The Wild Wheel
VI. The Innocent Mind
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.
In the beginning he had no technology. He perhaps could not have defined the word. When it caught up with him he bought it as he would buy a machine, and when he had bought it he controlled it. The use of it was only to find a way to do something he wanted done. His distrust of the expert never softened.
During the Ford Motor Company’s offside adventure with aviation I was in Cameron’s office one day, talking to a German scientist, when Ford came in. The first they meant was that in order to act upon a thing in an original manner you have to see it as it is, see it directly, with no labels on it to tell you what it is and no thing he said to me was: “Have you seen our aviation plant?”
I said yes, I’d just been looking it over; and then began to twit him gently on the fact that they were developing planes without an air tunnel. He shrugged that off. If they needed an air tunnel they would have one.
On his way out the German scientist whispered in my ear: “You don’t understand. Nobody is a scientist here. We are all mechanics.”
Ford would drive scientists crazy. He hired enough of them to fill a small asylum; and he understood them much better than they understood him.
His next question to me was to ask if I had any reservations about the future of flying. I acknowledged a few.
“You shouldn’t,” he said. “You shouldn’t. And do you know why you shouldn’t?”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because so many young people are putting thought material into it. When you see that you may be sure that something big is coming out of it.”
That was more important than a wind tunnel.
I said: “On the ground, before there were any automobiles, you saw streets full of them. Now what do you see in the sky?”
Speaking slowly, looking at the sky through the ceiling, he said: “Many planes. Many, many planes.”
Just then one of his all-metal planes took off and passed diagonally across the window.
“Animals like that?” I asked.
“Bigger,” he said. “Much bigger.”
“That’s funny,” I said. “People think you are going to build little planes for everybody.”
“Because I’m a little-car man,” he said, “they think I’d be a little-plane man. No. For people, the little car. Not airplanes. They will have to be big. And that reminds me. For a long time I’ve been seeing an engine in my dreams. It worried me at first because it was where you wouldn’t expect a big engine to be, somewhere in space, suspended by sticks and strings. Then it came to me. That’s the big engine I want for the big plane I’m talking about.”
“How clearly do you see it?” I asked. “Could you draw it?”
“Yes,” he said. “I’m drawing it now.”
Shortly after that the whole flying machine job went over the back fence. He gave it up on the ground that it was a distraction; he had broken one of his rules to touch it at all. The rule was that everything the Ford Motor Company did should pertain to the manufacture of an automobile.
The engine he had been seeing in his dreams was never built and aviation was left to the young people who were putting thought material into it, until World War II. To the war the most spectacular Ford contribution was the apparitional plant at Willow Run, where planes for the first time were built in the jaws of cantilever bridges.
2
NO ONE could say precisely when Ford the mechanic became aware of technology as an art. He was always sensitive to the slur that Model T was not a finely made car. In early Ford practice there was no fetish of precision. That is why the Model T was noisy and rattled; that was why also it possessed the animal qualities of the mountain ass, such as hardihood, extraordinary powers of endurance, phlegmatic courage and a kind of cheerfulness when not too much abused. One of Ford’s rich minority stockholders would never ride in it, and boasted of the fact; and if ever Ford was caught riding in any other car howls of derisory amusement echoed in the land.
Once with a party the size of a small caravan he was driving from New York to Detroit. He was in a fine English car; behind him was a Packard and behind the Packard were two Fords. The reporters discovered him and demanded to know what he was doing in an English car. Why wasn’t he driving a Ford? He said “I’m on vacation. We are in no hurry. We don’t care when we get home. That’s why I’m not in a Ford.”
To the aspersion that Model T was a crude utility, built by the mechanics who scorned precision, he made one characteristic retort. He would become the American patron of precision. In the arsenal of the Swedish government was a genius named Johansson who had invented block gauges that carried precision of measurement to the millionth part of an inch. That degree of refinement was one hundred times greater than anything the Ford shop could use. Nevertheless, Ford bought the exclusive right to make the gauges, and took Johansson on the payroll, and then so improved the process of manufacture that the supply of gauges was increased and the price reduced, until any machine shop could afford to buy them. “Which proves,” he said, “that there is nothing incompatible between quality and mass production.” With that he went on making Model T’s as before. He no more needed a gauge that measured the millionth part of an inch than a blacksmith needs a jeweler’s loop.
