SOURCE: "Fixation and the Twenty-Five Track Mind," in The First Henry Ford: A Study in Personality and Business Leadership, The MIT Press, 1970, pp. 34-74.

[In the following essay, Jardim examines the early part of Ford's career.]

"Mr. Ford," W. J. Cameron liked to say, "had a twenty-five track mind and there were trains going out and coming in on all tracks at all times." Here Cameron was attempting to account for the diverse interests and the singular opinions that at one time or another Ford saw fit to uphold. How else, runs the implication, does one make sense of Ford's excursions into international politics, racial bigotry, newspaper publishing, fertilizer manufacture, old-fashioned dancing, antique collecting, and the professions of medicine and education?

One of the less friendly of Ford's biographers described Cameron as Ford's "verbal alter ego," and this was in essence a job description. After the closing in 1927 of Ford's newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, Cameron's sole job, apart from a weekly broadcast on the "Ford Sunday Evening Hour," was to interpret Henry Ford to the public. The function he served was in no way designated by the company—he carried no official title—nor was it acknowledged by Cameron himself: "The Ford Motor Company," he insisted, "has no public relations department and employs no public relations counsel or 'spokesman.'"

But the need for his services was real. With the introduction of the $5 day in 1914, Henry Ford burst upon the public stage, and, as Cameron said later, "he spoke in telegrams and epigrams … they had to be translated." Significantly enough, the telegrams and epigrams had little to do with the world of machines and they bore no mark of prior thought or real commitment. Fred L. Black, one of Cameron's associates on the Dearborn Independent, said:

Mr. Ford expressed very positive opinions about things without thinking very much about it.… If some newspaperman would ask him some question on a subject he hadn't thought very much about, he'd express a snap judgment. It practically became Cameron's function to weed that out of the interview. I've heard Cameron say, "Well, I wouldn't say anything about that. I don't know what he meant myself. It would be dangerous to express his thoughts about something or other unless we understood him."

Sometimes Ford managed to elude his protectors and the flippancy came through bare of any deeper meaning which might otherwise have been imposed. His belief in reincarnation, he told reporters, was based on simple observation: "When the automobile was new and one of them came down the road, a chicken would run straight for home—and usually be killed. But today when a car comes along, a chicken will run for the nearest side of the road. That chicken has been hit in the ass in a previous life."

At a time when rumors abounded that he would run for the presidency he gave his opinion on the state of society: "All that is the matter with this world is injustice," he said. "Establish justice and everything will be all right." Pressed for what should be done to remove injustice, he offered his own solution: "Increase the salaries of the supreme court judges. Pay them more money. They don't get enough. Put their salaries up where they should be."

The point at issue here has been made by one of Ford's earliest biographers. There were hundreds of men prominent in the businessworld of no greater learning than Ford, Dean Marquis wrote, "but on matters with which they are not familiar they have the gift of silence and a correspondingly low visibility." Despite Cameron's descriptive phrases and best efforts, Henry Ford's public forays after 1914 bear little resemblance to the actions of a man possessed of wide interests, who capably and methodically pursued them. Rather they bear the stamp of a man grasping at straws.

Indeed, the twenty-five track mind comes more and more to look like a single track of the narrowest gauge, intercepted by spurs leading nowhere, and laid in an inexorable line from the farm and the farmer to the farmer's car.

Why, at its simplest, should it have been Henry Ford who so unerringly sensed the future of the automobile? There were so many others who saw it too and who lacked the determination or the desire to put their vision to work. In this the pioneer Olds was not alone. William C. Durant, the founder of General Motors, foresaw the million-car years to come, even as the entire industry was struggling to manufacture 65,000 cars in 1908. In Kenosha, Wisconsin, Thomas B. Jeffery began building the Rambler in 1901. He integrated his plant and was among the first builders to adopt a single-model strategy. But while other men saw the market, the method, and the policy, why was it Ford alone who put them together?

He began haltingly enough in the 1890s. In 1879 at the age of sixteen he left his father's farm for Detroit's machine shops, but after only three years in the city he returned home. He worked only irregularly on the farm after this, spending the bulk of his time operating and servicing steam engines for neighboring farmers and others throughout southern Michigan. In the early 1880s—the date cannot be fixed—he built a "farm locomotive" using for a chassis the frame of an old mowing machine which his father had discarded. Essentially a tractor powered by steam, the locomotive ran for forty feet and then stopped for lack of pressure; it never ran again.

Later Ford said that it was during this period that he changed from steam to the gasoline engine, but neither his wife nor his sister could afterwards remember that an engine was ever built as a result. He seems in fact to have been slowly teaching himself basic principles rather than pushing any fixed idea. Many years later in the first of the autobiographical volumes written in collaboration with Samuel Crowther, he said:

It was life on the farm that drove me into devising ways and means to better transportation. I was born on July 30, 1863, on a farm at Dearborn, Michigan, and my earliest recollection is that, considering the results, there was too much work on the place.… There was too much hard hand labor on our own and all other farms of the time.

People had been talking about carriages without horses for many years back—in fact, ever since the steam engine was invented—but the idea of the carriage did not seem so practical to me as the idea of an engine to do the harder farm work, and of all the work on the farm ploughing was the hardest.

To lift farm drudgery off flesh and blood and lay it on steel and motors has been my most constant ambition. It was circumstances that took me first into the actual manufacture of road cars. I found eventually that people were more interested in something that would travel on the road than in something that would do the work on the farms. In fact, I doubt that the light farm tractor could have been introduced on the farm had not the farmer had his eyes opened slowly but surely to the automobile.

These statements were made long after the event, and as an explanation for Ford's failure to pursue his early concern with a farm tractor they seem plausible enough. Yet his progress was so much a matter of fits and starts in the immediate years to follow that there seem grounds to hold that his early disappointment over the tractor was a more serious setback than he ever later admitted.

In September 1891, accompanied by his wife of three years, Ford abandoned the farm his father had given to him when he married, and returned to Detroit to work as an engineer with the Edison Illuminating Company. His salary was forty-five dollars a month. "I took it," he said later, "because that was more money than the farm was bringing me and I had decided to get away from farm life anyway. The timber had all been cut."

The two years which followed are sparsely and confusingly documented. Ford said that he immediately set to work and by 1892 had built his first car. But this was not so; his first automobile was completed in the summer of 1896, and in the meantime Ford seems to have spent his time on the job picking up information where he could and experimenting haphazardly, with little of the urgency that he was later to develop.

Nevins and Hill, in the first volume of their history of the Ford Motor Company, have cited the evidence of Charles B. King, the earliest of the Detroit pioneer builders, to the effect that Ford's first gasoline engine was completed late in 1895, and King is corroborated to some extent by Oliver Barthel who was in King's employ at the time. Barthel said that he showed Ford an article in the American Machinest of November 7, 1895, which gave instructions on how to build an engine from odd bits and pieces of machinery. Ford, he said, decided to build one.

King wrote later that when he was at work on his first car using the facilities of the Lauer machine shop, "Henry Ford was then an engineer in the Edison Illuminating Company.… He looked after the repair of the engines and this brought him to Lauer's shop where my work was in progress. Ford realized the possibilities of the automobile then and started at once to work building his firstcar in the little brick shop at the rear of 58 Bagley Avenue."

The address sets a limit to predating work on the car, for the Fords moved to Bagley Avenue in December 1893. But the accuracy of King's memory grows doubtful when he goes on to say that Ford's funds were so low at the time that he started to teach night classes in metalworking at the Detroit YMCA. While Ford did do so, the classes were held in the winter of 1892-1893, at least one year earlier than King's first statement would indicate.

The discrepancy, in fact, seems to arise in the attempt to fix an approximate date for Ford's first efforts at building a car as distinct from a gasoline engine. That Ford worked with a series of engines, unclear as to the final purpose to which they would be put, supports the belief that when he moved to Detroit it was not with a car in mind but with a much vaguer notion of developing gasoline engines for use on the farm. The evidence of King and Barthel attests only to Ford's continuing interest in engines: King's memory is unreliable as to when work on the first car began, and the Barthel reference is indicative only of Ford's lack of familiarity with the engines whose plans Barthel showed him.

