The People's Tycoon

Henry Ford and

the American Century

By Steven Watts

KNOPF; 614 PAGES; $30

If one life best maps the American character in the 20th century or has had the most pervasive influence on our modern sensibilities, it may well be Henry Ford's. There's no better way to understand America's identity struggle -- its mix of authority and freedom, idealism and practicality, invention and reaction -- than to understand the man who both embodied and reinforced these conflicting propensities.

Ford, the humble farmer turned industrial icon, has been the subject of several recent biographies. Some, like Douglas Brinkley's "Wheels for the World," focus on the titanic achievements of the company he founded in 1903. Some social historians, such as Neil Baldwin in "Henry Ford and the Jews: The Mass Production of Hate," examine Ford's unconscionable anti-Semitism throughout the 1920s. Other sources look at his enlightened treatment of African Americans or take aim at his tragic failure as a father. Resolving the contradictions of this enigmatic giant has been no easy task.

In "The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century," University of Missouri historian Steven Watts attempts the most integrated understanding to date of Ford's enormous influence and varied appeal. Employing oral histories, newspaper editorials and cultural insights, Watts organizes Ford's life according to the many roles he played (25 chapters correspond to 25 "personas") and reconciles these within the larger drama unfolding in the 20th century.

In examining Ford's sensational career, Watts credits two equally powerful sentiments that informed his subject's intuition at every turn: reverence for rural traditions and an almost religious devotion to efficiency. These sentiments grew out of Ford's early experience on his father's Dearborn, Mich., farm, where 19th century values of self-reliance, pride in hard work and suspicion of power converged with 20th century innovations in engines and machinery that were easing the farmer's burden.

Ford's love of efficiency and aversion to physical labor -- which, he believed, wasted human energy on tasks that could be better handled by a machine -- inspired the innovation for which he is best known: the moving assembly line, an improvement that radically cut the costs of manufacturing. Ford further reasoned that increased production created a need for increased consumption, so he introduced his second revolutionary innovation: the "Five- Dollar Day." The new wage, which doubled existing salaries, enabled his workers to purchase the cars they produced. It was a move that sent shock waves through the nation, infuriated his fellow capitalists, made an overnight folk hero of Ford and created America's first consumer class. The Model T also spurred a revolution in advertising, which focused on the modern consumer and the virtues of "leisure time" and "self-fulfillment" through mobility -- it was a remarkable departure from decades of Victorian self-restraint.

But the Highland Park factory, Ford's shrine to efficiency and material reward, would be at odds with his provincial self-image. Ford compensated by carrying forward the populist rural sensibilities that had for so long informed him, though they were not always so easily transferable and often seemed paternal. He rationalized that his revolutionary wage increase and the less popular efforts to regulate and improve workers' personal lives were designed "to help protect [workers] from powerful financial interests in industrial society." His vitriolic attacks on Wall Street bankers, stockbrokers and moneylenders played well to the urban and rural poor, where suspicions of financial power were well entrenched and memories of farm foreclosures were fresh. Ford succeeded in inventing himself as a defender of the weak against the predatory, the people's tycoon. But was there more to this story?

Watts suggests that Ford, having let the genie of mechanization and consumerism out of the bottle, had serious misgivings. His behavior throughout his career suggested a man deeply conflicted about his creation, driven by guilt and a sentimental longing for a simpler time. He blamed the changing styles of dance, fashion and music on the Jewish influences on Protestant culture; he was incapable, it seems, of internalizing the major role he played in creating a vastly different culture. He looked to blame what he couldn't control and lashed out at the unfamiliar.

So it is no wonder that his behavior manifested so many contradictions. The defender of Christian virtue was not a religious man. He was not even a man of the age for which he pined. He was an individualist to be sure, pioneering experimental uses of soybean and hemp and exploring alternative energies decades ahead of his time. He advocated a smoke- and alcohol-free workplace and was a fitness and health fanatic devoted to alternative diets and medicine. His mystical convictions included a belief in telepathy, the power of positive thinking and reincarnation. A lifelong vegetarian and environmentalist, he created a bird sanctuary on his Georgia property. He eradicated malaria in several poor Southern communities, restored old mills and built experimental schools for blacks. Thoroughly modern, he was a man always in the process of becoming.

The scholar and writer Max Lerner observed that commentators on American character, from Tocqueville to Commager, have collectively ascribed to Americans an impossible combination of traits, concluding that "Americans are bewilderingly human." In his exhaustive and original undertaking, Watts untangles alternating influences that made such an improbable character out of Ford, a man both celebrated and vilified; and in so doing offers a surprising reassessment of his record. The fascinating result may change the way Henry Ford is remembered.