Chapter 25

World on Wheels: Ford Dynasty and UAW

When a man dies, it means that a part has worn out.

—Henry Ford

Nothing has spread socialist feeling in this country more than the automobile … they are a picture of the arrogance of wealth with all its independence and carelessness.

—Woodrow Wilson in 1906

FORD isn’t always easy to see. Some years ago I went out to Dearborn from Detroit in a company car. The officials had been evasive as to whether I had an actual appointment or not. Probably they didn’t know either. The chauffeur kept talking about Ford, and, though we were some miles from the plant, refused a cigarette because he said there were spotters everywhere and if he were caught smoking he’d be fired.

The Ford story is the greatest in America. Any newspaper man will understand what I mean by this. It is not the most important story. That is probably TVA or foreign policy. The Ford story is the “greatest” for the simple reason that it has never been written. A Ford bibliography could fill a library, but, even so, much about the old man is not known; much else that is known cannot, for various reasons, be freely told. It is still extremely difficult to get facts on Ford; the mythology is boundless, and three different people, all supposedly well informed, will give you three different versions of the same circumstance or episode.

Henry Ford is a very old man now, almost eighty-four, and still the richest in the world, the Nizam of Hyderabad possibly excepted. The president of the company today is Henry Ford II, his thirty-year-old grandson. In the span between the two Fords an era was born, the automobile age, the era of both mass and precision production, of the world on wheels. What would the United States be like today if Ford had never lived? Someone might have arisen in the same field with roughly the same accomplishment. Maybe. It is possible. Just the same Ford’s peculiar idiosyncratic personality as well as his work, his peculiar Zeitgeist, have left a mark on this continent that will never be effaced.

In 1914 occurred two seminal historic events. One was the outbreak of World War I. The other was the announcement that Ford would pay a $5.00 per day minimum wage—for which he was, of course, denounced as a crackpot or a monster by the entire manufacturing, commercial, financial, and propertied class. I am not sure which of these two events, in the long run, will be remembered as the more significant.

I reached Dearborn, and had conversation with Ford men. I was told that Mr. Ford, who at that time bore no company title of any kind, only seldom used his office; instead he just “circulated.” Most of the offices had glass partitions, and you could see anybody approaching a half mile off. Ford likes visibility. Yet I did not see the old man come near the room where I was waiting. He is swift as a shadow. I do not remember now much that he talked about, but the physical impression remains very vivid. He is taller than one thinks from his pictures. He is lean, with a stomach long and flat like an ironing board; his hair is carefully kept and lustrous; the years have written long, deep parentheses at each end of his quick, sensitive mouth. He is able neither to sit or stand still for long. When he stands, his hands flutter across his chest or by his sides. When he sits, he crosses and recrosses his legs, making gestures practically with his toes.

Mr. Ford disappeared after half an hour or so and one of the executives, with a kind of frightened reverence, took me tiptoeing to his private office. On the floor were neat copies of old bound magazines, Harper’s and Leslie’s Weekly, and the window seats were full of toys, rubber dolls and animals. Ford gives them to children in the village when he is out walking. The desk contained two telephones, a Detroit phone book, and a few folios of papers. What impressed me most was the table adjacent, which was covered from rim to rim with—old watches! Ford still loves to tinker with watches and slowly, carefully, take them apart.

I visited Dearborn again in 1945. This time I noticed in the whole establishment a considerable relaxation, a slackening of the tension. I was allowed to smoke. Unless my memory misleads me some Ford officials actually smoked too, right there in the building. The relaxation, the humanization, expressed itself in other and more important fields. The executives seemed to be of a new and much more reasonable stamp. This was at a time when a great inner revolution, or convulsion, had just occurred, as Henry II was taking over and when Harry Bennett, of whom more presently, resigned. Ford used to be a shop where “anybody could fire anybody,” where no schematic organization existed at all, where one executive could countermand the orders of all the others. “You got your head lopped off if you talked to the wrong guy,” as I heard it said. Nowadays this has all changed drastically. The intimidation days are gone, too, so far as labor is concerned; the plug-uglies have disappeared. “Ford won’t be a roundheel in labor relations,” one of his top men told me, “but he’ll play fair. If labor works, we work, and vice versa.” Finally, though as we shall see Ford does not “have” to make money in the manner of other more mundane companies, the organization is determined to get out in front again, and regain the position of undisputed leadership it held for so long.

But about the entire titanic Ford plant there is still an aura of uniqueness, of differentiation. Ford is like no other industrial undertaking in the world. He was, or rather is, a kind of government—and much more powerful than many governments. The annual budget of the republic of Brazil before the war was about 160 million dollars. Ford’s was at the time at least three times greater. The total value of the imports of the kingdom of Jugoslavia, prewar, amounted to about 580 million dollars. So did Mr. Ford’s. Switzerland normally spent about $270,000 per day to run itself. Ford spent, and still spends, about one million dollars a day on payroll alone.¹ Since its foundation, the company has grossed more than 11 billion dollars.

The overriding phenomenon that, in abrupt analysis, makes Ford unique is that no stock is held outside the family. This is why the company can take losses, as it did for many years. This is why almost all his competitors eventually have nervous breakdowns, because nobody can ever predict what Ford will do. If he suddenly lowers the price of his cars, as happened without warning in early 1947, the rest of the industry lurches with dismay because, whereas Ford can do this, they may not be able to do so—or rather, even if they can, they may not want to. Ford has no outside stockholders to satisfy, no banking interests to appease, no interlocking directorates to keep in order, no meetings in New York of bondholders or directors, and, above all, no dividends to pay outside the family. Ford could start giving automobiles away tomorrow for nothing, or pay people a premium to buy them; all that would happen would be that the family fortune, which probably amounts to 800 million dollars or more, would be cut into. But General Motors and Chrysler and the other great companies have stockholders for whom dividends must be earned. Ford doesn’t even publish a balance sheet for general attention. He doesn’t have to, except in certain states like Massachusetts which demand a limited declaration, since nobody trades in Ford securities. Nobody even knows what the family dividends may be.

Ford—to put it somewhat mildly—is a very strange person indeed, an “off-ox” as I heard it put. This is the last of the spectacular, ornery American individualists. For a generation he carried a billion-dollar business under his hat. A lone wolf of lone wolves, he never even joined the Automobile Manufacturers Association. But every Ford patent, of which there are thousands, is available absolutely free to anybody in the world who wants it.²

Greenfield Village

History is bunk.

—Henry Ford

If only Ford himself were properly assembled! If only he would do in himself what he has done in his factory!

