Another Fine Mess Read online

  ‘Never counted, guess three hundred or so.’

  We were in Mark’s inner sanctum, a survivalist chamber secreted behind the office, and I’d asked him how many guns he owned. It seemed a conservative estimate. In the corridor that led to this windowless bunker we’d squeezed past an array of wardrobe-sized gun safes; Mark had opened one and I saw it stacked with at least thirty rifles, below a top shelf laden with sidearms and ammo. There were another two safes here in the sanctum, along with a bed, a petrol generator, a chest freezer, a microwave and boxes and boxes of bottled water, dried food and cookies. There was also a pool table, which would give Mark something to do in the post-apocalypse – something other than killing people, which he evidently expected to do a lot of, and at short notice. A rack on the wall above the bed was home to three assault rifles and a cavalry sword. Two crossbows lay ready on a chair.

  I was already a bit too scared to ask Mark questions he might find over-stimulating: how he felt about Donald Trump, what on earth Prince Charles’s second wife could possibly have done to incur the wrath of a Texan lathe operator, and above all any investigation of scenarios that might lead to him taking his last stand here. And that was before he opened the gun safe and effortfully extracted the largest firearm I ever hope to see in paranoid private hands. ‘When those SWAT teams come,’ he grunted, propping the stock of a 5-foot black-and-tan machine gun on the concrete floor, ‘I’ll pull up the shop doors, and they’ll see my bad-ass Browning and turn tail.’ His jaw tightened as he stood beside that outrageous weapon, pike bearer in a one-man army. Then he looked at me over the top of his glasses. ‘Now that I’ve shown you this place, I will have to kill you.’

  Mark’s shooting range was an expanse of browned pasture behind his workshop. We went out and took turns with an Army-issue M4 assault rifle, slamming shoulder-punching rounds into a stack of railway sleepers and water-cooler bottles. Conflicting emotions coursed through me: this ranked amongst the manliest experiences of my recent life, and the most childish. Then Mark lugged out his monstrous Browning, set its bipod support feet on a camping table and sat down on a swivel office chair behind it. It was quite the incongruous spectacle.

  ‘There’s been jets shot down with these,’ he said, feeding a bullet the size of a frankfurter into its chamber. ‘Got a five-mile range, and will go straight through half-inch steel plate.’ We all pulled ear protectors on and Ross and I retreated a good 10 feet back. Mark tilted his head, eased his right eye towards the telescopic sight and unleashed hell. The ground trembled beneath my feet, splinters of railway sleeper flew high into the air and I blasphemed severally and at immense volume. It was all I could do not to leap into Ross’s arms like Scooby Doo into Shaggy’s.

  ‘I don’t know if you can appreciate this,’ said Mark, casually plucking off his ear protectors and easing himself back in his typist’s chair, ‘but firing that is a lot like being punched in the nose.’ He took off his glasses, briskly rubbed his face with both hands, then swivelled round to face us. ‘Who’s next?’

  ‘Too much gun for me,’ said Ross. I conveyed my own reluctance through a ridiculous bleating giggle. Then a distant rattle grew into a hefty clatter and a freight train trundled slowly across the end of Mark’s property, passing directly behind his target-stack at a range of perhaps 150 yards. As an infringement of the most basic protocols of health and safety this demanded explanation, and when the train had disappeared from view Mark stood up, frowned pensively, and said, ‘What’s real fun to do is find something you can blow up. I got twenty-one acres out in the country and a lot of tannerite explosive.’

  On the drive back, Ross told me that Mark and a lot of other people he knew had begun to stockpile serious weaponry in the aftermath of Barack Obama’s reaction to the Sandy Hook massacre, an especially dreadful mass shooting which cost twenty six-year-old schoolchildren their lives. ‘When he said there was no need for anyone outside the military to own an assault weapon, a lot of guys took that to mean: “The government is coming to take all my guns away.”’ There it was again, that blind, deaf hatred of federal authority, the same pioneer-pattern phobia that underpinned the Trump phenomenon. In a curious conflation of constitutional amendments, gun ownership had evolved into a currency of individual freedom: the more guns you had, and the bigger they were and the faster they shot, the freer you became.

