by A. J. Baime
AT 1:00 PM ONE day in the early 1920s, Henry Ford appeared in the “Roundtable” lunchroom of the company’s stately Engineering Laboratory, offering his limp handshake to his most trusted employees, about a dozen men total—the engineering brain trust of Ford Motor Company. It was tradition for these men to lunch together each day at exactly the same time, with waiters in ties serving them strange concoctions that Henry had his chef dream up using soybeans. Edsel took his seat to Henry’s right at the table, and Charlie Sorensen sat on Henry’s left.
Business matters were off-limits at these lunches, but Edsel brought up business anyway. There were problems with the Model T’s brakes, which paled in comparison to the competition’s. Customers were angry, and government men in Washington were calling, saying the car was unsafe. There were complaints from abroad too.
“Father,” Edsel said, “I believe the time has arrived for us to give serious consideration to a hydraulic brake system.”
The men at the table leaned in, awaiting Henry’s response.
“Edsel, you shut up!” Henry barked. He stood and left the room, leaving his son red-faced and humiliated.
For months Edsel had been having trouble communicating with his father. Something was coming between them. Edsel was now a man with four kids of his own, and he was attempting to establish himself as a trailblazing corporate officer. When he tried to bring in a new breed of college-educated executives and a corporate flow chart, his father would not allow it.
“Mr. Ford didn’t go along with that line of thinking,” recalled Henry’s secretary, Ernest Liebold. “He often said that if he wanted a job done right he would always pick the man who didn’t know anything about it.”
When Edsel started on a new building to house a team of trained accountants, his father came looking for him.
“What’s going on here?” he asked, pointing at the construction site.
Henry didn’t believe in accountancy. When he learned of Edsel’s plans, he ordered the construction stopped and had the site fenced off. He had all the accountants fired, and all their desks and chairs removed from their offices on the fourth floor of the old Administration building. Then he went looking for his son.
“Edsel,” Henry said. “If you really need more room you’ll find plenty of it on the fourth floor.”
As company president, Edsel was ahead of his time. He sought to modernize everything he saw—from styling to corporate structure to engineering. “The next big development will be rear-engine designs, with all driving mechanism behind,” he told one reporter, predicting an engineering movement that would revolutionize the auto racing world thirty years later.
Most importantly, Edsel continued to build on his father’s work to expand and strengthen the company’s foundation abroad, turning Ford Motor Company into one of the first modern international corporations, along with American powerhouses like Standard Oil, Eastman Kodak, and Detroit rival General Motors. With his son Henry II standing beside him, Edsel broke ground with a gold shovel on Dagenham, “the Detroit of Europe”—the largest factory on the continent when it opened its doors in 1931, located on the Thames River twelve miles outside London. In Germany he moved operations from a small plant in Berlin to a full-fledged factory in Cologne that same year. In France the company added a new assembly plant in Asnières to its homebase in Bordeaux, with plans for further expansion at a site in Poissy.
Always impeccably dressed, Edsel presented a levelheaded and eloquent persona. “He attained a kind of greatness that Henry was utterly incapable of understanding,” one biographer wrote of Edsel. He had “a statesmanlike quality that reached far beyond the industrial confines of his day.”
His father, meanwhile, had changed. Now in his early sixties, Henry no longer worked with his hands. When his curious fingers became idle, a darkness emerged. No one defined this transformation better than a Detroit minister named Samuel Marquis, whom Henry hired to “put Jesus Christ in my factory,” and who later fled the company out of fear of what the Rouge was becoming.
“There rages in him,” the Reverend said of Henry, “an endless conflict between ideals, emotions and impulses as unlike as day and night—a conflict that at times makes one feel that two personalities are striving within him for mastery.” The one Henry was “a dreamer, an idealist.” When the darkness emerged, “the affable, gentle manner has disappeared. There is a light in the eye that reveals a fire burning within altogether unlike that which burned there yesterday.”
