Model T Tycoon

Henry Ford, the most famed tycoon alive, was up a tree this week. The old 'coon had been treed before, but this time not only Organized Labor but the U. S.

Government was after him. C. I. O.'s tough young United Automobile Workers had given formal notice of their intent to strike Ford's River Rouge, Highland Park and Lincoln plants. In Dearborn, Mich., in the vast River Rouge plant, mounted policemen patrolled the grounds. There was no trouble yet, but no one could say when there might be.

Mr. Ford had either to deal with the union or fight the fight of his life.

Both sides were adamant. U. A. W. was confident that it had the strength to cripple Ford's production, if not stop it completely. And Henry Ford seemed determined not to budge from his lifelong position. Said he: "We do not intend to submit to any union, and those who belong to one are being fooled. . . . The men in our plants are satisfied generally with wages and conditions. Occasionally agitators try to keep our employes stirred up, but the men know they will be treated fairly by the company, without outside intervention."

Most of the limbs on Henry Ford's tree have been lopped off--one of the last ones by the Supreme Court. An NLRB ruling that Mr. Ford had violated the Wagner Act was upheld by the Circuit Court. The Supreme Court declined to review the case when Ford appealed. About the only limb left was delay. Toward that limb Mr. Ford was edging. Said his hardfisted, right-hand man, Harry Bennett: "If the NLRB orders an election, of course we will hold one, because Mr. Ford will observe the law. C. I. O. will win it, of course, because it always wins these farcical elections, and we will bargain with it because the law says so. We will bargain until Hell freezes over, but they won't get anything." There was small hope that a respite proclaimed by Michigan's Governor Murray D. Van Wagoner would accomplish anything. Governor Van Wagoner last week invoked a State law, declared that both sides must observe a "cooling-off" period of 30 days, allow time to mediate.

But at week's end a State mediation commission had accomplished nothing. Tension heightened.

The Public Interest. Governor Van Wagoner proclaimed that the public interest was involved. It certainly was. Not only were the jobs and wages of thousands of Michiganders involved; at River Rouge, whose buildings sprawl across 1,200 acres of Michigan land, their chimneys, tanks, furnaces, conveyors, cranes sprouting into the cold Michigan sky, men were beating ploughshares into swords--$122,000,000 worth. Already rolling off the bus assembly line were ugly, buglike reconnaissance cars ("Blitz Buggies") for the Army. Already in limited operation was a magnesium alloy foundry, turning out lightweight castings for airplane engines.

Greatest preparation of all was centred around the building for making airplane engines. Over its steel framework contractors had first built a fibreboard shell, so that workmen, sheltered inside, could lay brick and pour concrete through winter weather. Last week the building, almost a fifth of a mile long, was hatching, pink and raw, out of its cocoon. By June, Pratt & Whitney double Wasp engines should be rolling out of it, 15 a day.

Also under way were two projects which may prove to be Ford's most important contribution to national defense. One project is a 12-cylinder, 1,500-1,700 h.p., liquid-cooled airplane engine, with cast instead of forged cylinder sleeves and many simplifications of design. If that engine passes its laboratory tests successfully, it may be the answer to the industry's dream: an airplane engine which can be mass-produced.

The other project: a technique (seam welding and gang riveting) which would make possible the mass production of airplane fuselages. At Ypsilanti the building where Ford will turn out centre sections for Consolidated and Douglas bombers on an assembly line was almost finished. According to big, leathery Charles Sorensen, chief Ford production man, the aircraft industry has done the development job, the production job is now up to the automakers, who understand how to work out the integration and flow of materials for volume output.

Integration and flow were last week being worked out swiftly at Rouge. But human hands were needed to sort out, punch, weld, rivet, bolt, assemble. If there was a strike, human hands would close into fists, and sorting, bolting, assembling would cease.

No Trouble. "Labor-union organizers," says Henry Ford, "are the worst thing that ever struck the earth." They and their unions have never yet struck him hard. And it must have appeared to him last week that being the operator of an organized plant is no guarantee of industrial tranquillity. U. S. Steel, operating under a contract with C. I. O., was in danger of having that contract ended.

Until recently Ford has paid and publicized the highest wage, and the Ford method of keeping organizers out of the plants has been simple and direct: hit them first. Keeping organizers out has been the job of Harry Bennett's "service department," whose personnel is far-from-prissy.

Bennett got a cracked head in a fight outside the Rouge plant in 1932, in which four jobless marchers were killed. Brutally beaten by Ford agents were two other men who are now in the very front rank of U. A. W.--Richard Frankensteen and Walter Reuther (whose plan for making airplane parts in auto factories was projected last winter). Brutal beatings took place in Dallas, Tex.