The wish to tie an automobile to the engines has led Nevins and Hill to the assumption that Ford went to Detroit in 1891 bent on building a "horseless carriage": he had earlier repaired a gasoline engine at a bottling plant in Detroit, became convinced it could be applied to a road vehicle, and said so to his wife who later remembered it. This is then cited in support of their conclusion that Ford must have been working on the car during the first years of the 1890s. "It is difficult to believe," they wrote, "that a man of Ford's skill, experience, and energy should have repaired an Otto [an early gasoline engine] in 1885 and studied various other models including the one which prompted him to come to Detroit and yet more than four years after his arrival have done nothing in the area of experiment which was professedly his reason for leaving the country."

And yet this is precisely what seems to have happened; in these early years Ford's concern lay with the engine and hardly at all with the automobile.

In the course of writing their first volume, Nevins and Hill appear not to have had available to them the reminiscences of Frederick Strauss which clearly indicate that Ford was working on engines rather than attempting to develop a car. Strauss first met Ford when as boys they worked together at a Detroit machine shop in 1879 and the acquaintance was resumed when Ford returned to Detroit. "In 1893, when I was working down at the Wain [machine] shop," Strauss said later,

Henry had all kinds of time and he used to come down to see me. Hehad.a little shop of his own back of the Edison Company.… They had old motors down there and the Electric Company used that as a storage place. Henry used that as a hangout. He was never hardly in the power station.

While I was working at Wain, I used to go up there and hang out too. There were other fellows who would come and sit in there.… He had this idea of making a little gasoline engine out of scrap.… It was a one-cylinder engine. I built the whole thing but he gave the instructions.

We didn't work every night. We would just joke away. Sometimes we would work and sometimes not. It took about six weeks to get this little engine built.

On Saturday nights we had quite a crowd. Henry had some kind of a "magnet." He could draw people to him, that was a funny thing about him.

We had an awful time with the ignition.… There was a kind of a little make and break spark. There was no battery or anything. It was something like a cigar lighter.… It wasn't a flint because I can remember that we took the head of a nail and soldered that onto a little spring. Later on we found that that would burn. Somehow or other we got hold of a little piece of platinum and we soldered that on … and it didn't corrode. I think the cylinder was brass made out of a piece of pipe, a steam pipe of some kind.

The engine ran satisfactorily and Ford sold it to a boat owner for installation in his boat. In 1896 Ford helped Strauss set up a small machine shop. He invested $30 for two months rent on the building and $94.82 of a total of $268.50 spent on equipment. Two more gasoline engines were built, one for a neighbor of Ford's in Dearborn and the other to power yet another boat. In the meantime, Strauss and men in other shops in Detroit machined parts for what was to become Ford's first car. It was put together in a workshop behind Ford's home without their knowledge and with Ford working almost entirely alone.

The saga of Ford's first years in Detroit in the 1890s is thus one in which the gasoline engine is central. From it the automobile gradually evolved, and while Ford took longer than the other pioneers to build a car which would run on the road, his preoccupation with the engine was to give him his greatest advantage. His first car weighed less than 700 pounds, and except for the Duryeas' it was faster than other cars of the time, which not only weighed up to 2000 pounds but ran on ignition systems so inferior that the driver was almost always enveloped in clouds of oily smoke.

Toward the end of 1898 Ford completed a second and better car, and within a year several prominent Detroit businessmen agreed to back him. They formed the Detroit Automobile Company with a capitalization of $150,000 of which $15,000 was in cash. Ten days after the company's incorporation on August 5, 1899, Ford resigned from the Edison Company to work full time as a builder of cars.

The shareholders in the new automobile company included some of the wealthiest men in Detroit, and in W. C. McMillan they could lay claim to a close relationship with the most powerful family in Michigan. William C. Maybury, another shareholder, was at the time mayor of Detroit. His family had long had close ties with Ford's, and by 1897 Maybury had already helped Ford financially and had procured machine tools for his use.

The shareholders clearly anticipated that upon incorporation the company would put Ford's second car into production. A year earlier in August 1898 one of them had written Maybury with this assumption implicit:

With all the failures there have been in experimenting with gasoline, I still think it would be a good idea to examine into the others and compare them with Mr. Ford's, and see wherein his excels and to what extent. I believe it would be money well invested. It might save us a heap of money hereafter, or it might give us such faith and confidence that we would go ahead and push the business and make ten times as much as what it cost us.

Yet, on July 24, 1899, when Henry Ford signed a contract of employment with the Detroit Automobile Company to work as mechanical superintendent "performing such duties as may be assigned him," the "second car" moved into the background.

A three-year lease was signed on a building which, Strauss said later, was "just perfect for our shop." Equipment was bought and machinists hired. Within three weeks the shop was ready and the new directors anxious to begin. But, said Strauss,

Henry wasn't ready. He didn't have an automobile design. To get the shop going, Henry gave me some sketches to turn up some axle shaftings. I started machining these axle shaftings to show them we were doing something. It was just to get it going but they didn't belong to anything. We never used them for the automobile. It was just a stall until Henry got a little longer into it.

There was a woods back there and Henry said that he and Bille Boyer were going back in the woods where it was quiet. They were going to design an automobile.

The first thing I knew I never heard or saw any more of Bille Boyer.… Nobody took Boyer's place. Henry then had the business all to himself. He never put much time in the shop. He was going all the time. He might come in every day for about an hour or two.… Every time he would come in he would bring a little sketch.…

With no reasons given for the abandonment of the "second car" the company's production was restricted to a heavy delivery wagon, and Ford's design was a flat failure: the vehicle was slow, heavy, and unreliable. The machinists got so far ahead of Ford's sketches that parts mounted up in the shop, initially to the satisfaction of the directors but soon to contribute to a growing sense of unease as out of the mountain of parts came only two completed and unsatisfactory vehicles.

Ford's agreement with the company had given him no part as a shareholder; he worked for a salary of $150 a month, yet he had agreed "to give his whole time and attention and devote his best energies" to the company's business. Either he could not or would not use the promising "second car" which had formed the basis for the company's incorporation. Instead, he set himself the near impossible task of building a heavy vehicle when all of his previous experience lay with a light design. "The directors weren't satisfied," said Strauss. "One of them wanted to throw in the sponge. Everything was going too slow for him. They had a directors' meeting but Henry said that he wasn't going to do any more on these two cars until they gave him a better settlement.… Henry had told me that they were going to have a meeting. He said 'if they ask for me, you tell them that I had to go out of town.'"

When asked for Ford, Strauss dutifully gave the message and the directors in the absence of their mechanical superintendent evidently agreed to disband. Formal notice of dissolution was not filed until January 1901, but in the meantime operations were reduced to experimental work in a much smaller shop in the same building.

On the day following the meeting Strauss was ordered by the directors to destroy the car bodies previously built and to call in a junk dealer and sell everything else. He later recalled that they

brought the bodies down and put them into the boiler room, and we took a sledge hammer and busted all these beautiful bodies. Then we burned them under the boiler. The machine parts were sold to a junk man.… There was a lot of steel castings and bronze gear-wheels. Everything was sold out and we started in new in the new shop. I didn't hear from Henry for a few days, maybe a week. I just did what I got orders to do. All at once Henry came in one morning. He took a little corner of the shop and he started to hire Ed Huff for electrician, Harold Wills as the draughtsman and he also hired a pattern-maker.… They started to make a little car.

Ford had weathered the storm and had in fact managed to keep a handful of the original backers interested enough to pay the bills. But when they discovered that the "little car" was nothing more than a front for Ford's continuing experiments, that he was in fact not attempting to perfect it but was at work on two bigger experimental cars, the situation again came to a head. Murphy, the wealthiest remaining backer, discovered what Ford was doing and, Strauss said: "he got disgusted and they had a break-up. Murphytold me to go on and to pay no attention to Henry at all. Then the pattern-maker was laid off, and that was the end of Henry and Wills and Huff. I didn't see them any more."

