Henry Ford: The Good, Bad and Ugly
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Hey, everybody. Host Nora McInerney is back for season two of The Head Start, Embracing the Journey, a podcast from Ruby Studio and AbbVie. In each episode, Nora has a real conversation with real people living with chronic migraine to see how they took action to understand this disease. So jump into the conversation for season two, a show that creates a little more space for empathy and understanding in such a complicated world.

There shouldn't be so much hesitation around asking questions and asking for help. So don't wait. Join the Head Start Embracing the Journey and learn a little bit more about life with chronic migraine. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here too, and this is Stuff You Should Know, the biopic edition of Unrecorded. Who plays Unrecorded?

Well, I feel like technology is getting close to a point where we could dig him up and reanimate him and he could just play himself. So maybe we wait like five years and then do it. Yeah, you know, I didn't even see a lot of pictures of this guy. You have. He's very plain looking. But if you know what you're looking at, like a picture of him, he's a wily old codger. I thought you were going to say cuss.

I could have. It would have worked just as well. But you can just see it. And the more you know about him, when you see one of his pictures, you can just see all of it. It's really interesting. But he's very plain looking. So I wouldn't be surprised if you'd seen a picture of him and just didn't recognize him. I'm looking at him now. He doesn't look super familiar. But, I mean, I kind of have a go-to that either Michael Shannon or Sam Rockwell should play everybody. Right. Yeah.

And I could see Sam Rockwell gussied up here a little bit as Henry Ford. What about Danny McBride? Build a car with all the phoenixes. A little eastbound and down joke for the fans out there. Sure. I was more a vice principals fan. That was great, too. Walton Goggins. He should play him. Get him in there. There you go. Maybe they could just trade off halfway through the movie.

Yeah, and see who F-bombs better. So let's get this started. Yeah, let's get this started in here.

All right. Well, if we're going to talk about Henry Ford, who, by the way, I feel like we don't need some big whopping intro, but I think a lot of people recognize Henry Ford as the founder of the Ford Motor Company and not the inventor of the automobile, but certainly the gentleman who made the automobile ubiquitous, affordable kind of thing for the common person. Yeah. He's also strongly associated with the assembly line.

Which he did not invent, but he just like the automobile, he definitely like made it a thing. And in doing these things, like normalizing the assembly line and car ownership really had a huge impact on history, especially the history of America. For sure. Shall we talk about where he was born or you want to skip that? No, I mean, he was born in Dearborn, Michigan. What's next?

That was in 1863, July 30th, to William and Mary Ford. And as Pops was an Irish immigrant farmer and his mom was a homemaker, had a bunch of siblings. And this is something that you can put a pin in. It's kind of very, seems very key to his life, or at least his formative years, is that he went to one of those kind of old school, one room school houses until he was 17 years old. It was literally old school.

Yeah, very old school. But it seemed to be a big deal to him, as we'll see later. Yeah, for sure. So just kind of skipping ahead a little bit, he, like Rudolph Diesel, was fascinated by engines from a very early age and was like, I want to build one of those. Along the way, before he got to the point of building things like cars and everything, he tried his own hand at farming like his old man. He got married to a woman named Clara, who he would stay married to for the rest of his life.

And he got a job with Thomas Edison at Thomas Edison's, I believe it's Menlo Park complex and had his own little shop and everything and was very interested in trying to create a gasoline engine after reading an article in American Machinist, which is now known as Hustler. I'm not going to say, is it true? Can you imagine what a transformation that would be?

I think one of the interesting things about his early life, though, is that, and for some reason this strikes me as hysterical, is that he had some horse riding accidents when he was a kid. Mm-hmm.

And I kind of was like, you know what? I want to get rid of those things. Like, those are dangerous, and we shouldn't be writing them or using them for work. And that seemed to be one of the strange childhood drives to start working with machinery. Yeah, it is very strange. It's really not at all...

I guess, really, if you think about it, that his skills at building cars, his desire and drive to build cars, is what he built his career on. Like, very much so. He built a few cars, especially the first one called the Quadricycle. It was so named because it looked like two bicycles parked next to each other.

