( In My Forty Years with Ford, Charles Sorensen-sometimes...)
In My Forty Years with Ford, Charles Sorensen-sometimes known as "Henry Ford's man," sometimes as "Cast-iron Charlie"-tells his own story, and it is as challenging as it is historic. He emerges as a man who was not only one of the great production geniuses of the world but also a man who called the plays as he saw them. He was the only man who was able to stay with Ford for almost the full history of his empire, yet he never hesitated to go against Ford when he felt the interests of the company demanded it. When labor difficulties mounted and Edsel's fatal illness was upon him, Sorensen sided with Edsel against Henry Ford and Harry Bennett, and he insisted that Henry Ford II be brought in to direct the company despite the aging founder's determination that no one but he hold the presidential reins. First published in 1956, My Forty Years with Ford has now been reissued in paperback for the first time. The Ford story has often been discussed in print but has rarely been articulated by someone who was there. Here Sorensen provides an eyewitness account of the birth of the Model T, the early conflicts with the Dodge brothers, the revolutionary announcement of the five-dollar day, and Sorensen's development of the moving assembly line-a concept that changed our world. Although Sorensen conceived, designed, and built the giant Willow Run plant in nineteen months and then proceeded to turn out eight thousand giant bombers, his life's major work was to make possible the vision of Henry Ford and to postpone the personal misfortune with which it ended. My Forty Years with Ford is both a personal history of a business empire and a revelation that moves with excitement and the power of tragedy.
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Charles was born on September 27, 1881 in Copenhagen, Denmark, the son of Soren Sorensen, a modelmaker, and Eva Christine Abrahamsen. In 1883, Soren Sorensen immigrated to the United States, and his family joined him a year later. Later the family moved to Detroit.
Charles Sorensen finished high school in Buffalo, New York, in 1896 and became an apprentice in the pattern shop at the Jewett Stove Works there. When his father moved to Milwaukee in 1898, Sorensen went with him and worked under him, meanwhile taking correspondence courses in drafting, including algebra, geometry, and trigonometry.
In Detroit Sorensen met Henry Ford and went to work in the pattern department of the Ford Motor Company in 1904.
The cognomen stuck for the rest of his career because of his unrelenting harshness as an executive toward the people who had to work with or under him. An instance of this followed upon Ford's purchase of the bankrupt Lincoln Motor Company in 1921, with a verbal agreement that its founder, Henry M. Leland, would remain in charge of it.
Sorensen was sent to the Lincoln plant, ostensibly to inspect it for Ford, but he simply took charge, ignored Leland's protests, and in a few months ordered him out. Because of Henry Ford's dislike of formal organization and job titles, it is difficult to say just when Sorensen became an executive of the Ford Motor Company.
He succeeded Martin about 1925; he designated 1925 to 1944 as "the Sorensen period" in the Ford Motor Company, when he was in complete charge of Ford production.
In 1941 he became vice-president and a member of the board of directors. Sorensen's technical skill enhanced his talent for production. He was one of the group that worked out the system of the moving assembly line at Ford between 1909 and 1913. He was a party to the spectacular rise of the Model T, and when it finally went out of production, he assisted Henry Ford and others to design its successor, the Model A of 1928.
Sorensen's foundry skills were evident in 1932, when the Ford V-8 engine was made possible by an innovative foundry technique that permitted the entire engine block and crankcase to be cast as a single unit. The same method was used to cast crankshafts. Throughout his unique tenure of forty years with the Ford Motor Company, Sorensen saw himself as "Henry Ford's man"; he regarded it as his function to take Ford's ideas and make them operative.
But Ford encouraged competition among his subordinates to improve their efficiency, and Sorensen came to regard his fellow executives as rivals. He constantly worked to get rid of real or supposed threats to his position. One of his successes, inducing William S. Knudsen to resign, was hardly beneficial to the Ford Motor Company, for Knudsen went on to help Chevrolet overtake Ford in sales.
Early in the 1930's, Sorensen became involved in a bitter power struggle with Harry Bennett, who was in charge of Ford security and had gained a commanding influence with the aging Henry Ford. Sorensen claimed that he sought to heal the widening breach between Ford and his son Edsel, for which he held Bennett largely responsible, and worked to preserve the company so that it could be handed over to the Ford family when its founder died.
The one point on which Sorensen and Bennett were in agreement, in common with Henry Ford, was implacable hostility to labor unions. Sorensen was probably not responsible for the "Battle of the Overpass" in 1937, when union organizers, including the Reuther brothers, were attacked and beaten by Ford security men, but it was certainly with his consent that Ford was the last automobile manufacturer to come to an agreement with the United Automobile Workers (UAW)--and then only after a long and bitter strike in 1941.
During World War II the Ford Motor Company was in confusion. The elder Ford was sinking into senility, and Edsel's sudden death in 1943 meant that his oldest son, the young and untried Henry Ford II, had to be brought back from the navy to take charge. Sorensen was fully occupied with wartime production, in particular with building and operating the gigantic airplane plant at Willow Run for the manufacture of B-24 Liberators.
This project fell so far behind schedule that it was referred to as "Will-it Run?" The plant was poorly located in relation to the labor supply, and the labor shortage was exacerbated by the efforts of Sorensen and Bennett to keep the UAW out. Moreover, the automobile and aircraft industries had different philosophies of production, and Sorensen was unable to handle delicate relationships with a company in another industry.
He became the scapegoat for Willow Run's disappointments, and in March 1944, Cast-Iron Charlie went the way that he had compelled so many other Ford executives to take. Officially he resigned. In July of the same year, he became president and vice-chairman of the board of the Willys-Overland Company, a small auto-manufacturing firm. When Willys-Overland was absorbed by Kaiser-Fraser in 1953, Sorensen retired and thereafter spent much of his time on St. Croix in the Virgin Islands.
He died at his summer home in Bethesda, Maryland.
Charles Sorensen was instrumental in the development of the moving assembly line, the Model T, the 1928 Model A, and the innovative foundry work that resulted in the casting of the 1932 V-8 engine and crankcase in a single piece. He became a vice-president of Ford motor company and board member in 1941. His inability to reach expected airplane production at the Willow Run plant west of Detroit during World War II ended his tenure at Ford in 1944.
( In My Forty Years with Ford, Charles Sorensen-sometimes...)
Quotes from others about the person
"Of all the men who served Henry Ford, " the historians Allan Nevins and Frank E. Hill concluded, "Sorensen was the most powerful, and stands alone as the most dynamically ruthless. " It seems a fair and accurate appraisal.
Having been widowed after the death of his first wife Helen (née Mitchell) Sorensen, he married Edith Thompson Montgomery in 1960.
