This was the last car for which Henry Ford himself was responsible. He had lived from the days of horse and buggy until cars were part of our way of life. This world was his world. In 1911 Ford built Highland Park, the largest factory in the world.
He was almost 50 and had just made his first million. In 10 years the auto industry had developed from nothing to nearly the largest in the United States. These scenes are some of the earliest shot by an industrial corporation.
In 1914, Ford grasped the potential of film as a medium to push his world view. It was a world that he was working to change. A generation earlier, most of Ford's workers would have lived on farms.
The Ford Film Unit covered everything from the activities of the company to the myth of the man. A man who seemed to embody the American dream. But the world the young Ford grew up in was harsh and uncompromising.
He was born in 1863, 30 years before the first automobile appeared in the U.S. He lived on a farm. His father was struggling. to clear. His early experience was a Puritan environment with an endless round of farm drudgery.
This film shows the kind of prejudice Ford grew up with. As a result of depressions and speculation in the grain market by money men, the farmer's wife is shown as being unable to buy bread. Like most boys of his generation, Ford took an early interest in tinkering.
He was fascinated with the lumbering steam engines, which would appear from time to time on the farm. From his pocketbook jottings, his only written record, we can see his own design for a model steam engine. And for a water wheel, built under his supervision by his boyhood friends. Mechanization could clearly affect the quality of life. By 1885 when Ford was 22, growing industrial cities were linked by the railroad.
The continent was becoming a single market, booming as a new labor force poured in from Europe. This is the Westinghouse Works and is the earliest film record of mass production. The workers'function was simply to put identical parts together.
Craftsmanship was not needed. Mass production led to cheap goods. With urban population growing fast, the cycle of modern capitalism was underway.
This would be Henry Ford's world. But not until he was 28 was he able to leave the farm and find a secure job in Detroit. In 1891, he married a local girl, Clara Bryant.
After they had been in Detroit two years, their only child, Edsel, was born. It was an important year, 1893, the year the first gasoline car was run in the U.S., that of Duryea. A year later, he and a friend, James Bishop, handcrafted one of the country's first cars. The car was built around a bicycle frame and ran up to 20 miles an hour, but the event was unnoticed in the press.
Ford failed to attract backing and had no money of his own. At 34, he went back to the farm. An industry of cars powered by steam electricity and gasoline was passing him by.
Oh, boys, jump in. We're just going for a ride. Let it go, Bill. Locomobile, Peerless, and Columbia. Oldsmobile, Stanley, and Shelley.
There were 97 manufacturers at the date of this film, 1900. Most of the names are now forgotten. Carriage makers were building new toys for those who could afford carriages. By 1900, Ford had managed to save enough money to move back to Detroit.
At last, he got backing from a group of speculators headed by Alexander Malcolmson. In 1902, Ford took on the champion, Alexander Winton. Winton took a lead. Ford had no brakes and had to coast on the corners.
Then Winton's machine started smoking and Ford forged ahead. The hours of tinkering were paying off. The next year he attracted enough money to build the huge 999. He hired the cycling champion Barney Oldfield to race for him and established the world's record of 57 miles an hour over 5 miles.
At 40, Ford was a con... He was developing a single-minded idea to build a cheap popular car. There were 24,000 automobiles sold in the US in 1905. Of these, 2,000 were Fords.
The next year, Ford captured 25% of the market. Under Cousins, dealerships were set up. Models ranged from cheap to flashy.
There was the lightweight Model N, which Ford wanted to make. Most expensive was the touring car, which the directors wanted. In that end of the market, profits were the highest. There was a struggle for power. Ford threatened to resign, isolated his backer, Malcolmson, and bought up his stock.
There was another challenge from outside the company. In 1879, a lawyer, George Selden, had taken out a patent on the gasoline automobile. Now he was building a trust out of licensees. Ford defied him with characteristic pithiness. The company advertised, selling themselves as the small man against the big trust.
By the time the decision came down for Ford in 1911, the roles had been reversed. Ford was now the largest automobile manufacturer in the U.S. He had made the American dream come true.
Through his victory in the Selden suit, he became a folk hero. For the car he was now building, his name was coming to be a household word. He took his sweetheart for a ride last Sunday. He was dressed up in his best Sunday clothes. She never closed to his side.
Things were just dandy till they got down the road. This is early advertising film for the Model T. The car does everything. Goes everywhere, even up hills. Everything needed repair. So he got out and got under, got out and got under to fix his little machine.
From the start, the Model T was a topic for films and songs. The Model T was rugged and tough. cheap and offered in only one color, black.
