Henry Ford

Henry Ford (1863–1947) was an American engineer, industrialist and founder of the Ford Motor Company. Fascinated by machinery from an early age, he built his first experimental automobile during the 1890s and helped establish the Ford Motor Company in 1903. The introduction of the Model T in 1908 brought relatively simple, durable and affordable motoring to a mass market. Ford’s adoption of the moving assembly line at the Highland Park plant dramatically increased production and reduced manufacturing costs, influencing industrial methods far beyond the motor industry. His achievements transformed transport, factory work and everyday American life, although his legacy is complicated by his paternalistic control of employees, virulent antisemitism and political controversies.

Within John Jakes’s Crown Family Saga, Ford appears principally in American Dreams, the second novel after Homeland. Carl Crown, the mechanically gifted younger son of Chicago brewery magnate Joe Crown, rejects the conventional professional future expected by his family and goes to Detroit, where he puts his engineering abilities to work for Ford. His contact with Ford places the fictional Crown family at the centre of the rapidly developing automobile industry before the First World War. Carl later leaves factory work for the more dangerous world of motor racing with Barney Oldfield and eventually becomes an aviator. Through Ford, Jakes represents the technological ambition, mass production and restless pursuit of innovation reshaping the United States between 1906 and 1917.

In E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, historical figures including Harry Houdini, Emma Goldman, Henry Ford, J. P. Morgan and Evelyn Nesbit move through the fictional story.