Edsel Ford Quotes

Edsel is the artist in our family. Art is something I know nothing about.

As [William] Valentiner noted in his uncompleted memoirs Remembering Artists, [Diego] Rivera’s [Detroit Industry] murals rooted the Detroit Institute of Arts to the many-faceted jewel of its central court because of the harmonious, fertile relationship between "the industrialist" and "the artist." Rivera remarked to Valentiner how especially struck he was that "Edsel had none of the characteristics of the exploiting capitalist, that he had the simplicity and directness of a workman in his won factories and was like one of the best of them." Their relationship was like the murals themselves, a superb expression of pluralism, toleration, and empathy for the other, and of a cosmopolitan sense of all the Americas, not just of the United States of America or Detroit alone.

Now Solidarity House was located at 8000 East Jefferson on property that was hauntingly familiar. Edsel and Eleanor Ford once had owned a riverfront mansion on that very site. The family moved there when Henry II, the oldest of four children, was four, and left when he was nine, moving on up to a new mansion in Grosse Pointe Shores designed by Albert Kahn. The old place on East Jefferson was gone now, but the original boathouse still stood in back of an undistinguished building that looked more like a cut-rate motel than UAW headquarters, a center of the labor movement.

understand all Edsel Ford had endured. This thing killed my father, Henry II thought to himself. I’ll be damned if I’m going to let it kill me. Henry

You combed Third Avenue last year For some small gift that was not too dear, Like a candy cane or a worn out truss, To give to a loving friend like us You'd found gold eggs for such wealthy hicks As the Edsel Fords and the Pittsburgh Fricks The Andy Mellons, the Teddy Shonts The Coleman T. and Pierre duponts But not one gift to brighten our home So I'm giving you back your Goddamn poem.

Edsel Ford, son of the firm’s founder Henry,