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 , Albert M. Wibel
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 . Mr. Ford used to exhibit only Lincolns at the Automobile Shows because
Lincoln was a member of the National Automobile Chamber of Commerce
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.
