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Also under way were two projects which may prove to be Ford's most important contribution to national defense. One project is a 12-cylinder, 1,500-1,700 h.p., liquid-cooled airplane engine, with cast instead of forged cylinder sleeves and many simplifications of design. If that engine passes its laboratory tests successfully, it may be the answer to the industry's dream: an airplane engine which can be mass-produced.
The other project: a technique (seam welding and gang riveting) which would make possible the mass production of airplane fuselages. At Ypsilanti the building where Ford will turn out centre sections for Consolidated and Douglas bombers on an assembly line was almost finished. According to big, leathery Charles Sorensen, chief Ford production man, the aircraft industry has done the development job, the production job is now up to the automakers, who understand how to work out the integration and flow of materials for volume output.
Integration and flow were last week being worked out swiftly at Rouge. But human hands were needed to sort out, punch, weld, rivet, bolt, assemble. If there was a strike, human hands would close into fists, and sorting, bolting, assembling would cease.
No Trouble. "Labor-union organizers," says Henry Ford, "are the worst thing that ever struck the earth." They and their unions have never yet struck him hard. And it must have appeared to him last week that being the operator of an organized plant is no guarantee of industrial tranquillity. U. S. Steel, operating under a contract with C. I. O., was in danger of having that contract ended.
Until recently Ford has paid and publicized the highest wage, and the Ford method of keeping organizers out of the plants has been simple and direct: hit them first. Keeping organizers out has been the job of Harry Bennett's "service department," whose personnel is far-from-prissy.
Bennett got a cracked head in a fight outside the Rouge plant in 1932, in which four jobless marchers were killed. Brutally beaten by Ford agents were two other men who are now in the very front rank of U. A. W.—Richard Frankensteen and Walter Reuther (whose plan for making airplane parts in auto factories was projected last winter). Brutal beatings took place in Dallas, Tex.
Mr. Bennett wrote last week to the Governor of Michigan: "I wish to inform you that no labor dispute exists between this company and its employes, despite attempts of certain groups of labor agita tors to create the false impression with the public. This is the same group which introduced the 'sitdown' strikes to Amer ica and the reign of terror which followed. . . . These former 'sit-downers,' whose acts of terror in Michigan industry alone make Jan Valtin's revelations in Out of the Night seem like Mother Goose stories, would now sabotage the Defense Program of the nation to satisfy their greed for dues and more dues."