Farm Boy
By the early 1920s, Henry Ford may have been the most famous man in
the world. His inexpensive, durable, and perky Model T had taken
America by storm, and the pioneering industrialist had garnered
enormous fame and wealth. The Ford visage seemed to appear
everywhere, constantly. A torrent of interviews, newspaper stories,
publicity handouts, advertisements, and popular biographies flooded
into the public realm, carrying details of his life story and his
comments on every imaginable topic. Often based on interviews with
him, or legendary tales, these pieces told the story of Ford’s life
as he wanted it to be told.
They poured the events of Henry Ford’s life into the mold of the
American success story. This hoary genre dated back to Benjamin
Franklin and his autobiography of the penniless, bright, and
determined youth who had walked into colonial Philadelphia munching
on bread rolls as the first step in his meteoric rise to
distinction. Horatio Alger had updated it for the nineteenth century
with popular novels such as Struggling Upward and Mark the Match
Boy.
Now Ford sought to place himself squarely within this American
mythology. His version of his life story could have been lifted from
any one of Alger’s cookie-cutter plots: the young man pursues his
dream while others scoff, he undertakes a lonely journey from the
country to the city in search of fulfillment, overcomes obstacles
with a combination of pluck, determination, and talent, and finally
rises to heights of achievement and prosperity. The Ford success
story contained an additional element-the youthful hero had a stern
father who was skeptical of the son’s newfangled ambitions and
sought to stymie his creativity.
The struggle against paternal authority, with its Oedipal overtones,
became a key to Henry Ford’s rendering of his own early life. His
ghostwritten book, My Life and Work (1922), a runaway best-seller,
particularly highlighted this theme. Designed by Ford to popularize
his ideas and enhance his legend, the book related how his father,
William, sought to discourage his interest in machines. “My father
was not entirely in sympathy with my bent toward mechanics. He
thought that I ought to be a farmer,” Ford told readers. When he
finally decided to leave the farm, “I was all but given up for
lost.” Ford added that his later experiments with the gasoline
engine while he was an electrical engineer “were no more popular
with the president of the company than my first mechanical leanings
were with my father.”
There was one problem, however, with this tale of triumph over
overweening paternal domination: it was as much the product of Henry
Ford’s imagination as a picture of reality. The facts suggest a
different story. Though tension between father and son certainly
existed, its causes were more complex and its results much less
melodramatic than the younger Ford related. In part, it resulted
from clashing personalities and private needs. Henry Ford’s oft-told
tale of rebellion and triumph over his father reflected a
fundamental trait in his personality: a deeply felt need to present
himself as a self-reliant individual who fought to prevail against
lesser opponents and skeptics.
But this embroidery also went beyond personal issues. It was rooted
in far-reaching currents of historical change that were broadly
social as well as narrowly personal. By the late nineteenth century,
America’s industrial revolution was expanding explosively and
beginning to overwhelm the traditional rural republic. Ford’s story
of rebellion, flight, and triumph was told thousands of times over
as hordes of young men fled the countryside and streamed into urban
manufacturing centers. This tidal wave of change, of which young
Ford was a part, produced the machine age. Its alien values and
unfamiliar landscape exhilarated many younger men, but it unsettled,
even frightened many older citizens.
The younger and elder Fords were caught up in this larger social
dynamic of America in the late 1800s. As William Ford occasionally
remarked, “Oh, Henry ain’t much of a farmer. He is more of a
tinkerer.” The son’s tale of struggle with his father was destined
to take shape in the stark, melodramatic terms of authority
challenged, defied, and finally overturned. Even if it was as much
imagined as real, Henry Ford’s story not only revealed the young
innovator’s state of mind but resonated with the kinetic energy
generated by the larger remaking of the United States in this era.
B
In late July 1863, much of the United States still was abuzz with
reports of unimaginable fighting and bloodshed seeping out from the
small Pennsylvania town of Gettysburg, where, a few weeks before,
Robert E. Lee’s invasion of the North had been thwarted by the Union
Army of the Potomac. Far away, in the hinterland of the fractured
American republic, in the early-morning hours of July 30, a healthy
son was born to William and Mary Ford in Greenfield township, near
Dearborn, Michigan. They had married two years earlier, and their
first child had died at birth in 1862. So this pregnancy had caused
much anxiety, and the safe arrival of the infant was the source of
much relief. The parents decided to name the boy Henry.