And he built this thing, like I think he and his friends built the parts they needed or else they stripped other things like steam engines of parts and really like built this thing from scratch. And then he would ride it around town and caught the attention of some very wealthy people in Detroit, in particular, the mayor named William Mayberry, who became his first real investor and was like, you need to build more of these and we're going to sell a bunch of them. So together in 1899, was it?

They formed the Detroit Motor Company. This was Henry Ford's first car company, his first attempt. Yeah, his first couple of attempts at car companies and bringing a car that actually could be mass produced and sell on the market were not successful. This one folded about a year later. He got investors for the Henry Ford company next. That also failed to bring about a car that he could sell to people.

But kind of interestingly, that company went on to become, once Ford was kind of shown the exit, the Cadillac Automobile Company. Yeah, I looked up. I was always like, what is Cadillac named after? It's named after the founder of Detroit, Antoine de la Moth Cadillac, who established what would become Detroit in 1701. So that's what Cadillac's named after for anybody who was wondering. Yeah, maybe we should do a show on Caddy's at some point. Okay.

I'm not a big car guy, but the Caddy's iconic. Oh, yeah, for sure. I mean, at the very least, OutKast loves it. Right.

And the thing he did next was, you know, he was always trying to raise money and always had kind of a love-hate relationship with investors because he was like, you know, I need their money, but that's kind of all they're good for. Otherwise, they just meddle in my creative genius. So he set about racing cars to kind of drum up publicity and investor interest. And that's what happened when he started winning races with two cars, the Aero and the 999, which is

Look these things up. They're super cool looking. And that led to some investors, most notably a guy named Alexander Malcolmson.

Yeah, so just like building the quadricycle and riding it around, like setting the land speed record in one of the race cars he built, that attracted Malcolmson too. And Malcolmson, this time it stuck. Malcolmson helped Ford launch the Ford Motor Company, which may ring a bell because it was established in 1903. And get this, it's still around today over 120 years later. It sure is. Yeah.

So I guess you could say this one was a success, starting with the Model A, which started selling, you know, I don't know, like hotcakes, but selling well enough in 1905 to keep the company afloat. They were building about 25 of them a day, had about 300 people working for them. Not bad. And started over like a five-year-ish period releasing, you know, different models indicated by a different model letter. Did you look any of these up, the C, the F, the N, the B, and the K? Yeah.

I did. Those B and the Ks were the more luxury models, and they're just gorgeous automobiles. I mean, they're absolutely amazing, even still today. And then if you look at the more, like, reasonably priced cars, like the Model C and the F and the N, they're basically just, like, open-air buggies with a motor in them. Yeah.

Which is, I mean, that's what 1905 and 1907 and 8 cars were in a lot of ways. But that B and that K, they're just something extra special. It's really, I'm not a car guy at all. And I find those alluring for sure. Yeah, I think we're kind of the same. Like we're not big car dudes. But if you see something like that or the one that the guy did the first cross-country road trip in. Yeah.

Like I'm able to be knocked out by a car. You just go vroom, vroom. So you said that his, he had a love hate relationship with investors. I would posit that he had a use hate relationship with them. Good point. He, to Henry Ford, he was the visionary designing and building cars.

Malcolmson gave him some money and was getting money in return. He got his thing. That was their arrangement. Malcolmson was saying, hey, you're making all these like reasonably priced cars. Forget that. We need to be focusing on luxury cars. And Henry Ford bristled with his back turned at his workshop desk and resolved right then and there that he would either murder Alexander Malcolmson or force him out of the company. And he ended up going with the latter. Yeah.

That's right. In 1906, he had Malcolmson successfully pushed out and not murdered. He launched the Model T in 1908. And this was, you know, the Model T is an iconic, legendary automobile because this was finally the one that had that perfect balance of

A little bell and whistle action, but something that was easy to fix. It held up well, and it was affordable for the common person, which kind of cemented him as a man of the people. It was an enormous achievement, the Model T was. It sold for like $850 when it first came out in 1908. That was the highest price it was ever charged from what I can tell.

