Henry Ford (2013)

This installment of "The American Experience" is one that will never bore you despite its length. This is because there are so many things about the life of Henry Ford that will both impress you and completely repulse you--making him a strange and complex figure in American history. The first portion of the documentary is about Henry Ford's rise towards becoming a titan of the auto industry. Most of this is stuff you will admire--his determination, his love of old fashioned values and the work ethic. However, as the show progresses the picture becomes more fuzzy and difficult to understand. While he was way ahead of his time by offering his workers fantastic wages, profit-sharing and a shorter work day, he later was rabidly anti- union, spied on his employees and was incredibly paranoid. But the picture gets worse as the film progresses, as Ford's antisemitism and narrow and inflexible manner make him a man that is easy to hate. All in all, with so much material and such a complex man, it must rank as one of the best episodes of this fantastic series--one that will impress you even if you aren't completely impressed by the man.

Perhaps the best example of someone who snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in American history, Henry Ford--if even half as evil as this American Experience episode pillories him--deserves to be forgotten. How anyone with an ounce of human feelings can consider climbing into a "Ford" after seeing this expose is totally beyond me (you would not be caught dead driving a "Nixon" subcompact even if it got good gas mileage, would you?). Henry Ford hounded his only son Edsel to an early stress-caused death, had auto plant assembly line workers shot by plant "security" thugs if they dared to talk to anyone else on the line, was a megalomaniac who stole the credit from all the other people who thought up "his" innovations before firing and destroying them, and as America's richest and craziest-ever anti-Semite, was Hitler's #1 enabler in the U.S.: itz all documented here.Detroit, MI, is the only city in the history of the industrialized world to fester from a population of more than 2 million souls to WAY less than 1 million people, and itz not hard to see why it deserves this curse. Ty Cobb of the Detroit Tigers--Henry Fordz contemporary--was the main villain of the BASEBALL documentary by Ken Burns. Detroiter Charles Lindbergh, an epic American hero of this same time, hobnobbed with Hitler. Detroit-based Father Coughlin, the Rush Limbaugh of his day on Fordz local radio, was known as Hitlerz priest. And current Michigan governor Rick Snider all but out-lawed the UAW this month, one of the few evil things Henry Ford thought up but failed to pull off. As AMER!CAN EXPERIENCE proves here, Ford outdid them all by choosing evil over good whenever he could, instead of retiring to the billion-dollar life-sized Lego village he created to escape hearing the wailing and gnashing of teeth he had almost single-handedly brought upon the so-called "Motor City" (rather than letting the more right-minded Edsel take over and save the day from his stroke-crazed dad).