 CHAPTER XXVII That surging mob of men outside this factory during the week following the announcement of his profit-sharing plan had impressed indelibly on Ford's mind the tremendous importance of a job. A working man's job is his life, he says. No one man should have the right ever to send another man home to his family out of work. Think what it means to that man, sitting there at the supper table, looking at his wife and children, and not knowing whether or not he will be able to keep them fed and clothed. A normal, healthy man wants to work. He has to work to live right. Everybody should be able to take his work away from him. In my factory, every man shall keep his job as long as he wants it. Impractical The idea seems fantastic in its impracticality. What? Keep every man, lazy, stupid, impudent, dishonest as he may be, every man in a force of 18,000 workmen on the payroll as long as he wants to stay, surely if there is any point at which ideals of human brotherhood end and cold-blooded business methods begin, this should be that point. But Ford, obstinate in his determination to care for the interests of everyone, declared that this policy should stand. As a part of his new plan, he installed the labor clearing house as part of his employment department. Now when a foreman discharges a man, that man is not sent out of the factory. He goes with a writ slipped from the foreman to the labor clearing house. There he is questioned. What is wrong? Is he ill? Does he dislike his work? What are his real interests? In the end he is transferred to another department which seems more suited to his taste and abilities. If he proves unsatisfactory there, he returns again to the clearing house. Again his case is discussed. Again he is given another chance and still another department. In the meantime the employment manager has taken active interest in him, in his help, his home conditions, his friends. He is made to feel that he has friends in the management who are eager to help him make the right start to the right kind of life. Perhaps he is ill. Then he is sent to the company hospital, given medical care and a leave of absence until he is well enough to resume work. Over 200 cases of tuberculosis in various stages were discovered among Ford's employees when his hospital was established. These men presented a peculiar problem. Most of them were still able to work. All of them must continue working to support families. Yet if their cases were neglected, it meant not only their own deaths, but spreading infection in the factory. The business world has never attempted to solve the problem of these men. Waste from the great machine, they are thrown carelessly out, unable because of that telltale cough to get another job, left to shift for themselves in a world which thinks it does not need them. Ford established a heat treating department, especially for them. When the surgeons discover a case of incipient tuberculosis in the Ford factory, they transfer the man to this department where the air, filtered, dried and heated, is scientifically better for their disease than the mountain climate of Denver. Here the men are given light jobs which they can handle and paid their regular salaries until they are cured and able to return to their former places in the shops. It's better for everybody when a man stays at work instead of laying off, Ford says. I don't care what's wrong with him, whether he's a misfit in his department or stupid or sick. There's always some way to keep him doing useful work. And as long as he is doing that, it's better for the man and for the company and for the world. And yet there are men in business today who install systems to prevent the waste of a piece of paper or a stamp and let the human labor and their plants go to waste wholesale. Yes, and they sat up and said I was a sentimental idiot when I put in my system of taking care of the men in my place. They said it would not pay. Well, let them look over the books of the Ford factory and see how it paid. How it paid all of us. Five months after Ford's new plans had gone into effect, his welfare workers made a second survey. 1,100 men had moved to better homes. Bank deposits had increased 205%. Twice as many men owned their own homes. More than $2 million worth of Detroit real estate had passed into the hands of Ford employees who were paying Ford on the installment plan. Among the 18,000 workmen, only 140 still lived in conditions which could be called bad in the reports. And the output of Ford automobiles had increased over 20%. That year, with an 8-hour day in force and $10 million divided in extra profits among the men, the factory produced over 100,000 more cars than it had produced during the preceding year under the old conditions. Many figures had proved to the business world the practical value of sentimental theories. Ford's policy had not only done away with the labor problem, it had also shown the way to solve the employer's problems. The heart of the struggle between capital and labor is the idea of employer and employee, he says. There ought not to be employers and workmen, just workmen. There are two parts of the same machine. It's absurd to have a machine in which one part tries to foil another. My job at the plant is to design the cars and keep the departments working in harmony. I'm a workman. I'm not trying to slip anything over on the other factors in the machine. How would that help the plant? There's trouble between labor and capital. Well, the solution is not through one side getting the other by the neck and squeezing. No, sir. That isn't a solution. That is, ruin for both. It means that later the other side is going to recover and try to get on top again, and there will be constant fighting and jarring where there ought to be harmony and adjustment. The only