Fordlandia (9 page)

Roosevelt worked for Ford’s Republican rival, condemning Ford’s pacifism as treasonous, making an issue of Ford’s earlier comment that he thought the American flag “silly.”
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Politicians and journalists joined in denouncing Ford as “criminal” and “insane,” unfit for public office. “Upon some of the biggest questions of Americanism,” wrote the
Chicago Tribune
, “Henry Ford is, to our way of thinking, wrong. He is dangerously wrong. We agree with Theodore Roosevelt.” Roosevelt even called on Ford to sacrifice Edsel to atone for having opposed America’s entrance into the war, since the fighting would have been over in ninety days and many lives spared “if we had prepared.” Ford belonged not in the Senate, he said, but “on the mourners’ bench.”
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Roosevelt died in early 1919, having lived to witness Ford’s pacifism, seemingly triumphant in 1915, wilt in the face of the fervor in which Americans marched into war. Roosevelt also saw Ford turn his factory over to war production, leading many who had simply considered the carmaker a fool to now think him a hypocrite. And he even bested Ford with his death: Ford had planned to run a “scathing” indictment of him in the inaugural issue of the
Dearborn Independent
, a local newspaper Ford purchased in 1918, but he was forced to scrap it on news that the ex-president had passed.
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FORD WAS IMMUNE to the emotions of nationalism and deaf to the grievances of history. The motor force of his internationalism, the one true thing that moved him, was constructive, rationally ordered activity, which he believed could be transplanted to any country to help mute political passions. What did it matter that India was colonized by Great Britain if its people were at work making things? Would Serbians care that they were oppressed if they had factory jobs to go to? What did matter was war, for it was an absolute mockery of everything Ford stood for. He was appalled by the destruction, by the insanity of using factories, machines, and men to kill rather than to make. “Every time a big gun was fired, it cost almost as much as a Ford car,” wrote a contemporary to explain Ford’s disgust. “A rifle cartridge cost almost half as much as a spark-plug. The nitrates burned up in explosives would fertilize all the worn-out farms in the world.” One day during the war, Ford, having learned that twenty thousand men had been killed within the previous twenty-four hours, quickly figured that if those wasted men had worked for him for a year they would have earned $30 million. Capitalized at a standard rate of 5 percent, Ford calculated, that meant that $600 million was lost in a single day.
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World War I, along with Ford’s failure to stick to his own convictions when the US entered it, prompted a gradual revision of his internationalism. He still continued to insist that his balm of hard work, high wages, and moral living could be universally applied, regardless of country or creed. Yet through the 1920s, Ford would back away from his high modernist disdain for “tradition,” coming to believe that if the world was to be saved it needed to look for solutions rooted in the small-town values of America’s past.

*
Ford also appreciated Victor Hugo, jotting down in his notebook a translated paraphrase of a fairly obscure quote from his fellow world-government advocate: “I represent a thing that does not yet exist the party of the revolutionary civilization will come in the 20th century,” giving rise first to “the United States of Europe and then the United States of the world” (BFRC, accession 1, box 14, folder 8).

CHAPTER 4

THAT’S WHERE WE SURE CAN GET GOLD

HENRY FORD DIDN’T MUCH LIKE TO READ. READING WAS LIKE A “dope-habit,” he said. “Book-sickness is a modern ailment.” He delegated most of the reading and writing required to run his company and keep up his public persona to his subordinates, as Ford himself admitted when one or another of his pronouncements got him into trouble. “Mr. Delavigne wrote that,” was Ford’s fallback defense when criticized for undermining American military preparedness; Theodore Delavigne, his “peace secretary,” ghostwrote many of Ford’s pacifist manifestos. “Why should I clutter my mind with general information,” he once asked, “when I have men around me who can supply any knowledge I need?”
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Ford wasn’t illiterate, as his detractors claimed, though he did pass on several opportunities to prove otherwise. In 1919, Ford sued the
Chicago Tribune
for libel for having called him an “anarchist” yet in his testimony refused to read passages from documents entered as evidence. He forgot his spectacles, he said, or his eyes were too watery from “the hay fever.” He claimed he didn’t care that he gave the impression that he couldn’t read. “I read slowly, but I can read alright.”