3
WHETHER Ford got the doctrine of the value of ignorance from Edison, or Edison from him, is an immaterial question. They were born that way. Both made their discoveries by a kind of unspoiled original sense. For their attacks on the impossible they had but one tool. That was trial and error.
Edison was more articulate about it. His mind was more at ease than Ford’s in regions of abstraction. He loved to cite examples.
He said to me one day: “Have you seen the New Haven Railroad’s electric locomotive?”
I said yes, I had seen it.
“Did you notice how the power was coupled to the wheels?”
I hadn’t noticed that particularly.
He said: “The next time you see it you notice that, because I’m going to tell you a story about it.”
I did notice it the next time I looked at the New Haven’s electric locomotive. Afterward I noticed it in Europe. For some silly reason the problem of getting the power down to the driving wheels of the early electric locomotives had presented awkward difficulties and had been solved in several ways.
The story went on.
“Well,” said Edison, “the engineers had that locomotive all finished except for one last thing. They couldn’t think of a right way to get the power down to the wheels. They stood around for weeks, looking at it, making little drawings and tearing them up. The boss posted a notice on the bulletin board. A reward for anybody who could make a workable suggestion. Still nothing happened. They were all in a rut. They couldn’t see what the problem was. One day the boy from the drafting room stopped at the chief’s desk and said, ‘I don’t know anything about it, but do you think this might work?’ He held out a little pencil sketch. The chief said, ‘That might work.’ They tried it and it did work, and that’s what you’ll see the next time you look at the locomotive. The point is, that boy was not in a rut.”
We got to talking about planes. I happened to say something that caught his attention.
“Good,” he said. “Make a little drawing of that and I’ll send it along with mine.”
“With yours?”
“Yes,” he said. “I was in Washington last week. Those Navy aviators came to see me. They said, ‘Mr. Edison, we’ve got the finest plane there is.’ I said I was glad to know that. ‘Our trouble now,’ they said, ‘is that we don’t know how to go on from here. We’ve got no new ideas. We were hoping you might give us some.’ I said, ‘Yes, I’ll be glad to.’ They all got up and said, ‘Come look at the plane.’ I told them I was too busy, I just couldn’t come. I didn’t dare tell them I’d never seen a plane in my life nor if I saw theirs I probably couldn’t give them any ideas at all. I told them I’d be thinking about it and when I got home I’d make some drawings and send them down. Here they are.” He pulled them out of a pigeonhole.
“Not one of them is worth a damn,” he said. “That isn’t it. I’ll tell you what will happen. They’ll say, ‘Ah, here are the ideas from Edison.’ They will sit down with the drawings and begin to pass them around. After three or four they will begin to make faces. One will say, ‘There’s nothing here.’ Another will say, ‘How does he get to be called a great inventor?’ Then one will say, ‘Will you look at this. See what the idiot has done. He ought to know that won’t work, but why didn’t he do this?’ The instant one says, ‘Why didn’t he do this?,’ I they’ve got an idea of their own. They are on their way again. That’s all these drawings are good for.”
I was in Edison’s laboratory one day when they were playing with a rock that contained a valuable substance and hated to give it up. The rock was in a big wooden tank, immersed, and they were experimenting with a catalytic chemical that would leach the valuable substance out and release it, only it took too long and because it was slow it was too costly. Tacked to the tank was a chart on which the chemists kept a record of the reaction time. Once every day Edison came in, looked at the chart and grunted, because the reaction time line kept running flat—no improvement at all. One day he said: “Put in more of that stuff.” The chief chemist said: “We can’t go any further that way, Mr. Edison. We’ve already put it in to the saturation point. Any more will be inert.” Edison said: “Put in five times as much,” and went away. The chemists looked at each other, thinking: “That’s what he knows about chemistry. Well, he’s the boss.” They put in five times as much, and then for a reason no chemist could give the time line began to rise.
4
SO THEY worked—the innocents, who did many things that were impossible because they didn’t know any better. They didn’t mind failure. “One who fears failure,” said Ford, “limits his activities. Failure is only the opportunity more intelligently to begin again.”