All work, no frills. It owed much to its makers Puritan origins. Other manufacturers were making luxury cars.
The Ford company was moving in the other direction. Ford made the car so strong because he used lightweight vanadium steel. It had arc springs which prevented the body swinging against the chassis on bad roads. It had a tough planetary transmission, easy to drive without stripping the gears. It had a flywheel magneto as a reliable source of direct current.
It had a four-cylinder block cast in one piece and the valves were sealed, protected against the dust of the road. Ford never felt comfortable with blueprints. The foundryman who executed his ideas was Sorenson, cast iron Charlie. Components not made by Ford were supplied by the Dodge brothers, two of the original shareholders. In charge of sales, quarter of a million in the company.
in 1914 was Norval Hawkins. The man who controlled the supply and flow of men and materials in the factory was Cousins. Along with Ford, he had seen that productivity could be increased if the unskilled worker's function was simplified. He designed a system in which every movement was timed to the second. Ford and his team introduced mass production into automaking.
And as demand for the Model T increased, they took this one stage further. They developed the moving assembly line. The worker had to perform a specified function in a specified time.
There were over 50 sub-assemblies, some with as much as 87 separate machine operations. A rule of iron was needed to see that the timing was exact as the parts came to the final assembly. 1,000 cars a day in 1914, 2,000 in 1916. As productivity went up, the price went down. Soon, 60% of all cars made in the US would be Model T's.
The auto industry was becoming the largest in the country. President Wilson's visit to Detroit recognized this. Ford was of national political importance. Frequently he was seen with celebrities, here with Helen Keller.
We can't tell what they talked about, but it's likely that Ford had an ear for Keller's socialism. From his youth he had nurtured a bitterness against the misuse of money. Greedy capital wants all industry to raise prices and cut down labor, he wrote in this semi-illiterate hand.
I am not attacking anyone but the system. I don't blame any person but the system. He then made one of his shrewdest moves against the system. He raised wages to an unprecedented $5 a day. Before, production had been disrupted by the turnover of labor.
Now, that's stopped. The move made Ford a friend of labor, but an enemy of the establishment. Ford saw a new world in which machines would eliminate the drudgery of labor and create the cash and leisure for a better life.
At 51, Ford was free to turn to other matters and implement his progressive ideas, among them his trade school. Applicants would write from all over rural America, hoping to follow in the footsteps of the man whose blend of rural philosophy and urban success had made him so popular. Like Ford's other projects, social workers to teach immigrants English, the employment of ex-convicts, the trade school was progressive and also shrewd public relations.
Ford's presence meant the mission was well publicized. The peace ship was a failure. Ford was called a clown strutting on the stage. When the US joined the war, Ford joined the war production. He was approached by the Navy to mass produce an anti-submarine ship.
The factory site he showed the visitors was one he had been eyeing for some time. A tract of undrained land on the Rouge River. ...paid for the clearance of the land and production started on a truly Ford scale. This was the first time in industrial history that Ford techniques of assembly were applied to large structures. A whole Eagle boat could be built in 10 days.
Ford had been criticized for the peace ship. Now he was criticized for making profits out of war. The press claimed that his boy Edsel should have been drafted.
The company said he was needed to run the Eagle boat program. The charming young heir was now taking responsibility from his father. Ford was nearing 60 and Edsel would soon reach his 30th birthday. To his father, Edsel always showed a bond of loyalty. In style, the two were entirely different.
Edsel, sensitive and urban, moved with a gross point set. The young, fast-moving millionaires of the post-war days. Started in the factory from a young age.
His taste was for style and speed in cars. And when in 1921 the prestigious Lincoln Company was ailing financially, Ford purchased it. It was Edsel's kind of car.
The founder of Lincoln was Henry Leland, the master among Detroit engineers. Ford had promised control to Leland, but when the deal was signed, Ford's men were moved in and Leland edged out. Ford was becoming a monarch in the company.
Cousins had quarreled with Ford's domineering attitude and resigned. In 1917, the Dodge brothers and other large shareholders had asked for dividends on stock. Ford wanted to expand. He threatened to get out, forcing them to sell him their stock or see it decline.
They sold. To pay them off, he faced a cash crisis. He responded by sending every Model T and every spare part in the factory to the dealers.
Either they pay him or lose the dealerships. They borrowed locally and paid. Ford had the cash for expansion.
The man dominating this expansion was Sorenson, cast iron Charlie. He ran the foundry and from there he would boss the company. By gaining total financial control of the company, Ford was an exception to the rule among millionaires.
