Once in a Great City

by David Maraniss

  The reshaping of the Ford image by Henry Ford II also involved the company’s approach to labor. Ford had been the last of the Big Three to have its workers unionized, and during the thirties and early forties had tried, ferociously and at times violently, to repress the efforts of the United Auto Workers. When company thugs attacked Walter Reuther at the battle of the overpass in 1937, it was not an isolated incident but part of a concerted effort by Ford to harass, intimidate, and injure union leaders. Just as Henry Ford had set up an external ring under Liebold, the Nazi sympathizer, to track radicals, he established a larger internal network of spies and goons in his Service Department, under the iron grip of Harry Bennett, to control activities within his own company. Bennett, a pug boxer picked up off the streets of New York who knew nothing about cars, proved so valuable to Henry Ford as the in-house enforcer that he rose to the top of the company and thought he would be the founder’s successor. The Deuce fired him the day he took control. “I simply said to him, ‘Harry, we’ve got to part company.’ His reaction wasn’t very good,” Ford later recalled. More than a thousand “Bennett men” were fired along with the head thug.

  In 1946, less than a year after HF2 became president of Ford, Reuther was elected president of the UAW, and Ford took a quiet but unconventional first step toward calming the company’s approach to the union. “When Walter was elected president of the UAW, the first thing I did was pay a call on him at his office,” Ford recalled in the oral interview. “Everybody [in the executive suites at Ford] thought that was heresy. But I said, ‘Well, hell, aren’t you guys working with him? Doesn’t he run your plants for you? Might as well find out about the guy and see what kind of guy he is.’ So Walter and I had a very good relationship over many, many years. But Walter was left of center by a long ways. I didn’t believe what Walter believed in. But as far as being a guy that you could work with, or sit down and talk with, Walter was as reasonable as any. And a very decent and nice guy.”

  The inevitably contentious push and pull of labor-management relations would persist, but in a less poisonous environment. “Labor unions are here to stay,” HF2 had said in one of his early speeches as company president. Ford Motor Company was not going to try to turn back the clock or break the union, he insisted, but deal with Reuther and his UAW in the same professional negotiating manner that the company would use in any other business transaction. It was under Reuther and Henry Ford II that the UAW and Ford Motor Company reached what would become one of the defining collective bargaining agreements in American labor history, a contract in 1949 that for the first time provided full pension benefits, funded by the company, along with medical and hospital insurance and wage increases tied to the inflation index. In exchange, the union agreed to a five-year contract that would promise the automaker a period of stability and labor peace. Chrysler, after a 104-day strike, accepted the same agreement, and finally General Motors signed on for what became known as the Treaty of Detroit, establishing a set of conditions that as much as anything lifted hundreds of thousands of working people into the middle class and made it possible for millions of workers across the nation to share that dream. When considering all that Detroit has meant to America, along with cars and music and civil rights, it can be said in a profound sense that Detroit gave blue-collar workers a way into the middle class, and that Henry Ford II and Walter Reuther, two giants of the mid-twentieth century, were essential to that result.

  Ford and Reuther. It was not a coincidence that Reuther’s first appearance at the Detroit Auto Show banquet in October 1962 came when HF2 was president of the Automobile Manufacturers Association. They were far from social friends, coming from wholly different backgrounds and perspectives, but they remained in frequent contact over the years through notes and letters and occasional visits. After a trip to London in 1961, Reuther sent Ford a copy of the “Proposed British Charter of Industrial Relations,” a gift that Ford received with thanks and at face value. A year later Ford sent Reuther copies of photographs he had taken in London during a visit with Sir William Carron, president of the Amalgamated Engineering Union, whose trade unionism was so moderate that he was knighted in 1963, appointed to the Bank of England, and disparaged by British socialists as a capitalist tool. Although Reuther was more militant than Carron, his comfort with the American establishment also drew criticism from his left flank.