When Ford was playing with one of his most exciting toys—the Detroit, Toledo & Ironton Railroad—he watched the track writhe as a train went over it and thought how unmechanical it was to lay steel rails on wooden ties buried in a bed of cinders. Why not a rigid roadway, with rails laid in concrete? The old railroad men told him it wouldn’t work; with that kind of roadway the train would jump off at the first curve. He wouldn’t believe it, and had a stretch of experimental track built the way he wanted it. Then he watched a train jump off at the curve, and said, “Do it again.” It jumped off again. He had them do it a third time. Then he said: “Tear it up.”
Ford, Edison, Harvey Firestone and John Burroughs used to go camping together, for recreation they thought, but really for the pleasures of adversative communion, until, as it would be, such a caravan of Olympians began to be trailed by reporters. That spoiled it.
Edison told me this. One evening at the campfire Ford began to tell of the tractor he was building. The design was all complete but for the steering mechanism. He had not been able to get that right. He explained what the requirements were. It had to be powerful, sensitive, quick, and so on. “Think about it,” he said to Edison. When he had thought about it Edison made a little drawing. Ford glanced at it and said it wouldn’t do. Then he made a drawing and showed it to Edison, who said he was sure that wouldn’t work, and Ford agreed with him. They swapped several drawings that way, and then Ford said, “Here’s one I think will work.” Edison looked at it and said: “That’s the worst one yet.” Ford said, “No; I think that will work.” “And,” said Edison, “that’s the one he tried and that’s the one that worked.”
Fumbling they understood.
As the fumbling mind may arrive at truth, so the fumbling hand may make a precision tool, or a tool that will unerringly describe a straight line—a thing the hand itself cannot do and a thing, moreover, that has first to exist in the imagination because it is nonexistent in nature. Fumblers they were, purposeful, persistent and sometimes lucky. Or you may think of them as anglers blindfold, casting their hooks into the mouth of the void, hoping to draw Leviathan forth. When they were wrong it was like losing a fish they had never seen, and one that maybe was never there. They often were wrong.
A time came when the Ford Motor Company decided to electrify itself. The engineers went forth to look, and when they had seen how everybody else did it they came back to design an installation the Ford way. The one thing they added was very high voltage, higher than anybody had used before. When they were all ready to turn it on, Ford said: “Now wait a minute. We don’t know much about electricity. Mr. Edison does. He knows everything about it. I’d like to have him look this over.” So Edison came, looked it over and went home. Ford called his engineers in and faced them uneasily. “Mr. Edison has got me worried,” he said. “He likes what we’ve done. He thinks it’s a fine job. But he says it’s dangerous. He’s made me afraid of it.”
One of the engineers said: “When he says it’s dangerous, what does he mean?”
“Dangerous,” said Ford. “You know what that means. Dangerous.”
“He means it might kill somebody?” the engineer persisted.
“Certainly,” said Ford. “That’s what dangerous means.”
The engineer said: “Well, Mr. Ford, if you are going to get killed by electricity does it make any difference to you whether it’s one thousand volts or ten thousand?”
For a moment Ford stared thoughtfully at the engineer. Then he said: “Ah! That fool Edison. Turn it on.”
5
FOR all their agreement on the doctrine of original perception, which they called the value of ignorance, these two minds differed remarkably in their separate ways of working. Ford was hand-minded. If you had cut off his hands you would have crippled his mind. As for Edison, the loss of his hands probably would not have affected his mind at all. He had no brains in his hands. The contrast was noticeable when they walked among moving machines. Ford could not look at a machine without feeling it in his tissues, sympathetically, and if he touched one it was as if he touched a living thing. Edison was distant with machines and if he touched one he did it timidly, as if it might do an unexpected thing or snap at him.
Ford’s way was to let his mind run free, like a puckish servant; it made many unnecessary and willful excursions, and yet did generally come back with what it was sent to bring.
Edison bridled his mind and made it answerable to his will. He had a curious way of watching it work. He once told me about inventing the way to make four simultaneous messages go by one wire without mixing.
“You start with one,” he said, “that’s fast here.” (Between the thumb and forefinger.) “Then you reach out there for two, which isn’t so far, and you get it to where you can hold it tight along with one. Then three. That’s away out there. You find it and bring it in slowly and then, just as you think you’ve got it, away it goes, and two with it. So you bring two back and reach again for three. After a while you get three in place. Then four. Four is away, away out there, and just as you are about to get hold of it, three flies off again.”
