[Illustration: HENRY FORD]
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HENRY FORD'S OWN STORY
How a Farmer Boy Rose to the Power
That Goes With Many Millions
Yet Never Lost Touch
With Humanity
_AS TOLD TO_
ROSE WILDER LANE
[Illustration]
ELLIS O. JONES
FOREST HILLS NEW YORK CITY
1917
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COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY
THE BULLETIN
COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY
ELLIS O. JONES
All rights reserved, including that of translation
into foreign languages, including the Scandinavian
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FOREWORD
BY ROSE WILDER LANE
Fifty-two years ago[1] a few farmers' families near Greenfield,
Michigan, heard that there was another baby at the Fords'--a boy. Mother
and son were doing well. They were going to name the boy Henry.
Twenty-six years later a little neighborhood on the edge of Detroit was
amused to hear that the man Ford who had just built the little white
house on the corner had a notion that he could invent something. He was
always puttering away in the old shed back of the house. Sometimes he
worked all night there. The neighbors saw the light burning through the
cracks.
Twelve years ago half a dozen men in Detroit were actually driving the
Ford automobile about the streets. Ford had started a small factory,
with a dozen mechanics, and was buying material. It was freely predicted
that the venture would never come to much.
_Last year--January, 1914--America was startled by an announcement from
the Ford factory that ten million dollars would be divided among the
eighteen thousand employees as their share of the company's profits.
Henry Ford was a multimillionaire, and America regarded him with awe._
Mankind must have its hero. The demand for him is more insistent than
hunger, more inexorable than cold or fear. Before a race builds houses
or prepares food with its hands, it creates in its mind that demigod,
that superman, standing on a higher plane than the rest of humanity,
more admirable, more powerful than the others. We must have him as a
symbol of something greater than ourselves, to keep alive in us that
faith in life which is threatened by our own experience of living.
He is at once our greatest solace and our worst enemy. We cling to him
as a child clings to a guiding hand, unable to walk without it, and
never able to walk alone until it is let go. Every advance of democracy
destroys our old hero, and hastily we build up another. When science has
exorcised Jove, and real estate promoters have subdivided the Olympian
heights, we desert the old altars to kneel before thrones. When our
kings have been cast down from their high places by our inconsistent
struggles for liberty, we cannot leave those high places empty. We found
a government on the bold declaration, "All men are born free and equal,"
but we do not believe it. Out of the material at hand we must create
again our great ones.
So, with the growth of Big Business during the last quarter of a
century, we have built up the modern myth of the Big Business Man.
Our imaginations are intrigued by the spectacle of his rise from our
ranks. Yesterday he was a farmer's son, an office boy, a peddler of
Armenian laces. To-day he is a demigod. Is our country threatened with
financial ruin? At a midnight conference of his dependents, hastily
called, he speaks one word. We are saved. Does a foreign nation,
fighting for its life, ask our help? He endorses the loan.
We contemplate him with awe. In one lifetime he has made himself a world
power; in twenty years he has made a hundred million dollars, we say. He
is a Big Business Man.
_Our tendency was immediately to put Henry Ford in that class. He does
not belong to it. He is not a Big Business Man; he is a big man in
business._
It is not strange, with this belief of millions of persons that the men
who have been at the head of our great business development are greater
than ordinary men, that most of them believe it themselves and act on
that assumption. Henry Ford does not. His greatness lies in that.
With millions piling upon millions in our hands, most of us would lose
our viewpoint. He has kept his--a plain mechanic's outlook on life and
human relations. He sees men all as parts of a great machine, in which
every waste motion, every broken or inefficient part means a loss to the
whole.
_"Money doesn't do me any good," he says. "I can't spend it on myself.
Money has no value, anyway. It is merely a transmitter, like
electricity. I try to keep it moving as fast as I can, for the best
interests of everybody concerned. A man can't afford to look out for
himself at the expense of any one else, because anything that hurts the
other man is bound to hurt you in the end, the same way."_
The story of Henry Ford is the story of his coming to that conclusion,
and of his building up an annual business of one hundred and fifty
million dollars based upon it.