  One day in mid-July 1963, eighteen years after his first visit, HF2 again met Reuther on his union turf. This was two weeks before the Henry Ford centennial anniversary celebration at Greenfield Village. When Ford first visited Reuther back when they were both new to their jobs, UAW headquarters was on Milwaukee Street in the shadows of the General Motors offices, one block west of Woodward and south of West Grand. Now Solidarity House was located at 8000 East Jefferson on property that was hauntingly familiar. Edsel and Eleanor Ford once had owned a riverfront mansion on that very site. The family moved there when Henry II, the oldest of four children, was four, and left when he was nine, moving on up to a new mansion in Grosse Pointe Shores designed by Albert Kahn. The old place on East Jefferson was gone now, but the original boathouse still stood in back of an undistinguished building that looked more like a cut-rate motel than UAW headquarters, a center of the labor movement.

  Reuther, who had just returned from Washington, where he had testified before Congress on behalf of JFK’s civil rights bill, showed Ford around the building and grounds for more than an hour before they sat down to talk. Rumors spread afterward that they had broached the subject of Ford-UAW contract negotiations, which would come around again in 1964, but both men denied it and said they discussed political issues, including civil rights, and the national scope of matters they dealt with as colleagues on Kennedy’s Advisory Committee on Labor-Management Policy. The intent of that committee, the brainchild of Arthur Goldberg, the secretary of labor, was to enable high-level communications between business and labor leaders on a routine basis in hopes that this might create a sense of common purpose and avert national crises similar to the prolonged 1959 strike in the steel industry. “We used to remark lightly that it’s important that Henry Ford II see that Walter Reuther doesn’t have fangs; and it was important for Walter Reuther to see that Henry Ford can be a reasonable man,” recalled David W. Burke, who served as executive secretary for the advisory committee. “So my belief was that the main purpose of the committee was to forestall future labor disputes that had a serious economic impact upon the country.”

  In an oral history interview for the John F. Kennedy Library, Burke offered sharp insights into the different ways Ford and Reuther approached their committee work. Ford, he said, always came well prepared by his staff with talking points and briefing documents and was eager to contribute but was not comfortably fluent in the nuances of the discussion. “I always felt that Henry Ford came so well prepared that he knew what the bottom line was that he was supposed to maintain but not knowing entirely how he got there, he didn’t know how to back off it.” When the committee tried to reach a consensus, Burke noticed, “Ford was always very brittle in that situation because if you don’t know how you got to your position, then you don’t know how to come off it, by issue, to accommodate a resolution.” Reuther, by contrast, appeared to Burke to be “terribly thoughtful, he was innovative, he was looking for new ways to do things” and was more fluid reacting to changing circumstances. But he also seemed to have a strong need to prove himself, in different ways, to the two people on the committee who were most immediately relevant in his sphere: Ford, his nominal opponent in management, and George Meany, the AFL-CIO president, his nominal ally but visceral antagonist.

  The conflicts on the committee were often between Meany and Ford, not Reuther and Ford, and even more between Meany and Reuther, Burke said. “I always felt that Meany took on Ford more than Reuther to make some kind of point that I’m not willing to speculate about. It was sort of, ‘I’ll show you, Walter, how to deal with this fellow.’ And he’d go and do that.”
Reuther often tried to ignore Meany and direct his thoughts toward Ford. “He was trying to prove something to Henry Ford. . . . He didn’t have to prove that he was more intelligent, but he also had to prove that he had a lot of other interests in mind other than just the union that he represented, which is a hallmark of the United Auto Workers”—a sensibility that only further irritated Meany, with his narrower us-versus-them mentality.