That's about $30,000 today. So it was roughly equivalent to like a Honda Civic or like a Subaru Legacy or something like that, right? At the time, all other cars that were being built were luxury cars, and they were going for $2,000 to $3,000. So anywhere from like $70,000 to $100,000 plus to buy a car. Now, all of a sudden, this guy's selling them for $30,000, the equivalent of $30,000. And car ownership just boomed from there. You said they were building 25 cars a

A day in 1905 by 1913, they were selling or building 189,000 of them a year, which I haven't done the math, but that's a lot more than 25 a day. Well, yeah. And good job on not doing math. Thank you.

First of all, you say I speak for myself and all listeners. And this is a direct result of his innovation of the assembly line. Like we said kind of at the beginning, a lot of people think he invented the car. Not true. Invented the assembly line. Also not true. There were assembly lines at other factories like bicycle factories and stuff. Oh, yeah. There were conveyor belts used in cars.

uh, farming and like, uh, cattle operations and stuff like that. Candy factories. But,

candy factories. Um, well put a pin in that actually, but he actually combined those two things in a way that no one had before where he was literally bringing the work to the people. They would stand in one spot that conveyor belt would bring along the thing they needed to, uh, to work on or, or finish or tinker with or whatever, or inspect. Uh, first it was a rope and then it was like a chain assembly. And then, um,

It led to definitely some I Love Lucy type moments. I mean, that was, first of all, the workers didn't like it at all. They thought it was really boring. But it also at times was like, I'm not done with the thing that's now left me. And that was a big problem when you had to stop the assembly line. Yeah, for sure. Because before these people were like part of an army assembling a car. They didn't just make this one cog over and over and over again. And like you said, it got very boring. It was very repetitive.

And the turnover rate for employees at Ford by 1913 was at 370%. And that's just churning. That's a really high turnover rate if that number doesn't immediately present itself as such to you. Well, for sure. Here's another stat. If 370% doesn't mean much to you. He was hiring 53,000 people every year to fill 14,000 jobs. Oh, my God. Wow. And...

Which was no good. You know, that's never good for a company. But that also, that assembly line brought the price down on that Model T. I think you said it would be like 30 grand in today dollars. By 1912, they brought that cost down to what would be about $9,000 plus change in today's money. I think in 1912, it was...

uh 525 by 1916 it was 345 dollars so for a car it went down from from 30 grand to 16 grand to about nine grand in today dollars yeah

So, wow, that's impressive. One of the things that was the result of that, that streamlining of costs and the reduction in price, was Henry Ford came up with an idea to keep workers around. He said, how about this? You trade your boredom for more money. And workers said, all right.

I'll hear you out. And so Henry Ford came up with the $5 workday. If you worked at Ford, you made $5 a day, at least. And that at the time is equal to about $1,100 a week here. I think, what is that? $50? $154 a day in today dollars. Okay. But times like seven days a week, basically. Eventually six. So it was a pretty good wage. Yeah.

And people were blown away by it so much so that Ford was able to basically use it as a PR campaign too. It basically be like, I'm paying $5 and I'm characterizing it as profit sharing because I take care of my workers. And this really helped establish his reputation from the outset as like a man of the people, a populace who cared about factory workers, which is not true.

True. To put that in perspective, when I first started working as a PA in the film industry, I made a hundred bucks a day working at least 12 hour days. Wow. They were working. He actually shortened their workday to eight hours a day at one hundred and fifty four dollars a day. So that ain't bad at all. No, it's not.

So that really handled that, reduced that turnover rate. It got it under control. Productivity started to stabilize. I mean, it proved that, like, if you treat employees, at the very least, pay them what they're worth, people will work harder for you. It's just a really good way to run a company rather than squeezing every last dime that you can out of as few people as you can. Henry Ford kind of proved that that was true.

