Big Money (8 page)

When war broke out in Europe, he had ideas about that too. (Suspicion of armymen and soldiering were part of the midwest farm
tradition, like thrift, stickativeness, temperance and sharp practice in money matters.) Any intelligent American mechanic could see that if the Europeans hadn't been a lot of ignorant underpaid foreigners who drank, smoked, were loose about women and wasteful in their methods of production, the war could never have happened.

When Rosika Schwimmer broke through the stockade of secretaries and servicemen who surrounded Henry Ford and suggested to him that he could stop the war,

he said sure they'd hire a ship and go over and get the boys out of the trenches by Christmas.

 

He hired a steamboat, the
Oscar II
, and filled it up with pacifists and socialworkers,

to go over to explain to the princelings of Europe

that what they were doing was vicious and silly.

It wasn't his fault that Poor Richard's commonsense no longer rules the world and that most of the pacifists were nuts,

goofy with headlines.

When William Jennings Bryan went over to Hoboken to see him off, somebody handed William Jennings Bryan a squirrel in a cage; William Jennings Bryan made a speech with the squirrel under his arm. Henry Ford threw American Beauty roses to the crowd. The band played
I Didn't Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier.
Practical jokers let loose more squirrels. An eloping couple was married by a platoon of ministers in the saloon, and Mr. Zero, the flophouse humanitarian, who reached the dock too late to sail,

dove into the North River and swam after the boat.

The
Oscar II
was described as a floating Chautauqua; Henry Ford said it felt like a middlewestern village, but by the time they reached Christiansand in Norway, the reporters had kidded him so that he had gotten cold feet and gone to bed. The world was too crazy outside of Wayne County, Michigan. Mrs. Ford and the management sent an Episcopal dean after him who brought him home under wraps,

and the pacifists had to speechify without him.

 

Two years later Ford's was manufacturing munitions, Eagle boats; Henry Ford was planning oneman tanks, and oneman subma
rines like the one tried out in the Revolutionary War. He announced to the press that he'd turn over his war profits to the government,

but there's no record that he ever did.

 

One thing he brought back from his trip

was the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

He started a campaign to enlighten the world in the
Dearborn Independent;

the Jews were why the world wasn't like Wayne County, Michigan, in the old horse and buggy days; the Jews had started the war, Bolshevism, Darwinism, Marxism, Nietzsche, short skirts and lipstick. They were behind Wall Street and the international bankers, and the whiteslave traffic and the movies and the Supreme Court and ragtime and the illegal liquor business.

Henry Ford denounced the Jews and ran for senator and sued the
Chicago Tribune
for libel,

and was the laughingstock of the kept metropolitan press;

but when the metropolitan bankers tried to horn in on his business

he thoroughly outsmarted them.

 

In 1918 he had borrowed on notes to buy out his minority stockholders for the picayune sum of seventyfive million dollars.

In February, 1920, he needed cash to pay off some of these notes that were coming due. A banker is supposed to have called on him and offered him every facility if the bankers' representative could be made a member of the board of directors. Henry Ford handed the banker his hat,

and went about raising the money in his own way:

he shipped every car and part he had in his plant to his dealers and demanded immediate cash payment. Let the other fellow do the borrowing had always been a cardinal principle. He shut down production and canceled all orders from the supplyfirms. Many dealers were ruined, many supplyfirms failed, but when he reopened his plant,

he owned it absolutely,

the way a man owns an unmortgaged farm with the taxes paid up.

In 1922 there started the Ford boom for President (high wages,
waterpower, industry scattered to the small towns) that was skillfully pricked behind the scenes

by another crackerbarrel philosopher,

Calvin Coolidge;

but in 1922 Henry Ford sold one million three hundred and thirtytwo thousand two hundred and nine tin lizzies; he was the richest man in the world.

