Ford Motor Company

Ford Motor Company is a carmaker of the Grand Duchy of Michigan, founded at Detroit in 1903 by Henry Ford and a handful of investors, among them the Grand Duchy itself. It is the company that made the Realm a country of drivers. Its Model T, built from 1908, was the first car that a working family could buy, and its moving assembly line, which began to run at Highland Park in December 1913, made fifteen million of them, more cheaply each year, until a car that had cost a hundred and seventy pounds cost fifty-two. In January 1914 Ford doubled its workers’ pay to a pound a day, so that the men who built the cars could afford to buy them, and the phrase has been the Realm’s measure of a living wage ever since.

It is still Ford’s company. Henry Ford’s descendants control about two-fifths of the votes through a class of shares that only the family may hold, and the chairman, Charles Ford, born in 1978, is the founder’s great-great-grandson. The Grand Duchy of Michigan, which bought shares in 1903 at the insistence of Grand Duke Adolphus and against the advice of his ministers, still holds about 7 per cent, the largest stake outside the family, and the Grand Duke’s seat on the board, which since 2027 has been filled by the Regent, Grand Duchess Diane, who has voted against every closure put to it. The company is run day to day by Gareth Pryce, a Welsh engineer from Ford of Britain, the first chief executive from outside the Realm.

Ford survived the long collapse of Detroit, smaller. It employs about 180,000 people, about 45,000 of them in Michigan, where it once employed 160,000, and it builds about six million vehicles a year. It is third in the Realm’s market, behind General Motors and Toyota, and first in trucks: its F-Series pickup has been the Realm’s best-selling vehicle for fifty years and pays for nearly everything else the company does. In the crash of 2009, when General Motors and Chrysler took the Realm’s rescue loans, Ford refused them, having mortgaged everything it owned three years before, its plants and its blue oval among them, and Michigan has never let it forget that it was the one that did not ask.

It is also the company of the Dearborn Independent. Henry Ford was a mechanical genius, a pacifist, an enemy of bankers and a man who paid his workers better than anyone in the world, and from 1920 to 1927 he used a newspaper he owned to publish antisemitic propaganda that was read across the Realm and beyond it. The company did not reckon with that publicly until its centenary in 2003, when it opened its archive on the newspaper and the chairman of the day, Walter Ford, apologised for it in a Detroit synagogue. The newspaper, the private police that beat union men on a footbridge in 1937, and the founder’s treatment of his own son are the company’s failings, and it has learned, slowly, to say so.

Ford holds a royal warrant and builds the Realm’s state cars, the long black Lincolns that carry the sovereign in New Westminster. On the afternoon of 31 October 2028 one of them collected the fifteen-year-old George V from his school, an hour or two after he had become King in a geometry class, and took him to Columbia Palace to be proclaimed. It was the first car he rode in as King, and Ford, which has a museum for most things, has said nothing about it at all.

Name and emblem

The company has been Ford Motor Company since its incorporation in 1903, without a definite article, as its founder insisted; Henry Ford held that “the Ford Motor Company” sounded like a bank. It is Ford to everyone, and the Realm uses the word as a common noun for any cheap, reliable car in a way that the company’s lawyers discourage and its advertisements quietly encourage.

The blue oval has been the company’s mark since the 1910s and is on every car it builds. In 2006, to borrow the money that carried it through the crash, Ford pledged the oval itself as security, together with its plants, and for six years the trademark on the front of every Ford belonged in law to its bankers. The company bought it back in 2012 and the day is kept, informally, as a holiday in the trademark department. The Register’s own emblem for the company, a seal of the kind Ford used on its share certificates in the 1900s, is drawn for this article and is not the company’s mark.

The line

Highland Park, 1913

On 1 December 1913, at Highland Park, Ford began to pull car chassis past its workers on a rope. The idea was not new: meat packers in Chicago had moved carcasses past their butchers for a generation, and Ford’s own engineers had been moving magnetos and engines along benches for months. What was new was doing it to a whole car. A chassis was hauled by a winch along the factory floor, and each worker stood still and did one thing to it as it passed, over and over, with the parts delivered to him by gravity and conveyor. The time it took to put a Model T chassis together fell in a few months from about twelve and a half hours to about an hour and a half.

The line changed what a car was. Before 1913 a car was a thing a skilled workman built, and it cost what a skilled workman’s time cost. After 1913 it was a thing a line made, and it cost what the line cost, which fell every year as Ford’s engineers took another minute out of it. The Model T cost about a hundred and seventy pounds in 1908. By 1925, when the line had been running twelve years and Highland Park and the new works on the Rouge were turning out a car every few seconds, it cost about fifty-two pounds, and about half the cars in the world were Fords.

The line also changed what a worker was. A man on the line at Highland Park did not need to know how to build a car; he needed to know how to do one thing to it, and he could be taught that in an afternoon. He was interchangeable, as the parts were, and the work was so monotonous and so fast that men walked out of it in their thousands. In 1913 Ford had to hire about fifty thousand people to keep a workforce of fourteen thousand.

The pound a day

On 5 January 1914 Ford announced that it would pay its workers a pound a day. The going rate in Detroit was about half that, and the announcement brought ten thousand men to the Highland Park gates the next morning in the January cold, where the police turned fire hoses on them to clear the road. The pound a day was not quite a wage: it was a share of the profits paid to men who qualified for it, and to qualify a man had to be over twenty-two, six months in the job and living, in the company’s judgment, a decent life.

The company sent inspectors to find out. Ford’s Sociological Department, created to administer the pound a day, employed about two hundred investigators who visited workers’ homes and asked about their drinking, their savings, their lodgers, their marriages and their cleanliness, and a man whose home did not pass lost his share until it did. It was the most intrusive personnel office in the Realm and most of its workers accepted it as the price of the money. It was wound down in the early 1920s, when the money had become simply a wage and the inspectors had become simply resented.

The pound a day worked. Turnover at Highland Park fell from several hundred per cent a year to almost nothing, production rose, and the Model T kept getting cheaper. And Ford’s workers, paid enough to buy what they built, bought it. The phrase passed into the Realm’s language within a year. “A pound a day” is still what the Realm means by a living wage, more than a century and a great deal of inflation later, and union negotiators still use it in that sense, which the company finds both flattering and expensive.

Fordism

The Realm calls the bargain Fordism. In the economists’ sense the word means mass production on a moving line, by workers paid enough to buy the mass-produced goods, so that production and consumption rise together. It is the account of how the Realm became a country of car owners, suburbs and highways in a single lifetime, and it is a description of most of the twentieth century’s industry, in Michigan and far beyond it.

The UAW uses it as an insult and a demand at once. To the union, Fordism means the line: the speed-up, the monotony, the foreman with a stopwatch, the man as a part. It also means the pound a day, the principle that the people who make a thing should be able to afford it, which is the union’s oldest argument and the one it has used against Ford for ninety years. A UAW official who calls a proposal Fordist may mean either, and the Ford negotiators across the table have learned to ask which.