And so it went on and on until at last, when he had four in place and could hold it fast, his right arm was trembling from the strain and great beads of perspiration were standing out on his forehead. Merely from the recollection of it.
Ford, if he had happened to want the same thing, would have suspended an interrogation mark in the top of his head; then he would have gone about using his hands, tinkering with tools, whittling maybe, or talking by the hour on things he was not thinking about—all the time expecting the answer to come. And it might come.
He apparently never got anything out of books. “I don’t like to read books,” he said. “They muss up my mind.” And again: “Machines are to a mechanic what books are to a writer.”
Edison worked, lived and slept with books. His library was a part of his equipment, like a bench tool. Not a general library. It was a record of his mental journeys. Each subject he had ever explored had its shelf or two of books, some of them as forgotten as travel folders, and yet never discarded. Rubber, chemistry, botany, metallurgy, physics, sound, rare substances, geology, economics.
The economics shelf was sad and dusty. One night by the campfire Ford asked him to put his mind on money and invent a whole new monetary system, simple, scientific and banker-proof, for the people. The idea was not entirely absurd. Simon Newcomb, a great American astronomer, once out of sheer exasperation turned his mind to political economy and produced the finest, clearest textbook in the language. But Edison’s mind was not like that.
The first thing he did was to get someone to make him a list of economic titles. He read them all and then produced his plan. His Wall Street friends went over it respectfully and said: “We are sorry to tell you, Mr. Edison, there’s nothing in it.” Edison said: “There’s got to be something in it. I’ve spent three months on it.”
He took it then to the financial editor of the New York Times, old Sandy Noyes, who said the same thing. Adolph Ochs, the publisher, said anyhow a monetary system invented by Edison had popular news value, if nothing else, and gave it full publicity. There was nothing in it, really. What Edison could not understand was that people’s trouble with money comes from nothing money does to them but from what they do to money. Almost any monetary system would work if you could leave people out, as he did.
6
Never himself a profit maker, Edison envied that side of Ford. It dazzled him.
Ford envied the qualities of Edison’s mind, without ever being able to say precisely what they were—natural powers of abstraction, analysis and synthesis, consciously if rudely exercised. He called Edison “the world’s greatest scientist,” whereas Edison was no more a scientist than Ford was and disliked to be named one. To that dubious eulogy Ford added: “I’m not sure that he isn’t also the world’s worst businessman. He knows almost nothing about business.”
The friendship between them was famous. On Edison’s side it was whimsical, indulgent and Socratic; and on Ford’s side it was romantic and a little extravagant. They lived the same arc, one overtaking the other. They were the copybook prodigies of their time, heroes of the same mythology, and not rivals. In the Detroit Institute of Arts there is a mural by Diego Rivera in which you may find them both as a composite symbol of machine man.
Power was their plaything. As they unchained and set it free in a muscle-weary world, the roar and light and heat of it filled them with innocent glee. When Archimedes said, “Give me whereon to rest my fulcrum and I will move the world,” he was boasting of a new toy which we call the principle of the lever. Their toy had a built-in volcano.
Emotionally they were children.
Once when Edison was invited to Greenfield Village, where Ford had embalmed American life as it was before Model T, he found there what he took at first to be a replica of the old frame shop in which he had done some of his great work. It was not a replica. It was the shop itself. Ford had sent out men to recover the very boards wherever they might be, and the lumber that was in the wizard’s bench, and to dig in his forgotten dump for objects that might be restored, such as a broken mortar and pestle that could be mended—and here it all was, just as he remembered it, so cunningly re-created that he could believe he had never left it and that everything that had happened in the years since he moved out of it had been only imagined. As he touched the familiar objects he said, “I could sit down here and go right to work with my old tools” and began to weep.
7
WONDERFUL they may be, and yet the values of ignorance are not without price. When men say anything is possible if you don’t know any better, they express a kind of contempt for history, experience and expert opinion. It is a shibboleth and may be very exciting; but it has almost no other merit. When men begin to believe it, as if it were true, they are bound to go on to the thought that if anything is possible, so anything may be true, with the cynical notation that what people generally believe is probably wrong. With that, they expose themselves to every cracked wind that blows. They imagine themselves to be skeptics whereas in fact they are gullibles. A skeptic doubts everything. These willful innocents, however, doubt what is commonly believed because it is commonly believed, and then in place of it they believe something else because it is contrary.
