
Speaker 2 (09:42):
An Irish tenant on an Irish tenant farm, and he
always seems to have felt a sort of grateful surprise
that he now owned not only a farm of his own,
but a prosperous one. Henry fell a little differently. He
loved everything about the farm except the farming. He said.
My ear recollection is that, considering the results, there was
(10:04):
too much work on the place. That is the way
I still feel about farming. There are clouds of folklore
about Ford's boyhood. A lot of them sent up by
Ford himself, but it does seem clear that he was
very early interested in shifting onto machinery burdens that people
had borne since biblical times. He said, even when I
(10:27):
was very young, I suspected that farm work might somehow
be done in a better way. That is what took
me into mechanics. Although my mother always said I was
a born mechanic. He very early began taking things apart
to see how they would work, and he always got
them back together. But what he took apart and got
back together often ran better. A neighbor said that every
(10:52):
clock in the Ford household shuddered when it saw it coming.
But he did more harm than good with the clocks,
and by the time he was twelve he was repairing
neighbors watch is now.
Speaker 3 (11:01):
The next year, when he was thirteen, his mother died.
Speaker 2 (11:05):
And he expressed the loss in you know, the best
way he knew how. He said the house was like
a watch without a mainspring, and it was perhaps the
nearness of her death that made him particularly sensitive to
the impact of what he called the most important, biggest
event of my early years. His father was driving him
(11:29):
into town in his wagon family wagon when they came
upon a steam farm engine moving their way. Here is
how clearly Ford described it sixty years later. I remember
that engine as though I had seen it only yesterday,
for it was the first vehicle other than the horse
drawn that I had ever seen. It was intended primarily
for driving threshing machines and sawmills, and was simply a
(11:51):
portable engine and boiler mounted on wheels. I had seen
plenty of these engines hauled around by horses, but this
one had a chain that made a between the engine
and the rear wheels. The engineer was very glad to
explain the whole affair.
Speaker 3 (12:05):
He was proud of it.
Speaker 2 (12:06):
He showed me how the chain was disconnected from the
propelling wheel and the belt put on to drive the machinery.
He told me that the engine made two hundred revolutions
a minute, and that the chain pinion could be shifted
to let the wagon stop while the engine.
Speaker 3 (12:21):
Was still running.
Speaker 2 (12:23):
And here Ford, so much of whose early youth is elusive,
makes a clear and plausible statement of the moment his
life took a course that would change everyone else's. This last,
he means the engine running in neutral while not driving
the wagon is a feature which is incorporated in the
modern automobiles. It was not important with steam engines, which
(12:47):
are easily stopped and started, but it became very important
with the gasoline engine. It was that engine which took
me into automotive transportation. Ford followed that farm engine for
the rest of his life. My toys were all tools,
he wrote. When he was in his sixties, he added,
and they still are. But of course, as a teenager
(13:09):
he had to learn to use those tools, and he
couldn't have found himself in a better place to do that.
Detroit had standing timber all around. There was lake shipping,
there was iron ore, and the city took advantage of
all of this. When Henry Ford turned seventeen and left
home to go, there already had one hundred and twenty
thousand residents, ten railroads feeding it, and it was home
(13:32):
to a thousand different manufacturing businesses, machine shops scattered everywhere.
Ford spent a few months in business school there, and
that was the only time in his life when his
handle writing was legible. But his real education came from
the machine shops. He held jobs in several of them
and impressed everyone he worked with. He had an almost
(13:54):
instinctive sense of machinery. Even at the end of his life,
he could look at ten identical carburets laid out on
a bench and point to the one that had something
wrong with it. Yeah, and he loved being among machines.