-----
Footnote 1:
July 30, 1863.
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CONTENTS
FOREWORD
I. ONE SUMMER'S DAY
II. MENDING A WATCH
III. THE FIRST JOB
IV. AN EXACTING ROUTINE
V. GETTING THE MACHINE IDEA
VI. BACK TO THE FARM
VII. THE ROAD TO HYMEN
VIII. MAKING A FARM EFFICIENT
IX. THE LURE OF THE MACHINE SHOPS
X. "WHY NOT USE GASOLINE?"
XI. BACK TO DETROIT
XII. LEARNING ABOUT ELECTRICITY
XIII. EIGHT HOURS, BUT NOT FOR HIMSELF
XIV. STRUGGLING WITH THE FIRST CAR
XV. A RIDE IN THE RAIN
XVI. ENTER COFFEE JIM
XVII. ANOTHER EIGHT YEARS
XVIII. WINNING A RACE
XIX. RAISING CAPITAL
XX. CLINGING TO A PRINCIPLE
XXI. EARLY MANUFACTURING TRIALS
XXII. AUTOMOBILES FOR THE MASSES
XXIII. FIGHTING THE SELDON PATENT
XXIV. "THE GREATEST GOOD TO THE GREATEST NUMBER"
XXV. FIVE DOLLARS A DAY MINIMUM
XXVI. MAKING IT PAY
XXVII. THE IMPORTANCE OF A JOB
XXVIII. A GREAT EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTION
XXIX. THE EUROPEAN WAR
XXX. THE BEST PREPAREDNESS
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HENRY FORD'S OWN STORY
CHAPTER I
ONE SUMMER'S DAY
It was a hot, sultry day in the last of July, one of those Eastern
summer days when the air presses heavily down on the stifling country
fields, and in every farmyard the chickens scratch deep on the shady
side of buildings, looking for cool earth to lie upon, panting.
"This weather won't hold long," William Ford said that morning, giving
the big bay a friendly slap and fastening the trace as she stepped over.
"We'd better get the hay under cover before night."
There was no sign of a cloud in the bright, hot sky, but none of the
hired men disputed him. William Ford was a good farmer, thrifty and
weather-wise. Every field of his 300-acre farm was well cared for,
yielding richly every year; his cattle were fat and sleek, his big red
barns the best filled in the neighborhood. He was not the man to let ten
acres of good timothy-and-clover hay get caught in a summer shower and
spoil.
They put the big hay-rack on the wagon, threw in the stone water jugs,
filled with cool water from the well near the kitchen door, and drove
out to the meadow. One imagines them working there, lifting great
forksful of the clover-scented hay, tossing them into the rack, where,
on the rising mound, the youngest man was kept busy shifting and
settling them with his fork. Grasshoppers whirred up from the winrows of
the dried grass when they were disturbed, and quails called from the
fence corners.
Now and then the men stopped to wipe the sweat from their foreheads and
to take long swallows from the water jugs, hidden, for coolness, under a
mound of hay. Then, with a look at the sky, they took up their forks.
William Ford worked with the others, doing a good day's task with the
best of them, and proud of it. He was the owner, and they were the hired
men, but on a Michigan farm the measure of a man is the part he takes in
man's work. In the cities, where men work against men, let them build up
artificial distinctions; on the farm the fight is against nature, and
men stand shoulder to shoulder in it. A dark cloud was coming up in the
northwest, and every man's muscles leaped to the need for getting in the
hay.
Suddenly they heard a clang from the great bell, hung high on a post in
the home dooryard, and used only for calling in the men at dinnertime or
for some emergency alarm. Every man stopped. It was only 10 o'clock.
Then they saw a fluttering apron at the barnyard gate, and William Ford
dropped his fork.
"I'll go. Get in the hay!" he called back, already running over the
stubble in long strides. The men stared a minute longer and then turned
back to work, a little more slowly this time, with the boss gone. A few
minutes later they stopped again to watch him riding out of the home
yard and down the road, urging the little gray mare to a run.