—Samuel S. Marquis

Greenfield Village, a few miles from Dearborn, is one of the most singular sights in the United States. It is a far cry from the black furnaces and grunting machines of Willow Run and River Rouge; it is something in a different and blander sphere—Ford’s attempt to resurrect the American past, the America he knew as a boy and which, as much as any man, he helped to obliterate.

“Well now, let me see,” Mr. Ford said jerkily when I asked him about the origins of this project which is at once stupendous and in a curious way absurd. “I haven’t thought much about that. I suppose it began in my head twenty-five years ago. It occurred to me to try to get together some early American furniture and industrial equipment. We went seriously to work on it six or seven years ago. Oh, it will take years to complete—years and years!”

Ford, more than any other man, typifies the era of machines; now, next door to his birthplace, he goes back to horse and buggy, venerating what he destroyed. Ford created the automobile assembly line and, just as important, the standardization and interchangeability of parts, which made the early automobile practicable, and which today is one of the giant bases of the industry. Now, in his old age, out of some kind of psychological displacement or nostalgia, he tinkers with his fingers in a blacksmith shop and looks for old-style locomotives that go puff-puff. The man who made the Model T allows no automobiles in Greenfield Village, except in the museum. You go from exhibit to exhibit behind a horse.

Of course the whole thing is almost insufferably grandiose. Here the criteria of the millimetre gauge is applied to antiques. The first thing I saw was a sixteenth century Cotswold cottage, brought over from England bodily, and set up stone by stone. Every timber and bit of plaster is of course original. It is not a replica of the Cotswold cottage. It is the Cotswold cottage. Such devotion to the minutiae of genuineness is, one need not point out, a familiar enough American characteristic; Hearst has it too. But Ford goes further. Was it necessary to bring over from the Cotswolds an authentic herd of Cotswold sheep, which now graze on the sunny Greenfield slopes? Anyway they are sheep alive and of undeniable authenticity.

Ford’s idea was to show the development of American institutions. I saw an original Mississippi River boat, complete, and the original log cabin where W. H. McGuffey of the McGuffey Readers was born. Here is a building in which Lincoln practiced law, Luther Burbank’s office, and the cottage where Steinmetz performed his experiments. Carried to its logical conclusion Greenfield Village should, of course, include the Alamo, Mount Vernon, and Independence Hall. Well, Independence Hall is here, down to the very crack in the Liberty Bell—but in replica, alas. Maybe Mr. Ford couldn’t persuade Philadelphia to surrender the original.

The prize of the whole village, which covers 220 acres and contains several hundred thousand objects, is the group of structures associated with Thomas Edison, Ford’s hero. Here is the entire Menlo Park laboratory, complete with the very test tubes and mortars that the great inventor used, and including the whole train (!) which Edison set on fire as a boy, the original hawker’s basket in which he sold newspapers and bananas (bananas absent), and a few square rods of his own red earth, imported reverently from New Jersey.

Of course there are acres of automobiles, quiescent, including some wonderful-looking old juggernauts (do not forget that, in the United States alone, more than two thousand different makes of automobiles have been built and sold in the past fifty years—today only about a dozen survive); there is No. 999, the Ford in which Henry himself set the world’s record for the mile in 1902; there are the ten millionth Ford and the twenty millionth Ford and hundreds of other Fords for some reason notable. Also I saw near by the first car Ford ever built. Occasionally, to amuse visitors, Ford (sometimes Mrs. Ford watches), carefully priming it with fluid out of an eyedropper, starts its engine. It still runs very well.

Aladdin of the Tin Lizzie

If you will study the history of almost any criminal, you will find he is an inveterate cigarette smoker.

An army or navy is a tool for the protection of misguided, inefficient, destructive Wall Street.

—Henry Ford

Ford’s father was an Irish immigrant; his mother was of Pennsylvania Dutch extraction. He has a younger brother, William, whom scarcely anybody has ever heard of; his wife, with whom he has lived more than half a century of undiluted happiness, was named Clara Bryant. The outline of his early life and struggles, his first puttering with the horseless buggy, are too well known to bear repetition here. Ford, like so many American boys, got ahead by quitting jobs rather than by revering them. Almost overnight, from being an obscure mechanic, he became the most famous man in the world. Does anybody remember the inundating cycles of Ford jokes when the Model T first swept the roads?

Ford sued the Chicago Tribune for a million dollars for having called him an “anarchist,” and got 6¢ damages after an elaborate trial; an incident in this was that, trapped in cross examination by smart Tribune lawyers, he didn’t know who Benedict Arnold was. He organized the Ford Peace Ship expedition, with which he hoped to stop World War I.³ Indirectly, through the medium of the Dearborn Independent, he waged a long campaign against the Jews; not until 1927, when a reputation for anti-Semitism was cutting into his business gravely, did he publicly recant. He ran for the Senate as a Democrat in 1918, and was only just beaten by Truman Newberry; a generation later, one of his grandsons and a Newberry scion were classmates at Hotchkiss, in Connecticut. Wall Street and the bankers sought to buy into old Henry or break him or get him, and for decade after decade he hated Wall Street, in the conventional western way, hated it more than anything on earth except, maybe, organized labor. When the UAW first sought to organize Ford, he put notices in the pay envelopes warning every worker that unionization was just like Wall Street, “two ends of the same rope,” only worse; he has long since come to terms with labor, but his hatred of absentee capital and the financial world of the East is still implacable.

The Ford Motor Company was incorporated on June 16, 1903, with a thousand shares of stock at $150 per share, of which Ford held 255 shares. The Dodge brothers had a hundred shares, and James Couzens, whose career was to be interlocked with Ford for many years, had twenty-five. Couzens started life as a $10-a-week car checker for Michigan Central. I would like very much to know what has happened to a man named Alex Y. Malcomson.⁴ He too had 255 shares in the original company, an amount equal to Ford’s, and he was its first treasurer. It seems that he was a coal dealer, and Couzens was a clerk in his office. Ford must, of course, have bought him out many years ago, as he bought out Couzens. I was unable to find anybody in Detroit who knew anything further about Mr. Malcomson. But it has been calculated that any original Ford investor who held his stock even for sixteen years, till 1919, made a return of 355,000 per cent on the investment.⁵

It is natural enough that Ford, like General Motors later, should have been the proving ground for many who became famous in the industry. The Dodge brothers I have just mentioned. William S. Knudsen, later to become a lieutenant general and among other things an early partner to Sidney Hillman in war production, was of course a Ford man for many years. So was Charles E. Sorensen, whom many think to be the actual inventor of the assembly line. Knudsen left Ford for General Motors, and presently sales of Chevrolet (named for a French racer of the day) passed Ford’s. Ford, which had once sold 40 per cent of all passenger cars in the United States, has never recovered its lead; in 1941 its share of the total business was only 18 per cent. Malcolm W. Bingay, editorial director of the Detroit Free Press, told me that someone asked Ford once if he had not regretted letting Knudsen go. “That’s a good question, a very legitimate question,” Ford replied. “I’m not surprised that Chevrolet has passed us. Mr. Knudsen is the best production man in the United States. But he was getting too big for me. I spent more energy trying to handle him than my competitors.”⁶

