The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (Hardcover)

~ (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Performing the same magnificent feat for Henry Ford as he did for Walt Disney (in The Magic Kingdom), historian Watts offers a magisterial and balanced biography of one of America's business legends. As a farm boy in Michigan, Ford (1863–1947) followed the beat of his own drum, avoiding hard work but watching farm machinery with fascination. He objected to wasting physical energy when a machine could accomplish the same task in less time, and spent much of his leisure taking watches apart and rebuilding them to learn about their mechanisms. Once he moved to Detroit, Ford worked as an engineer at the Edison Illuminating Company, where he quickly became famous for his ability to patch up engines. Then, in 1898, he invented the prototype of his Model A car, secured investors to set up a business and established the first unit of what would become the Ford Motor Company. Watts deftly traces Ford's rise to fame and the innovations, such as the "five-dollar" workday, which doubled factory workers' salaries, that he brought to the workplace, while a chapter titled "Bigot" delineates his notorious anti-Semitism. Watts also brilliantly reveals the contradictions of Ford's business philosophy and his personal and work life. While Ford thought of himself as a man of the people and strove to improve working conditions and wages in his factory, for example, he opposed unions. As Watts points out, Ford embodied both the promises and pitfalls of modern American democracy: "its devotion to opportunity, openness to new ideas, [and] lack of pretension" as well as its anti-intellectualism and "faith in the redemptive power of material goods."
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The New Yorker

By the early nineteentwenties, half of all cars on the road were Ford Model Ts, and Henry Ford was one of the most widely quoted men in America. This sturdy biography credits Ford with having, more than anyone else, "created the American Century," spearheading a vast consumer revolution by his mastery of "the mechanisms of modern publicity." When his first attempts at auto production failed, Ford captivated the nation with a series of audacious publicity stunts. His maverick populism made him the first tycoon to be a hero to ordinary Americans, but it was a short step from his early tirades against East Coast bankers and intellectuals to the anti-Semitic crusades that now mar his legacy. Watts somewhat underplays recently discovered evidence of Ford's collaboration—through a German subsidiary—with the Nazi regime, preferring to concentrate on the man who embodied the maxim "To make a sensation, be one."
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 640 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; 1St Edition edition (August 9, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375407359
• ISBN-13: 978-0375407352
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.5 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #555,716 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

  Popular in this category: (What's this?)

  #26 in

  Books > Biographies & Memoirs > People, A-Z > ( F ) > Ford, Henry

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

37 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The life of the mechanical, marketing, and industrial genius who changed America forever, November 4, 2005

By	Craig Matteson (Ann Arbor, MI) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)

While the name of Henry Ford is still synonymous with automobiles and assembly lines, he does not fill the popular culture as he did even as late as the 1970s. This excellent book is not only a biography of the man, it discusses the cultural icon and how it was made and remade. We see a mechanical genius who "read machines as other men read books" and watch his fabulous success with the Model-T and the Highland Park plant.

Steven Watts has organized this book so that it flows more or less chronologically in the broad sweep, but each chapter is really a different topic that exemplifies a certain stage in Henry Ford's life. Within each chapter, the author feels free to swing into the past and recapitulate events that he has discussed previously but now fleshes out or to take us into the future to see how a certain aspect of his life played out in Ford's later life.

One of the important reasons to read these kinds of histories is that without them our past becomes flattened and we lose the sense of what happened when and why. We tend to remember a couple of events that we think are important because we remember them, but we have no context and often jumble their actual historical context and meaning. For example, the famous $5 a day is easy to misunderstand unless you also add in Ford's starting an organization that worked with his workers and their families (or intruded on them, depending on your position) to make sure they were using all that money properly. Also, not every worker was eligible for that wage. Single women without dependents could not sign up for that program.

Ford also was a master of publicity. He kept himself in the limelight, partly as a way of not having to pay for advertising. However, he also was jealous of anyone in his company who got attention in the press. More than a few found their careers ended when Ford felt they were stepping into his limelight.

One of the areas where Ford hurt himself was in the kind of bullying yes men he hired to run his company for him. And for all his talk of progressive values and consumerism, he still treated his workers as cogs in the machine, to be used and disposed of as needed. He felt that their pay was sufficient to warrant his freedom to do with his company as he wished without further regard to how it affected the lives of the tens of thousands who depended on his company for their living. After all, it was Henry's company, and he simply hired them to do a job. If they couldn't do the job because they were sick or old or if he had to retool or anything else, they were out the door and left to their own devices. During the depression, they drove the men even harder to produce. Even talking on the job was grounds for dismissal. If you had time to talk, you weren't working hard enough or paying enough attention to your task.