Not the way to go. That's right. But it came with some catches. In 1914, he came up with the sociological department of his company. And that was a group who, over the course of about seven years, would go around and come to your house and do little home visits and say, like, oh, I see alcohol in the house. And it's kind of a pigsty. So you don't qualify to get that $5 a day. Right.

If you took in a border, like, looks like you're renting a room to someone. Sorry, you don't qualify. These are all, you know, pretty vast overreaches when, you know, when you think about, like, today's standards. Some of them were pretty good, though. If you had domestic violence rap against you, you didn't qualify. So, you know, good for him for that, I guess. Sure.

And today, I mean, yes, that would be crazy if somebody did that because instead employers just spy on you through your work computer rather than dropping by your house, actually, because that'd be too obvious, you know? Yeah, that's untoward. So I think we talked about this in the Fordlandia episode where like the sociological department was really keeping an eye on people. And in a lot of ways, you're like, that's just insane. And it was.

There's another like kind of facet to it that is worth pointing out that most of these workers whose houses were being visited, visited, lived in Ford housing that was built right near the plant. Um, and I believe they got subsidized housing. So based on what I know about Ford, if he paid for something, even a little bit, he,

He owned it. So he felt totally emboldened to just send people into your house to see if you were drinking or not. And then that would affect your employment. He owned you. He was paying you a really good wage. He owned you. He owned your house. He owned your family. That's just how he saw things. He could buy anything with money. And he just behaved that way as well. Yeah.

Totally. Should we take a break? Yeah. All right. So we're going to, we've talked about his career up until this point. We're going to take a little slight turn to talk about his personal life right after this. Thank you.

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All right. As promised, we're going to talk a bit about the man's personal life. We mentioned that he married his wife, Clara Bryant, in 1988. And they stayed married and, you know, had a very...

uh close partnership as as married people go uh but all while that was going on all the while he was having an affair I mean I don't think you'll see this printed on any Ford Motor Company like official histories or anything but uh he had a long-standing affair with a woman named uh Evangeline uh coat

And eventually would get one of his friends, perhaps even his personal driver to his guy named Ray Dollinger to marry her because he it appears as though he had a son with her named John and was like, hey, buddy, you got to marry this this lady and make it look like that's your son. And the whole time we're going to be having this kind of secret affair. Yeah.

That was the setup. And again, like he paid for Evangeline's house and Evangeline and Ray's house. Apparently they had like at least two or three estates, one of which was just like a couple miles down the road from where Ford lived with Clara. He even built a secret staircase that he could use that was away from prying eyes and went directly up to Evangeline's bedroom.

That's creepy. And in the 70s, John Ford, who Henry Ford's been a...

inordinate amount of time with if it wasn't his actual son. He later in the 70s, like, I think he wrote a memoir and said, like, yeah, this guy's my, he was my father. Like, he was my father. Sorry if you don't want to hear it. That's how it was. And I think still, it was never, it still never, no one ever took a paternity test. Evangeline never talked to the press about it. Like, it's just not

Officially confirmed, but in every single way besides officially, it's confirmed. Yeah, for sure. During this time, he also had a son named Edsel. He would famously name a very failed automobile after. Probably on purpose. Yeah, he was born in 1893. He was a good dad for about a minute.

But once Edsel got to be a little bit older, they did not have a very good relationship. He thought he was kind of a weakling. He thought it was soft.

He did give him a job and he would humiliate him and belittle him. He would even back him to be the president, his son to be the president of the Ford Motor Company. But just in kind of like he didn't have any real teeth in that job because dad was still running the show. Yeah, a really widespread anecdote about how Henry Ford treated Edsel. Yeah.