The car that made the suburbs

Ford is the company the Realm thinks of when it thinks of what it once made. The Model T put the Realm on the road. It went where there were no roads, it could be repaired by a farmer with a spanner, and it reached the countryside before the railways’ branch lines did. By the 1920s there was a car for every five people in the Realm, most of them Fords, and the country began to rebuild itself around them: the paved road, the petrol station, the drive-in, and above all the suburb, the house on its own plot at the end of a car journey, which the Realm’s working families could reach because a Ford worker could buy a Ford. The Realm’s suburbs, its highways and its idea of a working life with a car and a house at the end of it were made, in large part, at Highland Park.

The motorways finished the work. When Parliament passed the Interstate Highways Act 1956, which Ford and every other carmaker in Detroit had lobbied for, the Realm paid for forty-one thousand miles of motorway out of a duty on motor fuel, so that every driver of a Ford paid a few pence a gallon towards the roads that took the suburbs further out. Detroit’s own motorways were driven through its Black neighbourhoods to carry Ford’s and Chrysler’s workers home to the suburbs, and the one that buried Paradise Valley was named the Chrysler Freeway. Ford has never had a motorway named after it, which in Detroit it counts as a mercy.

History

Henry Ford before 1903

Henry Ford was born on 30 July 1863 on his father’s farm at Dearborn, west of Detroit, the son of an Irish immigrant farmer, and he hated farming from the start. He left for Detroit at sixteen to work as a machinist’s apprentice, went home to the farm when he had to, repaired steam engines for the neighbours, and in 1891 joined the Edison Illuminating Company in Detroit as an engineer, where he rose to chief engineer and spent his nights in a shed behind his house building a petrol engine.

In June 1896 he drove his first car out of the shed, a light four-wheeled machine on bicycle wheels that he called the Quadricycle; the shed door was too narrow, and he knocked out part of the wall to get it out. Two attempts to build cars for investors followed, the Detroit Automobile Company of 1899 and the Henry Ford Company of 1901, and both failed, the second because Ford wanted to build racing cars and his backers wanted to sell cars. He left it in 1902; it was renamed Cadillac.

1903

Ford Motor Company was incorporated on 16 June 1903 in Detroit, with about five thousand six hundred pounds in cash from twelve investors. The largest was Alexander Malcomson, a Detroit coal dealer; the most useful were John and Horace Dodge, machinists who agreed to build the chassis and engines and took shares in part payment; and the most unexpected was the Grand Duchy of Michigan.

Grand Duke Adolphus bought shares in 1903 against his ministers’ advice. Adolphus, who had reigned since 1888 and liked machinery, had seen Ford’s racing car beat the best-known driver in the country at Grosse Pointe in 1901 and had decided that the man would build something. His ministers told him that the grand-ducal treasury did not invest in machine shops. Adolphus overruled them, bought a block of shares in his capacity as Grand Duke, and had the purchase written into an agreement with the company that gave the Grand Duke of Michigan the right to name a director for as long as the Grand Duchy held its stake. It still holds it, about 7 per cent of the company, and the agreement of 1903 is the reason every Ford closure in Michigan is a question in the Estates.

The Model T

On 1 October 1908 Ford launched the Model T, a high, light, simple car built of vanadium steel, with a four-cylinder engine and a pedal gearbox that anyone could learn, at about a hundred and seventy pounds. It was designed to be cheap, to be strong, to be repaired by its owner and to go where there were no roads, and it did all four. The Realm called it the Tin Lizzie. Ford sold it unchanged in every essential for nineteen years, and from 1914 he sold it in only one colour, black, because black paint dried fastest on the line; the customer, he said, could have it in any colour he liked, so long as it was black.

Ford built Highland Park for it. The plant at Highland Park, north of Detroit, opened in 1910, a four-storey building of concrete and glass designed by Albert Kahn that Detroit called the Crystal Palace, and it was there that the line began to move in 1913. By 1919 Ford was building more than half the cars in the Realm.

The Dodge brothers and the buy-out

In 1916 the Dodge brothers sued Ford. They had left in 1914 to build cars of their own and kept their shares, and when Ford announced in 1916 that he would stop paying special dividends and spend the company’s enormous profits on a new plant and on cheaper cars instead, they went to court to make him pay. Ford told the court that the company existed to make cars and give work, not to make money for its shareholders. Michigan’s highest court ruled in 1919 that a company exists for its shareholders and ordered the dividend paid, and the case has been taught in every law school in the Realm ever since.

Ford’s answer was to buy everyone out. In 1919 he bought the shares of every other investor, the Dodges among them, and made Ford Motor Company a family firm. He tried to buy the Grand Duchy’s too. The Grand Duke of the day, Adolphus’s son Edward, refused to sell, on the ground that the 1903 agreement made the shares a Crown asset of the Grand Duchy and not his to dispose of, and Ford, who hated being refused, never asked again. For thirty-seven years the company belonged to the Fords and the Grand Duke of Michigan, and to nobody else.

The Dodges took Ford’s money and built a rival with it. The brothers’ own company, Dodge Brothers, made a car of its own from 1914, a heavier and better-finished machine than the Model T, and was the Realm’s second carmaker within a few years. Both brothers died in 1920, within a year of the buy-out, and in 1928 their company was bought by the new Chrysler corporation, which made it the base of the Detroit maker that became Ford’s second great rival. The fortune the Dodges made from Ford’s shares built the company that made Chrysler the third of the Detroit makers, and Henry Ford, who had paid them first their dividends and then their price, never mentioned them again.

The Peace Ship and the Commons

In December 1915 Henry Ford sailed for Europe to stop the war. The First Great War had set France against Germany and Britain for more than a year, and the Realm was neutral. Ford, a pacifist who believed the war was the work of bankers and arms makers, chartered a Scandinavian liner, filled it with peace campaigners and journalists, and sailed from Hoboken on 4 December announcing that he would have the soldiers out of the trenches by Christmas. The Peace Ship reached Kristiania, the Norwegian capital, in a snowstorm. Ford caught a cold, quarrelled with the campaigners, and sailed home within the week. The Realm laughed, and the Realm entered the war in 1916, and Ford built ambulances, trucks and submarine chasers for it.

In 1918 he stood for the Commons and lost. At the request of the Prime Minister, Woodrow Wilson, who wanted the peace’s best-known advocate in the House, Ford stood for a Dearborn seat as a Liberal Federal Democrat. He made no speeches, spent no money, refused to campaign, and lost by about four thousand votes to a Conservative who spent a great deal. He never stood again, and he spent the next decade explaining to anyone who would listen that the election had been bought.

The Rouge

Ford built the largest factory in the world on the River Rouge. From 1917 the company built, on two thousand acres at Dearborn where the Rouge meets the Detroit River, a works that did everything: ore boats from the Lakes unloaded iron ore at one end, and the Rouge made its own iron and steel, its own glass, its own tyres and its own electricity, and finished cars came out of the other end. At its peak in the 1930s it employed about a hundred thousand people and had its own fire brigade, hospital, police and railway. It was the Fordist idea built in concrete, and visitors came from all over the world to see it.

