The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century

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		The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century
		The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century

How a Michigan farm boy became the richest man in America is a classic, almost mythic tale, but never before has Henry Ford’s outsized genius been brought to life so vividly as it is in this engaging and superbly researched biography.

The real Henry Ford was a tangle of contradictions. He set off the consumer revolution by producing a car affordable to the masses, all the while lamenting the moral toll exacted by consumerism. He believed in giving his workers a living wage, though he was entirely opposed to union   labor. He had a warm and loving relationship with his wife, but sired a son with another woman. A rabid anti-Semite, he nonetheless embraced African American workers in the era of Jim Crow.

Uncovering the man behind the myth, situating his achievements and their attendant controversies firmly within the context of early twentieth-century America, Watts has given us a comprehensive, illuminating, and fascinating biography of one of America’s first mass-culture celebrities.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

网友对The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century的评论

一部深入了解美国工业化时代的书，福特成就了流水线、现代工业管理、劳资关系、大型托拉斯等现代工业必不可少的发展阶段。他非常重视对劳动者生活待遇的提高，不像我们以前认为的资本家就是剥削工人，榨取剩余价值，不顾工人死活。

I have recently returned from a first visit to beautiful Dearborn, Michigan. There I visited the Henry Ford Museum, Greenfield Village and the Rouge and Flatrock factories. My experience was greatly enhanced by reading the excellent and engaging story of Mr. Henry Ford's life and his vital role in shaping modern 20th Century America offered by Professor Steven Watts. This remarkable chronicle of America's first "industrial celebrity" is not only academically sound, but a joy to read. It helped me understand this magnificantly complex and humane person. It helped me look into myself and at my fellow man in a different light.

The chapter dealing with The Great Depression era contained so many parallels with our current economic crisis. Ford's assesment of the New Deal on page 441 was sarcastically that "entrepreneurs should join the crowd 'to make it unanimous and have us all live off the Government' then all that is required 'to be perfectly happy is a new kind of Santa Claus who will keep the Government well supplied with money or anything else it wants' "; and again in 1935 he denounced plans for new taxes on business as destroying the very foundations of productivity and prosperity. Further in 1936 he argued passionately. "Both government and finance, whenever they get the chance, show the same avid desire to regulate and control the operations of producers."

I whole-heartedly recommend this landmark book to ALL without reservation. I am now ordering a book on the next chapter of Ford Motor Company about the life and times of Henry Ford II.
AGK - Birmingham, Alabama

Well written, and hard to believe at some points!

What a character Mr. Ford was. I think the greatest strength of this biography is the richness in detailing the everyday Mr. Ford-- the many delightful accounts of him encountering locals in anonymity, like the farmer who was cursing at his Ford-Ferguson tractor-- Old Henry Ford can shove this tractor up his backside! And there was Henry Ford, among the wealthiest men in the world, in overalls and a straw hat. Ford fiddled around under the hood, got the motor running.

Next day the man learned who his visitor had been, and expected to be fired, but Ford never let on that it had happened.

I wanted more technical details on his cars, but that is not this book. I read the section on the Dahlingers twice-- Watts really handles that well.

Did Ford increase his workers's wages by 100 percent in order to avoid paying out his accumulated horde of cash in dividends? He considered his stockholders to be "parasites," and I think the wage increase is best explained as his avoiding rewarding those investors, not in order to give his workers more money so that they could buy more Ford cars.

Suffers from too few photos. Has no maps and no diagrams.

First, the biggest problem with this book is that the print is about 1-2 font sizes smaller than any book you will read. This makes it very difficult to read, enough so that I would not have bought it. But, with that said, the writing is decent and its a good story. His early childhood stories are not that exciting or worth telling, but the book gets better as it goes on. If it was in larger print, I would recommend it. But, as is, probably not.

A well-balanced and captivating history of one of the most interesting and influential characters of the early 20th century. Ford emerges as a paradox: kind and caring, anti-intellectual and biased, world-peace activist and jew-basher, a delightful combination of groundbreaking entrepeneur and reactionary Americana traditionalist.

I've read this book with great relish and would warmly recommend it to anyone with an interest in the Ford Motor Company and the broader early 20th century making of the consumer capitalist society.

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