  Reuther considered himself a visionary and focused his attention on the major issues that he thought would define labor in America and the world for the rest of the century. A stump speech that he delivered in various forms in Detroit, New York, and abroad during the spring and summer of 1963 involved automation, technology, and the meaning of work—the vast magnitude of the future. Unions, he said, were on their way to becoming less economic organizations than socioeconomic forces working to improve the quality of life. They would be functioning in a rapidly transforming society in which there would be more technological change in the next quarter century than there had been in the previous 250 years. To adapt and survive in this period of flux, Reuther thought that unions, employers, and the government had to work together to bring about four essential conditions: meaningful and creative employment, adequate educational facilities, equal rights regardless of race, and a full measure of economic security for the aging. Medicare was three years away. The civil rights bill was in committee. The rising postwar baby boom generation had flooded the school systems and created a surge in government funding and parental involvement in education. Meaningful and creative employment was another matter. From the time Ford installed the first assembly line in 1913, it had been difficult to make routinized factory work anything but tedious and soul-sapping, if not dehumanizing and dangerous. “Three young men in dirty work clothes,” Philip Levine, the Detroit native who became the great poet of the autoworkers, wrote in “Salt and Oil,”

  on their way home or to a bar

  in the late morning, this is not

  a photograph, it is a moment

  in the daily life of the world,

  a moment that will pass into

  the unwritten biography

  of your city or my city

  unless it is frozen in the fine print

  of our eyes.

  They could have been leaving the Rouge plant on their way to Salamie’s or Johnny’s, walking past young Bob Ankony as he was going the other way, playing hooky, the image of the three men in grimy work clothes freezing in the fine print of his eyes, reminding him, despite all the talk about the dignity of work, precisely what he did not want in his own future, just as it reminded the poet. Work, yes, but not that life. Morning after morning, week after week, year after year, the unwritten biography of Detroit. There had to be a better life outside the factory, Reuther believed. The work clothes might not be as dirty in the technological future, but the jobs could be just as numbing, or more so. In 1961 he had proposed that autoworkers with seniority get a lengthy sabbatical every now and then, and he was thinking of pursuing it again in the 1964 negotiations now that the United Steelworkers of America had won something similar in a contract agreement announced that summer on the same day as Detroit’s Walk to Freedom. Steelworkers with fifteen years seniority would get a thirteen-week vacation every five years. This concession came in exchange for two years of labor peace and no wage increases. The sabbatical would not only refresh workers but would expand the workforce through replacements. Fringe benefits of that sort energized Reuther in a way that fights over dollars and cents could not. The steelworkers deal was also received well by a spokesman for Ford, reflecting the interests of the industry, who said the company was “pleased, of course, that there will be no strikes in the steel industry”—strikes that had a debilitating secondary effect on the automakers. And Pierre Salinger, the White House press secretary, said that President Kennedy was “gratified” by the agreement. Perhaps it was working, that labor-management advisory committee of which Reuther and Henry Ford II were such key members. Since 1960, according to the Department of Labor, the United States had enjoyed a sustained period of minimal strike activity unparalleled in modern peacetime.

  • • •

  After arriving at Ford Motor Company a decade and a half earlier out of graduate school at Princeton, Lee Iacocca had sprinted up the marketing ranks until he had real power as the Ford Division general manager. He was a star, his rise seemingly inexorable, but he was never a Ford protégé. There was something about him that irritated the Deuce despite the obvious talent. Reuther was the respected enemy, but Iacocca was something less pleasing. Some of it might have been social and cultural. Iacocca never felt fully comfortable among Ford’s WASPy set, and associates of the Deuce could recall times when they heard Ford calling Iacocca “that goddamn wop.” But mostly it was a conflict of ambition and style. Like many very rich people, Ford did not have to sell himself; Iacocca knew no other way. “He had a lot of ability,” Ford later said of Iacocca. “Unfortunately his ability lies ninety-nine percent in sales. But it isn’t only in selling cars—it’s selling everything. It’s selling himself, it’s selling an idea, selling anything—the Brooklyn Bridge, if you will. When he started to talk he could talk interminably, selling something, and he did a good job. Now if he was really wound up I think at the end he forgot what he started with, but he was still selling something at the end. It didn’t make much difference because it usually got sold.”

