by A. J. Baime
Edsel regarded Bennett as a curiosity at first. He saw plenty of Harry and his “Service Men,” as his father put Bennett in charge of all security detail. For Edsel, kidnapping threats were routine, for himself and his four kids. “I can replace factories, but not grandchildren,” Henry said. Edsel had his own bodyguards. Curiously, however, he began to notice that he was being followed. When he played golf, he saw men in the woods in suits and fedoras, watching him. When his eldest son Henry II drove his Lincoln Zephyr (he was at Yale now), he saw cars trailing him in his rearview.
The more Edsel learned about Harry Bennett, the more he realized the kind of things of which the Little Man in Henry’s Basement was capable. Once, when a hoodlum threatened Henry II, Bennett said he would handle it. “Later on,” remembered Edsel’s youngest, William, “the guy was found floating face down in the river.”
An astute political creature, Edsel began to see Bennett as a rival for his father’s affections. Edsel was an only child, but suddenly there were two sons in the Ford empire.
The stock market crash of 1929 fomented chaos in Detroit. No city was hit as hard with such immediacy in the first years of the Great Depression. From Black Tuesday on, America stopped buying cars. For three years, economists in Washington struggled for control over the monetary system. But in the end, Detroit’s banks failed first, sending the ailing economy off a cliff in 1933.
In February, spurred by the insolvency of Detroit’s banks, Michigan governor William Comstock declared a bank holiday, closing the doors to customers desperate to pull out their cash. Indiana’s banks followed on February 23, Maryland’s on the 25th, Arkansas’s on the 27th, and Ohio’s on the 28th. Banks in Alabama, Arizona, California, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nevada, and Oregon all locked their doors within the next week.
By this time, the auto industry had laid off more than half its workers. Detroit parking lots turned into shantytowns. Any business open all night became a homeless shelter. The jobless rate hit 40 percent by the time the banks closed; 125,000 Detroit families had no financial relief whatsoever.
When reporters sought Henry out at Ford offices, they found that his dark alter ego had taken complete control. Henry called the Depression “a good thing, generally.”
“Let them fail,” Henry said on one occasion. “Let everybody fail! I made my fortune when I had nothing to start with, by myself and my own ideas. Let other people do the same.”
The New York Times sent Anne O’Hare McCormick, one of the first powerful female journalists, to interview Henry. In a glass-walled office, he fidgeted for two hours. “Henry Ford is the only American name more potent internationally than that of a movie star,” she wrote. “To the world at large, his is the image in which we live and move.
“Something has happened to Ford,” she concluded, “and perhaps through him to the America which he represents.”
One reporter called Henry “the Mussolini of Detroit.”
Henry saved his most sour vitriol for the new president, Franklin Roosevelt. In a fury of activity during Roosevelt’s first one hundred days in the White House, he introduced his National Industrial Recovery Act, which dictated rules for businesses to function in a paralyzed economy. Henry went on the attack. He told reporters that Roosevelt was a leader “whose particular genius is to try to run other people’s businesses.” The government, Henry said, “has not any too rosy a record running itself so far.”
When the President invited Henry to the White House in an attempt to mend fences, Henry refused to meet him.
“If Henry Ford would quit being a damn fool about this matter and call me on the telephone,” Roosevelt told a friend during his first term, “I would be glad to talk to him.”
Henry finally agreed to meet Roosevelt on April 27, 1938. The meeting made the cover of Newsweek. Walking out of the White House afterward, Henry said, “Well, he took up the first five minutes telling me about his ancestry.” Henry had no idea why, “unless Roosevelt wanted to prove he had no Jewish blood.”
Edsel faced the bank crisis with optimism: not long after Black Tuesday, he gave everyone a raise. “Ford Motor Company employees of every grade began working under an increase wage scale Monday,” he announced, his statement making the front page of the New York Times.
But as the nation sank deeper into despair, Edsel fell into its grip. He was financially leveraged and had to ask his father for help bailing out a Detroit bank in which he was heavily invested.
