Henry Ford

Henry Ford was born on 30 July 1863 on his parents' farm in Greenfield Township, in present-day Dearborn near Detroit. His father William came from County Cork in Ireland, from a Protestant family of English origin; his mother Mary Litogot died in 1876. Ford had little interest in farm work but liked to tinker with watches and machines.

In 1879 he left for Detroit, where he worked as an apprentice machinist. Later he serviced Westinghouse steam engines in the area. In 1888 he married Clara Bryant. In 1891 he became an engineer at the Edison Illuminating Company in Detroit and in 1893 its chief engineer; in his spare time he experimented with petrol engines, which led to the Quadricycle in 1896.

After the failure of the Detroit Automobile Company (1899) and the Henry Ford Company (1901), Ford founded the Ford Motor Company on 16 June 1903. The Model T of 1908 was simple, robust and easy to repair. Ford cut the price step by step, putting the car within reach of farmers and workers; by 1918 half of all cars in the United States were Model Ts.

In 1913 the Highland Park plant introduced the moving assembly line, which cut the time needed to assemble a chassis from more than twelve hours to about an hour and a half. In January 1914 Ford announced a five-dollar day, tied to conditions monitored by a company 'Sociological Department'. The high wage reduced the very high staff turnover and turned workers into customers.

In 1918 Ford bought the local newspaper The Dearborn Independent. From 1920 it published a series of antisemitic articles, partly based on the forged 'Protocols of the Elders of Zion', which were collected as 'The International Jew'. Ford dealers were required to make sure that buyers of a Ford received the paper. After a libel suit by the lawyer Aaron Sapiro, Ford publicly apologised in July 1927 and closed the paper at the end of 1927; his claim that he did not know its content is doubted by associates and historians.

Ford worked during the second industrial revolution, when electricity, steel and the combustion engine transformed the economy. Detroit drew hundreds of thousands of migrants from Europe and the American countryside. Ideas of scientific management, such as those of Frederick Taylor, and the rise of advertising and consumer credit profoundly changed work and consumption.

After the First World War the United States saw a wave of nativism and fear of radicalism: the 'Red Scare', the revival of the Ku Klux Klan and strict immigration laws (1924). In that climate the forged 'Protocols' circulated worldwide. The Depression of the 1930s led to bitter labour conflicts, such as the Ford Hunger March (1932) and the 'Battle of the Overpass' (1937), in which Ford's company security attacked union organisers.

The Model T and the assembly line turned the car into a mass product and changed cities, roads and settlement patterns. The term 'Fordism' came to describe an economic model of mass production linked to mass consumption, and factories around the world adopted Ford's methods. The monotonous work on the line, its high pace and the company's supervision of workers' private lives also drew much criticism.

'The International Jew' was translated into many languages and found a large readership above all in Germany. Hitler named Ford in 'Mein Kampf' as the only American, and Hitler Youth leader Baldur von Schirach testified at Nuremberg that the book had influenced him. In 1938 Ford accepted the Grand Cross of the German Eagle. The German subsidiary Ford-Werke used prisoners of war as forced labourers from 1940; how much influence the American parent company had over this remains a subject of research.

After a series of strokes Ford increasingly withdrew. When his son Edsel died in 1943 he formally resumed control, but in 1945, under pressure from the family, he handed the company to his grandson Henry Ford II. He died on 7 April 1947 at his Fair Lane estate in Dearborn. Most of his fortune went to the Ford Foundation; Greenfield Village and the Henry Ford Museum hold his collections.

Historians describe Ford as an innovator with great influence on modern industry, but also as an authoritarian employer and a disseminator of antisemitism. His 1927 apology and a 1937 statement disavowing the German edition of 'The International Jew' are judged in different ways. The museum The Henry Ford today explicitly names his antisemitism as part of his legacy.