Ford later described the directors of the Detroit Automobile Company as "a group of men of speculative turn of mind" who were determined to exploit him. They gave no support to his one desire to make a better car for the public. "The main idea," he wrote, "seemed to be to get the money. And being without authority other than my engineering position gave me, I found that the new company was not a vehicle for realizing my ideas but merely a money-making concern—that did not make much money."

This is a judgment as harsh as it is inaccurate. The Detroit Automobile Company lost $86,000 during the brief period of its existence, and at its dissolution there was still nothing ready for the market. The facts were that the company was formed expressly to build a car for sale. Ford's behavior, his biographers have called it "perfectionism," in reality betrayed an ambivalence that was to stay with him for several years to come. It was a device which protected him from an outright commitment to building the cars as he had undertaken to do, and at the same time it freed him from control by other men despite his nominal acceptance of their direction. He moved into commitment and subordinacy and as quickly moved back. He had built his first car almost entirely alone; others had built or machined parts for him, but he had put it together. And he had done so in such secrecy that Frederick Strauss, who could properly be called Ford's partner in the machine shop they established, did not know that Ford was at work on a car. Ford had never told him. Two months after his first car was completed, Ford sold it despite the hard work he had put into it. But this after all was but a single car, built by an amateur, and it could be sold on this basis. It represented no real commitment. The "second car" which might have put the Detroit Automobile Company on its feet never went into production, and while the shareholders held on, Ford designed failure after failure.

In the months following the final disagreement in the Detroit Automobile Company, Ford began work on a racer, using the two unfinished cars which must have formed the bulk of the company's assets at its dissolution. By April 1901 he had again succeeded in interesting W. H. Murphy, the director of the defunct company who had earlier opposed him, since Mrs. Ford's diary records that on April 25th, "Henry and Mr. Murphy went out with Automobile." In May he was sufficiently solvent to employ Oliver Barthel, King's former assistant, to work part time with Huff and Wills to develop the racer.

The point has often been made by Ford's biographers that the venture into racing was the outcome of Ford's need, first, to find backers—a successful racing car would lead to wide public acceptance of a commercial model and capital to manufacture would thus be more easily forthcoming; second, to surmount the problems of design—a successful racer had to withstand the strain of anengine running flat out and generally to attain a much higher level of performance than the average car. The myth was fostered by Ford himself. "The public," he wrote, "thought nothing of a car unless it made speed—unless it beat other racing cars."

But the facts are different. Ford had backing. He had been better financed than any other builder, R. E. Olds alone excepted. It was Ford's fault alone that his company had never gone into production. The design of his second car was as good as the Olds curved-dash run-about, of which Olds was to build 425 in 1901 and 2500 in 1902 without once having to prove the car's merits on the track. In fact no racer was to achieve wide public acceptance.

For Henry Ford, racing seems to have been yet another way out. Once again he could play THe amateur without the risk of real failure; and when he sold the cars, as he would, they were discards, not symbols of his own commitment—a commitment which would be inevitable once his cars were put on the market in numbers.

In October 1901 Ford's racer defeated Winton at a Grosse Pointe track, and at the end of November his early backers again agreed to finance him. The ever-hopeful Murphy and four former shareholders in the Detroit Automobile Company organized the Henry Ford Company, with Ford a shareholder for the first time. Each man held 1000 shares of $10 each, and $30,500 was advanced in cash by the five former shareholders.

The company, according to Barthel, who now joined Ford full time, was to manufacture a small car. But Ford had the racing fever: "He did not seem inclined to settle down to a small car production plan. He talked mostly about wanting to build a larger and faster racing car. This, together with some dissatisfaction as to the amount of interest he was to share in the company led to considerable dissension between himself and Mr. Murphy, who represented the group."

On Ford's instructions Barthel began drawings for still another racing car with a four-cylinder, inline vertical engine, and in the meantime Ford took up racing as a business with increasing seriousness. In January 1902 he wrote to his wife's brother about his intention to race the French champion, Henri Fournier:

My Dear Brother,

If I can bring Mr. Fournier in line there is a barrel of money in this business. It was his proposition and I don't see why he won't fall in line if he don't I will chalenge him until I am black in the face. As for managing my end of the racing business I would rather have you than anyone else that I know of. My company will kick about me following racing but they will get the advertising and I expect to make $ where I can't make (2s at manufacturing, we are writing to Mr. Fournier.

Henry

The advertising that the company received was apparently insufficient. Murphy discovered the purpose of Barthel's nightly labors and this, added to the lack of progress on the small car, precipitated the final break. Ford left the company on March 10, 1902. He was given $900, Barthel's unfinished drawings, and the company agreed to discontinue the use of his name. Asked by Ford to join him in completing the racer in return for a ten percent interest in any subsequent Ford venture, Barthel refused; and Ford moved to new premises, working with Wills's assistance to finish the racing car. Within weeks he had new backing, this time from the bicycling champion, Tom Cooper, who with another famous cyclist, Barney Oldfield, had decided to move into motor racing.

Cooper financed Ford's work on two racing cars, the redpainted "Arrow" and the yellow "999." In mid-October 1902, with Oldfield driving, the "999" defeated Alexander Winton and two other nationally known drivers at Grosse Pointe. But in line with precedent, the partnership had already broken up. "Henry sold his machine to Cooper two weeks ago," Mrs. Ford wrote to her brother on October 27, 1902, "thinks himself lucky to be rid of him. He caught him in a number of sneaky tricks. He (Tom) was looking out for Cooper and Cooper only :… I am glad we are rid of him.… He thinks too much of low-down women to suit me." But Oldfield's version of the break differs considerably in its emphasis. It seemed to be Henry Ford rather than Cooper who looked out for himself and himself only:

The red car [Oldfield wrote later] was finished first and taken out to the old Grosse Pointe one mile track for its first trial, which was a flat failure. The engine was as hot as mother's cook stove and it looked like Cooper and Ford had not only wasted their money but a lot of time and energy. The fact of the matter was Ford finally got disgusted with the machines and turned the red one over to a fellow in Detroit whose main business was a piano tuner. Ford would not tell Cooper where the red machine was. He was so disgusted that he wanted to wash his hands of the whole affair and therefore agreed to sell Cooper the two cars for the actual cash value he had put in (not charging for his or Mr. Wills' time). In addition Cooper was to assume all outstanding indebtedness and was to pay for the machinery that was then in the shop, namely a drill press, lathe, and emery wheel. Hence Cooper was practically forced to buy Ford out before Ford would produce the red car and help finish the yellow car.

Lighting the way for his biographers, Ford himself was later to attribute the venture into racing entirely to pressures over which he had no control. "I never really thought much of racing," he wrote, "but following the bicycle idea the manufacturers had the notion that winning a race on a track told the public something about the merits of an automobile—although I can hardly imagine any test that would tell less." And so a later rationalization was called in to explain the earlier inability to come to terms with the work he had undertaken.

Even as Ford broke with Cooper, however, still another backer appeared on the scene and he brought with him the first faint shadow of what in a few months was finally to become the Ford Motor Company. He was Alexander Malcomson, a well-to-do Detroit coal merchant, who in August 1902 signed an agreement with Henry Ford to establish an automobile company. John W. Anderson, the lawyer who drafted the agreement, later testified that

Mr. Ford … had designed a motor car, an engine along rather novel lines; and Mr. Malcomson who was then driving a Winton car, and was interested in automobiles, had become interested in Mr. Ford's idea, and thought it was a good one, and was willing to back his faith by advancing money to supply materials and pay the labor necessary to create a car based upon the designs which Mr. Ford had made.

The agreement required Ford "to devote his time to the construction of a Commercial Automobile for exhibition purposes"; the partnership would continue until the car was built and capital raised to form a manufacturing company. The partners would hold a majority of the shares in such a company and these would be divided equally between them. Malcomson, it was stipulated, would "have charge of the financial and commercial departments and … Henry Ford … of the mechanical and factory departments of the business."

