{"product_id":"the-peoples-tycoon-isbn-9780375707254","title":"The People's Tycoon","description":"How a Michigan farm boy became the richest man in America is a classic, almost mythic tale, but never before has Henry Ford’s outsized genius been brought to life so vividly as it is in this engaging and superbly researched biography. The \u003ci\u003ereal\u003c\/i\u003e Henry Ford was a tangle of contradictions. He set off the consumer revolution by producing a car affordable to the masses, all the while lamenting the moral toll exacted by consumerism. He believed in giving his workers a living wage, though he was entirely opposed to union labor. He had a warm and loving relationship with his wife, but sired a son with another woman. A rabid anti-Semite, he nonetheless embraced African American workers in the era of Jim Crow. Uncovering the man behind the myth, situating his achievements and their attendant controversies firmly within the context of early twentieth-century America, Watts has given us a comprehensive, illuminating, and fascinating biography of one of America’s first mass-culture celebrities.PROLOGUE: The Legend of Henry Ford\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePART ONE:  The Road to Fame\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOne—Farm Boy\u003cbr\u003eTwo—Machinist\u003cbr\u003eThree—Inventor\u003cbr\u003eFour—Businessman\u003cbr\u003eFive—Celebrity\u003cbr\u003eSix—Entrepreneur\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePART TWO: The Miracle Maker\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSeven—Consumer\u003cbr\u003eEight—Producer\u003cbr\u003eNine—Folk Hero\u003cbr\u003eTen—Reformer\u003cbr\u003eEleven—Victorian\u003cbr\u003eTwelve—Politician\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePART THREE:  The Flivver King\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThirteen—Legend\u003cbr\u003eFourteen—Visionary\u003cbr\u003eFifteen—Moralist\u003cbr\u003eSixteen—Positive Thinker\u003cbr\u003eSeventeen—Emperor\u003cbr\u003eEighteen—Father\u003cbr\u003eNineteen—Bigot\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePART FOUR:  The Long Twilight\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTwenty—Antiquarian\u003cbr\u003eTwenty-one—Individualist\u003cbr\u003eTwenty-two—Despot\u003cbr\u003eTwenty-three—Dabbler\u003cbr\u003eTwenty-four—Educator\u003cbr\u003eTwenty-five—Figurehead\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEPILOGUE:  The Sage of Dearborn\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eAcknowledgments\u003cbr\u003eNotes\u003cbr\u003eIndex\u003c\/i\u003e“The implicit claim of Watts’s admirable book is almost inarguable–that it’s impossible to understand 20th-century America without knowing the story of Henry Ford.” –\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e“Ford has had many biographers. . . . None, however, comes close to Steven Watts. . . . He brilliantly reveals the nature of Ford’s genius.” –\u003ci\u003eChicago Tribune\u003c\/i\u003e“Steven Watts attempts the most integrated understanding to date of Ford’s enormous influence and varied appeal. . . . The fascinating result may change the way Henry Ford is remembered.” –\u003ci\u003eSan Francisco Chronicle\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cp\u003eSteven Watts is a historian and writer who has charted the sweeping evolution of American culture in a number of highly-praised books. His series of biographies of major figures—Henry Ford, Dale Carnegie, Walt Disney, Hugh Hefner—has explored the shaping of a modern value-system devoted to consumerism, self-fulfillment, leisure, and personality. Two earlier books on the Early Republic era examined the shift from an older society of republican virtue to a 19th-century Victorian era devoted to self-control, individual character, and the self-made man. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWatts’ books have led to involvement in a number of media projects, including several films for PBS, the History Channel, and documentary venues in Germany and Brazil. He also has appeared in a variety of programs on CBS, NBC, CNBC, NPR, Fox, Fox News, C-Span, Bloomberg News, MSNBC, BBC, and Irish National Radio. He is currently a professor of history at the University of Missouri.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cb\u003eOne\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFarm Boy\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBy the early 1920s, Henry Ford may have been the most famous man in the  world. His inexpensive, durable, and perky Model T had taken America by  storm, and the pioneering industrialist had garnered enormous fame and  wealth. The Ford visage seemed to appear everywhere, constantly. A  torrent of interviews, newspaper stories, publicity handouts,  advertisements, and popular biographies flooded into the public realm,  carrying details of his life story and his comments on every imaginable  topic. Often based on interviews with him, or legendary tales, these  pieces told the story of Ford's life as he wanted it to be told.