Reverse engineering: Henry Ford created the future with his eyes on the past.

• Author: Wallace-Wells, Benjamin
• Position: The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century - Book Review

The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century By Steven Watts Alfred A. Knopf, $30.00

Americans of extreme wealth have often come to be defined after their deaths by the monuments they leave. William Randolph Hearst left his castle near Carmel, a gargantuan, perplexing design that has made his legacy one of profound self-absorption and wacky materialism. Andrew Carnegie set out to soften the mean feeling millions of working-class Americans had for him by building libraries as intellectual anchors for small towns across America. The Duke family, tobacco millionaires from North Carolina, turned a quiet country college into a prestigious research university. The great Guggenheim family of New York, stern German-Jewish bankers, erected a batty swirl of a museum; the only Guggenheim we now remember is their Paris Hilton, Peggy. Henry Ford built Greenfield Village.

"In 1929, after years of preparation, Ford opened to the public a large tourist park and museum built on 252 acres in Dearborn," writes Steven Watts in his admirable new biography. "Visitors could inspect a display of Americana--antiques of every imaginable variety--painstakingly collected by Ford's agents. In the enclosed buildings of the Henry Ford Museum, visitors saw an array of everyday goods from 18th- and 19th-century America: farm implements, railroad engines, furniture, cookware, wagons, woodstoves, and much, much more. Outside, in Greenfield Village, stood many architectural artifacts--a courthouse where Abraham Lincoln practiced law, Thomas Edison's laboratories, the homes of Stephen Foster and Noah Webster, a Southern plantation house, the Wright Brothers's bicycle shop, a gristmill, and a stagecoach tavern, to choose just a few examples--that had been purchased, carefully disassembled, and then rebuilt by Ford's carpenters and craftsmen."

This was more EuroDisney than Disneyland, a strange and didactic mass costumed as entertainment, dropped into a culture that felt it increasingly alien. The village's main street mingled vintage-styled, small-town shops ("Village Blacksmith Shop") with the shipped-in structures of engineering labs, as if insisting through the quiet fraud of juxtaposition that 19th-century values and mechanical progress necessarily went hand in hand. Ford called Greenfield Village "my Smithsonian Institute." He hoped it would draw millions.

Like Hearst's castle, Greenfield Village makes a telling monument, a marker of the nervous tension its maker felt between the 19th century and the 20th. The automaker had been a great--perhaps the great--booster of the emerging American middle class, setting his factory wages so high and pricing his Model T so low that millions more Americans could afford the markers of what had been luxury, and becoming a hem to the flowering progressive movement in the process.

To the extent that the United States is a literary experiment, this is the nub of it: What happens when you give great wealth and social power to a group that had not been born into it? Ford was disappointed by the early returns. World War I made it clear that modernity was moving away from the automaker's version of Eden rather than back towards it. In the 1920s, it became evident to...