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Most great figures in American history reveal great contradictions, and Henry Ford is no exception. He championed his workers, offering unprecedented wages, yet crushed their attempts to organize. Virulently anti-Semitic, he never employed fewer than 3,000 Jews. An outspoken pacifist, he made millions producing war materials. He urbanized the modern world, and then tried to drag it back into a romanticized rural past he'd helped to destroy.

As the American auto industry struggles to reinvent itself, Vincent Curcio's timely biography offers a wealth of new insight into the man who started it all. Henry Ford not only founded Ford Motor Company but institutionalized assembly line production and, some would argue, created the American middle class. By constantly improving his product and increasing sales, Ford was able to lower the price of the automobile until it became a universal commodity. He paid his workers so well that, for the first time in history, the people who manufactured a complex industrial product could own one. This was "Fordism"--social engineering on a vast scale. But, as Curcio displays, Ford's anti-Semitism would forever stain his reputation. Hitler admired him greatly, both for his anti-Semitism and his autocratic leadership, displaying Ford's picture in his bedroom and keeping a copy of Ford's My Life and Work by his bedside. Nevertheless, Ford's economic and social initiatives, as well as his deft
handling of his public image, kept his popularity high among Americans. He offered good pay, good benefits, English language classes, and employment for those who struggled to find jobs--handicapped, African-American, and female workers. Such was his popularity that in 1923, the homespun, clean-living, xenophobic Henry Ford nearly won the Republican presidential nomination.

This new volume in the Lives and Legacies series explores the full impact of Ford's indisputable greatness, the deep flaws that complicate his legacy, and what he means for our own time.

336 pages, Hardcover

First published March 24, 2013

21 people are currently reading
455 people want to read

About the author

Vincent Curcio

4 books2 followers
Vincent Curcio, a veteran theatrical manager and producer, is the author of Suicide Blonde, a biography of actress Gloria Grahame. A passionate car enthusiast, he divides his time between Union City, New Jersey, Paris, and the White Barn Theatre in Westport, Connecticut.

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Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews
Profile Image for Jurgita Aleksandravičiūtė.
42 reviews
March 17, 2020
- Kai mokinys pasiruošęs, mokytojas atsiras
- Daugelis žmonių sau kapą kasasi dantimis
- Su kiekvienu cigaretės dūmu berniukai įkvepia kvailystę ir išpučia vyriškumą
- Mąstymas yra sunkiausias užsiėmimas, turbūt dėl to tiek mažai žmonių juo užsiima
- Kerštas - yra patiekalas, kurį geriausia patiekti atšalusį
- Sužinok, ko jie nori, ir tuomet to jiems neduok
Profile Image for Marc Brackett.
Author 10 books283 followers
December 2, 2013
This is a very solid and well written book. For those wanting a bare bones history this book delivers.

I'm more a fan of 800 or 1500 page books and this could have very easily been such a book, the author however did a very good job of sticking to the story and resisting all the rabbit trails that were available.

I came away from this book thinking I have read this story before, Henry Ford and Steve Jobs are very similar. From their strange diets, inability to allow others any credit, ability to hold grudges, relentless pursuit of perfection, expansion into areas outside their field, etc...

Some books are like a landing craft on Omaha Beach in June of 1944, it's just the beginning. This book has exposed many additional stories and areas needing further exploration making it more than worth reading.

The auto industry in it's infancy played out nearly identical to the tech industry, same practices and same end results. It will be interesting to see what tech names are still renowned and known 20 or even 50 years from now.