In 1920 the Ford accumulated surplus was more than 200 million dollars. In 1937 its surplus balance was more than 600 million dollars. But, over a period of eleven years ending in 1937, according to the Federal Trade Commission, Ford operated at a net average loss of 0.80 per cent. But since the reserves were so enormous and there were no hungry shareholders to pay off, this did not matter much. The Ford empire continued to grow, and its wealth in real terms remained literally incalculable. As everybody knows Ford has, or had, companies in Great Britain, Canada, Germany, and Japan, a large coal business so that he would always have his own access to coal, steamship lines, and rubber plantations in Brazil. The total assets of the company, as calculated by the New York Times, were still conservatively estimated at $1,021,325,-159 in 1945.

Unorthodox hints to young men studying to be executives, who may like to know of Ford’s business habits: He hates paper work, almost never writes a letter, very seldom issues an order and never keeps appointments unless he really feels like it.⁷

Perplexities increase when we leave the domain of pure business. Ford has an anti-Semitic past; yet at least one of the associates whom he most admires is Jewish, the architect who built most of his plants—Albert Kahn, one of the foremost industrial architects in the world.⁸ He has been accused of being anti-Russian; yet Ford was the first big American industrialist to do business with Soviet Russia. He brought Russian engineers to Detroit by the sackful, taught them mass production, and sent them back to establish the Ford plant at Nizhni Novgorod, now called Gorki. Ford’s theory was that anything that would assist Russia to become stable was a good thing; he liked to say, “It never hurts to put someone to work again.” One result was that he got about 350 million dollars worth of Russian business—before the rest of the United States and the NAM woke up.

He is accused of being anti-Negro, but he has insisted on a substantial number of Negro workmen in all his plants since about 1914. One charge, a shade fanciful, might be argued against him—that he is antifeminist. Until World War II at least, extremely few women were employed at Ford’s.

But now to other and more serious matters. Shortly after the outbreak of the war Ford said, “There is no righteousness in either cause. Both [sides] are motivated by the same evil impulse, which is greed.” He began to show a most extraordinary catholicity in hiring people. Fritz Kuhn got a job at Ford’s shortly after he arrived from Germany, and was a Bund leader in Detroit. There is no record, however, that Ford knew of his subversive actions. Colonel Lindbergh was a close friend and trusted employee at Willow Run for years. Ford had a great impulse to take in anybody who was in trouble no matter how disreputable the trouble might have been. For instance he promptly gave a job to an army officer who, following gunplay at Selfridge Field, was forced to give up his commission. Admiral Kimmell and General Short—who are in a totally different category of course—found jobs with Ford after Pearl Harbor.

Then there is the extraordinary tropism toward athletes. That such an imposing number of athletes are, or were, on the payroll, may however be more the result of the influence of Harry Bennett than of Ford himself. Athletes may be converted into healthy assistants. Ed Cicotte, the “Black Sox” pitcher, worked for Ford. A famous ex-hockey player named Stewart Evans was a director of labor relations for a time. A member of the Ford private police, Charlie Bernard, was once a Michigan All-American, and Bennett’s secretary was also a football star. A celebrated ex-prize fighter, Kid McCoy, was a Bennett employe, and one of his friends, Harry Kipke, who had been coach at the University of Michigan, became a member of the university board of regents.⁹ We know well Ford’s fierce autochthonous puritanism. Once he threatened (but did not put the threat into effect) never to build a car again if prohibition were repealed. Is it too fanciful to associate this puritan impulse, the worship of a strong body, with his fondness for athletes? But if this is so, one is entitled to ask why so many people, no matter how superb physically, were hired whose moral qualities were not exactly puritan.

In any case the consequences of all this spread, even into politics. Detroit elections are city-wide and nonpartisan, and almost anybody with a big name in the world of sports is a good candidate. Two city councilmen today are Billy Rogell, a former shortstop of the Detroit Tigers, and Gus Dorais, formerly of Notre Dame, the University of Detroit, and the Detroit Lions.

Of course Ford is, in his own field, a man of authentic genius, and like many genuises he is apt to stray when he enters other fields. Basically he is a wily but simple-seeming peasant with an excessively developed mechanical skill. “Mr. Ford reads a machine the way a bibliophile reads a first edition,” one of his men told me. Knudsen thinks that his greatest single characteristic is a tremendous ability to concentrate; others talk of a superlative intuition. I heard it seriously stated that if half a dozen carburetors were put on a table, identical in appearance but five good and one bad, Ford could tell by looking at them which one was defective. I also heard that, walking down the street and seeing a brick wall, he can compute instantly, within a margin of 1 or 2 per cent of error, how many bricks it contains.

Bennett, Internal Politics, and the Succession

I do nothing because it gives me pleasure.

—Henry Ford

Few characters in American industrial history have had more mysterious careers than Harry H. Bennett. He helped erect Ford’s “iron curtain,” and for years he operated behind it. Bennett has been a sailor, waterfront hanger-on, deep-sea diver, lightweight boxer, clarinet player, draftsman, and artist. He still paints. He keeps both lions and tigers on his estate. He was once shot in the stomach and seriously wounded, and was almost brained on another occasion when his guards sought to break up a labor demonstration.¹⁰

Bennett joined Ford in 1917 or thereabouts, and became in time head of what was known as the service department. This was the Ford police, which has been described as “the most powerful private police force in the world.” Bennett, a tough boy, assembled around him a group of tough boys. Some were uniformed; some were not; that all members should wear insignia was one of the main points that the UAW insisted on in its first contract with Ford. Bennett and his men were, at first, primarily a security organization. The Ford family, with grandchildren growing up, feared kidnappers, and the Bennett group was in a position to know what, if any, gangs might be moving in on Detroit. But Bennett, who always called himself “Mr. Ford’s personal man,” nothing more, nothing less, was much more than a detective with underworld connections. First, his organization inevitably became the Ford spearhead against labor; second, it developed into a kind of palace guard. Bennett controlled appointments, labor relations, and personnel. He was the grand vizier who had the decision on the most important of all things in a structure like Ford’s—access. For years, very few people ever saw the old man until they had been screened by Bennett’s group, with its giant illuminated switchboard and system of telephones. A minor proof of this is that any newspaperman who had even a semblance of approach to Ford—or Bennett—was always sure of a good job in Detroit. Anybody near the throne was a kinglet.

