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In the immense 30-bedroom house where he and his wife now live alone, he rises at 6 a.m. Before breakfast he takes a long walk around his estate, sometimes vaulting a stone fence to prove to himself that he can still do it. He drives to the engineering laboratories, prowls around, goes home for breakfast, is back at the plant at 10.
From then on Henry Ford's day is unpredictable. He wanders as the spirit moves him through the great River Rouge plant or greater Willow Run, talking, looking in on experiments, watching the Ford empire hum.
In 1932, when early attempts at casting the V-8 engine were a failure, Ford showed up one day at the foundry with a bundle under his arm, took out a pair of overalls and went to work until the job was done. He still pops up at trouble spots. "You can't solve these things by paper work," he says, like Frank Morisette, like all of them. "You have got to see them."
At 1 p.m. Ford has lunch with his closest assistants at his famed round table ("The Billion-Dollar Table") in a pine-paneled room of the engineering labs. He may discuss a big problem, get a new project under way, or he may only warn his staff that sugar on grapefruit causes arthritis—a theory widely ignored by physicians. Or, gnawing at his frugal lunch of raw carrots, soybean crackers and milk, he may say nothing at all. Whatever his mood, he dominates the meal. Even Son Edsel Ford, president of the company, seldom speaks up without The Boss's bidding.
Model "T." When World War II began, autocratic, headstrong, pacifistic Henry Ford looked like the least helpful of U.S. citizens. He hated war; he hated the New Deal's labor and foreign policies.
Henry Ford was an America Firster; he called Appeaser Neville Chamberlain "one of the greatest men who ever lived;" after war began he hoped that England and the Axis would club each other into a coma. In the summer of 1940 he refused to make Rolls-Royce airplane engines, when he learned that some of them were destined for Britain. (As usual, he had a good mechanic's reason: later, grief and headaches in other plants making English-designed munitions proved what he knew or had guessed—that the British blueprints were informal to the point of helter-skelter, had to be completely worked over, causing costly rejections, delays, waste.) In Canada, Henry Ford was assailed as a "menace to democracy"; a boycott of his cars was threatened. Matter-of-fact old Henry Ford was unmoved. Said he, firmly: "Anyone who would do that is a sugar tit."
But even the most whole-souled mechanic takes some time off, and Henry Ford, the lean Midwesterner with a farmer's flair for opinionating and a mechanic's scorn for words, was always two men. He was a cantankerous, stubborn, cracker-box philosopher who could not bear to be contradicted; and he was a maker, a maker of machines that work.
At the start of World War I, Ford had been the cracker-box philosopher; he was again it. But as soon as the U.S. got into the war, Ford the mechanic got to work: he built tractors and tanks, put up a mammoth plant for Eagle anti-submarine boats. When the Government offered 30¢ apiece for steel helmets, Ford made 3,000,000 of them for 7¢. When the war ended, he turned back every cent of profit to the Government.