Vintage Auto Ads: Ford

In the early 20th century, The Saturday Evening Post would consistently carry more automobile advertising than any other publication. Perhaps this was why Henry Ford chose its pages to introduce his wonder car, the Model T, which would go on to become one of the most successfully sold automobiles of all time.

Take a look at the evolution of Ford automobiles from the early years through the 1960s, as advertised in The Saturday Evening Post. (For more on the auto industry’s early years, check out Post‘s new special collector’s edition, Automobiles in America!)

The Model T was priced at one half to a third of what other cars cost in 1908.

 

 

More than a year after this 1911 ad appeared, Ford introduced the moving assembly line, which allowed him to drop the Model T price l, cut production time exponentially, and increase employee wages.

 

 

By 1926, the Model T was losing popularity. Ford added new features and lowered the price to boost sales, but production on the T ended the following year.

 

 

Ford introduces his Model A, and sells a million of them by early 1929.

 

 

In 1932, Ford introduces the famous flathead engine, which would be used in Ford models for years to come and earned him a letter of endorsement from outlaw Clyde Barrow of Bonnie and Clyde fame.

 

In 1949, Ford became the first automaker among the Big Three to offer a car that wasn’t just an updated pre-war design.

 

In the second half of the 20th century, Ford’s frame, suspension, and drive shaft were all new, and the V8 engine was engineered to deliver 100 hp.

 

To stay competitive, the 1955 Ford offered a body design similar to the popular Chevrolet. The new model also featured a more powerful engine and curved-glass windshields for a panoramic view of the road.

 

The Thunderbird, a convertible two-seater with a powerful V8 engine, was Ford’s upscale response to the sports-car market opened up by the Chevrolet Corvette.

 

Longer and lower, the 1957 Ford displayed a modest extended tailfin, a feature that would become characteristic of 1950s automobiles.

 

In 1964, the Post carried ads that introduced the Ford Mustang, a mid-range sports car with a long hood and short rear deck. In its first year of production, over 400,000 of the “workingman’s Thunderbird” were sold.

 

The Mustang received a Tiffany Gold Medal for Excellence in Design. But more importantly, it appeared in a James Bond film that year.

 

Why Did Henry Ford Double His Minimum Wage?

In 1914, Henry Ford made a big announcement that shocked the country. It caused the financial editor at The New York Times to stagger into the newsroom and ask his staff in a stunned whisper, “He’s crazy, isn’t he? Don’t you think he’s crazy?”

That morning, Ford would begin paying his employees $5.00 a day, over twice the average wage for automakers in 1914.

In addition, he was reducing the work day from 9 hours to 8 hours, a significant drop from the 60-hour work week that was the standard in American manufacturing.

According to an article (above) in the Post sponsored by the automaker, Ford arrived at the new wage scale during a meeting with his managers.

He wrote on the board the Ford wage standards: minimum pay of $2.34 for a nine-hour day. He tossed down the chalk and said: “Figure out how much more we can give our men.”

The Ford executives worked all day, cautiously adding 25¢ an hour, and then another 25¢. Every so often Ford walked back in, said: “Not enough,” and walked out.

Finally they had doubled the basic pay—up to $4.80 a day. One man snapped, “Why don’t you make it $5 a day and bust the company right?”

“Fine,” said Henry Ford. “We’ll do that.”

A young reporter from the Times travelled to Detroit to learn more about this revolutionary move. His name was Edward Peter Garrett, but he wrote under the name Garet Garrett, which was how Post readers knew him when he was the magazine’s financial writer between 1922 and 1942.

Arriving in Detroit, Garrett found the city’s manufacturers panicking and predicting various disasters. The higher wages would cause other employers to leave the city, they said. Carmakers who remained and tried to match Ford’s wages would go bankrupt. Ford employees would be “demoralized by this sudden affluence,” and, of course, Ford Motor Company would soon be bankrupt.

Fortunately, Garrett was able to get an audience with Henry Ford and, over the course of two days, discuss the company’s revolutionary changes. He wrote of his extended interview with Ford in a 1952 book, The Wild Wheel. He recalled asking Ford why he raised wages when every other manufacturer was trying to reduce wages to the lowest acceptable figure. Ford believed he was buying higher quality work from all his employees. “If the floor sweeper’s heart is in his job he can save us five dollars a day by picking up small tools instead of sweeping them out.”

Higher wages were necessary, Ford realized, to retain workers who could handle the pressure and the monotony of his assembly line. In January of 1914, his continuous-motion system reduced the time to build a car from 12 and a half hours to 93 minutes. But the pace and repetitiveness of the jobs was so demanding, many workers found themselves unable to withstand it for eight hours a day, no matter how much they were paid.

But Ford had an even bigger reason for raising his wages, which he noted in a 1926 book, Today and Tomorrow. It’s as a challenging a statement today as it as 100 years ago. “The owner, the employees, and the buying public are all one and the same, and unless an industry can so manage itself as to keep wages high and prices low it destroys itself, for otherwise it limits the number of its customers. One’s own employees ought to be one’s own best customers.”

It might have been just another of Ford’s wild ideas, except that it proved successful. In 1914, the company sold 308,000 of its Model Ts—more than all other carmakers combined. By 1915, sales had climbed to 501,000. By 1920, Ford was selling a million cars a year.

“We increased the buying power of our own people, and they increased the buying power of other people, and so on and on,” Ford wrote. “It is this thought of enlarging buying power by paying high wages and selling at low prices that is behind the prosperity of this country.”

In 1919, Ford raised his minimum wage again, this time to $6.00 a day. Again, the wage hike produced higher production numbers. Ford told Garrett, “The payment of five dollars a day for an eight-hour day was one of the finest cost-cutting moves we ever made, and the six-dollar-a-day wage is cheaper than the five. How far this will go we do not know.”

He learned how far in 1929. In the aftermath of the stock market crash, he raised wages to $7.00 a day, hoping it would spark an economic recovery. But this time, it didn’t work. Orders fell, production slowed, hours were reduced. But Ford didn’t blame the workers for the sluggish economy. The fault lay in business leaders who were “continually putting the profit motive over what he called the wage motive.” Ford told Garrett, “When business thought only of profit for the owners ‘instead of providing goods for all,’ then it frequently broke down.”

While it worked, though, Ford’s $5.00-a-day policy helped the company achieve record profits. It made its cars affordable to its workers (who could purchase a Model T with four months’ wages.) It helped put 15 million Americans behind the wheel of an automobile. And it set a standard for wages that, despite all the predictions of doom for the Ford Motor Company, every other car company eventually adopted.