Where Are They Buried? (94 page)

Henry Ford was a complex personality who exhibited a variety of enthusiasms and prejudices. In 1915, adamant that “history is more or less bunk,” he chartered an ocean-going “Peace Ship” in an attempt to end World War I by means of “continuous mediation.” Three years later, Ford bought the
Dearborn Independent
, and for seven years published a series of attacks on the “International Jew,” a mythical figure he blamed for society’s ills. “When there is something wrong in this country, you’ll find the Jews,” he wrote. Anti-immigrant, anti-labor, and anti-liquor, he opposed social and cultural change, decrying Hollywood movies, out-of-home childcare, and new styles in dress and music. Worried that his workers would go crazy with their five bucks a day, he set up a “Sociological Department” to insure that they didn’t blow their “wealth” on vices. He introduced European royalty and company executives to peculiar dances like the
mazurka
and the
quadrille
at old-fashioned social outings. He sponsored the reading of quaint essays to “plain folks” on a weekly radio hour, and experimented with soybeans
for food and durable goods. Ford also constructed the rural Greenfield Village and its companion Henry Ford Museum, filling them with artifacts from when America was almost wholly countrified.

By the late 1920s, Ford’s vertically integrated, automobile-building juggernaut was a model of self-sufficiency, boasting Brazilian rubber plantations and Minnesota iron ore mines. Ford became arrogantly convinced that auto buyers needed Ford more than Ford needed them and, with a similar know-it-all, authoritarian management style, the stage was set for decline. Trusting in what he believed was an unerring instinct for the marketplace, he refused to offer any innovative features, even color, famously adding that “customers could have any color they wanted as long as it’s black.” He drove out subordinates who bucked his philosophies. Violently opposed to labor organizers, he employed company police to prevent unionization. By 1936 Ford Motor Company was third in sales in the industry and, if World War II hadn’t come along and exploited the company’s manufacturing prowess in the business of building bombers, tanks, and jeeps, it’s entirely possible that Ford’s 1932 V-8 engine might have been its last innovation.

A known pacifist, Ford opposed America’s entry into World War II, but agreed to build airplane engines for the British in May 1940. After Pearl Harbor was attacked, Ford began a tremendous, all-out manufacturing effort, including the production of B-24 Liberator bombers at the rate of one an hour on a mile-long assembly line. By the end of the war, some 86,000 complete aircraft, 277,000 Willys jeeps, 57,000 airplane engines, and more than a million other fighting vehicles had been built at Ford factories from India to Britain to New Zealand.

Though he would continue to strictly control the company, Ford had turned its presidency over to his son Edsel in 1919. When Edsel died in 1943, Ford resumed the post, but, after a series of strokes, he handed the reins to his grandson.

In 1947, the innovator died in bed at his 1,300-acre Fair Lane mansion. At 83, he was buried at Saint Martha’s Episcopal Church in Detroit, Michigan.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
From I-96, take Exit 183 and follow Highway 39 south for a mile to Exit 13. Follow Joy Road east for three-fourths of a mile, and the church and cemetery are on the right.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Henry’s grave is easy to find in the Ford section of the cemetery.
Most of his personal estate, valued at $205 million, went to the Ford Foundation, which had been set up in 1936 as a means of retaining family control of the firm. Today it’s one of the world’s largest public trusts.

MAY 6, 1856 – SEPTEMBER 23, 1939

Though the Austrian doctor Sigmund Freud is known first as an explorer of the psyche, it’s also worth noting that he was the first professional to broadly promote cocaine as a tonic, though he was shortly followed by Pope Leo XII, Jules Verne, and Thomas Edison. In 1884, when Freud was a young, obscure neurologist and not yet the pope of psychoanalysis, cocaine had only been researched as a local anesthetic. But Freud found in it a solution for both his depression and his chronic fatigue, and he fell in love with the drug, praising it as a cure for asthma and stomach disorders and recommending it to overcome morphine and alcohol addiction. He was even paid by pharmaceutical giants to endorse their rival brands of cocaine and, when the cocaine-laced health tonic Coca-Cola was sold for the first time in 1886, it was undoubtedly inspired by Freud. Later, he backed away from his earlier claims and acknowledged that repeated use could bring on hallucinations and violent behavior, but the word was out and the damage had already been done.

