SOURCE: "The Wheel of Fortune: Henry Ford," in The Quick and The Dead, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1931, pp. 115-48.

[In the following essay, Bradford presents a generally positive overview of Ford's life and career.]

I

On the whole it may be said that the United States of America has always been a country of work. During the last three hundred years, with the developing means of transportation, repeated shocks of energy have come to this country, a flood of wanderers, representing the pushing, eager, active, restless elements of a score of European peoples, has pressed over, determined to make its way and its fortune, sometimes by illegitimate means, but more often by earnest, indefatigable, incessant toil. No doubt of late years the habit of work has somewhat faded, not owing to indolence, but to increasing luxury and distraction. Yet it may be safely said that it is work that has made the power and the prosperity of America.

Assuredly no American has ever been more of a worker than Henry Ford. He worked from his early childhood, all the time. The son of a well-to-do farmer in Michigan, of energetic, Scotch-Irish stock like Woodrow Wilson, Ford was born in 1863. He was early accustomed to the drudgery of the farm. As drudgery he hated it, and that hatred was a large element in all his later effort. Even as a boy he dabbled in mechanics, played with engines and devised a scheme for making watches in vast numbers and selling them cheaply on the Ford plan. The sight of a clumsy, steam-driven engine moving on the roads was an inspiration for all his life-work. He early slipped away from the farm to Detroit and toiled long hours for small pay in machine shops and jeweler shops, learning all that the mechanics could tell him. Then he went back to his father for a time, married a lively, attractive girl, who believed in him, and as a farmer he appeared to be doing well. But the lure of the machine was too strong. He moved to Detroit and worked for years, through privation, poverty, and mockery, till he made the first Ford car. Finally he secured financial backing, then broke away from it and arrived at complete ownership, so that he could carry out his idea of producing what the largest possible public would buy at the lowest possible price and getting the best men to work for him by paying the best wages. Following this policy he became the richest and most materially successful man in the world. But at sixty-seven he works just as ardently as he always did. In him at any rate the passion for work can never be satisfied.

Ford, like Edison, is apt to attribute his success almost wholly to untiring, persistent work: 'When all is said and done, the ability to work means more than anything else.' No doubt a few other elements enter in. There is the extraordinary varied fertility of an active and highly endowed brain, and there is the exquisite skill and efficiency of manipulation in the fingers to bring the designs of the brain to reality. But steady work does count, enormously, and Ford is never tired of emphasizing it in all its aspects. At times it seems as if, judging others by himself, he was inclined to assume that the love of work is inherent in all men, whereas most of us love other things better, or, however we may work hard at our play, are indisposed to a task just because it is assigned us, whether it is assigned by others or by ourselves. Indeed Ford himself admits that he personally hates to take orders and that mere repetitive labor would be most irk-some to him.

Nevertheless, he insists at all times upon the necessity and the duty of work. Work is the normal condition of humanity. We cannot be happy without it, we cannot be good without it, we cannot live without it. 'There is always something to be done in the world, and only our-selves to do it.' And he makes the further, most important, point, that, if you want to get ahead, you must work not only at set hours, but all the time. 'I had plenty of time, for I never left my business. I do not believe a man can ever leave his business. He ought to think of it by day and dream of it by night.' You cannot make a fortune by working when you are told and playing the bulk of the time.

Again, according to Henry Ford, work, to a well-constituted mind, is not only a duty but a pleasure. It brings not only wealth, but health and contentment: 'Some people seem to think that what is the matter with the world is that people have to work for their living. Many men try to evade work as if it were a disease. But the world would be infinitely worse off it it were not for work.' And he cries out against the tendency to shorten hours and shift burdens. One ought not to seek these things, but just the opposite: 'As a matter of fact, I don't believe in any hours for work. A man ought to work as long as he wants to, and he ought to enjoy his work so much that he wants to work as long as he can.' In the Ford factories this is every one's state of mind, or at any rate Henry likes to think so.

And if there might be some argument about work as pleasure, there can be none about work as profit. The smallest necessities and the greatest luxuries can only be had and kept by somebody's working for them, and the material profit is in the end no greater than the spiritual: 'The day's work is at the foundation of the world; it is the basis of our self-respect.' Or, put more largely and with the petulant vigor which Ford manages to get into his language: 'The idea is rather general that the chief curse of life is to work for a living. Thinking men know that work is the salvation of the race, morally, physically, socially. Work does more than get us our living: it gets us our life.'

With such convictions about labor, it is evident that Ford would not have much sympathy with indolence or self-indulgence. Nor has he. A leisure class, living on the accumulation of the past, seems to him as utterly parasitical and hateful as it seems to the Socialists and the Bolsheviks, though his idea of getting rid of it is different from theirs: 'In my mind nothing is more abhorrent than a life of ease. There is no place in civilization for the idler.' Nor does this apply only to those who have never worked; it has equal force for the man who has worked hard and made his pile and thinks he has finished. Work is never finished. Only when we are working can we be sure that we are alive and we must work to the end, not for the material profit it may bring us, but for the spiritual benefit to the world and to ourselves.