Even worse, his dreams of a future as an aviation pioneer crashed to the ground, literally. The Fords had allowed the US military to experiment with a Ford Tri-Motor to see if the airplane could carry the weight of bombs. While in flight, one of the plane’s wings sheared off, and the fuselage became a missile, exploding on impact and killing its two pilots. Soon after, Edsel was in the Engineering Laboratory working over a new airplane design when his father entered the room. He showed the new plane to Henry.
“That’s no good,” Henry said. “No, don’t do that.”
When Edsel watched his father walk out of the room that day, he saw his defining ambitions vanish. Henry was sickened by the death of the pilots, by the idea of Ford airplanes being used for military purposes, and perhaps by the sales charts too. The peak year for the aviation venture was 1929, when Ford sold ninety-four airplanes. By 1932, that number shrank to four. Henry ended the company’s aviation venture. He turned Ford Airport into a motorcar test track.
“Edsel Ford is more depressed than I’ve ever seen him,” a Ford friend wrote in his diary in 1933.
Harry Bennett, however, found opportunity in the Depression. As head of personnel, Bennett ruled the Rouge. People were desperate for work. If a man wanted a job—well, then, maybe he’d have to do somebody a favor. Maybe he’d have to vote a certain way in an election. Maybe he would have to wax one of Harry Bennett’s yachts, if he didn’t want to get his teeth knocked out. By 1937, Bennett had succeeded in building the Service Department into what H. L. Mencken’s American Mercury magazine called “the most powerful private police force in the world.”
“There are about eight hundred underworld characters in the Ford Service Department,” labor leader Benjamin Stolberg said. “They are the Storm Troops. They make no pretense of working, but are merely ‘keeping order’ in the plant community through terror.”
Among the Service Men employed by Bennett: Norman Selby, an ex-pugilist who fought as “Kid McCoy,” married ten times, paroled to Bennett after serving twenty years for murdering his sweetheart. Joseph “Legs” Laman, admitted serial kidnapper, nicknamed for his ability to evade the law on foot. Joe Adonis, a mobster called by the New York Post “a gang punk” and “dope king.” Sicilian mob boss Chester LaMare, the “Al Capone of Detroit,” who controlled Detroit’s waterfront during Prohibition. Former journeyman pugilist Elmer “One Round” Hogan, Sicilian gangster Joe Tocco, Jack Dempsey’s former manager Leonard Saks. . . .
Under constant intimidation by Bennett’s Service Men—the “Ford Terror”—workers at the Rouge suffered nervous breakdowns and an anxiety-induced ailment known as “the Ford stomach.” “I think it was just fear that caused this tension in the company,” recalled engineer Roscoe Smith. “A lot of people, when [Bennett’s men] came around and started taking them apart, just couldn’t take it. They couldn’t stand the pressure.”
Meanwhile, the speed of the assembly line increased.
“Go like hell,” was the call of the foremen. “If you’re gonna get that raise, you gotta increase production.”
Once the best place to work in the country, Ford was becoming the worst. “Henry had a way of getting his work done through fear,” said Jack Davis, a longtime Ford sales executive. “The loyalty you had, you had because of Edsel. You hoped and prayed for the day when Edsel could be in charge.”
As Edsel lost control of the company, he found solace in his own role as a father. There were football games at Gaukler Pointe and sailing trips on the lake. Though he indulged his
four kids and shielded them from the Ford Terror, his oldest, Henry II, saw the worry lines deepen into his father’s face. The split between Henry and Edsel was, in the words of one of Henry II’s schoolmates, “the dirty little secret of the Ford family.”
Edsel knew that Henry II was next in line. The young man would soon be the center of this drama. Edsel took an active role in grooming Henry II, in his education at Yale and his future at the Rouge. He made sure that Henry II had a relationship with his grandfather.
Then, one day, Edsel was on a train from Maine to Detroit when he was overcome by a stabbing pain in his gut. He had to be removed from the train and taken to a hospital. The next day he told reporters that he was “all right,” that the ailment was “not serious.” But it was serious. The malignancy Edsel would battle for the rest of his days had struck for the first time. Locked in a power struggle with Bennett and his father, he began to suffer vomiting episodes at work, sometimes retreating to the private suite connected to his office, where his secretary brought him glasses of milk and crackers.