Ford was in fact an impressionistic reader, and he was animated by big ideas. He insisted that his dog-eared copy of Orlando Smith’s
A Short View of Great Questions
, which popularized for an American audience highbrow German anti-Semitism and Oriental metaphysics, “changed his outlook on life.” And he continued to quote “Locksley Hall” until the end of his life.
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Ford’s cultivation of himself as a heartland sage dispensing folksy wisdom owes much to the influence of William Holmes McGuffey’s
Eclectic Reader
, his childhood civics textbook. The early twentieth century was swollen with books—many of them still found, underlined and annotated, on the shelves of his estate, Fair Lane—that defined what it meant to be modern, ideas concerning diet, exercise, reincarnation, and politics that Ford often passed on to friends and employees. “Mr. Ford wouldn’t discuss the books he read or anything like that,” said Albert M. Wibel, head of the company’s purchasing division. “He just did it enough to make me think, ‘What the heck is he talking about? I’m going to find out.’ ” Though not always with enthusiasm: “I hated those God damn soybeans and didn’t want any part of them,” he said about one of Ford’s more enduring obsessions.
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Ford liked to keep his advice short and simple yet his interest in matters philosophical led him to expand his vocabulary. The Ford Archives hold dozens of his “jot-it-down” pocket notebooks, which Ford kept at the ready to save his thoughts and occasionally list variations of words:

Met a physic

Met a physical

Met a physician

Met a fizishan

Met a physics

Coming upon his boss in his Fair Lane sitting room reading Ralph Waldo Emerson, Reverend Marquis, the minister who headed the Sociological Department, asked Ford what he thought of the “Concord philosopher.” “Emerson’s a pup,” Ford replied. “Why a ‘pup’?” Marquis asked. “Well,” Ford said, “I just get comfortably settled to the reading of him, when he uses a word I don’t understand, and that makes me get up and look for a dictionary.”
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Of all of Henry Ford’s many intellectual influences, Emerson was his most enduring muse. Ford appreciated the Concord philosopher’s optimism and celebration of individualism and self-reliance. But he also found in Emerson a useful corrective to the writings of other nineteenth-century pastoralists, who saw industry as a violation of nature. William Wordsworth, for instance, protested the coming of the railroad to England’s lake country in 1844, warning against the spread of the mechanical “fever of the world.” “Is then,” he asked, “no nook of English ground secure from rash assault?” Emerson, in contrast, celebrated steam power, railroads, and factories as rejuvenating forces that would help man fully realize the wonders of the natural world. Mechanization opened up the West, dissolved Old World hierarchies and stifling customs, turned deserts into gardens, and freed the mind from meaningless labor to allow more contemplative thought. In answer to the poet who feared that the railway and the “factory-village” would break the “poetry of the landscape,” Emerson insisted that both “fall within the great Order not less than the beehive or the spider’s geometrical web. Nature adopts them very fast into her vital circles, and the gliding train of cars she loves like her own.” In the years after World War I ended the optimism of the Progressive Era, Ford would prescribe a similar holism as a solution for America’s problems, setting out on an increasingly manic quest to restore order to a world off-kilter.
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THE IMMEDIATE CATALYST for Ford’s initiative was America’s 1920 recession. The downturn lasted less than two years, short compared to either the six-year contraction that began in 1873 or the great desolation that would come in 1929. Yet the drop in economic output was acute, revealing the vulnerability of both urban and rural society under the new regime of mass consumer capitalism. Banks failed and businesses closed. Unemployment skyrocketed in cities and families went hungry. The recession and its aftermath were a blow to one of Ford’s mostly loyal constituencies, farmers, who still made up about a third of the US labor force. The price of agricultural products plummeted by as much as 40 percent, never to fully recover, even after the economy began to grow again in 1922. It was the first serious downswing since Ford had put his industrial and social system into place in Detroit the decade previous, and it galvanized him into action. For the rest of his life he would commit a good part of his great wealth to addressing the problem of industry and agriculture by trying to harmonize the two. “We cannot eat or wear our machines,” said Ford. “If the world were one vast machine shop it would die. When it comes to sustaining life we go to the fields. With one foot in agriculture and the other in industry, America is safe.”

