TIME: Almanac 1995

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<text id=93HT1274> <link 93XP0416> <title> Ford: Detroit Dynast </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--Ford Portrait </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> April 21, 1947 Detroit Dynast </hdr> <body> Hours before the funeral, umbrellas bobbed along the sidewalks in front of St. Paul's Cathedral. Along Detroit's Woodward Ave., the curious hung out of windows, perched on roofs and climbed the trees to get a better view. At the cathedral's entrance, the limousines disgorged the auto city's great. From a maroon Lincoln limousine, Clara Bryant Ford stepped out, leaning on the arm of her grandson, Henry. Inside St. Paul's in a sealed casket, lay the pinch-faced, fragile remains of her husband. All day, the day before, the body of Henry Ford had lain in state in the lobby of the recreation building at Greenfield Village, while 105,000 people had filed past. Now, inside St. Paul's, the Very Reverend Kirk B. O'Ferrall read the service. The crowd filed out and a Packard hearse carried the body of Henry Ford out along Joy Road to the small family cemetery beside a four-lane highway. Henry Ford had never ridden comfortably in any car but one of his own make; he wouldn't have liked it. They lowered the coffin into a hole in the wet, clayey mud. The rain came down in buckets while the police hustled 20,000 sightseers on their way and opened the highway again to traffic. The cars rushed past, filling the night with the smell of gasoline. The Legend. To Henry Ford, the smell of gasoline had been like perfume. He was born a tinker, not a farmer, which was what his farmer father had wanted him to be. He was also born stubborn, so he quit the farm and ended up tinkering with a gasoline contraption in a red brick shed back of his house in Detroit. One day in 1896 he took an ax to the wall of the shed (the door was too small) and drove the contraption out into the world. That was the start. He believed in gasoline and the engine. Seven years later, aged 40, he organized the Ford Motor Co., with eleven stockholders, who put up $28,000. A lot of other men had built autos, but Henry Ford had a special theory. Build them cheap, he said, so everyone could own one. Make them simple, he said. The Model T had only 5,000 parts, counting every last nut. Standardize the parts, he said, so that anyone could buy a new carburetor in any one of the thousands of garages which he visualized springing up across the country. The Model T was high-slung, narrow-wheeled and homely. Said Ford: "Customers can have it painted any color they want so long as it's black." He turned out 10,607 in 1909. In 19 years he made 15,000,000. The Model T became a legend; it became the hero of $.10 joke books. Ford's own favorite joke was the one about the gravedigger who was asked why he was digging such an enormous hole. "They're going to bury this fellow with his Ford," the gravedigger explained. "He said it had pulled him out of every other hole, it would pull him out of this one." The Tin Lizzie rattled and banged across the country. It had to have roads. Roads were built. It had to have gas. Gas pumps sprouted. It paid taxes. It made jobs. It transformed a nation. The Empire. Henry Ford did it. He was the genius of mass production. He created social problems which the U.S. is still trying to solve. For himself he built an industrial empire of coal mines, rubber plantations, iron mines, timberland, sawmills, hydroelectric works, companies in a dozen other nations. The empire's capital was the plant on River Rouge where the stubborn, cantankerous, opinionated Henry Ford ruled the roost. At one time it was estimated that he was worth $2 billion. The bankers tried to horn in on the empire, but he repulsed them. He had a low opinion of all bankers--especially Eastern. He had opinions on everything: "If you will study the history of almost any criminal you will find that he is an inveterate cigaret smoker." "Literature is all right but it doesn't mean much." "A man learns something even by being hanged." He was a teetotaler and a pacifist. During World War I he chartered the Oscar II and sailed for Europe, determined to confront the leaders of Europe and argue them out of their senseless conflicts. He came home sickened by ridicule and disillusion. He ran for the U.S. Senate and was beaten. He sued the Chicago Tribune for calling him an anarchist, and collected $.06. He fought "international Jewry" with the faked Protocols of Zion. He made a fetish of raw carrots and soybeans. He was ruthless with employees who fell out of his favor, charitable to human strays. The Sociologist. He had opinions about labor. In 1914, the country was flabbergasted when he established an unheard-of minimum $5-a-day wage and a profit-sharing scheme. Good pay makes good workers, he said. Well-paid workers could buy more cars. So many thousands stormed his gates for jobs that Ford officials had fire hoses turned on them. But there were moral strings attached to the profit-sharing. He appointed the dean of St. Paul's to see that the money went into wholesome food, Ford cars, etc.--not into liquor and riotous living. The unions tried to move in and he fought them. He assigned a hard-faced ex-sailor, Harry Bennett, to guard his empire. Heads were cracked. In 1932 four jobless marchers were killed outside the Rouge plant. He defied the New Deal. But in 1941, he capitulated. He signed a union-shop contract, something of which even Walter Reuther in his wildest moments had not dreamed. He believed in training youth. When Martha Berry, the famed Southern educator, asked him to contribute to her schools for Georgia mountain children (the story went), he sent her $1 with which she bought peanut seed, making a profit on the crop. Afterwards he built a Gothic quadrangle for her school, spending millions. He loved and collected the relics of the old, slow age which he had destroyed. In his Greenfield Village near Dearborn, he lovingly set up Abraham Lincoln's courthouse and the Menlo Park workshop of his hero, Thomas Edison. He filled his museum with stage coaches, buggies, prairie schooners, old furniture, old tools, old junk. The Ancient. When World War II came he was an old man. He was as tough as his Tin Lizzie. Theoretically he had retired and handed the business over to his only, beloved son, Edsel. But he was still the real boss, striding along the great assembly lines, sitting, birdlike and domineering, among the empire's reverent executives. Once again he cried out against the stupidity of war. He was an America Firster. But when the Japs attacked Pearl Harbor, he turned his Rouge plant into an arsenal. He put his company on a seven-day week. From his new, vast Willow Run plant, after several false starts, the bombers rolled out. Thousands of other U.S. plants poured out the tools of war, mass-produced by the techniques of the old pacifist, Ford. But before the war ended, Edsel died and a spirit died in the old man. He was 80. One day, trotting in his usual fashion from his car to the Administration Building, he tripped and fell face down on the grass. Thereafter he walked. Edsel's son, Henry II, came home from the Navy to run the empire. An attack of acute indigestion almost finished the old man. He puttered around his Georgia plantation and Greenfield Village and the museum. In a Cold Room. One day last week he had his chauffeur drive him over to the Village. The River Rouge was swollen with rain. The old paddle-wheel riverboat, Suwanee, one of his relics, had sunk at her permanent anchorage. The river had submerged the lowlands, flooding the cellar of Ford's own mansion. The big house was without electricity or telephone service, heated only by open fires. He and Mrs. Ford went to bed at nine in a cold bedroom. At 11:15 Clara Ford heard her husband's voice. She got him a drink of water. She roused the chauffeur and sent him off to the nearest telephone to call Dr. John Mateer of the Ford Hospital, which the old man had endowed. But before Dr. Mateer arrived a cerebral hemorrhage had done its work. In the cold, hushed room, Henry Ford, aged 83, had died by the light of old-fashioned kerosene lamps and flickering candles. </body> </article> </text>