The car manufacturer Henry Ford dominates this remarkable book, managing, like Falstaff, to be its tragic hero, villain, and comic relief all at the same time. A gaunt, pacing figure, he conducted interviews while standing, believed in the values of small Main Street America (though his methods of industrial mass production destroyed these), and in pacifism, fitting out a ship to sail to Europe in an attempt to stop the Great War (though later he made billions out of armaments, and had machine-guns mounted on his factories while his paid thugs shot down hunger-marchers).
He believed in many things, in the soy bean, wholemeal bread and unpolished rice; he hated even more, among them booze, Jews, dairy products (he considered cows to be the most inefficient machines on earth) and trade unions. As you might expect, he considered himself, with his factory whistles and time-and-motion surveys, a great force for good in a world he had provided with cheap cars. Nothing seemed beyond a man looked up to by Hitler, Lenin, Trotsky and Mussolini, once described by a Brazilian writer as ‘the Jesus Christ of industry’, a man who declared, ‘Nothing is wrong with anything.’ Only something was.
If his cars were to actually move, they needed tyres, by 1925 50 million of them a year in the United States alone. And tyres were made of rubber. But not just tyres; hoses, valves and gaskets too. The only thing was, an Englishman had stolen the rubber. In 1871, Henry Wickham, who had gone into the jungles of South America hoping to shoot enough tropical birds to supply his mother’s hat shop off Piccadilly Circus, instead stole the seeds on which Brazil’s monopoly of world rubber turned. Queen Victoria knighted him, the seeds, perfected by Kew, were transplanted to Britain’s south east Asia colonies, and by the 1920s this country could exercise price controls on what was virtually the world’s supply, for by then the Brazilian rubber industry had been destroyed. So the American car industry needed an alternative source of supply. But where?
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