Why do American auto makers seem to go FUNNY IN THE HEAD?
And by "funny", I don’t necessarily mean "funny ha-ha".
[PLEASE NOTE: You may assume that a bold emphasis within a blockquote’s probably mine.]
YOU ARE NOW LEAVING THE PLANET! PLEASE KEEP HANDS AND ARMS INSIDE THE VEHICLE! ... Isn’t there be something to be said for very rich people being powerful enough to impose their twisted versions about the way things ought to be on the rest of us? (There’s no information available on that former Twitter executive in the spacesuit.) (Wikipedia / CC0)
“NEW TWITTER CEO AND SOLE DIRECTOR ELON MUSK SENT A COMPANYWIDE EMAIL TO REMAINING EMPLOYEES OF THE SOCIAL MEDIA BUSINESS ON WEDNESDAY, DEMANDING THEY COMMIT TO WORKING ‘LONG HOURS AT HIGH INTENSITY’ OR RECEIVE ‘THREE MONTHS OF SEVERANCE’
... if they did not consent to these conditions or support his vision for ‘Twitter 2.0.’”
That was on CNBC’s website last Thursday. It continued:
The companywide ultimatum, sent around midnight in San Francisco time and shared with CNBC by current Twitter employees, comes after Musk has already fired key Twitter executives, laid off half of Twitter’s full-time employees, and slashed the number of contractors working with the company without notice.
This week, he also fired veteran engineers at Twitter after they criticized him in public, or in the company’s internal Slack channels.
He probably had his reasons, but were they smart ones?
I mean, isn’t it just possible that some guy gets extremely rich and eventually goes weird and drives himself way the hell off the road?
Has this ever been known to happen? Here’s one example from history.
Back in the early part of the last century, many thought Henry Ford had totally lost it when he started barking out new orders:
1914 the Ford Motor Company announced that it would henceforth pay eligible workers a minimum wage of $5 a day (compared to an average of $2.34 for the industry) and would reduce the work day from nine hours to eight, thereby converting the factory to a three-shift day.
If you do the conversions, you see that $5 a day in 1914 would be about $149 a day in 2022.
Is that a lot? Well, with today’s manufacturing average hourly rate of $25.37, times eight hours, that should be about $203 per one day’s work. But still.
His system came to be known as “Fordism”, the “mass production of inexpensive goods coupled with high wages for workers. Ford had a global vision, with consumerism as the key to peace.”
Overnight Ford became a worldwide celebrity. People either praised him as a great humanitarian or excoriated him as a mad socialist.
Ford said humanitarianism had nothing to do with it. Previously profit had been based on paying wages as low as workers would take and pricing cars as high as the traffic would bear. Ford, on the other hand, stressed low pricing (the Model T cost $950 in 1908 and $290 in 1927) in order to capture the widest possible market and then met the price by volume and efficiency.
Ford’s success in making the automobile a basic necessity turned out to be but a prelude to a more widespread revolution. The development of mass-production techniques, which enabled the company eventually to turn out a Model T every 24 seconds; the frequent reductions in the price of the car made possible by economies of scale; and the payment of a living wage that raised workers above subsistence and made them potential customers for, among other things, automobiles—these innovations changed the very structure of society.
But the man had even bigger visions:
During its first five years the Ford Motor Company produced eight different models, and by 1908 its output was 100 cars a day. The stockholders were ecstatic; Ford was dissatisfied and looked toward turning out 1,000 a day.
The stockholders seriously considered court action to stop him from using profits to expand.
In 1909 Ford, who owned 58 percent of the stock, announced that he was only going to make one car in the future, the Model T. The only thing the minority stockholders could do to protect their dividends from his all-consuming imagination was to take him to court, which Horace and John Dodge did in 1916.
The Dodge brothers! Heard of them?
The Dodge brothers, who formerly had supplied chassis to Ford but were now manufacturing their own car while still holding Ford stock, sued Ford for what they claimed was his reckless expansion and for reducing prices of the company’s product, thereby diverting money from stockholders’ dividends.
The brothers won.
In 1919 the court said that, while Ford’s sentiments about his employees and customers were nice, a business is for the profit of its stockholders.
HENRY AND CLARA FORD, OUT FOR A SPIN? … Maybe not, given that his hands seem to be in his lap rather than on the steering thingy. They’re in his very first experimental model, the “Quadricycle”. (Wikipedia / Public Domain)
Irked that a court could allow minority stockholders to tell him how to run his own company, he bought them out and started a new company,
... a behemoth owned solely by his family that controlled every stage of the process, from ore mines and Great Lakes freighters to steel mills to forests where the wood was grown for the dashboards, with the sawdust waste sold as charcoal briquets under his own Kingsford brand name.