As in all such cases, one inquires curiously what may be the underlying motives for this incessant, bee-like assiduity of labor. Ford himself insists that the desire of money is not among them, and this may be true, although the American habit of work is so intimately involved with the right to gain by that work that it is always difficult to separate the two. Ambition, the desire to succeed in what you have undertaken, is far more significant, to show these idlers, these gapers, these mockers, that you can do what you have set out to do, can make an automobile and make the world ride in it. But perhaps most significant of all is the eternal, unconscious, instinctive passion for doing something, the craving to be occupied, the fruitful nervousness, which is as habitual to some men as it is inexplicable to others. This restless undying activity seems to have been inherent in Ford, from childhood to age, as is suggested in the comment of John Burroughs, describing one of their camping trips: 'Mr. Ford was so restless that if he could find nothing else to do he would clean out springs, or chop wood, or teach a young lad to run the car.' Only in Ford the activity, which in many men is vague and gets nowhere, ran from the start in the direction that led to fortune.

II

For it cannot be denied that what appeals to the imagination of his country and of the wide world, even more than the automobile, is the fact that Ford in a few years progressed from nothing to a billion and is to-day the richest man that ever lived. And every one asks how he did it. It may be said at once that it was not by dishonesty or even by sharpness in the derogatory sense, though no doubt the man is shrewd enough in making a business deal in a business way. There was of course the great idea of producing something that every one would use with small profits on enormous sales. But no idea made this billion. It was the infinite care and intelligence in detail, the extraordinary organization for efficiency, the economy of human effort in every possible way, the saving of time, the saving of steps, the saving of strength. It was, for example, the insistent rule of perfect cleanliness, which Ford says he learned from his mother, and which might seem sometimes to be a useless luxury. But it pays in the end, in health and in production; otherwise it would not be the Ford rule. Everywhere there is order, everywhere the marks of long, consistent thought, the overwhelming evidence of brains directing and utilizing the habit of work which never fails.

And as Ford's acquisition of money is profoundly interesting, so the same interest attaches to his views of the handling of it when you have got it. Every word that comes from him on such a matter has a vast influence on the youth of America, and when it was reported that he spurned saving, 'No successful boy ever saved any money. They spent it as fast as they could for things to improve themselves,' a far-reaching incentive was supplied for tendencies already human enough and not requiring any special encouragement among the American youth of to-day. Obviously Ford's idea of spending and wasting was very different from that of the boy who lets his money flow out as freely as it comes in for any casual purpose. Being a passionate worker himself, the billionaire could not conceive of any one's spending except to advance his work. But when Ford looked about and appreciated the vast outlay on personal indulgence and luxury that was going on around him, his protest was as strenuous as that of any old-fashioned economist: 'Teaching and leading the people to invest wisely, to begin getting things that make their lives more productive of real values is one thing; teaching them to forget their natural abhorrence of debt, leading them to forego their independence by working for a small army of instalment collectors is quite another thing.' Yet probably Henry Ford's agency was as potent in this latter direction as any other one influence.

These utterances on saving are only a small item in the flood of comments with which Ford has enlightened the world on money as on many other matters. His financial discussions go far beyond the homely, concrete facts which might have a bearing upon his own prosperity and success. He does not hesitate to theorize about that complicated subject, the abstract nature of money and exchange and the difficult question of the gold and other possible standards. It is all a comparatively simple matter when you have invented and worked out a practicable automobile. Especially he loses no opportunity to abuse the experts in finance and the banking methods by which they carry on their operations. Even he is forced to admit that business could hardly thrive without banking to assist it. Nevertheless, the bankers are a parasitical class, flourishing on the hard, legitimate labor of the true business man and in an ideal society there would be no place for them whatever. As a shrewd critic expresses it, 'When Mr. Ford gets hammering Wall Street, and then goes on to hammering international bankers and Jews indiscriminately, he reminds one of A. E.'s Irish orator who was forever trying to bring up a large family of words on a small income of ideas.'

