The Ford Motor Corporation constituted one of the major automobile manufacturing companies in the 20th-century United States.
Craftsman Henry Ford founded the Ford Motor Company in his small Detroit, Michigan, workshop in 1903. By 1921, the company employed more than 32,000 people and produced over 930,000 cars per year. In the 1920s, Ford was a national and international hero, hailed, in the phrase of historian William E. Leuchtenburg, as the “high priest of mass civilization.” The Ford Motor Company’s Model T stimulated American’s demand for automobiles, for unlike previous cars, it was both inexpensive and tough. The use of standardized parts kept the price low, as did the production of cars in just one color—black.
During World War II, Ford stopped making automobiles and produced airplanes in his new mile-long plant at Willow Run, near Detroit. It contained 1,600 pieces of heavy machinery along with 75,000 jigs and other fixtures. At full tilt, it employed over 42,000 people, and was, according to aviator Charles Lindbergh, “a sort of Grand Canyon of the mechanized world.”
Passenger car production resumed in the summer of 1945. Henry Ford’s grandson became president of the company that same year, and Ford himself died in 1947 at the age of 83. The Ford Motor Company became a publicly held company with the public sale of common stock in
1956, a major change from the days when Ford kept everything in his own hands.
The company found itself involved in a public relations disaster with the introduction of the brand-new Edsel in
1957, which became available at just about the time the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite. The new car, with a front grille that looked like a toilet seat, seemed to be a symbol of flabby, materialistic American culture in the 1950s that could not compete with Russian technological expertise.
In the face of mounting competition, one automobile, the Ford Mustang, emerged as the company’s greatest success story during the 1960s. First rolling off the assembly line in Dearborn, Michigan, on March 9, 1964, the Mustang featured one of the most effective product launches in automotive history, debuting at the New York World’s Fair in April 1964 and introduced to the public on all three American television networks two days later. The Mustang went on to sell more than 1 million units during its first 18 months on the market and continued to be produced, albeit with revisions to its original form, decades later.
In the 1960s, the company received favorable exposure when the company’s president, Robert McNamara, who had helped revive Ford’s fortunes, became secretary of defense in the administration of John F. Kennedy.
Further reading: Robert L. Shook, Turnaround: The New Ford Motor Company (New York: Prentice Hall, 1990).
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