The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (Vintage) (87 page)

Ford's opposition to the New Deal reflected his deepest convictions about the mainsprings of American life. Put simply, he believed that private initiative, energy, and innovation had fueled the nation's material progress, and that government attempts to regulate the economic and social life of its citizens spelled doom. As early as 1931, even before FDR took office, Ford had begun railing against government intrusions into economic life. He noted that Washington was already paying soldiers and public employees, and some were now urging it to regulate the sale of industrial and agricultural products. Perhaps, he observed sarcastically, entrepreneurs should join the crowd “to make it unanimous and have us all live off the Government.” Then all that was required “to be perfectly happy is a new kind of Santa Claus who will keep the Government well provided with money or anything else that it wants.”
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Roosevelt's initiatives only exacerbated Ford's concerns. He believed that an activist federal government was inimical to the spirit of America. A close look at the NIRA, for example, clearly revealed that initiatives were being “put into law under cover of Recovery that were contrary to our whole American way of life and government.” Promoting work, high wages, and reasonable working hours was a laudable goal, but forcing workers to join unions and regulating production and prices made for tyranny that “is impossible in America, which makes it all the more amazing that any American government should lend countenance to it.” Under such regulation, “we can be told how much to pay for our materials whether they are worth it or not, how many cars to produce in a year, at what price to produce them, at what price to sell them, and every detail of our operation can be placed under control of a committee, one-third of whom are politicians and one-third of whom are labor leaders,” Ford wrote. He especially abhorred two types who were filling the ranks of government: the “social theorist” who was determined to extract from businessmen support for the entire citizenry, and the representative of big finance who sought to use government power for “reestablishing money control of all our activities.” This unholy alliance of antibusiness radicals and Wall Street financiers spelled “the destruction of the United States.”
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Ford elaborated upon these themes in attacking the programs and provisions of the New Deal. He denounced plans for new taxes on business as destroying the very foundations of productivity and prosperity. “I have never objected to paying taxes, but I do object to government eating up the real wealth of this country on the pretext of giving it back to the people,” Ford declared in 1935. “Industry can stand it, yes, but it would be like using the doors and woodwork of your house for fuel—pretty soon you have neither house nor fuel.” A year later, he lit into Roosevelt's plans for government
imposition of high wages. Ford said, “It is easy enough for a man who has never met a payroll or managed anything to sit on a commission and airily declare for higher wages, while at the same time imposing regulations which make the payment of these wages impossible.” With the New Deal, Ford concluded, “the country has been given a postgraduate course in how not to do a number of different sorts of things. That experience should prove to be of great value to the country.”
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As the Depression decade unfolded, the old populist in Ford increasingly moved to the fore. Like Huey Long, he denounced the federal government for allying itself with Wall Street to prey upon genuine “producers.” He urged workers and businessmen to resist these “parasites” on behalf of American prosperity. He drew a parallel between government intrusion into the economy and speculation in the stock market. Government regulation of independent companies, Ford declared, dampened the creation of real wealth and promoted the interests of bankers, financiers, and other “money changers.” “The politicians may not know it, but they are working right into the hands of that crowd,” he said repeatedly. “Money lending is the only business that has prospered during the depression.” After listening to one of his rants, a reporter wrote that Ford was determined to resist “the schemes of the money lenders to control America under the mask and pretensions of the New Deal.” This critique, like much of the populist tradition, carried a whiff of anti-Semitism. Publicly, he denounced Wall Street bankers as secret partners in the New Deal coalition; privately, he identified Jewish financiers as culprits. “Mr. Ford seemed to feel quite strongly that there was a DuPont-Jewish-Roosevelt clique that was more or less tied together,” reported one of his associates. “This was pretty deep in him.”
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In 1936, Ford issued his definitive populist condemnation of the New Deal. Writing in
The Saturday Evening Post,
he described government and finance as “the two great businesses of today.” These “parasites” had determined to “suck the lifeblood” out of the American economy in the interests of power and profit. “There is no difference, as far as the effect on the people is concerned, between overgrown finance and overgrown government,” he argued passionately. “Both government and finance, whenever they get the chance, show the same avid desire to regulate and control the operations of producers.”
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Ford's ideological confrontation with the Roosevelt administration revealed fully the individualist, producerist code of conduct that he believed had created American material prosperity. Within his company, that same rigid mind-set shaped his attitude toward a rapidly worsening problem—his company's relations with laborers. Workers' desperate search for
economic security during the 1930s propelled them toward unionization, but this movement found a cold reception in Dearborn. Committed to an old-fashioned view of labor and its relationship to management that had been forged in the halcyon times of the Five-Dollar Day, Ford was unable to comprehend, let alone accept, the rationale for unionizing his company. This failure brought on spectacular episodes of labor strife, and also led him to promote to the top of his company one of the most controversial characters in its long history.

On March 7, 1932, a crowd of some twenty-five hundred unemployed workers and radical agitators gathered on the outskirts of Detroit. After arriving on foot, by streetcar, and on buses, they organized themselves in the early afternoon and began moving toward Dearborn. Most of them had been present the night before at two mass meetings addressed by William Z. Foster, the Communist Party leader, whose fiery rhetoric escalated a sense of outrage. Describing their effort as a “hunger march,” the marchers headed for the River Rouge plant, where they were determined to present grievances to the Ford Motor Company and demand jobs. Some seventy Detroit policemen monitored their progress as the protesters sang songs, chanted slogans, and waved placards saying “Come On Workers, Don't Be Afraid,” “We Want Jobs!,” and “Now Is the Time to Act!” When they arrived at Miller Road, which led to Gate 4, the main entrance to the Rouge, three dozen Dearborn police, supported by Ford security forces, blocked their way.