But even when Ford is astonishing and sometimes amusing, he is always interesting, and his ideas about the use of money are as suggestive as about the getting and the care of it. Spending, for purposes of luxury or pleasure, has never been a large part of his program: he has no time to spend: 'I never have known what to do with money after my expenses were paid—can't squander it on myself without hurting myself, and nobody Wants to do that. Money is the most useless thing in the world anyhow.' Giving is a more serious matter, and when you have a billion, you can give a good deal without feeling it. Ford's generosity in individual cases, where his feelings are touched, is indisputable. But it has been noted that he does not embark on any such immensely extensive philanthropies as the Carnegie or Rockefeller Foundations, and the explanation of his attitude is to be found in his general views on charity which are expressed with the sharp incisiveness that distinguishes all his utterances. 'I have no patience with professional charity.' Again: 'Why should there be any necessity for almsgiving in a civilized community? Instead of feeding the hungry why not go further and make hunger impossible? It is easy to give; it is harder to make giving unnecessary.' A good deal harder, some of us would think; but nothing is impossible with Henry Ford: has he not made the automobile? All that is needed is to find work for everybody, and work can always be found. Then charity will not be required.

The chief point that impresses one in Ford's many comments on money is his contempt for it. There is nothing of real value or permanent importance that money can do for you or give you. If you think of it as an end, you will stunt your life. 'He has no notion that wealth has made him great,' says one observer, 'and any one who is impressed merely by his wealth bores him.' Over and over he repeats in ever-varying forms his favorite adage that it is not money that counts, but service. The public has made your fortune, it is your duty to turn it back to the public benefit: 'Business as a money-making game is not worth much thought. It is no place for a man who wants really to accomplish something. Also it is not the best way to make money. The foundation of real business is service.' Or, more generally: 'We are growing out of this worship of material possessions. It is no longer a distinction to be rich. As a matter of fact, to be rich is no longer a common ambition.'

Yet underneath it all one feels all the time that the man relishes to the full the enormous power that money gives him. When you have hundreds of millions in the bank and hundreds of thousands of men working for you, you become an almost incalculable force in the world, and Ford appreciates what this means as keenly as any one. It is not only the mere superficial sense of wealth, such as appears in Frank Munsey's remark to a friend, 'I like to pull out a roll and strip off a thousand-dollar bill and hand it to some one,' and as appears still more in Ford's reply to Lochner's query as to whether he was willing to go the financial limit in his Peace efforts: 'Of course. Shucks! I can put $150,000,000 cash right now into this work if necessary. And then I have plans and inventions in my head that can net me another $150,000,000.… And, by the way, speaking of money reminds me. I've got $10,000 cash right now on my person; even Plantiff doesn't know anything about this. I thought that when we go to Europe you and I might want to run off on some little stunt of our own. Asking Plantiff for money might give it away.' The sense of power goes far deeper than these manifestations, and involves the intimate appreciation that most men still look up to money with awe, not only for what it is but for what it does.

When I was a mere boy, I noticed my father's attitude in this matter with interest and amusement. My father was one of the most independent men who ever lived and he cared as little for money in itself as any one. He left business before he was forty because he had accumulated enough to enable him to indulge tastes and habits that he thought more spiritually worth while. Yet I never tired of observing the contrast between his deferential awe in saluting the local millionaire and the off-hand patronage in his greeting of the local minister. To watch it was an illiberal education.

III

You cannot do much in the world, certainly you cannot make much money without using human beings. At any rate Henry Ford has made vast and constant use of them, and the elements and aspects of this use deserve curious study. Like Edison, it would appear that Ford owed little in his early years to the influence of any one. His mother helped him and formed him much, he says, but she died when he was very young. I do not find that he had any teachers who counted greatly, even in his mechanical labors. He worked out his problems himself and got surer if slower results in that way.

On the other hand, there seems to be some question as to how much other men have influenced his career and policy in later years. Lochner, in his account of the Peace Ship adventure, suggests that Ford was much affected and at times almost controlled by other forces in the organization. The influence of his secretary Liebold is asserted to have been very powerful and Lochner gives a striking and vivid account of the methods employed by Marquis to dissuade his chief from following up the peace under-taking: 'He provided a setting of coldness, chilliness, and loneliness (Mr. Ford was left absolutely alone for hours at a time while Dr. Marquis locked the apartment and left) to hasten Mr. Ford's decision to quit the party and return to Detroit.' Which certainly provides an odd comment on the futility of millions. But Lochner was prejudiced and it should never be forgotten that Ford has always been supremely ingenious in slipping the responsibility for dis-agreeable decisions on to his subordinates.

The question arises as to Ford's insight and his gift for understanding the men and women with whom he works so largely. Opinions here seem to differ. By many observers he is said to be natural and simple in his approach to people, to listen to them, to defer to them, above all to be quick and sure in his apprehension of their characters and lives. And again Marquis assures us that if Mr. Ford had been a better listener and mixer, he would have avoided some mistakes. But Marquis also is obviously prejudiced and the natural conclusion is that Ford, with his admirable gift of quick and subtle thinking, goes right to the bottom of men's hearts when he has occasion to, but that much of the time he is too absorbed with his own problems and interests to concern himself about those of others.