He was creating a dynasty. With the birth of Edsel's son, Henry II, succession in that dynasty was assured. Ford's image was of the national leader who was family man, the Farmer.
But then Ford's public image was damaged. The Chicago Tribune had called him an ignorant idealist, criticizing his stand on peace and failure to pay back war profits. At the trial for libel, Ford's ignorance of history and fifth grade education were exposed. The more painfully because of Ford's stammering inability to speak in public and explain that he was only interested in the history of the common man.
But the expansion had begun. In the early 20s, Ford bought land for rubber in Brazil, and large tracts of timber for car bodies in northern Michigan. Ford also bought coal mines. All was to center on his vast new factory on the Rouge River.
The Rouge plant was on the site of the Eagle boat factory. Ford's idea was to cut out both the profits and delay of suppliers. With its own steel making plant the entire production system came under his control. Ford himself seldom came to the Rouge.
The company management was five miles away in Dearborn. At the Rouge, the rule of Sorensen and the others was ruthless. To obey Ford's demand for more and more Model Ts, they speeded up the assembly line.
The size, the noise, the cramped workspace, conditions at the Rouge were brutal. Talking was forbidden. So were unions. Ex-convicts Ford had employed became the basis of a spy system to spot idlers.
Ford's progressivism now became a blueprint for control. Production of Model Ts had now reached a million a year. But with inflation, profits were only $2 a car.
Gone was the affluence of the $5 day. Ford wages in 1924 were worth less than they had been 10 years before. Among Ford's cronies was a rising henchman, Harry Bennett. Once filmed technician, he was now in control of the spy system at the factory.
Bennett was Ford's strong-arm man and becoming his right-hand man. Ford was happiest when surrounded by cronies, turning to his rural origins, searching for fundamentals. Like Lenin in Russia at this period, Ford saw the lightweight tractor as the basis of agricultural change. Ford's tractor was like the Model T, cheap, rugged, and lightweight.
Like the Model T, it was a brilliant piece of engineering that Ford himself supervised. It came at a time when only 3% of farms in the U.S. had tractors, and it paved the way for the ordinary farmer to own a tractor. There was both substance and style to Ford's rural activities, even his camping trips.
Romantic excursions with film crews and the famous. Harvey Firestone, Ford and Edison. Americans who had made America great. Urban men searching for the rural origins of the American genius.
The camping trips were exercises in pleasure and publicity. For Ford's major object in life was still to sell Fords. To do so, he made films like this. Music Sixty years earlier, the young Ford had hated farm work. Now cellular melodramas carried the message.
As many as four million people a month would see these films showing Ford's vision for a better life. The films sold modern ways. In 1924, only one farmer in four had any kind of mechanized transport. His protest dismissed, the hero, like the young Ford, is sent off to the Little Red Schoolhouse. Unlike the young Ford, the hero has the opportunity to compete for a scholarship that will lead him away from the farm and along the road to happiness.
The scholarship in highway engineering was provided by Ford's friend, the rubber magnet, Harvey Firestone. The hero wins the scholarship, becomes... county engineer and the local celebrity.
With the road to happiness paved, mechanization could send the farmer farmer safely along it. In another film, another obstinate old farmer is persuaded to buy a tractor. The tractor saves labor, and the farmer has money in the bank.... With the cash, the farmer goes to the Ford dealer and gets still another truck.
The cycle is complete. Ford films were often shown at Ford dealerships. In this film, at the end of the road to happiness, lies leisure. Leisure was spent innocently enough reading Ford's own newspaper, the Dearborn Independent.
But under the simple homespun picture lay a sting. The sting was Ford's complex hatred of finance. What do we get for borrowing from the bankers? And where do they get the money?
Ford associated banks with his virulent anti-Semitism. The Dearborn Independent carried Ford's sting. In the early 20s, 91 articles attacked the Jews, the most specific being on the Sapiro brothers, pioneers of cooperative farm marketing.
Ford was sued but persuaded by his friend Rabbi Franklin to publicly apologize. He did so. He had reason for wanting to avoid bad publicity.
Under a brilliant administrator Alfred Sloan, General Motors with its six cylinder Chevrolet was working into Ford's market. Sloan saw the potential for selling luxury and accessories. GM and other firms provided a flow of new models, updating them each year.
Ford also tried advertising to women. The Model T had always been difficult to handle. Now concessions were made, such as a self-starter. But more and more people could afford an extra hundred dollars for style. In 1925 and 26, the Chevrolet gained in the market.
