The Arsenal of Democracy: FDR, Detroit, and an Epic Quest to Arm an America at War Read online

1

  Henry

  With his Model T, Henry Ford affected the world more than any other man in fifteen hundred years.

  —HISTORIAN NORMAN BEASLEY

  THERE WAS NOTHING GLAMOROUS about the invention, nothing to suggest that it was destined to revolutionize human life. It stood awkwardly on its four wheels, a Frankenstein machine made out of bicycle pieces, a wooden box that looked like the bottom half of a pauper’s coffin, and an array of minutiae from the hardware store. It had a bench atop, under which sat its heart and soul, an engine that produced the power equivalent of four horses. Sometime after midnight on June 4, 1896, in a dingy brick shed that stank of gasoline behind a row house at 58 Bagley Avenue in Detroit, a gray-eyed inventor labored over its final touches with the tenderness of a father caring for a newborn.

  Henry Ford was thirty-two years old, not young considering that the average life span in America at the time was forty-nine. He was a man of almost no formal education, and he had little in the bank but a dream. With his friend Jim Bishop standing by, he wheeled his invention—a horseless carriage, what he called a “Quadricycle”—out of the Bagley Avenue shed into the humid night, a light spring rain beading in his mustache.

  At roughly 4:00 AM, he ran into his home and woke his wife Clara—or Callie, as he called her. It was time, he said. Everything was ready. She rushed from bed, grabbing a cloak, an umbrella, and their two-year-old son Edsel. Together the family moved to the backyard and into the rain. Clara held the cloak over baby Edsel with one hand and the umbrella over Henry with the other. As Henry would later tell the story:

  “Mr. Bishop had his bicycle ready to ride ahead and warn drivers of horse-drawn vehicles—if indeed any were to be met with at such an hour. I set the choke and spun the flywheel. As the motor roared and sputtered to life, I climbed aboard.”

  The Quadricycle had come to Henry as an epiphany six years earlier, in 1890. He was a newlywed living comfortably on a Dearborn farm about eight miles from downtown Detroit. It was a quiet life in those days. There were no cars driving by, no airplanes overhead, no air conditioners whirring, not even a tractor in the barn. The loudest sounds Henry would hear on a given day were an occasional thunder crack, the smack of an ax on a log, his wife’s fingers on the piano keys. Henry’s future was set. He would spend his years tilling this land in quiet obscurity, as his father had done before him.

  But he felt the tug of ambition. He had an obsession with mechanical objects—with clocks in particular. What made them move? How could a mechanism function with such immaculate precision, with no interference from human hands? It seemed to have an intelligence all its own, one that surpassed human capability in a way. Even as a child, Henry couldn’t keep his curious fingers out of timepieces. As a neighbor put it: “Every clock in the Ford home shuddered when it saw him coming.”

  He had likely learned of the internal combustion engine while reading about the pioneering work of Germany’s Karl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler, who built the first gasoline-powered horseless carriages in Europe in 1885 and 1886. Not long after Henry and Clara settled on the farm, he saw a gas engine in a soda bottling plant. One night, while Clara was playing the piano, he blurted out a prophecy.

  “I’ve been on the wrong track,” he said. “What I would like to do is make an engine that will run by gasoline and have it do the work of a horse.” He grabbed a sheet of music and sketched the Quadricycle on the back. “But I can’t do it out here on the farm. I need money for tools and money to pay for other things.”

  Henry and his wife moved from the farm to the teeming city in search of their dream. Their odyssey had begun.

  Over the next five years, they struggled with finances while Henry worked day and night. They moved from one apartment to the next, smaller each time. Clara had to plead with the clerk at the hardware store to extend their $15 credit. Henry began to call his wife “The Believer.” He found a job at the Edison Illuminating Company for $40 a week—good money, but he needed every penny for parts and experiments.

  Henry worked night shifts at Edison from 6:00 PM to 6:00 AM. He’d gotten the position under dubious circumstances. The man before him had been killed on the job. But here among the steam engines and Edison dynamos, Henry was in his element. The plant powered some 5,000 streetlamps in the city and brought electricity into the homes of over 1,000 Detroiters for the first time. To see an Edison bulb flicker on at sunset was proof that an idea could change the world.