solution is to get together. It can't come only by the demands of labor. It can't come only by the advantages of capital. It's got to come by both recognizing their interest and getting together. That's the solution of all the problems in the world as I see it. Let people realize that they're all bound together, all parts of one machine, and that nothing that hurts one group of people will fail on the end to come back and hurt all the people. So at the end of 37 years of work, Henry Ford sat in his office on his 52nd birthday and looked out on a community of nearly 20,000 persons working efficiently and happily together, working for him and for themselves, well-paid, contented. He thought of the world, covered with a network of his agencies, crossed and re-crossed with the tracks of his cars. He had run counter to every prompting of practical business judgment all his life. He had left the farm, built his engine, left the moneyed men who would not let him build a cheap car, started his own plant on insufficient capital, built up his business, established his profit-sharing scheme, all against every dictate of established practice. He had acted from the first on that one fundamental principle. Do the thing that means the most good to the most people. His car, his factory, his workmen, his sixty millions of dollars answered conclusively the objection. I know it's the right thing theoretically, but it isn't practical. Thinking of these things on that bright summer day in 1914, Ford decided that there remained only one more thing he could do. End of Chapter 27 Chapter 28 of Henry Ford's Own Story Henry Ford's Own Story by Rose Wilder Lane Chapter 28 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 horsepower 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 monorail cars, each with two-ton hoists which carry materials, in short the innumerable details of that mammoth plant. Then they inspected the hospitals, the restrooms, 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 comprehend that every detail of his policies saved 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 everyone 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 the 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 everyone 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 employers, 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're 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 today 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 a 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 fifty-two, 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 Fourth of August 1914 which brought misery, ruin, desolation to Europe, and panic to the whole world gave him his opportunity. End of Chapter 28. Chapter 29 of Henry Ford's own story. This Libervox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Leanne Howlett. Henry Ford's own story by Rose Wilder Lane. Chapter 29. The European War. War. The news caught at the heart of the world and stopped it. For a time the whole business structure of every nation on earth trembled, threatened to crumble and to ruin under this weight to which it had been building from the beginning. Greed, grasping selfishness, a policy of each man for himself against other men, these are the foundations on which nations have built up their commercial, social, industrial success. These are the things which have always led and always will lead to war, to the destruction of those structures they have built. Austria, Germany, France, Belgium, Russia, England, Japan, Turkey, Italy, one by one they crashed down into the general wreck. Everything good that the centuries had made was buried in the debris. The world rocked under the shock. Here in America we read the reports in dazed incredulity. It could not be possible. It could not be possible, we said to each other with white lips. And this age now, today, for, living as most of us do, on the surface of things, among our friends, in an atmosphere of kindness and helpfulness, we had been cheerfully unconcerned about the foundations of our economic and industrial life. In the winter there are thousands of unemployed men. We try to give each one a bowl of soup, a place to sleep. Our street corners are unpleasantly infested with beggars. We pass an ordinance, arrest them for vagrancy, feed them a few days and order them to leave town. The city is full of criminals. What are the police doing? We inquire testily. We build another prison, erect another gallows. We are like an architect who, seeing threatening cracks in the walls of the building, would hurriedly fill them with putty and add another story. Henry Ford read the news from Europe. He saw they were purposeless, useless, and waste of everything valuable. He saw a machine, wrongly built for centuries, so that each part would work against all the other parts, suddenly set in motion and wrecking itself. It was a repetition, on a larger scale, of a catastrophe with which he had been familiar in the business world. How many companies in his own field had been organized in the early days of the industry, had gone into business with the one purpose of getting all they could from everyone, workers, stockholders, buyers, and had gone down and roamed. Only those companies which had been built on some basis of fair service had succeeded, and these had done so in proportion to their real value to others. Whether or not this principle is recognized by those who profit from it, it is the fundamental principle on which business success is built. The trouble is that people do not see that, said Ford. A man goes into business from purely selfish motives. He works for himself and against everyone else as far as he can. But only so far as his grasping selfishness really works out in benefit to other people, he succeeds. If he knew that, if he