"Going for Doc Hall," they surmised. They got in a few more loads of hay
before the rain came, spattering in big drops on their straw hats and
making a pleasant rustling on the thirsty meadows. Then they climbed
into the half-filled rack and drove down to the big barn.
They sat idly there in the dimness, watching through the wide doors the
gray slant of the rain. The doctor had come; one of the men unhitched
his horse and led it into a stall, while another pulled the light cart
under the shed. Dinner time came and passed. There was no call from the
house, and they did not go in. Once in a while they laughed nervously,
and remarked that it was a shame they did not save the last three loads
of hay. Good hay, too, ran a full four tons to the acre.
About 2 o'clock in the afternoon the rain changed to a light drizzle and
the clouds broke. Later William Ford came out of the house and crossed
the soppy yard. He was grinning a little. It was all right, he said--a
boy.
I believe they had up a jug of sweet cider from the cellar in honor of
the occasion. I know that when they apologetically mentioned the spoiled
hay he laughed heartily and asked what they supposed he cared about the
hay.
"What're you going to call him, Ford?" one of the men asked him as they
stood around the cider jug, wiping their lips on the backs of their
hands.
"The wife's named him already--Henry," he said.
"Well, he'll have his share of one of the finest farms in Michigan one
of these days," they said, and while William Ford said nothing he must
have looked over his green rolling acres with a pardonable pride,
reflecting that the new boy-baby need never want for anything in reason.
Henry was the second son of William Ford and Mary Litogot Ford, his
energetic, wholesome Holland Dutch wife. While he was still in
pinafores, tumbling about the house or making daring excursions into the
barnyard, the stronghold of the dreadful turkey gobbler, his sister,
Margaret, was born, and Henry had barely been promoted to real trousers,
at the age of four, when another brother arrived.
Four babies, to be bathed, clothed, taught, loved and guarded from all
the childish disasters to be encountered about the farm, might well be
thought enough to fill any woman's mind and hands, but there were a
thousand additional tasks for the mistress of that large household.
There was milk to skim, butter and cheese to make, poultry and garden to
be tended, patchwork quilts to sew, and later to fasten into the
quilting frames and stitch by hand in herringbone or fan patterns. The
hired hands must be fed--twenty or thirty of them in harvesting time;
pickles, jams, jellies, sweet cider, vinegar must be made and stored
away on the cellar shelves. When the hogs were killed in the fall there
were sausages, head-cheese, pickled pigs' feet to prepare, hams and
shoulders to be soaked in brine and smoked; onions, peppers, popcorn to
be braided in long strips and hung in the attic; while every day bread,
cake and pies must be baked, and the house kept in that "apple-pie
order" so dear to the pride of the Michigan farmers' women-folk.
All these tasks Mary Ford did, or superintended, efficiently, looking to
the ways of her household with all the care and pride her husband had in
managing the farm. She found time, too, to be neighborly, to visit her
friends, care for one of them who fell ill, help any one in the little
community who needed it. And always she watched over the health and
manners of the children.
In this environment Henry grew. He was energetic, interested in
everything, from the first. His misadventures in conquering the turkey
gobbler would fill a chapter. When he was a little older one of the
hired men would put him on the back of a big farm horse and let him ride
around the barnyard, or perhaps he was allowed to carry a spiced drink
of vinegar and water to the men working in the harvest field. He learned
every corner of the hay-mow, and had a serious interview with his father
over the matter of sliding down the straw-stacks. In the winters,
wrapped in a knit muffler, with mittens of his mother's making on his
hands, he played in the snow or spent whole afternoons sliding on the
ice with his brothers.
Best of all he liked the "shop," where the blacksmith work for the farm
was done and the sharpening of tools. When the weather was bad outside
his father or one of the men lighted the charcoal in the forge and Henry
might pull the bellows till the fire glowed and the iron buried in it
shone white-hot. Then the sparks flew from the anvil while the great
hammer clanged on the metal, shaping it, and Henry begged to be allowed
to try it himself, just once. In time he was given a small hammer of his
own.
So the years passed until Henry was 11 years old, and then a momentous
event occurred--small enough in itself, but to this day one of the
keenest memories of his childhood.