Edsel could not make a step as president of Ford Motor Company without his dad's approval. And if he did, there was trouble. And in one case, the administrative offices were starting to get overcrowded. So he had a new wing built for it, new offices built. And he didn't pass it by his dad first. So when his dad found out, his dad halted

work on it. By this time, they dug out the foundation and Edsel said, okay, sorry about that. I'll just fill the ground back in. And Henry Ford said, no, you won't. You will leave that there and you have to walk past it every day on your way to work and it will remind you of your humiliation, essentially. That's how Edsel was treated by his father. It's like Henry Ford had a rich kid

Just by definition, but hated rich kids, like kids that were born rich. Right. And he treated his son that way. And from what I can tell, his son was not a bad guy and didn't deserve this at all. No. I mean, he might as well have said, I'm going to leave that hole in the ground as a reminder of what a jerk father I've been to. Yeah. Yeah. It's very sad. Yeah. It's real sad. Like he, I mean, it's also his son died young in 1943 at age 49. Yeah.

I think we talked about this in the Fordlandia episode, too, that he died one of two ways from stomach cancer or from a bad reaction to raw milk that his father made him drink. And even as he was sick and dying, Henry Ford was like, suck it up, you wuss, you know, stop making such a big deal out of this. And

As it became clear that Edsel was very, very sick and actually dying, Henry Ford was like, oh, okay, I'm going to try to get some doctors out here and get the best of the best. And they couldn't do anything. And when Edsel died, he blamed Edsel's doctors. And then I guess eventually he blamed himself. But I don't know how he did that or how that's documented. Yeah, agreed. All right. So back to his career in 1919. Yeah.

Again, he's tired of the investor sort of getting in his way in his mind. This is amazing, actually. He lost a lawsuit that basically said you have to pay out dividends to the Dodge brothers, two of his biggest investors at the time. And also his competitors who own Dodge Motor Company. The Dodge brothers own Dodge? Yeah. Can you believe it? Yeah.

And by that time, he was like, I really want to control everything. I want to be able to build a factory that basically handles everything but the tires because the Firestones have that under wraps, basically. And he was friends with Harvey Firestone, too. Yeah, for sure. So he said, all right, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to announce...

um, that I'm leaving the company. I'm going to announce that I'm going to build a better company that's going to produce better cars and cheaper cars. And all the, the stockholders freaked out because they were like, if Henry Ford's not at the helm, this company is going to go under. And so they started selling off their shares. Uh, what they did know is they were, uh, mostly selling to an investment company that was, uh, controlled by Henry Ford. So he ended up

I mean, I don't know if this is illegal at the time. At the very least, it was unethical. But he ended up outright owning the Ford Motor Company basically by himself with his son and wife. Isn't that amazing? I mean, say what you will about the man, but that is one of the wiliest business moves in the history of American business.

Wiley is a good, soft way to sell that. I read that when he was told that the whole plan worked, it was done, he danced a jig in his office. Well, he loved dancing. He did, yeah. I guess it's not that surprising. Yeah, we didn't mention that because that'll come up later too. He had a thing for square dancing and tried to get his employees to learn square dancing. I think we talked about that in the Fordlandia episode too.

It seems like it came up for sure. I mean, how can you can't talk about Henry Ford and not talk about his weird love of square dancing?

Yeah. I mean, he loved what he loved. One of the things he did not love was war. He was an avowed pacifist and he spoke out quite publicly. One of the things he used his recognition and fame for as a man of the people was to use that to speak out against World War I. And that was really dicey because the Espionage Act of 1917 was used about

2,000 times, 2,000 people were charged between 1917 and 1920 for speaking out against World War I. So that was not something that he just did casually. It was a big deal that he did that. He gave interviews about it. He chartered a boat to ride to Europe to try to advocate for peace. It's called the Peace Ship. It was not very well received by the press. He was made fun of, but

Like he was definitely a pacifist for sure. But when when America entered World War One, he backed it fully. Yeah, he did the same thing with World War Two. He was against it until Pearl Harbor. And once America was in these wars, he didn't just fold his hands and say, well, you're on your own.

He would, you know, of course, at the government's behest, transform the Ford Motor Company into building everything from airplane engines to ambulances and military personnel vehicles. And those ambulances would go on to blow up when they were rear-ended in the 70s, often with patients in them.

Were they Pintos? They were close. So one of the things that Henry Ford was, in addition to speaking out about pacifism, he spoke out about a lot of stuff. And he was interviewed once. He was very opinionated, totally convinced that his opinion was correct, like objectively correct from what I can tell. I think he's a narcissist. A little bit. He was interviewed in the Chicago Tribune, and he said, among other things, that he basically hates art.

