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The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century, by Steven Watts
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From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Performing the same magnificent feat for Henry Ford as he did for Walt Disney (in The Magic Kingdom), historian Watts offers a magisterial and balanced biography of one of America's business legends. As a farm boy in Michigan, Ford (1863–1947) followed the beat of his own drum, avoiding hard work but watching farm machinery with fascination. He objected to wasting physical energy when a machine could accomplish the same task in less time, and spent much of his leisure taking watches apart and rebuilding them to learn about their mechanisms. Once he moved to Detroit, Ford worked as an engineer at the Edison Illuminating Company, where he quickly became famous for his ability to patch up engines. Then, in 1898, he invented the prototype of his Model A car, secured investors to set up a business and established the first unit of what would become the Ford Motor Company. Watts deftly traces Ford's rise to fame and the innovations, such as the "five-dollar" workday, which doubled factory workers' salaries, that he brought to the workplace, while a chapter titled "Bigot" delineates his notorious anti-Semitism. Watts also brilliantly reveals the contradictions of Ford's business philosophy and his personal and work life. While Ford thought of himself as a man of the people and strove to improve working conditions and wages in his factory, for example, he opposed unions. As Watts points out, Ford embodied both the promises and pitfalls of modern American democracy: "its devotion to opportunity, openness to new ideas, [and] lack of pretension" as well as its anti-intellectualism and "faith in the redemptive power of material goods." Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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From The New Yorker
By the early nineteentwenties, half of all cars on the road were Ford Model Ts, and Henry Ford was one of the most widely quoted men in America. This sturdy biography credits Ford with having, more than anyone else, "created the American Century," spearheading a vast consumer revolution by his mastery of "the mechanisms of modern publicity." When his first attempts at auto production failed, Ford captivated the nation with a series of audacious publicity stunts. His maverick populism made him the first tycoon to be a hero to ordinary Americans, but it was a short step from his early tirades against East Coast bankers and intellectuals to the anti-Semitic crusades that now mar his legacy. Watts somewhat underplays recently discovered evidence of Ford's collaboration—through a German subsidiary—with the Nazi regime, preferring to concentrate on the man who embodied the maxim "To make a sensation, be one." Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker
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Product details
Hardcover: 640 pages
Publisher: Knopf; First Edition edition (August 9, 2005)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0375407359
ISBN-13: 978-0375407352
Product Dimensions:
6.6 x 1.5 x 9.5 inches
Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
4.1 out of 5 stars
68 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#399,100 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
I was motivated to find out more about Henry Ford after visiting the outstanding Ford Museum in Detroit. This book is an exhaustive telling of Henry Ford's life, and the foundations of his phenomenal economic success. You will see how that success led him to believe (as seen by many great businessmen) that their magic touch in business led him to believe he had equal prowess in other areas, with often embarrassing or tragic results. He had some unusual beliefs and ideas that would have been given much less credence if he hadn't been incredibly rich. The lack of introspection and tendency to undermine others that were successful in the company due to an innate jealousy were troubling. Ford believed his own press clippings and longed for the old days (certainly helped in the creation of the Henry Ford & Greenfield village), while at the same time driving change and economic development. From my standpoint, the book dragged at times with overraught details that should have been condensed or summarized - I wanted to say "I get it'". Overall, well written, but would have enjoyed more if condensed by 25% or more. I liked the 1st half of the book more than the 2nd.
This is a challenging book for a lot of reasons. The font is the smallest you will find in any major book on the market. It is the size of footnotes in some other books. With 538 pages of actual text plus a prologue, this is a long book. As other reviewers have also noted, Watts quotes newspapers and popular magazines a great deal and often tends to write a paragraph about one of Ford’s achievements and use a quote as a final exclamation mark to his point. The constant use of direct quotes about Ford or his company would be more effective if they were used more sparsely.The length would also be much less of a problem if the author did not repeat himself and do a lot of commenting. The repetition occurs because the book is not primarily structured chronologically but by categories like “Folk Hero,†“Visionary,†“Father,†and “Despot.†Watts by necessity frequently has to go over some of the same ground for the reader to “catch up†on the topic. For example, it is not until the early 1920’s that Watts goes into detail on Ford’s marriage to his wife Clara. This means going back into the 1800’s, giving details on Clara’s background, and reviewing events up to the time of some of the book’s other divisions. This “catching up†happens several times.For much of the first 350 pages or so Watts has little but good things to say about Ford. The author has many paragraph or page-length comments about Ford’s impact on America and on Ford’s uncanny ability to visualize machines and his goal of making a vehicle for the “common man.†These comments are not inaccurate but the author does it again and again. The author also has a tendency to use value-laden adjectives like “dynamic†or “great†to describe not just Ford but his associates in the course of Ford’s life. Again these may not be inaccurate but I wish the author would have allowed the events and people’s actions to speak more for themselves and not involved himself so much in the flow of the book.With chapter 19, “Bigot,†the book’s tone changes dramatically. Ford’s verbal but vicious anti-Semitism and the millions he spent to publicize hatred are important factors in the history of prejudice in this country. Watts does a good job of describing it all but again it appears pretty much out of the blue in the way the book is structured. Maybe Watts divides the book as he does because he clearly wants to separate Ford’s creative abilities and positive impacts from his negative ones. But a more chronological presentation of Ford’s life without the clear topic divisions might allow the reader to see a more integrated person and maybe give us more clues as to why Ford became the individual he was. Watts tries to do this by referring back to Ford’s early views of people with more education or money but I still find Ford’s lifeline fairly disjointed.So this book definitely has the details of Henry Ford’s life. Watts deserves credit for his extensive research. Parts of the book are page-turning reading like the 1901 auto race in which Ford drove and his mechanic hung onto the outside of the car to balance it. But I found the structure of the book and the wordiness of many of the author’s descriptions and comments made it harder to develop a full picture of Henry Ford as a person.
Well written, and hard to believe at some points!What a character Mr. Ford was. I think the greatest strength of this biography is the richness in detailing the everyday Mr. Ford-- the many delightful accounts of him encountering locals in anonymity, like the farmer who was cursing at his Ford-Ferguson tractor-- Old Henry Ford can shove this tractor up his backside! And there was Henry Ford, among the wealthiest men in the world, in overalls and a straw hat. Ford fiddled around under the hood, got the motor running.Next day the man learned who his visitor had been, and expected to be fired, but Ford never let on that it had happened.I wanted more technical details on his cars, but that is not this book. I read the section on the Dahlingers twice-- Watts really handles that well.Did Ford increase his workers's wages by 100 percent in order to avoid paying out his accumulated horde of cash in dividends? He considered his stockholders to be "parasites," and I think the wage increase is best explained as his avoiding rewarding those investors, not in order to give his workers more money so that they could buy more Ford cars.Suffers from too few photos. Has no maps and no diagrams.
A well-balanced and captivating history of one of the most interesting and influential characters of the early 20th century. Ford emerges as a paradox: kind and caring, anti-intellectual and biased, world-peace activist and jew-basher, a delightful combination of groundbreaking entrepeneur and reactionary Americana traditionalist.I've read this book with great relish and would warmly recommend it to anyone with an interest in the Ford Motor Company and the broader early 20th century making of the consumer capitalist society.
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