A confrontation erupted. The police demanded that the marchers refrain from violating private property, and when the crowd shouted its defiance and surged forward, the defenders fired several tear-gas canisters. The protesters responded with a hail of rocks and kept pushing forward. The police retreated in orderly fashion and gained support from the Dearborn Fire Department, which turned streams of water on the protesters from overhead passageways. More rocks greeted this tactic.

At this point, the escalating conflict halted for a peculiar interlude. The locked gate at the Rouge swung open, and a single automobile drove out. Next to the driver sat Harry Bennett, the Ford Company's head of security and chief labor negotiator, whose tough reputation had spread throughout Detroit. The car drove right up to the crowd. “Well, somebody yelled ‘We want Bennett,’ so like a fool I said, ‘I'm Bennett,’ and got out of the car,” he
described later. “Well, you should have seen those rocks. Honest, they came at me like a flock of pigeons.” With typical bravado, Bennett went after one of the ringleaders when a rock struck him in the head and knocked him unconscious.
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When Bennett went down, the situation turned ghastly. The crowd pushed on, throwing bricks and stones, and this time defenders opened fire with shotguns and pistols. Witnesses reported that gunfire also came from ranks of the protesters. A full-scale, bloody riot erupted amid clouds of tear gas as the sound of guns, shouting, and shattering glass from plant windows punctuated hand-to-hand fighting between marchers and police and security men, all of whom were armed with wooden cudgels and lengths of metal pipe. As the battle raged, calls went out for support, and units from the Detroit police and the Michigan state police rushed toward the scene. When these reinforcements arrived, the marchers retreated in disarray. The smoke cleared on a horrifying site. Four men lay dead on the stone-littered ground, and thirty badly injured individuals were trying to drag themselves to safety or call out for help. Harry Bennett lay unconscious under the lifeless body of one of the march leaders, whose corpse, ironically, shielded the hated Ford operative.
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This violent confrontation caused a sensation around the country.
The New Republic
termed it the “Dearborn Massacre” and blamed the repressive policies of Henry Ford and his allies in the Dearborn Police Department for causing the tragedy. Ideological positions hardened and divided Detroit. Many of the marchers had been communists, and three days later they held a rally in a meeting hall where four caskets lay in state beneath a picture of Lenin while the band played a Russian funeral march. At the opposite end of the spectrum, the local American Legion passed a resolution promising to “tender to the Ford Motor Company and other Wayne County industries the assistance of our organization and pledge them the support of all members in any further emergency.” One of the assistant prosecutors involved in the subsequent grand-jury investigation told journalists, “I don't care who knows it, but I wish they'd killed a few more of those damned rioters.”
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The riot tragically highlighted the labor crisis that slowly enveloped the Ford Motor Company during the Great Depression. But it also illustrated another important development in the company's affairs during the 1930s: the central role played by Harry Bennett. After being knocked unconscious by the barrage of rocks, he was hailed for his courage by Ford supporters. But pro-union forces denounced Bennett's tactics, viewing him as “a cross between a spy and a gorilla,” in the words of one magazine. Whatever was made of this controversial figure, one thing was clear. Henry Ford had
placed Bennett in a position of authority during this period of labor agitation and backed him completely. The effects of this decision would resonate for many years.
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The tale of Harry Bennett's rise in the Ford Motor Company was remarkable. Through a combination of fortune and canniness, this disarmingly candid but ruthless roustabout climbed to the very apex of power in one of the nation's largest industrial enterprises. Trading on his close personal relationship with Henry Ford, Bennett became head of personnel and payroll and eventually took charge of labor relations. Given his connections to mobsters in the Detroit underworld, he surrounded himself with a small army of thugs and created an extensive spy system within the company. Bennett became Henry Ford's “pistol-packing errand boy,” in the words of Charles Sorensen, and devoted himself utterly to his boss. By the early 1930s, he had become the second-most-powerful man in the Ford Motor Company.
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Bennett had been born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1892and grew up in Detroit. A rebellious, unruly child, he also demonstrated an artistic flair, studying painting and sculpture at the Detroit School of Fine Arts. He decided to join the navy in 1909, at age seventeen. As an enlisted sailor, Bennett had cruised to Central America, Europe, and Africa, and also drawn cartoons for a navy magazine and played clarinet in a service band. He became interested in boxing and fought a number of matches under the name Sailor Reese.
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In 1916, while on furlough in New York City and planning to re-enlist, Bennett accidentally made the most important acquaintance of his life. Along with a close friend, he had become embroiled in an argument with customs officials at Battery Park when things escalated into fisticuffs with the police. Arthur Brisbane, the noted journalist, wandered by during the fight and persuaded the authorities to release the young sailors. Bennett's friend promptly fled to the ship, but Brisbane asked the young Michigander to accompany him to Broadway to meet someone from his home state. A short time later, Brisbane introduced Bennett to Henry Ford, whom the journalist had known for a number of years. They chatted for a while, and Ford asked the sailor if he would like a job at his new plant under construction in Detroit. He promised a position as a security officer, explaining, “The men who are building the Rouge are a pretty tough lot, and I haven't got any policemen out there.” Bennett accepted and returned to Detroit. Ford sent him to the Rouge “to be my eyes and ears.” Upon arriving, Bennett
promptly exchanged punches with a huge Polish foreman, and they knocked each other to the ground. Thus establishing his credentials, he began his career at the company, which he described in these simple words: “I am Mr. Ford's personal man.”
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