In his own mechanical world Ford could not be fooled. A thing worked or it didn’t work, and that was finality. Outside of that world he was a very credulous man. Let it be a metaphysical thing, a property of the ethos, a political matter involving passion and prejudice—let it be anything the truth of which you can neither prove nor disprove with a monkey wrench or on the work bench, and there in every case he preferred the perverse opinion. If there was no perverse opinion, so much the better; he made one up.
What he could believe without cracking the pot was evidence of a kind of fool-proof sanity. He was aware of himself in that aspect.
He did not mind being thought a fool. It was not bad to be a fool for what one believed was right. Then, not to leave himself or the fool entirely in the lurch, he would add: “The best part of it is that fools sometimes live to prove they were right.”
At that moment he was probably thinking of the Ford Peace Ship, which made him the fool of the world. That was the weirdest single episode of his life.
World War I was going into its second year. The Americans had not yet got into it. One day a woman pacifist in cotton stockings from Budapest crashed Ford’s office to tell him that the combatant nations all wanted to stop, only they didn’t know how; in the chancelleries of Europe, on both sides, they were praying for someone to come and show them how. He believed it. She told him that as a man to whom anything was possible he could do it. He believed he could. He believed he could stop the war with, first, a Ford sermon such as he could inspire his publicity people to write, and then by leading a shipful of pacifists to Europe under the slogan “Get the boys out of the trenches by Christmas.”
The newspapers yelled, Whoopee! For the reporters it was a savage feast of whale meat. The American government was embarrassed and treated it all very coldly. European governments asked sternly if this American fantast thought he was going to start a soldiers’ strike. That would be sinister. Ford had been quoted as saying that it would be—a world-wide strike against war. This he repudiated. It was nothing like that. The idea was that all people alike, statesmen, generals and soldiers, wanted to stop fighting. What they lacked was a Ford formula. He said: “I don’t care what the critics say, I have believed other things possible, and they were.”
The Rev. Samuel S. Marquis, Ford’s pastor, went along in the role of Sancho Panza. Writing of it afterward, he told how he wrestled with his unmanageable knight on the eve of the ship’s departure. Ford kept saying: “It is right to try to stop war, isn’t it?” To that the pastor would only say yes. Then Ford would say: “Don’t you believe that what is right is bound to succeed?” The argument that there was a right way with right things and that a right thing attempted the wrong way might fail moved him not at all.
But Cervantes’ Don Quixote was not the world’s richest automobile manufacturer. This one was. He was sick and cold and hurting with disillusionment when the Peace Ship arrived in Scandinavia, and permitted himself to be whisked away from his quarreling pacifists, by his bodyguard, and to be put aboard the next ship home, very glad perhaps that his owlish friend Edison had refused to go along.
He never talked much about it afterward. He had trusted the information that some of the nations were anxious for peace and would welcome his demonstration. In the hope that this was true he had financed the expedition to Stockholm in what had since been called the Peace Ship. He did not regret the attempt. That it failed had not convinced him that it was not worth trying. He was one to learn more from failure than from success. What he had learned on that trip was worth the time and the money, and as to whether his information was true or false, he did not care.
8
HE BELIEVED that war was “a purely manufactured evil”—manufactured by international bankers, munitions makers and profiteers, who had perfected a “definite technique” of wickedly exciting nations to hate and fear one another.
He believed there existed in the world a secret cabal of super-Machiavellian men, acting upon every government, every great business organization and every agency of publicity, with intent to create panics, depressions and states of political frenzy; riding the aftermath of dire events, like masked ghouls, they extended their power and made off with the spoils.
He believed there was a Jewish conspiracy to corrupt and destroy the Christian world.
He believed the Protocols of Zion.
