The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (Vintage) (97 page)

Cameron emerged as a key figure in the anti-Semitic controversy that engulfed the
Independent
in 1927. Because he was editor of the newspaper, his testimony was crucial for determining the depth and nature of Ford's views on the Jews as well as his culpability in slandering Aaron Sapiro. Cameron absolved his boss of responsibility and took the rap. He insisted that Ford did not see advance copies of the newspaper articles and shouldered all blame for their content himself. Following the settlement of the lawsuit, Ford remained forever grateful for this act of loyalty.

Like Ford's, Cameron's ideological position had a strong populist streak. The rhetoric of “the people” suffused his writing, and he idealized American small-town life, maintaining the view that Protestants were socially and morally superior. Cameron denounced bankers, stockholders, and financial speculators for their greed and nonproductivity throughout his career. Once again like his patron, Cameron had a worldview infected by anti-Semitism, associating Jews with financial corruption and urban manipulation. In his case, however, the position was entangled with a curious set of religious ideas. Cameron was a disciple of the British-Israelite movement and headed an affiliate group in the United States called the Anglo-Saxon Federation. This sect believed that Anglo-Saxons were direct descendants of the lost tribes of Israel, and modern Jews were descended from other groups in Judea. Like other British Israelites, Cameron portrayed Anglo
Saxon Christians and Jews as adversaries, the former being “true children of Israel” and the latter claiming a false birthright. This viewpoint influenced the anti-Semitic essays he wrote for Ford in the Dearborn
Independent
and led Cameron's Anglo-Saxon Federation to peddle pamphlet versions of
The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.
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After the debacle of the collapse of the
Independent,
Cameron took on a new role. He became the house intellectual and wordsmith for the Ford organization, where he kept busy composing greetings, remarks, and introductions for Henry and Edsel, writing press releases, and ghostwriting articles that appeared under Henry's name. In particular, Cameron became a personal public-relations officer for Henry Ford. “I never had an official function with the Ford Motor Company,” Cameron confessed. “I would say that I acted as an interpreter for Mr. Ford.” Gradually, his most important duty became handling the press. By the early 1930s, he was sitting at Ford's side during most interviews and interpreting his hazy pronouncements or convincing reporters to ignore his snap judgments about things of which he was ignorant. As Cameron noted of his protective role, “I felt I knew what he meant, and people who hadn't met him so often wouldn't know the background of what he was saying.” Cameron's role as gatekeeper became the basis of his power. Even to see the industrialist one had to be cleared by his interpreter, and if he “did not think you were entitled to take up any of Ford's crowded time, you did not take it up.”
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Then, in 1934, Ford launched the
Ford Sunday Evening Hour,
and the forum for Cameron's influence expanded. This program was aimed deliberately at a mass, middlebrow audience, none of its selections of classical pieces lasting more than ten minutes. Featuring a different conductor and soloist each week, the show opened and closed, at the special request of Henry Ford, with the “Children's Prayer” theme from
Hansel and Gretel.
In 1936, with its popularity swelling, it began broadcasting from the stage of the Masonic Temple in Detroit, which seated five thousand. By 1938, the
Ford Sunday Evening Hour
ranked as the fifth-most-popular program on radio, standing behind shows such as
Jack Benny
and
Charlie McCarthy
and ahead of others, such as the
Kraft Music Hall
and
Amos ‘n’ Andy.
By 1942, the show had some twenty-nine million listeners, who tuned in an average of 2.8 times a month.
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For many listeners, a highly anticipated feature of the show was the weekly talk during the intermission, which Cameron himself had suggested. When Henry and Edsel first conceived the idea for a radio show centered on the Detroit Symphony, they sought the writer's counsel about its content. He recommended that they avoid excessive commercials and have the announcer talk about something interesting during the intermission. The
Fords asked him to write an example of what he envisioned, so Cameron composed two or three brief talks. Several announcers auditioned unsuccessfully. Henry then asked Cameron to read his own work, and he performed so well that he was hired. Using his rich, soothing speaking voice fully, Cameron offered homilies that were heavy on old-fashioned common sense and village wisdom.