Ten years later, controversy further dogged Freud’s reputation when he developed the cluster of theories he would give the name of “psychoanalysis.” His fundamental idea was that all humans are endowed with an unconscious, one in which potent sexual and aggressive drives, and defenses against them, struggle for supremacy. This idea has struck many as a romantic but scientifically unverifiable notion. His contention that the catalog of neurotic ailments to which humans are susceptible is nearly always the work of sexual maladjustments, and that erotic desire starts not in puberty but in infancy, seemed to many at the time nothing less than obscene. His dramatic evocation of a universal Oedipus complex, in which a little boy loves his mother and hates his father, seems to some more like a literary conceit than a thesis worthy of a scientist of the mind.

Freudian theory was built upon the foundations of both medical science and philosophy. As a scientist, Freud was interested in seeing how the human mind affected the body, particularly in cases of paranoia, hysteria, and other mental illnesses. As a theorist, he explored basic truths about how personalities are
formed. In 1923 Freud ventured so far as to develop a model of the human mind consisting of three elements—the ego, the id, and the superego.

But the book that made Freud’s reputation was his turn-of-the-century work
The Interpretation of Dreams
, an indefinable masterpiece of dream analysis, autobiography, mind theory, and even history. The principle underlying this work is that mental experiences and entities, like physical ones, are part of nature, and there are no mere accidents in mental procedures. The most nonsensical notion, the most casual slip of the tongue, the most fantastic dream, must have a meaning and can be used to demystify our often incomprehensible thoughts and actions.

For good or ill, Sigmund Freud, more than any other explorer of the psyche, shaped the notions of the twentieth century and the methods of contemporary psychoanalysis. The very vehemence and persistence of his detractors are a wry tribute to the staying power of his ideas.

In 1923 Freud was diagnosed with cancer of the jaw, but he continued to smoke heavily, insisting it was the tobacco that gave him his creativity and great capacity to work. By 1938, though, he had undergone 31 operations to remove tumors, and had been fit and refit with an extensive prosthesis to replace half his mouth. In that same year, the Nazis invaded Austria and the dying Freud fled to London, leaving behind virtually all his possessions. By the following summer, the 83-year-old couldn’t eat, and he was surrounded by a mosquito net to keep the flies from his open wounds. At Freud’s request, his doctor injected him with two lethal doses of morphine, and he was done.

Freud was cremated and his ashes interred in a Greek vase at the Ernest George Mausoleum of Golder Green Crematorium in London.

JULY 20, 1919 – JANUARY 11, 2008

Preferring to be called Ed and considering himself “an ordinary person with ordinary qualities,” Sir Edmund Hillary was a gangling and unpretentious New Zealander who became the first person to summit Mount Everest, winning renown as one of the century’s greatest adventurers. Part of a British climbing expedition, Ed and Sherpa mountaineer Tenzing Norgay scaled the mountain on May 29, 1953. Reaching the summit of Everest four days before Elizabeth II was crowned Queen of the British Empire, she immediately knighted Ed who was just 33.

“Awe, wonder, humility, pride, exaltation—these surely ought to be the confused emotions of the first men to stand on the highest peak on Earth, after so many others had failed,” he noted. “But my dominant reactions were relief and surprise. Relief because the long grind was over and the unattainable had been attained. And surprise, because it had happened to me, old Ed Hillary, the beekeeper, once the star pupil of the Tuakau District School, but no great shakes at Auckland Grammar and a no-hoper at university, first to the top of Everest. I just didn’t believe it.”

Before Norgay’s death in 1986, Ed consistently refused to confirm he was the first to the top, saying he and the Sherpa had climbed as a team. But in his 1999 book,
View from the Summit
, Ed finally admitted that he was the first to step atop Everest. “We drew closer together as Tenzing brought in the slack on the rope. I continued cutting a line of steps upwards. Next moment I had moved onto a flattish exposed area of snow with nothing but space in every direction,” he wrote. “Tenzing quickly joined me and we looked round in wonder. To our immense satisfaction we realized we had reached the top of the world.”

