Business: Boom, Shortages, Taxes, War

(8 of 9)

Like the rest of the industry (in line with OPM's policy), Ford went on making cars in 1941. But Henry Ford does not like to do things by halves. He can see red lights and green lights, but is blind to yellow—which was the prevailing color at OPM. As soon as Ford saw that OPM could not guarantee enough materials to keep him in the automobile business, he lost interest in the passenger-car market and began looking around for a new customer. The All-America customer on the 1941 horizon was, of course, defense.

Ford started work on the Pratt & Whitney job before he even had an order. He also, without an order, turned an engineer loose on a new V12 liquid-cooled aircraft engine of his own. When a Navy man related his troubles about training cadet mechanics, Ford built a $1,000,000 training school and gave it to the Navy. When an Army man told him his troubles about getting a complex fire-control instrument, Ford put the problem into his shop. Every time a man in uniform had lunch with Henry, his lieutenants groaned: they knew they were in for more work.

To keep his production lines occupied, Ford tried to get an order for Army trucks. Fordmen felt they were being discriminated against on trucks by OPM, which had standardized the truck program to Chevrolet, Yellow Truck and Dodge specifications. But by this time, union-hating Henry Ford had a new salesman: Knudsen-hating Walter Reuther. (The U.A.W. maintains a four-man office in Washington.) Reuther knew that the Army, despite the standardized program, was still short of trucks, and that trucks were also the second biggest export item (after food) on Lend-Lease. He therefore proposed to Knudsen that the Army take all the standardized G.M.-Dodge output, and that all Lend-Lease trucks be standardized on Ford. From where the reluctant Knudsen sat, it looked as though the toughest old man he knew, and the toughest young man, had become partners.

When OPM's tank program ran short of transmissions, Ford avowed that his auto and truck plants contained the necessary gear-cutting equipment. He would do the job without having to burden the overworked toolmakers with orders for new machinery. He started negotiating for the transmission in September, will soon be making the whole tank.

Yet like the economy as a whole, the unparalleled resources of Ford were barely tapped in 1941. His biggest job, the Ypsilanti plant, was all new; a mere handful of presses were transfers from the mighty Rouge.

The case of Ford symbolized the problem of the nation in 1941. He was ready, and needed, to win Washington's war. He was also rich, perhaps the richest man in the U.S. If he had died in 1939, the inheritance tax would either have socialized his business or forced his estate to raise cash by selling stock to the public (which, in Ford's philosophy, was just a longer drawn out way of becoming insolvent). But by the end of 1941, Ford's very insolvency in terms of the inheritance tax posed the basic question in the minds of all U.S. businessmen: Will the U.S. go socialist?