Many people have sought to explain the hold Bennett had on Ford. The most reasonable and probably the best is simply that Ford liked him. Then, as he grew older, and was perhaps not quite so alert as in earlier years, Bennett’s influence grew, and so did Ford’s dependence on him as the one man he could trust. I asked several people in Detroit what “ran” much in the Ford organization—until two years ago. The answers were all but unanimous: “Harry Bennett.”

The upper hierarchy of Ford executives did not accept this situation lightly, and at least one very important production man hated Bennett. So on the top level there came to be two camps, Bennett and anti-Bennett, with the Ford family itself involved.

Ford’s only son was Edsel. He took over the presidency of the corporation in 1919, and was at least its titular head until his early and unexpected death in 1943. This was a crushing blow. The old man himself had to step out of “retirement” and take over. Edsel and Bennett were not close friends. One story is, in fact, that the real struggle at Ford was sometimes between the old man, supporting Bennett, against his own son. Another, highly suggestive, is that Ford wanted Edsel to demand that he, Ford, choose between Edsel and Bennett, as a test of Edsel’s character, but Edsel, a notably decent and gentle character, could not bring himself to do so. Edsel’s widow, a lady with great good sense, dignity, and courage, and the mother of Henry II, found herself in a key position. One widespread Detroit rumor, of course impossible to substantiate, is that she once threatened to sell her Ford stock on the open market, which would have compromised forever the closed character of the corporation, if Bennett’s wings were not clipped.

On September 21, 1945, Henry Ford II, having reached the age of twenty-eight, took over the presidency of the company from his grandfather. A few days later, Bennett was “relieved of his position” as director in charge of administration, and in October he resigned. The board of directors was reshuffled, and several of the “Bennett” men among top executives were shelved. In other words young Henry moved in with a broom. The old guard began to scatter. Two years before. John S. Bugas, a young Wyoming lawyer who had become head of the FBI in Detroit, was hired by Ford as Bennett’s chief assistant. When Bennett went out, Bugas succeeded him as director of personnel and labor relations, and has admirably handled the job ever since. John Edgar Hoover once publicly called Bugas “the best man in the FBI.”

Finally, a word about young Henry. He is a careful, well-brought-up, plump young man, who takes with extreme seriousness his responsibilities. The old Ford hands, delighted to see the Bennett regime ended, call him “the world’s greatest young fellow.” Henry II went to Yale. He did not like to study much, and never was graduated. He enlisted in the Navy in 1941, and served two years; then he had a brief novitiate studying the Ford ropes, before acceding to the presidency. I have read several of his speeches. They are somewhat guarded, very much on the proper side, and conventionally well written. Some of them are so earnest that, even in the printed versions, the italics young Mr. Ford made for emphasis are preserved. When he gives an interview, he is quoted in the third person only. Little by little, his poise and confidence have been built up. A well-meaning and friendly person, he reveres the memory of his father, and it goes without saying that his mother is a signal and healthy influence. Mrs. Edsel, it might be said, is the spiritual mainspring of the Ford company today.

Young Henry, when he was still at Yale, fell in love with a girl named Anne McDonnell, one of fourteen children of James Francis McDonnell, a wealthy New York broker, and one of sixty-three grandchildren of an inventor, Thomas E. Murray. Miss McDonnell was, and is, a vigorous Catholic, whereas the Fords are Methodist. Monsignor Fulton J. Sheen, the prelate who assisted at the conversion to Catholicism of Heywood Broun and Clare Boothe Luce, gave young Henry instruction, and he was admitted to the Catholic church. Time printed a remarkable photograph of the wedding party, with Sheen among the guests. Henry’s Catholicism, which is devout, is very little talked about in Detroit. At first people wondered what his grandfather would say. The old man, a masterfully oblique character, waited until several weeks after the wedding, and then, after many years of unsuccessful attempts to persuade him to do so, consented to enter the thirty-third degree of Masonry at an imposing ceremony at which all the thirty-third degree Masons in Michigan were present.

What will happen to old Henry’s fortune? About this there is as much mystery as anything in Detroit. Something exists known as the Ford Foundation. This owns Greenfield Village and the Edison Institute (the village, one sees, may turn out to have a utilitarian aspect after all), and as such is a nonprofit organization and is tax exempt. When Ford dies, it is generally believed that most of his wealth will be left to this foundation; if so, the huge estate may escape most inheritance taxes. This procedure will also presumably insure that no Ford stock will have to be dumped on the market to meet enormous tax charges. The old man is believed to own 58 per cent of Ford stock today, and the foundation, on his death, will almost certainly be the richest in the world.

Biggest Union in the World

We come now to the International Union, United Automobile, Aircraft and Agricultural Implement Workers of America, CIO, the biggest labor organization in America. From 15,000 dues-paying members ten years ago, it jumped to 1,250,000 during the war. The figure is considerably less today, mostly because of contraction in the aviation industry. But it is not size that makes the UAW so important. What counts is its power, leadership, heterogeneity, and explosiveness. This is the most volcanic union in the country.

Into Detroit, from the time that Ford announced the $5.00 day, have streamed for years the most miscellaneous types of labor; hence the UAW contains everything from Ku-Kluxers to Trotskyists, from political theorists of the most advanced type to hillbillies who can scarcely read. The UAW is a “rank-and-file union,” in which power rises from the bottom; its leaders, unlike those in the United Steelworkers for instance, have to deal with a constantly shifting body of men who demand the most complete democratic freedom of expression; this has imposed at times an extreme strain on the leadership, in that its first duty has had to be to educate, to teach responsibility.

Also the newness and the speed of rise of the UAW, its enormousness (after all its “population” is twice that of the city of New Orleans or Minneapolis) and its association with an extremely volatile industry, have made fissures inevitable, and a right wing and a left wing have developed. For a time the criterion was whether a member was anti-Communist or not. Now this is not nearly so true. None of the top UAW men are Communists. The Communist philosophy was smartly beaten down at the last Atlantic City convention. Actually differences of view among leaders, though expressed with vociferousness on occasion, are based mostly on personalities, as we shall see.

What is remarkable, in fact, is not so much the degree to which the UAW is split, but its cohesiveness in spite of all the centrifugal rivalries. One factor making for unity is the character of Detroit itself, a city packed with hate, and representative of the “tycoon mind” at its most backward. Here, men who could scarcely understand a newspaper headline became millionaires wielding vast economic power overnight. The great automobile companies for years were not only vehemently antiunion; they thought of labor simply as an inanimate commodity. A Detroit skyscraper, one of the tallest buildings in the world, was built largely by scab labor brought in from Canada, and paid about 20 per cent under the American scale. A mild indication of the kind of thing that went on was that, according to testimony heard by the La Follette Civil Liberties Committee of the Senate, General Motors alone paid $839,764 for detective service in a two-year period. A workman never knew whether or not the man next to him on the assembly line was a spy.

