The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century by Steven Watts

Author:Steven Watts [Watts, Steven]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Business, Transportation, Automotive, History, Business & Economics, Industries, Automobile Industry
ISBN: 9780375707254
Google: LIDyU91YMHAC
Amazon: 0375707255
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 2006-10-10T00:00:00+00:00

In 1918, Frank Parker Stockbridge, a journalist writing for World's Work, was surprised to hear a heartfelt outburst of sentiment from Henry Ford. Stockbridge had visited Highland Park, observed complex assembly lines and huge machines, seen thousands of laborers at work, and talked at length with the man who directed this extensive operation. Thus he was surprised when Ford stopped in front of the farmhouse he had lived in as a boy and declared emotionally, “I belong here. I am a farmer. I want to see every acre of the earth's surface covered with little farms, with happy, contented people living on them.” Some years later, a reporter for Forbes, after spending considerable time with the master of River Rouge, felt a similar pang of cognitive dissonance. Ford's personality, he concluded, “is almost altogether rural. When you first meet him you think that he is a mechanic with a bent for farming; later you decide that he is a farmer with a bent for mechanics.”45

These writers had discovered the great irony that the central designer of the modern American industrial order was in love with the virtues of rural life. This was no sudden development. Although Ford had physically fled the countryside as a youth to pursue mechanics, part of his heart remained behind. During his adulthood, this emotional attachment became steadily more evident. After spending time with Ford in 1912, Elbert Hubbard wrote, “Instinctively he is a farmer, a lover of the great out-of-doors, and is on good terms with the birds, bees, butterflies, flowers and trees.”46

In 1916, John Reed was similarly struck by Ford's rural sympathies. When the sociological department discovered that Russian immigrants were saving money to return to the motherland and buy farms, Ford was delighted. “That's fine!” he replied. “I wish they'd all do that. I'd like to get two-thirds of the population of the earth back on the land.” Moreover, Ford himself seemed a product of Midwestern rural stock and was fully imbued with such values: “puritanical narrowness, individualism run rampant, boundless energy, and a naïve political idealism.” Reed noted that Ford avoided Detroit's sophisticated social circles and preferred “sitting on a neighbor's back porch of an evening and talking things over with the farmers.”47

Around the same time, Ida Tarbell was astonished to hear Ford describe his dream for the eighteen thousand men working at his Highland Park plant. “I'd like to move them all out onto the land right now,” he declared. “If they could have two weeks of out-of-doors planting this spring, two or three weeks more in haying time, help in harvesting next fall, they would be better workmen, better men, and there would be more food raised at cheaper prices.” Tarbell toured Ford's thousands of acres of farmland in the Dearborn area and listened as he extolled the virtues of rural life. She concluded, “Whatever else Henry Ford might be, inventor, organizer, manufacturer, his real motive power was love of the soil.”48

By the 1920s, Ford was consistently promoting rural life in interviews and public statements.

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