The child was born into a society barely emerged from the
wilderness. Though Michigan had become a state in 1837, it remained
predominantly a frontier area, sparsely settled with farmers who
were beginning to hack their way through primeval forests of oak,
elm, maple, ash, beech, basswood, and pine trees. By the 1840s and
1850s, the first signs of commercial endeavor had started to appear
in the countryside. The Erie Canal had provided connections between
the Great Lakes region and the Eastern port of New York City; later,
the first primitive steamboats, turnpikes, and railroads moved into
the interior of Michigan, carrying people and commercial goods.
Detroit grew steadily, along with other trading towns such as Port
Huron, Kalamazoo, Grand Rapids, Benton Harbor, and Ypsilanti.
Agriculture remained the backbone of the state’s economy, but by the
1850s timber harvesting, the fishing industry, and the mining of
copper and iron ore were contributing significant wealth.
By the onset of the Civil War, Michigan stood as the embodiment of
the nineteenth-century rural republic. With a population of roughly
750,000-immigration of large numbers of Irish and Germans had added
to the stream of New Yorkers and New Englanders bringing settlers
over its borders-the state presented a proud rural culture populated
by self-reliant landowners and fiercely independent citizens. In the
1850s, like most of the Old Northwest, Michigan was swept up in
antislavery politics and became a bastion of the new Republican
Party, with its ideology of “free soil, free labor, free men.”
Staunchly Unionist during the Civil War, Michigan contributed ninety
thousand troops to the federal armies; some fifteen thousand of them
died from battlefield wounds or disease.
Henry Ford’s childhood, which began in the heart of this great civil
conflagration, typified rural Midwestern life in the mid-nineteenth
century. In the hundreds of towns, villages, and rural communities
scattered throughout the area bounded by the Great Lakes in the
north and the Ohio River to the south, and the Appalachians and
Great Plains to the east and west, life was shaped by local
influences. Several threads-extended family connections, seasonal
farm labor, community gatherings, church-came together in a tightly
woven web of social experience. Young Henry, like any toddler on a
busy farm, stayed close to his mother, but he could not avoid being
immersed in nature, the seasonal rhythms of agricultural production,
and the workaday calendar of providing shelter and sustenance. His
first childhood memory invoked this rural quality of life:
The first thing that I remember in my life is my father taking my
brother John and myself to see a bird’s nest under a large oak log
twenty rods east of our home and my birthplace. John was so young
that he could not walk. Father carried him, [while] I being two
years older could run along with them. This must have been about the
year 1866 in June. I remember the nest with 4 eggs and also the bird
and hearing it sing. I have always remembered the song and in later
years found that it was a song sparrow.
As a boy, young Henry increasingly came into contact with the adult
male world of farm work. William pursued the typical, varied
activities of a self-sufficient farmer: growing wheat, corn, and
hay; raising livestock and smoking meat; tending a fruit orchard;
hunting and fishing; preserving vegetables in cellars over the
winter; cutting firewood for domestic use and to sell in nearby
Detroit for extra cash. Labor was long and hard, and, in the words
of a Ford neighbor, farmers set off for their fields and “went to
work from daylight to dark, and then went home and did their
chores.” Tagging along with his father, Henry lent a hand with
planting and harvesting, caring for livestock, and doing various
chores. Inevitably, contact with hard-bitten farmhands produced a
comical initiation rite. At about age six, the youngster was resting
with some of the laborers when one of them innocently offered him a
plug of chewing tobacco. Ignorant of the proper procedure for
leisurely mastication and spitting, he chewed up the potent
concoction and then swallowed it. As the men laughed, the boy grew
lightheaded and dizzy as he began walking woozily back toward the
house. Sitting down by the creek near his home, he recalled much
later, “I had the feeling that the water was flowing uphill.” When
he staggered in the door with his story, his mother burst into
laughter but quickly reassured her son that he would be all right.
In January 1871, at age seven, Ford trooped off to the one-room
Scotch Settlement School, about two miles from his house. He had
been well prepared by his mother, who already had conveyed the
rudiments of reading by teaching him the alphabet and patiently
leading him through simple texts. Among his early school instructors
were Frank R. Ward, a sharp-witted neighbor; Emily Nardin, a young
woman who roomed with the Ford family for a short time; and John
Brainard Chapman, a large, stout man whose intimidating physical
presence made up for his intellectual shortcomings. According to
John Haggerty, one of Ford’s schoolmates, Chapman “could have told
Henry and me everything he knew in 10 minutes. But he weighed 275
pounds and it was the weight that really counted.”
