The Crank That Set the World Rolling

Henry Ford helped usher in a new world—one he could never bring himself to embrace.

It's easy to imagine many of yesterday's tycoons as modern CEOs, but not Henry Ford. His anti-Semitism would get him booted out of the boardroom. His hiring of an army of bullies to terrorize his workforce would put him at odds with the best practices they teach at Harvard Business School . And his decision to cashier just about every executive who contributed to his success would tend to irritate the shareholders.

As it happens, Ford didn't have shareholders for most of the time he ran the Ford Motor Co., F -0.63% and he didn't want them. The man who founded one of America's iconic companies hated investors, as well as accountants and bankers—anybody implicated in the financial arts. Just as paradoxically, the industrialist who, as he himself said, invented the modern age despised modernity and built a museum village to commemorate the past. He was oddly oblivious to style—cars, to Ford, were all about the engine. And though his opinions could be noxious and retrograde, he was often ahead of his time. He made a point of hiring thousands of African-Americans, and he had surprisingly 21st-century notions of health, frowning on tobacco and meat and favoring fruit and legumes. He was also a mechanical genius.

Born just weeks after the Battle of Gettysburg in the then-rural community of Dearborn, Mich., Ford detested the drudgery of farm life. As a boy, he could take apart and reassemble a watch so that it worked better. As a young man, he recognized when few others did that neither steam nor electricity was suited for the horseless carriage; gasoline, he knew, was the trick. Yet he was hardly a prodigy. His first two companies failed. He was 28 when he gave up farm life for good and nearly 40 when he launched the Ford Motor Co. He was a "visionary" but not a deep thinker, a sparely educated man who proudly declaimed that history was "bunk" and in whom ordinary Americans saw an image of themselves. This was true even when Ford had millions in the bank (sagely, he refused to trust his money to the stock market).

It was in fact Ford's common touch that enabled him to revolutionize the emergent auto industry. In the early years of the 20th century, car makers focused on building playthings for the rich. Ford saw the opportunity for the masses. He relentlessly cut prices and just as relentlessly cut costs. Nothing in the factory—not even the floor sweepings—went to waste. With the Model T, he achieved a kind of utilitarian perfection, a hardy, affordable motor car targeted at the average American.

A nearly identical portrait of Henry Ford emerges from Richard Snow's "I Invented the Modern Age" and Vincent Curcio's "Henry Ford." Neither author proposes a new interpretation or provides fresh facts, but it doesn't matter: Ford is a fascinating and infuriating character whether the subject is familiar or not. Mr. Curcio, in a brief introduction, suggests that his mission is to reconcile Ford's "malignancy" with his "greatness." Mr. Snow, whose subtitle is "The Rise of Henry Ford," focuses on Ford's early and better years, culminating in the development of the Model T.

Mr. Snow doesn't play down his subject's bigotry or his "cranky certainties," which ripened with age, but he concentrates on Ford's inventive period, when he was not only designing cars but also inventing the parts that went into them. The Detroit that Mr. Snow describes was so rich with the creative chaos of hundreds of would-be auto entrepreneurs, from the Dodge brothers to James Ward Packard, that it reminds us of Silicon Valley in the early days of the personal computer.

Though we think of cars evolving from the horse and buggy, Mr. Snow traces their mechanical lineage to the bicycle. Ford's first attempt at a genuine four-wheel vehicle, which he called the Quadricycle, used valves adapted from a steam engine and didn't have a reverse gear. Alas, it couldn't fit through the door of the woodshed Ford was using for a garage, so he used an ax to smash his way out.

The Model T improved on such predecessors with a series of small refinements (such as cushioned seats), making it suitable for family transportation and capable of going 40-45 mph. Soon Ford was developing the assembly line, which would boost production from 20,000 Model T's in 1910 to 600,000 six years later. Mass production, Mr. Snow shows, was really a revolution in machine tools. It flowed from Ford's preference for simplicity—one tool, one job. The "T" is itself a protagonist in Mr. Snow's often lyrical book. It collapsed distances and created new notions of spare time. It also nurtured a generation of home mechanics.

As Mr. Snow meticulously relates, the owner of a "T" had to crawl under the chassis and lube it up each day, and that was just for starters. With its "high unlovely body and pugnacious snout," the Model T became the object of jokes, songs and a new American folklore. It got you from one place to the next but—like the horse it was replacing—you had to coax it along. Writers of the era expressed their frustration with the car but also a perverse affection for it. E.B. White would recall: "I can still feel my old Ford nuzzling me at the curb, as though looking for an apple in my pocket."

There was less to love, though, about its woolly-headed creator. He often showed a mean streak, a callous indifference. Even his syntax was odd—overly concise, as if he couldn't be bothered. Yet as unfeeling as he seemed, his pithy speech had a way of getting to the heart of matters. On losing his beloved mother, at age 12, Henry said simply, "The house was like a watch without a mainspring."

