Economic Influencers between 1900 and 1929

 “Henry Ford came into the world on July 30, 1863, when the smoke had barely cleared from the Battle of Gettysburg, when Queen Victoria and Napoleon III were in the middle of their reigns, and before the electric lightbulb, the telephone, or the phonograph had been invented.”[1]

Henry Ford was born in Springwell's Township near Detroit, which is also near Dearborn, a town that he would come to be associated with. His father gave him a pocket watch at the age of 12 & he began to tinker, eventually disassembling and reassembling the watch. By the age of 15, Ford was repairing watching in his neighborhood. While he had a series of jobs in different industries prior to establishing the Ford Motor Company, it was the watch repair that gave him his breakthrough idea. A ”product for the masses”[2] that was affordable.

His work for Westing House Steam Engines taught him how pistons worked. [3]

In 1891 he went to work for Edison Illuminating Company of Detroit. 

By 1892, Ford had built his first functional combustion engine powered car.[4]

On August 5, 1899, Ford founded the Detroit Automobile Company. That company lasted two years. While he had to close the company, it taught Ford how to avoid making an expensive car that only the wealthy could afford to buy.[5] He then worked for the Dodge brothers and the company that would become Cadilac.

On June 16, 1903, the Ford Motor Company was born. Henry Ford had jumped around from company to company for over 15 years, all along the way he acquired knowledge as he went.[6]

It was that broad base of knowledge that helped Henry Ford to become one of the most successful car makers of his time. From management to machinery, Henry Ford’s many different jobs provided him with the knowledge of every aspect of car making. He debuted the Model T in 1908 at an initial cost of $825.[7] By 1916, the price had dropped to under $400 or two months' pay for a Ford employee. Ford had achieved his dream of mass producing a car that the masses could afford to own. That’s less than $11,000 in 2024.[8]

By 1918, 50% of all the cars in the USA were Ford Model Ts.[9] There were two reason for this: one was the simplicity of Ford’s car. The Model T was a simple car that lacked modern luxuries. The Model T did not have air conditioning or heat. It didn’t have power windows or power steering. That is one reason why Ford was able to keep the price so low.

The second reason was the assembly line. Ford did not invent the assembly line, but he did perfect the concept. Eventually, every major industry in America would use the assembly line to increase the speed of production and decrease the costs to the consumer for all mass produced items. To keep his workers from quitting, Ford raised the pay of his assembly line workers to $5 a day, ”twice what they could earn at any other auto company.”[10]

“In the booming 1920s, the mass marketing and mass production of automobiles changed America forever.”[11] With this new generation of drivers came the need for paved roads, fill up stations and repair shops; all to service these new cars.

Throughout the 1920s, Ford was heralded as the modern version of the self-made man. Yet, his reputation was tarnished by three events: The first was a series of lawsuits in response to his reprinting of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, antisemitic articles in the Dearborn Independent. The Dearborn Independent was a newspaper that Henry Ford printed and required all Ford car dealerships to carry.

The second was his overproduction of his Model T. For believed that the measure of his success was to outproduce his competition. Unfortunately, Ford’s desire contributed to the Great Depression by flooding the market with cars that could not be sold. In the spring of 1927, Ford “shut down”[12] his Michigan Ford production plant “The Ford River Rouge”[13] for six weeks, which left 40,000 workers unemployed. By August of 1931, “The Ford Motor Company, Detroit’s Largest employer stopped making cars.  This was due to a decrease in demand during the Great Depression, a condition Ford had help to create by over producing his own cars in an effort to out produce his competitors. Now the numbers were 60,000 Ford workers, who joined the already 100,000 unemployed Detroit workers.

The third was Ford’s connection to Adolf Hitler. In 1922, the New York Times reported that Henry Ford had bankrolled Hitler. While Hitler deigned receiving funds from Ford, Hitler did use copies of Ford’s Dearborn Independent in his attacks on Jews in Europe.[14]

Ford’s only son, Edsel died in 1943 from stomach cancer and Henry Ford was forced to come out of retirement to run the company he started. Eighteen months later he would be forced out by his own board as the company was nearly bankrupt.[15] Henry Ford died two years late in 1947.[16]

 

 

Sources:

Bak, Richard, Henry and Edsel: The Creation of the Ford Empire. New York:

 

Curcio, Vincent. Henry Ford, Oxford: Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2013.

Else, Jon. ” A Job at Ford's”  The Great Depression 1 – PBS Great Depression Series,,WGBH, Boston, 1993.

 

Ford R. Bryan, "The Birth of Ford Motor Company" Archived August 29, 2012, at the Wayback Machine, Henry Ford Heritage Association, retrieved August 20, 2012.

https://www.dollartimes.com/inflation/inflation.php?amount=360&year=1916

 

Ford, Henry; Crowther, Samuel My Life and Work, New York: Garden City Publishing Company, Inc. 1922.

 

Lochbeiler, Don (July 22, 1997). "I think Mr. Ford is Leaving Us". The Detroit News Michigan History. detnews.com. Archived from the original on July 15, 2012. Retrieved October 29, 2010.

Schulman, Daniel, “America’s Most Dangerous Anti-Jewish Propagandist”. The Atlantic.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/11/henry-ford-anti-semitism/675911/

 

Wiley, 2003.Curcio, Vincent. Henry Ford, Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2013.

 

Watts, Steven. The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century. New York: Random House, Inc. 2006.

 

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[1] Vincent Curcio. Henry Ford, (Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2013.), 4.

[2] Ibid., 13.

[3] Steven Watts. The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century. (New York: Random House, Inc. 2006), 28.

[4] Henry Ford. My Life and Work. (New York: Columbia, 2019), 17. 

[5] Bryan Ford, "The Birth of Ford Motor Company" Archived August 29, 2012, at the Wayback Machine, Henry Ford Heritage Association, retrieved August 20, 2012.

[6] Vincent Curcio. Henry Ford, (Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2013.), 43.

[7] Richard Bak, Henry and Edsel: The Creation of the Ford Empire. New York: Wiley, 2003), 63.

[8] https://www.dollartimes.com/inflation/inflation.php?amount=360&year=1916

[9] Henry Ford, Crowther, Samuel (1922), My Life and Work, Garden City, New York, USA: Garden City Publishing Company, Inc.

[10] Jon. Else ”A Job at Ford's”  The Great Depression 1 – PBS Great Depression Series,,WGBH, Boston, 1993.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid.

14 Daniel Schulman, “America’s Most Dangerous Anti-Jewish Propagandist”. The Atlantic.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/11/henry-ford-anti-semitism/675911/

 

[15] Watts, Stephen. The People's Tycoon. (New York: Vintage Books,2005), 503.

[16] Don Lochbeiler (July 22, 1997). "I think Mr. Ford is Leaving Us". The Detroit News Michigan History. detnews.com. Archived from the original on July 15, 2012. Retrieved October 29, 2010.