There is the same apparent contradiction in his judgment of mankind in general. With the natural haughtiness of one who has done great things easily, where the mass of men cannot do them at all, he is inclined to emphasize the distinctions. Some men are born to do the monotonous tasks, which he could not endure. Let them do them. Some men are born plodders, others are born pioneers, and it is fortunate for the race that it is so. There is no more absurd folly than the insistence that all men are born equal or can ever become equal. Nor should we accept a too optimistic view of men's virtue any more than of their intelligence. Most systems of reform 'make the assumption of honesty among mankind to begin with, and that, of course, is a prime defect. Even our present system would work splendidly if all men were honest.' Yet with all this cynicism in spots, Ford frequently shows a sincere as well as an ostentatious kindliness and there is not wanting evidence of a candid trust in human nature that is almost naïve.

With this general basis of human understanding Ford of course had at all times to meet all sorts of persons in his business progress. There were those whom he met on a footing of equality, colleagues or competitors. Evidently in the early years he had to depend much upon assistance, at any rate financial assistance, from others. There seems to have been no serious friction or difficulty. He was always tactful, always considerate. When his partners left him, it was usually on good terms and often with a large fortune in their pockets. But they left him, or he got rid of diem, for he believed in playing a lone hand and played it. One curiously significant feature of his persistent assertion of independence is unwillingness to be bound by appointments with anybody. Even persons of great consequence have waited for hours in Ford's ante-rooms, so that his secretary cries out in despair: 'I tell you, Mr. Ford keeps me on the jump inventing excuses for his forgetfulness.' With competitors it is something the same as with coadjutors. In the abstract Ford speaks of competition with respect. It is the life of business and only through it can progress be made. But when his interests are threatened, he can be very active, and his obstinate fight against those who sued him for infringement of patent is one of the most notable events of his career.

Even more interesting is Ford's relation to those who serve him. From every one he gets all that can be got, and he would be the first to admit it. There are the manual workers for a weekly wage. Ford secures the best men that can be had by paying them liberally. He furnishes them every facility and encouragement that can be given by mechanical appliances and aids to efficiency of all kinds, he provides for their health and comfort and safety, he stimulates their interest to work in every possible way—and then he expects an almost incredible amount of work and sees that it is done. He never orders, he suggests; but his suggestions are as valid as the orders of Caesar or Peter the Great. He often goes quietly in overalls among the men, moves and speaks and works as one of them, but they are perfectly aware that he is the boss of them and of millions, and he knows they are. It is the same with the workers of a higher rank. Take the corps of writers, of one kind or another. They often provide Ford with words, sometimes it seems as if they provided him with thoughts; but the thoughts and the words, like the time and the life, become his, for he pays for them. And if it is convenient to shift the master's sins on to their shoulders, it is done—and paid for. So with the managing executives everywhere. They are well paid and treated with consideration. But they have to be efficient, they have to take the burden of severity off their chief's shoulders when it is indicated, and if they show symptoms of being too independently capable, they have to—disappear.

With this apparent remorseless exaction there is also an at any rate apparent extreme thoughtfulness for every worker, from the highest to the lowest. Better wages are paid than any one else pays. Sickness is provided for as well as health, and you can be treated in the magnificent Ford Hospital—only it must be strictly according to the Ford rules. The lame, the blind, the crippled, have always been regarded as a useless burden on society. In the Ford shops they are made useful and happy with work and proper employment is found for them, which often they can do better than any one else. Have you been a drunkard or a thief or a murderer and are you just out of jail? It makes no difference to Ford. You apply for a job, you show your capacity for doing it, and you get it and keep it, so long as you continue to behave decently. Your police record is obliterated and forgotten.

Ford himself strongly and constantly emphasizes the philanthropic aspect of all these matters. He is the friend and benefactor of poor people, wants to benefit them in every way, and is benefiting them by providing them with work that will bring them an honest livelihood: 'I don't want any more than my share of money. I'm going to get rid of it—to use it all to build more and more factories, to give as many people as I can a chance to be prosperous.' And the enthusiastic John Burroughs says much the same thing: 'He is always thinking in terms of the greatest good to the greatest number. He aims to place his inventions within reach of the great mass of the people.' More cynical critics do not always echo me benign eulogy. Mr. Pound emphasizes the assistance Ford must have received from many helpers, yet 'die semi-autobiographical story of Ford's business contains no mention of these.

Mr. Ford does not share authority; neither does he share the limelight.' And again: 'The public gifts of Henry Ford are small in proportion to his huge earnings.… There is no hint as yet that the Ford wealth is troubling the Ford conscience or the Ford spirit.' And one extremely harsh critic declares that Ford 'is as selfish a man as God permits to breathe.'