went to work deliberately to help other people, he would do more good, and at the same time he would make a bigger success for himself. But instead of that, he gets more and more selfish. When he has got a lot of money and becomes a real power, he uses his power selfishly. He thinks it is his grasping policy that has made him successful. Why everything I ever did selfishly in my life has come back like a boomerang and hurt me more than it hurt anyone else, and the same way with everything I have done to help others, it helps me in the end every time. It is bound to. As long as a machine runs, anything that is really good for one part is good for the whole machine. Look at those fighting nations. Every one of them is hurting itself as much as it hurts the enemy. Their success was founded on the fact that they have helped each other. England got her dyes and her tools and her toys from Germany. Germany got her wheat from Russia and her fruits and olives from Italy. Turkey got her ships from England. They were all helping each other. Their real interests, the comfort and happiness of their people, were all one interest. Left to themselves, the real German people would never fight the French people, never in the world. No more than Iowa would fight Michigan. Race differences? They do not exist in sufficient degree to make men fight, and they are disappearing every day. See how the races mix in America. I have 53 nationalities, speaking more than 100 different languages and dialects in my shops, and they never have any trouble. They realize that their interests are all the same. What is the root of the whole question? The real interests of all men are the same. Work, food, and shelter, and happiness. When they all work together for those, everyone will have plenty. What do people fight for? Does fighting make more jobs, better homes, more to eat? No. People fight because they are taught that the only way to get these things is to take them from someone else. The common people, the people who lose most by fighting, don't know what they are fighting for. They fight because they are told to. What do they get out of it? Disgust, shame, grief, wounds, death, ruin, starvation. War is the most hideous waste in the world. In the first terrible months of the war, the American people in horror echoed that opinion. With a spectacle of half the world and bloody ruins before our eyes, we recoiled. We thanked God that our country remained sane. We saw a vision of America after the madness had passed, helping to bind up the wounds of Europe, helping to make a permanent peace which should bring the people of the earth together in one fraternity. By degrees, that feeling began to change. We want peace. Are there a hundred men among our hundred million who will say they want war for war's sake? We want peace, but we've begun to ask that old question. Is it practical? That vision of the people of the world working together, increasing their own happiness and comfort by helping to make happiness and comfort for each other. It is a beautiful theory, but is it not a bit sentimental, a bit visionary, just a little too good to be true? Here is a world where war happens, we say. If a war should happen to us, what would we do? Let us begin to prepare for war. Let us take war into our calculations. Let us be practical. And Henry Ford, reading the papers, listening to the talk of the men in the streets, saw the object lesson of his great organization disregarded. He heard again the objection which had met every step of his life. It is a good idea, but it is theoretical. It is not practical. It will not work. Things never have done that way. He saw this country already wasting incalculable human energy, destroying innumerable lives daily because of a practical system of organization, preparing to drain off still more energy, still greater wealth, in preparation for a still more terrible waste. The dearest principle of his life, the principle whose truth he had proven through a life of hard work, was in danger of being swept away and forgotten. End of chapter 29. Chapter 30 of Henry Ford's own story. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Leanne Howlett. Henry Ford's own story by Rose Wilder Lane. Chapter 30, The Best Preparedness. Henry Ford saw that the meaning of his work was about to be lost. He was in for the greatest fight of his life. He counted his resources. The mammoth factory was still wanting to capacity. The farm tractors, which would mean so much in increased production of food and greater comforts for millions of farmers, were almost ready to be put on the market. His plan for profit sharing with the buyers of his cars had recently been announced. 300,000 men in this country would have, during 1915, an actual proof and dollars and cents of the practical value of cooperation, of Ford's principle that helping the other fellow will help you. Those men would share with him the profit which would add still more millions to his credit. Ford had these things. He had also a tremendous fortune at his command. He cast about for ways of using that fortune in this fight, and again the uselessness of money was impressed upon him. Money is of no real value, whatever, he says. What can I do with it now? I cannot pay a man enough to make him change his real opinions. The only real resource this country has now is the intelligence of our people. They must think right. They must know the true principles on which to build a great strong nation. They must hold firm to the big true things and realize some way they must be made to realize that they are practical, that ideals are the only practical things in this world. It is to everybody's interest to do right, not in the next world, nor in a spiritual way only, but in good, hard, dollars and cents business value. Let's be