  ‘Guys like Mark, he’s doing pretty well, no money worries or whatnot, but you’re just hoping their lives don’t take a bad turn.’ I struggled to keep my imagination in check as we drove on in silence. ‘That enough shooting for you, then?’ asked Ross after a while. ‘’Cos if it ain’t, I know a guy who’ll take you up in a chopper with an AK47 and fly over a herd of wild pigs.’

  Mike seemed reinvigorated by his halfway service, and for my part I drove away from Lilleker Antique Restorations almost dangerously enthused by a surfeit of human kindness, ballistic bravado and deadpan English snark. We raced a three-loco Santa Fe goods train to Temple, where I did boisterous battle with a cockroach in the door seal of my motel fridge. I hit 48mph sweeping through the largest military base on earth, Fort Hood, 215,000 acres of huge beige sheds and huge beige vehicles – sand is now the standard backdrop for America’s military might. And mile by noisy, north-west mile I found myself easing away from swelling, wealthy Texas into shrivelled old clapboard towns on the slide, past boarded-up laundromats and dry goods stores strung out along yawning, empty main streets, places that once had oil or cotton but now had little left but a name that conjured their glory days: Gunsight, Rising Star, Energy. Rich Texans vote Republican. Poor Texans vote Trump. Inching towards the northern panhandle, I was headed into my electoral map’s very reddest blots.

  Breakfast is the only meal small-town Americans get excited about, a communal institution for local old-timers. It’s the only meal I got excited about too, because a US breakfast is really a million meals in one, a groaning, greasy smorgasbord of enticing fried options. Five types of toast, eggs a hundred ways, potatoes any style, bacon, bacon, bacon. You can’t go wrong. Actually you can. Never, ever have biscuits and gravy, unless this seems like a tempting three-step start to the day: (1) Moisten two scones. (2) Stir one cup of meat gravel into one cup of magnolia emulsion. (3) Combine, serve, tip into bin.

  Richard Grant had advised me that even if the only restaurant left in town was a McDonald’s, the boys would still meet up there for an early McMuffin. He wasn’t wrong. One morning I stopped in Breckenridge, an old oil town with a few rusty derricks about, a drive-thru ‘Beverage Barn’ and a scattering of used needles in the Walmart car-park undergrowth. The Breckenridge Maccy D’s was decorated with framed photos of that Mike-period black-gold boom: ranks of derricks and clapboard hotels, earthen streets messily log-jammed with Model Ts and their owners, men in shirtsleeves and straw hats, staring into the camera with hands on hips. A caption told me that in 1920, the town’s population rose from 1,500 to 30,000 (it’s now 5,700). Fox News was playing on a wall-mounted telly, and a dozen seventy-somethings were gathered beneath it: ironed polo shirts, trucker caps, a couple of Stetsons and a lot of neatly marshalled moustaches. These elderly breakfast buddies invariably seemed in fine fettle: most were pretty trim, and none of them nipped outside for a smoke. It took me a few weeks to realise that their podgy, puffing friends were all long dead.

  ‘That your T? Fine little outfit.’

  Mike always gave me an in.

  ‘So, ah, what do you boys think about your new president?’ These studiously non-judgemental words would do me yeoman service in the deep-red Trump Belt. (Breckenridge is the largest town in Stephens County, where the Democrats had attracted just 10 per cent of the votes – comfortably their worst ever result.) The discourse that followed set a durable template: for a good ten minutes, my grey-’tached companions took turns to denigrate Trump’s predecessor and his election rival in the most vitriolic and often flatly deluded terms, without ever once mentioning the man himself by name.

  ‘He�
�s a whole lot better than the last one. That man Bay-Rack Obama put us thirty trillion dollars in debt, and he was gonna steal our guns! Woulda been a war down here if he’d tried to take even one pistol.’

  ‘I think he’s a Muslim. I really do.’

  ‘I know he’s a Muslim.’

  ‘Hillary Clinton, she’s just a crook, plain and simple. She’s lied, she’s cheated, she’s corrupt.’

  The subtext: Trump might not be a great president, maybe not even a good one, but come on – what choice did we have? I never really did find out why Hillary Clinton was quite so universally reviled. I’ve no doubt that for a certain slice of the electorate, a female president would have seemed like the last straw after eight years of a black one. But even the handful of Democrats I met couldn’t muster a good word for her. I suppose she represented the establishment that so many people on all sides seemed desperate to reject.

