Insight into History: Henry Ford

Let me say, right off the bat, that Henry Ford was a ruthless, anti-Semitic homonym for the thing you get when you are jabbed by a pin or a needle. He was also a genius who did more for America's working poor that any man in our nation's history, including Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

We all know what Mr. Ford invented: he invented the Ford. More than that, he invented the assembly line, without which car manufacturers the world over would be lost. But, there was far more to the man than his inventions.

Henry Ford was both practical and naïve about many things. He strongly advocated for peace without victory in the midst of World War I, but, when his mission to preach that gospel to the warmongering combatants was so cruelly scorned, he became a very wealthy war profiteer instead.

When I visited my parents in Ohio to celebrate the nation's bicentennial with them, I had recently read the excellent USA trilogy by John Dos Passos. It is not an easy-breezy read, by any stretch, but, if you are willing to commit to it, it is spellbinding.

I bring that up because, throughout all three of the novels, Dos Passos inserted news items and thumbnail biographies of the events and people that shaped the era in which he set the stories. Within the third novel, is a chapter titled "Tin Lizzie." As you might suppose, it was about Henry Ford.

Getting back to that visit with my parents, there were a number of guests on hand for the big 4^th of July party they threw. At some point, one of my dad's co-workers, possibly wanting to impress "the young people" with his broad-minded liberal credentials, said something on the order of, we have certainly come a long way from the days when that a**h***, Henry Ford, used to pay his workers five dollars a day.

No, I disagreed with our guest, as much as I despise the abuses of the robber-barons, I think Henry Ford was one of the good guys. You see, back then, five dollars a day was an unheard-of amount to pay a laborer, unskilled or skilled.

Due, more than anything else, to our huge influx of immigrants in the late 19^th century, the working people of America were being ground down by what was then known as "The Iron Law of Wages."

Roughly translated, that meant: You don't want to work for 20¢ an hour, Paddy? Fine, we'll get some Jew to do your job for 15. What, you aren't happy making 15¢ an hour, Abie? Fine, we'll get some Polack to do your job for 10; and so forth.

Henry Ford quickly caught on that, if the automobile were ever going to be anything more than the plaything of the rich (whose numbers were far too sparse for Mr. Ford's liking), he was going to need to get two details taken care of. The first was to attain the means to produce a large number of cars, quickly and efficiently, all with interchangeable parts. That's where the assembly line came in.

The second thing he had to do was to get more money in to the pockets of the working people to whom he wanted to sell those cars. Nobody making 15¢ an hour was even going to think about buying a Model T, then or ever. That's where the five-dollar-a-day wage came in. It worked out to 50¢ an hour, but, at the beginning of the 20^th century, that was huge.

Ford was right, of course. In 1909, the year he instigated the assembly line, he sold about 10,000 cars...for the entire year. By the start of the 1920s, his annual sales of the "Tin Lizzie" were approaching a million cars. By 1922, he was the richest man in the world.

In his drive to attain that status, or, at any rate, to attain the entirety of the Ford Motor Company, he bought out his minority partners for the aggregate sum of 75 million dollars. He did not have that kind of cash jangling around in his pocket, and he did not like the way the banks were going about negotiating to lend him the money. What he did instead was to ship every car and every car part in his plant out to the nationwide network of Ford dealers, whether they were ready to receive them or not, and demand immediate payment in cash.

It put a tremendous squeeze on the dealers, not all of whom survived the gambit, but, those who did, had little choice in the matter. A Ford dealership, back then, was far too valuable a franchise to walk away from on a matter of principal.

Somewhere in Ford's abortive peace mission to Europe during the war, he had obtained an insidious tract known as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. As I said, Ford, for all his ruthless pragmatism, had room in his psyche for the most astounding credulity, and, sad to say, he bit on this treatise full-out. He became the most virulent anti-Semite in the history of America.

In his office, Adolph Hitler had one prominent portrait. Was it Otto von Bismarck, the "Iron Chancellor?" Was it King Frederick the Great? The brilliant composer, Richard Wagner? No, it was Henry Ford.

All that said, Henry Ford never sent a Jew to a concentration camp or provided their oppressors with the information needed to do so. On the other hand, when he broke the Iron Law of Wages, he enabled the laboring Jewish great-great grandparents of many American families today to start on the path to a better life.

Let us be clear on one thing, though: Henry Ford did not raise the workers' standard of living for the workers. He did it for Henry Ford. When the depression came, Ford, like so many other businesses, had to cut back on its workforce. Desperate jobseekers, who had massed at the Dearborn factory in the hopes of finding jobs, were met instead with machine-gun fire.

Yet, for all his cruelty and thoughtlessness, Henry Ford taught the world of American commerce a lesson it has forgotten and needs to re-learn very quickly. If you, the small, wealthy minority, are hell-bent on concentrating almost all the wealth in your hands, while leaving the majority of people in desperate straits, you will not prosper in the long run.

How could such a concept apply to today's world? Well, for all the millions Mr. Ford made from the mass sales of his cars, he had to shoulder a considerable expense to pay the workers as well as he did. But, it paid off for him in the end, didn't it?

The difference in today's society is that, we are not just talking about cars, but everything-goods as well as services. If you, the CEO and your top-tier cronies, are making far, far more money than you need to live an extremely comfortable life, at the expense of massive layoffs and outsourcing, then the American market for your product will shrink and shrink, until everything but bread, milk and toilet paper become "playthings of the rich."

Every executive making over half a million dollars a year should take the excess over that amount and apply it to hiring back workers, whether it is "efficient" to do so or not. The issue is no longer that we're paying oppressed immigrants 15¢ an hour-even the illegal Mexicans make more than that-it's that we're not paying far too many Americans anything at all. On top of that, many of the ones we are paying do not feel sufficiently bold to spend frivolously, as our politicians and business leaders wish they would.

Henry Ford realized this, way back in 1909. Have we become so numbed by our past success that we are unable to re-learn it?

Postscript

It is very hard to determine which way the scale balances in the summation of Henry Ford's life. There is one thing, I felt, that tipped it, just barely over to the positive. Ford and Harvey Firestone were mutual fathers-in-law, their children having married one another. One morning, Henry Ford spent hours and hours whittling wooden croutons to place among the real ones that Firestone put in his soup.

Sources

John Dos Passos, USA

Wikipedia

William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

The National Lampoon