Read The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (Vintage) Online
Authors: Steven Watts
The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (Vintage) (55 page)
By the late 1910s, Sorensen's talents as a production manager had fully flowered. At Highland Park, he had overseen a host of important innovations: the revolutionary technique of the moving assembly line, the plant layout for its implementation, new machines for multiple drilling, and the purchase of a pressed-steel plant. Sorensen also became an expert at skillfully calculating production estimates and costs for the Model T. In terms of the actual functioning of the factory, he gained a reputation for demanding efficiency, workmanship, and effort. He was impatient with those who said “It can't be done,” but encouraging to those who bent to solving problems and developing new techniques. “Charlie always put up with a lot of mistakes from a guy who really tried,” noted one associate. To this spirit of innovation and dedication, Sorensen added a penchant for sheer hard work. In his memoirs, he described practically living at the plant: “My day would start there as early as seven o'clock; luncheon was at Dearborn. I would then be back in the plant until about three o'clock, when I would go into production planning or tool design. At 5:30 I would return to my office for another hour. Several nights in the week I would come back after dinner at home for more office work.” As one associate recounted, of all the Ford managers he encountered over a long career with the company, Sorensen was “the man who made the deepest impression on me—the most brilliant man I have ever known with the ability to render the right decisions on the instant.”
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But
how
Sorensen achieved results at the Ford Motor Company became as important as
what
he sought to do. He was, in the words of one of his associates, a “rough customer” who did not shrink from intimidation, physical confrontation, even violence in the interest of achieving his goals. According to Ernest G. Liebold, “Sorensen used to get things done, but he used to drive hell out of a man to get it done.” In later years, Sorensen claimed that this reputation resulted from tall stories blown out of proportion. “The truth is that during my thirty-nine years with Ford Motor Company,” he wrote, “I never laid hands upon a soul, no one ever laid a hand on me, and I never smashed a desk in my life.” But many witnesses and a string of incidents testified otherwise.
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Charles Voorhess, a power engineer who worked on several projects with Sorensen over the years, saw him in action numerous times. Voorhess described Sorensen as speaking sharply to subordinates and being “a very poor listener.” According to Voorhess, one afternoon when Sorensen
became annoyed with certain office personnel in the tractor division, he and his lieutenants “went into their offices and pulled the drawers out and threw the materials on the floor.” Mead Bricker, a production supervisor who worked closely with Sorensen for many years, provided an even clearer picture of his boss's tyrannical tactics:
Sorensen would go out and upset a department, turn a bench or a desk over, and it was my job, or somebody else's job, to go out and straighten that all out again. When you'd go back the place was all demoralized and everybody wanted to quit…. I have seen Sorensen grab a hold of people, but he would never kick anybody. Several times I saved him from being beaten up by these same people. He was very disliked all through the plant.
Sorensen was feared by all and grudgingly respected by many. By the time the new Ford plant began to go up along the River Rouge, he had moved into a strong position for gathering even more power.
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In fact, Sorensen played a prominent role in planning and building Ford's new factory. In July 1915, he had attended a meeting on Miller Road, near the River Rouge, along with Henry Ford, Ed Martin, John Lee, and Fred Gregory. Sorensen agreed with Ford's assessment of the potential of this site. Over the next couple of years, Sorensen and Ford frequently discussed the need to build blast furnaces and a foundry at the Rouge because of the increasing difficulty of securing adequate materials. With typical prescience, Sorensen's analysis of production and supply problems helped lay the groundwork for Ford's decision to adopt vertical integration: “The bigger [Ford Motor Company's] production got the harder it became to find suppliers who could keep pace. And when a supplier couldn't keep up with our needs for parts or materials, the alternatives were either to cut production or shut down until supplies caught up, or make the things ourselves.” Sorensen's conclusion cut to the heart of the matter: “If others would not provide enough steel for our needs, then we would. It was just as simple as that.”