Good roads had followed the narrow ruts made in the mud by the Model T. The great automotive boom was on. At Ford's production was improving all the time; less waste, more spotters, strawbosses, stoolpigeons (fifteen minutes for lunch, three minutes to go to the toilet, the Taylorized speedup everywhere, reach under, adjust washer, screw down bolt, shove in cotterpin, reachunder adjustwasher, screwdown bolt, reachunderadjustscrewdownreachunder adjust until every ounce of life was sucked off into production and at night the workmen went home grey shaking husks).

Ford owned every detail of the process from the ore in the hills until the car rolled off the end of the assemblyline under its own power, the plants were rationalized to the last tenthousandth of an inch as measured by the Johansen scale;

in 1926 the production cycle was reduced to eightyone hours from the ore in the mine to the finished salable car proceeding under its own power,

but the Model T was obsolete.

 

New Era prosperity and the American Plan

(there were strings to it, always there were strings to it)

had killed Tin Lizzie.

Ford's was just one of many automobile plants.

When the stockmarket bubble burst,

Mr. Ford the crackerbarrel philosopher said jubilantly,

“I told you so.

Serves you right for gambling and getting in debt.

The country is sound.”

But when the country on cracked shoes, in frayed trousers, belts tightened over hollow bellies,

idle hands cracked and chapped with the cold of that coldest March day of 1932,

started marching from Detroit to Dearborn, asking for work
and the American Plan, all they could think of at Ford's was machineguns.

The country was sound, but they mowed the marchers down.

They shot four of them dead.

 

Henry Ford as an old man

is a passionate antiquarian,

(lives besieged on his father's farm embedded in an estate of thousands of millionaire acres, protected by an army of servicemen, secretaries, secret agents, dicks under orders of an English exprizefighter,

always afraid of the feet in broken shoes on the roads, afraid the gangs will kidnap his grandchildren,

that a crank will shoot him,

that Change and the idle hands out of work will break through the gates and the high fences;

protected by a private army against

the new America of starved children and hollow bellies and cracked shoes stamping on souplines,

that has swallowed up the old thrifty farmlands

of Wayne County, Michigan,

as if they had never been).

Henry Ford as an old man

is a passionate antiquarian.

He rebuilt his father's farmhouse and put it back exactly in the state he remembered it in as a boy. He built a village of museums for buggies, sleighs, coaches, old plows, waterwheels, obsolete models of motorcars. He scoured the country for fiddlers to play oldfashioned squaredances.

Even old taverns he bought and put back into their original shape, as well as Thomas Edison's early laboratories.

When he bought the Wayside Inn near Sudbury, Massachusetts, he had the new highway where the newmodel cars roared and slithered and hissed oilily past
(the new noise of the automobile)
,

moved away from the door,

put back the old bad road,

so that everything might be

the way it used to be,

in the days of horses and buggies.

Jack o' Diamonds Jack o' Diamonds

    
You rob my pocket      of silver and gold

 

WITNESSES OF MYSTERY IN SLUSH PROBE

 

Philadelphian Beaten to Death in His Room

 

the men who the workers had been told a short year before were fighting their battle for democracy upon the bloodstained fields of France and whom they had been urged to support by giving the last of their strength to the work of production—these men were coming to teach them democracy and with them came their instruments of murder, their automatic rifles, their machineguns, their cannon that could clear a street two miles long in a few minutes and the helmets that the workers of Gary had produced

 

Yes we have no bananas

    
We have no bananas today

 

TRACTION RING KILLS BUS BILL

 

Drunken Troops in Skirts Dance as Houses Burn

 

GIRL SUICIDE WAS FRIEND OF OLIVE THOMAS

 

Kills Self Despite Wife Who Goes Mad

 

SEEKS FACTS OF HUNT FOR CASH IN THE EAST

 

the business consists in large part of financing manufacturers and merchants by purchasing evidences of indebtedness arising from the sale of a large variety of naturally marketed products such as automobiles, electrical appliances, machinery

“Misser Andson Misser Andson, telegram for Misser Andson.” Charley held out his hand for the telegram, and standing in the swaying aisle read the strips of letters pasted on the paper:
DOWN WITH FLU WIRE ME ADDRESS SEE YOU NEXT WEEK JOE.
“A hell of a note,” he kept saying to himself as he wormed his way back to his seat past women closing up their bags, a greyhaired man getting into his overcoat, the porter loaded with suitcases. “A hell of a note.” The train was already slowing down for the Grand Central.