  When Clara got pregnant, the couple’s finances grew more complicated. On November 6, 1893, a doctor arrived at their apartment on a bicycle with a bag of equipment tied to the handlebars. Clara gave birth to a healthy boy. “Mrs. Ford didn’t give me any trouble at all,” the doctor told Henry. “She never complained one bit.” And the child? “He was born without circumstance.”

  Henry entered the bedroom and saw Clara with the baby in her arms. Here was a son whose destiny would ride alongside his own. The child had his mother’s chocolate brown eyes and delicate mouth. Henry reached out one of his long, calloused fingers, and the baby curled a fist around it.

  “You can see he’s smart, Callie, by the way he knows me,” Henry said. “He cost twice as much as Grandpa Holmes paid to get me safely into this world, but he’ll be worth it.”

  Though the couple had little money, they named the child Edsel, which in Old English meant “rich.”

  Soon after, the family moved yet again—to Bagley Avenue, which had a brick shed in the back where Henry could work on his machine. Things were looking up: he’d been named chief engineer at the main Edison plant, working the day shift. His new apartment was just three blocks from his work, and the apartment was wired for electricity supplied by Edison. After dinner each night the Fords moved to the shed out back, Clara keeping Henry company while Edsel crawled around, burning his little hands on occasion on hot valves.

  Then came the night of June 4, 1896. At 4:00 AM, with Clara and two-year-old Edsel watching in the rain, Henry sat in his throbbing invention for the first time, not knowing what the engine of fate had in store, incapable of imagining that he would see millions upon millions of automobiles with his name on them spring to life in the coming decades.

  Henry hit the gas and rolled down the cobblestone alley. He made his first historic drive through the streets of Detroit.

  Locals grew accustomed to seeing “Crazy Henry” and his family motoring through the city. The Fords cruised over the bumpy cobbles at twenty miles per hour, past the gutters full of horse manure and the electric-powered streetcars that crisscrossed downtown Detroit. Henry wore a bow tie, the wind brushing back his side-parted brown hair and mustache. Clara sat beside him in a bonnet, veil, and flowing dress, cradling Edsel in her lap. Kids gave chase, pumping away on bicycles. Along the streets, saloons emptied and necks craned. Always a friend rode ahead on a bike to clear a path and warn carriage riders, whose horses would get spooked.

  “Here comes that crazy Henry Ford,” Henry heard time and again over the engine’s song.

  “Yes, crazy,” he muttered, smiling at his little boy Edsel. “Crazy like a fox.”

  With the help of investors, Henry launched the city’s first automobile manufacturing outfit, the Detroit Automobile Company, on August 5, 1899. He quit his job at Edison, and that winter he introduced his first commercial car. It made the front page of the Detroit News-Tribune: “Thrilling Trip on the First Detroit-Made Automobile When the Mercury Hovered About Zero.”

  The company ran out of money within the year. Now out of a job, Henry continued to look for investors. The Fords moved into cheaper quarters again, living with Henry’s seventy-six-year-old father William on West Grand Boulevard. William Ford urged his son to get a real job.

  “You’ll never make a go of it,” he said of the horseless carriage business. “They’ll never sell.”

  Henry pushed on. In 1903 he managed to gather eleven investors, who raised the phenomenal sum of $150,000. At 9:30 AM on June 16, 1903, at 68 Moffat Street in
Detroit, the official forms were signed. Henry took 255 shares, each at $100, while most others signed on for 50 shares. Ford Motor Company was born. With a crew of about seventy-five men, Henry rented a wooden single-story space on Mack Avenue. He was forty years old. It had been twelve years since he moved to Detroit to chase his dream, and now everything was in place.

  The first customer was a Chicago dentist, who paid $850 for his Ford automobile. In the next twelve months, 1,000 more automobiles rolled out of Mack Avenue. Customers were willing to pay for Henry’s cars because they were reliable, affordable, and easy to maintain, and Henry had an uncanny talent to produce one just like the one before. His genius lay not in the product he produced but in the production itself—an integrated factory system as precise as a timepiece. Every spring and cog and hook had sprung from the imagination of the factory’s creator and his team, and the factory functioned as if it possessed its own sentience. Thanks to its efficiency, the product could be created cheaply, and that savings was passed on to the customer.

