The Wild Wheel

FORD’S out-shop life had the color, the richness and somewhat of the dreamlike unreality of a medieval storybook. Through no fault of his own, only because he is somehow different, the hero is misunderstood and ridiculed by his own people, who seem to forget how much they are indebted to him for the works he has performed in their service; he sets out on a journey into strange lands, with a stick in his hands that turns out to be a magic wand; he has many exciting experiences and returns with pageantry in his train and forgivingness in his heart and builds them for free a Wonder Place, which they enjoy to this day.

It began when an editorial writer on the Chicago Tribune called him an ignoramus. He sued the newspaper for libel, asking damages in the sum of one million dollars.

The trial took place at Mt. Clemens, Michigan. It was an American event, purely native, unimaginable in any other jungle of civilization, except possibly in comic opera. The only person not paid to do it who took it seriously was Ford himself. People at large were immensely tickled by the spectacle of the world’s most original and most successful industrialist undergoing a teen-age intelligence test, in a country courtroom before a rural jury, at the hands of pompous lawyers who behaved as the sheriffs of knowledge and used the dictionary as a book of wisdom. The little town was overcome by its sudden importance. Its inhabitants were as dazed as if they had stumbled onto a movie set and were groping in the limelight, stepping on parts of the apparatus and colliding with celebrities.

The news was covered with fine journalistic frenzy. Reporters working in relays were continually rushing to the telephone with bulletins for the headlines:

Ford says, “I don’t know what you mean by fundamental principles of government.”

Ford guesses he forgot the War of Independence.

Ford says the War of 1812 was a revolution.

Ford doesn’t know who Benedict Arnold was.

Ford says he can read but refuses to try.

And so on and on for weeks.

The absurdity of it was painful. His answers were sometimes sullen, sometimes angry when his tormentors pushed him too far, and then again so unexpectedly satirical and so barbed with common sense that the pomposities were shattered. What was the United States in the beginning? “Land,” he said. And once, instead of saying again that he didn’t know, he said, as he whittled the sole of his shoe: “I can find somebody to tell me in five minutes all I want to know about that.” His ignorance of history was probably shared by some members of the jury. He was a better witness than he knew. His performance did him no damage whatever in public esteem; on the contrary, his simplicity, his earthiness, the weariness of his contempt for the magniloquent word, his un-self-saving candor about what he had never had time to learn from books, endeared him to millions, all more or less like that themselves, only ashamed to confess it.

Nevertheless, it was an ordeal. He had not foreseen it. He learned something about the savagery of litigation when counsel for the Chicago Tribune, in his summing up, said: “Gentlemen of the jury, they forced us to open the mind of Henry Ford and expose it to you bare, to disclose the pitiable condition that he had succeeded in keeping from the view of the public.”

The jury found the Chicago Tribune guilty of libel, and Ford was awarded damages in the sum of six cents.

2

THE verdict of course was worthless. He was hurt and humiliated, and for all the rest of his life he was doing something about it, even long after the hurt was gone.

His first answer was to start the Dearborn Independent, a weekly magazine, the leading feature of which was “Mr. Ford’s Own Page.” He didn’t write it, of course, but the ideas were his. Then in collaboration with Samuel Crowther he did three books—and very interesting books they were. After that, who could say he was an ignoramus?

A saying that kept coming back to plague him was: “History is bunk.” It took him a long time to learn that an ignoramus may not say such a thing out loud, but a scholar, even an historian, may say it. Van Loon opened his History of Mankind with those words, and that was all right.

Years later I was a customer in the Ford Hospital in Detroit. It had become my favorite service station. Cameron came in to see me. He asked me if there was anything I wanted to read. I said I had been intending the next time I was in bed to read “The Yale Chronicles,” but I hadn’t been able to find them in Detroit. He said: “We’ve got them in our library.” The next day they came, fifty volumes in a wooden box. The first title I picked up was Elizabethan Sea Bogs, by William Wood. There I read how Henry VIII, whose best friends were his sailormen, found Fletcher of Rye, who had discovered the art of tacking and could sail a ship against the wind. The whole king’s navy was made over on that new principle, and the next time it went into battle it confounded the enemy by sailing around him in zigzag patterns, no matter where the wind was, killing him with broadsides. That was the foundation of British sea power.

I had just put the book down when Ford came in. He asked what I was reading and I told him the story. Then I added: “Think how much history you might have read without coming on that one simple tremendous fact.” His eyes lighted as he tapped me on the knee and said: “Yes, history is bunk, as I always said it was.”

He could say it then with ease and surety, for in the years between he had done something with American history.

He had seized it by its artifacts and put it in a showcase.

That was his answer to the jeering he took when he first said history was bunk.

3

HE EXPLORED the past as if it were an unknown world, pushing off like a boy on a raft, with no destination and only a yesterly sense of direction—this man who had never been a boy because he was born with his head full of wheels. It was a dream raft that stopped of itself when he said, “There! What’s that?” And it was a wonderful world, in one way especially, that it stirred in him the kind of remembrance you may have of things that have happened but did not happen to you. Each time he returned to the raft he brought some curious object that was new because it was old. When the raft was full he needed a barge and when the barge was full a string of barges, and then trains, ships, planes and fleets of motor vehicles to send the things back.

