[rotorwrench]

If a person reads enough of the archived personal accounts of Ford Motor Company's employees that were transcribed and are available on the Henry Ford plus some of the books that were written by and about the people that worked for Ford in those early years, you find that there were all forms of personality clashes and infighting amongst them. This is all human nature so a person does have to sometimes receive the information with a grain of salt. The more you read though, the more you see that it was a challenging environment from day one. A lot of it was due to Henry Fords nature but there were a lot of other personalities that came and went for one reason or another. James Couzens was their first treasurer and holder of purse strings. He eventually became the mayor of Detroit and on to a national Senate seat after Henry bought him out. Bill Knudsen went on to GM and ran the Chevrolet Division but was called up for duty during WWII to run the War Department's Office of Production. He is one of the few men in US history to have been commissioned as a Lieutenant General directly from being a civilian. The list goes on. You can't discount what these folks had to say even if some of it was detractive or self serving. The history of the Ford Motor Company is very complex and complicated but it's also very interesting.