For seven years he carried on a campaign of defamation against the Jews. For its spirit of enterprise, for marvel of invention and for valor of ignorance, it had no parallel in all the literature of anti-Semitism. He did not write it. Cameron, his editor, did the writing, as everybody knew. The organ was the Dearborn Independent, Ford’s private magazine, which seven thousand Ford dealers, Jewish and non-Jewish, were obliged to buy and promote. The first series of articles in the Independent began: “There is a race a part of humanity which has never yet been received as a welcome part.” The articles were reprinted in four books and widely distributed, not for profit.
The curious fact was that Ford probably believed himself when he said he was not anti-Semitic. He was only trying once for all to settle the immemorial Jewish question. How? By obliging Jews to see themselves as he saw them; and he expected good Jews to stand with him. One of his good Jews was a rabbi in Detroit to whom he presented each year a Ford car in token of friendship. He was astonished and hurt when one year the rabbi refused to accept his gift, and called him on the telephone to ask what was wrong. Had something come between them?
Then suddenly he recanted the whole of it in a statement that was abject and absurd. He blamed his subordinates. He had been too busy to notice what they were doing in his name, until certain trustworthy friends informed him that Jews everywhere were terribly resentful and regarded him as their enemy. “This,” he said, “led me to direct my personal attention to this subject in order to ascertain the exact nature of these articles. As a result of this survey I confess I am deeply mortified that this journal, which is intended to be constructive and not destructive, has been made the medium for resurrecting exploded fictions, for giving currency to the so-called protocols of the wise men of Zion, which have been demonstrated, as I learn, to be gross forgeries, and for contending that the Jews have been engaged in a conspiracy to control the capital and the industries of the world, besides laying at their door many offenses against decency, public order and good morals. Had I appreciated even the general nature, to say nothing of the details, of these utterances, I would have forbidden their circulation without a moment’s hesitation.”
Cameron could not have written a thing so lame. Nor did Ford write it; he only signed it. To believe it you would have to suppose not only that he had never read what his own magazine was saying but that for seven years he had been deaf, since his dealers and his associates had been telling him all the time that his campaign was hurting the sale of Ford cars.
The Dearborn Independent went to the ash can, to the great relief of Ford dealers; Cameron accepted the scapegoat’s burden and lived it out. All the rest of it the shop absorbed. Model A was just then coming out.
There was a last word. It appeared in the chapter entitled “Things in General,” of My Life and Work, by Henry Ford, published in 1922. Ford could not have written it. The style is Cameron’s. However, since it was Ford’s autobiography and since he must have approved it, it was he who said—
“The work which we describe as Studies in the Jewish Question, and which is variously described by antagonists as ‘the Jewish campaign,’ ‘the attack on the Jews,’ the ‘anti-semitic program,’ and so forth, needs no explanation to those who have followed it. . . . There had been observed in this country certain streams of influence which were causing a marked deterioration in our literature, amusements, and social conduct; business was departing from its old time substantial soundness; a general letting down of standards was felt everywhere. It was not the robust coarseness of the white man, the rude indelicacy of, say, Shakespeare’s characters, but a nasty Orientalism which has insidiously affected every channel of expression—and to such an extent that it was time to challenge it. The fact that these influences are all traceable to one racial source is a fact to be reckoned with, not only by us but by the intelligent people of the race in question. Our work does not pretend to say the last word on the Jew in America. It says only the word which describes his obvious present impress on the country. When that impress is changed the report of it can be changed. For the present, then, the question is wholly in the Jews’ hands. If they are as wise as they claim to be, they will labor to make Jews American instead of laboring to make America Jewish. The genius of the United States of America is Christian in the broadest sense, and its density is to remain American. . . . The work was taken up without personal motives. When it reached a stage where we believed the American people could grasp the key, we let it rest for the time. Our enemies say that we began it for revenge and that we laid it down in fear. Time will show that our critics are merely dealing in evasion because they dare not tackle the main question. Time will also show that we are better friends to the Jews’ best interests than are those who praise them to their faces and criticize them behind their backs.” 1
9
ANOTHER debit against the value of ignorance may be noted. You may see a thing clearly, but the more clearly you see it the more probable it is that you will see it in isolation, with no relation to anything else. Two or more different things may be as one in principle. If you see them separately and act upon them separately you will probably find yourself involved in contradictions, that is, contradictions in principle. This will be true of things that cannot be taken apart on the bench.
Thus Ford.