While Ford obviously had a pretty big head, he was still an idealist of sorts. He didn’t like wars. He thought they were wasteful and blamed them on “greedy financiers who sought profit in human destruction”.
In 1939, he went so far as to claim that the torpedoing of U.S. merchant ships by German submarines was the result of conspiratorial activities undertaken by financier war-makers.
The financiers to whom he was referring was Ford's code for Jews; he had also accused Jews of fomenting the First World War.
Once WWII did break out, his pacifism led him to insist he wouldn’t do business with belligerents, but he eventually ended up dealing with and selling to both sides, and when asked by FDR in 1940, he created a factory near Detroit just to build thousands of B-24 bombers.
Ford was a prominent early member of the America First Committee against World War II involvement, but was forced to resign from its executive board when his involvement proved too controversial.
Yet Ford’s world-famous antisemitism, while openly stated, sometimes seemed hedged and qualified:
Every year, Henry Ford sent a new Model T as a gift to his neighbor, Rabbi Dr. Leo Franklin. They lived on the same street in Detroit, and when Ford learned that the spiritual steward of Temple Beth El needed a new car, he added the rabbi to the list of Americans who had a Model T ...
In 1920, however, Franklin sent back the latest gift with a letter of explaining why.
Ford had begun publishing a series of antisemitic articles in his newspaper, The Dearborn Independent. It ran for nearly two years – 91 consecutive weeks. The series was derived from “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” although some of its headlines blamed Jews for domestic American issues, such as the “Moron Music” of jazz. Ford later published them as an internationally bestselling four-book series titled “The International Jew.”
But Ford never understood why the articles upset the rabbi, according to an unconventional new film, “10 Questions for Henry Ford” ...
What was he thinking?
But even if the rabbi didn’t like his stuff, at least Adolf Hitler did. He even presented Ford with the Grand Cross of the Order of the German Eagle, the highest award the Nazis gave to foreigners.
Speaking in 1931 to a Detroit News reporter, Hitler said "I regard Henry Ford as my inspiration," explaining his reason for keeping a life-size portrait of Ford behind his desk.
Steven Watts wrote that Hitler "revered" Ford, proclaiming that "I shall do my best to put his theories into practice in Germany", and modeling the Volkswagen Beetle, the people's car, on the Model T. ...
Historians say Hitler distributed Ford’s books and articles throughout Germany, stoking the hatred that helped fuel the Holocaust. ... While these articles explicitly condemned pogroms and violence against Jews, they blamed the Jews themselves for provoking them.
According to some trial testimony, none of this work was written by Ford, but he allowed his name to be used as an author. Friends and business associates have said they warned Ford about the contents of the Independent and that he probably never read the articles (he claimed he only read the headlines).
WHERE DID ALL HIS HATE COME FROM?
These excerpts come from the Benson Ford Research Center, part of the Ford Museum in Dearborn (aka, “The Henry Ford”):
HENRY FORD AND ANTI-SEMITISM: A COMPLEX STORY
As with most famous people, Henry Ford was complex and had traits and took actions that were laudatory as well as troublesome. The most controversial and least admirable aspect of Ford’s career was his descent into anti-Semitism.
Convinced that “bankers” and “the Jews” were responsible for a whole range of things he didn’t like, from the world war to short skirts to jazz music, Ford used his newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, to carry on an active anti-Semitic campaign. Between 1920 and 1922 a series of articles denounced all things Jewish. ...
Why would Ford agree to publish such a thing?
Many have accused Ford’s personal secretary, Ernest Liebold, of being the source of the campaign, and Liebold’s anti-Semitic views are well documented. E.G. Pipp resigned as editor in protest over the series. However, William Cameron, who then became editor of the Independent, was an enthusiastic supporter of the publication of the anti-Semitic diatribes.
However, Ford’s own attitudes towards Jews were the major reason for the publication of “The International Jew.”His anti-Semitic beliefs formed along several strands from his upbringing, attitudes, and personal beliefs. They were also influenced by current populist political sensibilities that advocated a distrust of financiers, bankers and institutions of economic power.
A common stereotype at the time led some people to assume that Jews controlled the international banking system; that belief may have fed his anti-Jewish feelings.
Ford’s pacifism probably formed a second strand. His crusade against World War I convinced him that international Jewish bankers were fomenting the war. Here again, the stereotype noted above may have convinced him that international Jewish bankers supported the war for personal gain.