And that he, quote, history is bunk, that there's nothing to be learned from history. We always just need to be looking forward. And so the same year, 1916, the Chicago Tribune, the paper he was interviewed in, also published an editorial calling him an ignorant idealist and an anarchistic enemy of the nation.

And so he said, you know what, that's libel and I'm going to sue you. And it went to trial in 1913. And he won. He won six cents, which is less than five dollars today. That's how much he won from the Chicago Tribune. That's how much he was awarded. But even worse, he was just really exposed as an ignorant person on the stand. He was like quizzed about things like history and stuff like.

And just completely got stuff wrong. And all of the papers, including the Tribune, published all this stuff. So it didn't really make him look good. Yeah. It was kind of like, I'll take your test. And then afterward, he's like, I shouldn't have taken this test. Especially in front of everybody. Yeah. Under oath. There was also a rumor that he might have been illiterate. I don't think that was probably true. And it stems from the fact that he refused to read aloud.

Um, but who knows? He may have had some form of dyslexia or a learning disorder. Like we just don't know. So speculating, uh, in 2024 is a little, I don't know, big fan. It makes it pretty ironic that one of the things he collected were McGuffey readers, which were, uh, 19th century textbooks. Like he collected them. That's a strange thing for a person who's not literate to do.

Yeah, elementary school textbooks. They were for kids. Sure. So maybe that made more sense. I don't know. Maybe. He's like, yeah, I collect these. I'm definitely not teaching myself from them. So he didn't like the press, not just because of this, but he was just a lightning rod for good press and bad press. But he got fed up with it. Eventually, he was like, you know what? I'm going to start my own newspaper. So he bought one, the Dearborn Independent in 1919.

And he, you know, basically controlled it and was like, here's what I'm going to do. I'm not sure if everyone knows...

about my anti-Semitic views. So I'm going to start making this newspaper write lots and lots of articles about how Jewish people are in control of the world and the finances of the world and are responsible for everything bad, including these wars that are happening and jazz music that is leading to, you know, drug use.

So in all, they ran about 91 stories in the paper that he would eventually collect into a four volume book called The International Jew, which he distributed like a half a million copies to people for free.

purposely never copyrighted it so that it could be republished. And it still is. It's a huge, it's like a bookshelf must for white supremacists still today. The fact that none of the stuff he ever said in it was ever proved or shown to be true or correct has no bearing on that whatsoever. And I don't know if this is the origin of it, but he certainly perpetuated, if he didn't create it, the idea that Jewish bankers secretly ran the world. Yeah.

which is still a trope today among white supremacists and racists of all stripes. One of these articles, I think it was about Jews taking over the American farming industry, mentioned one guy in particular, a Jewish activist who was a union activist trying to organize farm workers named Aaron Shapiro. And he was named

personally in this article. So he's like, oh, you like libel suits? Here's one for you too. And he sued him for libel. Yeah, he did. And I think he ended up settling out of court, right? He did. And part of the settlement was that he was required to make a public apology to Jewish people, which he took the opportunity to make what seemed like a sincere apology, like he'd seen the error of his ways.

But apparently, privately, he had all the same views. And if you want to know anything about Henry Ford and his anti-Semitism, he accepted an award from Hitler in 1938. And this was the culmination of a longtime mutual admiration between the two. Hitler cited Henry Ford as an inspiration in Mein Kampf.

And I think in 1931, a reporter from the Detroit News interviewed Hitler in his office and noted that there was a huge portrait of Henry Ford behind Hitler at his desk. And Hitler said, I regard him as my inspiration. So they definitely admired one another's views and work. Yeah.

I think that's enough said on that, right? Sure. It speaks for itself. Yeah, for sure. All right. Should we take a break and come back with a little more career? Yeah. All right. We'll be right back. Thank you.