There can be no question as to the sincerity of Ford's own convictions in the matter. When he says, 'All business should be reshaped on a basis of service. I want to show that poverty can be abolished by increasing the service rendered to the people by all business,' he means what he says and is doing his best to act upon it. But it is endlessly curious to trace the complication of motive in the matter. For Ford himself amply admits that the simple philosophy of this large benefaction is that it pays. You are not doing it for that, your motive is better and higher. All the same it does pay. You make the world better wisely, judiciously—and you get rich doing it: 'Do what is fundamentally best for everybody. It will work out for our interests in the end.' The widest usefulness carries with it fatally, inevitably, the biggest profit. Now the ordinary man finds it difficult to see his way in this complicated spiritual process and even gets to resent 'service' as an eternally reiterated watchword. Is he really being helped? Is he really being exploited? Are both possible at once? Such inconvenient interrogation attaches and will attach to the philanthropic millionaire, and as a consequence he may be respected and admired, he is rarely beloved.

IV

Even these most absorbed and furious workers must have some distraction, though it seems as if not many of them, not even Edison, had less than Ford, and especially as if not many infused more of the element of work into their distractions. He sometimes proclaims that he can find fun in anything, but for him work remains the greatest of amusements, 'the greatest fun of all being in the day's work.'

Many persons find the rarest and most delicate distraction in the things of the mind and look upon intellectual pleasures as being the most varied and inexhaustible. The complication of Henry Ford's view in this matter is most interesting. He appreciates that thinking is a vital essential of all fruitful work of any kind and that it is not only fruitful but laborious: 'An educated man is one who can accomplish things. A man who cannot think is not an educated man, no matter how many college degrees he has. Thinking is the hardest work that any one can do.' Yet thinking as an amusement, thinking for itself and unproductive, he cannot too bitterly condemn. Intellectual activity, followed as a mere pastime, is perilous, seductive, corrupting: 'Our reading is too casual. We read to escape thinking. Reading can become a dope habit.… Book-sickness is a modern ailment.'

He has at least been determined mat mat ailment should not affect his robust physique. He had little formal edu cation to begin with and he has never supplemented it by the wide irregular reading which Edison has kept up so remarkably. Ford says, 'I don't like to read books; they muss up my mind.' A curious aspect of this aversion to acquiring knowledge is his attitude toward the specialist and the expert. Sometimes he insists that if we want to know anything we should find it out for ourselves, only so can we have a sure grip on it. Yet again he admits that he turns to specialists for all sorts of information. Why should he grub and toil when he can pay a man to tell him all he wants in five minutes? And yet all the time he is using the expert he despises him, declaring that he is the ruin of business and can only see things and do things according to convention and precedent.

In this disregard of ignorance and even praise of it lies the root of many of Ford's strange limitations. He boasts his contempt for the past, he calls history 'bunk,' he proclaims that the present and the future are all that interest him. As if any man could use the present or gauge the future without knowing the past! As if he himself, Henry Ford, in urging this view were not the most suggestive comment upon the admirable words of Woodrow Wilson: 'The worst possible enemy to society is the man who with a strong faculty for reasoning and for action is cut loose in his standards of judgment from the past.' And it would be difficult to exceed me intellectual arrogance of Ford's own pronouncement: 'The only reason why every man does not know everything that the human mind has ever learned is that no one has ever yet found it worm while to know that much.'

If Ford has little interest in intellectual pleasures, in aesthetic he has still less. Painting, sculpture, and music are as much 'bunk' and waste of time as history. Processes sometimes interest him, and he has spent many hours in artists' studios watching them work; but the results are of little consequence. So with the natural world. He proclaims a desire to enable all mankind to enjoy 'God's great spaces,' and he takes pains to protect the birds. But when he goes on a camping trip, he wants to be doing something, making fires or cutting down trees, and his chief interest in the streams is, how much power they might be made to yield.

It is something the same with human relations. Ford is kindly and affectionate and lovable, so far as he has time for such things. He appears to cherish his mother's memory with deep devotion: she taught him how to keep things clean, which is of the greatest use in a factory and in making a fortune. He delayed inventing the automobile for a few months, so that he might woo a capable girl and marry her, and he found her advice, her criticism, and above all her trust and confidence of the greatest value in his work: 'It was a very great thing to have my wife even more confident than I was. She has always been that way.' And he turns to her in many things besides work.

Perhaps the most charming hint of distraction mat I have come across in connection with Ford is his love for children. Lochner says, 'Henry Ford is at his best when playing with children. They take to him instinctively. He will sit on the floor with them, whittle wooden toys for them, tell them simple stories and forget wholly about affairs of the greatest moment while thus enjoying himself.' In this connection I wish I had more light about his dealings with his son Edsel. Apparently he not only always adored the boy but is ready to turn over to him his largest interests and most momentous concerns. Is Edsel merely or mainly a brilliant sample of his father's handiwork, or, as sometimes happens in these cases, is the strong, authoritative, arbitrary father completely subdued and moulded to the suggestion and influence of the son?

