Henry Ford

Henry Ford did not invent the automobile, but he made it something ordinary Americans could own. In 1908 he introduced the Model T — a simple, durable machine designed for mass production and priced to reach the working class. By 1913, his Highland Park plant had perfected the moving assembly line, cutting the time to build a complete car from over 12 hours to 93 minutes. The price fell as fast as the production time. By 1920, half the cars in the world were Model Ts. Ford had not simply built a car company; he had constructed modern consumer culture.

Ford's decision to pay his workers five dollars a day — roughly double the prevailing wage — in January 1914 made him a folk hero overnight. He grasped before almost anyone else that workers needed to earn enough to buy what they made. The practical result was a stable, loyal workforce; the philosophical result was a model of industrial capitalism — high wages, low prices, mass consumption — that competitors were eventually forced to match. His methods spread to factories across America and Europe, industrializing the 20th century in ways that outlasted his company.

Ford's legacy is permanently shadowed by his virulent antisemitism. He published a series of antisemitic articles collected into a book, "The International Jew," translated into German and widely distributed across Europe. Adolf Hitler kept Ford's portrait in his Munich office and cited him in Mein Kampf. Ford received the Grand Cross of the German Eagle — Nazi Germany's highest civilian honor for foreigners — in 1938. These facts sit alongside his industrial genius and cannot be separated from any honest account of his life.