  Iacocca could talk cars nonstop, but marketing was his most comfortable domain, and the language of dealers and advertisers his native tongue. From the time he had made his name in Ford’s mid-Atlantic region with a 56 in 56 marketing campaign—$56 a month for the 1956 Ford—he was considered the Ford favorite among ad men. HF2 could be crusty, wondering why he was spending so much money on marketing, questioning the value for the cost. There was a bit of us versus them, substance versus style in his outlook, but Iacocca looked at it from a more mutually dependent perspective. His philosophy was encapsulated in a speech he later delivered to the American Association of Advertising Agencies called “The Four Freedoms of Advertising.” From the perspective of ad agencies, no declaration could have been more sympathetic to their cause. Iacocca’s four freedoms called for total immersion and involvement of the ad men in the process from beginning to end. Freedom of access. Freedom of involvement. Freedom to experiment. Freedom to persuade. From the time he rose to power within the Ford Division, he said, “we’ve had a formal setup to make sure our agency people are involved in the development of our products darned near as soon as we are. Wouldn’t it be ridiculous to call the agency in the sixty days before our new model introduction and tell them to come up with some fresh ideas? Advertising men are a vital link between us and the customer. They help us figure out what the customer wants. . . . You have to live with the car for a long time before you can decide what it really has that will make news to the customer. You have to experiment—take pictures, write copy and see whether they look good or make sense.”

  And so it was with J. Walter Thompson and Project T-5. Bill Laurie’s team in Detroit and their creative counterparts in New York had been immersed in Iacocca’s new car from the beginning, starting with the Fairlane Room dinner meetings and the secure work inside the Tomb in the Buhl Building. By midsummer 1963 the agency had assigned hundreds to the project. By then Laurie’s ad men had been told that key decision makers at Ford were leaning toward naming the car Torino, after the city in Italy more commonly known in the English-speaking world as Turin. In some important ways, the name made sense. Italian fashion was considered the best in the world, Italian cars were highly regarded for their coachwork, and this Ford model evoked an imported look. Franklyn Thomas, Laurie’s deputy, recalled what happened next: “To fire up the enthusiasm of our ‘hot project’ staff, we needed film, lots of film on the car. We asked Ford for a running prototype of the car to establish a pictorial emotion and personality platform for the product. The Ford staff agreed.”

 
; There was only one prototype model in full operation, and a quirky model at that. It was virtually handmade, away from the assembly line, at a cost of about $200,000. No shock absorbers. Bucket seats bolted into the farthest back position. Windows that did not roll down. A right door that did not open. On the Fourth of July weekend, Ford slipped the prototype into a closed transport van and hauled it to the Romeo Proving Grounds northeast of Detroit. A team of twenty-five artists, writers, and photographers from JWT were there waiting for its arrival. “For three days and part time nights, everybody sweated off pounds shooting secret film around the clock and around the car,” Thomas recalled. “This frantic photo safari brought in over a thousand still shots and 5,000 feet of motion picture film, all in color. We needed this film to convey to top Ford management all the excitement we knew was in this product . . . to bring that product out of the garage where the client had been seeing it and put it in action in the proper environment on highway and byway.”

  Was this essentially a family car or a sports car or some combination of the two? Sentiments at Ford and JWT differed on that question, so it was decided to get an early read on what the public thought. Sworn to secrecy, fifty-two couples with young children were brought to Ford to look at the T-5 model. At first their consensus seemed to be heavily on the side that this was a sports car, not for families. “They loved the styling but decided it wasn’t their cup of tea,” according to Thomas. “Too impractical.” Then they were asked to guess the price. Their estimates came in at least $700 above the planned sticker price, with most guesses more than $1,000 too high. When informed of the price, these same couples “walked back for another look and began rationalizing about how practical the car would be after all.”