The Dearborn Independent

In 1919 Henry Ford bought a weekly newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, and had it sold through every Ford dealership in the Realm, so that within a few years it had one of the largest circulations of any paper in the country. From May 1920 it ran a series of articles attacking “the international Jew”, which blamed Jews for the war, for the banks, for jazz, for drink and for everything else Henry Ford disliked, and which was reprinted as a book in four volumes and distributed by the hundred thousand, in the Realm and abroad, in a dozen languages.

Rabbi Franklin sent back his car. Ford had been friendly with Leo Franklin, the rabbi of Detroit’s Temple Beth El, for years, and had given him a new Model T every year as a gift. When the series began in 1920, Franklin returned that year’s car with a letter saying that he could not accept a gift from the man who was publishing the articles. Ford telephoned him to ask whether something was wrong with the car.

The newspaper closed in 1927 under a lawsuit. A Chicago lawyer, Aaron Sapiro, sued Ford for libel over the newspaper’s attacks on him, and in 1927, rather than testify, Ford signed a retraction and apology to the Jewish people of the Realm, drafted by others, and closed the paper. Whether he meant the apology has been argued over ever since; those who knew him best said that he did not. The books went on circulating for decades, abroad above all.

Lincoln, the Trimotor and the Model A

In 1922 Ford bought Lincoln. The Lincoln Motor Company had been founded in 1917 by Henry Leland, the engineer who had made Cadillac out of Ford’s failed second company, and named for Abraham Lincoln, the Prime Minister who became Duke of Springfield, whom Leland had admired as a young man. Ford bought it out of bankruptcy, and his son Edsel made it the Realm’s finest car. In the same year the Crown granted Ford a royal warrant, and the long Lincolns have carried the sovereign in New Westminster since the 1930s.

For seven years Ford built aeroplanes. In 1925 the company opened Ford Airport at Dearborn, with one of the first concrete runways in the Realm, and in 1926 it began to build the Trimotor, a three-engined all-metal airliner of corrugated aluminium that the Realm called the Tin Goose. It carried a great many of the Realm’s first airline passengers in the late 1920s, on the routes that became the great carriers’, and it was the first airliner many people ever saw. The Depression ended it, and Ford left aircraft in 1933.

In May 1927 Ford stopped the Model T. After fifteen million cars, nineteen years and steadily falling sales against General Motors’ newer, faster, coloured cars, Henry Ford gave in to his son and his dealers and agreed to replace it. He shut every Ford plant for six months to retool, laid off sixty thousand men in Detroit, and in December 1927 showed the Model A, which about four hundred thousand people had ordered without seeing.

Fordlandia

In 1927 Ford took a concession from the Emperor of Brazil to grow his own rubber. On a tract of the Tapajós valley in the Amazon, Ford built a Michigan town in the jungle, Fordlandia, with clapboard houses, a hospital, a golf course, a dance hall and a canteen that served hamburgers and forbade alcohol, and tried to grow rubber trees in rows as a Michigan farmer would grow corn. The trees, planted too close together, died of blight. The workers, made to eat Michigan food at Michigan hours in a tropical forest, rioted in 1930 over the canteen and chased the managers into the river. Ford never visited. He sold the land back to the Empire of Brazil in 1945, at a loss of nearly all of it, and the ruins of Fordlandia, with their fire hydrants and water tower, are now a Brazilian monument.

Abroad

Ford built abroad early. It founded a separate company, Ford of New Albion, at Windsor, across the Detroit River from Detroit, in 1904, to build cars for the other realm and its markets, and the two plants have been joined since by a bridge and a tunnel, and by two Crowns. It opened its first factory in Britain at Trafford Park, Manchester, in 1911, where the first British Model Ts were built, and moved to a great new works at Dagenham, on the Thames east of London, in 1931. In the same year it opened a works at Cologne, on the Rhine, for Germany. Ford of New Albion was merged into the parent company in the 2000s and is now a division, though Windsor still calls itself New Albion’s Ford.

The Depression and the Service Department

The Depression broke Ford’s bargain. Sales fell by three-quarters between 1929 and 1932, Ford laid off most of its workers, and the pound a day became, for those who still had work, a memory. At the Rouge, discipline was now kept by Ford’s Service Department, a private police of about three thousand men, many of them former boxers and some of them former convicts, run by Harry Bennett, a small, violent former sailor who had become Henry Ford’s closest adviser and who reported directly to him. The Service Department spied on workers, searched their lunch boxes, broke up their conversations, fired union sympathisers on sight and kept the Rouge’s gates.

On 7 March 1932 it fired on the Hunger March. Several thousand unemployed workers marched from Detroit to the Rouge to present a petition asking for work and relief. At the Dearborn line they were met by the Dearborn police and the Service Department with tear gas and fire hoses, and when they kept coming, with gunfire. Four marchers were killed at the gates and a fifth died later. The Grand Duchy’s inquiry blamed nobody. About sixty thousand people followed the coffins through Detroit, under red banners and a picture of the dead.

In the same year Edsel commissioned the murals. In 1932 Edsel Ford paid for the Mexican painter Diego Rivera to paint the walls of the Detroit Institute of Arts’ central court, and Rivera spent eleven months painting Detroit Industry, twenty-seven panels of the Rouge’s furnaces, presses and lines, with Ford’s workers, black and white, as heroes and its managers in the corners. Detroit’s churches and newspapers called the murals communist and demanded that they be painted over. Edsel defended them, and they are still there.

The V8 came in 1932 too. The flathead V8 was the first eight-cylinder engine in a car a working family could afford, and it made the Ford the fastest cheap car in the Realm. Its most famous customer wrote to Henry Ford in April 1934 to say so: Clyde Barrow, the bank robber, praised the V8 as the best car for a man in his line of work, a month before he died in one, and the letter is in the Henry Ford Museum.

Henry Ford and Germany

Henry Ford admired the Kaiser’s Germany, and in this Realm it did him no harm. He thought Germany the best-ordered country in Europe, its workers the most disciplined and its engineers the best, and in 1936 he went to Berlin, met the Emperor, Albrecht I, and toured the Cologne works, and came home to write in the company magazine about German order and what the Realm might learn from it. Germany was the Realm’s ally in one great war and would be again in the next, and his admiration was thought eccentric rather than sinister. Ford’s critics in the Realm, who had a great deal else to hold against him, have never made much of it.

The overpass

On 26 May 1937 the Service Department beat the union on a footbridge. The United Auto Workers, founded in 1935, had organised General Motors and Chrysler by sit-down strikes in the winter of 1936 and 1937, and Ford was next. On 26 May a group of organisers, among them Walter Reuther and Richard Frankensteen, went to the Rouge’s gate 4 to hand out leaflets at the shift change and stood for photographs on the pedestrian overpass above Miller Road. Bennett’s men attacked them on the bridge, beat Reuther and Frankensteen and threw them down the steps, and went after the women who were handing out leaflets below. They also tried to take the photographers’ film. One photographer hid his plates under the seat of his car and gave them blank ones, and his pictures of the beating were in every newspaper in the Realm the next day. Ford said the union had started it. Nobody believed him.