Mr. Bennett wrote last week to the Governor of Michigan: "I wish to inform you that no labor dispute exists between this company and its employes, despite attempts of certain groups of labor agita tors to create the false impression with the public. This is the same group which introduced the 'sitdown' strikes to Amer ica and the reign of terror which followed. . . . These former 'sit-downers,' whose acts of terror in Michigan industry alone make Jan Valtin's revelations in Out of the Night seem like Mother Goose stories, would now sabotage the Defense Program of the nation to satisfy their greed for dues and more dues."

But with the Supreme Court decision in its pocket, U. A. W. thought it was sitting much prettier than Harry Bennett last week. It now has bargaining contracts with most of the industry, including General Motors and Chrysler Corp., where managements accept union leaders as spokesmen for the workers. And last week U. A. W. thought it was on the cards that it would soon be the accepted spokesman for Ford workers too. When it was, it was going to squawk about: 1) the speedup, 2) lack of seniority rules to protect the older workers, 3) the service department, 4) the absence of any machinery to adjust grievances.

U. A. W. points out that Ford wages are no longer the highest in the industry. The average wage at Ford is a fraction over 90-c- an hour, which is under the average wage for the industry (95-c-). Average wages at both Chrysler and G. M. are over $1. Privately, other automakers look at Ford askance, convinced that he is bucking the tide, that so far as labor policy is concerned he is still rattling along in the Model T era.

Nevertheless, a poll taken in the spring of 1940 by FORTUNE of a cross-section of working people showed that 73.6% believed Ford had been "helpful to labor." He topped Senator Wagner, Madam Secretary Perkins and John L. Lewis by comfortable percentages.

"I Got a Ford." As far as Henry Ford is concerned, the Model T era was a pretty good one to stay in. Son of an Irish immigrant, he lavished the hours he could spare from his job at Detroit Electric Co. working on a "horseless carriage." When he had one he thought would work, he persuaded eleven businessmen to finance him and went into production. Cars were then a luxury. Ford's aim was a car for every man. He had his plans, translated them into four cylinders, four wheels and the frugal minimum of sheet steel. From a crude assembly line in Detroit, Model Ts began to jerk--10,660; 19,051; 34,858; 76,150 a year--200,000 as the assembly line smoothed out.

By 1912, Associate James Couzens had 7,000 dealers at work selling Model Ts; Ford Motor Co. was doing 40% of the U. S. automobile business. Up & down the country rattled the Tin Lizzies, leaving a spoor of lunch boxes, fruit skins, pop bottles, flat tires. The U. S. was on wheels and Henry Ford, the master of Mass Production, had put it there. More than any man in the 20th Century, with the exception of his good friend Thomas Edison, he had changed the way of men's living. He did so by originating a means of getting a useful instrument in many people's hands at lower & lower cost, and in so doing had shown his own country and the world the way to distribute many other useful instruments to the millions.

In 1919, in a $105,260,000 deal, Ford & Son Edsel had bought out all remaining stockholders. Ford hated bankers ("a lot of Jews sitting around smoking cigars . . ."), and balked their every effort to horn in on him. In 1927 Ford decided to retool his machines, give the world Model A, a blood brother to T, but up-to-date, sleeker, slicker than a whistle. He sold 1,310,000 of them in 1929.

General Motors' Chevrolet, steadily on Ford's trail, passed him two years later. Except for 1935 Chevrolet has led him ever since. Last year Chevrolet turned out 853,000 cars; Ford, 542,000. But let no one think that meant the decline and end of Ford. Founder Ford, at 77, is still full of surprises (plastic bodies for cars, for instance). This week he was talking, as he has before, of flivver planes to fill the skies.

In spite of age, competition, World War II, the Ford empire is still a mighty one. Able, dapper, brown-eyed Son Edsel, as president, is technically the company's head, but Father Ford is the boss, still the absolute ruler of this industrial domain. The empire includes Ford of the U. S., Ford of Canada, and Ford of England.

In 1937, the book value of Ford of the U. S., which the Ford family (Henry, Mrs. Ford and Edsel) owns outright, was listed at $624,975,000. No one can compute the exact value of their complex, world-wide holdings. But the Ford family is certainly the wealthiest in the U. S.

Some of that wealth was being sideswiped last week into pockets and purposes for which Henry Ford had little liking. In Canada, England and Australia, Ford plants were working overtime for the armies of Britain. On continental Europe, Hitler was running Ford plants, had set them to building mobile units for the Nazi war machine. There was nothing Henry Ford could do about it except express the hope--as he recently did--that both sides would destroy each other--and leave him and the U. S. alone.