He thought the railroads were very badly managed and was in a continuous feud with them for the way they handled his freight and what they charged for doing it. Therefore it was not surprising that while supporting President Wilson for re-election he was for government ownership and operation of the railroads. Yet when he got a railroad of his own he hotly resented government regulations.
And the same again with public utilities. He was publicly on record as an advocate of government ownership, yet when it came to the water power development at Muscle Shoals on the Tennessee River—an unfinished government project from World War I—which he tried very hard to buy, he stipulated in his offer of purchase that the government should not touch him for one hundred years.
Looking at government, he could say that when you got a whole country thinking that Washington was a sort of Heaven and that behind its clouds dwelt omniscience and omnipotence, you were educating that country into a dependent state of mind which augured ill for the future. The government was servant. The moment the people became adjuncts of government, then the law of retribution began to work, for such a relation was unnatural, immoral and inhuman.
Then a time came when he looked at the presidency, himself in the White House, and that was very different. He signed an article in Collier’s entitled “If I Were President,” and nobody who read it could doubt that Henry Ford as Mr. President would put plenty of omnipotence into government, if not omniscience. He suggested that it might be necessary for industry sometime to absorb government, which meant of course that in that case government would be run like the Ford Motor Company.
What was perhaps the wildest contradiction in him was the one least observed.
For the public that bought the Ford car he had a very deep respect. He was grateful for its long loyalty and felt an obligation to satisfy its expectations. It was always right, it was sovereign; even when it bought fewer and fewer Model T’s it was still right, and he made a new and better car, more to its liking.
But for the public as people he had a lively contempt. He cared nothing for people’s opinions, which he thought were generally wrong; all the more people cared for his, and clamored for them. Reporters were assigned to dog him. To avoid them he sometimes went in and out through the windows. Yet he liked it, too. If he said church was good for those who needed it, that carrots were the perfect food, that poverty was a crime, or that the League of Nations would save the world from the international bankers, it was news. He got the habit of sounding off and loved the newspaper headlines. He could hardly have failed to get the notion that any thought that popped into his head was worth printing. It probably never occurred to him to wonder why. Any reporter could have told him.
Distrust of the expert is a native American prejudice. Any man may do anything. Are we not founded on the faith that the obscure boy may become president, and one not much worse than another? Greatness is a Jack-of-all-trades. The irrational assumption follows that a man who has achieved greatly in one thing will have important opinions to impart on many things. This is the theory of the value of ignorance turned around and coming back. Maybe Ford did it to himself; maybe the people whose opinions he despised did it to him.
Touching anything that was Caesar’s he was consistently adamant. From this you may deduce that many of his extravagant sayings were shockers only.
Through all of his career the conservative grimsires of the American free enterprise system regarded him with alarm; he was a dangerous maverick, almost a revolutionary, at the least a menace, an anticapitalist capitalist—certainly the last man you could trust to defend the premises with his life. And yet, when the New Deal came, he was the one who had the will and the courage to stand against it, and he stood alone.
But for the Ford Motor Company, it would have to be written that the surrender of American business to government was unanimous, complete and unconditional. Its representatives went to Washington in relays and signed Blue Eagle codes, binding themselves under pain of fine and imprisonment, not to compete any more, not to cut prices, to limit production, and not to increase their capacity for producing wealth without a certificate of sanction. All of Ford’s competitors in the motor industry signed. He refused. The White House sent for him. When he came back and was asked what had happened he said the President had talked a good deal about the Roosevelt ancestry. “Old Iron Pants” Hugh Johnson, boss of the Blue Eagle, threatened him with extinction, but in vain. Ford said the Blue Eagle was not the law, which it was, and that Hugh Johnson’s word wasn’t law, although for everybody else it was. Public opinion was against him because people had been persuaded that competition and price cutting prevented recovery from the Great Depression. That left him cold. His associates were scared and told him it might ruin the Ford Motor Company. He stopped his ears. He never did sign. His vindication was that the United States Supreme Court at length declared the law unconstitutional and killed the Blue Eagle.
In moments of social exuberance he had advocated higher income and inheritance taxes. In the end he beat the tax collector by leaving his surplus wealth to the Ford Foundation for the good of mankind, which is not taxable.
2My Life and Work, by Henry Ford. Copyright 1922 by Doubleday & Co., Inc.