What were they, these things? Anything at all, any relic of the ancestral life; and the ancestral life was all the life that had been lived before Model T. Later he said: “We want to have something of everything.” So it might be a windmill, a buggy, a string of sleigh bells, a rusty reaper, a stern-wheel river boat, old pots and pans, a log cabin, wooden Indians, furniture, crockery, a crazy quilt, fiddles, a cradle, a chair somebody sat in—and not one of each kind of thing but many, hundreds, even thousands.

The wand was not money. It was a physical power to externalize fantasy. That was a power that could no more have been evolved by money alone than an organization to produce an automobile every ten seconds.

What Ford had behind him was a self-contained cosmos out of which, at a moment’s notice, he could call a team of engineers, mechanics and seabees to do anything. When he called they came running with the right tools in their hands. Anything he could think of, that they could do, and do it the Ford way with a kind of military urgency. It might be something nobody ever heard of before until the call came, or something nobody had ever done before. Sometimes it required a kind of forgotten skill. In that case somebody riffled the employee cards showing what a man did before he became a Ford machine worker, and nearly always the skill was there, or even the talent, one instance being that of a young Hungarian who knew what a cymbalum was and how to play it and was transferred from the shop to the Ford dance band. He had only to say, “Do this,” and it was done before he could get back to see. Besides, in the extremely rare case, if he stumped them he could tell them how. Certainly men who made a chore of picking up bodily a tractor plant in Detroit and setting it down in Ireland would make no difficulty at all of such a task as to take down an old stone cottage in Cotswold, England, stone by stone in numbered bags, and set it up again in Dearborn, so perfectly that when the authentic landscaping was added the English masons who came along to do the work had moments of thinking they dreamed it. This Cotswold cottage was a freak whim. The only notion to justify it in Greenfield Village—which is coming—was that Americans might like to see how their ancestors were housed before they came to this country.

4

HE ACCUMULATED an incredible quantity of Americana. Some of it was good; a lot of it was debris. To find it he searched attics, cellars, dumps, junk yards, secondhand stores, antique shops, barn lots, hillsides, crossroad hamlets, all the eddies and backwaters of a by-gone life. Yet he was not a collector. As we use the word, a collector is one who collects objects of a certain kind in a certain order; it may be paintings, first editions, rare bindings, porcelains, glass, weapons, period furniture, historical documents, coins, stamps, even trifling things such as buttons or paper match books; the interest may be aesthetic or whimsical, but always selective.

There is no word for a collector who collects everything. It is something else he is doing.

For example, when Ford discovered the McGuffey Readers there were already a number of fine collections of that piece of Americana, in the hands of bibliophiles who had spent years getting together the complete series, who knew one another as fellow hobbyists, swapped books to fill in gaps and exchanged information. Ford was not content to have such a collection; it was not enough to reproduce the books in beautiful facsimile and distribute them privately; but he must have the log cabin in which William Holmes McGuffey was born on a western Pennsylvania farm, and then a replica of the schoolhouse where he taught, built of logs cut on the farm where he was born, together with the desk he used. Or if Lincoln was his discovery, then besides the kind of Lincolniana a discriminating collector would pursue, such as papers, books, documents and letters, he must have from Illinois the Logan County Court House where Lincoln practiced law—the building itself—and in it, according to the words of the Greenfield Village Guide Book, “several pieces of Lincoln furniture, the original corner cupboard fashioned by young Abe and his father, Lincoln’s wardrobe, the table from a law office where he once practiced, a number of chairs and other pieces from his Springfield home, and in one corner the chair in which he was seated in the box of a Washington theatre on the night of his assassination”—and a fireplace like the one that was probably there and on the hearth an eternal flame lighted by President Hoover.

Not objects of any order, not objects in any sequence, not objects for sheer love of them, although in My Life and Work he did say: “Our forefathers knew how to order some parts of their lives better than we do. They had much better taste; they knew more about beauty in the design of commonplace, everyday things.” That dim rationalization of the fantasy was probably phrased by Samuel Crowther.

What was he trying to collect? The past. Simply that.

The past cannot be a collector’s item. But if you are trying to put it in the eye of dull imagination, you may need such things as a Pennsylvania Dutch churn, an old vertical steam engine, the first Edison phonograph or Georgia slave huts authentically reproduced in brick from a brickyard on the plantation where Negro slaves did actually live.

The further he went with it the more it absorbed him until his actions seemed to proceed from a source of inner compulsion, and he came to be seized with a great nostalgia for a way of life that had been destroyed by electricity, the internal-combustion engine and automobiles.

He hated the drudgery of farm life and fled from it; he thought he had done more than any other man to relieve it. He wrote: “I have followed many a weary mile behind a plow and I know all the drudgery of it. What a waste it is for a human being to spend hours and days behind a slowly moving team of horses when in the same time a tractor could do six times as much work!” When he went back to the land it was with tractors. He had a large dairy farm in Dearborn. It delighted him to watch there fifty tractors plowing in line. That was farming. “Our dairy farm,” he said, “is managed exactly like a factory.”

All the same he loved the old way too. In another mood he said: “It was an evil day when the village flour mill disappeared.”

When the things he had sent back from the world of the past made a pile so high and wide that it was in the way, even on the spacious River Rouge premises, and something had to be done about it, the thought of a museum began to take form. But a museum could be only a partial solution. For how could you put an old church, steeple and all, indoors on the teakwood floor of a museum? Well, anybody might have thought of the natural answer to that. There had to be an outdoor museum, too, something like an old-fashioned village, with a green in the middle and around the green all the things proper to a village—things that would be there if it were a real village and not the ghost of one.