It was quiet on the grey underground platform when he stepped out of the stuffy pullman and took his bag from the porter, lonely-looking. He walked up the incline swinging his heavy suitcase. The train had given him a headache. The station was so big it didn't have the crowded look he'd remembered New York had. Through the thick glass of the huge arched windows he could see rain streaking the buildings opposite. Roaming round the station, not knowing which way to go, he found himself looking in the window of a lunchroom.

He went in and sat down. The waitress was a little dark sourfaced girl with rings under her eyes. It was a muggy sort of day, the smell of soap from the dishwashing and of hot grease from the kitchen hung in streaks in the air. When the waitress leaned over to set the place for him he got a whiff of damp underclothes and armpits and talcumpowder. He looked up at her and tried to get a smile out of her. When she turned to go get him some tomatosoup he watched her square bottom moving back and forth under her black dress. There was something heavy and lecherous about the rainy eastern day.

He spooned soup into his mouth without tasting it. Before he'd finished he got up and went to the phonebooth. He didn't have to look up her number. Waiting for the call he was so nervous the sweat ran down behind his ears. When a woman's voice answered, his own voice dried up way down in his throat. Finally he got it out: “I want to speak to Miss Humphries, please. . . . Tell her it's Charley Anderson . . . Lieutenant Anderson.” He was still trying to clear his throat when her voice came in an intimate caressing singsong. Of course she remembered him, her voice said, too sweet of him to call her up, of course they must see each other all the time, how thrilling, she'd just love to, but she was going out of town for the weekend, yes, a long
weekend. But wouldn't he call her up next week, no, towards the end of the week? She'd just adore to see him.

When he went back to his table the waitress was fussing around it. “Didn't you like your soup?” she asked him. “Check. . . . Had to make some phonecalls.” “Oh, phonecalls,” she said in a kidding voice. This time it was the waitress who was trying to get a smile out of him. “Let's have a piece of pie and a cup of coffee,” he said, keeping his eyes on the billoffare. “They got lovely lemonmeringue pie,” the waitress said with a kind of sigh that made him laugh. He looked up at her laughing feeling horny and outafterit again: “All right, sweetheart, make it lemonmeringue.”

When he'd eaten the pie he paid his check and went back into the phonebooth. Some woman had been in there leaving a strong reek of perfume. He called up the Century Club to see if Ollie Taylor was in town. They said he was in Europe; then he called up the Johnsons; they were the only people left he knew. Eveline Johnson's voice had a deep muffled sound over the phone. When he told her his name she laughed and said, “Why, of course we'd love to see you. Come down to dinner tonight; we'll introduce you to the new baby.”

When he got out of the subway at Astor Place it wasn't time to go to dinner yet. He asked the newsvendor which way Fifth Avenue was and walked up and down the quiet redbrick blocks. He felt stuffy from the movie he'd killed the afternoon in. When he looked at his watch it was only halfpast six. He wasn't invited to the Johnsons' till seven. He'd already passed the house three times when he decided to go up the steps. Their names were scrawled out, Paul Johnson—Eveline Hutchins, on a card above the bell. He rang the bell and stood fidgeting with his necktie while he waited. Nobody answered. He was wondering if he ought to ring again when Paul Johnson came briskly down the street from Fifth Avenue with his hat on the back of his head, whistling as he walked. “Why, hello, Anderson, where did you come from?” he asked in an embarrassed voice. He had several bags of groceries that he had to pile on his left arm before he could shake hands. “Guess I ought to congratulate you,” said Charley. Paul looked at him blankly for a moment; then he blushed. “Of course . . . the son and heir. . . . Oh, well, it's a hostage to fortune, that's what they say. . . .”