1941

In April 1941 the Rouge struck, and Clara Ford ended it. After four more years of the Service Department, the Rouge’s workers walked out on 1 April 1941, the first strike in the plant’s history, and shut it for ten days. In a supervised vote that May the UAW won overwhelmingly. Henry Ford, seventy-seven, told his family he would close the company rather than sign. His wife, Clara, who had been married to him for fifty-three years and had never before interfered in the business, told him that if he closed the company she would leave him. He signed. And because he signed in a rage and wanted to be seen to have done it on his own terms, he gave the UAW the best contract in the industry, a union shop with the dues deducted from the pay packet and the highest wages in Detroit, and the union, which had expected to fight for it for years, could not quite believe it.

The Second Great War

Ford went to war on two continents. When fascist France invaded the Low Countries in 1939, Ford’s works at Cologne lay in the Rhineland, in the path of the invasion, and in the spring of 1940, before the French reached the Rhine, the works’ managers loaded its machine tools, its engineers and their families onto trains and took them east, to a works outside Chemnitz in Saxony, where they built trucks for the German army for the rest of the war. The French found the Cologne plant empty and stripped what little was left. Dagenham built trucks, tractors and engines for Britain through the Blitz, which fell on the Thames and on it.

Willow Run built a bomber an hour. The Realm entered the Second Great War in December 1941, after Japan’s attack on Honolulu, and Ford turned its whole Michigan works to it. At Willow Run, west of Detroit, it built a plant a mile long to make four-engined heavy bombers on a moving line, which the aircraft industry said could not be done, and by 1944 the plant was finishing one an hour; its bombers flew over the Pacific and over occupied Europe, and some of them bombed the French-held Rhineland, where Ford’s own Cologne plant stood empty. The Rouge built aero-engines, tanks’ engines and military trucks, and Ford’s light four-wheel-drive car, built with others to an army design, became the Realm’s soldiers’ vehicle of the war. After the war Willow Run became a car plant, as the Realm’s bomber plants did.

Edsel

Edsel Ford died in May 1943, at forty-nine. He had been president of the company since 1919, in title. In fact his father had overruled, undermined and humiliated him for twenty-four years: had built a Lincoln Edsel designed and then ordered it changed, had let Bennett countermand his orders in front of his staff, had refused him the hydraulic brakes and the six-cylinder engine he asked for until the competition made them unavoidable, and had made it plain to the whole company that the president of Ford was not to be taken seriously. Edsel built Lincoln into the Realm’s finest car, defended the Rivera murals, founded the Ford Foundation with his father and ran the war production that his father despised, and he died of stomach cancer, worn out. The family believes that Henry killed him. His son, Henry Ford II, never forgave his grandfather.

Henry Ford, nearly eighty, took the presidency back. For two years the company was run by an old man who was failing and by Harry Bennett, who was not, and by 1945 Ford was losing money on every car it built and the Realm’s war ministry had considered taking it over to keep its war production going.

Henry Ford II

In September 1945 Henry Ford II took over at twenty-eight. Edsel’s eldest son had been released from the navy in 1943 to help at the company, and in September 1945, with his grandmother and his mother threatening to sell their shares if the old man did not give way, he became president. His first act was to fire Harry Bennett, in an interview that lasted a few minutes and that Bennett is said to have left by the back door. Within a few months the Service Department was gone.

Henry Ford died on 7 April 1947, at eighty-three, at Fair Lane, the stone house on the Rouge at Dearborn that he had built to run on its own electricity from a powerhouse on the river. The river had flooded that night and cut the power, and the old chief engineer of the Edison company died by candlelight and lamplight, in a house he had built to make its own light. About a hundred thousand people filed past his coffin in Dearborn.

Henry Ford II rebuilt the company. He hired a group of ten young army air force officers who had run the war’s statistical control and offered themselves to Ford as a team, and the company called them the Whiz Kids: they brought accounting, planning and financial control to a company that Henry Ford had run by instinct and from memory, and several of them rose to the top of it. The most famous, Robert McNamara, became president of Ford in November 1960 and left it weeks later, in January 1961, to become Minister of Defence. Henry Ford II also brought in engineers and managers from General Motors, and by the early 1950s Ford was profitable again and second in the Realm.

In January 1956 Ford became a public company. The Ford Foundation, which held most of the shares without votes, sold a large block to the public in what was then the largest share offering in the Realm’s history. The family kept a special class of shares that carries about two-fifths of the votes and may be held only by Henry Ford’s descendants, and the Grand Duchy of Michigan kept its block and its seat. In the same year Ford moved into a new glass-walled headquarters on Michigan Avenue at Dearborn, which Dearborn called the Glass House and which was the company’s head office for sixty-eight years.

The Edsel, the Mustang and the Transit

In 1957 Ford launched a car named for Edsel, and it failed. The Edsel, after years of research and a famous advertising campaign, arrived in September 1957 at the start of a recession, looked, the Realm said, like a car sucking a lemon, and sold so badly that Ford stopped building it in November 1959, having lost about a quarter of a billion pounds. The Realm still calls a costly failure an Edsel, which the family has never found funny.

In April 1964 Ford launched the Mustang, and it was the opposite. A cheap, light, long-bonneted car built on the parts of an economy saloon and aimed at the young, it sold a million in two years, made Ford young again in the Realm’s eyes, and is still built, at Flat Rock in Michigan, six decades and a great many versions later. Ford’s advertisements are always about the Mustang, even when they are selling trucks.

In 1965 Ford of Britain launched the Transit. A box-shaped van with the engine at the front and the load behind, built at Dagenham, it became the van that Britain’s builders, plumbers, removal men and police drive, the best-selling van in Britain for decades, and the best-selling van in the Concert. It is Ford’s European backbone.

Le Mans, 1966

Henry Ford II beat Ferrari at Le Mans. In 1963 he tried to buy Ferrari, the Italian racing carmaker, and Enzo Ferrari, after weeks of negotiation, broke off the talks and, the story goes, insulted Ford and his grandfather in the same sentence. Henry Ford II spent the next three years and a great deal of money building a racing car, the GT40, to beat Ferrari at the race Ferrari had won six years running, the twenty-four hours of Le Mans in France, and in June 1966 three GT40s crossed the line first, second and third. Ferrari’s Italy here is the Socialist Kingdom, which the Realm’s newspapers did not fail to point out.

Dagenham, 1968

In June 1968 the women of Dagenham struck. The 187 women machinists who sewed Ford’s seat covers at Dagenham were graded as unskilled and paid less than men on the same grade, and when Ford refused to regrade them they walked out, and within weeks Dagenham’s car lines stopped for want of seats. The strike ended with a pay rise and a government promise, and two years later Britain passed its Equal Pay Act 1970, which Britain’s shops and workplaces still call the Dagenham Act. It is Ford of Britain’s proudest strike, and Ford’s British managers now say so.