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As development proceeded at the Rouge, Sorensen dived into one of its most important projects: purchasing and reviving the decrepit Detroit, Toledo & Ironton Railroad. By the late 1910s, shipping delays caused by overtaxed, run-down railroads had become a vexing problem. With the Rouge project, Ford and Sorensen were determined to solve this difficulty. When the DT&I, which ran southward into Ohio, came to Ford and asked for financing to repair several old railroad bridges, Sorensen sensed an opportunity. “Here's a chance to pick up a railroad that will break our
freight shipment bottleneck,” he told Ford. “This road on its route south cuts across every main line going east and west north of the Ohio River. If we can buy it, we can run it into the Rouge plant and handle all our outgoing and incoming materials.” Ford endorsed Sorensen's idea, bought the railroad, and modernized its operations. Bringing its line directly into the Rouge broke the shipping bottleneck, speeded up distribution, helped reduce the company's inventory en route by more than half, and allowed for coal, limestone, and iron ore to be transported directly from mines to the Rouge. Subsequent savings paid the railroad's purchase price several times over.
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Ultimately, however, for Sorensen the new Rouge plant provided an opportunity to realize personal ambition. He stood at the center of a striking aspect of the company's shift from Highland Park to the new complex: the exodus of prominent executives from about 1919 to 1921. “The business world is astonished by the procession of Ford executives moving out of the front door for the last time,” noted
Detroit Saturday Night.
“‘Watch the Ford officials go by,’ is the latest advertising joke.” As Sorensen exclaimed with typical bluntness, “We are getting rid of all the Model T sons-of-a-bitches.”
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The purge at the Rouge plant was partly Henry Ford's doing. By 1919, as he bought out minority stockholders to gain absolute ownership of the company, he also sought to consolidate his power within it. James Couzens had resigned in 1915, of course, and now a long line of old associates and lieutenants began to leave. C. H. Wills, John R. Lee, Norval Hawkins, Samuel S. Marquis, and production manager William Knudsen would depart by 1921, as would many less prominent but experienced and influential figures such as company treasurer Frank L. Klingensmith, chief auditor Louis H. Turrell, and head of advertising Charles A. Brownell; Hubert E. Hartman, general attorney; and Warren C. Anderson, the company's European representative. The old Highland Park group gave way to a new set of Rouge managers who were devoted completely to Ford. Sorensen, by helping purge top managers to satisfy his boss, methodically eliminated his own rivals in the company.
As operations geared up at the Rouge, Sorensen undermined company managers whose authority had been rooted at Highland Park. He engaged in a power struggle with Wills, Ford's longtime chief engineer, and helped drive him out. He rationalized this move as a defense of Henry Ford. “I found that one problem in getting things the way Ford wanted was Wills, who at times was extremely critical of his boss and his ideas,” Sorensen wrote. “Instead of giving him what he asked for, [Wills] frequently tried to mold the Ford idea to his.”
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Sorensen also clashed with Knudsen, a production manager at Highland Park who had directed the construction of fourteen Ford assembly plants around the United States, helped oversee the making of Model T's at Highland Park, and supervised the company's building of Eagle antisubmarine boats during World War I. In 1919, Sorensen and Knudsen disputed division of responsibilities at the Rouge and nearly came to blows. Ford backed Sorensen, and Knudsen left in 1921. Around the same time, Sorensen countermanded the directives of Samuel S. Marquis and drove him from the sociological department. Sorensen tried to ensure that trusted Ford associates such as William B. Mayo did not solidify their power. According to one of Mayo's assistants, Sorensen “planted his underlings … to needle Mr. Mayo,” and as a result, Mayo gravitated toward Edsel Ford, for whom he became chief consultant throughout the 1920s.
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The biggest potential for strife, however, lay with Sorensen and P. E. Martin, the production chief at Highland Park. Martin had begun working for Ford Motor Company in 1903 and rose to become head of the assembly department at the Piquette Avenue plant by 1906. He helped launch production of the Model T at this factory, and then worked on implementing the assembly line at the Highland Park facility. By 1913, Martin had been appointed superintendent of production and Sorensen served as his assistant. When Sorensen left Highland Park to manage production in the new tractor division, both men's authority rose in their separate spheres. The two of them were hard-driving, demanding men—Martin was quietly stern, however, compared with Sorensen's more volcanic style—so by the time the Rouge opened there was great potential for conflict.