The Model T was still the Model T. A radical decision was made. It was decided to build a new Ford. 12,000 employees were laid off for retooling.
Ford's factory was bigger than any in the world. But to Ford, it was still his workshop. To revamp that workshop, he dipped into his own pocket to the tune of $250 million. No other industrialist had such control. Body design on the new car began under Edsel's supervision.
Under his father, the laboratory started testing for a new engine. Typically, much of the emphasis was on strength. The other key to mass production was precision.
In 1924, Ford had bought the company which made the Johansson gauge, the finest unit of industrial measurement in the world, capable of precision to within one one-hundred-thousandth of an inch. To Henry Ford, making a car was a matter of shaping metal. Mass-producing it meant doing so to minute tolerances. In 1927, the Model A was ready for the road. The car combined the talents of father and son.
Its engine owed much to Henry's supervision. Four cylinders and light, but developing the best power-to-weight ratio of any car in the market. In many ways, the Model A was an updated Model T, but it was also a baby Lincoln.
The understated elegance owed much to Edsel. In 1929, Ford sold two million Model As worldwide. Why, everywhere is falling for her now.
I'm talking about the new Ford, and boy, it's sure a while. Lay off people, lay off folks. None of your sarcastic jokes. Henry's made a lady out of Lizzie. No more bruises, no more aches.
Since she's got those four-wheel brakes, Henry's made a lady out of Lizzie. He-he. Even got a rumble seat and lots of style and class. The horn just seems to holler out, to toot thou shall not pass.
Now that Ford celebrated the roots of the American ethic on which his empire was built. On October 21st, 1929, Ford opened his Greenfield Museum of Technology on the site of his boyhood. The date was the 50th anniversary of Edison's invention of the light bulb. As Edison stepped off the old train with President Hoover, the lights all over the country were dimmed. Around him Ford had those whose names were synonymous with success in the 20th century.
Steinmetz, the electronic wizard from General Electric. Charles Schwab of Bethlehem Steel. Lee DeForest, the pioneer of radio.
Among the guests under Ford's direction were also Marie Curie and Orville Wright. There was an irony in the timing of this event. At the exact hour that President Hoover paraded through downtown Detroit, the stock market was closed in New York. The depression was on. Ford became a Republican.
I suppose I am like most Americans. We never bother about politics, but let it mean something to us. Herbert Hoover should be allowed.
to carry out his program and I think he will. He has faced the enemy for three years now. He knows all the tactics of the forces of destruction.
Mr. Hoover is carrying a greater burden than Abraham lincoln carried and he and he is carrying it in a way that places him beside lincoln and sacrificial service it is only common sense when a man like mr hoover has been educated by experience when he has got control of the thing he is fighting when he is beginning to show results it is only common sense to let him finish his job i think of him as a human-hearted honest mind hard-working hoover in 1930 sales of the model a were down 50% sales of Chevrolet were down only 5% those who kept their jobs were the lucky ones matters came to a head when a hunger March set out for the Ford factory the marchers walk the five miles from Dearborn Then the hoses were turned on. In the fight, Bennett had tried to stop the marchers, was beaten up and emerged a hero in Ford's eyes. He is the only one who does what I want.
Ford said of him. Bennett's growing power fed off Ford's hatred of unions. His attitude was dividing Ford from his son Edsel, who saw the company declining because of its old-fashioned ways with labor and management.
A company so big its fortunes were identified. with those of the country. We have just been showing several hundred newspaper men our new models for 1934. And they have been asking us what we think of the coming year. All I can say is is that we feel pretty good about the outlook. The United States, even when it is running in low, is a pretty big business proposition.
But I believe the country is getting ready to make a very decided step forward next year, and we are doing all that we can to help it along. What do you think of that, Father? Well, I think everybody's decided that they've got to go to work.
And I think from now on, there's no one can stop this great country from going ahead. Full blast. The Monarch was becoming disenchanted.
In five years, Ford lost $174 million. To catch up with competitors, the company brought out the V8. It was yet another step forward in the assembly line process, now completely bossed by Sorensen. Thank you. A system was developed at the Rouge for moving the furnaces and casting the engine block.
Steel was made, purified, and poured into the engine molds without ever being allowed to cool. The Ford V8 represented power and speed for the popular market, but the boom market no longer existed, and labor relations continued bad. GM had given in and signed a contract with the United Auto Workers.
