Matt MacNabb - A Secret History of Brands - The Dark and Twisted Beginnings of the Brand Names We Know and Love

A brief history of Ford’s efforts towards the workforce could seem like a win-win for everyone, except that, as with so much of Henry Ford, digging a little deeper unveils a more complicated view of the man and his methods and how they often seemed to circle back to his distrust of immigrants. The $5 per day wasn’t a wage that you would just walk off the street and get. It was actually an incentive wage and wasn’t guaranteed unless you met Ford’s rigorous requirements. Ford required his immigrant workforce to attend the company English school in order to become fully ‘Americanised’. It took six months to graduate ‘the pageant of the Ford melting pot’. The workers who completed the forced cultural appropriation training would all dress in stereotypical clothing from their country of origin and jump into a literal large pot and get stirred-up. The workers would then emerge wearing a proper American-style suit and a straw hat. It must have been quite a spectacle. The idea of Americanisation was far from something that Henry Ford invented. In fact, Americans had been practising a form of cultural assimilation when it came to Native Americans for hundreds of years prior to that. The idea behind it was to ‘civilize’ the Native Americans and adapt them to the European-American way of life, customs, clothing and education. This bigoted and ignorant process would effectively nullify their culture.

The Ford Sociological Department would also be sent to invade the personal lives of the workers to investigate the cleanliness of their homes. In KGB-like fashion, they would grill the workers to find out whether they sent money back to anyone ‘back home’, if they were really married, did they have any boarders in the house, and would even check to see if their water was clean. Henry Ford tried to socially engineer immigrants to force them to become his vision of an American citizen. It turns out that Ford actually used his $5 a day wage as a way to strip the foreign culture out of immigrants. After two failed inspections a worker was fired. That level of invasion of privacy and social engineering would be unheard of in today’s world.

Henry Ford eventually embarked on a massive public relations campaign, even going to the lengths of establishing the Ford Motion Picture Department to produce in-house features. It was in 1914 that they released their first movie in theatres titled How Henry Ford Makes 1000 Cars A Day . The self-promoting film presented Henry Ford as a simple everyman with simple tastes. Henry Ford was portrayed as hard working, like his workers, and a plain man that just likes to work on his farm.

The real Henry Ford was a peculiar dichotomy, he was a very wealthy man that was often photographed with his many celebrity friends and yet he enjoyed a reputation in the press as the everyman industrialist. This treatment would cause the ego of Henry Ford to grow. When it came to dealing with his employees, his ego would never allow him to fire anyone himself; that could damage his image. Instead, he would have the unsavoury task done on the sly. An employee could come in for work one day and their desk would have simply disappeared. Ford came to enjoy the power that he held over others, a position that would swell his own self-importance and convince him that his own judgement and opinions were impeccable and not to be questioned.

Henry Ford begrudgingly handed over the Ford Motor Company to his son Edsel in 1918, but that was far from the last time he would be involved in the decision making process. Ford would retain a high level of control in the company, eventually even tricking the stockholders into selling their shares to him and Edsel, which placed the control of the company back in the hands of the Ford family. Truly, Henry Ford would let Edsel only ostensibly run the company, while he continued to control and manipulate every aspect and even take the opportunity to humiliate Edsel from time to time.

The 1920s in America were full of change. There was new youthful music, dancing clubs and prohibition. The change was all over the roadways. There were suddenly so many cars, where there had been virtually none before. The roadways were often clogged and congested, but this new era brought an enormous amount of change. The automobile industry boom fuelled the rubber and oil industries, created gas stations, roadside motels, restaurants and of course the inevitable road construction and expansion. The sudden boom and use of the car changed vacation habits and even the way cities were set up. The younger generation had embraced the idea of the car as a tool of leisure and escape, a fact that the old fashioned thinker Henry Ford wasn’t fond of. The new generation of consumers would demand more detailed and flashy cars, along with new features. The Roaring Twenties were full of flash and style, a trend that Ford had no intention of carrying over into his own vehicles. The flagrant consumerism seemed to make him uncomfortable. ‘The American of a generation ago was a shrewd buyer’, Ford said, ‘but nowadays the American people seem to listen and be sold.’

Ford ignored the new marketplace and the inevitable happened…sales began to fall. The sales of Chevy/GM, by contrast, had tripled and were available in a variety of fresh, new colours. Ford didn’t want to make anything but the Model T. He held strong to the idea that his own vision was all that mattered, and it began to hold him back in the marketplace. The Model T had already become obsolete in the new world. Ford asserted, ‘The only problem with a Ford car is that we can’t produce it fast enough’.

Edsel Ford saw the need to make some major changes and finally went toe-to-toe with his father. The sleek Ford Model A was the first Ford car to be available on an instalment plan. Edsel was behind it, but Ford took the credit in the press. Edsel had to push to get it made. The Model A revived the company’s sales, with 700,000 cars sold in the first year alone. The relationship between Henry Ford and his son soured at this point, and would never properly recover. Henry couldn’t face that his baby, the Model T, was now obsolete; but the country was going through a major period of change. Rural America began to disappear, as more people were living in cities than on the farm.

The 1929 Stock Market crash deeply affected the city of Detroit and the auto industry. A wave of poverty and unemployment began to move across the country and soon the consumer was no longer there. In four years the automobile marketplace lost ninety per cent of its previous business. Ford tried to keep the workers solvent and raised wages to $7 per day, but Model A sales weren’t there anymore, so the layoffs came. The mayor of Detroit, Frank Murphy, estimated in the early 1930s that a third of the 200,000 people in the bread lines were laid off by Ford’s factories alone. Unemployed citizens would wait hours for just a small ration of bread during the difficult economic times. The former employees of Ford were hungry and would even take to the streets with other unemployed workers in hunger marches. An article published in Fortune at the time noted that ‘Declining sales have changed Mr Ford from one of the greatest U.S. money-makers to one of the greatest money losers.’ Ironically, the very same Fortune magazine would name Henry Ford as businessman of the century in 1999.

Henry Ford hated the idea of a labour union. He hated that they were a challenge to his power and his absolute authority over the way he chose to run his factory.

Ford employed a young man named Harry Bennett, an ex-Navy man, to control the River Rouge factory floor with his gang of armed toughs that kept strict grips on the employees. Bennett was a small man at only 5ft 7in, and weighing a spry 145lbs. Ford wanted the 24-year-old to act as his muscle at his Rouge factory. The men there were gritty and tough to manage and Ford needed someone who answered directly to him that could strong-arm the employees into subservience. Bennett wasn’t a disappointment; he and his men ruled the plant with an iron fist and loaded weapons.