But a few years later he was back in Dearborn
on the farm. He'd been lured there by his father
with the promise of forty acres of land and his
(14:15):
eighty acres. His father still hoped Henry would become a
farmer too. Ford didn't want the farmland, but he went
because he did want to be perceived as a more
stable citizen. And the reason he cared about that was
because he'd fallen in love with an eighteen year old
named Clara Bryant. He'd met her at a New Year's
Eve dance. He loved dancing all his life, and he
(14:38):
married her in eighteen eighty eight, and she turned out
to be a great choice. She was steady and staunch
and brave and had such complete faith in him that
he took to calling her the Great Believer. And being
married to Henry cannabin easy for her at first, because
over the next ten years they lived in ten rental houses,
and all during that time, Ford was experimenting with creating
(15:01):
with a machine that would do what the steam traction
engine had, which was drive itself. He knew all about
steam engines by now and decided they were simply too
heavy to power what he had in mind, so he
began to look to gasoline and the internal combustion engine.
He started building a car in the woodshed behind his
rented house. Woodshed makes it sound like too modest a think.
(15:24):
It was actually a rather substantial little brick building. You
can see it or a replica of it today in
the Greenfield village. It was a lonely and frustrating job
because everything had to be built from scratch. When Ford
needed a carburetor, he had to invent one. He didn't
even have a name for it. The word hadn't come
into the language yet. And he worked on his first
(15:46):
car for months and felt it was finally ready in
June of eighteen ninety six. And it gives a good
idea of the intensity of purpose with whichy, the concentration
with which he worked that it was only when he
was ready to take it out on its trial row
that he discovered it was too big to fit through
the woodshed door. While he fixed that with an axe
and got his car started and coaxed his two cylinder
(16:10):
engine into life, and drove off into his future.
Speaker 3 (16:13):
And hours.
Speaker 2 (16:21):
The car worked, and he improved it and finally got
it running well enough to convince Detroit lumber tycoon to
finance what Ford called the Detroit Automobile Company. And I
think it's worth remembering how courageous it was to stake
everything on building automobiles in those days. Years later, Ford
(16:41):
said a very interesting thing about it. He said, of course,
there was no demand for an automobile. There never is
for a new product.
Speaker 1 (16:53):
And you've been listening to Richard Snow tell the story
of Henry Ford. My toys were all tool, he recalled.
They still are, and my goodness they were. And Detroit
at the turn of the century we're talking about the
eighteen nineties and the time that Ford went there and
started to work there, there were one hundred thousand plus citizens.
(17:15):
Ten railroad lines fed the city, and there were all
kinds of manufacturing shops and concerns. And of course, Ford,
while this is living large, being amongst all of those people,
making all of those machines, and it's interesting the first
ten years of his marriage, ten separate rentals, working on
(17:36):
his car for months, and as he put it, of
course there was no demand for the automobile. There never
is for a new product, and he was cutting new ground.
Speaker 3 (17:47):
Henry Ford.
Speaker 1 (17:48):
When we come back more of the story of the
man who invented the Modern Age here on our American stories,
and we continue with our American stories, and Richard Snow,
(18:12):
the author of I Invented the Modern Age, The Rise
of Henry Ford, Let's pick up where we last left off.
Speaker 2 (18:21):
And I think it's worth remembering how courageous it was
to stake everything on building automobiles in those days. Years later,
Ford said a very interesting thing about it. He said,
of course there was no demand for an automobile. There
never is for a new product. That run's totally countered
(18:43):
to the old saw about invention being the in the
necessity being the mother of invention, and this very often
it's exactly the other way around. Invention being the mother
of necessity. Is you know, nobody wanted an iPhone until
they had one in their hand. Anyway, Ford got his
start company started and seems instantly to have lost interest
(19:04):
in it. I just wandered away, wouldn't show up. Nobody
knows why. Perhaps he wasn't quite ready to manufacture cars.