Resentment against all this and much else in Detroit helped hold the UAW together. Richard T. Frankensteen told me during his race for the mayoralty that, among other things, the city was “the rat capital of the world.” He did not mean human rats. He meant those that feed in alleys on the city’s garbage. Detroit has one acre of playground per thousand population (the figures are approximate) compared to New York’s twelve, Chicago’s eleven, and Cleveland’s nine. It has two outdoor swimming pools—for 1,623,452 people. Its transportation systems are even more dilapidated than those of Chicago and, in 1945, on the opening day of school, 30,000 children could not get in, because there wasn’t any room.

It isn’t easy to work out the fissures in UAW leadership on a straight “left” or “right” basis. A more satisfactory division would be between Reutherites, Thomasites, and anti-Reutherites. Walter P. Reuther, the president today, is both a socialist and a marked conservative. Like social democrats in Europe, whom he strongly resembles, he is a Marxist in theory, but what he hates most in the world are Communists. He calls the American species “prostitutes” and “saboteurs” and points out that they did not defend Stalingrad. In return Reuther is the Communists’ Public Enemy No. 1, and, he says, they spent $50,000 (unsuccessfully) to beat him at the last convention. Yet, by most newspaper readers and by opinion generally throughout the country, Reuther is thought of as on the extreme left wing.

Actually the leftist leader is the former president and present vice president, R. J. Thomas. He too is very far from being a Communist, however. His role was mostly that of moderator, at least till the 1946 convention. Associated with Thomas are Richard T. Leonard, an able man who for years was head of the union’s Ford department and who is now another vice-president, and George F. Addes, who has been secretary-treasurer and the second-ranking officer almost from the beginning. Addes is supposed to be the most leftist of all, and usually he is backed by the Communists. It is an interesting point that he should also be an ardent Catholic.

In 1946, Reuther won the UAW presidency by 124.4 out of 8,765.2 votes. The voting was hairline close right down the line. Leonard, a Thomas supporter, squeezed in by fewer than fifty votes. So today UAW is run by Reuther and an anti-Reuther cabinet. The supreme ruling body is a board of twenty-two men, elected on the basis of the per capita contribution of every affiliated local union. Of the present twenty-two, Reuther’s men are a small minority. This does not mean, however, that he does not have great power.

A further word on Thomas. When I saw him he said that factionalism was less acute than at any time in the history of the union. I do not know if he would say the same thing today. Early in 1947, amid hurly-burly over the Allis-Chalmers strike, Reuther called him “false, malicious, and irresponsible,” and Thomas replied in kind.¹¹ Originally Thomas was a Murray-Hillman man. He was a worker for years in a Chrysler body plant. He would rather be president of the CIO some day than of the Ford Motor Company, or, doubtless, the United States. Some people think that, like labor leaders in England, his duties and responsibilities have made him too standpat and stodgy.

A further word, too, on Frankensteen, another UAW vice president until recently. The name is pronounced to rhyme with “bean,” incidentally. A point somewhat extraordinary, considering the name, is that his assistant when he was a big union figure was named Dragon. During the 1945 mayoralty campaign, his enemies called him a Jew in the German districts of Detroit, and a German in the Jewish districts. Actually Richard Truman Frankensteen is an Episcopalian, though most of his family is Catholic; his mother is of Irish stock. Frankensteen is one of the most extroverted men in the American labor movement. He is a very large, handsome youngster, bursting with cheerfulness and vitality; he was a football star at both the University of Detroit and the University of Dayton; he likes night clubs and conviviality in moderation and has written several plays, including a musical comedy called Gypsy Moon.

Frankensteen, along with Reuther, was beaten up in a famous fracas by company police, at the “Battle of the Overpass,” sometimes called the “Battle of Bull’s Run,” outside Gate No. 4 at River Rouge in 1937. What happened is all a matter of public, though confused, record. Frankensteen, Reuther, and their comrades were passing out circulars and handbills as part of an organizing drive. This procedure was against the Dearborn ordinances. Later, however, such ordinances forbidding circularization were declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. Ford men broke up the demonstration, and the UAW boys were mauled and set upon.¹² Frankensteen, who is handy with his fists, is indignant to this day that he couldn’t fight, because someone got him from behind and pulled his coat over his head, imprisoning his arms.

Frankensteen ran for mayor in 1945. Whether this was with official UAW blessing is disputable. He ran, so I heard it put, “without much previous consultation.” Some CIO right-wingers voted for him on the theory that, if he won, he would have to leave the union. But Frankensteen is not much interested in ideology one way or the other. He won the primaries neatly, but was beaten in the runoff.

History of the UAW, as such, begins in about 1936. I have heard its steep climb described as the “greatest surge forward of the underpossessed” in the history of industry. Here Ford enters the story again, because he was inevitably the crux and the test. In 1928 there were 435.000 automobile workers, mostly unorganized; their average pay was $33 for a forty-four-hour week. Came the depression. In 1933 only 244,000 had employment; they worked only thirty-three hours a week, and their take-home pay was $20.10.¹³ After prodigious struggles in the 1930’s the UAW managed to organize a few plants, and some successful small strikes followed—against Bendix at South Bend, and Midland Steel and Kelsey-Hayes in Detroit. The first great General Motors strike was centered at Flint and was won on February 11, 1937. Reuther played a conspicuous role in this as we shall see. A sit-down at Chrysler followed, equally successful. By the end of 1937, the UAW was in full swing, and had won contracts with four hundred companies.

But Ford held out. This was the tough nut to crack. He was the lonely patriarch of the business. To organize Ford became a consuming ambition from the psychological as well as practical point of view. Ford broke up a UAW organizing drive in 1937. Then came periods of acute dissension in the UAW, which all but wrecked it. In 1939, however, “strategy strikes” were successful against both GM and Chrysler, and the union knit itself together. Ford still fiercely resisted unionization. Finally the UAW became strong enough to force the issue, and, in 1941, after a short strike, the National Labor Relations Board ordered an election, and Ford workers voted for UAW-CIO by three to one. The Ford folk had to accept this or be in contempt of federal law. Then—to everybody’s immense surprise—Ford, as if giving up the fight for good and all and accepting in good spirit the fact that he was beaten, gave the union practically everything it asked for, including the first union shop and the first dues checkoff in the automobile manufacturing industry. Ford’s relations with the UAW have been fairly good ever since—with occasional spasms and though there have been plenty of wildcat strikes. Leonard and Bugas get on together well, and Ford still pays the highest wages in the business and is still the only company operating a union shop.