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Most listeners rightly considered Cameron to be Henry Ford's spokesman on the show. “That talking is a gift. I'm glad I never acquired it and I'll never try again,” the audience-shy industrialist once told Charles Sorensen. “I can hire someone to talk for me that knows how.” Having molded Ford's discourse for many years, Cameron proved perfect for this task. His six-minute talks, he explained later, were his own compositions but they reflected “Mr. Ford's attitude as I saw it.” Cameron, benefiting from his years of experience, understood that Ford was an undisciplined, intuitive thinker who arrived at conclusions through flashes of perception rather than systematic analysis. “Mr. Ford had a twenty-five-track mind and there were trains going out and coming in on all tracks at all times,” he once said of his boss's restless sense of inquiry. Moreover, Cameron grasped his boss's provincial mind-set. Ford, he once observed, inherited from his “rural, Populist background a terrible fear of monopolistic power holding everything down,” a passion that fueled his attacks on financiers as well as his construction of steel mills and mines in order to control all aspects of his enterprise.
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Thus Cameron's radio talks turned time and again to themes dear to the heart of his patron—individual initiative, productivity, business as public service, the virtues of labor, uniting agriculture and manufacturing, and the foolishness of war. Titles from his first season include “American Individualism,” “Thomas A. Edison,” “The McGuffey Readers,” and “A Day at Greenfield School.” In later seasons they included “Peace Comes of Age,” “Machines and Jobs,” “Business and Recovery,” and “The Method of Progress.” Throughout these short addresses, Cameron explained the Ford perspective on issues such as industry's responsibility to the public, the evils of government regulation of business, the benefits of efficient production, and the necessity of high wages. Popularizing Ford's veneration of hard work, loyalty to family, experimentation and tradition, and the dignity and worth of ordinary Americans, Cameron distilled his benefactor's views into easily digestible morsels.
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Praise for Henry Ford the man was also a constant thread in the talks. The first address focused on “the personality behind the name” of his boss. Ford, he told the millions of listeners, was an unconventional magnate who seldom used his office, and spent most of his time talking directly to his
managers and workers as he “circulated 'round.” Though he lived his work and was devoted to manufacturing a useful car for ordinary people, Cameron continued, he also pursued educational and agricultural experiments. Ford foresaw a bright future of “undreamed progress, sound prosperity, and that social justice for which he has worked all his life.” In such fashion, Cameron served as a conduit between Ford and his public. The following season, in a talk entitled simply “Henry Ford,” he provided a brief biography that highlighted his employer's impressive list of accomplishments. “His greatest personal pleasure—creating more jobs,” Cameron reported. “His constant goal—higher and yet higher wages … Says if he knew any better way of helping than by sticking to his job, he would do it. And so, at the age of 73, his face is in the light; he believes it is still early morning in America.”
⁴⁶

Ford eagerly participated in this promotional project. He frequently dropped by Cameron's office to hear the next talk straight from the author and offer suggestions. He listened to the show regularly, either on the radio or by attending the live performance. For his part, Cameron embraced the notion of speaking for his innovative but verbally challenged patron. “William J. Cameron is Ford's voice, almost Ford's other self, for …he knows his employer's views and principles as well as Ford himself,” a contemporary critic concluded. For millions of radio listeners, Cameron came to personify the great Detroit automobile company that had revolutionized modern life. Every Sunday evening for years, they heard a familiar state-ment—“You will hear from William J. Cameron of the Ford Motor Company”—that drove home the connection.
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Cameron worked very hard at shaping his weekly messages. Having settled in with his wife and four children in a comfortable Dearborn residence, he usually worked at his home library, often laboring into the early-morning hours. His output was prolific. He not only wrote and delivered several hundred radio talks, but composed countless speeches and newspaper and magazine articles over nearly twenty-seven years with the company. His written work ran into the many thousands of pages.