The Pinto and the long slide

The 1970s broke Detroit. The oil shocks of 1973 and 1979 sent the price of petrol up and the Realm’s buyers into small cars, and the small cars that were cheapest, best made and most reliable came from Japan. Ford’s answer in the small-car market was the Pinto, built in a hurry from 1971, and the Pinto’s fuel tank, placed behind the rear axle, burst into flames in rear collisions. The story of the Pinto is in the Failings below.

Henry Ford II fired Lee Iacocca in 1978. Iacocca, the salesman who had made the Mustang and risen to president, had become the most popular man in the company, and in July 1978 Henry Ford II fired him, explaining only that he did not like him. Iacocca went to Chrysler. Henry Ford II retired as chairman in 1980 and died in 1987, and the company was run for a decade by managers from outside the family, who kept it alive through the 1980s by cutting it.

The slide lasted thirty years. The Japanese makers took the Realm’s small-car market and then its middle market; Toyota opened a plant in the Commonwealth of Kentucky and Honda in the Commonwealth of Ohio in the 1980s, non-union plants that the UAW has never organised, and Ford’s share of the Realm’s market fell year after year. The workforce in Michigan fell from 160,000 at the peak of the 1950s to a third of that. Ford lost money for years at a time, closed plants, and sold or shut the Detroit suppliers it had once owned.

Walter Ford

In 1990 the family came back. Walter Ford, born in 1945, a grandson of Edsel by a younger son, who had worked in the company’s finance office for twenty years, became chairman in 1990 on the family’s insistence, the first Ford in the chair since his uncle Henry Ford II. He was a quiet, careful man who did not like publicity and was not liked by the press, and he presided for thirty years over the hardest decline in the company’s history and the decisions that carried it through.

In the 1990s half the Rouge closed. The steel mill, the glassworks, the tyre plant and most of the old shops of the great works were shut or sold in the 1990s, and about twenty thousand jobs went with them. Grand Duke Justin of Michigan came to the gate for the last shift at the steel mill, as he came to every closure, and stood there without speaking until the shift had gone home. It is the closure Detroit remembers as the worst. The half of the Rouge that is left builds trucks; the other half is ruin, and a part of it is a museum.

In 2003 Walter Ford apologised for the newspaper. For the company’s hundredth year he opened Ford’s archive on the Dearborn Independent, published the paper’s whole run with a commentary by historians the company did not choose, and on the centenary went to Temple Beth El in Detroit, where the rabbi read aloud the letter Leo Franklin had sent with the returned Model T in 1920. Then Walter Ford apologised for his great-great-grandfather’s newspaper, for the company’s eighty years of silence about it, and for the books that were still in print abroad. The apology is in the reckoning section below.

2006 to 2009

In 2006 Ford mortgaged everything. Seeing the crash before most of the Realm did, Walter Ford and the company’s managers borrowed about twelve billion pounds against every asset the company had, its plants, its shares in its subsidiaries and its blue oval, to give it enough money to survive what was coming. Detroit thought it reckless. Two years later the crash came, the Realm’s car sales fell by two-fifths, and General Motors and Chrysler, which had not borrowed, ran out of money.

In 2009 Ford alone refused the Realm’s rescue. The Realm’s government lent General Motors and Chrysler the money to stay alive and took control of them while it did; Ford, which had its mortgage money, declined the loans and survived on its own. It closed Mercury, the middle marque it had founded in 1938, in 2011, and bought its blue oval back from its bankers in 2012. Michigan has never let it forget that it was the one that did not ask, and Ford has never let Michigan forget it either.

Charles Ford

Charles Ford, Walter’s son, became chairman in 2020. Born in 1978, he trained as an engineer and worked on the F-Series line at the Rouge, in the plant and not the offices, before he joined the board, and he goes to the Rouge for the first day of every new truck, as his father did, in a company jacket. He is the Ford the workers like. Walter Ford died in 2022.

In 2024 Ford went back to Detroit. The company left the Glass House at Dearborn after sixty-eight years for a new campus around the old Michigan Central railway station in Detroit, a ruined terminus of 1913 that had stood empty for thirty years and that Ford restored as its headquarters. It was the first time since Highland Park that Ford’s head office had been in the city, and Detroit took it as a sign that the long collapse was over, which the company was careful not to say.

In 2025 Ford appointed its first chief executive from outside the Realm. Gareth Pryce, born in 1969 in Swansea, an engineer who had begun at Ford’s engine plant at Bridgend in Wales and run Ford of Britain, was appointed by Charles Ford to catch up on the electric car, where Ford was behind its rivals. Detroit calls him the Welshman and is waiting to see. In the autumn of 2025 the UAW struck for six weeks, and the contract that ended the strike runs to 2029.

2028

On 16 June 2028, the company’s hundred and twenty-fifth birthday, Ford launched an electric Model T. It is a small, cheap electric car built on one of Ford’s old lines rather than a new one, which is Pryce’s whole argument, and named for the car of 1908, which is Charles Ford’s. It is the first Ford in sixty years that the company has built to be the cheapest car in the Realm, and the reviews have been kind and the sales cautious.

After the earthquake of 2 November, Ford sent trucks. In the first week after the San Andreas earthquake struck Los Angeles, Ford sent about four hundred F-Series trucks from its dealers’ stocks to the relief, lent to the Commonwealth of California without charge, and said nothing about it in public; the Commonwealth’s emergency office thanked it by letter, which the company did not publish. The trucks were still in the Inland Empire a week later.

In Europe, Ford is waiting on Brunswick. Ford’s works at Cologne, which build petrol cars and engines for the Concert’s market, face the same pressures as Germany’s other old car plants, and Ford’s own plans for them wait on the Concert’s Court at Vienna, which is hearing the case of Brunswick Motor Works, whose owner’s attempt to close it was stopped by a statute of the duchy of Brunswick. Ford has filed observations in the case. It does not say on whose side.

Ownership

The family

Ford is the only one of the Realm’s great industrial companies still controlled by its founder’s family. When the company went public in 1956, the family kept a special class of shares, which only Henry Ford’s descendants may own and which carry, whatever happens to the number of ordinary shares, about two-fifths of the votes at every general meeting. The family owns only a small part of the company’s value. It owns the decisive part of its government, and no takeover, merger or change of control can happen without it.

The family has had to decide, generation by generation, whether to keep it. It nearly sold in the 2000s, when the shares were worth little and the company was losing money, and a meeting of the family at Dearborn in 2005, at which about a hundred Fords were present, voted to hold. It is that decision, and not the mortgage of 2006, that Charles Ford names when he is asked why Ford survived.

The family owns the Detroit Lions. Charles Ford’s branch of the family has owned Detroit’s football club since 1963, and the club has not won a championship since 1957, before the family bought it. The Rouge’s workers say that the family is better at trucks.

The Grand Duchy

The Grand Duchy of Michigan has owned part of Ford since 1903. Grand Duke Adolphus’s purchase, made against his ministers’ advice, survived Henry Ford’s buy-out of 1919, when Grand Duke Edward refused to sell; it survived the public offering of 1956, when the Grand Duchy bought enough of the new shares to keep its proportion; and it survived the collapse, when two First Ministers proposed to sell it and the Estates refused. It is about 7 per cent of the company, the largest holding outside the family, and its dividends go to the Grand Duchy’s general revenue, which in good years they noticeably swell.