The UAW grew hard and fast after this. With Ford organized, very few other manufacturers dared to stand out.

Man Named Reuther

Walter P. Reuther, a modest but ambitious redheaded young man with an earnest smile and a beguiling sort of self-confidence, is one of the most stimulating men in American labor. For several reasons his story is worth telling briefly. In a way, despite the most obvious differences, he is almost as typical an American as Ford, if only for the qualities of savvy, industriousness, and enterprise.

Reuther (pronounced Roother, not Royter), was born in Wheeling, West Virginia, forty years ago, the son of a German brewery worker and devout old-school Socialist. Young Reuther had the polemics of the working class drilled into him from the cradle, and when he was still a schoolboy he organized a local shop. Then, finding the Wheeling horizon too limited, he set out to make his way in the world. He went to Detroit, and became an expert tool and die maker at Ford. He knew, however, that work was not enough. There was something known as school. So, while working an eight-hour day, he also worked his way through high school and three years of Wayne University. He got up at dawn, caught his first class at eight, did his school work till one, and then put in his stint at Ford from 3 till 11:30. After this—homework! His brother Victor, who is now director of the education department of the UAW, kept house and did the cooking. Before long, Walter stood first in his class, and was earning $12.00 a day. Then Ford fired him for “union activity.”

Reuther passed his final examinations, drew every cent he had out of the bank on the day before the Detroit banks crashed in 1933, and then, with Victor, set out on a trip around the world. The Reuther boys were away for thirty-three months. As Walter says today, “We wanted to find out how the world was living.” A trip like this is a fairly conventional thing for young Americans to do, but few have ever done it quite so thoroughly as the Reuther boys. They arranged their itinerary as a “tour in social engineering.” It was a serious vocational attempt, very German and Socialist, to get underpinning for a future career. The boys worked their way across the Atlantic, bought pushbikes, and cycled 12,000 miles in western Europe. Only twice in nine months did they sleep in hotels. If they ever bothered to look at the “sights,” like the leaning tower at Pisa, this was mere frosting on the cake. What they really liked to do was visit mills in Lancashire and mines in Gelsenkirchen. Whenever they were broke they paused to get a job. They slept at student hostels in Germany, joined workers’ groups, helped organize them, and, as Hitler was rising to power, made contacts in the Socialist underground. Victor spoke excellent German but, as Walter laughs about it today, “with such a wonderful West Virginia accent that the Germans thought we came from some remote part of Swabia.”

Next, Russia. The boys traveled 18,000 miles in the Soviet Union. They are among the very few Americans who, in those days, reached Central Asia and saw Samarkand. Being skilled mechanics, they had no trouble getting jobs. Walter became, in fact, an instructor in the Ford plant at Gorki, and showed Russian boys how to build gasket dies with tolerances to one-seven-thousandth of an inch. “It was darned delicate work,” he says today.

One day the Reuthers got a letter from another brother, Roy, telling them that the automobile situation was popping and to come home. They took the Trans-Siberian to Manchuria, bicycled briefly through Japan, and eventually arrived back in Detroit.

By 1936, Reuther had become an important cog in the stirring UAW. He organized a small local on the west side of Detroit. This he merged with six other locals, and so created the first Reuther “machine,” membership seventy-eight. He borrowed three hundred dollars, opened an office, and bought a typewriter. In nine months he had 32,000 paid-up members, with organizations in forty shops. “To be a union leader in those days,” he reminisces, “you had to run like blazes to keep up with the membership.”

Reuther’s first signal coup was the Kelsey-Hayes strike in December, 1936. He tied up Kelsey-Hayes, which makes wheels and brake drums for Ford, and which had some 5,000 workers, though he himself had not more than thirty-five men in the plant. This was one of the first three considerable strikes the UAW won, and it presaged the organization of the whole industry.

This is how Reuther did it. He was busy passing out leaflets and making speeches at street corners. Such activity did not satisfy him. He wanted something more decisive and dramatic. But he had only a handful of people in the plant, and he could not get in himself, having been blacklisted as a notorious organizer. What the workers were protesting about most was not wages but the speed-up. Reuther had an idea. He was helpless unless he could contrive to get inside. He suggested that a girl on the day shift, in department 49, a brake-shoe line, should faint at the exact moment when the pace was fiercest. If the superintendent was duly deceived by this artifice he would pull a switch and stop the assembly line. Then there would be a scramble and the workers would quit and demand that Reuther, their leader, be called in.

The scheme worked to perfection. The girl “fainted” on schedule. Reuther was waiting at the end of a telephone. After much commotion the dialogue with the personnel director of the company went something like this:

Director: “Workers in 49 won’t work. They say to call you up.”

Reuther: “What do you want me to do?”

Director: “Put ’em back to work.”

Reuther: “How can I? Will they listen?”

Director: “They listen to you on street corners.”

Reuther: “I can’t talk to ’em from here. Will you let me in?”

The company obligingly sent a car for him and by the time he arrived the strike had wild-fired, with several thousand workers milling around; Reuther climbed on a pile of boxes, and started to make a speech. The personnel director grabbed him by the coat, yelling, “What’s going on here? You said you’d put ’em back to work!” Reuther’s single-line reply has become a classic in Detroit folklore: “I can’t put ’em back to work,” he shouted, “until I get ’em organized!”

The rest of the story I have no space for, though it is full of punch and color. Reuther made a deal for a meeting between company and workers the next morning, and, as the night shift arrived, managed to harangue its members too. By morning, 2,000 men and women were organized. Then the negotiations failed. Reuther ordered his members (a) to stick by their machines, and (b) not to work at them. This, the most notable of the early sit-downs, lasted ten days, whereupon the company gave in.

Reuther strategy had a good deal to do with the great GM strike that followed in January, 1937. One incident is still recalled as “Reuther’s feint.” The key plant at Chevrolet was no. 4, which makes the actual motors. This became Reuther’s object of attack. But he carefully contrived that everybody should think that he was going after no. 9, a bearing plant, not no. 4. Such stratagems were forced on him because he was not at all sure of his own men. Of key men in the Chevrolet local, he trusted only a few; some others might be stool pigeons. The upshot was that, by feinting at plant no. 9, he not only managed to win no. 4, but to find out who his traitors were. They tipped the guards off to protect no. 9, whereupon Reuther and his loyal cohorts promptly made for no. 4, half a mile away, which was denuded of protection. By the time the police got back, Reuther and his group were safe inside. They held out till the end of the forty-four day strike. This strike, which was national in scope and which was not predominantly fought on the issue of wages but on the right to unionize, turned the balance for the whole industry. The UAW was really “in” from this time on.