Ed later climbed ten other neighboring Himalayan peaks and led a highly publicized, though ultimately unsuccessful, search for the Abominable Snowman in the 1960s. In 1958 he guided a group in a three-year Antarctic expedition that culminated with their crossing of the South Pole, and he wrote or co-authored thirteen books. Still, he always maintained that he was most proud of his campaign to set up schools and health clinics in Nepal. Known as “burra sahib” (big man) by the Nepalese, Ed funded and helped build hospitals, health clinics, airfields, and schools in the small mountainous country through the Himalayan Trust he founded in 1962.

At 88, Ed died of natural causes. He was cremated and his ashes spread over New Zealand’s Haruaki Gulf.

JANUARY 1, 1895 – MAY 2, 1972

Two years after earning a law degree from George Washington University, J. Edgar Hoover began working for the Department of Justice and, in 1924, before he was even 30 years old, was named the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Hoover held the prized position for 48 years, through eight different presidential administrations, until his death in 1972. Through politics, publicity, and a strong record in law enforcement bolstered by underhanded manipulations and outright blackmail, Hoover became
one of Washington’s most powerful figures, taking the free rein of a renegade, all but immune to control by his superiors.

Hoover was, by turns, admired and vilified. His story is enormous and his numerous biographies, some approaching a thousand pages, still fail to capture all of the details of his contributions and crimes. Like many men who are in an all-powerful position for a long period of time, Hoover’s strengths and weaknesses were both larger than life.

On the one hand, as America’s top policeman, Hoover took a corrupt, inefficient, and dysfunctional organization, top-heavy with political hacks, and whipped it into shape in record time, building the basis of the world’s most celebrated arm of law enforcement. Under Hoover’s direction, a sense of decorum and professionalism was applied to crime fighting; appointments were based on merits, promotions were made on proven ability, and the round-’em-up, shoot-’em-up traditions were, eventually, abandoned. Hoover also oversaw the application of science to police work; he promoted the creation of police training facilities as well as the National Crime Information Center, its centralized fingerprint cataloging system, and its state-of-the-art laboratories. Hoover monitored and crushed whatever activities he considered to be immoral and dissident (especially when it was in his own best interests); in the 1930s Hoover’s agents rounded up the notorious gangsters and seedy drifters of his “Ten Most Wanted” list; in the war years they arrested German saboteurs and secret agents; in the postwar period, the bureau established itself as the bulwark against communism and, during the turbulent 1960s, the FBI disrupted and eventually destroyed the network of murderous Klansmen who perpetuated rampant racial terrorism. For certain, both during Hoover’s tenure and since, the FBI has demonstrated that it is not perfect or infallible, but, in the majority, the organization is an elite, professional, and incorruptible corps that exists to some degree as a result of J. Edgar Hoover’s tyrannical determination.

But, of course, there’s still the “other hand” to discuss. Hoover’s shortcomings as an individual were many and, as would be expected because the Bureau was his life, these foibles infected his performance as its director. And, many contend, his faults transcended his accomplishments.

A paranoid who held virtually unchecked public power for almost 50 years, he manipulated presidents from Roosevelt to Nixon, and kept extensive files on everyone from Groucho Marx to Bess Truman. Casting aside protections granted by the Constitution, Hoover used federal agents as his exclusive henchmen to destroy personal enemies, either real or imagined, through illegal
wiretaps and hidden microphones. Creating the Bureau in his own autocratic image, Hoover did not tolerate dissent or failure, and he directed agents to concentrate on areas that catapulted both his own and the Bureau’s public reputations to a fraudulent level of invincibility. Though Hoover was himself a closet homosexual, he was obsessed with the crimes and failings of society’s liberal orders and, with straitlaced morality, hypocritically sideswiped any attempts to advance progressive causes. He helped create McCarthyism, blackmailed the Kennedy brothers, forged connections with mobsters, and condoned and planned the systematic harassment of Martin Luther King Jr., retarding the civil rights movement. Indeed, a biographical study of J. Edgar Hoover’s life is a contradictory study of observations and speculations blurred by hyperbolized facts and out-and-out lies.