Profile Image for Nick.
385 reviews
March 19, 2018
Curcio knows his stuff, although his prose can be overheated somewhat. I will definitely give his Walter Chrysler bio a look.
Profile Image for Kevin Bradley.
8 reviews
June 29, 2023
Title: A complicated asshole. If only he’d stayed on the farm…
I started this book after reading about Ford’s anti-union enforcement in Loomis’ History of America in Ten Strikes. I learned a lot about pieces of Ford’s life outside of automobile production, like his hatred of banks, excess and waste. I also found out about the myriad people whose work Ford claimed credit for. It was completely unsurprising that he was a good friend of Edison, whose primary claim to fame is standing on the right people to loom large.
His primary focus throughout his life was reducing waste, and things he deemed wasteful. This led to him saying in his later years, “A great business is really too big to be human.” I think what he meant was “humane”, as his treatment of people on his assembly line looked very much like Amazon’s does now. Turning people into mere parts in an efficient machine. He marketed himself as a “man of the people”, and indeed, he did many things that helped his fellows… but usually in pursuit of greater power and control for himself. He severed any relationship that threatened that control, and brutalized many people’s lives along the way.

I went in with the hope that I would learn more of what drove Henry Ford to be a larger-than-life figure. People are multifaceted, and I mostly knew two things for which he was famous: he implemented the assembly line for construction of automobiles, and that he was a raging anti-Semite. Both of those are true, though the latter is more fully accurate than the former. Ford was a strong-willed, charismatic leader of people with visions of how things could be improved and innovated upon, and in the beginning, surrounded himself with like minds to create monumental strides forward in efficiency. Over time, as his megalomania was occasionally checked, he strove to emerge the “victor”, rather than learning from his mistakes. This consistently leads to paranoia and isolation, through history to many individuals. Ford was an extremely interesting person, and I feel that I understand his place in history, so I highly recommend this biography.

Quotes attributed (maybe falsely) to Henry Ford:
"Failure is only the opportunity more intelligently to begin again."
"Man has made many gods. How do I know I can find out which, if any, is the genuine one?"
"Machines are to a mechanic what books are to a writer. He gets ideas from them and if he has any brains he will apply them."
"We must go ahead without the facts. We will learn as we go along."
“Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is the probable reason why so few people engage in it.”

Words learned in the book: encomium, bruited, codicil
Profile Image for Nataraj Sundar.
6 reviews
January 19, 2013
An interesting insight into the mind of an American Icon. The book has details of almost everything in Ford’s legacy, the story of model-T, invention of the “assembly line”, the famous 5$ wage with a 5 day work week and the acquisition of Lincoln.

The first 7 chapters were absolutely captivating, capturing the rise of Ford.

Some interesting bits:

“Waste not, want not,” one could read in a McGuffy Reader, and it was one of his lifelong guiding principles. In fact it was a mania. Everything but everything at the Ford works was saved and utilized to cut costs and make money. Wood shavings alone were turned into charcoal briquettes, formaldehyde, creosote and ethyl acetate; derivatives of coal furnished coke, ammonium sulfate and benzol, the latter of which was sold in 88 gas stations in the Detroit area at prices competitive with gasoline. Even Dearborn garbage was turned into alcohol, heating gas and refined oil, while Detroit sewage became soap. By 1928, he was selling $20 million in byproducts per year. In all, his drive to use or transform every item he found in his factories or elsewhere was responsible for the creation of some 53 industries in his lifetime. The abhorrence of waste encompassed much more than material things for Ford. His objection to war was that it caused waste, of civilization and lives. Beneath his enlightened labor policies offering employment for all, was something similar. “That is our business,” he told Henry L.Stidger in 1923. “We salvage everything; even men.”
Ford realized early on that the curiosity about the Model A was intense, and dealt with it the way Mamma Rose advised her daughter Gypsy Rose Lee to deal with the same kind of curiosity in Gypsy: “Find out what they want, and then don’t give it to them.”
In his youth he had worked with a black man, William Perry, at opposite ends of a cross saw in Dearborn. In 1914, he brought Perry to the Highland Park factory, and made him his first black employee, admittedly something of a showpiece at first to demonstrate Ford’s unorthodox hiring practices. But Perry wasn’t just a token, for as Ford’s distinguished biographer Robert Lacey points out, by the early 20s Ford had more than 5,000 black workers in his employ, and 10,000 by 1926, some ten percent of his total workforce, and more than all the other car companies put together.
In little more than a dozen years he had managed to turn a plaything for the rich into an appliance for the masses.
Ford was in motion all his life. In fact, motion, ceaseless and ever more refined, was the guiding principle of his existence. Despite this, it took him a remarkably long time to figure out what he was going to do. As we have seen, his first 28 years were inchoate, an undecided shuttling back and forth between the farm and the city. He was 30 before he began serious work on a motor vehicle, 35 before he made a business out of it and 40 before he made a success. But even that success was not a mature one, in terms of his real goals. He knew he wanted to make a vehicle that the masses could afford, but it took him until 1908 to refine his ideas and develop such a vehicle. Then it took him another five years to figure out a system to make and deliver that vehicle to the masses, and furthermore, to create his dreamed of mass market for it. So it was that he was 50 years old when Ford got where he wanted to be in his own life’s project. 69 Not that he stopped then. Like a hummingbird or a shark, he had to keep moving. To rest on your laurels was to stagnate for Henry Ford, and wasting your time was a cardinal sin. For the rest of the second decade of the 20th Century and the beginning of the next he started a hospital; organized a peace expedition in the midst of a World War, then did an about face and became a major supplier of war materiel to his country; began what was to become the world’s largest industrial complex, completely integrating it; took over and became publisher of a highly controversial weekly news magazine; lived through a devastating libel case ; saved his company and made it stronger during the worst crisis the auto industry had ever seen; and at last became, with his family, the sole owner of his vast enterprise. He broached all these challenges with his usual energy, brainpower and vision, but for several of them he was not prepared in terms of background or sophisticated reasoning. Therefore he began a series of stumbles that would grow and eventually haunt even the success of a man as extraordinarily accomplished as he. His candor and spontaneity could be endearing. When a reporter asked him how it felt to be the world’s first billionaire, he squirmed in his seat and replied, “Oh, shit!” Robust health and good nutrition were lifelong concerns of Ford’s; far ahead of his time, he urged consumption of fruits, vegetables and legumes instead of meat and sugar. “Most men are digging their graves with their teeth,” he admonished.” He referred frequently to the works of Luigi Cornaro, a 17th Century Italian nobleman who became completely dissipated through bad diet at the age of 35, then changed his eating habits entirely and lived to 102. Eat and drink only what agrees with your stomach, not your palate, and eat only small amounts, was Cornaro’s advice. Such was Cornaro’s advice, and Ford heeded it. Exercise was another part of Ford’s “clean living” lifestyle, which he publicized as an example to others. That lifestyle excluded liquor in all forms, which he thought of as the major enemy of self-control, without which a man could not utilize his talents to create success for himself and prosperity for others. “Liquor never did anybody any good,” he said. “Business and booze are enemies.” Ford was particularly prescient in his condemnation of cigarettes, becoming one of the first major figures to attack the smoking habit by publishing a pamphlet entitled, “The Case Against The Little White Slaver” in 1914. In addition to what he saw as a dulling of the senses, (“with every breath of cigarette smoke [boys] inhale imbecility and exhale manhood”), he quite correctly saw that smoking debilitated such major organs as the heart, kidneys and lungs. There may have been more than a whiff of old fashioned moralistic reform coming off his jeremiads against the evils of tobacco, and especially alcohol, but nearly a century on, in the age of smoke free living and bottled spring water replacing alcohol for millions, there is still a pervasive societal echo from his pronouncements on these matters.