Again, in larger human relations I wonder whether Ford has any real, close friends. He seems at times to have an almost wistful longing for human kinship and speaks of friendship as a rare and precious possession. But he must feel keenly the difficulty of securing genuine attachment for a man in his position. That billion hedges him off with a more impassable barrier than even thrones and crowns. How can you ever be sure that the man who approaches you does not want something? And most of them do. Flattery and cringing and time-serving intrude and crowd into such an atmosphere with an inevitable and fatal pressure. You feel the singular weight of these things in all the Ford biographies. The oppression of millions hangs upon them and distorts and disfigures everything.

In general social intercourse and conversation Ford is said to be gentle, quiet, unassertive, and even shy. As Lord Northcliffe said of him, 'Ford, who looks like the Bishop of London, is an anti-militant ascetic and must not be treated as a commercial man.' He is extremely averse to speaking in public and avoids it wherever possible. But when he is once at ease and likes his audience, his flow of words is free and abundant. He tells good stories, plenty of them, and he has a play of quiet jesting, even occasionally at himself.

Amusement in general seems to be something he knows little about. When he was a boy, he swam and skated. He still skates when he can. Skating is good physical exercise and exercise is necessary to health and hence to work. Ford has always cared for his health and by exercise, moderate eating, and total abstinence from stimulants he has kept his spare, lean body capable of tremendous effort, so that in the sixties he was fully equal to the remodeling of the standard Ford, which he called the greatest labor of his life.

But amusement as such is rather unimportant. One curious pastime has developed in his later years, the collecting of relics of antiquity, and his purchase and restoration of the Wayside Inn with accessories is almost as notorious as the automobile. The interesting thing here is that after so energetically decrying the historical past, the man should set himself to establishing a museum of antiques. The explanation seems to be that he is immensely interested in the past, provided it concerns himself. Perhaps a little wider study would have taught him that the history of the whole world exists only to throw light upon you and me and Henry Ford.

Games proper are even less profitable than larger amusements. Ford used to play baseball as a boy and in age occasionally condescends to millionaire golf. But these things make little appeal. Here again there is the curious exception and in later years he has revived the old-fashioned dances of his youth. The whole treatment of these is characteristic. No sooner does he get interested, than he hires a satellite to write up the subject, and the old reels and rounds and square-dances are all formally standardized with the completeness of every Ford institution. Yet somehow I cannot imagine Ford really carried away by the exhilaration and the ecstasy of the dance. What he needs to make him perfect is to be vamped by a siren of a New York night club. But it is a little difficult to imagine Henry Ford in this connection.

v

When a man analyzes life in general with such shrewd and penetrating if often divagating insight, one is naturally curious about his analysis of himself. Here there are the usual Ford contradictions. Sometimes he seems peculiarly apt and willing to reveal his soul. Hear what one observer has to say on this head: 'As I talked with him, he gave the impression that he thinks aloud, one was astonished at the thoughts he permitted to escape from the hidden sources of his mind. Another man would not say everything he thought. Ford does.' Yet again he shuts up, and seems determined to let no one see the inner life at all. As he said to a man once: 'You know me too well; hereafter I am going to see to it that no man comes to know me as intimately as you do.' And the very abundance of Ford's talks on all sorts of subjects, their abundance and apparent abandon, is misleading. He says a great deal, but he says so much you do not quite know what he is saying. Moreover, you can never be sure what is Ford and what is his interpreter. He is so much in the habit of letting others speak for him that he gets to accepting and admitting their representation of his thought as his own, when in reality his own might be different.

Yet with all these drawbacks and difficulties you can get extraordinary glimpses of insight into an extraordinary character, and the difficulties, as usual, only make the effort more interesting. Take Ford's estimate of his own practical abilities and powers. On the surface he is extremely modest and deprecatory about them. Nothing remarkable there, nothing that every ordinary man does not have, if he is disposed to use it. Any man can make a billion dollars, if he will take the trouble. Yet all the time, almost unconsciously, you feel the secure exaltation, the immense and solid egotism, which does appreciate that it stands above others, far above them, whether by their incapacity or their indolence is not important. It is all apologetic, it is always carefully we who do things. But the we simply doubles, triples, infinitely multiplies the personality and the greatness and the achievement of Henry Ford. There is nothing more interesting to watch than the studied and for that matter often the real modesty of an ego that identifies itself with the universe, as you and I also do for that matter.

With this consciousness of his own power is there in Ford any consciousness of practical weakness or deficiency? I have searched for such, but I do not find many. He says of himself, 'When I go into a thing, I usually jump in with both feet.' But this sounds quite as much like the assertion of a quality as the admission of a defect. And in the larger field of moral excellence or imperfection I find Ford much the same. There is never a hint of conceited boasting of his own virtue, but there is a comfortable assurance of it, all the same, and never anywhere is there the faintest suggestion of disquietude or discomfort over matters of conduct done or omitted. You might be better, you might be worse; but you are just—Henry Ford, doing the best you can, and why should God ask any more of you?