Lastly, Ford’s growing cultural conservatism, anti-urbanism, and nostalgia for the rural past formed an important third strand. Ford saw Jews present in everything that he viewed as modern and distasteful—contemporary music, movies, theater, new dress styles, and loosening social mores.
Ford even had an explanation for the 1919 Black Sox World Series fixing scandal, according to Alan Zeitlin:
Despite not being convicted, it was widely thought that the notorious Arnold Rothstein had a hand in the Black Sox World Series Scandal in 1919, where players took money to throw games. The film [“Jews and Baseball“] notes how Henry Ford wrote on May 22, 1920:
“If fans wish to know the trouble with American baseball they have it in three words—too much Jew.”
It cannot be missed that the new cosmopolitan behaviors Henry Ford found himself distaining — the “loosening social mores”, the new “moron” music of jazz, migration from farms to cities — was at least partly due to his own encouragement to get everybody out driving around in cars to learn about their world.
But once he saw what his products had done to the world, he tried to walk it back, including by returning America’s musical tastes and customs to what he thought were its roots:
As it turns out, there’s an unusual reason why so many American students spend their formative years [in schools] learning to do-si-do. ...
To understand how square dancing became a state-mandated means of celebrating Americana, it’s necessary to go back to Henry Ford, the founder of Ford Motor Vehicles. Ford hated jazz; he hated the Charleston ... and believed that Jewish people invented jazz as part of a nefarious plot to corrupt the masses and take over the world ...
In volume three of Ford’s The International Jew series, written in 1921, he writes:
“Many people have wondered whence come the waves upon waves of musical slush that invade decent homes and set the young people of this generation imitating the drivel of morons. Popular music is a Jewish monopoly. Jazz is a Jewish creation. The mush, slush, the sly suggestion, the abandoned sensuousness of sliding notes, are of Jewish origin.”
Whether or not Henry Ford literally wrote that, he allowed whoever did to sign Ford’s name to it.
Did he ever apologize, you ask? Well, yes, even though he apparently didn’t even write that himself. Here’s the story from Haaretz:
In 1924, Ford decided to focus on a Jewish plot to control America’s farm-food distribution system.
He began with an article with the catchy title of “Jewish Exploitation of the American Farmer's Organizations: Monopoly Traps Operate Under the Guise of Marketing Associations," which explored the alleged conspiracy of Jewish farmers, lawyers, merchants and others behind the cooperative agricultural system.
At the heart of this conspiracy was Aaron Sapiro (1854-1959), a former rabbinical student-turned-California lawyer who had been highly successful in organizing farm cooperatives, first in his state and later nationally. ...
According to the Independent, the Sapiro Plan had "turned millions away from the pockets of the men who till the soil and into the hands of the Jews and their followers."
This was too much for the headstrong Sapiro, and he decided to sue the business titan for libel.
The night before Ford was supposed to testify, his car was run off the road (by a Studebaker! Oh, the indignity!!) and was too shaken up to testify, but for unrelated reasons, the judge declared a mistrial and a new trial was announced:
Before it could commence, however, Ford’s people secretly made contact with Louis Marshall, a prominent Jewish attorney and one of the founders of the American Jewish Committee. ...
Ford asked Marshall to draw up a letter of apology and explanation for him to sign. In it Ford was to ask for forgiveness for having published the “Protocols,” which he acknowledged, "have been demonstrated, as I learn, to be gross forgeries."
A “deeply mortified” Ford, in the letter prepared by Marshall, revealed that he had learned that "Jews generally, and particularly those of the country, not only resent these publications as promoting anti-Semitism, but regard me as their enemy." Ford expressed his admiration for the Jewish people and their “unselfish interest in public welfare...”
Did Jews themselves buy this turnaround?
In general, Jewish organizations and journals responded with enthusiasm and credulity to Ford’s about-face.
So happy did some Jews appear to be to have Henry Ford in their corner that even Louis Marshall, the man who had engineered the apology, expressed his amazement to a colleague at the willingness of some of his co-religionists to “declare … a Mordecai” someone whom “only last week … was regarded as a Hamen.”
(At first, I didn’t quite catch the meaning of that last reference, which turns out to be a cool Jewish thing. Feel free to look it up here.)
HOW FAR OUT OF THE MAINSTREAM OF HIS TIMES WERE FORD’S OPINIONS ABOUT THE JEWS?
Well, some of the same questions were asked about his good friend, Thomas Edison, but while the two weren’t exactly singing from the same page on this, they did seem to share some of the same stereotypes, according to the Edison papers at Rutgers:
Ford Motor Company executive Harry Bennett wrote, “I only saw Ford ashamed of his bigotry before one man, and that was Thomas Edison . . . More than once I heard Edison rebuke Mr. Ford for his prejudice.”