More likely, he resented working for anybody. He never liked
having a boss, and shed something that He then went
on to ruin a second company, and he was still
(19:26):
able for a third throw of the dice to find
a circle, smaller but a real circle of investors for
his next enterprise, which he found in nineteen three with
twenty eight thousand dollars capital paid in. This one bore
his own name, the Ford Motor Company, and it would
last now. His investors not unreasonably wanted the Ford Motor
(19:48):
Company to build expensive cars. In nineteen seven, the Packard
gray Wolf sports car, though that term wouldn't exist for
another forty years, cost ten thousand dollars, and a nice
suburban house might go for eighteen hundred dollars.
Speaker 3 (20:03):
Now, work that calculation out.
Speaker 2 (20:05):
Today, and if prices have stayed relative, the house would
cost maybe one point two million, and a Dodge Viper
would cost six million dollars. So, of course it was
more desirable to sell something worth thousands of dollars than
something worth hundreds of dollars, Ford leaved exactly the opposite.
Speaker 3 (20:24):
Make the car cheaper.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
You'll do better selling lots of low priced cars to
farmers and shop clerks than you will a few costly
ones to billionaires. And the way to achieve this, he said,
he told one of the backers of his new company,
is make one automobile like another automobile, just as one
pin is like another pin when it comes from a
pin factory, or a match like another match when it
(20:47):
comes from a match factory.
Speaker 3 (20:50):
But how to do it? How to do it?
Speaker 2 (20:52):
The car should be simple and durable, useful to farmers.
Ford might have hated farming, but he loved the farm life,
or rather the virtue shoes of loyalty and steadiness that
he ordered.
Speaker 3 (21:03):
That he saw in it.
Speaker 2 (21:05):
The car would be fundamental enough for any farm boy
to understand and repair, rugged enough to negotiated the truly
dreadful roads at the time, versatile enough to be hooked
up to a band, a fresher, or a pump. Now
by nineteen four he was a success, but he saw
it hidden inside every car he built, the ghost of
a much greater car, And in nineteen eight he called
(21:27):
together as most trusted executives and started designing one in
a sealed off room in his factory. And here his
genius played as strongly and steadily as it ever would,
and his inherent contradictions deployed themselves only to a creative
end of contradictions, because the car he was building would
(21:47):
be at once as perfectly simple as he could make
it and yet immensely sophisticated. It would, for instance, have
four cylinders, when no inexpensive car had more than two,
and the engines in multi celder cars tended just to
be fussy, complicated, hard to repair, hard to maintain. Ford
wanted his engine machined out of a single block of metal,
(22:09):
and while his helpers were trying to figure out how
to do this, Ford had another thought, slice off the top.
That is, have the engine in a single casting with
its four cylinders wholly accessible, and then fit the cylinder
head on top of it like a hat and bolt
that down. And that's how car engines are built to
this day. The steering wheel and American cars and all
(22:33):
cars was almost always on the right of ancient tradition
on that because the steam locomotive engineer sat head end
right hand in his cabin Ford.
Speaker 3 (22:43):
Thought it belonged on the left, put it.
Speaker 2 (22:45):
There, and there it stays, unless you're English. The materials
in the body would be cheapest he could make them,
but the chassis would be made of vanadium steel, which
was a light, tough, very expensive alloy, quite new to
the United States. And he'd run through the alphabet from
his first Model A and now is currently selling the
Model S.
Speaker 3 (23:05):
So we named the new car.
Speaker 2 (23:08):
The Model T and put it on the market in
October of nineteen eight. Very briefly, in eighteen seventy nine,
a Rochester patent attorney named George Selden looked at a
gasoline engine and thought, hey, this could make a wagon go,
and drafted a patent said that it would be attached
to the wheels of the car, though he didn't say
(23:29):
how that would happen, and then he sent it into
the patent office. But in those days you could put
off a patent for seventeen years by making tiny modifications
to your wording and stuff. And he kept it alive
basically until the automobile was becoming a feasible thing, and
then incredibly he got a patent on the idea of
(23:53):
the automobile, and he got money backing him and started
to exact ransom from all the car makers, even the
young General motors finally rolled over, and only Ford foughtum
fought on, fought them alone. Patent litigation was extremely expensive,
but Ford was spending two dollars a car on the
(24:13):
but he stuck it out right to the end and
he won, and that and that there he got.
