A GREAT EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTION
It happened that on Ford's fifty-second birthday a commission from the
French Chamber of Commerce arrived in Detroit, having crossed the
Atlantic to inspect the Ford factories.
They viewed 276 acres of manufacturing activity; the largest power plant
in the world, developing 45,000 horse-power from gas-steam engines
designed by Ford engineers; the enormous forty-ton cranes; 6,000
machines in operation in one great room, using fifty miles of leather
belting; nine mono-rail cars, each with two-ton hoists, which carry
materials--in short, the innumerable details of that mammoth plant.
Then they inspected the hospitals, the rest rooms, noted the daylight
construction of the whole plant, the ventilating system which changes
the air completely every ten minutes, the labor-saving devices, the
"safety-first" equipment.
At last they returned to Henry Ford's office, with notebooks full of
figures and information to be taken to the manufacturers of France. They
thanked Ford for his courtesy and assured him that they comprehended
every detail of his policies save one.
"We find, sir," said the spokesman, courteously, "that last year you had
more orders than you could fill. Is it not so?"
"Yes, that is correct," replied Ford. "But with the increased output
this year we hope to catch up."
"And yet, is it not so that this spring you lowered the price of your
car fifty dollars?"
"Yes, that is true," said Ford.
"But, sir, we cannot understand--is it then true that you reduce your
prices when already you have more orders than you can fill? This seems
strange to us, indeed. Why should a manufacturer do that?"
"Well," Ford answered, "I and my family already have all the money we
can possibly use. We don't need any more. And I think an automobile is a
good thing. I think every man should be able to own one. I want to keep
lowering the price until my car is within the reach of every one in
America. You see, that is all I know how to do for my country."
Unconsciously, he was voicing the new patriotism--the ideal to which he
was to give the rest of his life. He said it simply, a little awkwardly,
but the French commission, awed by the greatness of this Detroit
manufacturer, returned and reported his statement to the French people
as the biggest thing they had found in America.
Yet this viewpoint was the natural outcome of his life. A simple man,
seeing things simply, he had arrived at a place of tremendous power in
America. He had come to a time when he need no longer work at his engine
or his factory organization. He had leisure to survey his country and
its problems, to apply to them his machine idea.
And he saw in America a great machine, made up of countless human
parts--a machine which should work evenly, efficiently, harmoniously,
for the production and just distribution of food, shelter, clothes, all
the necessities of a simple and comfortable life.
His part, as he saw it, was to make and distribute automobiles. He meant
to do his part in the best way he knew how, hoping by his success to
hasten the time when every one would follow his example, and all the
terrible friction and waste of our present system would be stopped.
This was his only interest in life. A farmer-boy mechanic, who had left
school at sixteen, who had lived all his life among machines, interested
in practical things, he saw no value in anything which did not promote
the material well-being of the people. Art--music, painting, literature,
architecture--luxuries, super-refinements of living, these things seemed
useless to him.
"Education? Come to Detroit and I'll show you the biggest school in the
world," he says. "Every man there is learning and going ahead all the
time. They're realizing that their interests are the same as their
employer's, that he is the men's trustee, that he is only one of the
workmen with a job of his own, and that his job, like the jobs of the
others, has to be run for the good of the whole plant. He would fire a
man who took away from the other men for his own advantage. That spirit
would harm the works. Similarly, the men would have a right to fire him
if he took away from them for his personal benefit.
"The men in my plant are learning these things. They're leading the way
for the workers of this country. They are going to show other workers,
just as I hope to show other employers, that things should be run for
the most good for the most people. That's the education we need.
"This education outside of industry that we have to-day is just the
perpetuation of tradition and convention. It's a good deal of a joke and
a good deal of waste motion. To my mind, the usefulness of a school ends
when it has taught a man to read and write and figure, and has brought
out his capacity for being interested in his line. After that, let the
man or boy get after what he is interested in, and get after it with all
his might, and keep going ahead--that is school.
"If those young fellows who are learning chemistry in colleges were
enough interested in chemistry they would learn it the way I did, in my
little back shed of nights. I would not give a plugged nickel for all
the higher education and all the art in the world."
This, then, was Henry Ford at 52. A slender, slightly stooped man, with
hollow cheeks, thin, firm, humorous lips, gray hair; a man with sixty
odd millions of dollars; used to hard work all his life, and liking it.
A man who on a single idea had built up a tremendous organization, so
systematized that it ran by itself, requiring little supervision.
In some way he must use his driving energy, in some way he must spend
his millions, and his nature demanded that he do it along the line of
that idea which had dominated his whole life--the machine idea of
humanity, the idea of the greatest good to the greatest number.
That summer, for the first time, he found himself with leisure. He was
not imperatively needed at the plant. He and Mrs. Ford spent some time
in Greenfield, where he enlarged the old farm by purchasing nearly four
thousand acres of land adjoining it. He himself spent some time on the
problems of organizing the work on those acres. He and his wife lived in
the house where they had begun their married life, and where, with their
old furniture and their old friends, they reconstructed the life of
thirty years before.
Ford returned to Detroit with a working model for a cheap farm-tractor
which he intends to put on the market soon. He worked out the designs
and dropped them into the roaring cogs of his organization which
presently produced some dozens of the tractors. These were sent down to
the farm and put to work. In due course, caught up again by the Ford
organization, the tractors will begin to pour out in an endless stream
and Ford will have done for farm work what he did for passenger traffic.
But he realized that those occupations did not absorb his whole energy.
Unconsciously he was seeking something bigger even than his factories,
than his business operations, to which he could devote his
mind--something to which he could apply his ruling idea, something for
which he could fight.
The terrible 4th of August, 1914, which brought misery, ruin, desolation
to Europe and panic to the whole world, gave him his opportunity.