The Arsenal of Democracy: FDR, Detroit, and an Epic Quest to Arm an America at War

by A. J. Baime

  By the “Roaring Twenties,” Fordism—mass production and the Model T—had rewoven the fabric of a nation. Fordism had democratized mobility, created new industries, and powered an economic boom as if by engine and throttle, crystallizing the emergence of a new American middle class. It had changed the way people worked, dressed, shopped, farmed, worshiped, and vacationed. It had also reshaped cities and connected them to farms, enabling the rise of the suburb.

  Fordism was the crowning invention of a new machine age. Americans living through the first two decades of the twentieth century saw an incredible array of new mechanisms that inspired their collective imagination and changed their quotidian lives: the telephone, electric passenger elevator, radio, phonograph, motion picture machine, electric railway, and flying machine. But it was the car that powered the United States to the forefront of the community of nations. It was mass production that defined Americans in their own minds as masters of the new machine age.

  Meanwhile, the Model T spread the gospel of Fordism overseas. It was used as a taxi in Cuba, Japan, and all over Europe. In Russia it was called “the Universal Car.” As Ford offices and assembly plants were erected all over the world, populations celebrated the arrival of mobility and its economic power.

  Henry was just beginning. Already an industrialist, he sought to become a social engineer, using his factory as a laboratory. Highland Park swelled with Poles, Russians, Romanians, Hungarians, Maltese, and Serbs—a total of forty-nine nations were represented. These men couldn’t communicate with each other, but they could communicate with the machine, working their piece of the assembly line. Highland Park moved faster and faster. By 1919 a substantial number of Henry’s 45,000 workers were handicapped in some way. One had no hands, four had no feet, four were blind, thirty-seven were deaf and dumb, sixty were epileptics—but all were doing jobs specifically designed to accommodate their circumstances, like cogs in the machine.

  On January 5, 1914, Henry invited a handful of reporters to his offices. He knew that the sheer audacity of the announcement he was about to make would send it clear across the globe. Never comfortable with public speaking, he stood by a window while Ford’s chief finance man read a statement.

  “The Ford Motor Company, the greatest and most successful automobile manufacturing company in the world, will, on January 12, inaugurate the greatest revolution in the matter of rewards for its workers ever known to the industrial world. At one stroke it will reduce the hours of labor from nine to eight, and add to every man’s pay a share of the profits of the house. The smallest to be received by a man 22 years old and upward will be $5 a day.”

  In the space of a paragraph, Henry had just doubled the pay of tens of thousands of workers. Given the pay that prevailed in other industries (an average of $1.75 for a nine-hour day for steelworkers, for example), the “$5 Day” was a shock.

  “He’s crazy, isn’t he?” New York Times publisher Adolph Ochs said when he heard of Henry’s $5 Day. “Don’t you think he’s crazy?” The Wall Street Journal called the $5 Day an “economic crime” and a misapplication of “Biblical principles.”

  To understand the genius behind the idea one had to read between the lines. By doubling his workers’ pay, Henry knew the first thing each of those thousands of workers would do was buy a Model T.

  Later that same year, Henry showed up at Highland Park with a black man named William Perry and instructed a foreman to “see to it that he’s comfortable.” In the United States, black people were prohibited from most jobs, from serving in the military to working in most schools and public offices. But they were not forbidden in Henry Ford’s factory. William Perry was the first skilled black worker in a Detroit plant. With his hiring, Henry triggered a historic exodus of poor African Americans from the South.

  “Five dollars a day was what Mr. Ford said,” Amiri Baraka wrote in Blues People, “and Negroes came hundreds of miles to line up outside his employment offices.”

  There were 5,000 African Americans in Detroit at the turn of the century. By 1920, there were 40,000, with a thousand more arriving every month, most headed to the gates of “Ford’s.”

  By 1918 Henry had begun to conceive his ultimate mechanical masterpiece. It would not be a car, but a new factory—an industrial megalopolis so intimidatingly vast that it would seem otherworldly to anyone but Henry himself. “We are going to make it at the Rouge,” he confided to one of his top production men, speaking of the little river that wound through Dearborn, a river named by explorers a century earlier for the red wild flowers that grew from its banks.

