Race of Three

(See front cover)

Ford Motor Co. is a Delaware corporation. Its main plant--the most magnificent aggregation of industrial equipment in the modern world--is at River Rouge, Mich. At the start of last year it had assets of $639,000,000, over one-half of which was in cash or liquid paper. During the past 30 years it has sold more than 22,000,000 automobiles, approximately the total number on the road today. Its principal stockholder once turned down an offer of a billion dollars for the company as a going concern. Since it was founded in 1903 with $28,000 of paid-in capital, it has grossed a few hundred millions in excess of $11,000,000,000, retained as net gain nearly $800,000,000. No man in all history has made so much money so quickly or so cleanly as Henry Ford.

Mr. Ford is not an officer of Ford Motor Co. His only connection with the corporation is his ownership of 58% of the stock and a seat on the board of directors. With him on the board sits his son, President Edsel Bryant Ford, who owns the rest of the stock, and Vice President Peter E. Martin, one of the few survivors of the countless upheavals in Ford management. There is a secretary and assistant treasurer, and an assistant secretary of the corporation, but no other title within the whole Ford organization. Henry Ford does not believe in titles.

It takes an efficient executive staff to run a business whose payroll at one plant alone has been as high as 104,000 persons, whose purchases have run as high as $40,000,000 per month and whose operations include coal mines, glass factories, steel mills and a fleet of 37 ships. Yet the Ford staff is small. All the key men in the company can sit down together at a lunch table in a maple-paneled corner room at the Engineering Laboratory where the elder

Ford makes his headquarters. There for counsel and advice go untitled Fordlings like William Cowling (sales), Albert M. Wibel (purchasing) and Charles Sorensen, hard-boiled superintendent of the mighty Rouge works.* Also high in Ford councils are William J. Cameron, Mr. Ford's official spokesman, and Harry H. Bennett, who handles personnel and directs Ford Motor's notoriously efficient police. But the one & only boss of Ford Motor Co. is Henry Ford.

Last week the spare, stooped grey-haired dean of the premier U. S. industry launched a 1935 edition of the Ford V8, Model 48. And for the first time in his life he launched a model at the New York Automobile Show, No. 1 of the great fairs where the men from the motormaking provinces of the Midwest each year exhibit their newest and finest transportation wares (see p. 62).

Mr. Ford used to exhibit only Lincolns at the Automobile Shows because Lincoln was a member of the National Automobile Chamber of Commerce (now the Automobile Manufacturers Association) which sponsored the exhibits. But Ford, characteristically, never joined the industry's trade association. This year the show was staged not by the manufacturers but by their local dealers. Hence Mr. Ford exhibited. He sent cross-section displays, a team of two mechanics who could pull down a V-8 motor in six minutes, assemble it in ten, a cutaway car on a traveling belt which, when big blocks were tossed under its wheels, demonstrated what Ford calls "Center-Poise," balanced riding quality. And he also sent a modern car.

The 1935 Ford is mechanically much like its predecessor in the Model 40 series. The motor is practically unchanged because, as the Founder said in a signed advertisement, ''We have not learned how to build a better one." Major improvements are in line and ride. Bodies are heavily streamlined, tires are bigger, hood louvers are set in a horizontal line. Like many another motormaker who learned from Walter P. Chrysler's Airflow models of last year Mr. Ford moved his engine forward about 8 in. over the front axle, thus equalizing the distribution of weight. In addition he lengthened the old transverse springs, mounted them ahead of the front axle and behind the rear axle, stretching the spring base to 123 in. but retaining the old 112-in. wheelbase.

But what made the 1935 Fords more interesting than other Fords was the fact that their maker announced last autumn with considerable fanfare that he planned to sell 1,000,000 of them--"or better"--in the third year of Roosevelt II. A dozen years ago when Chevrolet sales were 76,000 and Plymouth was not even an idea in Mr. Chrysler's head, Mr. Ford was turning out Model T's at the rate of 2,000,000 per year. But Chevrolet has outsold Ford in six of the past eight years, and the last million-car year at River Rouge was 1930. Last year Mr. Ford had a head start over Chevrolet, which was delayed by the tool & die strike. Yet in combined truck and passenger car sales Chevrolet again nosed out Ford. The most famed U. S, industrial box score (estimated for 1934 on eleven-month domestic sales) reads as follows:

1934 1933

Chevrolet 680,000 575,000

Ford 675,000 374,000

Plymouth 305,000 249,000

Said Mr. Ford in 1933: "I don' t know how many cars Chevrolet sold last year. I don't know how many they're selling this year. I don't know how many they may sell next year. And--I don't care."

Mr. Ford's indifference to his competitors is no pose. His sole interest is in building the best car he can for the money. To him merchandising is merely a necessary nuisance. If a person chooses to buy a Chevrolet or a Plymouth, the loss, Mr. Ford feels, is the buyer's, not his. Even the staggering deficits rolled up in the Depression--$132,000,000--do not bother him. It is, to Henry Ford, merely money "spent."