Another well-known Reuther accomplishment was the “strategy” strike in 1939, during the interval when GM was tooling for the next year’s production. Reuther persuaded his colleagues that it was at this exact time that the industry was most vulnerable, and that by drawing out a few key men, tool and die makers, he could tie up the whole GM structure. He did so, and General Motors capitulated after an interval.

In these days violence was plentiful. Things have moved so fast that it is almost impossible to realize that, until the Flint strike, the great companies did not even answer letters from unions. Labor “negotiations” were matters for plug-uglies. Think by contrast of the great 1945–46 strike which Reuther also led against General Motors. Not a single person was hurt in a tie-up that lasted 113 days. There was not one bloody nose.

An attempt to beat up and possibly kill Reuther was made in 1938. Walter, Victor, and a group of friends were quietly celebrating a birthday in the family. Somebody ordered chop suey over the telephone. Half an hour later came a knock on the apartment door. Victor opened it, thinking the food had arrived. But two sluggers pushed their way in. One snapped, “We want Walter Reuther,” and the other pointed out, “There’s the————in the corner. We’re taking you for your last ride tonight.” The sluggers, armed with a blackjack and gun, herded family and friends against the wall, and then appeared to lose their nerve. Remarks came like “We can’t get him out of the room with all these people here,” “Shoot him here,” “Not before all these witnesses,” and “Well, kill him with the blackjack.” Reuther grabbed the blackjack from one of the thugs, and a struggle started. He was being beaten when a UAW man jumped out of the second-story window, and called the police. The sluggers ran. It took an hour and a half before the police came.

This episode was thoroughly aired in court subsequently. The two thugs were arrested and identified, and Reuther, who had not been badly hurt, got a telephone call from an anonymous informant, describing who had hired them, for what price, and why. After fierce commotions, the pair agreed to plead guilty, provided that the charge was made something less than assault with intent to kill, which carries a twenty-year sentence in Michigan. Reuther refused to reduce the charge. When the case came to trial the two men were acquitted. Some months after this, one of the sluggers called Victor on the telephone. He said that he hoped the Reuther brothers had no hard feelings, that he was simply carrying out a routine assignment, and he wanted to make amends by asking them out to dinner.

For the last half dozen years the outline of Reuther’s career is well known. In 1940 the “Reuther plan,” a project for the conversion of empty automobile plants to aircraft production, aroused national attention. It is an interesting fact that, when Charles E. Wilson, president of General Electric,¹⁴ was running the War Production Board, he wanted Walter Reuther as vice chairman. Meantime his philosophy has solidified. Expressed in a sentence, it is to the effect that industrial and economic democracy must operate unhampered in the United States, if political democracy is to survive.

General Motors: First Glimpse

The business of the United States, Mr. Coolidge said once, is business; above all, this is the country of the giant corporation. General Motors is, in the words of the Federal Trade Commission, “the world’s most complicated and most profitable manufacturing enterprise.” Its monumental office building is the central citadel of Detroit,¹⁵ and it carries the ball for the entire industry, as it were. No matter how idiosyncratically important Ford may be, GM is much more important in setting the tone for the business as a whole. Ford is big, but General Motors is twice as big.

It would be inaccurate, however, to think of Motors as a peculiarly Detroit phenomenon, or of Detroit as predominantly a GM town. The capital of General Motors is New York. Of its stock, between a fifth and a quarter—representing something like 600 million dollars at today’s prices—is held by the Du Ponts of Delaware. It has 102 plants all over the nation, and its biggest money-maker, Chevrolet, lives in Flint, not Detroit. Flint is also the principal site of Fisher Bodies. General Motors has always believed in autonomy within autonomy; Buick and Cadillac and their kin, up to a certain level, make their own decisions. Outside the office building, probably not more than 25,000 out of General Motors’ 250,000 employees and workers live in Detroit at all.

I heard a labor man say admiringly once that “GM is the most brilliantly operated company in the world.” Automobile men laugh with scorn when you compare it to U. S. Steel. Steel, they say, started out as a virtual monopoly, and today holds only about a third of American steel production; General Motors started from nothing, and today approximately 45.6 per cent of all automobile business in the country is in its hands. Thirty-five per cent of all reconversion in America was a GM job, and its 1945 balance sheet shows assets of more than two billion dollars. Motors has an invested capital of $1,440,000,000, “a sum greater than the combined bonded debt of New York, California, and Illinois.”¹⁶ In 1941, the last “normal” year, its net sales were $2,437,000,000 which amounted to about 7 per cent of all American manufacturing sales. From 1936 to 1944 inclusive, it earned an average of 16.3 per cent on its invested capital, to the benefit of some 426,000 stockholders; for the years 1942–44, its average net profit was $161,000,000. Some earlier comparative figures are:

Name of Corporation	Average Profits, 11 Years
General Motors Corporation	$173,236,252
American Telephone & Telegraph Co.	150,524,232
Standard Oil Co. (New Jersey)	86,811,276
United States Steel Corporation	48,586,563
American Tobacco Co.	29,395,625
International Harvester Co.	26,668,811
Chrysler Corporation	24,213,767
Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co.	8,144,037

The automobile business is, as is well known, not only the most competitive but the most lucrative in the country. Calculations by the Securities Exchange Commission covering the total profit per $100 of invested capital in a group of industries, are as follows: Automobiles, 25.54; Office Machinery, 19.54; Agricultural Machinery, 16.93; Cigarettes, 16.63; Chemicals and Fertilizer, 15.95; Mail Order Houses, 15.17; Containers and Closures, 13.06; Oil Refiners, 10.67; Motion Pictures, 10.63; Sugar Beet Refiners, 10.60; Steel Products, 7.53; Tires and Rubber Products, 7.18; Department Stores, 6.37; Cement, 5.96; Meat Packers, 4.90.

In 1944 the Treasury’s list of top money-makers in the country put Charles E. Wilson of GM fifth, with a salary plus bonuses of $362,954. Two other Motors executives were in the first ten, Ormond E. Hunt ($287,745), and Albert Bradley ($276,018); five more, including Charles F. Kettering, were among the first twenty-five, all having received more than $200,000 in the year.¹⁷ One might mention that Walter Reuther’s salary, as president of UAW, is $9,000. Also the GM men suffered sharp reductions in 1944 as against 1943. Wilson’s income in 1943, when he was the second highest paid man in the country, was $459,041; only Louis B. Mayer exceeded him. An auxiliary point is that the salaries at their regular jobs of the three distinguished men who comprised Mr. Truman’s fact-finding commission in the General Motors strike, and who in effect determined the course of automobile wages for the immediate future, probably do not run to more than $10,000 each. The three were Milton Eisenhower, president of the Kansas State College, Lloyd K. Garrison, former dean of the University of Wisconsin law school, and Judge Stacy of the North Carolina Supreme Court.