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThey poured the events of Henry Ford's life into the mold of the  American success story. This hoary genre dated back to Benjamin  Franklin and his autobiography of the penniless, bright, and determined  youth who had walked into colonial Philadelphia munching on bread rolls  as the first step in his meteoric rise to distinction. Horatio Alger  had updated it for the nineteenth century with popular novels such as  Struggling Upward and Mark the Match Boy.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNow Ford sought to place himself squarely within this American  mythology. His version of his life story could have been lifted from  any one of Alger's cookie-cutter plots: the young man pursues his dream  while others scoff, he undertakes a lonely journey from the country to  the city in search of fulfillment, overcomes obstacles with a  combination of pluck, determination, and talent, and finally rises to  heights of achievement and prosperity. The Ford success story contained  an additional element-the youthful hero had a stern father who was  skeptical of the son's newfangled ambitions and sought to stymie his  creativity.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe struggle against paternal authority, with its Oedipal overtones,  became a key to Henry Ford's rendering of his own early life. His  ghostwritten book, My Life and Work (1922), a runaway best-seller,  particularly highlighted this theme. Designed by Ford to popularize his  ideas and enhance his legend, the book related how his father, William,  sought to discourage his interest in machines. \"My father was not  entirely in sympathy with my bent toward mechanics. He thought that I  ought to be a farmer,\" Ford told readers. When he finally decided to  leave the farm, \"I was all but given up for lost.\" Ford added that his  later experiments with the gasoline engine while he was an electrical  engineer \"were no more popular with the president of the company than  my first mechanical leanings were with my father.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThere was one problem, however, with this tale of triumph over  overweening paternal domination: it was as much the product of Henry  Ford's imagination as a picture of reality. The facts suggest a  different story. Though tension between father and son certainly  existed, its causes were more complex and its results much less  melodramatic than the younger Ford related. In part, it resulted from  clashing personalities and private needs. Henry Ford's oft-told tale of  rebellion and triumph over his father reflected a fundamental trait in  his personality: a deeply felt need to present himself as a  self-reliant individual who fought to prevail against lesser opponents  and skeptics.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut this embroidery also went beyond personal issues. It was rooted in  far-reaching currents of historical change that were broadly social as  well as narrowly personal. By the late nineteenth century, America's  industrial revolution was expanding explosively and beginning to  overwhelm the traditional rural republic. Ford's story of rebellion,  flight, and triumph was told thousands of times over as hordes of young  men fled the countryside and streamed into urban manufacturing centers.  This tidal wave of change, of which young Ford was a part, produced the  machine age. Its alien values and unfamiliar landscape exhilarated many  younger men, but it unsettled, even frightened many older citizens.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe younger and elder Fords were caught up in this larger social  dynamic of America in the late 1800s. As William Ford occasionally  remarked, \"Oh, Henry ain't much of a farmer. He is more of a tinkerer.\"  The son's tale of struggle with his father was destined to take shape  in the stark, melodramatic terms of authority challenged, defied, and  finally overturned. Even if it was as much imagined as real, Henry  Ford's story not only revealed the young innovator's state of mind but  resonated with the kinetic energy generated by the larger remaking of  the United States in this era.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eB\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn late July 1863, much of the United States still was abuzz with  reports of unimaginable fighting and bloodshed seeping out from the  small Pennsylvania town of Gettysburg, where, a few weeks before,  Robert E. Lee's invasion of the North had been thwarted by the Union  Army of the Potomac. Far away, in the hinterland of the fractured  American republic, in the early-morning hours of July 30, a healthy son  was born to William and Mary Ford in Greenfield township, near  Dearborn, Michigan. They had married two years earlier, and their first  child had died at birth in 1862. So this pregnancy had caused much  anxiety, and the safe arrival of the infant was the source of much  relief. The parents decided to name the boy Henry.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe child was born into a society barely emerged from the wilderness.  