Henry Ford and the Model T: The Car That Changed America

No single person did more to shape the American twentieth century than Henry Ford, and no single product did more to shape American life than the Model T. Between 1908 and 1927, Ford’s company built more than 15 million Model T automobiles — more than half of all the cars ever manufactured in the world up to that point. The Model T transformed the United States from a country of streetcar suburbs and walking commuters into a nation of paved highways, drive-in restaurants, and Sunday motorists. To understand the broader transformation, see our guide to the automobile industry in the 1920s and the wider story of the 1920s economy.

The Farm Boy Who Built a Car

Henry Ford was born on July 30, 1863, in Dearborn, Michigan, on a farm that had been in the Ford family for generations. As a boy, he was more interested in taking apart watches and machinery than in plowing fields, and at sixteen he left the farm to apprentice as a machinist in Detroit. In 1879 he moved to the Edison Illuminating Company, where he was promoted to chief engineer in 1893. The job gave him both an income and a relationship with Thomas Edison, who would later become a personal friend and a backer of the Ford Motor Company.

Ford’s tinkering continued at night. On June 4, 1896, he test-drove his first vehicle — the Quadricycle — through the streets of Detroit at 20 miles an hour, scaring horses and delighting onlookers. In 1899 he organized the Detroit Automobile Company, which failed. In 1901 he organized the Henry Ford Company, which also failed when his investors objected to his insistence on building a low-priced car for the mass market. In 1903, after a third try, the Ford Motor Company was incorporated with $28,000 in capital and 12 investors. The most important was a Scottish-born coal dealer named Alexander Malcomson, who put up $5,000 and became the company’s business partner. The contract to build engines went to brothers John and Horace Dodge, who were already Ford’s machinists. The car the company built first — the Model A — sold modestly in 1903–04. More models followed, letters A through S, as Ford refined his design. None of them sold in the volumes he wanted.

The Model T and the Birth of “Tin Lizzie”

On October 1, 1908, Ford introduced the Model T. The car was simple, durable, easy to repair, and light enough to handle the rough roads of rural America. Its 20-horsepower four-cylinder engine could reach 40 to 45 miles an hour, faster than any horse. The first Model Ts sold for $850 — a high price for 1908, but Ford promised to bring it down. The car earned the nickname “Tin Lizzie” because of its light, sturdy, sheet-metal body.

The Model T was not the most advanced car of its day. Other manufacturers offered more powerful engines, electric starters, and closed bodies. Ford’s genius was not in the engineering but in the cost. He intended to build a car “for the great multitude” — a phrase that became the company’s slogan — and he designed the production system around that goal. For a tour of the cars Americans drove,

The Moving Assembly Line

By 1913, Ford’s engineers had introduced the innovation that would change the world: the moving assembly line at the Highland Park Plant in Detroit. The inspiration, Ford later admitted, came from the meat-packing industry, where so-called “disassembly lines” had long been used to butcher hogs and cattle. Ford reversed the process to build cars.

The principle was simple. Workers stood in fixed positions. The car chassis moved past them on a conveyor. Each worker performed a single task over and over. The system was degrading, repetitive, and efficient beyond anything the world had ever seen. In early 1913, building a single Model T chassis took about 12.5 hours. By the spring of 1914, the time had fallen to about 93 minutes. The price of the car fell accordingly. The 1925–26 Model T Runabout — the cheapest Model T ever sold — retailed for just $260, the all-time low.

The Ford Rouge River Plant, completed in Dearborn in the late 1920s, was Ford’s attempt to extend the assembly-line principle to its logical extreme. Iron ore arrived at one end of the complex, and finished automobiles rolled out the other. The Rouge had its own power plant, its own railroad, its own steel mill, its own glass works, and even its own rubber plantation in Brazil. It was the largest integrated industrial complex in the world.

The $5 Workday

On January 5, 1914, Ford announced that the company would pay its workers $5 a day — more than double the prevailing factory wage of about $2.34 for a 9-hour day. The announcement was not a wage increase. The $5 included a profit-sharing element of about $3 a day, contingent on the worker’s sobriety, thrift, and clean home life.

The reaction was volcanic. On the day the new wages were announced, an estimated 10,000 job seekers showed up at Ford’s Highland Park gate. Workers at other factories walked off their jobs in protest. Henry Ford became a hero of the working class, and Fordism — the system of high wages, mass production, and mass consumption — became the model for industrial society around the world.

The system was also intrusive. Ford’s Sociological Department sent inspectors into workers’ homes to verify that they were living in clean, sober, monogamous households. Workers who failed inspection lost their profit share. The system was paternalistic, class-bound, and controversial. It also reduced worker turnover from more than 370 percent a year in 1913 to about 16 percent by 1915. The economic impact, combined with the constant reduction in the Model T’s price, was to make Ford’s own workers the customers for his product.

The Anti-Semite and the Pacifist

The 1920s also revealed the dark side of Henry Ford. In 1918, the agricultural chemist Irving R. Henius had warned Ford of the influence of Jewish financiers. From 1920, Ford’s own Dearborn Independent — the weekly newspaper he had bought in 1918 — began serializing The International Jew, a series of anti-Semitic pamphlets that blamed Jews for the world’s problems. The series was published in book form in 1922 as The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem and was widely read. Ford’s anti-Semitism was praised by Adolf Hitler, who kept a portrait of Ford on his office wall. Ford issued a public apology in 1927, though he privately continued to believe in the views expressed in the series.

Ford was also a committed pacifist. In 1918, he ran for the U.S. Senate on a peace platform and lost. In 1915 he had chartered a ship, the Oscar II, to take himself and other peace activists to Europe to “get the boys out of the trenches.” The episode ended badly when the passengers, accused of being unpatriotic, were attacked by mobs on their return to the United States.

The Legacy

Ford’s legacy is mixed. He revolutionized manufacturing, created the mass market, and — through the $5 workday — invented the modern middle-class economy. He also waged war on unionization. Ford’s Service Department, later renamed the Social Engineering Department, monitored workers and prevented the UAW from organizing the Rouge Plant throughout the 1920s. The stand-off would finally break in 1932, when Ford Hunger Marchers were fired upon outside the plant. Four marchers were killed. The Model T’s successor, the Ford Model A, was launched on December 2, 1927. The new car was Ford’s answer to General Motors’ Chevrolet — a closed-body sedan with four-wheel mechanical brakes and a four-cylinder 40-horsepower engine. It sold well from the start: roughly 4 million Model As were built before production ended in 1931. To understand the marketing revolution that made the Model A possible, see our guide to 1920s advertising history and the broader transformation in consumer culture in the 1920s.