  ‘How long you taking on this drive?’

  I flipped my half-drunk cardboard cup of Ronald McPisswater into the bin by the door and turned to face a weather-beaten chap in a lilac checked shirt and a bright yellow cap. A lot of these old dudes really went balls-out with their colour combos, possibly in reaction to the ever-beiger landscape. I told him I had just under two months before my visa ran out.

  ‘Nah, they’ll let you stay,’ he said, with a cheerily dismissive sweep of the hand. ‘You’re one of the good ones.’

  This was the same man who a minute earlier had told me that ‘Obama blackened America’s name.’ In fact, he’d said it twice, to make sure I got the point.

  ‘That’s what you think,’ I replied, and walked out into the blinding sun.

  Henry Ford, as I’ve said, was a more racially tolerant employer than most. He paid blacks and whites equally. It was not unknown at Ford for black foremen to take charge of an all-white crew. In 1939, when Ford was no longer the dominant force in Motown, the firm still employed two-thirds of Detroit’s black car workers. But all these apparently heartening initiatives in equal opportunity – Ford was also unusually keen to offer jobs to ex-convicts and the disabled – were founded on a dismaying principle.

  ‘I could not do the same thing day in and day out,’ he wrote. ‘But we have to recognise the unevenness in mental equipment. To other minds, perhaps the majority, repetitive operations hold no terrors.’ The Highland Park assembly line was intended as a death blow for skilled industrial labour, a workplace fit for even the most brainless prole. Even the blind. Even the black, because Ford was at best a benign racist, who believed white people were duty-bound ‘to give philanthropic service to subordinate races’. Of course there was a lot of it around back then, and still is. When MTV started in the 1980s, they were too scared to play Michael Jackson for fear of upsetting the Midwest. A recent survey found that white patients are twice as likely to receive pain medication as black patients with the same symptoms (which may partly explain why opioid addiction is an overwhelmingly white problem). Some 45 per cent of Trump supporters say that the word ‘violent’ describes blacks ‘extremely’ or ‘very’ well. An old re-enacting chum of mine who lives in Kentucky tells me that the accepted rule of thumb counts 15 per cent of the US electorate as fundamentally racist. I even heard a Fox News presenter concede that the figure was at least 5 per cent. My Kentucky friend has absolutely no doubt about the dominant reason for Trump’s victory: ‘Revenge for eight years of a black president.’

  ‘The Ford Company has no use for experience, in the working ranks anyway,’ wrote an admiring editor at the Engineering Magazine in 1915. ‘It desires operators who will simply do what they are told to do, over and over again, from bell-time to bell-time.’ Ford’s $5 day made his workers prosperous, but it came at a price. The repetitive, soul-crushing toil – unbearable for so many staff at $2.34 a day – now had to be endured. ‘We all moved the same, like marionettes, like a living machine,’ an old Highland Park hand told a documentary team decades later. Every human need, from sustenance to excretion, had to be squeezed into a single fifteen-minute lunch break. ‘Without the most rigid discipline,’ said Ford, ‘we would have the utmost confusion.’ In this spirit, spotters were recruited to enforce endless and draconian rules: no squatting, no whistling, no smoking, no leaning against the machines. Above all, no talking. Workers had to master the ‘Ford whisper’, muttering to each other through frozen lips like ventriloquists, as they tightened the same bolt 5,000 times a day. This was work at its most relentless and inhuman. In the broiled Detroit summers, half a dozen overworked, under-watered line assemblers might drop dead in a single day. Charlie Chaplin did much of his research for Modern Times at Ford’s assembly lines, and it’s no accident that the actor he cast to play the hellish fac-tory’s dictatorial boss was a dead ringer for Henry.

  But Ford’s hold on his workforce stretched way beyond the factory floor. No one had established any ground rules for the new relationship between generous boss and beholden staff, and Ford’s $5 day was duly accompanied by the creepiest, most intrusive employment regime in industrial history. More than 200 investigators from Ford’s Sociological Department visited workers at home, quizzing them on their diet, social outlook, recreational habits and living arrangements. To qualify for the new wage, husbands needed to show they were ‘taking good care of their families’, and bachelors were required to demonstrate ‘thrifty habits’. Those who gambled, drank to excess or refused to attend mandatory English classes (in 1914, two-thirds of Ford’s employees had been born outside the US) were expelled from the profit-sharing scheme and given six months to reform, or face the sack. So too, with a broad stroke of the scary brush, was any worker deemed guilty of ‘malicious practice derogatory to good physical manhood or moral character’.