In his aims and ideals as regards life at large, as well as regards business, Ford is absolutely sincere, there can be no question of it. He may be incoherent, he may be un-practical, but he is never hypocritical, never talks for the sake of talking. He is always trying to get somewhere, even when it is not quite clear where, and the lack of clarity is sometimes owing to the altitude. When he says, 'There is a pleasure in feeling that you have made others happy—that you have lessened in some degree the burdens of your fellow-men,' when he cries passionately, 'I have dedicated my life and fortune to helping to bring back peace on earth,' you may not be impressed with his methods, but his aim is as lofty as it is creditable. In all these utterances, and his books and his life are full of them, you get the impression of a man who has somehow outgrown himself, whose brain is reaching into a region far different from that touched by his manipulating hands and trodden by his feet.

In such an extended career of ideal and often vaguely directed effort one would suppose that there must be many plain failures, and it is interesting to get Ford's attitude towards these. What it amounts to is that, like Edison, he refuses to recognize failure at all. What is it but merely a stepping-stone in the progress to success? Difficulties? To be sure, he does say, 'It is better to avoid difficulties than to overcome them.' But evidently he relishes difficulties and thrives on them: they give him the sense of power which is the sense of life: 'It is when there are problems to solve and obstacles to remove that Ford is most himself and at his best,' says Mr. Benson. Stick to it, and you will not fail: 'More men are beaten than fail. It is not wisdom they need or money, or brilliance, or "pull," but just plain gristle and bone.'

As Ford discounts failure, so he rids himself of discouragement, depression, melancholy, and all the disagreeable concomitants that failure brings with it. I have looked long and carefully for suggestions of nerves, of the haunting, harrowing burden of futility and uselessness by which genius is so apt to be overcome and oppressed, but such things are rare indeed as the murmured sigh to Lochner in Norway, when the Peace expedition was losing its glamor and Ford was laid low by illness: 'Guess I had better go home to mother. I told her I'd be back soon. You've got this thing started and can get along without me.' And in general there is no admission of despair in any way whatever. Depression is unreasonable and meaningless. It has its root in fear, and fear is the deadliest enemy of man's achievement in general: 'Fear is the portion of the man who acknowledges his career to be in the keeping of earthly circumstances. Fear is the result of the body assuming ascendency over the soul.'

In contrast with failure, or in keeping with his estimate of it, is Ford's estimate of success. Undeniably there is a certain curiously mystic element in this. When all is said and done, he feels that there is a subtle something which brings or helps to bring plans to a happy consummation. He told Mr. Benson once that 'a certain dream always came to him before each great business adventure. I quickly asked him what it was, but he would not tell me.' Success with him, however, is far from being a matter of dreams. It is a matter of the same old persistent, indefatigable labor. People see great successes and think they are easy, all a matter of dreams. They are wrong: 'Success is always hard. A man can fail in ease, he can succeed only by paying out all that he has and is. It is this which makes success so pitiable a thing if it be in lines that are not useful and uplifting.' And because labor is so large an element of it, every man ought to be able to succeed provided his aims are reasonably possible, while Ford's splendid optimism enlarges the region of possibility far beyond the vision of most of us: 'Henry Ford is a self-made man. But because he has landed on top, he assumes that everybody else can do so. He believes that when a man fails to succeed, it is largely his own fault.'

Finally with Ford there is the realization that he is one of the most talked of men in the wide world and the question is how much he enjoys it. If you listen to his admiring friends, you will conclude that publicity is the last thing he thinks of. It is necessary to get the Ford automobiles and tractors to the people who need them. For himself he prefers quiet and life in shadow. But there are some utterances of his own and of others that make one doubt a little. He does indeed say, 'Most of us will never attain fame, and that is a pity, because then we shall never have the opportunity to realize how well off we were without it.' But perhaps the deeper truth of human nature shows in another remark: 'All men like praise. If a man says that he doesn't, he should examine himself again.' And the critical Marquis observes: 'I think he would rather be the maker of public opinion than the manufacturer of a million automobiles a year, which only goes to show that in spite of the fact that he sticks out his tongue at history, he would nevertheless not object to making a little of it himself.' In other words, if Henry Ford were to wake up some day and find that he was not one of the most prominent men in the world, the result would probably be some new discovery or development that would put him on the front page once more.