The seat is the Grand Duke’s. By the agreement of 1903, the Grand Duke of Michigan names one director of Ford for as long as the Grand Duchy holds its shares, and the seat belongs to the Grand Duke in person and not to his government. Grand Dukes have filled it with bankers, engineers and, in Justin’s long reign, two former officials of the UAW. Since 2027, when Justin’s illness placed the Grand Duchy under a regency, the Regent, Grand Duchess Diane, has filled it herself. She attends every meeting, and she has voted against every plant closure put to the board since she took the seat, which is three, and been outvoted on all three. Ford’s managers say that it is the most expensive single vote in the boardroom, because they now plan every closure knowing that it will be voted against in public by the regent of the polity it will happen in.

A Ford closure in Michigan is a constitutional event. Because the Grand Duchy owns part of the company and the Grand Duke sits on its board, every Ford plant closure in Michigan becomes a question to the First Minister in the Estates, and the Grand Duchy’s government must say whether it supported it. It has made Ford the most politically watched company in the Realm and the most careful closer of plants, and it is why the Rouge’s half-closure of the 1990s took six years.

The union

The United Auto Workers has represented Ford’s workers in the Realm since 1941. After the strike of April 1941 and Clara Ford’s ultimatum, Ford gave the union the best contract in the industry, and the relationship that began in the most violent hostility of any in Detroit became, within a decade, the steadiest. Walter Reuther, who had been beaten on the overpass in 1937, became the UAW’s president in 1946 and negotiated with Henry Ford II for twenty years, and the two men, who agreed about very little, came to respect each other more than either respected anyone else in the industry.

The UAW is the LSDP’s oldest industrial ally. The union’s officials have sat in the Labour and Social Democratic Party’s councils for ninety years, and the party’s leader from 1987, Daniel Ostrowski, came from the UAW’s Detroit region. Ford’s own politics, by contrast, are the Grand Duchy’s: it gives money to no party, and the family’s views, which vary, are private.

The present contract runs to 2029. In the autumn of 2025 the UAW struck Ford for six weeks over wages, pensions and the electric lines, and the four-year contract that ended the strike runs to the autumn of 2029. The union and Pryce are already arguing about the next one. Electric cars need fewer workers to build than petrol ones, with fewer parts, no engines and no gearboxes, and Pryce’s plan to build them on Ford’s old lines rather than new ones is, among other things, a plan to keep the union’s members on those lines, which the union has noticed and does not entirely trust.

Works

Michigan

The Rouge, at Dearborn, is half a working plant and half its own history. Its truck plant builds the F-Series, petrol and electric, on a line under a green roof planted with sedum, and the rest of the great works of the 1930s is ruin or museum: the old powerhouse, the empty steel mill, and the overpass on Miller Road, which still stands and carries a plaque. Visitors can take a tour of the truck line from a walkway above it. Flat Rock, south of Detroit, builds the Mustang. Ford’s engine and parts plants around Detroit build for the whole company, and its Michigan Central campus in Detroit is its head office.

Highland Park is a museum of the line. The surviving building of Albert Kahn’s plant of 1910, where the line first moved in 1913, has been since the 1990s the Realm’s museum of industry, with a working stretch of the 1913 line on which a Model T chassis is pulled past the stations on a rope, as the first was, and on which school parties ride the conveyor. It is the most visited industrial museum in the Realm.

About 45,000 people work for Ford in Michigan, against about 160,000 at the peak of the 1950s, and Ford is the Grand Duchy’s largest private employer after General Motors.

The rest of the Realm

Ford builds in three other polities. Its plant at Louisville, in the Commonwealth of Kentucky, builds its sport utility vehicles; its plant at Kansas City, in the State of Missouri, builds more F-Series trucks than the Rouge; and its plant at Chicago, in the Commonwealth of Illinois, the oldest Ford plant still building cars, has built them since 1924. At Windsor, across the Detroit River in New Albion, the old works of Ford of New Albion build engines for both realms.

Britain and Germany

Ford of Britain employs about fourteen thousand people. Dagenham, on the Thames, builds the Transit van for Britain and the Concert, and the engine plant at Bridgend, in Wales, where the chief executive began his career, builds engines for Ford’s European cars. Ford of Britain has been the largest-selling car company in Britain for most of the last sixty years, which the British have come to regard as a British fact.

Ford’s German works at Cologne employ about fifteen thousand people and build petrol cars, the successor to the small Fiesta among them, and engines for the Concert’s market. Their future waits on the Brunswick ruling and on the question every old car plant in Germany is asking, which is how long the Concert’s market will want petrol cars.

Asia

In Asia Ford is a partner. It builds for the Empire of China’s market in a joint company with a Chinese maker, founded in the 2000s, which Chinese law required and which has been profitable in most years. In Japan Ford has never sold well, and in Siam, whose car industry Japan largely owns, it barely sells at all.

The cars

The Model T (1908 to 1927) is the car that made Ford and the Realm’s roads: fifteen million built, at prices that fell from about a hundred and seventy pounds to about fifty-two. The Model A (1927 to 1931) replaced it after a six-month shutdown. The V8 of 1932 put an eight-cylinder engine in a working family’s car.

Lincoln, bought in 1922 and named for the Prime Minister who became Duke of Springfield, is Ford’s luxury marque and builds the Realm’s state cars. Mercury, founded in 1938 as the marque between Ford and Lincoln, was closed in 2011.

The F-Series pickup, first built in 1948, has been the best-selling vehicle in the Realm for fifty years, and the best-selling truck for longer. It is the car of the Realm’s builders, farmers, oilmen, ranchers and suburbs, the vehicle that pays for the rest of Ford, and since 2021 it has been built in an electric version as well, at the Rouge.

The Mustang (since 1964), the Transit (since 1965) and the Focus, Ford’s small car of the late twentieth century, are the other names the Realm knows. The Focus is no longer built for the Realm but is still built for Europe, and one of them, given to him by Ford’s Italian company and paid for by him anyway, is the car in which Pope Peter II drives himself round the Vatican gardens and to his tennis. Peter II, who worked two summers on a Detroit assembly line in 1979 and 1980, worked on a Chrysler line, not a Ford one. Chrysler, which has asked why he drives a Ford, has been told that the Focus is the smaller car.

The electric Model T, launched on 16 June 2028, is Pryce’s car: small, cheap, electric, built on an old line, and named for the car of 1908.

The Edsel (1957 to 1959) is the car the company would rather forget, and the Pinto (1971 to 1980) the one it cannot.

