(2 of 2)
The first of these substitutes were the war makers. In 1915, Ford chartered a "peace ship" to take pacifists to some unspecified neutral country for a conference that would end the war. His well-meaning, but wildly impractical effort brought Ford nothing but ridicule. The New York World, for example, taunted him in verse:
I saw a little, fordship
Go chugging out to sea . . .
And all the folk aboardship
Cried, "Hail to Hennery!"
Then, almost overnight, Ford plants began making munitions as vigorously as they had ever produced Model Ts. "The belligerence earlier turned against war," says Author Jardim, "and the makers of war was now expressed in waging it."
The end of the war brought a need for new targets. Ford bought a newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, and began assailing Jews as purveyors of munitions, alcohol, cigarettes, depraved movies and jazz. But like his militant pacifism, Ford's anti-Semitism was soon abandoned because it gave him no lasting relief from his unconscious conflicts.
Purged Executives. In a new search for relief, he turned on his employees. He became "the tyrant of the Rouge," his huge plant in Dearborn, Mich. He purged executives who disagreed with him, used spotters to weed out workers who dared take an unauthorized rest, permitted violence against the unions, "set the company against itself," and, as a Ford executive charged, worked on the principle of "Let's you and him have a fight and see how we come out."
With such tactics, Henry Ford nearly destroyed his own company; it survived only because of the new policies instituted by his grandson, Henry Ford II, when he became president in 1945. Whatever the real source of the elder Ford's obsession, Author Jardim concludes, he succeeded as long as he did because his fixation coincided with "the ordinary needs of ordinary men." When he began to fail, it was because the fixation had made him too rigid to change along with the times and men's needs.