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Martin and Sorensen each believed he had earned the right to supervise production at the new facility, and both attempted to do so. Confusion and tension prevailed, for, in the words of one Ford manager, “nobody could ever understand the dividing line of authority between Sorensen and Martin.” But as time went on, Sorensen, the more ruthless of the two, gained the upper hand. “Charlie was rather aggressive and he just butted in anywhere that he could and took whatever he could,” noted Frank Hadas, a production assistant at the Rouge. Eventually, the pair reached an accommodation. Martin, who shunned the limelight and was not power-hungry, gradually deferred to his former assistant. Sorensen assumed responsibility for the large-scale decisions and policy-making for the company as a whole, while Martin focused on the day-to-day management of production.
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The purges at the Rouge, however, went beyond Sorensen's confrontations with a few highly placed managers. As entire departments were downsized or revamped in the shift to the new factory, an atmosphere of unease pervaded the organization. “There was a great deal of apprehension because
virtually every day or every few days, purges were going on,” stated L. E. Briggs, the new company treasurer. “Departments were being eliminated overnight.” As old Ford hand W. C. Klann put it, “There was a very uncertain feeling about what was going on.” Edwin G. Pipp noted sarcastically that, to escape this power struggle, “I have gone for relief to the wholesome atmosphere of the foundry, the blast furnace, the heat treatment, the machine rooms, the assembly room.”
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Much of this fear could be traced to Sorensen's tactics in becoming master of the Rouge. He saw a desk he believed extraneous and ordered it thrown out; he saw file drawers locked and broke them open; he saw supervisors who were sitting and jerked the chairs from beneath them; he spotted men standing idle and issued an order: “Go fire those guys.” As he explained to a subordinate, “I figure it this way; I probably don't get out into the yard more than once a month, or once every two months, and when I do come there, I don't want to find a bunch of men standing around doing nothing.”
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He demanded order and efficiency at the Rouge. Once, when a workman could not find a certain screw from his cluttered workbox after searching for fifteen minutes, Sorensen and his assistant went through the whole area breaking open toolboxes and dumping their contents on the floor. On occasion, his tactics turned from intimidating to vicious. He created a special “service department” consisting of handpicked agents who enforced work discipline among the laborers and intimidated Sorensen's rivals. He approved their use of unsavory tactics—liquor, bribery, and women—to entrap and dismiss those who opposed his climb to prominence.
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Sorensen's tyrannical style also extended to his allies and underlings. Harry B. Hanson, a talented layout engineer who became chief of planning for the new Rouge plant, served Sorensen for many years as a loyal assistant. He praised his boss's energy and initiative and worked hard to implement Sorensen's plans. Nonetheless, Sorensen often abused him. Sorensen “was quite rough with me in conversations and he'd bawl me out in front of people whether I deserved it or not,” Hanson recalled. The subordinate shrugged off the tirades as products of his boss's hot temper. “I knew that was the method of his training,” he said. “I guess it was to show me how to be tough.” Hanson endured the abuse because of respect for Sorensen's high standard of production and loathing of poor workmanship and poor effort.
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By the early 1920s, Sorensen had emerged triumphant at the Rouge. He appeared “like a king on a throne telling us what to do,” in the words of one Ford operative. His power, however, was based on more than his prodigious talent or ferocious force of will. Ultimately, it lay in his relationship
with Henry Ford. Perhaps more than any other individual in the company, Sorensen understood the proclivities and principles that governed Ford's direction of his enterprise. It was an understanding that he carefully cultivated for many years.
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Sorensen's personal relationship with Henry Ford dated to his earliest days at the company. The two families lived fairly close to each other, and they began to get together, the wives socializing while the husbands took test drives in the new Model T. At this time Ford still resided in Detroit, but he had a modest country house in Dearborn. He would take Clara and Edsel there for weekends, and soon Sorensen, his wife, and young son began visiting on Sundays. “We brought our own lunches and sat on the lawn and ‘visited,’ ” Sorensen recounted many years later. “And when Henry Ford and I talked shop, Mrs. Ford would perk up and direct a little friendly sarcasm at us for our seriousness.” When Ford built a new estate in Dearborn in 1913, he urged Sorensen to construct a home nearby. So Sorensen purchased a tract of land along the same river, about one mile north of his boss—the tract had once belonged to one of Ford's uncles—and built a white Colonial-style house. “After my wife and I got settled in our new home, Henry and Edsel Ford would ride over on horseback to call,” Sorensen related.
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