The People's Tycoon - Steven Watts

Made one offhand remark about being surprised at Henry Ford's pacifism, and here we are. The People's Tycoon is a biography of Henry Ford that attempts to place his life in context of American culture and its shifts through his lifetime, and how he helped bring about many of those shifts.

Watts' approach is to move gradually forward through Ford's life, but with each chapter focusing not so much on a specific period of time, but on a specific aspect of Ford during that time. So one chapter might look at Ford's attempts to increase productivity, his ideas behind doing so, the public response, and his own concerns at the end result of his goal. Two chapters later, Watts is looking at the point when Henry Ford raised his workers' wages to $5 a day, his reasoning, the public response (both positive and negative). From there he might segue into Ford's attempts to try and impose his moral vision upon others, especially his employees. Turns out you could only get that pay boost by following a fairly narrow set of ideas about how to live your life, among other hoops.

The catch for Ford is that he helps create a society which he doesn't end up liking very much. Part of the idea between the wage hike was that it would boost the economy if workers had more money to spend. Ford was, at the time, a big believer in the idea that people should buy things they want or need, that leisure time and pursuits shouldn't be strictly the domain of the wealthy. But he doesn't want people spending money on booze or smokes, and he thinks people subsequently become too invested in the idea of buying things. He thinks there's a lot of value in hard work, but his desire to achieve his vision of a cheap, reliable car helps push him towards the assembly line. Then he worries that he's trapped his workers in a very narrow, repetitive role, which won't be fulfilling. His solution initially was that it would be made up for by those workers buying stuff. Find fulfillment in the leisure, since the work could no longer provide it.

One of Ford's biggest problems - besides his raging anti-Semitism - is that after a decade or so of everyone lining up to sing his praises, he buys into his own hype. Like the comedian that becomes convinced he really does have Important Thoughts about the issues of the day. Because Ford has been so successful at creating an affordable car people like, he must be an expert on whatever he cares to share his opinion on. That can be diets, the Depression, education, World War I. Ford may be entirely ignorant about the topic, but he will remain convinced he has the answer, and people should listen.

This extends to his own company, where, even as he becomes increasingly out of touch with the market, he will try to insist of having things his way. That the consumers will eventually realize he's correct about what they want. What's especially ugly about it is Ford will let others within the company make a decision, simply so he can come in and overrule them, as some cheap way to show off. He does this constantly to his son Edsel, in the belief it will toughen him up, and it contributes to Edsel's declining health.

There is a lot in the book, that I didn't know about Henry Ford, especially his growing interest in the 1930s in areas outside automobiles, like education and science. Ford invested a lot of money into research on possible uses of the soybean, including making fabrics and plastics from it. Or his belief in reincarnation. There's an entire chapter devoted to Ford's foray into politics during the Great War. Not just his failed Peace Ship idea (which was more of a debacle than I'd imagined), but how he almost won a Senate seat in Michigan without really campaigning at all, and while being generally unqualified for political office. But he was well-known, and had lots of money, and lots of everyday folks identified with him, especially when the "elites" mocked him for his perceived ignorance. That read as depressingly familiar, given our current situation.

'First of all, Ford's worldview as a modern industrialist led him to view warfare as a wasteful folly. Everything he valued in terms of economic and social endeavor - an ethic of work and productivity, keen standards of efficiency, consumption and abundance among the mass of people - was violated by the wartime destruction of human beings and material resources. In a long string of pronouncements, Ford made it clear that he viewed war as an economic disaster.'