Young Ford settled into the typical routine of provincial public
schools. The children of all ages met regularly during the winter
and rainy seasons, but adjourned for weeks during planting and
harvesting periods. School days began, after the woodstove had been
stoked, with the reading of a Bible verse and recitation of the
Lord’s Prayer. Teachers closely followed a basic curriculum of
reading, writing, and arithmetic and drilled into the heads of their
young charges standards of honor, hard work, and fair play. Sitting
at a desk on a raised platform at the front of the room, the teacher
called students forward to recite lessons orally or write them on
blackboards. Teachers sought to enforce discipline and instill
self-control as well as impart information. As Ford recalled,
students who misbehaved were brought to the front of the room and
“placed directly under the teacher’s eye.”
Henry was an expert prankster. With typical ingenuity, he once bored
two small holes in the bottom of another student’s seat. In one hole
he hid a needle with the point up, and then ran a connecting string
down through the other hole and under the bench to his seat. During
a dead space in the school day, he yanked on the string, and the
resulting howls brought peals of laughter from his classmates. He
also proved to be a bright, if unexceptional, student who
particularly excelled at “oral” arithmetic, or working out number
problems in his head. His greatest achievements, however, came from
mechanical tinkering. Sitting at his desk while classmates recited
at the front of the room, he would prop up his geography book as a
cover; behind it, he took apart classmates’ watches and put them
back together. Once Henry and his schoolboy pals built a dam of
stones and mud on a small creek near the school and installed a
primitive water wheel that turned as water flowed over the dam. At
the end of the school day, however, they forgot their construction
project, left it in place overnight, and flooded the neighboring
farmer’s potato field. Another time, Henry led the group in building
a crude turbine steam engine. Using an old ten-gallon can for a
boiler, they attached to it a short length of pipe for carrying
steam to revolving tin blades. A roaring fire built enough steam
pressure to turn the turbine very fast, but eventually the
contraption exploded. The spewing steam and flying tin slightly
injured the boys, including Henry, who was left with a lifelong scar
on his cheek. As Ford recalled ruefully, the explosion “set the
[school] fence on fire and raised ned in general.”
Henry Ford commenced his lifelong friendship with Edsel Ruddiman, a
neighbor boy, at the Scotch Settlement School. The two became nearly
inseparable, and they spent much of their boyhood together. They
played, walked, and talked nearly every day and carved their
initials next to each other in the desk they shared. The two
companions even went to church together on Sunday evenings-it was
about a four-mile walk-even though neither was very religious. “It
was more to be together,” Ruddiman admitted. In later years,
Ruddiman became a prominent pharmacist and chemist at the Ford Motor
Company. When Henry’s only child was born in 1893, he named him
Edsel.
Away from the school, Henry Ford spent his boyhood in the
comfortable atmosphere of a bourgeois home set in a typical
Midwestern village. Henry, the eldest child, had been followed by a
succession of five siblings who arrived like clockwork every other
year: John in 1865, Margaret in 1867, Jane in 1869, William Jr. in
1871, and Robert in 1873. Domestic life for the Fords revolved
around simple pleasures. After the workday was complete, parents and
children read, played card games, sang traditional songs and simple
hymns around the pump organ in the parlor, attended the Christ
Episcopal Church in Dearborn on Sundays, and joined in neighborhood
picnics and church socials. The Ford brothers jostled and engaged in
harmless antics. When their father decreed that the easiest chores
would go to the boy who first got out of the house in the morning,
William Jr. once filled Henry’s boots with applesauce to slow him
down. As an adult, Henry jotted down impressions that still remained
with him from boyhood: “Remember sleigh, wood hauling, cold winters,
setting sun, sleighbell, long walks, cold weather, boys and girls.”
Mary Ford, with her gentle but firm role in the household, provided
the dominant influence in Henry’s childhood. “Mother presided over
it and ruled it but she made it a good place to be,” he told many
people in later years. He elevated her to near-sainthood in later
life. Henry seemed especially struck by her moral influence. “I have
tried to live my life as my mother would have wished,” he told
journalist Edgar Guest in 1923.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from The People’s Tycoon
by Steven Watts
Copyright © 2005 by Steven Watts.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Knopf
Copyright © 2005
Steven Watts
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-375-40735-9