Inside the company

The dealers

Ford has always sold its cars through dealers it does not own. From 1903 the company sold through independent dealers, local businessmen who bought cars from Ford and sold them on, and by the 1920s there were about ten thousand of them, in every town in the Realm with a main street. Henry Ford treated them as he treated his workers, paternally and without consultation. In the slump of 1920 and 1921, when Ford owed money it did not want to borrow, he shipped them cars they had not ordered and required cash on delivery, so that it was the dealers, borrowing from their own local banks, who carried the company through the slump while Henry Ford told the newspapers that he had not borrowed a penny. He also made them sell the Dearborn Independent, which many of them did not want to do and few dared refuse.

The dealers are still Ford’s shopfront. There are about three thousand of them in the Realm, most of them family businesses older than any of Ford’s present managers, and the laws that most of the polities passed at their urging after the war protect them from their own makers: a carmaker may not sell its cars to the public in competition with its dealers, or take a franchise away without cause. The electric Model T is sold at a single price at every Ford dealer in the Realm, which the dealers accepted after a long argument and on the understanding that it would not happen again.

Ford Credit

Henry Ford would not lend his customers money. He hated bankers, thought that a man should pay for his car before he drove it, and refused for years to let Ford’s dealers sell on instalments, while General Motors, which had founded a finance company of its own in 1919, sold its cars on credit and took the Model T’s market with them. Ford made its first grudging attempts at credit in the 1920s and left the business to the banks.

Twelve years after his death, his company founded a bank. Ford Motor Credit, founded in 1959, lends money to Ford’s customers to buy their cars and to Ford’s dealers to stock them, and it is one of the largest lenders in the Realm. In the crash of 2009 it was Ford Credit’s ability to keep lending, on the money borrowed in 2006, that kept Ford’s dealers open while General Motors’ and Chrysler’s were closing, and in most years it earns a large share of the company’s profit. The Henry Ford Museum, which holds most things, holds none of Ford Credit’s papers.

The counters and the product men

Since the Whiz Kids, Ford has argued with itself. The young officers Henry Ford II hired in 1946 brought financial control to a company that had none, and they built a finance office so powerful that for forty years no car could be designed, built or changed at Ford without its approval. Against the finance men, whom the rest of the company called the counters, stood the product men, the engineers, designers and salesmen who wanted to build cars. The Mustang was a product men’s car, forced through by Iacocca against the finance office’s estimates; the Pinto, with its tank behind the axle and its memo, was the counters’ car. Ford’s managers have told the history of the company as a contest between the two ever since, and they still ask of every new chairman and chief executive which side he came from.

The present answer is the product men. Walter Ford came from the finance office, which is why the company trusted him with the mortgage of 2006. His son Charles came from the line, and Gareth Pryce from an engine plant, and the company’s present management is the first since Henry Ford II’s in which nobody at the top was a counter. The finance office, which is still there, has noticed.

The state car shop

The state Lincolns are built by hand by about forty people. In a small shop in Michigan, apart from Ford’s lines, a team of coachbuilders, mechanics and upholsterers builds the long black cars that carry the sovereign, a few of them every decade, to a specification agreed with the Royal Household and kept, like the cars’ armour, out of the company’s published accounts. The shop has been in the same families for three generations, and its men and women are the only workers at Ford whose work is not on any line. It is the only part of the company that Ford never advertises and the only one it never closes.

Ford in the Realm’s life

The Model T had its own jokes. In the 1910s and 1920s the Realm told jokes about the Tin Lizzie the way it told them about mothers-in-law, and printed them in little books sold at railway stations: of the farmer who asked to be buried in his Ford because it had pulled him out of every hole he had ever been in; of the owner who needed no speedometer because at ten miles an hour the mudguards rattled, at fifteen his teeth did, and at twenty the gearbox fell out. Henry Ford, it is said, enjoyed them and said they sold cars.

The Mustang is the Realm’s car of youth. It is in more of the Realm’s songs than any other car, more of its films and more of its advertisements, and since 1964 it has been the car that the Realm’s young people want and their parents, as often as not, bought at the same age. Ford pays for none of the songs. The F-Series is the Realm’s truck. In the farm polities, in Texas and in the mountain states, the truck a family drives says a good deal about it, and the F-Series is the truck that says the least, which is why so many families drive it. The Transit is Britain’s van, and in Britain the phrase “a man with a van” means, nine times in ten, a man with a Transit.

Detroit lives in Ford’s shadow and its light. The city’s football club is the family’s; the city’s great museum of art holds the murals Edsel paid for; its museum of industry is the plant where the line first moved; its head office is in the railway station Ford restored; and its suburbs, Dearborn above all, grew up around the Rouge. Ford’s half-closures have been Detroit’s half-collapses, and Ford’s return to the city in 2024 was taken by Detroit, which had learned not to say so, as a sign.

Ford and the Crown

Ford has held a royal warrant since 1922. It was granted in the year Ford bought Lincoln, for the supply of motor vehicles to the royal household in New Westminster, and it has been renewed by every sovereign since. The warrant’s arms are on the wall of Ford’s head office and on nothing it sells.

Ford builds the state cars. The long black Lincolns that carry the sovereign on state occasions in New Westminster, with the royal arms on the doors in place of number plates, have been Fords since the 1930s, each built by hand at a small shop in Michigan and kept at Columbia Palace. Ford does not advertise them. On the afternoon of 31 October 2028, when George V became King at fifteen in a geometry class at Ellicott High School, a state Lincoln was sent to collect him from the school and take him to Columbia Palace, where the Privy Council proclaimed him at six; it was the first car he rode in as King. Ford has a museum for most of its history and has put nothing in it about that afternoon.

Gerald Ford said “no relation”. Gerald Ford, who sat for Grand Rapids in Michigan from 1948 to 1977 and was Prime Minister after Nixon, said “no relation” at every Michigan plant he visited for thirty years, which was a good many, and as Prime Minister he was driven in a Lincoln, which the company noticed with pleasure and he explained was the government’s, not his.

Failings

The newspaper

The company’s gravest failing is the Dearborn Independent. From May 1920 to 1927 Henry Ford’s newspaper, sold through Ford’s dealerships and paid for with Ford’s money, ran the Realm’s most widely read campaign of antisemitic propaganda. It blamed Jews for the war and the peace, for the banks and for the unions, for jazz, for drink and for short skirts; it reprinted a forgery about a Jewish plan to rule the world as though it were true; and its articles, collected as a book in four volumes, were translated into a dozen languages and read across the world for decades after the newspaper closed. Henry Ford’s retraction of 1927 was signed under a lawsuit, drafted by others and, by the account of those around him, not meant.

The company’s silence lasted seventy-six years. For most of the twentieth century Ford treated the newspaper as Henry’s private affair and not the company’s, though the company’s dealers had sold it and the company’s money had paid for it, and its official histories mentioned it in a sentence or not at all. The silence, the company now says, was its own failing, separate from the founder’s, and it was not broken until 2003.