Malcomson agreed to contribute $500 to the partnership and "such further sums of money as may be needful and necessary to complete and equip said sample Commercial Automobile."

Malcomson soon assigned responsibility for the financial details of the partnership to James Couzens, the managing clerk of his coal business. On October 30, 1902, Malcomson wrote Ford from Cleveland:

Mr. Couzens tells me Mr. Wills is getting around and I am glad to hear it. Hope you will get everything running in good shape at the shop, so that the work can be pushed with all possible speed. Our salvation for next season will be in getting the machine out quickly and placing it on the market early. It is pleasing that you have been so successful thus far in getting the right kind of help. Mr. Couzens and I called at the shop last week and found quite a change, it is taking on quite a business aspect. Anything you may need while I am away will be attended to by Mr. Couzens. He understands the situation thoroughly.

The "right kind of help" for Ford included Harold Wills and Frederick Strauss. In an effort to induce Oliver Barthel to stay with him, Ford had earlier made a vain offer of a 10 percent stock interest in any future Ford enterprise. Now, to keep Strauss, he offered to assign to him the earnings of $2000 worth of stock for a period of two years after incorporation of an automobile company, the stock to become Strauss's property if he remained with the company during the two-year period. According to Strauss, a similar offer was made to Harold Wills. But Strauss did not take up theoffer nor did he stay with Ford for the required length of time; he lasted for only three months, from October to December 1902, when, with only an engine and transmission completed, work stopped temporarily due to a shortage of funds. "I couldn't wait," Strauss said later, "I had to go and get a job."

What is remarkable about these offers is that they were made by the Henry Ford, who years later would write that he left the Detroit Automobile Company "determined never again to put himself under orders." But he had done so in the Henry Ford Company, and now the Malcomson agreement made it clear that at best he would hold a minority interest in any company formed, and even this he was willing to share. At this point, in fact, Ford's inability to stay with a car long enough to put it into production was closely paralled by his indecision on the issue of control. It was only when finally he froze his design that the need for control of his company became dominant. Mass production and the need for control were as intimately related as the ambivalence and perfectionism of the past.

But this lay far ahead of him. The immediate problem, taken much more seriously by Malcomson than by Ford, was incorporation. Not until June 16, 1903, was the search for capital brought to an end and the company registered.

The new venture was capitalized at $150,000 with $100,000 issued and $28,000 in cash. One thousand shares of $100 par value were issued, and Malcomson and Ford, with 255 shares each, together held control with 51 percent of the issue. Malcomson put in no new capital, and Ford in return for his shares turned over what equipment and patents he owned. The new shareholders bore little resemblance to the glittering array of Detroit businessmen who had first backed Ford.

Almost alone Malcomson had put the company on its feet. John S. Gray, who put in $10,500 in cash, was Malcomson's uncle. John W. Anderson and Horace H. Rackham were Malcomson's lawyers; Anderson paid in $5000 in cash and Rackham $3500, giving a note for $1500. Charles H. Bennett had been referred to Ford by a cousin of Malcomson's; he bought 50 shares and gave notes for the entire amount, $2500 of it being guaranteed by Malcomson. Vernon C. Fry, Malcomson's cousin, bought 50 shares, paying $3000 in cash and giving a note for $2000. Charles J. Woodall, Malcomson's book-keeper, gave a four-month note for $1000 for 10 shares. Albert Strelow, Malcomson's contractor, paid in $5000 for 50 shares four weeks after incorporation. James Couzens, who was Malcomson's managing clerk at the coal company and was soon to take over the administration of the Ford Motor Company, bought 25 shares, paying $1000 in cash and giving a four-month note for $1500. The only shareholders who did not in some way owe their investment to a close relationship with Malcomson were John and Horace Dodge. But Malcomson had already discussed a manufacturing contract with them, and each brother bought 50 shares, with John Dodge giving a three-month note for $5000 and Horace a four-month note for the same amount.

The Dodges contracted to make 650 engines, chassis, and transmissions to Ford's designs and received $10,000 in cash to begin manufacture. Other contracts were let for bodies, cushions, wheels, and tires. The new company had no manufacturing facilities, it was to be entirely an assembly operation.

By the middle of August, wrote Ford's first "official" biographer, eight to ten cars had been assembled, "but none had been shipped because Ford felt they were not yet as good as he could make them."

The biographer of John W. Anderson, in the same vein, referred to Ford's stoppage of all shipments as a consequence of customer complaints. It was James Couzens in his capacity as business manager who insisted that the cars should be put on the road. "Ford's sudden abandonment of his former do-nothing policy defies rational explanation," wrote Professor Quaife, Anderson's biographer. "As good a guess as any would be that he was now subject to the influence of such aggressive men of action as Couzens and John and Horace Dodge."

Indeed Couzens's influence on Ford seems to have been incalculable. He was by all accounts a hard, driving man, and took control of every aspect of the company's business apart from engineering and assembly which were Ford's responsibility. "Couzens was handling all the books … the sales and purchasing—everything," John Wandersee, one of the earliest employees, said later. And John W. Anderson in a 1926 interview said that Couzens understood the financial operations of the business better than anyone in the company.

To Ford, looking back from the vantage point of many years later, "the business went along almost as by magic." And for this Couzens was almost solely responsible. Ford was still unable to freeze a design—between 1903 and 1907 there were seven models produced—but the assembly method of operation meant that substantial contracts had to be let months in advance and with Couzens driving him to it, Ford was compelled either to have his design changes ready or to defer them to a subsequent model.

In Strauss's account of the circumstances under which he stopped working for Ford, he referred to the months of delay before the Ford Motor Company was finally organized: "Henry wanted this company to make the complete automobile, to manufacture the whole automobile. Couzens was very much against it." And this rings true. Control over manufacturing operations would have given Ford the means of building but not selling, of constantly changing and of assiduously avoiding the market, and possibly the cycle begun in the Detroit Automobile Company would have been repeated for the third time. Now, with deadlines to meet and hardheaded businessmen to contend with, he restricted his talent to model lines rather than to the individual car and despite the legends which have formed, his later obsession with volume and cheapness was at this point still far from clear.

In the 1920s John W. Anderson testified that in 1903 Ford had said to him: "The way to make automobiles is to make one automobile like another automobile, to make them all alike, to make them come through the factory just alike—just like one pin is like another pin, when it comes from a pin factory, or one match is like another match when it comes from a match factory." This statement has frequently been cited as an indication of Ford's early commitment to the mass car, but again the facts are different. The inconsistency has been accurately summed up by Roger Burlingame, a recent Ford biographer. He is cited here at length for his description of the problem rather than for any attempt at explanation:

The Ford-can-do-no-wrong biographers [he wrote] insist upon the twin impulses of quantity and cheapness as a profound driving force that appeared with their hero's earliest consciousness and from which he never deviated. The debunkers point out many cases in which Ford completely departed from this line, such as when he forgot everything in his supposed passion for racing; when he designed and built several expensive models before his Model T arrived, and when he stood on the very threshold of success, he seems to have been willing to sell out for cash. Both of these proponents are partly right and both are quite obviously, from the records available to us, partly wrong.

It is hard to deny that Henry Ford was ridden by two obsessions: mechanical perfection and the common man. Sometimes one of these dominated the other. It is probable that in the years before Model T he was continuously searching for some sort of balance between the concentrations. Perhaps there were fleeting instants when the effort seemed too much for him … there is little doubt that in 1904 the technical obsession dominated the mass car in Ford's mind.

In 1905 we see an interesting demonstration of the two obsessions seeking some kind of common level. In that year Ford tested the Model C, a two-cylinder four seater, at $950.