In 1919, Henry bought a newspaper—the Dearborn Independent. In these pages, to Edsel’s horror, his father’s alter ego made its debut on an international stage. On May 22, 1920, an article appeared, taking up the entire front page, headlined “The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem.” For the next ninety-one issues, the Dearborn Independent published anti-Semitic tirades, with headlines like “Jewish Jazz—Moron Music—Becomes Our National Music” and “Does Jewish Power Control the World Press?” The articles ran without a byline, but because the newspaper branded itself “The Ford International Weekly,” readers assumed that Henry was responsible.
In truth, Henry hadn’t the formal education to write any article, nor the sophistication to understand the power of the pen. The stories were written by former Detroit News scribe William Cameron and Henry’s secretary Liebold, a portly anti-Semite who later said that the impetus came from “Mr. Ford’s wishes in carrying out the idea of revealing to the public the facts pertaining to Jewish activities.”
For Henry, anti-Semitism was a part of everyday life. It was all around him, even in the schoolbooks kids read. By giving a voice to the sentiment, he must have believed that his newspaper was expressing what people around him felt but couldn’t voice themselves. He used his car dealerships to distribute the Independent, pushing them to sell quotas of subscriptions.
Edsel begged his father to stop. He had close Jewish friends. Besides, he argued, the articles were costing the company customers. Both he and his mother Clara removed their names from the paper’s masthead.
In 1922, the articles were anthologized in a book called The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem. Readers consumed the book assuming that the sentiments inside were Henry’s own. An enthusiastic audience embraced the volume in Germany. One avid reader was an up-and-coming thirty-three-year-old militant named Adolf Hitler, who kept a dog-eared copy of Der Internationale Jude in his office, as well as a portrait of Henry Ford. When rumors surfaced in the United States of a Ford run for president before the 1924 election, Hitler offered his support.
“I wish I could send some of my shock troops to Chicago and other big American cities to help in the elections,” he told a Chicago Tribune reporter. “We look to Heinrich Ford as the leader of the growing Fascist movement in America. . . . We have just had his anti-Jewish articles translated and published. The book is being circulated in millions throughout Germany.”*
Henry ended the rants in January 1922. Following a devastating lawsuit, and under extreme pressure from friends (including the New York Times columnist Arthur Brisbane, who certainly did understand the power of the pen), Henry relented and stopped the articles. “No one can charge that I am an enemy of the Jewish people,” he said. “I employ thousands of them.” Soon after, he released an apology that ran on full pages in newspapers across the country. Meanwhile, sales of the book attributed to him boomed in Germany. Henry’s malice was metastasizing out of control.
By the time Edsel turned thirty years old, the Detroit he had known as a child had disappeared. When he walked the streets, he recalled as a boy seeing nothing but horses and carriages and “the bicycle craze,” people of all ages pedaling on the new two-wheeled fad. Now the place teemed with motorcar traffic and swelling crowds, with engines throbbing and horns honking. Detroit was America’s thirteenth-largest city when Edsel was born; now it was the fourth-largest (behind New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia). New factories sprawled across city blocks: Chrysler’s Lynch Road plant,
the Fisher Body factory, the Cadillac plant. The stacks cast their shadows across the city’s bourgeois emblems of prosperity: the Cadillac Theater, Hudson’s flagship department store (owned by Edsel’s in-laws), the Detroit Institute of the Arts (of which Edsel was president).
Nothing struck fear in Edsel’s heart, however, like the sight of General Motors’ majestic new downtown headquarters, a towering structure designed by Albert Kahn. For the first time—and the timing could not have been worse—the Ford family was facing serious competition from across town.
Founded in 1908, General Motors had by the 1920s developed a tiered lineup of brands—rising from the Chevrolet through the Oakland, Oldsmobile, Buick, and luxury Cadillac, not to mention GMC trucks and the Pontiac, introduced in 1926. (The Fords made Ford, Lincoln, and later Mercury cars.) It was the Chevrolet in particular that America lusted for in increasing numbers.
Thus was inaugurated the great corporate rivalry of the twentieth century, a capitalist slug match for the heavyweight title of America’s car brand. Banner headlines called out the biggest business story in American history: “Ford-Chevrolet War Looms,” “Ford-Chevrolet Battle for Supremacy.”