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All right, Chuck. So you talked about him wanting to build like a plant, what's called a vertically integrated plant where ore and raw materials are brought in and everything but the car's tires are built and assembled there, right? That's right. Like if you have something like this, you are extraordinarily powerful in whatever industry you're in. And he built it. It was a 2,000-acre plant called the River Rouge plant.

And I think it opened in 1918. And I mean, it was extraordinarily successful and just launched the company into like essentially a monopoly. Even though there were other car companies, nobody could compete with Ford to the point where it was like, you know, he might as well have had a monopoly on it. He was just so far ahead of everybody else by this time.

Yeah, for sure. And part of the success of that plant was due to the fact that he kind of caved a little bit on releasing cars that had some bells and whistles. He like, you know, I mentioned earlier, he wasn't the biggest fan of those and kind of like, you know, the car for the people. But sales were declining in the mid 1920s. So he said, all right.

The Model T has done its work, but I think we need something a little more luxurious. So the Model A was released in 1927, and they also sold a lot of those. They did. That's another pretty car, too. It's like the official car of, like, gangsters with Tommy guns who rob banks and, like, run along and jump on the running boards on the side. Yeah, yeah. That's that kind of car. It's a pretty car. Yeah, you can hang off the side of that thing with a Tommy gun like no other car. Right.

So I said earlier that Henry Ford had an enormous impact on American culture, American history. One of the ironic things or funny things, it's a little ticklish, is that he despised the consumer culture that he helped create.

Yeah.

Anti-Semitism. These three pillars, right? He saw people turning away from this, right? And so I think he railed against it for sure. But him personally, he took that as an opportunity to kind of like fade into this childhood fantasy, this idealized version of the way life was in his childhood. And he did this by building something called Greenfield Village. Right.

I thought you were going to say Celebration, Florida. I know. It bears a striking resemblance. I even wrote it's like Celebration, Florida. Yeah. It's also a little bit like his version of Colonial Williamsburg. He started developing this in 1919 when he restored his original house. And about 10 years later, it would open to the public as sort of like a Williamsburg of his time. It was like a living history village. There was a museum there. It still is. He would...

he would basically like Colonial Williamsburg would do, he would say like, "Hey, this is when things were the best." Like when I was a kid,

Totally, definitely a narcissist, have I mentioned. This is when things were most awesome. And here's what it was like back then. Here's what the buildings look like. You can come and walk around the village. It's even got, like it functioned as a real place where people live. There was that school in that one-room schoolhouse modeled after the one that he loved growing up. They had a full-time dance instructor there.

who was teaching square dancing among other things. And he was told to CEOs like, you need to get down there to Greenfield village. I've signed you up for Tuesdays at seven. Can you imagine?

No. So yeah, it's still there today, right? It's still a living museum open today. I've never been. It does sound interesting. In addition to the look back at history, which is ironic again, because he said history's bunk. It was also a way to preserve the great technological innovations of Thomas Edison. He took buildings from Menlo Park and moved them to Greenfield Village. So he assembled his idealized version of what

a town would have been like in his childhood and he just spent more and more time there and just

just kind of moving further and further away from the company. And as he spent less time at the company, he had to, somebody had to run the company. So he grudgingly had Edsel running things. He had another guy named Charles Sorensen who ran the plant, that huge River Rouge plant. And then he had another guy, a real scumbag named Harry Bennett, who we've talked about multiple times, who ran the Ford service department, which was the Ford goon squad, essentially. Yeah.

Yeah. And goon squad, meaning they he wasn't a big fan of unionization and workers organizing. So Bennett would go in and do the heavy work. A lot of paranoia created a lot of literal punishment for just dumb little infractions saying they couldn't have bathroom breaks. You get 15 minutes for lunch. I'm going to spy on the CEOs.

And if you come around here, like maybe from the UAW, the United Auto Workers, and you start talking about organizing, we're going to literally physically beat you down and run you out of here. Yeah, if you read about what's called the Battle of the Overpass in 1937, it's –

We've again, I think we talked about that before, too, but the the the Ford Service Department, led by Harry Bennett, who was in the mix, like beat these people so badly they were thrown down flights of concrete stairs. When they were knocked down, they would be picked up again so they could be beaten further. Some of the women that were there were roughed up.