Burlingame's "technical obsession" is of course the old "perfectionism," Ford's inability to freeze design, which nonetheless was modified from 1903 to 1905 by the circumstances under which the cars were produced. If Burlingame's statement is carried to its logical conclusion, it then follows that with the enormous success of the Model T in later years, the "technical obsession" must be seen as giving way to the mass obsession—but this would leave unexplained Ford's inability to check mass desertion to the Chevrolet, by changing the car in ways which would have preserved its usefulness and attraction to the "common man."

The fundamental issue is never raised, yet Burlingame is among the most perceptive of Ford's biographers. Given his statement of the two "obsessions" the issue of why they should exist is never questioned: Why, for instance, should the "technical obsession" bein the ascendant in 1904? Why should 1905 appear to be a compromise year? Why should the shift to the "mass obsession" begin to appear in late 1905, with plans for the first Ford car to be produced in volume?

In going through the chronology of 1905 it might be noted that 1695 cars were produced in the year ending July 31, thirteen cars fewer than in the company's first year of operations. It might be noted too that in May 1905 Henry Ford called in newspaper reporters to announce what must have seemed to be grandiose plans. He declared that he meant to reach the masses with 10,000 cars selling at $500 each: "It will take some time to figure out what we can do," he said, adding a little incongruously, "we do not care to say much until we know what the result will be." In November 1905 one might find that plans were announced for the Model N, a fifteen-horsepower four-cylinder Ford runabout designed to sell at a price between $400 and $500; and that in the same month Henry Ford took a long first step toward control of the company's manufacturing operations with the formation of the Ford Manufacturing Company, a concern quite separate from the Ford Motor Company, in which Ford with 2550 of the 5000 shares issued was in majority control for the first time.

The only other event of the year which might appear worthy of record would be the death of Ford's father on March 8, 1905. But, in fact, William Ford's death fixes a point in time for the emergence of a very different man, and it is only apparently coincidental that the real growth of the Ford Motor Company should begin with the year 1905.

William Ford, at least as his son remembered him and gave biographers, reporters, friends, and business associates to understand, had always opposed Henry Ford's bent for machinery. William Ford wished his son to be a farmer, wrote Benson, to whom Ford talked freely in the early 1920s, and although

Henry did not like farmwork, he worked hard at it. But his heart was always in his mechanical pursuits, which his father detested because he realized that they were leading the lad away from the country … [Henry] worked with his tools always against the wishes of his father.… For a time the struggle went on between the father's will and the son's determination. One day, when the boy was 16 the struggle ended. The mother had died three years before, the old home did not seem the same, and the call of the city silenced everything in the boy's heart. Without saying a word to anyone, he walked nine miles to Detroit, rented a room in which to sleep, and sought employment in a machine shop.

To Arnold and Faurote who published in 1915 the definitive account of the company's production system, Ford Methods and Ford Shops, Henry Ford reiterated his father's disapproval in a face-to-face interview. These are only two examples of an attitude which will subsequently be dealt with much more fully. They havebeen introduced here to bring into focus a dominant myth in Ford's life, myth because the facts which they claim to portray are simply not so. Ford said they were, but the evidence of his father's encouragement and interest in him is overwhelming.

A new man emerged in the months following the elder Ford's death and it would seem implausible at the very least to attribute this "new" Ford to anything other than psychological change. When one considers the 1890s—the preoccupation with engines, the late start on the car built almost alone, the inability to settle down to manufacture, the failure of the first two companies, the breakout into "racing fever" and the still uneven progress after 1903—the strong figure which begins to emerge late in 1905 is on the face of it almost incredible. Yet emerge it did, sure and purposeful, in pursuit of the car for the American everyman.

The Model N entered the scene as the original cast of shareholders was about to disband. In the industry at large, despite some firmly held convictions to the contrary, every market trend indicated a movement toward the heavy, expensive car. The Olds curved-dash run-about, the biggest seller to that point, was about to be discarded by the Smiths in favor of more costly cars.

Within the Ford Motor Company a dispute over product policy which reflected the tensions in the industry grew increasingly bitter. In 1905 the company had produced two different models, the four-cylinder "B" at $2500 and the two-cylinder "F," unchanged from the previous year, at $1000; and fewer cars had been sold than in any year since incorporation. Later, in explanation of the fall in sales, Ford wrote:

Some said it was because we had not brought out new models. I thought it was because our cars were too expensive—they did not appeal to the 95 per cent. I changed the policy in the next year having first acquired stock control. For 1906-1907 we entirely left off making touring cars and made three models of runabouts and roadsters, none of which differed materially from the other in manufacturing process or in component parts but were somewhat different in appearance. The big thing was that the cheapest car sold for $600 and the most expensive for only $750, and right here came the complete demonstration of what price meant. We sold 8423 cars—nearly five times as many as in our biggest previous year.

This change in policy brought with it Alexander Malcomson's resignation from the board. Malcomson, like the Smiths at the Olds Motor Works, was convinced that the future lay with the high-priced car and Ford's now-focused convictions were wholly at odds with the direction in which Malcomson believed the company should move. Supporting him, Malcomson had Fry, Woodall, and Bennett; against him, Ford and Couzens, whose concern with sales gave a practical edge to his position.

In a maneuver which completely outflanked the Malcomson faction Ford organized the Ford Manufacturing Company in November 1905 and excluded Malcomson and Fry from participation. Malcomson threatened to sue and he would have had strong grounds since the new company was to be given the manufacturing contracts for the Model N, previously held by the Dodge Brothers for all Ford cars, and would in fact represent expansion of the Motor Company's operations. But at this crucial point Malcomson announced his own intention to form a rival automobile company, the Aerocar, and the other Ford directors, who so far had maintained an uneasy neutrality in the dispute, on December 6, 1905, unanimously demanded his resignation from the board. In a strongly worded letter dated December 15, 1905, Malcomson refused to resign:

My connection with the company … and with its success has been too long and too close to allow me to sever my official relations with it without weighty reason.… It is true that I am interested in another corporation about to engage in the automobile business but you may be assured that that interest will not diminish my interest in the Ford Motor Company, nor will it interfere with the proper performance of my duties to the Ford Company.… But (and this is a matter you seem to overlook in assuming that my interests are adverse to those of the company) I am the owner of more than a quarter of the stock of the Ford Motor Company which now is, and under proper management will continue to be, a valuable property. Such occurrences as the recent precipitate action of the Board in doubling the Manager's salary [this referred to Couzens] despite protest and without waiting for a full Board meeting, are not calculated to induce the belief that my withdrawal would result in a management more careful of the stockholders' interests. It is true that there may be reasonable differences of opinion over matters of expense, and instances of increased expense are important only as showing a general tendency to sacrifice the interests of the general body of stockholders to those of some individuals. The most striking instance of this tendency in the management of the Ford Motor Company is the organization of the Ford Manufacturing Company, comprised and controlled by the holders of the majority both of stock and directorships of the Motor Company, and designed, as I am reliably informed, to sell its products to the Motor Company—presumably not without profit. In this new Company the minority stockholders were not invited to join.… I consider this scheme to be as unwise as it is unfair and I propose to exercise whatever power my official position in the Motor Company may give, as well as—if it becomes necessary—my rights as a stockholder, to prevent the accomplishment of the result for which the plan was designed.…

But Malcomson went no further. He was effectively excluded from managerial control and faced with the prospect that the Motor Company's profits would be absorbed in the prices charged by the Manufacturing Company for the engines and transmissions it supplied; he sold his shares to Henry Ford on July 12, 1906, for $175,000. Woodall, Fry, and Bennett sold theirs to both Ford and Couzens shortly after, and with 581/2 percent of the shares issued, Ford had finally won stock control.

In the meantime, the company backed Ford's new-found certainty to the limit. On January 1, 1906, the first advertisements for the Model N appeared, and in the light of the company's total production for the previous year, an unexceptional 1599 cars, they were sensational:

This is why we can build the Ford 4-cylinder Runabout for less than $500 [the advertisements proclaimed]. We are making—

40,000 cylinders

10,000 engines

40,000 wheels

20,000 axles

10,000 bodies

10,000 of every part that goes into the car—think of it! Such quantities were never heard of before.…

Henry Ford's idea is to build a high-grade, practical automobile, one that will do any reasonable service, that can be maintained at a reasonable expense, and at as near $450 as it is possible to make it, thus raising the automobile out of the list of luxuries, and bringing it to the point where the average American citizen may own and enjoy his automobile.

A few days later the Detroit Journal carried a story on the "Local Auto Manufacturer, who stakes his Reputation on a $500 Auto." Ford had already built two prototypes of the Model N, it was reported, and they were to be shipped to New York within a week for the annual motor show; twenty-thousand N's were to be built during the year and the company had already received orders for half this number. Ford was quoted directly: "I believe that I have solved the problem of cheap as well as simple automobile construction," he said. "Advancement in auto building has passed the experimental stage and the general public is interested only in the knowledge that a serviceable machine can be constructed for a price within reach of many. I am convinced that the $500 auto is destined to revolutionize automobile construction and I consider my new model the crowning achievement of my life."

The demand for the Model N confirmed Ford's convictions and in order to meet it the Manufacturing Company was forced constantly to improve its methods of production. "Model N was the first job on which the company introduced the idea of sequence of operations," one employee said subsequently. "They worked out at that time the closest possible sequence—so close that there was no chance of parts even falling off the bench.… Before that there were lathes in one place, drill presses in another … and we moved the materials around from place to place."

For Henry Ford the commitment had finally been made and with it came, perhaps inevitably, a renewed interest in the farm tractor. In the fall of 1905, the year in which he went to work for the Ford Motor Company, C. E. Sorensen helped to establish an experimental tractor shop in a barn a short distance from the Ford plant. JosephGalamb, the designer who was to play a large part in planning the Model T, later recalled that it was sometime in 1906 that he first became aware that Ford was interested in tractors. "Mr. Ford came to me and said, 'Joe, we have to build a light tractor that we can use out on the farm where the wheat is growing, and we need a binder. We have to build a tractor in three days.'"

With Sorensen's help Galamb finished the tractor within a week. It was the first of a long series of experiments which culminated in mass production only during the First World War when an urgent order from the British Government had to be met. When the Model T was finally abandoned in 1927, the tractor went with it.

But this was far in the future and the Henry Ford of 1906 still had a long way to go. Momentarily he faltered and in 1907 produced a fifty-horsepower six-cylinder car, the Model K, which had earlier been designed at Malcomson's insistence. Sold at $2800 the car was a disaster and had to be forced onto the company's dealers: for every ten of the cheap cars ordered the dealer had to accept a Model K. But within the same year work on the Model T had begun.

In January or February, Galamb said later, Ford selected him to begin work on his designs. "Mr. Ford," Galamb said, "first sketched out on the blackboard his ideas of the design he wanted. He would come in at seven or eight o'clock at night to see how we were getting along.… There was a rocking chair in the room in which he used to sit for hours and hours at a time discussing and following the development of the design."

Slowly the car rose from the drawing boards and into it Ford put every detail of his experience. "The Model T," he wrote in 1923, "had practically no features which were not contained in some one or other of the previous models.… There was no guessing as to whether or not it would be a successful model. It had to be. There was no way it could escape being so, for it had not been made in a day."

The car was introduced on October 1, 1908, and it won wide public acceptance. Interviewed in 1926, Galamb detailed its advantages over other contemporary models: Ford's insistence on lightness and strength had led to the extensive use of vanadium steel in the crankshaft, spindle, and other parts where wear and strain were heavy; because this alloy steel was far more durable than the poorly treated steels in use at the time, less of it needed to be used. The planetary transmission, which was essentially Ford's design, eliminated one of the worst defects of the early cars.

In the earlier days of the automobile industry [Galamb said], people did not know how to shift gears. The materials in the gears were very soft and as a result the gears were often stripped, clutches were heavy and sticky and shifting difficult. Things were still in a primitive stage and the public wanted a transmission which could be handled easily and without danger of damage to the mechanism. This made the planetary transmission very important atthat time.

The three-point suspension of the motor prevented distortion of the motor base, and in the light of the poor roads of the time it gave an advantage to the Model T that other manufacturers soon adopted. After initially ridiculing it, they adopted the detachable cylinder head as well. With this innovation, Galamb said, Ford was easily six years ahead of the industry.

And there were still other advantages: at a time when ignition systems were notably poor, Ford insisted that a fly-wheel magneto should be used to supply current. "We first tried to make it in one piece," Galamb said, "but this proved impractical and at Mr. Ford's suggestion we made up the sixteen magnets separately, charged them, and then built up the whole circle … it has been subject to very few modifications since."

This then was the car which in 1909 took the market by storm. Of it, the man who earlier had fought so hard against giving success a chance, who had undermined two companies because he could not freeze a design, who had hopped and skipped across market segments, said:

It is strange how, just as soon as an article becomes successful somebody starts to think that it would be more successful if only it were different. There is a tendency to keep monkeying with styles and to spoil a good thing by changing it. The salesmen were insistent on increasing the line. They listened to the five per cent, the special customers who could say what they wanted and forgot all about the 95 per cent.…

In 1909 I announced one morning without any previous warning, that in the future we were going to build only one model, that the model was going to be Model T and that the chassis would be exactly the same for all cars.

In the five years that followed, Ford cut the price of the basic car, from $900 in 1909 to $440 in 1914, and the average monthly total of unfilled orders swelled from 2172 to 59,239.

The car was strikingly successful in the vast agrarian market. As early as March 1908 a Motor World editorial reported the rapid development of the fanner market, "particularly in the broad area which the New Yorker dismisses as the 'middle west.'" And a year later, Thomas B. Jeffery, builder of the Rambler, cited sales to farmers in the Southwest in support of his assertion that the Midwest would soon tax the capacities of all the builders then equipped for production. "No small portion of the money of the country appears to be in the hands of the prosperous farmers," declared a Motor World editorial and the price cuts which became Ford's equivalent of an annual model change were the impetus to demand down the line to the poorest farmer. "Those who insist," read a prescient, if bitter, editorial in 1908,

on doing business with the kid-glove and check-book set or not at all, may see no possibilities in the well-recognized prosperity of the agricultural communities. To them the thought of dealing with so rude and uncouth a class … [is] more or less impossible, due to certain antiquated impressions and prejudices which actual contact with the Western farmer would quickly remove. But for the manufacturers who can adapt themselves to conditions and markets, without sacrificing any tenets of sound business, the assured prosperity of the farmer is a call to action.

The tocsin sounded for Henry Ford as for no one else, the Model T might have been built for the farmer. Where the back roads and swamps of the farm states were the undoing of other cars, they made the Model T. Severely functional in its appearance, the car could lurch through mud, ford streams, and plough through snow, attributes which found the greatest favor on the farms. By 1914 when a comprehensive survey of the automobile market was made by the Curtis Publishing Company, the extent to which Ford had penetrated, and depended on, the rural market was overwhelmingly clear; time and again in their interviews the researchers came up against the commitment of the farm trade to Ford. The researchers estimated that perhaps 10 percent of the country's farmers had already bought cars, leaving a market of 2.5 million who could afford to buy but had not yet done so, and this was the demand which Ford met with increasing success as the years passed.

The Model T was sold on service—it was rugged and reliable and could easily be fixed by men accustomed to handling machinery; it was sold on price—at $440 in 1914 a gap of nearly $500 existed between the Model T and its nearest reliable competitor; and it was sold for cash on the barrel-head by the company. If they needed it, Ford dealers were compelled to arrange their own financing, and since the largest market segment prepared to pay cash was the farm belt, this was the market which was most intensively cultivated. The Model T, more than any other, was the farmer's car.

In the first years of the Model T's success, Henry Ford did many things: he bought land and he went into farming extensively; he concentrated on the tractor as never before, and for a short time letters coming into Dearborn from unknown farmer correspondents asking about tractor developments received his personal attention; and what this represents must be judged against the thousands of letters in the Ford Archives to which the only reply made was, "Mr. Ford is out of town …" A typical letter, which gives an impression of Ford's interest went to a farmer in Fowler, Kansas, in October 1909:

Dear Mr. Waldron:

The points brought out in your letter … to Mr. Henry Ford are in exact accordance with Mr. Ford's ideas and the very principles you mention are being brought out in the sample tractors which he is now building.