Even more than Ford, General Motors has been an opulent pool for various fantastic careers and fortunes. De Tocqueville, in one of his prophetic passages, mentions “how an aristocracy may be created by manufactures.” Kettering, perhaps the greatest of all GM men, the man who invented the self-starter and much else, started life as a cash register mechanic. William C. Durant, whose history runs in and out of Motors like that of an erratic and often victorious racehorse, was a grocer’s clerk. The father of the seven Fisher brothers operated a village livery. K. T. Keller, the present boss of Chrysler, was a GM man for years. Walter Chrysler himself, who was once head of production for Motors, a Kansas boy, was an engine wiper who got five cents an hour. When he left the organization he sold his interest for 18 million dollars.¹⁸

General Motors has almost four hundred and fifty thousand stockholders; these own the business, but they do not control it. It is a familiar American phenomenon that, in any very large corporation with diffused ownership, a minority group of stockholders may exert control. The average GM stockholder has 1,094 shares; a great many have much less. But Du Pont has a solid block of 10,000,000 out of the 44,986,373 shares outstanding. Seven GM officers or directors are also Du Pont directors, and 37 Motors men hold 192 interlocking directorates in other corporations. As an indication of the immensity of this network here are a few of them—J. P. Morgan, Drexel & Co., the Bankers Trust Co. of New York, the Guaranty Trust, the National Bank of Detroit, the Bank of Montreal, the Pullman Co., Imperial Chemicals Ltd., General Electric, the New York Stock Exchange, the Lawyers Trust Co., the Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank, Ethyl Gas, the Yellow Truck and Coach Co., Kennecott Copper, the Pennsylvania Railroad, Consolidated Edison of New York, Bell Telephone of Canada, United States Steel, International Nickel, and the New York Central Railroad.

Note on Sensitiveness

One singular point is the extreme sensitiveness of most of the great American corporations. I do not mean General Motors in particular. Almost all have their tenor notes. At the least whisper that, even in the most legitimate way, they may be “running” things, they jump and quiver. One intimation about their internal life, no matter how legitimate or correct, and these monoliths shudder like aspens in the breeze. They may be fat as Japanese wrestlers, but they shy at criticism like featherweights.

Faces Without Names

There are too many names in this book. Let us have a word for people nameless. My mind rolls back through the lights and shadows of long middle western years, and I remember—

The biology teacher who was going to win a Nobel prize some day, and who drank, just a little, and who was the only happy cynic I have ever met, and who watched with icy glee the miserable shortcomings of his students, when he knew that he was not going to win a Nobel prize some day.

The young woman almost thirty, who had three children in a Wisconsin town, whose husband had been killed Christmas Eve, who was cool and crisp and who conceded absolutely nothing, but whose eyes were frightened, because she earned a living running a small airport, and the only pilot she trusted was a Negro.

The old men on piers, very old, fishing in Lake Michigan when the steamer from Mackinac came in, and talking about the war, with grave grumbling nods of the head, in thick German accents, and the restless, taut, dissatisfied schoolgirl on the upper deck, who restlessly thumbed through a book by Proust, with her chic hair tossing, and who would be off to Vassar next year, and whose father had had a much thicker German accent.

The Minnesota official, frugal and prominent in state affairs, who hitchhiked with his four growing sons through five states in order to see TVA.

The stewardess on the airline who had waited for three years to get a job on the airline, and she was twenty-two, and she had lived in eleven cities, and this was her twenty-seventh job, and she was going to hold onto it forever, that is until she got married.

The young student at the university, who had headaches every afternoon at a certain hour because of the excitement of reading new books, who talked long dreams to himself and wanted to do good for the world.

Generalizations in Drypoint

Perhaps we are far enough along now to risk brief generalizations about the United States as a whole, with particular reference to the Middle West. Three dominant problems are:

Item: How, if a period of sharp depression should come again, with widespread and damaging unemployment, to reconcile economic and political democracy—how, in other words, to maintain a democratic system if the economic machine breaks down.

Item: How to maintain military power and at the same time give it up, viz., how to use the tremendous military predominance of the United States for the furtherance of world organization and peace.

Item: How to reconcile the pleadings and pressures of special interests with the legitimate needs of the people as a whole, under a democratic political system—in other words, how to make democracy work and maintain the essential unity of the United States.

¹ One odd distinctive minor point is Ford’s attitude toward public relations in this public-relations-choked era. In Ford’s public relations department are employed exactly five men. Any comparable corporation has a staff of hundreds.

² According to Fortune, June, 1944.

³ Not many will recall that William C. Bullitt, who many years later became ambassador to Soviet Russia and France, was a member of this party.

⁴ A 1,075 page handbook, Report on the Motor Vehicle Industry, prepared by the Federal Trade Commission, is the indispensable sourCe for almost all details of this kind about the automobile industry.

⁵ Cf. Combustion on Wheels, by David L. Cohn, p. 83. Every dollar became §3,550.

⁶ See Mr. Bingay’s lively Detroit Is My Own Home Town.

⁷ One of his secretaries was once put to work going through three waste baskets full of Ford’s personal mail, some of which had been unanswered for two years. Cf. Henry Ford, by Samuel S. Marquis, D.D., p. 123.

⁸ Also he likes to give athletes like Hank Greenberg winter jobs. Harry Newman, a former Michigan All-American, is labor relations director in one of the big units at River Rouge.

⁹ According to John McCarten, American Mercury, “The Little Man in Henry Ford’s Basement,” May and June, 1940.

¹⁰ The only extended account of Bennett I have ever seen is the McCarten article cited above. Fortune, however, handled him with gingery caution in an article on the Ford heritage in June, 1944.

¹¹ New York Times, February 17, 1947.

¹² Pictures of both Reuther and Frankensteen, with bloody shirts but looking victorious, were printed in Life, September 10, 1945.

¹³ Figures from a pamphlet by Edward Levinson, The Rise of the Auto Workers, quoting statistics from the Automobile Manufacturers Association.

¹⁴ Not to be confused with the Charles E. Wilson who is president of General Motors.

¹⁵ An odd point is that the UAW headquarters are a small low building just across the street, lying as it were in GM’s shadow. It is so modest that it doesn’t even have an elevator.

¹⁶ Keith Hutchison in The Nation, December 8, 1945. Figures on average net profit are from a round table discussion by Charles E. Wilson.

¹⁷ Over-all leader in the 1944 returns was Leo McCarey, motion picture producer and director of Going My Way, whose total income was $1,038,035. Second was Charles H. Strub, founder and executive vice president of the Los Angeles Turf Club.

¹⁸ Most of these details are from Bingay, op. cit.