Speaker 3 (24:17):
You know, he.
Speaker 2 (24:17):
Actually got headlines that read things like God bless Henry Ford.
Speaker 3 (24:23):
Now the bottle t is no longer any.
Speaker 2 (24:26):
Sort of force in our lives, but I think it
refuses to look placid or quainter to acquire that glass
of appeal that the that time puts on. So many
ugly things that high on lovely frame and pugnacious snout
still flaunt the boxy antiques power to change a world.
(24:47):
The car was tall because the ruts were deep, thanks
in part to the vanadium steel. It was both tough
and light, only eleven hundred pounds, and it could scramble
over marshy terrain that would mobilize heavier cars for what
became so ubiquitous an American fixed her.
Speaker 3 (25:03):
It had many eccentricities.
Speaker 2 (25:05):
Beginning moved forward called a planetary transmission collector. Friend of
mine who owns a model T told me once that
you could leave it parked anywhere. Nobody would ever steal
it because nobody could figure out how to drive it.
Three pedals sprouted from the floor. One on the right
was to break the one in the middle put the
car in the reverse. The one on the left made
(25:25):
it go forward, and low gear went pressed to the floor,
and then high gear when released. The driving gears were
all engaged by bands that these pedals either tightened or loosened.
But with all those pedals on the floor, not one
was an accelerator. That was a lever on the steering wheel,
which you thumbed downward to feed more gas.
Speaker 3 (25:43):
To the engine.
Speaker 2 (25:44):
And when you wanted to know how much more gas
you had to feed, you left to feed. You stopped,
climbed out, lifted off the front seat cushion, unscrewed the
gas cap beneath it, and puked in the tank with
a wooden stick marked like a ruler, but with gallons
instead of inches. But for all the fussing the car required,
(26:06):
it went, it went, and it was as dependable as
a cast iron stove.
Speaker 1 (26:11):
And you're listening to Richard Snow, who's the author of
I Invented the Modern Age, The Rise of Henry Ford.
Go and buy this book. You won't put it down.
And the importance of Ford's courage can't be underestimated. No
one understood the man. That's true, he probably didn't understand himself,
but few would describe Ford as anything but courageous. And
(26:35):
he had the courage of his convictions, no doubt. As
to entrepreneurs throughout history, the Right Brothers, we learned from
David McCullough, had that same kind of courage, and not
that manufacturing excellence. By the way, mass marketing and mass
manufacturing airplanes was not in the wheelhouse of the Right Brothers.
(26:55):
And by the way, he did what nobody was thinking
about back in those early days of automobiles. Generally everyone
was just trying to make expensive cars, and here's Ford
trying to make them affordable. And though the Model T
had many eccentricities, it worked and it was as dependable
as a cast iron stove. When we come back more
(27:19):
of the remarkable story of Henry Ford. Here on our
American stories, and we continue with our American stories and
(27:40):
the story of Henry Ford let's pick up where we
last left off with Author Richard.
Speaker 2 (27:46):
Snow Ford liked to tell everybody a joke. He told
it the President Wilson when he met him about the
farmer making out a will instructing his lawyer to have
him buried in his Modelty and the lawyer no reason
for this, The man said, because I ain't in a
hole yet that it couldn't get me out of. And
(28:07):
when it was time to stay put and do some
farm work, you could take off a rear wheel and
hook it up to a thresher sawmill.
Speaker 3 (28:13):
The owner was.
Speaker 2 (28:14):
Expected to know how to do that, and indeed to
maintain the car generally. Midwestern man named Alfred Stevenson, who
owned the succession of Model Ts in the twenties, wrote
about this.
Speaker 3 (28:25):
He said, the whole car was simple, accessible.
