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The President and Fellows of Harvard College

Review
Author(s): Robert J. Brugger
Review by: Robert J. Brugger
Source: The Business History Review, Vol. 48, No. 4 (Winter, 1974), pp. 565-567
Published by: The President and Fellows of Harvard College
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3113554
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THE FIRST HENRY FORD: A STUDY IN PERSONALITY AND


BUSINESS LEADERSHIP. By Anne Jardim. Cambridge, Massachusetts, The MIT Press, 1970. Pp. ix + 278. $6.95.
Reviewed by Robert J. Brugger
Postdoctoral Fellow in Psychology
Johns Hopkins University
Here is unabashed psychohistory, imposing in its use of clinical language and frank in the display of its credentials. Written while Anne
Jardim took part in the Research Program in Applied Psychoanalysis at
the Harvard Business School, her book seeks to return focus from the
organizational system to the individual innovator and manager, to find
beneath the superstructure of consciousness and rational act the dark
underpinnings of unconscious forces. Why did Henry Ford the imaginative inventor become, at the height of his success, a rigid and irascible
industrial captain?
The question is worth asking and the patient is an attractive subject.
John Burroughs, the adding machine magnate, once described Ford as a
"loveable personality," tender as a woman though "much more tolerant,"
a man "who looks like a poet, and conducts his life like a philosopher."
Still, before the end of Ford's long career less winning qualities had made
him a scourge to his company and occasionally an embarrassment to
the country. So enamored was he with the design of the 1908 Model T
that he obstinately refused to change it, despite marketing disasters and
the pleas of advisors, for nearly twenty years. During that time he dismissed critics and grew ever more isolated and anxious. Convinced of his
wide-ranging wisdom, the developer of the Model T promoted squaredancing, tried singlehandedly to end World War I, and made the newspaper he owned a cranky transmitter of anti-Semitism.
Jardim finds the roots of Ford's inventive energy and managerial failure
in the dynamics of early emotions, a sense of abandonment and loss, and
a narcissistic personality. Ford's resolution of the classic
Oedipal conflict,
the author asserts, was to idealize his mother and displace onto his father
all the hostility inherent in the parents-son relationship. In this view Ford
unconsciously came to hold that his father had rejected him, and struggled
throughout his life to settle two unconscious issues: first, a need to retaliate against William Ford for this "abandonment;" second, an
urge to deny
to himself that he had "reversed" the process by
spurning his father in
turn. Furthermore, writes Jardim, the loss of parental ties, whether real
or perceived, builds narcissism - a love of self that enables one to feel
"chosen," independent of close relationships.
Behind this scaffolding of technical language, Jardim offers an interesting interpretation of Ford, one that recognizes the complex ties between
mind and outside reality. Ford's creativity, "behind the facade of action,"
was the product of conflict between father (a farmer who wanted his
boy to remain at home) and son (whose tinkering was aimed at avoiding
the farm, whose automobile enabled him to turn
away from the father
who had "abandoned" him). Ford's obsessive concern with
making a
car cheap enough for all the
people and especially the farmer represented
BOOK REVIEWS 565

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an attempt to show himself a friend of the farmer after all, to "make