Ford's instincts could be commonsensical, or they could miss by a mile. He demanded that employees live virtuously and sent social workers to snoop on them, and indeed there is evidence that, for a time, he uplifted his workers' lives. But prosperity drove him batty. Somehow, Ford had the idea that his shareholders—any shareholders—were "parasites." He soon bought them out—after he waged a titanic battle to avoid paying dividends. In 1914 (as if to divert the company's cash from investors), he doubled minimum pay to $5 a day. That landmark wage garnered headlines around the U.S. and worried the capitalists of the day, including the editors of this newspaper, who fretted that Ford might be applying "Biblical or spiritual principles in the field where they do not belong."

To Ford, business was a service; if it were done well, profits would accrue. By putting the customer, or the employee, first, Ford rejected the obsession with shareholder returns that, much later, brought companies such as Enron to grief. But homilies do not add up to a strategy. With Ford, simplicity could be vice as much as virtue—an excuse for ignoring (or mistreating) associates and avoiding hard decisions.

In the 1920s, Ford was as celebrated and quoted as any American. But his business was slipping. He refused to upgrade the "T" for years, and so he gradually let General Motors GM -0.73% eat his lunch. When Edsel, Ford's reasonable and likable son, commissioned an improved four-door version of the "T," Henry paced around the new model and then grabbed hold of a door and ripped it off. Another time, an engineer was developing a prototype for a six-cylinder engine. Ford summoned him to a conveyor leading to a scrap heap. There was his engine, destined for oblivion.

Mr. Curcio suggests that Ford's sourness began during World War I, when he suddenly felt an impulse to preach to the masses. His cause was peace—not a bad cause, but Ford pursued it with his usual black-and-white view of the world. (Every question had only one possible point of view: his own.) In December 1915 he chartered a ship to Europe to persuade the belligerents to lay down their arms. But the kaiser, just then, was preoccupied with the fighting in Serbia. Ford won plaudits for trying, but his peace ship was ridiculed by the smart set as the pipedream it was.

This humiliation, Mr. Curcio suggests, paved the way for Ford's later missteps. He was already quarreling with James Couzens, the business genius who, according to Mr. Curcio, "was just as responsible" for the company's success as Ford. By 1915, Courzens was gone. The same fate would attach to William Knudsen, the manager-producer who in 1921 would decamp for GM and build the Chevrolet.

Ford's most troubling wrong turn was into anti-Semitism. Having acquired the Dearborn Independent, a weekly newspaper, in 1920, he proceeded to publish a series titled "The International Jew" that, for 91 weeks running, offered a diet of conspiracy theory, religious libel and lies. A typical fiction published by the Independent was that Jews, supposedly stalwarts of hard money, assassinated Abraham Lincoln in retaliation for his issuance of inflationary greenbacks. The series gained a wide audience, even in Europe; Hitler was among its admirers.

Like Mr. Snow, Mr. Curcio devotes a fair amount of attention to the mystery of Ford's bigotry. He understates, I think, the degree of provincial intolerance in turn-of-the-century America. Populist farmers hated bankers, and anti-Semitism was common. Ford saw Jews not only as financiers (damnable in itself) but as carriers of the virus of modernity—jazz, flappers, moral looseness. However common such views were, Ford broke a code by venting them in public, which made establishment America uncomfortable.

In time, Ford apologized, though it is unclear whether he read the offending articles in his own newspaper or his signed apology. It is a measure of Ford's obtuseness that, when a rabbi who was a neighbor of Ford's (and his only Jewish friend) returned the Model T that Ford had sent him as a gift, the car maker inquired: "Has something come between us?"

Both "I Invented the Modern Age" and "Henry Ford" are well-researched. Mr. Snow has a conversational, highly readable style. Describing the famous scripted Ford logo, designed in 1902, he observes: "This looked pretty good to everyone back then, and you'll see it if you go outdoors today." Summing up Ford's effect on society, Mr. Snow writes that the Model T "left us the landscape we know today—gas stations, suburbs, parkways." Mr. Curcio's prose is more dense, but his book is studded with sharp descriptions, such as when he notes that Ford's thought processes "jumped from one subject to another without prelude," making his utterances "cryptic to the point of incoherence."

His story darkens considerably during the Depression, as the Ford Motor Co. racks up losses and Henry Ford's goons savagely beat up union organizers. Only when Ford's "great believer," his wife, Clara, threatens to leave does he sign an agreement with the United Auto Workers union.

Among the sadder victims of Henry's malignancy is Edsel, who cannot quite assert himself with his father. With Edsel's death—from cancer, at age 49—Henry increasingly entrusts authority to a former prize fighter, Harry Bennett, who commands personal shock troops to run the plant his way. Henry Ford II, the founder's grandson—being groomed for the top job, which he was to inherit—was so fearful of Bennett that he carried a gun on the premises.

The patriarch would die, at 83, with $26.5 million in the bank and a pocket knife in his trousers. He was not really so simple, or so one concludes from both Mr. Snow and Mr. Curio, and there is probably no reconciling his greatness and his malignancy. He had both.

—Mr. Lowenstein is the author of "The End of Wall Street" and "Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist."