One Summer: America, 1927 (36 page)

Eventually, Ford appointed a Scottish-born manager named Archibald Johnston, who was intelligent and able and made many belated improvements. Shops and a school, better housing, and a clean water supply were all provided. He and his estate managers even managed to get seven hundred thousand rubber trees growing, but only at the cost of keeping them constantly fumigated against insects and diseases. Even so, workers had to be sent out to pick caterpillars off the trees by hand. The costs were out of all proportion to any possible profits. At the same time, the onset of the Great Depression meant that demand and prices both slumped; then, during the Second World War, artificial rubber was developed. In 1945, after nearly twenty years of failed efforts, Ford gave up on its Amazonian dream and essentially gave back its jungle estates to the Brazilian government. Many estate employees didn’t know the Americans were pulling out until the day they departed. In an ultimate irony, the land was eventually taken over by the American company Cargill and today produces great quantities of soybeans, the agricultural product that Henry Ford esteemed above all others.

If things were going badly for Ford in Amazonia, in Detroit they were going even worse. For years, Ford’s son and heir, Edsel, had argued that the Model T should be retired and replaced with something more stylish, but his father more or less reflexively dismissed almost everything Edsel ever said. Indeed, Henry devoted much of his life to humiliating his son. Although he had appointed Edsel president of the company in 1919, when Edsel was just twenty-five years old, Henry routinely belittled Edsel in front of others or countermanded his orders. Once when Edsel had a new set of coke ovens built at the River Rouge factory, Henry waited until the work was finished and then ordered them taken down.

But now with sales plummeting Henry had to acknowledge, if not exactly admit, that the Model T had had its day. On May 26, while the world was in the grip of Lindbergh mania, the Ford Motor Company produced
what it claimed was its 15 millionth Model T (in fact, it was at least number 15,348,781, if not more—no one really knew), and immediately stopped production in order to build an entirely new car. For an indefinite period, the world’s largest car manufacturer would have no new products to sell. Sixty thousand Ford employees in Detroit were immediately thrown out of work. Tens of thousands more at assembly plants across America and throughout the world were similarly idled. Most would be out of work for at least six months, many considerably longer. The shutdown was hard on Ford’s long-suffering dealers as well, particularly those with city showrooms with high rents. Many never fully recovered.

Work on the new car was done in the utmost secrecy. Not even the name was revealed. Many guessed that it would be called the Edison after Henry Ford’s close friend and hero the inventor Thomas Edison. Only a few within the company knew that it was to be called the Model A. Rumors abounded as to what was going on within the plant. Henry Ford was said to be living in the factory, sleeping on a camp bed in his office or in one of the workshops. (He wasn’t.) The amount of work involved in producing a new car from scratch was daunting, to say the least. It was almost certainly the biggest industrial retooling ever undertaken anywhere, before or since. The new car would contain 5,580 separate components, nearly all of them brand-new, so all had to be designed afresh—and not just the parts themselves but also several thousand new machines to make the parts. Some of these were enormous. Two power presses stood almost three stories high and weighed 240 tons each.

Remarkably, the company did almost all of the design and retooling without expert guidance, for Henry Ford hated experts and refused to employ them. As he put it in his 1924 book,
My Life and Work:
“I never employ an expert in full bloom. If ever I wanted to kill opposition by unfair means I would endow the opposition with experts.” Later he added: “We have most unfortunately found it necessary to get rid of a man as soon as he thinks himself an expert—because no one ever considers himself expert if he really knows his job.”

In consequence, Ford had no one on the payroll with advanced
engineering or design engineering skills. The company didn’t even have a proving ground—it tested its cars on public highways, to the dismay of the police. Ford’s chief tester, Ray Dahlinger, was a man of very few words. He offered only two terse verdicts on any car: it was either “damn good” or “no damn good.” “You could never get any details from him as to what was wrong or what needed improvement,” sighed one engineer. The company did have a stylish research lab, designed by Albert Kahn, but Henry Ford refused to invest in precision instruments or other useful tools. Much of the space was given over to his experiments with soybeans and other foods.

Ford’s refusal to employ experts was what had doomed Fordlandia and now threatened to doom the Model A. For years, the Model T had been criticized for having unreliable brakes. Many states were beginning to require annual safety inspections, and there were fears within Ford that Model T’s wouldn’t pass the examinations. Germany was reportedly considering banning the Model T outright because of concerns over the brakes’ safety. For that reason, Lawrence Sheldrick, Ford’s top engineer, made sure new, safer brakes were designed for the new Model A. Henry Ford bitterly resented the idea of outsiders telling him how to make his products, and for some time through the summer refused on principle to let the safer brakes be incorporated into the new car, slowing progress further.

As Charles E. Sorensen, a long-suffering Ford executive, later noted, no rational businessperson would have stopped production of the Model T without having a replacement model designed and ready to go into production. Putting the new car together on the fly, Sorensen calculated, added between $100 million and $200 million to the cost of the changeover. The additional costs of Henry Ford’s intransigence were beyond computation.

On July 26, four days before Henry Ford’s sixty-fourth birthday, General Motors declared first-half earnings of $129 million. No manufacturer had ever made that much money in six months—and that was on sales made
before
the Ford shutdown. Now with Ford making no cars at all, his competitors had the marketplace all to themselves. How well, or
even whether, Ford could recover from such an extended shutdown was a question many within the industry were beginning to ask.

The rest of the world was beside itself with curiosity to know what Henry Ford would come up with as a replacement for the Model T. What the world didn’t know was that many within Ford were just as curious to have that question answered themselves.

*
Wickham returned to England around 1910 to find himself a national hero. He was given a life annuity by the British Rubber Growers’ Association and knighted by the king.

19

Before the 1920s, Florida was known for citrus fruits and turpentine and not much else. A few rich people went there for the winter, but hardly anyone else considered the state a destination. But then the wider mass of Americans discovered the attractiveness of Florida’s climate and the pleasantness of its beaches, and it suddenly became desirable. In 1925, Florida repealed income and inheritance taxes, which made it even more attractive. People swarmed into the state in huge numbers and began an intense and increasingly irrational property boom.

A plot of land in Miami that had been worth $800 before the boom now sold for $150,000. Property deeds sometimes changed hands two or even three times in a day as frantic buyers tried to trade their way to ever greater wealth. Some eager buyers bought plots of land underwater on the hopeful understanding that they would soon become prized beachfront through the miracle of landfill. (And in some cases, it must be said, that actually happened.) The
Miami Herald
carried so many property ads that one Sunday edition ran to 504 pages.

One of those drawn to Florida was Yankees owner Jacob Ruppert. Ruppert bought ten thousand acres on Tampa Bay with plans to build a resort community, modestly called Ruppert Beach, on a scale to rival Coral Gables or Palm Beach. As part of the process, he moved spring
training to St. Petersburg in 1925. Conditions were a little rough at first. At one practice, Babe Ruth was unable to take his place in the field until a groundskeeper chased an alligator back into the swamp beyond the (unfenced) right field boundary. Ruppert gave the development a catchy slogan—“Where Every Breath Brings Added Health and Every Moment Pleasure”—and the promise that this would be the finest investment opportunity on the Gulf Coast. In the spring of 1926, Ruppert Beach was advertising home sites as being available from $5,000—“at the moment.”

Then disaster struck. On September 18 and 19, 1926, a massive hurricane, the first of notable proportions in twenty years, crashed into Florida, laying waste to Miami Beach and much else beyond. More than four hundred people were killed. Eighteen thousand were made homeless. The bottom dropped out of the property market all over Florida, even where this storm did not hit. Many investors were ruined. Carl Fisher, a businessman from Indiana who had more or less started the boom, saw his net worth fall from $500 million to less than $50,000. Also hit hard was Jacob Ruppert. When the storm passed, he was left with nothing but “ten thousand acres of alligators and seagulls,” according to one contemporary observer. Ruppert Beach was never built.

In consequence of the hurricane, Ruppert entered 1927 in a fiscally cautious frame of mind and with heightened respect for the unparalleled earning power of America’s newest sporting infatuation: boxing.

To a surprising extent, boxing was a 1920s phenomenon. Although people had been smacking each other around in rings for over two hundred years, prize fighting in the 1920s acquired three things it had never had before: respectability, mass appeal, and Jack Dempsey. Together they made it a sumptuously lucrative pastime. It was this that stirred the interest of men like Jacob Ruppert.

The rise of modern boxing could be assigned any number of starting points, but a reasonable place to begin is with Jess Willard. Willard was a giant Kansas plowboy and would permanently have remained so except that a boxing promoter spotted him throwing five-hundred-pound hay bales around as if they were scatter cushions and encouraged him to take
up fighting. This was in about 1910. At six feet six and 225 pounds, Willard was certainly built for the game. He proved to be a terrifyingly powerful puncher. In his fifth bout, against a promising young fighter named John “Bull” Young, he hit the poor youth so hard that the blow drove a piece of Young’s jaw up into his brain and killed him. Willard scythed his way through a number of opponents, then became heavyweight champion of the world by knocking out the great—but conspicuously black and recklessly outspoken—Jack Johnson in twenty-six rounds in Havana.

Willard’s victory provided a crucial, if not laudable, milestone for boxing: it gave the sport a white heavyweight champion, a shamefully necessary prerequisite for its becoming a popular mainstream sport. Before this time, boxing was virtually the only sport in America—indeed, pretty much the only activity—in which blacks could compete with whites on equal terms. It is an ironic point from a modern perspective, but part of the reason boxing was considered unwholesome and insupportably raffish before about 1920 was that it
wasn’t
racist. And a big part of converting it into a respectable entertainment in the 1920s was making sure that it was, like all other major sports, dominated by white people. No black fighter would get a crack at the heavyweight title for a generation.

With only other white boxers to fight, Willard began to look invincible. Then he met Jack Dempsey. Their fight, on the Fourth of July 1919 in Toledo, Ohio, attracted enormous attention. Dempsey was a hot young boxer from out west. Willard had actually once killed a man in the ring. This was a combination the public could not resist.

Toledo was chosen not because it was a popular place for boxing, but because it was a legal one, and in 1919 there were not so many of those. In most places—New York State, most notably—boxing was banned altogether or so ringed around with restrictions as to make it ridiculous. Prizefights, where they were allowed at all, had to be advertised as “sparring exhibitions” or “illustrated lectures on pugilism,” with the participants sometimes described as “professors.” Because the matches were only exhibitions, it was forbidden for one participant to knock out another or for a panel of judges to declare one man the winner. In consequence, prizefighting remained a marginal sport and fights were held in (no disrespect to Toledo intended) marginal places.

Toledo didn’t have a stadium sufficient to hold a crowd of ninety thousand, so one was built, to be used just once, then torn down. To keep gate-crashers out, Tex Rickard, the promoter, had the stadium constructed with a single entrance and exit. Had fire broken out the consequences would have been unimaginable, but at least the authorities had the wisdom to ban smoking for the duration of the contest.

Willard entered the fight supremely confident. Dempsey was scrawny-looking for a heavyweight, slender and wiry rather than bulgingly muscled. Willard was a full head taller and sixty pounds heavier. “This will be one of the easiest bouts I’ve ever had,” Willard assured reporters, adding with a dash of bigoted loftiness that was distasteful even then, “I am better today than when I restored the championship to the white race.” As a demonstration of his confidence, he demanded to be indemnified in case he killed the challenger.

This proved to be something of a misjudgment. Dempsey may have been scrawny, but he was built of iron—hitting him, it was said, was like hitting a tree—and he attacked with startling ferocity, flying at his opponents like a loosened pit bull and pummeling them with merciless intensity. He had just won twelve fights in a row, nine with knockouts in the first round, one in just fourteen seconds. He was an unbelievably destructive fighter, and he proved it now.