He is building a tractor of from fifty to sixty horsepower that will easily handle four 14-inch plows and also has a pulley from which farm machinery can be easily driven.

He has been using a tractor on his farm for two years that was constructed by using a four-cylinder automobile engine and some wheels purchased from an agricultural implement company with an old automobile radiator, steering gear, etc. This machine developed about twenty horsepower and easily did the work of four or five horses. It would handle a double gang plow very nicely, pull an eight inch feed cut grain binder at a speed of five miles an hour, and other work on the farm in about a like proportion. But the tractor that he is now building will be far and away superior to the sample which he has been using and will probably be out as a commercial proposition some time next season.

From the fact that Mr. Ford has experimented for two years makes it an assured fact that the tractors which he will put out next season will be a success and he should be pleased to hear from you sometime early next spring at which time he will be able to send you photographs and possibly more information regarding the machine.

In contrast with Ford's lively interest in the problems of the farmers who wrote to him is Galamb's description of the conditions under which the experimental tractors were built. The promised photograph could never have been sent, for none of the tractors was to have its design frozen until after the outbreak of the First World War. In the meantime, Galamb said: "Mr. Ford asked me to keep everything away from the Ford Motor Company. He said the tractor was his own personal business and he didn't want anyone else butting in. That was why he had that little shop … to keep it away from Couzens and the others."

As the endless experimenting continued Ford would occasionally break into print with the promise of innovations even more important than the tractor: an "auto crop-harvester," for instance, which was "a combination of plow, harrow, seeder and roller in one machine, so arranged that the plow will lead and the other parts follow." But like the early tractors it was never put into production.

It would be difficult not to draw parallels with the development of the first cars. Then, too, Ford talked freely about engines and built them just as freely, for boats and work on a Dearborn farm. But the car itself he built in near secrecy, and then he could not freeze the design. The repetition of this pattern in the years following the introduction of the Model T, when the car's success was quickly becoming evident, suggests that for Henry Ford something had gone very wrong. And it would remain a suggestion but for the fact that between 1908 and 1916 he three times considered selling his interest in the Ford Motor Company. And this, in its own turn would seem unexceptional but for the violent drive for absolute control over every aspect of the company's life which was to dominate him in later years.

In 1908 and 1909 when the first offers were considered, Ford, said Couzens later, "really wanted to sell. He was sick in body and disturbed in mind."

The first offer came from Benjamin Briscoe and W. C. Durant. According to Briscoe, he had approached Durant with a proposal to organize a corporation to include Buick, Ford, the Reo Company, and Maxwell-Briscoe; he had already talked to R. E. Olds, who was willing to discuss the proposal further.

After several meetings with Couzens it was agreed that each company would present its financial statements at a meeting to be held in New York where an audit would establish the basis for an exchange of preferred stock for each company's assets, with the common stock to be divided on a separate basis. At the New York meeting, Briscoe said, Couzens stated that he and Ford had changed their minds and rather than take preferred stock they wanted $3 million in cash; only if the audit showed the Ford assets in excess of this would they be willing to take preferred stock for the balance. Olds then spoke up, Briscoe recalled. "Well," said he, "if the Ford Company is to get $3 million in cash, my company must get it also." Briscoe and Durant were unable to raise $6 million and the deal fell through.

Two years later Durant resumed talks with Couzens. In 1926, interviewed in the course of a suit brought by the former Ford shareholders against the Commissioner of Internal Revenue, Durant said that in 1910 Ford and Couzens were in New York. Couzens came to his office and told him that Ford was a sick man and suffering from nervous dyspepsia; for that reason Couzens had gone to see Durant alone but he was authorized to sell the Ford Motor Company for $8 million. Couzens himself was not prepared to sell: he told Durant that he wished to retain a one-fourth interest in the company. On this basis Durant took the proposal to his associate bankers but they turned it down.

Sometime later the indefatigable Briscoe made another offer for the company:

Based on information that had come to me concerning the Ford Company, it occurred to me that the time might be propitious for approaching them again.… I accordingly sent a friend of mine, Mr. George F. McCullough … to see Messrs Ford and Couzens and endeavor to obtain an option on the Ford Company. Mr. McCullough did get a letter from them, virtually an option as I recall it now. They agreed to sell at $8 million, but would give no definite option until they saw "the color of his money."

But once again the problem of raising funds proved insuperable and the agreement lapsed. "I dare say," Briscoe commented in 1921, "that Messrs Ford and Couzens have never known until now that I had any connection with McCullough negotiation and option."

What is of special interest is Henry Ford's professed willingness not only to share control of the company as consideration of the first Briscoe-Durant offer indicates, but as time passed his evident wish to get out of the automobile industry entirely; and yet he set the terms so high that they could not be met. By 1916 his indecisiveness was to take even clearer form in a series of discussions which he entered into with Thomas W. Lamont of the House of Morgan. Lamont wrote to Ford after a stay in Detroit:

When you said to me that you would like to have me think about some plan that would embody the "best ideas of Ford and Morgan" you gave me a great deal to think about.…

You have in mind, and are working upon a wonderful development for the benefit of the farmers of America and in fact of the world. You wish to be able to carry out in splendid fashion your fine ideas along this line. You have some question in your own mind as to your ability to do this and, at the same time, to carry the full responsibility of the present motor car business. There must, it seems to me, come to you moments of almost deep oppression [sic] for the responsibility that you have to carry day by day. I do not wonder, therefore, that your mind comes back, as it seemed to do when you talked with me, to this problem, and to the question which I will make a beginning to paragraph.

Fourth: Can I form any alliance under which I can still maintain intact the present sort of management, which has proved so successful and energetic in the Ford motor business, so that I can, at the same time, develop my tractor idea, so that I can at the same time share with others the heavy responsibilities which I have to bear?

Lamont's letter put the issues clearly: to sell or not to sell—to build tractors or not build tractors. And despite Ford's soon-to-be-articulated loathing of bankers, it was the House of Morgan, the very embodiment of a predatory Wall Street, which was called on for help.

The question raised is that of the unmistakable self-doubt which seems to have been Ford's constant companion in the years that followed the Model T. What did the car's success mean to Ford that he should follow it with a movement back in time to the tractor with which he had first begun—and yet find himself bound by an inhibition which is implicit in the continuous experimenting, the search for advice, the wish to give up responsibility?

The tractor finally went into production in 1917 under pressures which are not dissimilar to those which Couzens brought to bear on Ford in 1903; the similarity lies in the atmosphere of crisis which compelled Ford to freeze a design. He could finally say "this is it"—but not for himself, for someone else.

The British Government in 1917 was desperately seeking a means to increase its supplies of food. German submarines had decimated the merchant ships upon which the British traditionally depended and the tractors available in the country were both inadequate and expensive.

The approach to Ford carried Ministerial sanction. The company's British representative cabled:

The need for food production in England is imperative and large quantity of tractors must be available at earliest possible date for purpose breaking up existing grass and ploughing for Fall wheat. Am requested by high authorities to appeal to Mr. Ford for help. Would you be willing to send Sorensen and others with drawings of everything necessary, loaning them to British Government so that parts can be manufactured over here and assembled in Government factories under Sorensen's guidance? Can assure you positively this suggestion is made in national interest and if carried out will be done by the Government for the people with no manufacturing or capitalist interest invested and no profit being made by any interests whatever. The matter is very urgent. Impossible to ship anything adequate from America because many thousand tractors must be provided. Ford tractors considered best and only suitable design. Consequently national necessity entirely dependent Mr. Ford's design … urge favorable consideration and immediate decision because every day is of vital importance.