Clara Ford asked Sorensen to come to Fair Lane and explain what was happening to her son. What was happening between Henry and Edsel?
“Who is this man Bennett,” she asked Sorensen, “who has so much control over my husband and is ruining my son’s health?”
Sorensen was one of the hardest men in Detroit. He walked away in tears.
The empire had split into rivaling factions: Henry and Bennett on one side, Edsel on the other. Cast Iron Charlie Sorensen—who ran the production day to day—lived in the gray area between. The two factions rivaled like tectonic plates in a fault line. It was clear that something drastic was about to occur. And then one day it did.
On the morning of May 26, 1937, a union leader named Walter Reuther organized a gathering outside the Rouge’s main entrance, Gate 4, to hand out United Auto Workers union literature—mostly quotes pulled out of Roosevelt’s Wagner Act, which dictated by federal law for the first time that labor could organize. The Wagner Act changed the playing field in Detroit like nowhere else, putting unprecedented amounts of power in the hands of the workingman.
It was a typical spring morning in southern Michigan, warm and humid, with a drab, acid-stained sky. As more union men gathered, reporters and photographers showed up, as well as clergymen. Union activity was the source of mounting tension in the Motor City, but nowhere was that tension as fraught with danger as it was at the Rouge. Ever since Roosevelt had signed the Wagner Act in 1935, Harry Bennett’s Service Department thugs had mercilessly harassed anyone who dared to voice union sympathy. Reuther had worked in the Rouge—he had the scars to prove it—and he was the union’s loudest voice in the Motor City. On this day, as he handed out union literature, he knew that the possibility for violence was high.
Earlier that morning, a union man named Ed Hall had gotten a call from one of Bennett’s top Service Men, former Detroit police commissioner John Gillespie. “I don’t want you to go out there today,” Gillespie warned. “Something is going to happen—it’s going to be extremely unpleasant.”
“I have a license to carry two revolvers,” the union man came back. “If any of your stooges out there lay a hand on me, I’ll blow them so full of holes they won’t make a good sieve.”
The early hours outside the Rouge passed without incident. But then Reuther spotted the mob: a gang of forty Service Men walking his way, guys in fedoras and baggy suits. Among them, later identified in federal court documents, were Joe “Legs” Laman, ex-prizefighter Sam Taylor, mobster Angelo Caruso, and former “Black Sox” pitcher Eddie “Knuckles” Cicotte, banned from baseball for helping to throw the 1919 World Series.
“This is Ford property,” one of the toughs shouted at Reuther. “Get the hell out of here.”
Before Reuther could answer, the men attacked. The historic “Battle of the Overpass” had begun.
For months Henry Ford had stoked the fire in the Rouge. All of the Detroit companies had resisted union activity (General Motors, by this time the largest company in the world, paid $1 million to detective agencies in the mid-1930s to infiltrate the plants and rid them of labor leaders), but Henry had gone a step further. The advent of the union, a keystone of Roosevelt’s New Deal, incited rage in Henry.
“Labor unions are the worst thing that ever struck the earth,” he said in a statement in 1937. “Financiers are behind the unions and their object is to kill competition so as to reduce the income of the workers and eventually bring on war. We will never recognize the United Auto Workers union or any other union.”
Both General Motors and Chrysler signed union contracts in 1937, leaving Ford as the holdout—union enemy number one. Henry wanted “a strong, aggressive man who can take care of himself in an argument” to handle the union problem. In a meeting one day with Edsel, Sorensen, and Harry Bennett, Henry Ford put his aide-de-camp Bennett in charge of labor relations, igniting a shouting match between father and son.
“If you want to fight the union,” Edsel argued, “then let’s do it in the proper manner, and let’s fight it within the law. Let’s hire a good constitutional lawyer to assist Mr. Bennett, and let me sit in on the negotiations to offer my advice.”
