The Wild Wheel

LAISSEZ FAIRE was a religion that grew to full size in the American environment and never anywhere else. It was founded on the doctrine of Adam Smith’s unseen hand, the mysterious power of which was to bring it to pass that the individual, freely pursuing his own selfish ends, was nevertheless bound to serve the common good, whether he consciously intended to do so or not, or ever thought about it at all. It was cruel in the way that nature is cruel to weak and marginal things; but it worked. How and why naturally it produced here the most fabulous material achievement in the history of the human race is the subject of many heavy and quarrelsome books in the library of social and economic theory. The idea of this book is to make you see it working through the eyes of its darling practician.

If in this country, for both good and evil, free private enterprise had its logical manifestations in a prodigious manner, so Henry Ford was its extreme and last pure event. After him it was different. The religion declined. It no longer exists in the orthodox form anywhere.

But this is not a history of Ford and his times, nor a biography either, furnished with notes, conclusions and a philosophy of meaning. Rather, it is a structure of episode, word and deed, like a dwelling, and the man is there—a kind of divine mechanic, the ultimate child of his era, acting upon his world with ruthless and terrible energy, by instinct and intuition, who thought with his hands. As you watch him coming in and going out you may not understand him. Indeed, it is very probable that he did not understand himself. But you will perhaps get some feeling of life and its lusty transactions under the creed of Laissez Faire, and thereby arrive at a judgment of your own concerning what we have left behind.

G. G.