  “What are you going to do—have everything at the Rouge?” replied Henry’s employee.

  “Eventually.”

  “If we are going to move everything down there, someday you will have 100,000 people working there.”

  “That’s what I suspect.”

  Construction began in 1918. By dredging the little River Rouge, Henry enabled big ships to steer down its path, thus connecting this inland spot in Dearborn to the major ports of the world. From the riverbank, a factory rose, an industrial marvel straight out of an H. G. Wells novel. It would be called “The Rouge.”

  Meanwhile, when Henry looked out his office window, he saw thousands of men at the gates asking for work. Black, white, deaf, blind, and dumb, they came from cities and small towns, from nations abroad, a sea of broad shoulders, men who would make his cars and earn enough doing so to buy one themselves. Henry was beatified, cast as the new industrial savior, “the Zeus of American mythology.” When a group of college students were asked to name the greatest figures of all time, they ranked Henry Ford third behind Napoleon and Jesus Christ.

  But it wasn’t Henry Ford that had ushered in this new age of prosperity, Henry claimed. It wasn’t any man at all. It was the machine. The machine was the impetus for the new utopia. The machine would bring about the brave new world.

  “The machine,” Henry said, “is the new Messiah.”

  “Machinery is accomplishing in the world what man has failed to do by preaching, propaganda, or the written word,” said Henry. The machine “will soon bring the world to a complete understanding. Thus may be envisioned a United States of the World. Ultimately,” he naively preached, “it will surely come.”

  3

  Edsel

  There is not a scrap of artificiality about Mr. Edsel Ford’s smile. It just happens.

  —A LOCAL DETROITER

  EDSEL BRYANT FORD WAS too young to recall his first ride through the streets of Detroit in his father’s Quadricycle. “I don’t remember the first automobile that my father made,” he later said. “My father told me that I rode in it, but of course, I now recall nothing about it. But I do well remember that the Mayor of Detroit came to see . . . because I was standing at the window, watching for him to come in.” Edsel was old enough, however, to remember his father as a backyard tinkerer short on money. Through his childhood, he would watch his father grow from a broke dreamer into the most famous man in the world. In Edsel’s adult life, he would look back on the simplicity of his childhood with longing and, at times, desperation.

  His earliest memories were of sledding in winter and playing checkers at home. With little money, life was simple. He had a small table for himself in the family kitchen where he studied his ABCs in a bowl of his mother’s alphabet soup. When he wanted to take violin lessons, his father could afford the lessons but not the violin, so the teacher let him have it on credit.

  In an era when fathers were diffident—many worked six days a week, nine hours a day—Henry showered affection on his only child. Early family photographs show them embracing, playing in the snow, Henry turning cartwheels to make Edsel laugh. The family letters and diaries reveal an adoration for one another and an innocence that would soon vanish.

  “Snowed all day,” Henry wrote in January 1901. “Edsel got soaking wet. He and Grandpa played checkers. Edsel cheated awful and beat every game. Went to bed so full of laughs he could not say his prayer
s.”

  At Christmas that same year, young Edsel wrote a letter: “Dear Santa Claus, I haven’t had a Christmas tree in four years. And I have broken all my trimmings. And I want some more. I want a pair of rollar [sic] skates. And a book. I can’t think of anything more. I want you to think of something. Good by, Edsel.”

  As Ford Motor Company grew, it became a kind of family religion. It was “all the family talked about,” Edsel recalled. He got his first Ford car at age ten and began driving himself to school, after which he joined his father at work. He was a fixture by Henry’s side in the afternoon, trotting along on his short legs to keep up.

  Edsel liked to sit with his father’s rising star, the Dane Charlie Sorensen, who turned out wooden toys for the boy from the lathes. Everyone in the plant was terrified of temperamental Sorensen, a mechanical genius when his hands weren’t curled into fists. But he was like a proud uncle to young Edsel.