But the British Government soon found it impossible to secure facilities to manufacture the tractor, and the work was undertaken at Dearborn. Ford wrote later:

The tractor works was not ready to go into production … [but] we ran up an emergency extension to our plant … equipped it with machinery that was ordered by telegraph and most came by express, and in less than sixty days the first tractors were on the docks in New York in the hands of the British authorities.… The entire shipment of five thousand tractors went through within three months and that is why the tractors were being used in England long before they were really known in the United States.

The experimenting continued for the U.S. market on a machine that the British had found the "best and only suitable design," and it is with this as a background that the Model T resumes the center of the stage.

The theme which emerges is one of finality: Ford's work was done; the Model T had been built, the perfect car had reached the people. But with this came an unmistakable period of not knowing what he could now turn to. In some way the car was not enough, and yet it was all that he had. The halfhearted attempts to give it up were erased by the drive to confirm himself—by bringing the car to the people in ever-increasing numbers.

It is as if the numbers served to justify what he had done. They made his achievement more real and at the same time they ministered to a deeper injury. The vaster the sales of the Model T, the more Ford could take comfort in a symbolic sharing of guilt, and, at the same time, the farther the car took the farmer from the farm, the more necessary to Ford were the tractor and the village industries and his plans to make men half-farmers, half-industrial workers. Also increasingly necessary were his ill-conceived adventures into public life.

When the Model T was finally abandoned in 1927, the tractor went with it and so did the Dearborn Independent, the newspaper he had used as a vehicle for antiSemitism. In the same year he made an abject apology to the country's Jews.

But in 1909 the car was just one year old, and even as Ford considered the Briscoe-Durant offers in 1910 the Model T design had been frozen. On the face of it this was slight testimony to the extraordinary symbolism with which the car was invested and which slowly became clear as the years passed. It was in fact the most adaptive position, given the reality of the time. The design of the T was in advance of its competitors; standardization on as wide a scale as possible meant constantly falling costs of production and an ever-increasing market as the economies of scale permitted the price to be cut year after year.

In a 1913 interview Ford emphasized these advantages:

As we see it, Model T is the acme of motor car perfection. Although slight improvements are made from year to year as our corps of expert, experimental engineers discover them, they are not of sufficient importance to warrant the changing of the car's model. Therefore since 1909 contrary to the.policy of other companies, the Ford Company has made no yearly change in the model of its car. Many advantages accrue to the makers of a standardized car. Chief among these are economy and efficiency of manufacture, stability of product and in fact, all of those benefits which accompany concentration of effort.

But as the company's manufacturing facilities expanded and production continued to climb, from 10,000 cars in 1908 to 472,350 in 1915 to 933,720 in 1920, the Model T began to assume an explicitly symbolic value. And as this emotional commitment grew more and more evident, so did Ford's blindness to the need for change.

The "corps of expert, experimental engineers" was ham-strung. In his reminiscences Galamb gave a vivid description of the difficulties which developed as the car's design became obsolete. Complaints poured in from Ford agents: the car's brakes were unreliable, the planetary gearshift hopelessly unsatisfactory as the years passed in the light of the advances made by the company's competitors. While the latter steadily improved their designs, the Model Tcontinued as it had begun: "The last Model T," said Galamb, "had to be built the same way as the first." In the meantime factories all over the country did a thriving business supplying Ford owners with improvements which Henry Ford refused to build.

But Ford competed on price, and for as long as the prices of his competitors remained so much higher than his there was no need to change. And on this basis every element in the structure of his fixation locked into place: first, the car which had come to represent much more than reality ascribed to it—such a car could not be changed; second, the need to build the car by the millions—the production system which made this possible depended absolutely on a frozen design; third, the price which brought the car to the millions was itself a function of the frozen design and the production system to which it had given rise. Here reality and obsession walked hand in hand.

In 1924 Ford's refusal to permit any change in the car, and the symbolism with which he invested it, came together in some of his remarks during an illuminating interview:

For years and years the heaviest sort of pressure was brought to bear on us to change lines, change working parts—changes—changes—changes … had we fallen in with every suggestion that was made we wouldn't have an automobile … [and] the development of the automobile is the greatest single instrument for world peace that I know of. The United States is made up of many nations. These people live in peace and understanding because there is an easy interchange of ideals and ideas. There are no "remote places" in this country. The automobile has corrected that.… There could not be civil war.… the people understand each other too well for that.

When the automobile becomes as common in Europe and Asia as it is in the United States the nations will understand each other. Rulers won't be able to make war. They won't be able to because the people won't let them. No man is going to fight with a neighbor he knows, and likes because some temporary boss drops in and orders him to start a free-for-all.

This is the biggest thing the automobile will accomplish—the elimination of war. The automobile is the product of peace.

And so the magical link was forged—there could be no change in the car because to Henry Ford the Model T was not simply a car. "Our principle of business," he wrote in 1923, "is [to make for the consumer] something that, as far as we can provide, will last forever … we never make an improvement that renders any previous model obsolete."

The Model T rode to obsolescence under its own power. Higher incomes, changing tastes, better roads, the excellence of competitive cars were there for everyone to see but Henry Ford. Even the Model T jokes which had circulated around the nation formany years, sometimes with the assistance of Ford himself, assumed a far less tolerant form. "The Modern Twenty-Third Psalm" was typical:

The Ford is my auto,
I shall not want another.
  It maketh me to lie down beneath it,
It soureth my soul.
  It leadeth me in the path of ridicule,
For its name's sake.
  Yea, though I ride through the valleys,
I am towed up the hills, For I fear much evil.
  Thy rods and thine engines discomfort me.
  I anoint my tires with patches;
  My radiator runneth over.
  I repair blowouts in the presence of mine enemies.
Surely if this thing followeth me all the days of
my life
I shall dwell in the bug-house forever.

In My Years with General Motors, Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., identified four new and crucial elements that transformed the automobile market in the 1920s. The first of these was installment selling, and General Motors in 1919 with the organization of its Acceptance Corporation was the first company to offer facilities for consumer credit. "We believed," Sloan wrote, "that with rising incomes and the expectation of a continuance of that rise, it was reasonable to assume that consumers would lift their sights to higher levels of quality. Installment selling, we thought, would stimulate this trend." Interviewed in 1926, Ford said that installment sales were the bane of American business; the public was no longer buying, it was letting itself be sold: "We have dotted lines for this, that, and that, and the other thing—all of them taking up income before it is earned."

Sloan's second new element in the market of the 1920s was the used car trade-in, and this worked to Ford's double disadvantage. A good used car more than met the price of a new Model T and with an installment plan the buyer could even trade up to a better car using his Model T for a sizable down payment. Sloan's third and fourth elements were the closed car and the annual model. Ford met demand for the closed car by putting a cumbersome body on the Model T without essentially changing its open-car design, but the annual model change he utterly rejected. "The Ford car," he said in 1926,

is a tried and proved product that requires no tinkering. It has met all the conditions of transportation the world over. We are developing broader markets in South America, Australia and Europe. Within ten years Russia will be a big customer.… The Ford car will continue to be made in the same way. We have no intention of offering a new car.… we do not intend to make a "six," an "eight" or anything else.… we have experimented with such cars as we experiment with many things. They keep our engineers busy—prevent them tinkering with the Ford car.

Only a year later the Model T was finally abandoned following a crisis at the executive level of the company. Nonetheless, it was out of Ford's fixation that the gigantic factories rose, first at Highland Park and then at the River Rouge. Ford built them to make more, and still more, cars to a design that he hoped never to change. "Our big changes," he said, "have been in methods of manufacturing. They never stand still. I believe that there is hardly a single operation in the making of our car that is the same as when we made our first [Model T]."

If the cars are to be built for the millions, runs the implicit theme, the means must be there. And the means had to be there because it was in production by the millions that Ford found surcease. This alone seemed to confirm his achievement. That Ford's fixation moved for so long in such consonance with the ordinary needs of ordinary men is, perhaps, the story of industrial creativity; that it should have driven him to blind rigidity and the need for absolute power is testimony only to its depth.