Bennett’s statement was complimentary towards Edison, but this does not mean the inventor was entirely free of anti-Semitism. Many of the inventor’s remarks suggested that he was influenced by popular Jewish stereotypes.
Edison believed that in America where the Jew has freedom, “…in time he will cease to be so clannish” and not take advantage of others in the business world.
Even as Edison’s comments continued to stereotype Jews, it is important to note that he seemed to support Jewish emancipation. In a July 1916 letter, the inventor wrote that the Jew will receive justice “. . . when religious superstition dies out and all nations become republics.”
For some context of how out-of-the-ordinary Ford’s views were, we need to realize that he got a whole lot of public pushback because of them:
[t]he ADL mobilized prominent Jews and non-Jews to publicly oppose Ford's message. They formed a coalition of Jewish groups for the same purpose and raised constant objections in the Detroit press.
Before leaving his presidency early in 1921, Woodrow Wilson joined other leading Americans in a statement that rebuked Ford and others for their antisemitic campaign. A boycott against Ford products by Jews and liberal Christians also had an impact ... likely, or at least partly, motivated by a business that was slumping as a result of his antisemitism, repelling potential buyers of Ford cars.
Up until the apology, a considerable number of dealers, who had been required to make sure that buyers of Ford cars received the Independent, bought up and destroyed copies of the newspaper rather than alienate customers.
But whatever his bad relations with Jews, Ford was always known to be volatile, especially in business, and that may have finally caught up with him.
When Edsel Ford died of cancer in 1943, aged only 49, Henry Ford nominally resumed control of the company, but a series of strokes in the late 1930s had left him increasingly debilitated, and his mental ability was fading. Ford was increasingly sidelined, and others made decisions in his name.
The company was controlled by a handful of senior executives led by Charles Sorensen, an important engineer and production executive at Ford; and Harry Bennett, the chief of Ford's Service Unit, Ford's paramilitary force that spied on, and enforced discipline upon, Ford employees. ...
THE BATTLE OF THE OVERPASS IN 1937 ... Those are Harry Bennett’s goons, from the Ford Motors’ “Service Department”, coming from the left to beat up United Auto Workers (UAW) union organizers on the right, including Walter Reuther and Richard Frankensteen. The thugs later tried but failed to seize these photo plates, the publication of which hurt the reputation of Ford and helped the union. (Wikipedia / Public Domain)
Ford's incompetence led to discussions in Washington about how to restore the company, whether by wartime government fiat, or by instigating a coup among executives and directors.
Nothing happened until 1945 when, with bankruptcy a serious risk, Ford's wife Clara and Edsel's widow Eleanor confronted him and demanded he cede control of the company to his grandson Henry Ford II.
They threatened to sell off their stock, which amounted to three quarters of the company's total shares, if he refused. Ford was reportedly infuriated, but had no choice but to give in.
The young man took over and, as his first act of business, fired Harry Bennett.
IT’S NOT THAT HENRY FORD’S HISTORY IS REPEATING ITSELF WITH ELON MUSK — I’VE HEARD NO EVIDENCE THAT MUSK IS A RACIST BIGOT, FOR EXAMPLE — BUT MUCH OF THE MESSIANIC RISK-TAKING IS STILL THERE.
For instance, in the mid-1920s, there was tough competition from General Motors:
With Model T sales starting to slide, Ford was forced to relent and approve work on a successor model, shutting down production for 18 months. During this time, Ford constructed a massive new assembly plant at River Rouge for the new Model A, which launched in 1927.
And just as Ford did once he realized his investors could be more of a hindrance than a help, so did Musk at the end of last month:
Mr. Musk, who did not end up taking Tesla private, is doing so with Twitter.
As part of his $44 billion acquisition of the social media service, which closed on Thursday, he is delisting the company’s stock and taking it out of the hands of public shareholders.
Making Twitter a private company gives Mr. Musk some advantages. Unlike publicly traded companies, privately held firms do not have to make quarterly public disclosures about their performance. They are also subject to less regulatory scrutiny and can be more tightly controlled by an owner. That means Mr. Musk can make over Twitter — including tweaking the platform’s content rules, its finances and its priorities — without having to consider the worries of the investing public.
By the way, for more doing-it-your-own-way radical weirdness that comes with cutting stockholders loose?
Ford did not believe in accountants; he amassed one of the world's largest fortunes without ever having his company audited under his administration.