practical. Suppose we do prepare for war. Suppose we do take the energies of our young men and spend them in training for war. Our country needs the whole energy of every man in productive work, work that will make more food, more clothing, better houses. But suppose we turn that energy from real uses, train it to destroy instead of to create. Suppose we have half a million young men ready to fight. What weapons shall we give them? Shall we give them guns? They will be out of date. Shall we give them poisonous gases or disease germs, or shall we invent something even more horrible? As fast as we make these things, other nations will make worse ones. Shall we turn our factories into munition plants? Shall we build dreadnoughts? The submarine destroys them. Shall we build submarines? Other nations will make submarine destroyers. Shall we build submarine destroyers? Other nations will build war aeroplanes to destroy them. We must make something worse than the aeroplanes and something worse still and then something still more horrible, bidding senselessly up and up and up, spending millions on millions, trying to outdo other nations which are trying to outdo us. For if we begin to prepare for war, we must not stop. We cannot stop. I read articles in the magazines saying that we might as well have no navy at all as the one we have. That we might as well have no army as the army we have if this country should be invaded. Yet we have already spent millions on that army and that navy. Let us spend millions more and more millions and more and still unless we keep on spending more than any other nation can spend, we might as well have no army or navy at all. And yet there are people who think that to begin such a course is practical is good common sense. I tell you, the only real strength of a nation is the spirit of its people. The only real practical value in the world is the spirit of the people of the world. There were animals on the earth ages ago who could kill a hundred men with one sweep of a paw, but they are gone and we survive. Why? Because men have minds, because they use their minds in doing useful things, making food and clothes and shelters. A few hundred years ago, no man was safe on the street alone at night. No woman was safe unless she had a man with her who was strong enough to kill other men. We have changed all that. How? By force? No, because we have learned in a small degree that there are better things than force. We have learned that to look out for the interests of everyone in our community is best for us in the end. Let us realize that to think of the welfare of the whole world is best for each one of us. We do not carry a gun so that if we meet an Englishman on the street and he attacks us, we can kill him. We know he does not want to kill us. We know that the real people of the whole world do not want war. We do not want war. There are only a few people who think they want war. The politicians, the rulers, the big businessmen who think they can profit by it. War injures everybody else and in the end it injures them too. The way to handle the war question is not to waste more and more human energy in getting ready to hurt the other fellow. We must get down to the foundations. We must realize that the interests of all the people are one and that what hurts one hurts us all. We must know that and we must have the courage to act on it. A nation of 100 million people, of all nationalities and races, we must work together, each of us doing what he can for the best good of the whole. Then we can show Europe when at last her crippled people dragged themselves back to their roined homes that a policy of peace and hopefulness does pay, that it is practical. We can show them that we do mean to help them. They will believe it if we do not say it behind a gun. If we carry a gun, we must depend on the gun to save our nation. We must frankly say that we believe in force and nothing else. We must admit that human brotherhood and ideals of mutual goodwill and helpfulness are secondary to power and willingness to commit murder. That only a murderer at heart can afford to have them. We must abandon every principle on which our country was founded. Every inch of progress we have made since men were frankly beasts. But if our country is not to go down as all nations have gone before her, depending on force and destroyed by force, we must build on a firm foundation. We must build on our finest, biggest instincts. We must go fearlessly ahead, not looking back and put our faith in the things which endure and which have grown stronger through every century of history. Democracy, every man's right to comfort and plenty and happiness, human brotherhood, mutual helpfulness, these are the real practical things. These are the things on which we can build, surely and firmly. These are the things which will last. These are the things which will pay. I have proved them over and over again in my own life. Other men, so far as they have trusted them, have proved them. America has built on them the richest, most successful nation in the world today. Just so far as we continue to trust them, to build on them, we will continue to be prosperous and successful. I know this. If my life has taught me anything at all, it has taught me that. I will spend every ounce of energy I have, every hour of my life and the effort to prove it to other people. Only so far as we all believe it, only so far as we all use our strength and our abilities, not to hurt, but to help other peoples, will we help ourselves. This is the end of my story and the beginning of Henry Ford's biggest fight. The end. End of chapter 30. End of Henry Ford's own story, how a farmer boy rose to the power that goes with many millions, yet never lost touch with humanity, by Rose Wilder Lane. Recording by Leanne Howlett.