Russell Jones's Week Moment: What the Grasping Capitalist Monster Elon Musk Could Learn from Henry Ford

The bestselling author of 'The Decade in Tory' on a far-right, conspiracy-theorising, billionaire car manufacturer, who owned a self-aggrandising media outlet, and Elon Musk

At the beginning of January 1914, Henry Ford – capitalist monster, engine of disinformation, conspiracy theorist, antisemite, probably the richest person ever born in the USA, and the only American mentioned favourably in Mein Kampf – made one of the most surprising decisions imaginable for such a fundamentally greedy, grasping and appalling man. Overnight, he more than doubled the wages paid to his factory workers.

During Ford’s early years, America was in many ways just about as capitalist as it was possible to be. The nation – or to be strictly accurate, the white, male bits of the nation – consisted of myriad small-scale producers and independent farmers, each competing to sell their wares to whatever customers could be reached in one day on horseback. Business owners lived close to their workers, with every level of (white, male) society being recognisable to every other level. Competition was localised, but real. Monopolies were vanishingly rare. If you succeeded in your trade you could become, at best, moderately prosperous. Grotesque wealth was limited to the foreign royals who occasionally turned up on an ocean liner, and the Vanderbilt family, who provided the ship.

But beginning in the 1890s the world went through a technological revolution, and all of that began to change. Vanderbilt’s ever-expanding railroad system allowed companies to sell to wider markets, crush previously untouchable competition a thousand miles away, and transform themselves into corporations. For decades, highly localised economic conditions had shaped innovations made by small businesses. But now mass production and standardisation required the entire continent – and then the entire world – to adapt to the demands and requirements of remote corporations. The form of capitalism described a hundred years earlier by Adam Smith became warped out of all recognition.

So did the world of work. Henry Ford wasn’t the first person to implement an assembly line – that was Richard Garrett, a producer of steam engines in Suffolk, half a century earlier – but Ford turned the idea into a vast enterprise. The cost of a Ford Model T plummeted, but skilled workers who had once taken pride in their labour were left jaded by the grinding mundanity of the assembly line. Absenteeism became rife, and thousands simply quit. In previous decades a worker might reasonably expect to spend his life with a single employer. By contrast, Ford’s staff turnover rate reached 370% in a single year.

The social costs were terrible. Tens of thousands had rushed to Detroit to join the manufacturing revolution, and now found themselves in squalid housing, with insecure jobs, battling poverty wages, disease, what we now recognise as the sequalae of depression: alcoholism, violence, inactivity, and want. Ford himself might have been worth $200 billion (adjusted for inflation), but he when he went to his office, he sat in the midst of a crumbling society, scarred by deep-seated poverty and lousy productivity.

Surprisingly for one of the most unpleasant and grasping men to ever don a top hat – and let’s face it, there is some serious competition for that accolade – Henry Ford came up with a moral solution. He doubled wages for his workers in one fell swoop. Of course, he didn’t do it out of the goodness of his heart because his heart didn’t have any goodness. He did it to become richer, and it worked.