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Cameron brought several striking qualities of mind to his labors. He was well read, intelligent, and reflective, with spiritual interests that had produced a substantial library of religious tracts and, personally, “a ministerial manner and a very strict code of morals.” Cameron's dignified demeanor and attitude of moral certitude occasionally drifted into pomposity. He felt qualified to comment on every area of human endeavor. “Like all too many preachers, W. J. Cameron … finds himself at home in many fields,” a critic commented sharply. “Politics, economics, mechanics, finance, morals, psychology, history, life and death, right and wrong, taxation, sport, social problems—all
are apparently within his competence.” Yet Cameron retained an instinctive feel for the sensibilities of his middle-class audience. He also had a command of the English language that combined Victorian sentiment with a newspaperman's sense of brevity and human interest.
⁴⁹

One of the most fascinating aspects of Cameron's work for Ford, however, concerned not intelligence or productivity but a physical addiction. His alcoholism was an open secret in Ford Company circles. Something of a binge drinker, he underwent episodes of inebriation that caused great anxiety among the staff at the
Ford Sunday Evening Hour,
who worried that he would be unable to perform on the air. Cameron was assigned a special escort to watch over him on the afternoons of the broadcasts and convey him to the auditorium. In addition, Fred Black was always standing by to fill in if necessary. Cameron did deliver some of his addresses while drunk, but as a functioning alcoholic he always pulled off the performance without noticeable signs of trouble. Perhaps the most surprising dimension of this problem was his boss's tolerance of it. Ford's prohibitionist views were legendary, of course, but he put up with Cameron's weakness as he did no other individual's. A practical reason motivated Ford in part. “Cameron drunk is still a better writer and interpreter than anyone else I know,” he once said. Cameron's shouldering of the blame in the Sapiro trial—according to a friend, the writer resumed drinking when “this Jewish thing blew up in his face”—probably prompted both guilt and tolerance in Ford. As well, Ford's reformist temperament inspired the progressive view that alcoholism was a disease, and he said to all concerned, “We're going to cure him.”
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Thus, every week for eight years, Cameron overcame demon rum to deliver concise, stylized summations of his patron's view of the world. He perfected the role of small-town philosopher, reminding a modern society grown dizzy with bustle and sophistication of the virtues of traditional values. He approached the microphone with a dignified gait and exuded a solemn air. An audience member might “take him for the village preacher or perhaps the editor of the local paper” as he deployed a mellifluous speaking voice that exuded sincerity, wrote one journalist. His talks had an “almost sermon-like quality,” in the words of another observer, and they were “pitched to a reverent yet homey plane.” The overall effect was highly seductive. Indeed, one listener concluded that Cameron's weekly talks had “an accumulated effectiveness which only Roosevelt's Fireside Chats surpassed.”
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Some contemporary analysts saw Cameron's inspirational performances as a kind of propaganda. A half hour of music created a receptive audience, orchestra and singers soothing listeners with light classics and American folk melodies. Cameron's “sermon-like” messages floated smoothly on this current of warm contentment. An academic expert in communications
analyzed Cameron's rhetorical style, with its simplicity of theme, earnest delivery, positive images of progress, use of clichés and abstractions, occasional oratorical flourishes, down-home analogies, and patriotic allusions. He concluded that the speaker, with a superb grasp of his middle-class listeners, spoke to this group “in its own language” and fed back to it “its own ideals and symbols.”
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In fact, Cameron became something of an institution during the Depression. “His Sunday night talks, repeated in the high and low places of America, are beginning to be recognized as shrewd commentaries on the American scene,” a magazine noted. Some observers, in fact, found Cameron's popular appeal disconcerting.
The Christian Century
lumped Cameron with Huey Long and Father Coughlin as outspoken populist critics, but argued that he was the most dangerous of the three because of the “sweet reasonableness” of his attacks.
The Nation
attacked Cameron for “abysmal ignorance” and the promotion of “industrial dictatorship.” A critic writing in the
Public Opinion Quarterly
denounced Cameron's talks as a form of manipulation that appealed to a hazy “American Way” in order to defend business against the encroachments of government regulation.
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