Another problem we have with historical figures is that we tend to assign one judgment to an entire life. All of us have many aspects to our life, the difference was the scale of Henry Ford's life. There is the boy who had no use for school, but loved tinkering with machines and engines. Then there is the skilled and valuable employee who came to the attention of Thomas Edision; Ford's idol. You then have to look at the various car companies he started with investors, much to their consternation. Ford never took orders or took other's desires or wishes into much consideration (except for his wife, Clara). When he was a huge success with the Model-T some of the investors wanted dividends paid out rather than letting the company horde the cash. The Dodge brothers actually sued him, and won. It wasn't long until Ford bought all of them out, secretly of course.

It is unfathomable today that one man would own something as large as the Ford Motor Company was back then and build something as gargantuan as the River Rouge plant. When that plant was built it marked a turning point in Ford's life, and not all for the better. He had always had a strained relationship with his son, Edsel. Even when Henry put Edsel in charge of the company, it was Henry who retained all the power. He kept complaining that Edsel was too soft. Later in life, he said he was trying to get Edsel to get mad. However, it is unfair to ask a son to fight his father. And how can anyone fight a Henry Ford. One time, the Rouge Plant needed more steel making capacity and Edsel authorized the building of new furnaces. Rather than immediately countermanding the authorization, as he had so many of Edsel's decisions, he purposefully waited until they were built and running to give the order to tear them down.

Yet, when Edsel became ill and died in 1943 at the age of 49, it was a crushing blow for Henry. His relationship with his son was one of the great failures in his life.

There is so much to talk about in discussing this very complex colossus. There is the building of Greenfield Village, his dabbling in farming and his views of putting industrial plants in rural areas so men could make money in the factories during the winter, but farm during the summer. His views on education, his revival of old fashioned ballroom dancing that became a national craze, his fighting the unions until his wife Clara told him she would leave him if he didn't agree to the settlement, and so much more.

However, I do wish the author hadn't resorted to calling so many of Ford's attitudes and values Victorian and letting that pass for an explanation. It is really a quite meaningless label. Everyone thinks they know what it means, but few will agree on much except sexual repression, and that is really a mischaracterization as well. And someone as American as Henry Ford a Victorian? No, there is a lot more to the origins of those values than that easy bumper sticker of a term.

Also, there is never a discussion of the tycoon's wealth in detail. If you are going to use the term tycoon in the title, you really should devote a couple of pages describing how large the fortune became and what happened to it rather than simply describing the accumulation and charity as parts of other anecdotes, but hese are just quibbles. This is a very good book and I hope everyone reads it. There is no better single example than Henry Ford to understand how America moved from a nation of farmers to an industrial giant.

20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Transformation Of America And The Fall Of Henry Ford, September 2, 2005

By	C. Hutton "book maven" (East Coast, USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Mr. Watts has written a superb account of the genius of Henry Ford in his creation, building, and marketing of the Model T automobile. He singlehandedly created the car industry, it numerous suppliers and spin-off beneficiaries (new roads, diners, motels, et al). He paid his workers a credible salary so that they could afford his car but crushed labor unions who challenged his total control.

Unfortunately, this was his zenith of creativity. As he aged, he refused to change with the passage of time and stayed stuck with his outdated concepts. He remained a control freak for the rest of his life which stunted the growth of his children and of the Ford Motor Company. His anti-Semitism colored his isolationist views and led to his endorsement of the "America First" movement for neutrality during World War II.

Mr Watts tells his sad tale with the right mixture of admiration for his professional contributions and disdain for his personal failings. He places Henry Ford within the culture of his times and how he altered Americvan society. For the reader desiring further information, Robert Lacy's "Ford: The Men and The Machine" (1986) portrays the story of the Ford family until the mid-1980's.

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A VERY WELL BALANCED FORD BIOGRAPHY, September 11, 2005

By	D. Blankenship (The Ozarks) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Of the countless Ford Biographies out here, this is perhaps one of the more balanced. The author has done his research and has presented his material in a manner which is not only quite readable, but quite informative. I do like the way Prof. Watts has given us numerous examples of his sources, i.e. different publications, speeches, news paper articles, etc. The author has given us both the good and the bad of Henry Ford, and we find that the subject of the book, Henry Ford, is much like all of us...both good and bad. I did enjoy and appreciate the fact that the author does not seem to have a particular social or political ax to grind, but rather gives us the facts and gives credit to the reader's ability to make up his or her own mind. This is refreshing. Far enough time has passed so that now historians can make some judements and obervations as to the overall impact and ramifications of the actions taken during the Ford years, by both Ford and his contemporaries, have upon our society today. Not until recently have historians been able to do this. Mr. Watts has done a wonderful job of this. Recommend this one highly. Thank you Prof. Watts for some obvious hard work.