One Summer: America, 1927

departure. What can be said is that all the real innovations at Ford happened when Couzens was there and none of lasting consequence happened after – at least not until the summer of 1927, and those were by no means unalloyed successes.
     
    By the late 1920s, one American in six owned a car – which was getting close to a rate of one per family – and many people were finding the automobile an essential part of life. The sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd, in their classic study of middle America, Middletown , published in 1929, found to their surprise that more people in the anonymous town of the title (which in fact was Muncie, Indiana) had cars than bathtubs. Asked why, one woman replied simply: ‘Because we can’t go to town in a bathtub.’
    Unfortunately, and increasingly, the cars Americans loved were not Fords. Other makers were producing cars of superior quality and value. General Motors supplied as standard such devices as speedometers and shock absorbers that Ford was slow to supply at all. GM moreover produced a range of cars to fit every pocket, from Chevrolets at the basic end to Cadillacs at the top. (Cadillac was such an exclusive division that it maintained a showroom in Manhattan where, as its ads boasted, ‘Sales are neither made nor discussed.’ Visitors could admiringly inspect the latest models, but had to go elsewhere for the sordid business of making a purchase.)
    Under the enterprising leadership of Alfred Sloan, Jr, General Motors constantly restyled and refined its cars, adding new colours and features to stimulate interest and excitement. By the late 1920s GM was well on its way to perfecting the annual model change, a practice that was essentially needless but magnificently effective as a marketing tool. Also racing up from behind was the new Chrysler Corporation, which was formed out of the old Maxwell Motor Company and named after Walter Chrysler, its dynamic head. By the late 1920s Chrysler was doing so extraordinarily well that he could afford to build a splendid monument to himself: the fabled seventy-seven-storey Chrysler Building, which upon completion was the world’s tallest building. (Not for long, however. Eleven months later it was superseded by the Empire State Building.)
    All this combined to make Ford look increasingly old-fashioned and flat-footed. Ford’s last really good year was 1923. Between thenand the end of 1926, total production at the company went down by 400,000. During the same period production went up by an almost equal amount at Chevrolet – a division that had been developed by William Knudsen, a brilliant former Ford engineer who had been driven into the arms of General Motors by Henry’s autocratic methods.
     
    Remarkably, while this was happening Henry Ford increasingly occupied himself with other, less urgent matters. He pursued a fixation with finding industrial uses for agricultural products. He was particularly taken with what he saw as the infinite adaptability of the soybean. He wore suits woven from soy fibres and built experimental cars made almost exclusively with soy plastics and other materials. (The car never went into production because it never could be made not to stink.) He fed guests dinners that consisted primarily of soybean products – ‘pineapple rings with soybean cheese, soybean bread with soybean butter, apple pie with soy crust, roasted soybean coffee, and soymilk ice cream’, in the words of his biographer Greg Grandin. Ford so admired the head of his soybean research division, Edsel Ruddiman, that he named his only child after him.
    To promote his personal beliefs he bought a dying weekly newspaper, the Dearborn Independent , and turned it into a general-interest magazine. The Independent became famous for the dullness of its features and the waywardness of its views. It was produced from some surplus factory space, prompting one wag to call it ‘the best weekly ever turned out by a tractor plant’. Ford interfered with it extensively. One of his ideas was to bring assembly line methods to its production. Instead of assigning each article to an individual writer, as on a conventional publication, he wanted the articles to proceed along a kind of editorial assembly line where a team of specialists would each make a specific contribution and then pass the article on. One writer would supply the facts, another the humour, a third the moral instruction and so on. Ford waspersuaded to drop that idea, but tinkered