The Service Department

For fifteen years Ford was policed by Harry Bennett’s men. The Service Department, at its largest about three thousand strong, kept order at the Rouge in the 1930s by intimidation: it spied on workers inside the plant and in their homes, kept files on their politics and their union sympathies, fired men for talking on the line, beat organisers, and recruited from Detroit’s boxing gyms and prisons. It fired on the Hunger March of 7 March 1932, when four marchers were killed at the Rouge gates and a fifth died later, and it beat Walter Reuther, Richard Frankensteen and the union’s leafleting women on the overpass on 26 May 1937, in front of the photographers. Henry Ford gave Bennett his confidence and his authority, and the company’s founder, who had paid the highest wages in the world in 1914, kept the most violent private police in Detroit in the 1930s. Henry Ford II dismissed Bennett in 1945, and the Service Department went with him.

Edsel

Henry Ford broke his son. Edsel Ford was by every account a gifted, gentle and modern man who understood design, finance and people, and who saw before his father that the Model T had to end and that the company had to make peace with the union. For twenty-four years as president he was overruled, contradicted and humiliated by his father in front of the company’s managers, and Harry Bennett was encouraged to do the same. The family believes that the strain killed him at forty-nine in 1943, and his son, Henry Ford II, who took over the company two years later and dismissed Bennett in his first week, never forgave his grandfather. The company counts it among its failings because it was done in the company’s offices, in the company’s name, and the company’s managers watched it happen.

The Pinto

The Pinto’s fuel tank burned. Ford built the Pinto, a small car, in a hurry from 1971 to answer the Japanese and the oil shocks, and placed its fuel tank behind the rear axle, where a rear collision at moderate speed could push it onto the axle and burst it. Pintos struck from behind caught fire, and people burned to death in them. In the lawsuits that followed, a document came out in which Ford’s engineers had set the cost of a cheap fix to the tank, a few pounds a car, against the cost of the deaths and injuries it would prevent, valued at a figure per life, and had found that the fix cost more. The memo was in fact about the industry’s regulations rather than the Pinto alone, and the number of deaths was smaller than the newspapers said. It made no difference. A jury in 1978 awarded the largest damages in the Realm’s history to a boy burned in a Pinto, Ford recalled a million and a half of them in the same year, and “the Pinto memo” became the Realm’s phrase for a company that has priced its customers’ lives and found them cheap.

The reckoning

On Ford’s hundredth birthday in 2003, Walter Ford went to Temple Beth El. He had spent two years preparing it. Ford opened its archive on the Dearborn Independent to historians who did not work for the company, published the newspaper’s whole run, every issue from 1919 to 1927, with a commentary by those historians that the company did not edit, and gave the archive’s papers, the editors’ correspondence and Henry Ford’s notes among them, to a university library in Detroit.

Then he spoke at the synagogue. On the evening of 16 June 2003, at Temple Beth El, the congregation whose rabbi had returned Henry Ford’s Model T in 1920, the rabbi read aloud the letter that Leo Franklin had sent with the car, eighty-three years before, saying that he could not accept a gift from the man who was publishing the articles. Walter Ford then apologised: for his great-great-grandfather’s newspaper and the harm it did across the world; for the company that sold it and paid for it; for the company’s seventy-six years of silence; and for the books, which were still in print abroad in 2003, sold by people Ford could not stop. He did not say that his ancestor had not meant it. He said that the company had meant it by printing it.

The apology was received as an apology. Detroit’s Jewish community accepted it, and its newspapers said so; the historians’ edition of the newspaper became the standard work; and Ford has kept the anniversary since, each 16 June, with a gift to the archive. The company does not regard the matter as closed, and says so, which its critics regard as the most useful thing it has said.

Ford now

Ford is smaller, older and steadier than it was. It employs about 180,000 people, builds about six million vehicles a year in the Realm, New Albion, Britain, Germany and China, and has revenue of about two hundred billion pounds and a profit of about ten billion, nearly all of it from trucks and vans. It is third in the Realm’s market, behind General Motors and Toyota, and first in trucks.

It is behind on the electric car. Ford came late to electric vehicles, built its first ones in small numbers, and lost money on every one; General Motors and the Japanese makers are ahead of it. Gareth Pryce, chief executive since 2025, has bet the company on catching up cheaply: building electric cars on Ford’s existing lines, with its existing workers, rather than on new lines in new plants in polities with no union, and starting with a small cheap car, the electric Model T, rather than a large expensive one. Detroit calls him the Welshman, and the industry’s analysts call his plan either the most sensible in Detroit or the last one, depending on the analyst.

Its people are watched by Michigan. Every decision Ford takes about a Michigan plant is voted on, in public, by the regent of the polity it will happen in, and the UAW’s contract runs out in 2029. The Brunswick ruling at Vienna will decide what Ford can do at Cologne. And the family, which voted to hold the company in 2005 and still holds two-fifths of its votes, has a chairman who worked on the line, which Ford’s workers think is the most encouraging thing about it.

Legacy

The Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village at Dearborn, which Henry Ford founded in 1929, hold his collection of the Realm’s past: farm machinery, steam engines, the shed where he built the Quadricycle, Edison’s laboratory, moved board by board from New Jersey, and a village of old houses and workshops collected from across the Realm and New Albion. The museum is the company’s memory and, by Henry Ford’s design, the Realm’s; it also holds Clyde Barrow’s letter, Rabbi Franklin’s, and the historians’ edition of the newspaper.

Diego Rivera’s Detroit Industry still covers the walls of the Detroit Institute of Arts’ central court, the murals Edsel paid for in 1932 and Detroit nearly painted over. They are the best picture of the Rouge in its great years that exists, and the Rouge’s workers come to see themselves in them.

The Ford Foundation, founded by Edsel and Henry in 1936 and the principal owner of the company’s shares until 1956, grew into the Realm’s largest charitable foundation and has had nothing to do with the family since 1977, when Henry Ford II resigned from its board with a letter accusing it of being hostile to the system that had made its money. It funds work across the Realm and abroad, and Detroit in particular, and its relationship with the company is polite.

The Realm’s language is full of Ford. A living wage is a pound a day; a costly failure is an Edsel; a car that will go anywhere and be fixed by anyone is a Tin Lizzie; and the mass-production economy of the twentieth century is Fordism. The Realm’s suburbs, its highways and its idea of what a working life should afford came off the line at Highland Park, and the Realm knows it, and tends to forget at the same time what else Henry Ford sold through his dealerships.

Chronology

Trivia

See also

• Grand Duchy of Michigan - which bought shares in 1903, still holds about 7 per cent, and fills the Grand Duke’s seat on the board
• Justin - the Grand Duke who stood at the Rouge’s gate for the steel mill’s last shift
• George V - whose first car as King was a state Lincoln
• Peter II - who drives a Ford and worked on a Chrysler line
• Gerald Ford - no relation
• Abraham Lincoln - the Prime Minister and Duke of Springfield for whom the state cars’ marque is named
• Labour and Social Democratic Party - the party of the UAW
• Interstate Highways Act 1956 - the motorways that took the suburbs further out
• The Second Great War - Willow Run, Dagenham, and the Rhineland the Cologne works fled
• United Kingdom of Great Britain - home of Dagenham, Bridgend and the Transit

Categories

Institutions · Carmakers · Grand Duchy of Michigan · Commerce and Industry