One Summer: America, 1927

Ford’s mind. Asked to identify the notorious traitor Benedict Arnold, Ford replied: ‘I have heard the name.’
    ‘Who was he?’ pressed the lawyer.
    ‘I have forgotten just who he is,’ Ford answered. ‘He is a writer, I think.’
    Ford, it transpired, did not know much of anything. He could not say when the American Revolution was fought (‘In 1812, I think; I’m not quite sure’) or what the issues were that provoked it. Questioned about politics, he conceded that he didn’t follow matters closely and had voted only once in his life. That was just after his twenty-first birthday when, he said, he had voted for James Garfield. An alert lawyer pointed out that Garfield was in fact assassinated three years before Ford reached voting age.
    And so it went on, day after day. The world was so delighted and enthralled with Ford’s ignorance that one enterprising man sold hastily printed copies of Ford’s testimony for 25 cents each day outside the courthouse, and bought a house with the profits. (Eventually the jury found in Ford’s favour, but the jurors – twelve stolid Michigan farmers who clearly believed they had better thingsto do with their time – awarded him damages of just 6 cents. The Tribune never paid.)
    Whether Ford was stupid or just inattentive has fuelled debate among historians and other commentators for nearly a century. John Kenneth Galbraith had no doubt about the matter. Ford’s life and career, he maintained, were ‘marked by obtuseness and stupidity and, in consequence, by a congeries of terrible errors’. Allan Nevins and Frank Ernest Hill in a generally sympathetic biography of 1957 called him ‘an ignoramus outside his chosen field [but] an ignoramus of sense and integrity’. That was about as warm a tribute as Henry Ford received from those who knew him well or considered him carefully. He was not, in short, a terribly bright or reflective human being.
    Yet against this must be set his extraordinary achievement. When Henry Ford built his first Model T, Americans had some 2,200 makes of cars to choose from. Every one of those cars was in some sense a toy, a plaything for the well-to-do. Ford changed the automobile into a universal appliance, an affordable device practical for all, and that difference in philosophy made him unimaginably successful and changed the world. Within just over a decade Ford had more than fifty factories on six continents, employed 200,000 people, produced half the world’s cars, and was the most successful industrialist in history, worth perhaps as much as $2 billion, by one estimate. By perfecting mass production and making the automobile an object within financial reach of the average working man, he wholly transformed the course and rhythm of modern life. We live in a world largely shaped by Henry Ford. But in the summer of 1927, Henry Ford’s part of that world was beginning to look a little rocky.
     
    Henry Ford was born in July 1863, the same month as the Battle of Gettysburg, and lived into the atomic age, dying in 1947 just short of his eighty-fourth birthday. His earliest conviction was that he didn’t want to be a farmer, for ‘there was too much work on theplace’. For the first half of his long life, he was little more than an accomplished mechanic. After leaving school at sixteen, he worked in various machine and engine shops in Detroit, eventually becoming chief engineer of the Edison Illuminating Company. In the 1890s, he quit that to pursue a fixation with building the best possible motor car. According to Morris Markey, writing in the New Yorker , Ford was at a car race one day when a French driver crashed and was mortally injured. While others rushed to the stricken driver, Ford rushed to the car, which had survived better than he thought possible. Taking a hunk of chassis away with him, he discovered it was made of vanadium steel, a strong but lightweight material. Vanadium steel became the foundation metal for every car he made henceforth. However true or not that story is, it is certainly the case that Ford didn’t rush into production until he had worked out every detail of manufacture and composition. He was forty years old before he founded the Ford Motor Company in 1903 and forty-five when he produced his first Model T. fn2
    The Model T, like Ford himself, was an unlikely candidate for greatness. It was almost wilfully rudimentary. For years the car had no speedometer and no fuel gauge. Drivers who wanted to know how