  At the Detroit University School (a private high school—Henry could now easily afford the $70 per semester tuition), Edsel’s classmates called him “Brainy.” He joined the track team, but his real love was automobiles. He doodled them in class and kept thick scrapbooks of pictures he cut out of magazines, pasting them in at perfect right angles. These scrapbooks remained among his keepsakes for his entire life. Unlike his father, for whom the democratization of affordable mobility was an obsession, Edsel was mesmerized by the luxury chariots of Europe: Bugatti, Rolls-Royce, Hispano-Suiza. He was emblematic of the next generation of Americans, whose dreams and desires were loftier and more cosmopolitan than those of the one before.

  Henry saw poetry in machines and mass production. Edsel saw it in the beautiful lines of a Mercedes-Benz.

  Each afternoon Henry awaited the arrival of his son at the factory. “Have you seen Ed?” he would say. “Oh, yes, he’s here. I see his books!”

  “I told Edsel that he ought to know everything that was going on in the place,” Henry later said. “I told him that he would do better to spend two or three years just wandering around seeing how everything was done and getting acquainted with the men, always keeping in mind that, someday, he would be called upon to administer it all.”

  As Edsel later put it: “Father put me through the mill.”

  When Edsel graduated from high school and his friends went off to Harvard and the University of Michigan, he went to work full-time for his father. Employees called him Mr. Edsel; his father and Sorensen called him by his first name. In his office, Edsel kept an old engine that Henry had built in the Bagley Avenue shed—a reminder of the innocence of his childhood and how far the Fords had come.

  Once he became a fully grown man, Edsel stood in a glare of spotlight—the Motor City’s princeling son. Elegant in a suit tailored by Detroit’s most prominent haberdashery, Dunn & Company, and wearing handmade shoes from London, he had an eye for aesthetics. Upon meeting the Detroit artist Irving Bacon, Henry introduced his son as “the artist in the family.” (Bacon would remember Edsel being “extremely interested in his father’s affairs, the kind of son any father would be proud of.”) Lacking his father’s height (he was five-foot-four), Edsel made up for it with acuity and a smile that illuminated a room. He was “handsome enough to charm the dogs off a meat wagon,” one young woman said of him.

  Unlike Henry, a teetotaler who was uncomfortable in social situations, Edsel enjoyed his nights as much as his days. When the family visited Europe in 1912, the eighteen-year-old wrote in his diary: “Bad headache—too much Paris.” While Henry wouldn’t be seen at the Pontchartrain bar, Edsel introduced Detroit to the rumba in this noisy watering hole. (His father called this kind of nightlife “sex dancing.”) Edsel was a regular at Detroit Tigers games, and he developed a taste for yacht racing. He smoked his cigarettes like he played his golf: left-handed and with panache.

  On the occasion of his twenty-first birthday, Henry gave Edsel a gift. Together they went to the bank.

  “Bill, I have a million dollars in gold here,” Henry said to the teller. “This is Edsel’s twenty-first birthday, and I want him to have it.”

  Edsel was visibly shaken. Afterward, he returned to his desk, exemplifying the dutifulness that would define him in later years. An adored child of wealth and intelligence, Edsel was raised to be the man any young American would want to be, in an era that promised a bright future for most. But as was engraved on his cuff links, OMNIUM RERUM VICISSITUDO.

  All things change.

  On the evening of November 1, 1916, a who’s who of the new automotive aristocracy filed into a mansion on Boston Boulevard in Detroit to attend the wedding ceremony of Edsel Ford. Henry’s friends Thomas Edison, Harvey Firestone of the Firestone Tire Company, and the Dodge brothers took their places. Edsel appeared in a black tuxedo with his bride, Eleanor Lowthian Clay, the niece of the founder of Detroit’s most prominent department store chain, Hudson’s. Edsel was twenty-two years old, his bride just nineteen. The wedding was held at the bride’s family manse. Guests were surprised by the event’s lack of pomposity (“I don’t think I saw $1,000 worth of jewels among the crowd,” one man present remembered) and its sheer speed. The ceremony was over in minutes.