  In 1904, Henry moved into a bigger space on Piquette Avenue, a three-story brick building measuring 56 feet wide and 402 feet long. The day he stepped inside, he had visions of grandeur that would soon be eclipsed again.

  “Let’s run it!” he shouted, his footsteps echoing down the cavernous space, his son Edsel racing alongside on his bicycle.

  All over the world, thousands of dreamers and tinkerers were competing to be the first successful automaker. Henry read about their experiments in Horseless Age and Motor World magazines; their crude steam-, battery-, and gasoline-powered vehicles were almost all doomed to history’s junkyard. It was a race of ambition, ideas, and audacity—a race that Henry Ford won. Each car he produced in Detroit was a rolling ambassador of a new machine age, spreading the gospel through the streets of American cities and towns, and eventually overseas.

  After four years in business, Henry’s salary dwarfed that of Detroit’s new baseball star Ty Cobb fifteen times over. That didn’t include dividends, which paid investors 100 percent of their original money down in the first year. Company profits went from $283,037 in 1904 to $1,124,675 in 1907. Henry knew he had hit it big the day his wife came to him with consternation on her face. She was doing laundry one day and had found a forgotten uncashed check for $75,000 in the pocket of his pants.

  Reporters from the newspapers swarmed Henry’s factory, where they often found the gray-eyed man with his son Edsel by his side, the boy shyly looking up at his beaming father with wonder in his eyes. Despite all of Henry’s success and money, he told his friends and employees, it was his boy that mattered most. With his Ford car, he was becoming an icon. But with Edsel, he was a father. Edsel was destined to be his crowning achievement.

  2

  The Machine Is the New Messiah

  There is in manufacturing a creative joy that only poets are supposed to know. Some day I’d like to show a poet how it feels to design and build a railroad locomotive.

  —WALTER CHRYSLER

  DETROIT WAS ON THE VERGE. No city had ever grown so pregnant with fortune as Detroit at the turn of the twentieth century. Not San Francisco during the Gold Rush, not New York in the Gilded Age. This was the city where the age of coal and steam was about to end.

  The village of Detroit was founded in 1701 by a French explorer named Antoine Laumet de La Mothe sieur de Cadillac, on the banks of what is now called the Detroit River. By the nineteenth century, the city had gained a reputation for its metal workers. Over 250 metal shops had opened by the Civil War. Decades before a car ever appeared in the Motor City, urban planners prophetically designed Detroit’s downtown in the shape of a wheel, with a city center and grand boulevards fanning out like spokes, thoroughfares that carried horse-and-buggy traffic from downtown out into the sprawl.

  By the time Henry Ford sold his first car, Detroit was home to 286,000 people. It was the thirteenth-largest metropolis in the country, spread out over seventeen square miles. Like most northern cities, it was vastly Caucasian and homogeneous, with dirt and macadam roads filled with horse traffic. A post-Civil War lumber boom in Michigan made Detroit a shipping and railroad hub. With iron mines to the north (Michigan’s mines produced 80 percent of the nation’s iron ore at the turn of the century) and coal just about everywhere, the city was a perfect place for a new industry to explode. All it needed was a spark.

  Ransom Olds launched his auto company around the same time as Henry Ford’s. By 1904, 5,000 Curved Dash Oldsmobiles had rolled out of the Olds Motor Works at $650 apiece. John and Horace Dodge launched the Dodge Brothers Company in 1900 with the most sophisticated machine shop in town. Hard-drinking sons of a fish shop owner, and known for pulling pistols if they weren’t paid on time, the Dodges always got what they wanted. David Dunbar Buick, Louis Chevrolet, Walter Chrysler—they all found their way to Detroit, the Silicon Valley of the early twentieth century.