Profile Image for Laurel.
312 reviews1 follower
November 22, 2019
The book I'm reading isn't this one, but it isn't listed. It's actually called The New Henry Ford. The author is Allan L. Benson copyright 1923. I guess it's so old it's out of circulation. My mother died at age 95 and left me her books, and I've been reading them. Henry Ford is a fascinating character. He calls people that are dependent upon social programs "Parasites". (page 254)
He and Thomas Edison were friends. At one time they were discussing how machines are changing the world. Henry Ford asked "These Automatic Machines only require 2 men to do the job of 43 men. What will happen then?
Edison's answer, " Wages for those two can be very high, then. A son can be paid enough to take care of his mother and father after they age 50 years old without considering them a burden."
Profile Image for Tomas.
44 reviews1 follower
December 6, 2020
Šio žmogaus gyvenimas pasirodė įdomesnis nei maniau iki tol. Daug įdomių faktų, susijusiu ne tik su automobilizmu, tačiau su tuo laikmečiu apskritai. Vietomis buvo sunku sekti Pavardes ir datas (labai jau jos persipynusios), tačiau bendrai knyga patiko. Galbūt tikėjausi tik šiek tiek kitokio rašymo stiliaus.
30 reviews
June 3, 2024
Readable; lucidly lays out the many incongruities in Ford's persona and activities. Also persuasively argues for its subject's extraordinary impact on the economic and cultural life of America in the first half of the 20th century.
5 reviews
May 24, 2018
Great read. Now appreciate the flow of time and chance and opportunity to excel in any field.
6 reviews
March 7, 2017
This is a book that describes America's great car entrepreneur. This book also truly explored the life of Henry Ford. This book describes about his childhood, and his great successes and flaws. I truly like how Ford employed African-Americans, because at this time (before 1950s) this was not highly accepted. This book also explores on family life, such as relationships, and especially death. This book has higher vocabulary, which may be difficult to comprehend, and lots of pages with lots of words.
26 reviews3 followers
October 7, 2016
This is the better version in the two versions of Henry Ford biography.
The author has done quite a thorough research on myiad perspectives of Ford's time and life.
The famed Toyota Production Method TPM pales in comparison with the invention scene of Ford assembly. Eli Goldrat's theory is just stolen from Ford.
Yet it intrigues me to read the various works of Orlando Jay Smith. And the Protocol of the elders of zion as well.
1 review
January 6, 2014
i thought the book was good . In seemed that he had a hard life growing up and also found out that he was not the first to make a engine .the first person to figher that out was a man in germany witch at the moment i can not thik of his name. But in the united states he was foer first to come up with it so in many ways he was the fiorst to build the amarican car.
Profile Image for James Knight.
13 reviews
September 15, 2013
Extremely revealing that great inventors have personalities that are not always nice. The book is a fast read and will provide excellent insight into one the nations most interesting and successful businesses.
Profile Image for Pat Dewey.
32 reviews
February 13, 2014
To quote... "A cross section of the mind of Henry Ford would reveal some striking contrasts. A complex mind of strength and weakness, of wisdom and foolishness, in which the shallows are more pronouced because of the profound depths which lie between ... there is no middle ground to his makeup."
3 reviews
November 10, 2015
I personally loved this story and it tells how America became a big car industery. This company blazed a trail for Chevy and General Motors.This story is a true story that tells about the hard ships of owning a bissness.
928 reviews
October 7, 2015
I thought this book was an easy read about Henry Ford, not one groaning under the weight of too many facts. However, I would liked to have known more about the personal life and opinions of the Ford family, especially his wife, who stood up to him on at least 2 occasions reported in the book.

1 review
August 17, 2016
This book was a really good book and had very good lessons for young adults and youth. From economics to family this book had a verity of lessons as well. I would recommend this to anyone that has any sort of interest into cars and Herny Ford.
Profile Image for Curtin Matthews.
5 reviews
Read
September 30, 2016
This book is very good. I would recommend this book to anyone that takes an interest in history. I enjoyed this book because it has to do with my most favorite person. Lastly this book has lots of facts in it and would help when writing a biography.
Profile Image for Rosa Ramôa.
1,570 reviews84 followers
January 13, 2016
"O insucesso é apenas uma oportunidade para recomeçar com mais inteligência".
(Henry Ford)
Profile Image for Ayibatari Ogounga.
154 reviews2 followers
Read
March 10, 2019
Bennett's thugs beat a projectionist at a union film showing, this was so funny. Some contradictions exist here, was Henry financially inept giving a department a bucket of cash to buy what was necessary or was he a survivor of the great depression of 1933 by managing money with a firm hand. Then again the man Henry changed over the years adapting to the economic climate.
M-7 anti-gun detector.interesting
He won foot races in his seventies
Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews

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