Mr. Ford's competitors, however, have stockholders to think of, and last year the Man of Dearborn increased his share of the national business from 20% in 1933 to 28% of all cars sold. Relatively, both Chevrolet and Plymouth lost ground. What they will do in 1935 no man knows.

Chevrolet is General Motors' biggest unit and the finest merchandising organization in the industry. The fact that President Marvin E. Coyle surmounted his early production difficulties and again pushed Chevrolet to the front of the field is generally regarded as the outstanding selling job of 1934. Now 48, dynamic, little-publicized President Coyle has been with G. M. for 23 years, 17 of them in Chevrolet. William S. Knudsen picked him as his successor when that all-round motorman stepped up to executive vice president of General Motors Corp.

For the 1935 race President Coyle entered two lines of Chevrolets, the Standard and Master De Luxe. The Masters have "knee-action" front wheels, new all-steel "turret" tops by Fisher Bodies, are longer, roomier, more streamlined. The Standards have conventional springs, conventional steel bodies. But while the Masters are priced at last year's levels, the Standards have been cut $10 on almost all models, putting them as much as $25 below Ford's standard line. In the past year Chevrolet sold about 100,000 of the lower-priced Standards, will push them strongly in 1935 as a good transportation value for those who do not wish to pay extra for the latest gadgets.

Plymouth this year eliminated its lower-priced line to concentrate on the longer wheelbase. It abandoned independent front wheel springing but developed a new type of spring steel and, like Ford, moved the motor forward to improve the ride. Bodies are longer, roomier and pleasantly bulbous. Refinements in the motor are claimed to have increased economy 15% to 20%.

Until 1928 when Plymouth was first marketed, Ford and Chevrolet had the low-priced field pretty much to themselves. Under B. Edwin Hutchinson, Plymouth board chairman and Chrysler vice president & treasurer, Plymouth has on at least one occasion pressed Ford hard for second place in the Big Three's race. And even last year Plymouth lost less ground to Ford than did Chevrolet. More notable, the man who has multiplied Plymouth's sales by five is one of the few crack motormen who did not rise from the bench. Mr. Hutchinson is primarily a financial man, having raised the money to keep old Maxwell Motor alive when Walter P. Chrysler was fashioning that company into a personal springboard.

New Force. It is not surprising that Chevrolet could best Mr. Ford selling a six against a four (Model A). Yet Mr. Ford, selling an eight against Plymouth and Chevrolet sixes, has considerable difficulty in even holding his own. Messrs. Coyle and Hutchinson certainly do not reciprocate Mr. Ford's indifference to competition but they are by no means in mortal terror of the Man of Dearborn. What they fear, if anything, is a new force evident in Ford merchandising. And that force is powered by Edsel Bryant Ford, 41, heir-apparent to the last and greatest personal empire of U. S. industry.

Ford advertising and promotion have always been spasmodic, and Ford dealers have usually been treated as a necessary evil. But in the past few years dealers' commissions have been boosted. Ford's advertising appropriation of about $8,000,000 in 1934 is supposed to have been boosted for 1935. Last year Ford sent a big exhibit to the second edition of the Chicago World's Fair and last week Ford sent Edsel to the Show in Manhattan, where he nervously munched cough drops through various salesmeetings. But the most impressive sign of Edsel's growing power is the 1935 Ford, a modern car in comfort and appearance as well as engineering.

Henry Ford will be 72 next July. A lean, lonely figure roaming through his museum or fiddling with his old music boxes, he has lived five years of Depression without apparent change. He is trying to decentralize the vastest concentration of industry the world has ever seen by establishing small accessory plants in rural districts where workers can live on the land. He and his lady are seen more frequently at Detroit social functions. His spat with the Administration over his stubborn refusal to sign the Automobile Code is forgiven & forgotten.

But when Henry Ford steps to a drawing board or tinkers with a Ford part the years drop away from his thin shoulders, and he seems a different person from the aging man who has an earthy platitude for every interviewer. Ruralist and antiquarian though he has become, the Henry Ford who in 1934 laid out $20,000,000 for plant expansion when Big Business was shivering for reassurances or who boldly announced that he would spend nearly $500,000,000 for wages and materials in 1955, is the Henry Ford who motorized the U. S.

Last month in Manhattan in answer to the uneasy rumbling voiced by businessmen at a Congress of American Industry, Donald Richberg taunted: "Unless the businessmen of America have been shell-shocked into nervous impotence, there must come a time when they will respond to the fighting spirit of that old admiral who signaled, 'Damn the torpedoes. Go ahead!' "

Henry Ford damned the torpedoes two months ago and has been going ahead ever since.

*Once at the Rouge works, where sitting down is not encouraged, Superintendent Sorensen spied a workman squatting on a box fiddling with a length of wire. Up strode Mr. Sorensen, kicked the box from beneath the workman. When he got to his feet, the workman knocked Mr. Sorensen to the floor. "You're fired!" said Mr. Sorensen as he in turn uprose. "The hell I am," yelled the workman. "I work for the Bell Telephone Co."

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