Henry wanted none of it. Bennett stockpiled weapons and tear gas. As one Service Department goon said, “If it takes bloodshed, we’ll shed blood right down to the last drop.”
That morning in May 1937, as Reuther and his fellow unionizers passed out literature at the Rouge’s Gate 4, Bennett unleashed his Service Department goons. “They picked up my feet and my shoulders and slammed me down on the concrete,” Reuther later said. “And while I was on the ground, they kicked me again in the face, head and other parts of my body.”
Shattered noses, guts stomped, groins kicked in. Priests came shouting in the name of the Lord. Reporters stood helpless, their knees weak at the sight of the beatings. “My head was like a piece of raw steak,” union leader Richard Frankensteen later said. “I do not know how many times I was conscious or unconsciousness.” Another union man, William Merriweather, had his back broken. “Oh my God, he looked as if he were dead,” one witness later said in federal testimony. “Blood was coming out of his nose and mouth.” Beaten senseless, Reuther was thrown down a flight of concrete stairs. “The end of my spine hit every one,” he later recalled.
Service Men grabbed cameras from photographers, but one Detroit News shooter named James Kilpatrick made a sprint for it. “There is a cameraman,” yelled one of Bennett’s men. “Get that son of a bitch.” Following a foot chase, the photographer made it to a police station and took refuge, the evidence safe in his hands.
The next day, Edsel flipped through the pages of his newspaper, his brown eyes glazing over at the stark pictures of the Battle of the Overpass. (The pictures were later published all over the nation; they would inspire the Pulitzer Prize committee to create a category for photography.) The Battle of the Overpass was more than a brawl to Edsel; it symbolized the failure of the promise of industrial America, the destruction of the utopian dream that was supposed to be his destiny.
Edsel was forty-three years old and struggling with his health. As president of his family empire, he had watched it shrink and stiffen, as if, like himself, it suffered from some kind of disease. It was the largest automaker in the world when Edsel was made president; now it was America’s third-largest behind GM and Chrysler Corporation, with just 18.6 percent of the US market. Edsel had earned the respect of everyone in Detroit with the exception of his own father, who had chosen the affection of another “child.” Even the union men respected Edsel Ford.
“His soul bled,” said Reuther. “I felt sorry for him. I still do.”
Edsel could quit, walk away, and live out his life with his wife and his kids, whom he adored, in a state of quiet repose. He could devote his life freely to his passions—racing his yacht, curating the collections at the Detroit Institute of the Arts, crafting the minds of his children. Or he could continue dow
n this lonely road, fighting for his empire.
Ford Motor Company was the family religion. It was impossible to separate the family from the empire, the flesh of the men from the metal of the machine that bore their name. Besides, Edsel had a growing son, Henry II, now nineteen years old. Henry II’s birthright was this empire. If Edsel absconded, his firstborn’s future would be lost, whatever that future might be.
“It was like a family tragedy,” one person close to the Fords said. “At this point Edsel had the tragic recognition—that there was no way out of his dilemma except by death, his father’s or his own.”
7
Danger in Nazi Germany
The German Air Force is a guarantor of German peace. But I openly confess that terrible will be the result when the command for an attack comes. Then, we swear to the German people, we shall become the terror of our enemy. Nothing shall halt us from unreserved recklessness. . . . In defiance of all foes, this air force is invincible.
—HERMANN GOERING, Hitler’s second in command and head of the Luftwaffe, March 1, 1938
ON A SEPTEMBER DAY in 1938, a fifty-nine-year-old Detroit auto man named William Knudsen stood on the deck of the German ocean liner Bremen, watching the New York skyline disappear into the horizon. Knudsen was a giant, his frame rising well over six feet with heavy bulk stretching out of a finely stitched suit. Though his silver hair and mustache were finely groomed, he had the gnarled hands of a boilermaker.
Knudsen was the president of the world’s largest corporation, Detroit-based General Motors, which controlled an amazing 10 percent of the entire productive capacity of the United States, the most industrialized nation on earth. His $300,000-plus salary trumped that of any American who worked outside of Hollywood. As the Bremen steamed for Europe, two women recognized the towering auto man.