Speaker 2 (28:30):
In the evening, you could tighten the bands, look at
the timer, clean the plugs. A weekend would do nicely
to re line the bands, or grind the valves and
clean the carbon, or maybe tighten the rods.
Speaker 3 (28:40):
A four day vacation was plenty to overhaul the engine
or the rear end.
Speaker 2 (28:44):
If any of these jobs was a bit beyond your experience,
you had merely to ask your neighbor, who not only knew.
Speaker 3 (28:49):
But would come over and help there.
Speaker 2 (28:53):
Ratifications of this were far reaching and frequently unexpected. In
the Second World War, for example, German tanks were often
superior to their American counterparts, but that advantage was canceled
by how quickly a disabled sherman could get itself prepared
and back into action, and the Germans were baffled and dismayed.
(29:15):
Defined that, among his many other accomplishments, Henry Ford had
created a whole generation of mechanics. But perhaps the Model
t's most profound impact, what made it the single most
significant automobile ever built, was social. In nineteen eighteen, a
Georgia farm wife for Henry Ford, your car lifted us
(29:38):
out of the mud. It brought joy into our lives.
The Model T broke the age old isolation of the
farm in less than a decade, and wherever it went
it spun out behind it a new civilization of highways
and roadside fixtures like motels and of course gas stations,
(29:58):
and a new way of thinking about base and time.
And in the nineteen thirties John Steinbeck looked back with
a sort of sardonic awe on what had done in
just half of his lifetime. Now, of course, the Model
T could never had such an effect had it not
been deployed in enormous numbers, and this, even more than
(30:20):
the car itself, is the measure of Ford's genius. A
number of car companies were turning out one hundred cars
a day during the Model t's early years, and that
demonstrates very impressive capacities of manufacture. But there is a
fundamental difference between quantity production and mass production, and it
was by inventing the latter that Ford invented the modern age.
Speaker 3 (30:43):
The Model T was a success.
Speaker 2 (30:45):
Ford could sell as many as he could make. The
way to make them, he believed, lay in precision and speed.
Precision meant part so scrupulously manufactured that one would always
fit where it belonged, without any time consuming shaping or
filing a speed lay and breaking down the manufacturing process
(31:05):
into every smaller segments. This began in the spring of
nineteen thirteen with the magneto, which generated the electricity to
fire the plugs. It took a worker twenty minutes to
assemble one. When one worker put it together put another together.
Ford separated the process into twenty nine steps, and rather
(31:28):
than one worker doing twenty nine things, twenty nine workers
would do one thing as the parts moved past their
stations on what was the first modern assembly line. Before
it had taken twenty minutes. Now it took thirteen minutes.
So with the engine, then the transmission, then the upholstery,
the axles, and the radiators, finally the whole car itself,
(31:49):
all was Ford said, Bring the work to the man,
not the man to the work. When Ford first unveiled
his Model TY, it took twelve and a half hours
to make one. More than a decade later, it took
exactly a minute before the Model T was done. A
car was coming off the line every ten seconds. Ford
made his millionth Model T in nineteen fifteen, his two
(32:11):
millionth in nineteen seventeen, and so on for a while
a million cars a year, and then in the early
twenties two million. And he always lowered the price. He
flew directly in the face of all principles of monopoly capitalism,
which of course hold that if you have a desirable
item that you alone own and other people want, you
(32:32):
raised the price. Not Ford, he said, every time I
shave a dollar off the price, I gain a thousand
new customers. So the car had begun at eight hundred
and fifty dollars and ended two decades later at two
hundred ninety five dollars. In nineteen nine, the company made
a profit of the two hundred and twenty dollars and
(32:52):
eleven cents on each car. With the moving assembly line
up and running, the profit fell to ninety nine thirty.
Speaker 3 (32:58):
Four, and that was fine with Ford.
Speaker 2 (33:01):
And then in nineteen fourteen he announced that he was
raising the base pay in his shop to five dollars
a day. This was twice the going rate for industrial work,
and it caused a sensation.