good" the repudiation of his father. As long as Americans demanded
Model Ts as surely as Ford felt compelled to make them, this fixation
and reality nicely intermeshed; as long as the process of putting together
the car called for rigor and direction, Ford's need to control personal relationships, a function of his being an "abandoned son," served him well.
But with change Ford's brittle insistence on keeping the Model T in production spelled his failure as a corporate leader. Narcissistic personalities,
according to Freud, can better receive than give affection, and Ford's
harshness with company executives only worsened matters. His need,
once the Model T was built, to find other battles, to "externalize" his
unconscious conflicts, eventually left him a ludicrous public figure. In
one sense, Ford outgrew the usefulness of his personality.
Commendable in purpose and often suggestive, Jardim's effort suffers
from disappointing literary and logical flaws. Lengthy quotations from
unremarkable sources, unidentified characters, and unclear writing badly
impede the reader's course. Although the thematic organization of chapters gives the analysis structural strength, Jardim could have avoided
needless repetition and baffling chronology by arranging her material
more thoughtfully. The volume does not stand up very well as art.
As psychohistorical inquiry the book turns on two hinges, and both of
them squeak. First, there is neither compelling reason within the scheme
of psychoanalysis nor sufficient evidence historically to contend that unconsciously Ford believed his father had "abandoned" him. Idealization
does not end ambivalence; Jardim's case to the contrary is thin and tortuous. While Ford may indeed have claimed in the 1920s that he owed
"everything" to his mother, such evidence hardly convinces us that he
owed nothing to his father - or that Henry felt so, and therefore created
a "harsh[,] punitive father where non existed" (158ff). While Henry did
refuse his father's help (as he did the aid of other members of the family)
in building the first Ford, the leap Jardim asks us to make calls for considerable faith. Unconsciously, she insists, Ford must have seen this offer
as a bill of abandonment, a paternal wish to buy off his son and send
him to the city. Second, Jardim depends heavily on the Freudian description of the "narcissistic" personality. Yet the analytical value of this category, like Freud's "oral" character, is highly dubious and certainly limited.
Psychoanalysts and academic psychologists agree that we are all in measure oral, anal, and phallic; at times we are all narcissistic, obsessional,
and erotic. Ford may "fit" the narcissistic mold Freud outlined, but this
fact is not terribly meaningful.
The First Henry Ford illustrates both the interpretive possibilities and
the usual pitfalls of much recent psychohistory. The questionable case
for "abandonment" ought to remind us that, given the evidence available,
even judgments about unconscious operations must appear plausible to a
writer's readership. Jardim's reliance on "narcissism" demonstrates that
basing a psychohistorical position on retractable clinical ground cannot
be as effective as arguing an interpretation on its own merit, using
psychological insights principally to sharpen that historical argument.
Jardim's Applied Psychoanalysis is a bit of a limitation itself, for there is
no reason that psychohistory need limit itself in this way. Ford's case may
566 BUSINESS HISTORY REVIEW

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call for a more eclectic approach:Jardimmight profitablyhave discussed


Ford'searly years and latervulnerabilitiesin termsof his mother'suntimely
death, thus dealing with a loss both intellectually manageable and, as
John Bowlby has shown in recent studies, psychologically formative;
perhaps more helpful than narcissismin treating Ford's managerialtroubles and rigid defense of the Model T are Milton Rokeach'swork on the
dogmatic mentality and non-Freudianstudies of paranoid systems. Deliberately focusing on psychic processes in her discussion of Ford's personalityand decisions,Jardimnecessarilyneglects the automaker'spopulist
beliefs and homely values as shaping influences.But her one-dimensional
Ford makes it clear that psychohistoryat its best considers the dynamics
of mind and unconsciousfully in the socio-culturaland ideological setting.
Finally, the clumsiness of Jardim'sstyle and presentation is more than
a matterof polish, because it raisesthe question of the historian'spurpose.
The book lacks coherence. In "explaining"Ford to her readers, Jardim
has missed a chance to deepen our understandingof him.
Editorial Note: Professor Brugger volunteered to review this book
after learning(Business History Review, Winter, 1973, p. 509) that the
originalreviewerhad failed to carryout the task.
A HISTORY OF INVESTMENT BANKING IN NEW ENGLAND.
Organized and directed by Parker B. Willis. Boston, Federal Reserve
Bank of Boston, 1973. Pp. 150. Gratis.
Reviewed by Theodore P. Kovaleff

Assistant Professor of History


St. John's University
This extremely short book attempts to delineate all that has occurred
in the field of investment banking in New England. Obviously this is an
enormoustask and 150 small (4 x 7) pages are not enough to accomplish
the job.
The style is free-flowing and the book is easily read, but one senses
that it is a condensationof a much longer monograph.Only seven paragraphs (two pages) are devoted to business and industrialconsolidations
in the 1920s. Actually the book is a reprint of introductorymaterial to

be found in the Annual Report for 1960 of the Federal Reserve Bank of

Boston. Nothing of consequence has been changed, not even the charts.
In the past fifteen years, however, the field of investment banking has
evolved considerably.For example, the "funds"have come to dominate
certain issues, yet nowhere is there any treatment of this importantdevelopment.
The study is not the work of one man, rather it was organized and
directed by ParkerB. Willis, an economic advisor at the Federal Reserve
Bank of Boston. His principal assistantwas Bruce David, who was aided
by a number of persons drawn from both the academic and investment
banking communitiesin and around Boston. The usual pitfalls of such an
arrangementhave been successfully circumvented and the monograph
reads as if it had been writtenby one person.
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