In 1936, Ford was the only large company to refuse to bargain with organized labor. Ford grumbled and blamed his troubles on the $5 day of 20 years before. In March 1937, Ford workers were attempting to organize the Rouge. These are the photographs shown in the court by the UAW. Two young organizers, Walter Ruther and Richard Frankenstein, were pitted against Bennett's goons at the number five gate.
The beating of Frankenstein brought Ford employees solidly behind the UAW. But it would be four years before Ford would sign a contract. He was old, 74 now.
The world was passing him by. At Greenfield Village, Henry Ford rebuilt the schoolhouse he had attended 70 years before. Ford's only textbooks had been the McGuffey Readers, moral passages for 19th century farm children. Now, McGuffey was to be enshrined.
Friends. I'm glad to join with you today in giving honor to Dr. McGuffey. He was a great American, and the McGuffey readers taught industry and morality to the youth of America.
Thank you. Still, Ford's rural interests were not entirely nostalgic. He was thinking about a revolution in agricultural technology.
We must make milk out of something, he wrote. His mind turned to soybeans, which could be made into plastic for cars, and a substitute for milk. And he established a small experimental farm for growing soy.
Henry Ford also developed a series of rural factories to give farmers an income making Ford parts. Music This was utopian. When the 1940 World's Fair took place in New York, the last V8 model to be built before 1949 was displayed. Europe was at war. A fact Ford stolidly refused to believe.
Edsel was running the company, but he was sick, harried by his father. father wasted by ulcers, so sick that Clara Ford had to persuade Henry Ford to sign with the UAW. A few weeks later, Henry Ford suffered a stroke.
He became more than ever convinced that his son was misguided. In contrast, Bennett's power increased, as this note of Sorenson shows. Bennett in full accord with Henry Ford.
Henry Ford will support Bennett against any obstacle. By the time the note was written, Pearl Harbor had been bombed and the U.S. was at war. The factory Edsel and Sorenson built for war production was the culmination of the Ford Ideal, a mile-long assembly for B-24s.
The factory was built without Henry Ford's consent. Ford was a ghost of his old self. But the ghost still overshadowed the struggle for power in the Empire.
Edsel's health got worse. He developed stomach cancer and died. Sorensen jotted down the event.
Now it was Sorensen who was gone, dismissed after 44 years. Clara and Edsel's wife were afraid he would seize power from the family. Bennett impounded his company car.
Another figure now begins to appear in Ford films, Edsel's son, Henry Two. The government felt it essential that a member of the family keep an eye on the aging founder. FDR personally signed Henry Two's discharge from the Navy. Ford was nearing 80. For two years the young Henry Ford eyed Bennett suspiciously.
Then in 1945, when the war ended, he was able to fire the man who had wielded such power in the leaderless company. Henry Ford died in 1947. 70,000 people came to pay homage to him as he lay in state at Greenfield Village, the site of his boyhood. In the fall, the Ford supervisors went on strike. Many had been with Ford since the early days of the Rouge. The company was at its lowest ebb.
By normal accounting, the only profit since 1927 had come from the war years. But in five years, Henry II built the company back to life. The Ford Product Planning Committee, a team of top executives who coordinate all of Ford planning activities. Henry Ford, too, gave the company a modern management structure. He raided from General Motors and hired their executives such as Ernest Breach.
He also brought in a group of business school whiz kids, trained in systems approaches, including Robert McNamara. The transformation of the company was completed. Henry Ford, the founder, had wanted a car that was cheap, efficient, and without frills.
There would be little room for these values in the post-war market. Jim Johnson's a pretty normal guy ordinarily, but lately he's been acting very strange. Mine seems to be a million miles away. Mrs. Johnson and Judy are getting worried about him.
Last night, for example, he turned down a piece of his favorite pie. The other day, he even kicked that car he's always been so proud of. And is always writing figures of some kind on the backs of envelopes. No, this isn't like Jim at all.
There must be something wrong. That magazine he was looking at, maybe that's a clue. Yes, that's the answer.
Surprised you didn't guess, aren't you? Well, there's only one thing to do. Only one cure.
And Mrs. Johnson is wise enough to know it. She knows the only medicine for this condition in the American male is... this.
The gleam of new chrome, the sparkle of new paint, and that wonderful perfume that only comes from a new car yes it's a familiar scene one that's played every day all over America and we're all better off because of it you see that beautiful new car and the way Jim Johnson feels about it are the symbols of a constant desire for something newer and better that is typical of all the Johnson families across the nation and the competitive drive to satisfy that desire to build that better mousetrap is the force that has made the American marketplace the most abundant in the world.