Speaker 3 (33:12):
He understood that it would be big news.
Speaker 2 (33:14):
Think he would I don't think he'd quite prepared for
the astonishing response that got. People came in from all
over the country, and in fact he finally had to
discourage him by saying he would only hire people who
had lived in or around Detroit for two years or more.
Ford's workers became his customers. No man who bolted together
a packard gray wolf could ever own one. Every Ford
(33:37):
worker who wanted to could own a Ford. So Ford
also created a modern cycle of consumerism in which we
still live. During the great Black diaspora after the First
World War, up north to Detroit, the African Americans knew
there were two shops, only two shops that were worth
(34:00):
applying to. Packard might give you a job, and Ford
probably would give you a job. And he actually had
blacks running gangs of whites with the power to fire them,
which I think was not I can't think of another
American industry in nineteen twenty four where that would have
where that would have applied at all.
Speaker 3 (34:19):
And in the end he had to give it up.
Speaker 2 (34:21):
The last Model T came off the line, probably six
or seven years later than it should have. In nineteen
twenty seven, Ford had made fifteen and a half million
of them, and when production ceased there were more than
eleven millions still on the road. And of course there
was tremendous interest in what Ford would do to follow
the Model T. In fact, next to Lindbergh's flight, it
(34:44):
was the biggest story of nineteen twenty seven.
Speaker 3 (34:46):
Car sales dropped everywhere in a.
Speaker 2 (34:49):
Boom time as people waited to see what was coming.
It took the factory, of course, several months toy tool
and when the new car, Ford had started over fresh
by calling it the Model A was announced that December.
The New York World said the excitement could hardly have
been greater had Powaw the Sacred white Elephant of Burma
(35:09):
elected to sit for seven days on the flagpole of
the Woolworth Building. It sold well eight hundred thousand in
his first year, but Chevrolet sold a million that same year,
and the Ford Motor Company would never again be making
one out of every two cars on the American road
(35:30):
in any event. That was Henry Ford. How really to
assess the true impact of this manet? It may still
be too early. We're certainly still immersed in the modern world.
Speaker 3 (35:45):
He created.
Speaker 2 (35:47):
Will Rogers many years, many years ago came pretty close
when he said to Henry Ford, with none of his
usual folksiness, it may take one hundred years to tell
whether you hurt us more than you helped us. But
you certainly didn't leave us where you found us.
Speaker 1 (36:13):
And a terrific job on the storytelling, editing and production
by our own Greg Hengler. And a special thanks to
Richard Snow What a storyteller and what a story to tell.
He's the author of I Invented the Modern Age, The
rise of Henry Ford. And there's so much to unpack here,
my goodness, the stories about World War Two that we'd
(36:35):
always heard that Americans could just get under the hood
of anything and fix it, Well this happened because of
Henry Ford. He turned America into a nation of auto
mechanics and tinkerers. I mean, to this day, that's why
there are autozones. And my goodness, the story of what
he did, bringing precision and speed to the manufacturing process,
(36:58):
the first modern assembly line and bringing the work to
the man, and of course bringing the speed with which
he could produce one of his cars from twelve hours
to one minute. Ten years later and millions and millions
rolled off the assembly line, all totaled fifteen and a
(37:19):
half million Model tees. And the thing I think most
important contribution of Henry Ford's as it relates to capitalism
and monopoly is that he did that thing no one
expected someone with such market dominance to do, which should
generally be rip off the American public and raise prices forward,
(37:40):
always working to lower the price. And at the same
time he raised the wages of ordinary workers and factory workers,
doubling their wages and turning his workers into customers. That
Will Rogers line was the best of all. It may
take a hundred years to tell whether it helped us
or hurt us, but you sure didn't leave us where
(38:01):
you've found us. The story of Henry Ford, the story
of the Modern Age, and the man who invented it.
Here on our American Stories.
Host
Lee Habeeb
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