It was a bad jam. And then they chased the reporters down and tried to get their notebooks, tried to get the film out of their cameras. And only because a couple of reporters, one of them ran five miles to a police station to keep his negatives intact or his plates intact. And another one managed to hide it, hide his plates just in time and gave him fake plates or fake film essentially to go and break the

And this stuff got published and it was totally contrary to Ford's version of what had happened. And it really gave a huge black eye to the Ford Motor Company because you just didn't, that was just beyond the pale, even for the 1930s, like union busters, right? So,

So it actually helped pave the way for the UAW to make inroads and start organizing Ford. And the Ford employees finally, I think five years after the Battle of Overpass, were given the opportunity to vote whether to unionize. And they said, yes, union, yes. Si se puede. All right. So we're at the end. He had not been, you know, some people say he was still calling the shots kind of close to the end.

He was in his 70s by the time Bennett was doing his strong arm work, so there are people that say he wasn't super aware of that. Other people like, you know, one of the top folks, Sorensen, said, no, he was doing exactly what Ford wanted. But as he got older and older, he obviously started experiencing health issues, right?

And throughout that last decade, he was just sort of, you know, declining like we all eventually will. And that means at work as well, like not working as much, had a lot of health issues, especially his memory.

But he still wouldn't like officially give up control or just say, I'm just going to go hide away from the public. We talked about World War II and, you know, he activism there in the 1930s and 40s also was not a big fan of FDR and the New Deal in the 1930s. So he was not shutting up about that either. He would have loved social media if he were around today. He would be huge on social media. Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. We mentioned Edsel died in 1943 and for a very brief time after Ford took over the company again as president. But it was, you know, he shouldn't have been running a company at that point. No. One anecdote is that he would fire employees and then, you know, a day or two later ask why they weren't at the meeting because he'd forgotten. And

And so as more and more of this stuff mounted, the executives were like, you have to retire. Please just let us handle this. We can do this. And he finally caved in 1945. Two years later, he would be dead, April 7th, 1947. And I think his last day on earth really kind of illustrates him. He spent the morning with his mistress, Evangeline, and he died at night when he had an aneurysm while he was fluffing his wife, Clara's pillow at bedtime.

That's not funny, but the way you put it was funny. I mean, there's no other way to put it. I could have said it in like Italian or something, but then no one would have understood what I said except for our Italian listeners. I don't think we have Italian listeners because you've alienated them all. Oh, man. You got anything else? No, I'm looking for the compliment sandwich in that one, but I don't think it's the compliment. The last part is that you do a really great Italian impression regardless and everyone loves it.

You said you had nothing else, right? So that means it's time for Listener Mail. Yeah, this is about the just-released episode, part of which was about this mystery song from the 1980s, right? Yeah, 1980s.

Hey guys, my name is Nicole and I was just listening to this episode about the most mysterious song on the internet. I've been listening to it now for about 45 minutes and a couple of things stood out. I am German, born and raised during the 80s and have been living here almost 18 years now. Given the fact that I grew up during the time this song was discovered, some things have become rather apparent to me.

Okay. Also very interesting. Mm-hmm.

Number three, I find this utterly fascinating and it's definitely a rabbit hole, guys. And number four, I wonder if this song was accidentally played, smuggled in by someone unbeknownst to the radio station. Since it isn't professionally recorded, I found this to be very likely to be the case.

At any rate, thank you for making great shows to keep me on my toes and inspire me to think outside the box. This one in particular will be a great one, especially because I'd never heard of it before today. And that is from Nicole. Awesome. Thanks a lot, Nicole. Thanks for listening to us over there in Germany. That's awesome. And if you want to be like Nicole and send us your thoughts and observations on an episode that we've done, we love that kind of thing. You can wrap it up, spank it on the bottom, and send it off to stuffpodcast at iheartradio.com.

Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. ♪

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