VI

To complete the study of Henry Ford, it is necessary to consider his relation to the spiritual and abstract questions and elements of life. When these questions are connected with this world he is at all times full of interest in them. His busy and active mind is perpetually occupied with the larger problems, and the everlasting puzzle with him is to understand how an intelligence so sure and solid in the practical matters which have been his proper concern can trust itself and thrust itself with arrogant confidence in fields as to which he has little experience and less information. It is perfectly natural that he should have and express vigorous opinions about work and wages. But when it comes to complicated matters like general economics and finance, the minutiae of education, and the broader bearing of machines on life, one's interest is directed rather to how Ford comes to venture into such subjects than to the value of the opinions themselves. Yet on every one of these great themes he has a secure and positive pronouncement, such as it is.

With these sociological aspirations, it would seem obvious that Ford would be interested in the political means by which they might be realized. But his unlimited contempt for bankers and lawyers is quite equaled by his contempt for politicians. They are a useless tribe who give themselves to talk, and inefficiency like theirs would run the Ford organization on the rocks inside of a week. 'What the world chiefly needs to-day is fewer diplomats and politicians and more men advancing from kerchiefs to collars.' The most curious point here is Ford's own candidacy for the Senate, which was defeated by the corrupt practices of Newberry, and still more the movement to nominate him for President in 1924. It is notable that a vast body of farmers and Americans generally were inclined to favor him, and still more interesting is his own attitude in the matter. Ostensibly he was indifferent and even unwilling. He was occupied with bigger concerns than being president of the United States. But at the same time there is a charming, simple, shy suggestion that when the great need comes Henry Ford is in the background, always available: 'The leaders are here, although they do not crave any honor which is bought at the price of helplessness and impotence in office. The leaders are here, but they will not fight for the tinsel of a public title. The leaders are here; and when the hour arrives for free, untrammeled public service, these men will move quite naturally into their places.' Now who do you suppose the leaders can be?

To estimate Ford's qualifications for the presidency it is of advantage to sum up a few of the chimerical projects as well as the singular antipathies, which he has brought forward at one time or another. Among the latter the chief is the fierce attack on the Jews, which was waged by the Dearborn Independent, until the bitter irritation aroused drove Ford to disclaim the excesses and shift the burden to others. Of the more positive schemes there is the Muscle Shoals plan, which he still hopes to carry out, with its dazzling intermixture of public benefit and personal profit, the many suggestions for making over the life of the farmer, commodity money, which is to destroy the golden supremacy of those horrible bankers, the strange, almost unbelievable adventure of the Peace Ship, so much more like a Don Quixote than an automobile manufacturer, and, crowning all, the absolute confidence that radios and airplanes will bring about universal harmony: 'The motion-picture with its universal language, the airplane with its speed, and the radio with its coming international program—these will soon bring the whole world to a complete understanding. Thus may we vision a United States of the World. Ultimately it will surely come.'

Underneath these somewhat fantastic divagations it is always easy to trace a sure and solid basis of traditional middle-class American morals, which Ford learned at his mother's knee and has never forgotten. This appears admirably in the delightful talk with that thoroughly kindred spirit, Eddie Guest: 'I have tried to live my life as my mother would have wished. I believe I have done, as far as I could, just what she hoped for me. She taught duty in this world. I believed her then and I believe her now. I have tried to follow her teachings.'

On the other hand, when it comes to deeper and larger religious and philosophical considerations, Ford seems singularly empty and unprofitable. Here again the conventional attitude is obvious enough. Always go to church, even if you only get a little comfortable sleep in that way. Read your Bible. Under all circumstances observe the Sabbath, because mother did, and no wheel turns in any Ford factory on Sunday. But I do not find that God or the future are of much more import to Henry Ford than to Theodore Roosevelt or Nikolai Lenin. Do your work here, and let these ulterior matters take care of themselves: 'Religion, like everything else, is a thing that should be kept working. I see no use in spending a great deal of time learning about heaven and hell.' The odd point is that the only thing about the future life which appears to interest Ford is more, more, a lot more of life here, and the one vital element of his creed is the theory of reincarnation. If he can't get Muscle Shoals in this existence, he may come back and get it later: who knows?

And another striking point in Ford's religious connection is that, so far as he is interested in God at all, it is as a God of work. 'The Lord is working and will clear the land of those who will not go ahead.' In other words, God has got to work in order to keep his job. If he did not work day and night, like Henry Ford, the universe would not only not be worth living in, it would collapse and disappear. 'My Father worketh hitherto, and I work.' Everybody works. But some of us, who are probably born indolent and therefore natural objects of contempt, like to believe in and cherish the pure, divine possibility of play.

So as one looks back at this varied, many-colored survey, one finds the man not perhaps more of a mystery than most, but at any rate strangely complicated and one remembers the ingenious comment of Marquis, that 'he has in him the makings of a great man, the parts lying about in more or less disorder. If only Henry Ford were properly assembled!' With all the millions, with all the powers, with all the successes, with all the knotty problems solved and forgotten, one somehow gets the impression of a man groping, struggling, trying to adjust a universe that is vastly, tragically inadjustable, in short, of a man forever wrestling with life just like you and me.