  Somebody persuaded Ford to give his Sociological Department a moderately less Orwellian branding, but in 1921 the re-named Education Department was disbanded after its director quit, traumatised by his superiors’ insistence that ‘fear is a greater incentive to work than loyalty’. Henry, however, was soon keeping his men in line with a much blunter instrument. The swiftly notorious Ford Service Department was headed by Harry Bennett, an ex-boxer with underworld links who Henry had first met in New York, after a friend of his bailed Bennett out of jail following a bar brawl. ‘I could use a man like you,’ said Ford. ‘Can you shoot?’

  Nominally head of security at Ford’s River Rouge plant, Bennett would be Ford’s right-hand man and enforcer for more than twenty years – the boss of a 3,000-strong army of hoodlums and ex-cops that one newspaper called ‘the largest private paramilitary organisation in the world’. He stood 5’6” and always wore a fedora and a bow tie – neckties, he explained, were liabilities in a fight. Bennett kept two pet lions, and sometimes brought them into work. He was never without a gun. Staff became attuned to the explosive retorts from his office as he let loose his .32 target pistol, with Henry often in active attendance. When asked what his job was, Bennett would smile and slowly answer, ‘I am Mr Ford’s personal man.’

  His Service Department kept brutal order at River Rouge, deploying informers and intimidation to quell resistance to Ford’s ‘speed up’ policy, in which assembly lines were run ever faster, by surreptitious weekly increments. ‘Spies and stool pigeons report every action, every remark, every expression,’ noted a Time journalist, revealing the ‘hatred and fear’ that hung over River Rouge. In 1932, Service Department thugs and the police opened fire on a hunger march as it approached the River Rouge gates, killing four people. Five years later, forty of Bennett’s men viciously broke up a union meeting outside the plant, kicking workers down two flights of stairs.

  Staff at every level suffered nervous breakdowns and an anxiety-induced ailment known as ‘Ford stomach’. Even the toilet attendants lived in fear, never knowing if they’d polished enough porcelain that hour. Nor were the top brass spared. Edsel began to notice men in fedoras and big suits were following him, even staring out from deep in the woods when he played golf. He was told it wa
s for his own protection. Edsel’s eldest son, Henry II, once made the mistake of telling Bennett that some shady character had been threatening him. ‘Later on,’ recalled Edsel’s youngest son, William, ‘the guy was found floating face-down in the river.’ In 1945, with old man Henry enfeebled, Henry II finally plucked up the courage to fire Bennett, wisely delegating the task to his own enforcer, John Bugas, a former head of Detroit’s FBI. The meeting in Bennett’s office ended with both men pointing large-calibre handguns at each other. ‘Don’t make the mistake of pulling that trigger, Harry,’ said Bugas, ‘because I’ll kill you. I won’t miss. I’ll put one right through your heart.’ They don’t make boardroom disagreements like they used to.

  Ford’s achievements in low-cost mass production had been hailed around the world, but the working environment he fostered drew a very particular kind of admirer. A mighty human machine kept running at maximum capacity by a network of informers and the threat of violent retribution … hmmm. Stalin was quick to praise Ford as ‘one of the world’s greatest industrialists’, and adapted Henry’s techniques to force through his demanding and ever more brutal Five Year Plans. Anyone nicknamed ‘Man of Steel’ was all right in Henry’s book, and the appreciation became mutual. By 1926 Henry had shipped 24,000 Fordson tractors to the Soviet Union, and in 1930, Ford dispatched Charles Sorensen to Russia to help set up a series of factories that would build over 100,000 Ford-derived vehicles. All this in a nation whose existence the US government wouldn’t even acknowledge until 1933. Russian parents named their children Fordson, in honour of the machine that would cultivate the steppes, and Henry’s ghost-written autobiography, My Life and Work, was translated and reprinted five times. ’Incredible as it may seem,’ wrote a visiting journalist after a two-month tour of the country, ‘more people in Russia have heard of Henry Ford than of Stalin.’