GM’s chairman, Alfred Sloan, was reinventing his corporation, just as Edsel was trying to do, only in Sloan’s case there was no one in his way. Sloan saw in the new American customer the whim of desire. With a new styling chief named Harley Earl, Sloan came up with “Dynamic Obsolescence”—an annual model change coupled with heavy advertising campaigns for cars that would always be “completely new” and “priced so low.” It was a strategy to keep customers coming back for more “Hollywood styling.” Sloan also launched a banking unit (GMAC) that allowed customers to buy cars on credit—a stroke of genius.
In 1924, two out of every three automobiles sold in America were Model Ts. Two years later, Chevrolet was outselling Ford two to one, knocking the Ford family into second place for the first time in twenty years. As president of Ford Motor Company, Edsel saw his family empire spiraling on his watch.
Ultimately, the Model T became the rope that separated father and son in an awkward tug-of-war over the future. Ford needed an all-new model, Edsel argued. But Henry refused. He held on to his obsolete Model T, dropping the price so low that it cost less per pound than a wheelbarrow.
Edsel orchestrated an executive group in an attempt to gain influence, headed by his most trusted confidant and best friend, Ernest Kanzler, who was married to his wife’s sister. The two spent hours together huddled in the private study adjoining Edsel’s office, smoking cigarettes. (Henry didn’t approve of smoking.)
“I have responsibility but no power,” Edsel told Kanzler. “I can’t even face people. The whole thing is so silly and unfair.”
“Why doesn’t Mr. Ford take his goddamn fiddle and go somewhere and play?” Kanzler came back. “And let us run the plant?”
Edsel could no longer communicate with his father. So Kanzler penned a daring six-page memo to Henry on the need for a new model. It was dated January 26, 1926. The pair heard nothing. Days later, Edsel set sail for a vacation in Europe.
“Well,” Henry told one of his men, “by this time I think Edsel is several miles out to ocean, so I think tomorrow we can get rid of Kanzler.”
While abroad with his family, Edsel learned by telegram that Kanzler—his best friend—had been fired from Ford Motor Company.
He was devastated.
To escape the pressure, Edsel receded from the public eye. He asked public relations men that his name not appear in the press, nor his picture. “Please be advised,” he wrote Sorensen, “that my personal photograph is to be withheld from distribution or publication for any purpose.” When asked about his father publicly, Edsel said: “It’s his business. He built it from nothing. He has a right to run it as he pleases.”
Edsel avoided his father at work. Henry, in turn, paid Edsel’s staff to spy on him at home. At one point, Henry let himself into Gaukler Pointe and smashed all the liquor bottles.
“The next time you see Edsel,” Henry told his secretary Liebold, “tell him you don’t approve of the people he goes around with.”
“That’s going a bit far,” Liebold came back. “I think Edsel would consider it an affront for me to make a suggestion of that kind.”
“Well, you tell him. That’s what I want him to know.”
The tug-of-war over the Model T came to a head in 1926. Edsel was carefully convincing his father to release a new model (the Model A of 1928, which would become one of the most iconic automobiles of all time). One day after an argument over modernizing the design, Henry stormed off. He went to a secretary’s office and demanded to see Sorensen, telling him to order Edsel to leave the premises. He wanted Edsel to take a trip to California.
“Make it a long stay,” Henry said to Sorensen, “and tell him I will send him his paycheck out there. I’ll send for him when I want to see him again.”
Edsel refused to go. And then, just when the situation seemed like it had hit bottom, it got considerably worse.
Henry Ford had hired a new employee who was to become a kind of nemesis to Edsel. His name was Harry Bennett, though over the next three decades he would be called other things—Ford’s super-policeman, Henry’s pistol-packing errand boy, the “Company Rasputin,” a gangster, a Nazi, or simply “the Little Man in Henry’s Basement.” His rise in the 1920s would change the trajectory of Detroit forever.
“You know, gentlemen,” Henry said to a gathering of reporters, “in an organization as big as ours we must have an occasional son of a bitch. Naturally, we are so big we must have the very best in certain positions that we can get.”