  “I don’t envy you one bit but that boy of yours,” John Dodge told Henry Ford.

  “Yes, I have a fine son to carry on,” Henry said. “If he keeps on as he is now, the company will be in good hands some day.”

  The newlyweds honeymooned in Hawaii. (“You wouldn’t know us, we are so healthy,” Edsel wrote his parents. “I am getting very good on the surfboard.”) When he returned, Edsel had a surprise for his parents. Henry and Clara Ford had built a bucolic mansion called Fair Lane in Dearborn, which bordered the Detroit city line. Their new home was a shrine to their son. Edsel had a suite of rooms, a $30,000 pipe organ, his own bowling alley, and an indoor swimming pool lined with heated benches. The mansion was a young man’s paradise, designed to keep Edsel by his father’s side. But Edsel chose not to live at Fair Lane, or even on the property next door. He moved his bride into the city. Together they began to hatch a plan to build a home an hour’s drive away in Grosse Pointe—the fashionable center of a new wealthy social set on Lake St. Clair, the Motor City’s answer to Gatsby’s West Egg.

  Edsel and Eleanor eventually built their new home on Gaukler Pointe, a sprawling piece of property along the rocky lake front. The home was designed to resemble a cottage in the Cotswolds, a rural section of southwestern England. Pieces of the structure were imported from Europe, some dating back centuries. Edsel built a dock for his yachts. On September 4, 1917, Edsel and Eleanor gave birth to a boy they christened Henry Ford II—the name of obvious symbolism.

  In Detroit, gnarled hands sticking out of suit jacket sleeves signified honor and success, but Edsel fit more into the sophisticated world of New York and Washington, where Victorian standards of wealth and aristocracy were woven into the fabric of a new modernist sensibility. He befriended Jews, poured money into charities, and educated himself in the arts and literature. At secluded Gaukler Pointe, protected from harm by his security staff and the tall stone walls that surrounded the property, he had built a sanctuary.

  When he read the headlines of the coming war in Europe—the Great War, what would soon be called World War I—the violence seemed a world away. Nevertheless, each new headline—the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand in 1914, the sinking of the Lusitania with so many Americans aboard a year later—was difficult to grasp as reality. As the war came closer to home, Edsel, like all Americans, read these news stories with quivering hands.

  He did not know it at the time, but World War I was about to kick his life into the long, tragic spiral that would define him to the end.

  One November morning in 1915, Henry Ford sat in the swaying belly of a Pullman car with his publicity chief, Louis Lochner.* They were headed for Washington to meet President Woodrow Wilson. Throughout the train, passengers turned worried eyes on their newspapers. Germany was dropping bombs on England from zeppelins.
The British were using poison gas against the Germans. (One young German soldier named Adolf Hitler was temporarily blinded by gas weaponized by the British, forcing a long hospital stay.) Henry hoped to talk the President into participating in a peace crusade, to keep America out of the war. As the locomotive steamed southward, he worked over some maxims he hoped would grab headlines.

  “Men sitting around a table, not men dying in a trench, will finally settle differences,” he said over the sound of the railcar’s clattering. He turned to Lochner. “Make a note of that. We’ll give it to the boys in the papers when we get to New York.”

  At the White House, his legs crossed in a chair, Henry found the President amiable—but unwilling to commit to any peace crusade. The political situation was far too complex. So Henry delivered an ultimatum.

  “Tomorrow at ten in New York,” he told President Wilson, “representatives of every big newspaper will come to my apartment for a story. I have today chartered a steamship. I offer it to you to send delegates to Europe. If you feel you can’t act, I will.”

  On December 4, 1915, at 2:00 PM, the Oskar II—Henry’s “Peace Ship”—set sail out of New Jersey across the Atlantic. Aboard Henry had gathered an eclectic assemblage of activists. Before leaving, he unleashed a litany of peace aphorisms.

  “War is murder.”

  “The word ‘murderer’ should be embroidered in red letters across the breast of every soldier.”

  “I will devote my life to fight this spirit of militarism.”

  The most news-making personage in the world even wrote to the pope and made the missive available to the papers.