Henry Ford A Pictorial Biography by Jeanine M Head & William S Pretzer

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Soft Cover Reflections from lights on some photos

84 pages

CONTENTS

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION5

PART ONE: The Personal Henry Ford6

PART TWO: Henry Ford, The Industrialist26

PART THREE: Henry Ford, The Product Innovator46

PART FOUR: The Public Henry Ford60

CONCLUSION84

INTRODUCTION

Henry Ford was born in 1863, in the middle of the American Civil War, and he died in 1947, just after the end of World War II. He was born a farmboy and grew up to be one of the richest industrialists in the world. He developed a successful internal combustion engine automobile and he popularized mass production, assembly-line methods of manufacturing.

Historians have not been very kind to Henry Ford. A recent economic history of the United States (Stuart Bruchey, Enterprise: The Dynamic Economy of a Free People, 1990) by a respected historian says of him:

Barely literate, bigoted, and ruthless in his labor relations (said to be easily the worst in the auto industry), a man ignorant of the complexities of worlds beyond his chosen domain, Ford was nevertheless an extremely important innovator. He may have been the greatest manufacturer of all time.

Warranted or not, such conclusions reflect widely held historical judgments about the impact of this man's life and color the way we reconstruct our national value system. However, the essence of a person's life is almost always more complicated than the conclusions offered by historians.

All biographies are liable to distortions based on author's biases and feelings toward the subject. Moreover, even the written form of biography imposes limitations. Biographies often take the form of presenting chronologically organized events with limited ability to connect disparate elements of the person's life. Narrative histories rely upon the sequential presentation of facts, descriptions, and conclusions, often lacking the ability to pay attention to the seemingly irrelevant activity or personal detail that breathe life into and make comprehensible an individual's actions. Analytical histories using biographical stories often detail one or two key elements or accomplishments in a person's life in order to draw lessons applicable to an idea or issue that is the author's real focus. Henry Ford's accomplishments and attitudes are so intertwined with national mythologies that his biography is often presented in one of these ways.

Drawing on the more than 450,000 images relating to the Ford family and Ford Motor Company in the archives of Henry Ford Museum & Greenfield Village, this book conveys the basic facts of Henry Ford's life while demonstrating how both adulation and controversy surrounded him. While this pictorial biography embodies elements of each of the above kinds of histories, it is primarily an attempt to visualize the abstractions of past personalities, events, actions, and ideas. This volume is not exhaustive and it tries to avoid either criticizing or glorifying Henry Ford. It is an effort to see the world Henry Ford saw and the Henry Ford the world saw in order to understand how those images helped shape public impressions of him during his life and since.

For most of the twentieth century, the name Henry Ford has been one of the most recognized names in the world. His name has been associated with a variety of institutions and activities: he had a personal and family life; an occupation as a manufacturer and industrialist; a career as an automotive innovator; and a history of public activities. This booklet illustrates these four aspects of Henry Ford's life.

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