6
The Ford Terror
During the thirty years I worked for Henry Ford, I became his most intimate companion, closer to him even than his only son.
—HARRY BENNETT
HENRY FORD WAS RELAXING in a New York hotel room one day when he met a man named Harry Bennett. He was a little figure—five-foot-seven, 145 pounds, with hard blue eyes, receding brown hair, and a bulldog jaw. The New York Times columnist Arthur Brisbane introduced the two. Bennett was from Ann Arbor, Michigan, not far from where Henry lived. The twenty-four-year-old was just out of the navy, where he had served as a deep-sea diver and had boxed under the name “Sailor Reese.”
Henry took a liking to Bennett. The little man had sly eyes that were calculating and fearless and a picaresque past that made him sound like a character out of a gritty detective novel. Every scar on his face had a story. Harry Bennett had learned to brawl as a kid from his father. In fact, his father had been killed in a barroom fight.
“I could use a man like you at the Rouge,” Henry said. “Can you shoot?”
“Sure I can,” said Bennett.
The men at the Rouge were “a pretty tough lot,” Henry said. “I haven’t got any policemen out there.”
Soon after, Henry hurled Bennett into the iron jungle. “There may be a lot of people over there who want to fire you,” he told Bennett, “but don’t pay any attention to them. I’m the only one who can fire you. Remember, you’re working for me.”
Born in 1892, Bennett was a year older than Edsel. In his basement office in the Rouge, he kept a small desk, a fireplace, and a couch. He hung a picture of his daughter on the wall. Other than that, the office was spare. It had two doors, one in front of him controlled by a button under his desk, and another secret door behind him so that Henry could come and go without being noticed. Bennett hung a target in his office for .32 caliber target pistols. He and his boss Henry sat for hours firing away. According to Bennett, “Mr. Ford was a dead shot.”
Each morning Bennett dressed in a suit, his trademark bow tie (a hanging tie could be grabbed and used in a fight), a fedora, and a holster in which he packed a handgun at all times. He picked up Henry at his Fair Lane estate and took him to work. Whatever Henry needed done, Bennett was there for the doing. The fact that he couldn’t change the oil of an automobile stirred conf
usion among the ranks. When asked what his job was, Bennett answered, “I am Mr. Ford’s personal man.” And then: “If Mr. Ford told me to blacken out the sun tomorrow, I might have trouble fixing it. But you’d see a hundred thousand sons-of-bitches coming through the Rouge gates in the morning, all wearing dark glasses.”
Henry paid Bennett “peanuts for a salary,” according to the ex-navy man. But he had access to a safe full of cash for special expenses. He moved into a winged Gothic home owned by Henry on the Huron River in nearby Ypsilanti, where he threw wild parties and showed pornographic films with titles like The Casting Director and A Stiff Game. He called his home “The Castle.”
In the 1920s, Bennett began to amass a private security force called the Service Department—a group of ex-boxers and ballplayers, cons, bad cops kicked off the force, and characters from Detroit’s La Cosa Nostra, which during Prohibition ran a thriving booze trade, smuggling liquor over the Detroit River from Canada. Service Department men were noticeable for their size, rough language, and cauliflower ears, and for the fact that they hung around without doing any work.
“They’re a lot of tough bastards,” Bennett described his burgeoning Gestapo, “but every one of them is a goddamn gentleman.”
By the end of the 1920s, Bennett had become Henry Ford’s closest confidant. When asked by reporters one day who the greatest man in the world was, Henry smiled and pointed at the bow-tied brute. With Henry’s power behind him, Bennett’s star skyrocketed. Suddenly, if a reporter wanted to talk to someone at Ford Motor Company, he had to talk to Harry Bennett first. Nothing got done without Bennett’s approval.
“You couldn’t get a message to anybody without him seeing,” Ford engineer Laurence Sheldrick said of Bennett. “One could not hire, fire, or transfer a man. I could not send a man on a trip. I could not make a long-distance telephone call. I could not send a telegram if he did not wish me to do so. Regardless of where you were, he knew it. He had a spy system that was that thorough.”