AT RIVER ROUGE, where the empire came of age, the hierarchy assumed its perfect form. Ford was god, Sorensen was satan and Cameron was pope. They communicated with one another in a language that only seemed to be made up of words. The meaning was in what they understood. Nothing was too strange to happen.

THE X piece comes here. A small mind’s-eye etching may help to get it right side up.

WITH his great friend Thomas A. Edison, the self-made wizard, Ford shared a naive faith in what they called the value of ignorance. Ignorance was not the right word. Innocence would have been better. What preconceived impressions about it. Thus, as Ford would say, the less you know about a thing beforehand, or think you know, the better.

KEEPERS of the grand tradition treated Ford’s role in politics as that of Bottom in Midsummer Night’s Dream, wearing the head of an ass, only that Bottom knew it and Ford didn’t. Still, no one could be really sure. Maybe Ford did know it. He might have been president.

THE Great Depression had revolutionary political and social consequences, some of them irreversible, some of them still acting with unspent force. It began in 1930 and continued like a nightmare of Prometheus in chains until the nation’s energies were released again in preparation for World War II. During these ten years the relations between government and people were fundamentally altered.

FORD’S out-shop life had the color, the richness and somewhat of the dreamlike unreality of a medieval storybook.

THE museum first. It had to have a name; and it was named the Edison Institute Museum, to express Ford’s affection for his great friend the wizard. Then it had to have a front elevation, nothing modern, something in the way of colonial architecture, yet as grand as possible.

IT IS customary in the beginning to say why one is going to write a book. That was done. If at the end it is not clear there is very little that can be done about it. The theme was Laissez Faire, the subject was Henry Ford, and the idea was to illustrate the theme by means of the subject, so that one might say,

Man hath the design of his time.

There was the promise in the Foreword that there should be no moral judgment. Simply, for better or worse, it was like that. Let the reader do with it what he will.

BY

GARET GARRETT

AUTHOR OF “THE BLUE WOUND,” ETC.

NEW YORK

E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY

681 FIFTH AVENUE