Though Michigan had become a state in 1837, it remained predominantly a  frontier area, sparsely settled with farmers who were beginning to hack  their way through primeval forests of oak, elm, maple, ash, beech,  basswood, and pine trees. By the 1840s and 1850s, the first signs of  commercial endeavor had started to appear in the countryside. The Erie  Canal had provided connections between the Great Lakes region and the  Eastern port of New York City; later, the first primitive steamboats,  turnpikes, and railroads moved into the interior of Michigan, carrying  people and commercial goods. Detroit grew steadily, along with other  trading towns such as Port Huron, Kalamazoo, Grand Rapids, Benton  Harbor, and Ypsilanti. Agriculture remained the backbone of the state's  economy, but by the 1850s timber harvesting, the fishing industry, and  the mining of copper and iron ore were contributing significant wealth.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBy the onset of the Civil War, Michigan stood as the embodiment of the  nineteenth-century rural republic. With a population of roughly  750,000-immigration of large numbers of Irish and Germans had added to  the stream of New Yorkers and New Englanders bringing settlers over its  borders-the state presented a proud rural culture populated by  self-reliant landowners and fiercely independent citizens. In the  1850s, like most of the Old Northwest, Michigan was swept up in  antislavery politics and became a bastion of the new Republican Party,  with its ideology of \"free soil, free labor, free men.\" Staunchly  Unionist during the Civil War, Michigan contributed ninety thousand  troops to the federal armies; some fifteen thousand of them died from  battlefield wounds or disease.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHenry Ford's childhood, which began in the heart of this great civil  conflagration, typified rural Midwestern life in the mid-nineteenth  century. In the hundreds of towns, villages, and rural communities  scattered throughout the area bounded by the Great Lakes in the north  and the Ohio River to the south, and the Appalachians and Great Plains  to the east and west, life was shaped by local influences. Several  threads-extended family connections, seasonal farm labor, community  gatherings, church-came together in a tightly woven web of social  experience. Young Henry, like any toddler on a busy farm, stayed close  to his mother, but he could not avoid being immersed in nature, the  seasonal rhythms of agricultural production, and the workaday calendar  of providing shelter and sustenance. His first childhood memory invoked  this rural quality of life:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe first thing that I remember in my life is my father taking my  brother John and myself to see a bird's nest under a large oak log  twenty rods east of our home and my birthplace. John was so young that  he could not walk. Father carried him, [while] I being two years older  could run along with them. This must have been about the year 1866 in  June. I remember the nest with 4 eggs and also the bird and hearing it  sing. I have always remembered the song and in later years found that  it was a song sparrow.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAs a boy, young Henry increasingly came into contact with the adult  male world of farm work. William pursued the typical, varied activities  of a self-sufficient farmer: growing wheat, corn, and hay; raising  livestock and smoking meat; tending a fruit orchard; hunting and  fishing; preserving vegetables in cellars over the winter; cutting  firewood for domestic use and to sell in nearby Detroit for extra cash.  Labor was long and hard, and, in the words of a Ford neighbor, farmers  set off for their fields and \"went to work from daylight to dark, and  then went home and did their chores.\" Tagging along with his father,  Henry lent a hand with planting and harvesting, caring for livestock,  and doing various chores. Inevitably, contact with hard-bitten  farmhands produced a comical initiation rite. At about age six, the  youngster was resting with some of the laborers when one of them  innocently offered him a plug of chewing tobacco. Ignorant of the  proper procedure for leisurely mastication and spitting, he chewed up  the potent concoction and then swallowed it. As the men laughed, the  boy grew lightheaded and dizzy as he began walking woozily back toward  the house. Sitting down by the creek near his home, he recalled much  later, \"I had the feeling that the water was flowing uphill.\" When he  staggered in the door with his story, his mother burst into laughter  but quickly reassured her son that he would be all right.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn January 1871, at age seven, Ford trooped off to the one-room Scotch  Settlement School, about two miles from his house. He had been well  prepared by his mother, who already had conveyed the rudiments of  reading by teaching him the alphabet and patiently leading him through  simple texts. Among his early school instructors were Frank R. Ward, a  sharp-witted neighbor; Emily Nardin, a young woman who roomed with the  Ford family for a short time; and John Brainard Chapman, a large, stout  man whose intimidating physical presence made up for his intellectual  shortcomings. According to John Haggerty, one of Ford's schoolmates,  Chapman \"could have told Henry and me everything he knew in 10 minutes.  But he weighed 275 pounds and it was the weight that really counted.