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EFV-8 Club Forum / General Ford Discussion / Famous Ford Women: a Mother's Day Remembrance

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Posted By Discussion Topic: Famous Ford Women: a Mother's Day Remembrance     Yokomo99 05-07-2018 @ 2:41 PM reply profile send p.m. Member Posts: 52 Joined: Oct 2017 Larry I had not read this. Thanks very much for posting. Matt Be sure to check out my YouTube pages at: https://www.youtube.com/user/MatthewBergin1 https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJCdOfmXtM8xO9nXeQ-iSQQ Larry Lange 05-06-2018 @ 10:25 AM reply profile send p.m. Member Posts: 93 Joined: Jun 2011 (Writer's Note: This article originally appeared in the March/April, 2016, V-8 Times. I thought it might be worth another look as we approach a special day again) --- Mother’s Day is May 13, and it is a time of year when we remind ourselves of how important women have been in all our lives – and in the evolution of Ford Motor Co. while our favorite cars were being designed and built. At a time when women weren’t top corporate executives, two made brought profound changes in the company by using their family connections. One example came just before World War II, when Henry Ford faced off against the United Auto Workers. The union began organizing workers at the Route Plant and in early 1941 the employees walked off the job and picketed the giant complex, protesting the firing of several workers for union activity. The move came after years of skirmishing with Ford and his security team over labor activity. “Ford ‘terrorism’ was blamed for thirty beatings of union sympathizers, including a near-fatal attack on a UAW lawyer in Texas,” wrote historian Douglas Brinkley. Even after the workers voted in 1941 to join the union and the union had negotiated an agreement with other company officials, Ford himself initially refused to sign it. He expressed a determination to fight until the bitter end. “As far as I’m concerned, the key is in the door,” Ford said, according to one account. “I’m going to throw it away. I don’t want any more of this business. Close the plant if necessary.” With that, a sense of foreboding hung over the company, as employees feared more violence. But just hours after Ford had vowed to fight, there was a startling reversal: “Henry had signed a closed-shop contract and agreed to a checkoff by which union dues would be automatically deducted from workers’ pay,” wrote Peter Collier and David Horowitz in their book about Ford. Wrote Brinkley: “Once Henry Ford accepted the idea, he wanted it to be done right, with the result that Ford workers received a much better contract than their counterparts at GM or Chrysler.” Explaining his unexpected switch a few days later, Collier and Horowitz wrote, Ford told one executive that his wife “Clara had put her foot down,” threatening to divorce him if he didn’t settle with the workers. When she heard of his plans to keep fighting the union “Mrs. Ford was horrified,” he said. “She said she could not understand my doing anything like that. If that were done there would be riots and bloodshed, and she had seen enough of that.” “What could I do?” he said. “Don’t ever discredit the power of a woman.” The outcome, according to biographer Robert Lacey, placed Ford’s company “in the vanguard of labor relations again for the first time since the Five Dollar Day.” When it came time for old Henry to step down , Ford women again showed their ability to bring positive change in the company Just after Henry’s son Edsel died in 1943, Henry maneuvered to try to keep himself and his security chief in charge of running the company for several more years. Some family members and company officials, on the other hand, feared Henry would undo many of the advances the company had made while Edsel was company president. After Edsel was gone several of his key people, including the famous styling chief “Bob” Gregorie, had been fired or forced out. Henry stopped development work on small economy cars and on vehicles with front-wheel drive and independent suspension. He spent less and less time on company business. By the mid-1940s he had suffered several strokes, one of which left his mind altered. “He would drift off for days at a time in reveries of his own,” wrote Lacey. “He spent more and more time retreating into the bygone world of Greenfield Village…” According to Collier and Horowitz, he old man talked of dropping production of Mercuries and Lincolns. “Joe,” he told one engineer, “we’ve got to go back to Model T days. We’ve got to build only one car.” Federal government officials, nervously overseeing several war contracts with the company, began lobbying to get him replaced. Henry’s grandson, Henry Ford II, wanted to take control of the company. The old man balked “but, at this crucial moment, the women of the family, silent during Edsel’s long humiliation, threw their weight onto (young) Henry’s side,” Collier and Horowitz wrote. “It seems most likely that it was Clara Ford who eventually accomplished the impossible,” Lacey wrote. “Working on her husband through the summer of 1945, she slowly induced the old autocrat finally to relinquish his power and hand it not to Harry Bennett, his alter ago (and notorious security chief) but to the family’s choice.” Collier and Horowitz wrote that “Clara made it clear to her husband that denying Henry II power in the company would snap already damaged family ties once and for all.” Then, they report, came what may have been the decisive move: Clara’s widowed daughter-in-law Eleanor “set aside the deference which had always characterized her relationship with her father-in-law and issued an ultimatum: if her son (young Henry) was not put in charge of the company immediately, she would sell all the stock she had inherited from Edsel, some 41 percent of the company.” “This last threat got the old man’s attention,” they wrote, and he soon offered young Henry the presidency of the company and agreed to resign and leave. Henry II, at age 28, became Ford Motor Co. president on Sept. 21, 1945. His grandfather died in 1947. Henry II continued as president until 1960 and was chairman and chief executive from 1960 to 1979 and chairman for several months thereafter. He presided over the complete redesign of Ford cars for 1949, the last years of the “flathead” V-8 engines and the transition to overhead valve power plants and further styling changes in the 1950s. He was in charge when the company began offering stock publicly for the first time in 1956. He streamlined the company’s operations in Europe and enhanced the company’s stature when Ford-powered racers beat Ferrari at LeMans. During his tenure the company created several new car lines including the Mustang, which is still in production. Two models, the Pinto and Edsel, left the scene with clouded histories. Others, including the Thunderbird, Maverick and Lincoln Continental Mark II, were probably better regarded. Clara Ford died in 1950, Eleanor Ford in 1976. Henry II died in1987.

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