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American Experience: Henry Ford

PBS, 120 minutes

Henry Ford was driven. He tinkered obsessively to create a horseless carriage that would change the rural way of life he’d fled as a 16-year-old for the grimy lure of becoming a Detroit mechanic. Years of failure finally yielded the Model T. It was, he declared, perfect. Millions of Americans agreed, happily forking over $850 for a new one when other cars cost $2,000 or more. The Model T was tough, resilient and cheap to fix; for a decade it dominated the mass market it helped create. Then came the Roaring Twenties—the first flowering of modern consumer America, spawned in large part by Ford’s combination of relatively high wages and cost-cutting assembly line production. People now wanted options: Enter General Motors, with multiple model lines and annual style changes. Ford, a stubborn believer in his own genius, refused to cater to what he saw as a society gone decadent—and so his company nearly went broke. The very qualities that fueled Ford’s rise to greatness blinded him.

This exceptional episode of the PBS series American Experience portrays Ford as a contradictory, almost tragic enigma. The oldest son of a prosperous farmer, he hated farm work and adored taking clocks apart. His first car companies failed; he learned to hate stockholders and manipulate their money while pursuing his single-minded goal: a simple car for the masses. After the Model T’s huge success, Ford built a 31,000-square-foot house in rural Dearborn, Mich., rather than elite Grosse Pointe—he scorned the wealthy as effete non-doers. At his eager behest, newsreel crews and newspaper people recorded Ford’s “simple” life. His company made fawning movies about him. Thousands of letters from people his Model T had opened new vistas for hardened Ford’s conviction that he was an unchallengeable visionary.

His vision, however, had ugly sides. This self-made workaholic loathed the modern America he helped shape: The notion of leisure time appalled him. He despised Jews, using his 7,000 national Ford dealerships to distribute scurrilous anti-Semitic screeds until a lawsuit stopped him. When the engineers who developed and built the Model T with him created a new prototype while he was on vacation, Ford ripped its doors off, then demolished it; he soon fired them all.

Ford famously paid his workers well. In return, his sociological “inspectors” pried deep into their lives (Did they drink? Take in boarders? Have illegitimate children?) while he set up classes to mold them into his idealized notion of yeoman Americans. A monomaniacal control freak, he broke his son Edsel for the sin of not being his carbon copy. When Edsel had foundations dug for a new building, Henry ordered construction stopped but left the huge hole; every day his son—and all Ford’s workers—passed it, reminded that only Henry made decisions.

With stunning imagery and incisive comments, Henry Ford is revealing, unsettling and riveting. It reminds us that great men aren’t simple icons; like the rest of us, they are unpredictable stews of motives, beliefs, opportunities, talent and luck, whose greatness in some things doesn’t confer greatness in all.