Without an accounting department, Ford had no way of knowing exactly how much money was being taken in and spent each month, and the company's bills and invoices were reportedly guessed at by weighing them on a scale.
BUT MUSK IS JUST FOLLOWING A PLAYBOOK HE HAS USED BEFORE.
According to The New York Times — “Firing people. Talking of bankruptcy. Telling workers to be ‘hard core” — he’s acting much the same as he did with both Tesla and SpaceX.
Elon Musk was sleeping at the office. He dismissed employees and executives at will. And he lamented his company was on the verge of bankruptcy.
That was back in 2018 and the company was Tesla, as Mr. Musk’s electric automaker struggled to build its mass-market vehicle, the Model 3. ...
Over the years, Mr. Musk has developed a playbook for managing his companies ... through periods of pain, employing shock treatment and alarmism and pushing his workers and himself to put aside their families and friends to spend all their energy on his mission.
Since late last month, the 51-year-old has laid off 50 percent of Twitter’s 7,500 employees and accepted the resignations of 1,200 or more. On Monday, he began another round of layoffs, two people said. He tweeted that he was sleeping at Twitter’s offices in San Francisco. And he has applied mission-driven language ...
David Deak, who worked at Tesla from 2014 to 2016 as a senior engineering manager overseeing a supply chain for battery materials, said Mr. Musk “clearly thrives in existential circumstances.”
He added, “He quasi creates them to light the fire under everybody.”
Will that work again?
The similarities between Mr. Musk’s approach to Twitter and what he did at Tesla and SpaceX are evident, added Tammy Madsen, a management professor at Santa Clara University. But it’s unclear if he will find the means to motivate employees at a social media company as he did with workers whose quests were to move people away from gas-powered cars or send humans into space.
“At Tesla and SpaceX, the approach has always been high risk, high reward,” Dr. Madsen said. “Twitter has been high risk, but the question is: What is the reward that comes out of it?”
BUT HERE’S THE THING ...
I SAW SOMETHING SIMILAR IN ACTION WHILE PART OF THE SMALL CROWD THAT LAUNCHED TED TURNER’S CNN BACK IN THE SPRING OF 1980.
A little while before we even showed up to work, the crisis that worried some newcomers was that Ted Turner was lost at sea, competing in the Fastnet yacht race off Europe, through a storm that would eventually kill fifteen sailors and four spectators, but Ted not only survived, he sailed to victory in his aptly-named yacht, Tenacious.
While many CNN workers came straight from college, others came with experience in TV and journalism, taking the risk of quitting our jobs and moving across the country.
Why do that? At least some of us were inspired to get in on the ground floor of a 24-hour TV news operation, something that had never existed before.
And yes, oddly — while we were reluctant to admit it — we were likely inspired by the success of Turner himself, a rich, loud, crazy-talking drunken sailor from Atlanta who had made himself famous buying a satellite uplink and using it to transmit old movies and Braves baseball games out of his tiny Atlanta TV station to the whole country — that is, when he wasn’t skippering some yacht to victory in the America’s Cup.
We all knew we were going to be working for months for 16-hour days in a row, probably doing more than one job at a time and making very little money at it (straight pay, no overtime), and that we were setting ourselves up for a likely career failure, but also knew that if it succeeded, we’d have spent at least part of our otherwise miserable lives doing something big and historical.
Maybe what it just comes down to is this:
Henry Ford, a successful car maker with some fairly unique business ideas but also some plans for the world — some quaint, but some dreadful — made himself into one of the richest persons in the world in the process, and maybe once you rise to a rarified altitude where oxygen has to work overtime to get to your brain, your oversized ego kicks in and decides to indulge some of its own whims, and nobody quite knows how to handle them.
And it seems to be the same with the similarly annoying Elon Musk.
Maybe a bit more self-consciously, he’s shaking things up so hard that he risks doing damage to something, and seems to be doing this intentionally. Some speculate he might be destroying Twitter just to get back at the previous owners for giving him such a hard time, but despite his public image, I don’t think he really thinks that way. Hell, he might just turn out wreaking less damage to the planet than Henry Ford did!
Still, just assuming his intentions are noble, will his efforts work? And even if so, will the result be worth all this racket?
About SpaceX, Musk has been quoted as saying his purpose is, “making life multiplanetary in order to ensure the long-term survival of consciousness.”
Okay, survival of the whole concept of all living things is one thing, but how such an inspiring message as that might work on your average Twitter employee to help save this social media platform is open to debate.
But, hey — to misquote an old idiom — “You pays your money, you takes your chances!”
