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General Motors' Chevrolet, steadily on Ford's trail, passed him two years later. Except for 1935 Chevrolet has led him ever since. Last year Chevrolet turned out 853,000 cars; Ford, 542,000. But let no one think that meant the decline and end of Ford. Founder Ford, at 77, is still full of surprises (plastic bodies for cars, for instance). This week he was talking, as he has before, of flivver planes to fill the skies.
In spite of age, competition, World War II, the Ford empire is still a mighty one. Able, dapper, brown-eyed Son Edsel, as president, is technically the company's head, but Father Ford is the boss, still the absolute ruler of this industrial domain. The empire includes Ford of the U. S., Ford of Canada, and Ford of England.
In 1937, the book value of Ford of the U. S., which the Ford family (Henry, Mrs. Ford and Edsel) owns outright, was listed at $624,975,000. No one can compute the exact value of their complex, world-wide holdings. But the Ford family is certainly the wealthiest in the U. S.
Some of that wealth was being sideswiped last week into pockets and purposes for which Henry Ford had little liking. In Canada, England and Australia, Ford plants were working overtime for the armies of Britain. On continental Europe, Hitler was running Ford plants, had set them to building mobile units for the Nazi war machine. There was nothing Henry Ford could do about it except express the hope—as he recently did—that both sides would destroy each other—and leave him and the U. S. alone.
A few plants lost hardly affect the long list of Ford possessions. He owns estates in Michigan, Georgia, England, coal mines, a fleet of 29 freighters, a rubber plantation in Brazil, iron mines, timberland, sawmills, hydroelectric works, farms, Greenfield Museum & Village (where he collects the relics of an age that he helped destroy). He owns the courthouse where Lincoln started practicing law, the Menlo Park workshop where Edison, whom he reverences, made the electric bulb, and in Massachusetts, the Wayside Inn and the little frame building where Mary (of Mary's Little Lamb) went to school.
$5 a Day. Henry Ford was more than a national figure: he was a nation-wide force. He put a car on every road, and a question in every factory. The question: what should be the relationship between management and labor? A quarter of a century ago he tried to dispose of it with a simple answer: an unheard-of minimum wage of $5 a day. He was hailed as a saint — by some economists, as a sinner. His theory then was that good pay makes good workmen. Good workmen, like good steel and rubber, resulted in better Model Ts. And well-paid workmen can buy more products of industry — including cars.
Said Ford: "All men want is to be told what to do and get paid for doing it." He has always believed in simple things: simple 'engines, simple food, simple amusements, simple cures, simple theories.