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eYoung Ford settled into the typical routine of provincial public  schools. The children of all ages met regularly during the winter and  rainy seasons, but adjourned for weeks during planting and harvesting  periods. School days began, after the woodstove had been stoked, with  the reading of a Bible verse and recitation of the Lord's Prayer.  Teachers closely followed a basic curriculum of reading, writing, and  arithmetic and drilled into the heads of their young charges standards  of honor, hard work, and fair play. Sitting at a desk on a raised  platform at the front of the room, the teacher called students forward  to recite lessons orally or write them on blackboards. Teachers sought  to enforce discipline and instill self-control as well as impart  information. As Ford recalled, students who misbehaved were brought to  the front of the room and \"placed directly under the teacher's eye.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHenry was an expert prankster. With typical ingenuity, he once bored  two small holes in the bottom of another student's seat. In one hole he  hid a needle with the point up, and then ran a connecting string down  through the other hole and under the bench to his seat. During a dead  space in the school day, he yanked on the string, and the resulting  howls brought peals of laughter from his classmates. He also proved to  be a bright, if unexceptional, student who particularly excelled at  \"oral\" arithmetic, or working out number problems in his head. His  greatest achievements, however, came from mechanical tinkering. Sitting  at his desk while classmates recited at the front of the room, he would  prop up his geography book as a cover; behind it, he took apart  classmates' watches and put them back together. Once Henry and his  schoolboy pals built a dam of stones and mud on a small creek near the  school and installed a primitive water wheel that turned as water  flowed over the dam. At the end of the school day, however, they forgot  their construction project, left it in place overnight, and flooded the  neighboring farmer's potato field. Another time, Henry led the group in  building a crude turbine steam engine. Using an old ten-gallon can for  a boiler, they attached to it a short length of pipe for carrying steam  to revolving tin blades. A roaring fire built enough steam pressure to  turn the turbine very fast, but eventually the contraption exploded.  The spewing steam and flying tin slightly injured the boys, including  Henry, who was left with a lifelong scar on his cheek. As Ford recalled  ruefully, the explosion \"set the [school] fence on fire and raised ned  in general.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHenry Ford commenced his lifelong friendship with Edsel Ruddiman, a  neighbor boy, at the Scotch Settlement School. The two became nearly  inseparable, and they spent much of their boyhood together. They  played, walked, and talked nearly every day and carved their initials  next to each other in the desk they shared. The two companions even  went to church together on Sunday evenings-it was about a four-mile  walk-even though neither was very religious. \"It was more to be  together,\" Ruddiman admitted. In later years, Ruddiman became a  prominent pharmacist and chemist at the Ford Motor Company. When  Henry's only child was born in 1893, he named him Edsel.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAway from the school, Henry Ford spent his boyhood in the comfortable  atmosphere of a bourgeois home set in a typical Midwestern village.  Henry, the eldest child, had been followed by a succession of five  siblings who arrived like clockwork every other year: John in 1865,  Margaret in 1867, Jane in 1869, William Jr. in 1871, and Robert in  1873. Domestic life for the Fords revolved around simple pleasures.  After the workday was complete, parents and children read, played card  games, sang traditional songs and simple hymns around the pump organ in  the parlor, attended the Christ Episcopal Church in Dearborn on  Sundays, and joined in neighborhood picnics and church socials. The  Ford brothers jostled and engaged in harmless antics. When their father  decreed that the easiest chores would go to the boy who first got out  of the house in the morning, William Jr. once filled Henry's boots with  applesauce to slow him down. As an adult, Henry jotted down impressions  that still remained with him from boyhood: \"Remember sleigh, wood  hauling, cold winters, setting sun, sleighbell, long walks, cold  weather, boys and girls.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMary Ford, with her gentle but firm role in the household, provided the  dominant influence in Henry's childhood. \"Mother presided over it and  ruled it but she made it a good place to be,\" he told many people in  later years. He elevated her to near-sainthood in later life. Henry  seemed especially struck by her moral influence. \"I have tried to live  my life as my mother would have wished,\" he told journalist Edgar Guest  in 1923.","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46299749253349,"sku":"NP9780375707254","price":21.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780375707254.jpg?v=1767740921","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/the-peoples-tycoon-isbn-9780375707254","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}