A few plants lost hardly affect the long list of Ford possessions. He owns estates in Michigan, Georgia, England, coal mines, a fleet of 29 freighters, a rubber plantation in Brazil, iron mines, timberland, sawmills, hydroelectric works, farms, Greenfield Museum & Village (where he collects the relics of an age that he helped destroy). He owns the courthouse where Lincoln started practicing law, the Menlo Park workshop where Edison, whom he reverences, made the electric bulb, and in Massachusetts, the Wayside Inn and the little frame building where Mary (of Mary's Little Lamb) went to school.

$5 a Day. Henry Ford was more than a national figure: he was a nation-wide force. He put a car on every road, and a question in every factory. The question: what should be the relationship between management and labor? A quarter of a century ago he tried to dispose of it with a simple answer: an unheard-of minimum wage of $5 a day. He was hailed as a saint -- by some economists, as a sinner. His theory then was that good pay makes good workmen. Good workmen, like good steel and rubber, resulted in better Model Ts. And well-paid workmen can buy more products of industry -- including cars.

Said Ford: "All men want is to be told what to do and get paid for doing it." He has always believed in simple things: simple 'engines, simple food, simple amusements, simple cures, simple theories.

The only thing he was leary about was that the $5 might be squandered. He set up a Sociological Department, over which he installed the Rev. Samuel S. Marquis, gentle, earnest dean of St. Paul's Cathedral in Detroit. Dean Marquis' job was to see that the extra pay went only for better homes, milk, fruit, vegetables, and Ford cars -- not for liquor and riotous living. Ford declared: "I want the whole organization dominated by a just, generous and humane policy."

Then came intensified competition, technological improvements, unemployment, labor organizers. The organizers did not agree with Mr. Ford that his simple answer was satisfactory. They said that men wanted more than good wages, they want job security and good working conditions.

Said Ford: "I pity the poor fellow who is so soft and flabby that he must always have 'an atmosphere of good feeling' around him before he can do his work. ... It was about then that he decided the times called for a Harry Bennett. The Makings. At this week's end, Henry Ford was on his plantation in Ways, Ga., where he spends his winters, keeping in touch by telephone with Harry Bennett, who was in charge of the situation at Dearborn.

Mr. Ford's plantation covers 85,000 historic Georgia acres, includes eight original plantations and an old Confederate fort (Fort McAlister). The land was in the path of Sherman's march to the sea. What Sherman destroyed, Ford has restored. Still agile, wiry, taller looking than he is, he putters around his 100-acre lettuce patch, his cane fields and his sweet potatoes, occasionally attends a square dance at his Community House, watches the white-tailed deer, wild turkeys, quail, which live in peace, safe from hunters.

His neighbors are Georgia Crackers, whom he permits to dwell on his acres under an ancient kind of feudal patronage. They are allowed to work in the sawmill, the general store, the nursery. There are garden plots for families, schools for children. Ford and the colonists like to think of the project as selfsupporting. Actually, the plantation has a weekly payroll of $7,000 and Mr. Ford puts in another $50,000 a year for upkeep.

It was nothing new for Henry Ford to be in the midst of conflict. He had been in many a conflict before. For years he had waged a legal war over his alleged infringement of the Selden engine patents, and won it. The interests who had been behind that suit, he was convinced, had been fighting him ever since, in the guise of bankers, or labor unions. There was the libel suit he had brought against the Chicago Tribune for calling him an "anarchist"--when he collected damages of 6-c-. And there was the campaign he had launched against international Jewry through the pages of the Dearborn Independent, a campaign he retracted in 1927.

Like the antiques he had collected and stored away at Greenfield, Individualist Ford had stored away his conflict-tested convictions on a thousand matters, great and small. "We reincarnate over and over. We live many lives and store up much experience." From time to time he had given the world the benefit of Henry Ford's experience :

"If you will study the history of almost any criminal, you will find he is an inveterate cigaret smoker. ... I do nothing because it gives me pleasure. . . . Most of the ailments of people come from eating too much. . . . Salt is one of the best things for the teeth. And also for the hair.

. . . An army or navy is a tool for the protection of misguided, inefficient, destructive Wall Street. . . . My mother is in my workshops. She is in my workshops to this extent--it is impossible for me to tolerate disorder or uncleanliness. ... I do not believe in charity. . . . There is something sacred about wages. . . . Reading can become a dope habit. ... To say it plainly, the great majority of women who work do so in order to buy fancy clothes. . . . The number of needless tasks that are performed daily by thousands of people is amazing. ... A man learns something even by being hanged."

Frail-looking, but sturdy as one of his own Model Ts, Henry Ford at 77 is still absorbed in mechanics. With warring, untidy, pleasure-liking, improvident humanity he would prefer to have only a nodding acquaintance. And his feeling about labor unions is simple and characteristic: he wishes they would stop annoying him.

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