  Nightly a new breed of auto men gathered at the bar of the Pontchartrain Hotel on Cadillac Square. As one local described the Pontchartrain: “Excitement was in the air. A new prosperity was in the making. Fortunes were being gambled. Men played hard, but they worked desperately. It was not an uncommon sight to see four or five men carry a heavy piece of machinery into the room, place it on the floor or table and set it in motion. There, men began to talk a strange new language.”

  Meanwhile, Detroit’s bus and train stations unloaded daily thousands of laborers, who were lured by work in the factories. Detroit welcomed the first stretch of paved road and the first public parking garage.

  “Detroit in those days was seething with intensity,” wrote one Motor City chronicler. “Millions were tossed into a pot, and lost; pennies were tossed into a different pot, and came out millions.” Though David Buick’s name graced innumerable automobiles in his lifetime, he died a pauper in Detroit. Louis Chevrolet’s life ended in hardship in the Motor City; after helping start the company that bore his name, he had dropped out of the venture because he thought it had no future.

  On the other end, no auto man’s fortune skyrocketed like Henry Ford’s.

  Early one morning in the winter of 1906–1907, Henry arrived at his Piquette Avenue plant hunting for a $3-a-day pattern worker and rising production man, Charles Sorensen. A twenty-five-year-old Danish immigrant with big fists and an even bigger temper, Sorensen was so handsome that people called him Adonis. Two fingertips were missing from his right hand, not rare for a man in his line of work.

  Henry said to Sorensen, “Come with me, Charlie. I want to show you something.”

  They climbed the stairs to the north end of the third floor.

  “Charlie,” Henry said, “I’d like to have a room finished off right in this space. Put up a wall with a door big enough to run a car in and out. Get a good lock for the door. . . . We’re going to start a completely new job.”

  Soon this secret room—only Henry, Sorensen, and a small handful of engineers were allowed inside—was electric with activity. A large blackboard dominated the space. Henry spent endless hours in his lucky rocking chair staring at it. On that blackboard, the Model T was born. Sorensen would always remember the glint he saw in Henry’s eye—a look of genius and determination, the knowledge that something great was about to happen.

  Henry famously summed up the idea of this car: “I will build a motorcar for the great multitude. It will be so low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one,” he explained, adding that every owner of this automobile would enjoy “the blessing of hours of pleasure in God’s greatest open spaces.” Model Ts would soon cover every major city on earth like ants on an anthill.

  Mass production was still a new idea; it had been put into practice at Ford’s Detroit factory, the Singer sewing machine factory, and the Colt firearms works, among other examples. But Henry revolutionized the notion by imagining it on an exponentially larger canvas. The idea of fully integrated mass production came to him like the burst of light in an Edison bulb.* As he desc
ribed it:

  The man who places a part does not fasten it. The man who puts in a bolt does not put on the nut; the man who puts on the nut does not tighten it. Every piece of work in the shop moves. It may move on hooks, on overhead chains. . . . It may travel on a moving platform or it may go by gravity.

  Henry contacted Detroit’s finest architect, a German-born son of a rabbi named Albert Kahn, who had built Detroit’s Children’s Hospital and the Packard factory. Together they ventured to an old horse-racing track at the corner of Woodward and Manchester in a Detroit neighborhood called Highland Park.

  “When Henry Ford took me to the old race course and told me what he wanted,” Kahn later recalled, “I thought he was crazy.”

  Detroiters watched in awe as the building went up. Four stories tall, the factory covered twelve acres. Henry called it Highland Park, but the press dubbed it “Crystal Palace” because of its rows of windows that sparkled in the sunlight. When it was completed, Henry filled it with laborers from all over the world and breathed life into it. One writer who ventured into Highland Park in those early days captured its magnitude:

  Fancy a jungle of wheels and belts and weird iron forms—of men, machinery, and movement—add to it every kind of sound you can imagine: the sound of a million squirrels chirping, a million monkeys quarreling, a million lions roaring, a million pigs dying, a million elephants smashing through a forest of sheet iron . . . and you may acquire a vague conception of that place.

  Highland Park produced 19,000 Model Ts its first year, 34,500 its second, and 78,440 its third. Its efficiency and vastness struck beholders as nothing short of a miracle, and the man whose name was on the building gained a reputation as a singular character who could achieve the impossible.