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HF II soon showed that he could act with the decision of his grandfather. One of his first acts was to fire Harry Bennett, who was virtually running the company, and who was a symbol of union-busting to the U.A.W.-C.I.O. After that, there was no question of who was the new boss of the empire.
Young Henry brought in Ernest R. Breech, a crack production man who had run three General Motors subsidiaries, and made him executive vice president. When he joined Ford, said Breech, "there was no second team. We had nothing but top bosses and workers. We had no real research. Even the new [postwar] engine was no good; the Rouge was obsolete, and the company had lost $55 million in the first half of '46. About all we had that was any 'good was the name of Ford."
The Solutions. Together, Breech and HF II performed radical surgery. They shucked off all Old Henry Ford's peripheral enterprises, such as his Brazilian rubber plantations, his money-losing deal to make Harry Ferguson's tractors,* his experimental farms. They had another big problem: the inheritance taxes on the $208 million estates of Henry and Edsel. Luckily, Old Henry himself left $28 million in cash, and the family got the rest by loans from the company and sales of property. They kept control in the family by keeping the 172,645 shares of voting stock (now held in equal shares by Mrs. Edsel Ford and her sons and daughter), while the 3,089,908 shares of non-voting stock went to the Ford Foundation.
After reorganizing the company from top to bottom, Ford and Breech began to plow back profits and cash on hand into modernization and expansion.
As a whole new management team was assembled, Ford demonstrated that he had inherited his grandfather's capacities for radical innovations. He ordered tests to pick out promising young men on the production line to send them to school for training as managers. In spite of the fact that the company was overloaded with older workers, the corporation took on an $8,000,000 burden to set up pensions. But it reaped dividends in efficiency. Ford became a young man's company: the average age of its 35,000 salaried men is only 38, and that of its 130.000 production workers is 42. The Ford local of the union, the U.A.W.'s biggest, was skeptical of all these changes, notably because the long years of union-busting had given the local a hard core of Communists and fellow travelers. But its leaders have grudgingly doffed their hats to the new management. Last week, after Ford, with no fanfare, adopted a proposal to train Negro women without discrimination, the local's paper wrote: "There is a revolution in the Rouge on the entire question of the company's social responsibilities . . ."
The New Look. There was also a revolution in car design and style. Old Henry Ford had never given a hoot about either ("Give them any color they want as long as it's black"). Edsel, who had a flair for design, brought out the Lincoln Continental in 1939. But he made little progress in getting the company to set up its own design department. Breech and young Henry made that a first order of business. They also hired George Walker, a noted independent Detroit designer.