The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century

by Steven Watts

Book Overview

How a Michigan farm boy became the richest man in America is a classic, almost mythic tale, but never before has Henry Ford's outsized genius been brought to life so vividly as it is in this engaging and superbly researched biography. The real Henry Ford was a tangle of contradictions. He set off the consumer revolution by producing a car affordable to the masses, all the while lamenting the moral toll exacted by consumerism. He believed in...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0375707255
• ISBN13: 9780375707254
• Release Date: October 2006
• Publisher: Vintage
• Length: 656 Pages
• Weight: 1.37 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 5.3" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Insightful Biography

The People's Tycoon is an insightful and well-balanced biography of Henry Ford, the man who helped usher in the new mass consumer society along with the concept of mass production which produced his famed Model T. This car became a symbol of the ordinary person's ability to partake in this new era of plenty and opportunity. Henry Ford, a leader of this vision, is presented with both his accomplishments as well as the contradictions behind the man and the changes he wrought as well as some of his darker qualities. Watts succeeds fairly well in presenting Ford as the people's tycoon. Henry Ford's early business ventures in the rising automobile industry were unsuccessful, but Ford had a knack for taking the pulse of the American people and learning how to exploit the benefits of grabbing headlines and advertising, an example being his early interest in automobile racing. But Ford's populist streak led to a vision that became central to the man and his life's work; that vision was producing an affordable car that could be purchased by the average American. This also led to the concept of mass production, which would help lower the cost for the consumer. Of course this wasn't the product of one man, many people played important roles in the success of the Ford Motor Company. That's another strength of this book in that we get to see who some of these players were in this rising business. Ford seemed to have a genuine appreciation of ordinary people as he disdained the elite, both in the financial and academic sense, and this concern for the worker seemed to be exhibited when he implemented the new $5 dollar workday for employees. His company was also the sponsor of a sociological department that helped steer employees into better habits of learning how to spend their money wisely and even in how to live better lives. This in some ways had noble qualities, but also had the tendency to become too intrusive. The success of the Ford vision and its results with the Model T can not be denied, but you can't help but notice the contradictions in what Ford believed in and how his work was changing the rural landscape he so loved. America was changing rapidly from an agricultural and rural society to an urban culture driven by a desire for better opportunities, greater material wealth and other general changes in the"old values". By Ford's late career, he was evincing this nostalgia for the past with the creation of the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village, where various aspects of America's past he considered important were collected and opened to the public, all in the face of major cultural changes his company was partly responsible for. Ford wanted to help the ordinary American, and Watts's presentation makes him out to be a true Populist. Ford also displayed an inherent nativism in the face of major global changes during both World War I and World War II. His attempt to settle the First World War with his Peace Ship was perhaps so naive as to bord

Thorough biography of complex, confounding Henry Ford

Henry Ford did not invent the automobile, but he invented something bigger - twentieth century America. It is no exaggeration to say that without Ford's system of production, without his understanding of the mass market, without his Model T, that century would have been a very different phenomenon. Ford epitomized the contradictions, complexities and confusion of that America. Self-taught and utterly confident in what he knew, he despised what he did not know. A radical who created an industrial cornucopia for workers by introducing the five-dollar daily wage, he was an industrial tyrant who hired organized criminal gangs to intimidate labor union organizers. We strongly recommend this thorough biography. Author Steven Watts offers a new way of looking at the facts, and at Ford - and does so with engaging style.

The life of the mechanical, marketing, and industrial genius who changed America forever

While the name of Henry Ford is still synonymous with automobiles and assembly lines, he does not fill the popular culture as he did even as late as the 1970s. This excellent book is not only a biography of the man, it discusses the cultural icon and how it was made and remade. We see a mechanical genius who "read machines as other men read books" and watch his fabulous success with the Model-T and the Highland Park plant. Steven Watts has organized this book so that it flows more or less chronologically in the broad sweep, but each chapter is really a different topic that exemplifies a certain stage in Henry Ford's life. Within each chapter, the author feels free to swing into the past and recapitulate events that he has discussed previously but now fleshes out or to take us into the future to see how a certain aspect of his life played out in Ford's later life. One of the important reasons to read these kinds of histories is that without them our past becomes flattened and we lose the sense of what happened when and why. We tend to remember a couple of events that we think are important because we remember them, but we have no context and often jumble their actual historical context and meaning. For example, the famous $5 a day is easy to misunderstand unless you also add in Ford's starting an organization that worked with his workers and their families (or intruded on them, depending on your position) to make sure they were using all that money properly. Also, not every worker was eligible for that wage. Single women without dependents could not sign up for that program. Ford also was a master of publicity. He kept himself in the limelight, partly as a way of not having to pay for advertising. However, he also was jealous of anyone in his company who got attention in the press. More than a few found their careers ended when Ford felt they were stepping into his limelight. One of the areas where Ford hurt himself was in the kind of bullying yes men he hired to run his company for him. And for all his talk of progressive values and consumerism, he still treated his workers as cogs in the machine, to be used and disposed of as needed. He felt that their pay was sufficient to warrant his freedom to do with his company as he wished without further regard to how it affected the lives of the tens of thousands who depended on his company for their living. After all, it was Henry's company, and he simply hired them to do a job. If they couldn't do the job because they were sick or old or if he had to retool or anything else, they were out the door and left to their own devices. During the depression, they drove the men even harder to produce. Even talking on the job was grounds for dismissal. If you had time to talk, you weren't working hard enough or paying enough attention to your task. Another problem we have with historical figures is that we tend to assign one judgment to an entire life. All of us have many aspects t

A VERY WELL BALANCED FORD BIOGRAPHY

Of the countless Ford Biographies out here, this is perhaps one of the more balanced. The author has done his research and has presented his material in a manner which is not only quite readable, but quite informative. I do like the way Prof. Watts has given us numerous examples of his sources, i.e. different publications, speeches, news paper articles, etc. The author has given us both the good and the bad of Henry Ford, and we find that the subject of the book, Henry Ford, is much like all of us...both good and bad. I did enjoy and appreciate the fact that the author does not seem to have a particular social or political ax to grind, but rather gives us the facts and gives credit to the reader's ability to make up his or her own mind. This is refreshing. Far enough time has passed so that now historians can make some judements and obervations as to the overall impact and ramifications of the actions taken during the Ford years, by both Ford and his contemporaries, have upon our society today. Not until recently have historians been able to do this. Mr. Watts has done a wonderful job of this. Recommend this one highly. Thank you Prof. Watts for some obvious hard work.

The Transformation Of America And The Fall Of Henry Ford

Mr. Watts has written a superb account of the genius of Henry Ford in his creation, building, and marketing of the Model T automobile. He singlehandedly created the car industry, it numerous suppliers and spin-off beneficiaries (new roads, diners, motels, et al). He paid his workers a credible salary so that they could afford his car but crushed labor unions who challenged his total control. Unfortunately, this was his zenith of creativity. As he aged, he refused to change with the passage of time and stayed stuck with his outdated concepts. He remained a control freak for the rest of his life which stunted the growth of his children and of the Ford Motor Company. His anti-Semitism colored his isolationist views and led to his endorsement of the "America First" movement for neutrality during World War II. Mr Watts tells his sad tale with the right mixture of admiration for his professional contributions and disdain for his personal failings. He places Henry Ford within the culture of his times and how he altered Americvan society. For the reader desiring further information, Robert Lacy's "Ford: The Men and The Machine" (1986) portrays the story of the Ford family until the mid-1980's.