Ford increasingly began to preach, and then tried to implement, what he called his “village industry” program. More and more after 1920, his conversations with reporters were dominated by different iterations on one topic: a way to reconcile farm and factory work. A return to the fields, he said, would solve urban poverty, the application of industrial technology to farm life could relieve rural drudgery, and decentralized hydroelectric plants could liberate manufacturing and farming communities from the high prices charged by the parasitical “energy trusts.” Having helped do away with the horse as a source of transportation, he believed that in the “future farm animals of all kinds will be out. We don’t need them. We will be better off without them.” And to prove his point, he set up a small, fully mechanized farm just outside Dearborn. But mechanization was part of the problem, for the formula that provided Ford so much success in Detroit and Dearborn—machinery to lower prices, lower prices to increase demand, increased demand to make up for slimmer profit margins—didn’t work for agriculture. New mechanized farm equipment, including Ford’s Model Ts and Fordson tractors, might have relieved the slog of farmwork, but it continued to drive down prices by increasing yield. Corn, wheat, and other commodities poured into America’s great industrial centers, selling at prices well below what many small to midsize farmers could live on.
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Ford hoped to solve this problem by finding industrial uses for agricultural products, and he directed his chemists to synthesize beans, corn, flax, and wood chips into grease, fuel, paint, artificial leather, organic plastics, and assorted chemical compounds. “I believe,” Ford said, “that industry and agriculture are natural partners. Agriculture suffers from lack of a market for its product. Industry suffers from a lack of employment for its surplus men.” The time would come, he thought, when “a farmer not only will raise raw materials for industry, but will do the initial processing on his farm. He will stand on both his feet—one foot on soil for his livelihood; the other in industry for the cash he needs. Thus he will have a double security. That is what I’m working for.” No crop better promised to achieve this balance than soybeans, and over the next two decades Ford would spend four million dollars on soy research and more than twice that amount on soy processing equipment and physical plant facilities. His laboratories turned its oil into car enamel and house paint, varnish, linoleum, printer’s ink, glycerin, fatty acids, soap, and diesel, and its meal and stalks into horn buttons, gearshift knobs, distributor parts, light switches, timing gears, glues and adhesives, and pressed cardboard. Ford even began to talk about the possibility of “growing cars” and had the body of one made entirely of plastic. Dubbed the “soybean car,” it was ditched soon after it became clear that the strong mortuary smell from the formaldehyde used to process the plastic was not going to subside.
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Ford also promoted soy as a wonder food. He hired Edsel Ruddiman, a childhood friend and scientist after whom he named his only child, to develop novel foodstuffs from soy. He forced his associates to eat soy “biscuits,” described by one employee as the “most vile-tasting things you ever put in your mouth,” and served his dinner guests soy banquets, course after course of dishes made from soybeans, including puree of soybean, soybean crackers, soybean croquettes with tomato sauce, buttered green soybeans, pineapple rings with soybean cheese, soybean bread with soybean butter, apple pie with soy crust, roasted soybean coffee, and soymilk ice cream. Ford thought soy’s most promising food use would be as vegetable shortening, oleomargarine, and, of course, milk, which would allow him once and for all to eliminate cows. “It is a simple matter to take the same cereals that the cows eat and make them into a milk that is superior to the natural article and much cleaner,” Ford said in 1921. “The cow is the crudest machine in the world. Our laboratories have already demonstrated that cow’s milk can be done away with and the concentration of the elements of milk can be manufactured into scientific food by machines far cleaner than cows.”
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