It was at the time when a building was going up at Dearborn to make Pratt and Whitney engines for war-planes for Britain, but Mr. Ford himself professed still to be against any war work. ╥That is the plant,╙ he said when I raised the point. ╥I have got an alibi.╙ He meant that it was his son╒s doing.
I had to meet him in the morning at the little ╥Martha and Mary╙ church named after his mother and his wife in the park of Dearborn, where there are old London statues and Revolutionary period inns and shops. I noticed that he got out of his motor-car before it stopped, a tall, spare, active, high-shouldered figure in a grey suit with a Macdonald tartan tie and a hair guard for his watch. He looked at you with a half-serious, half-quizzical expression. He was not taking your questions very seriously, and you were not to take all his replies too seriously.
He had a natural dignity and did not need to stand to it. He had none of the great man╒s sense of importance; he expected no special deference. ╥I╒ll go up first,╙ he said, and he ran up the narrow gallery stairs like a youth. ╥I wish I could run upstairs like that,╙ I said at the top. ╥Ah, maybe I am just showing off,╙ said Henry Ford with a grin.
It was a chapel for children from the Ford schools near by with his plan of undenominational service. After the service we walked across the grass to the Clinton Inn, an old Michigan roadside hostelry replanted there and replenished with period furniture and pictures and nothing else. We sat on a horsehair sofa and talked. It was a friendly, homely, disputative talk, probably in some ways much in the vein of talks that have passed on that sofa when it was new. ╥Why didn╒t the English raise their own food?╙ He had sat next to Churchill at a dinner in London in 1913 and asked him ╥Why don╒t you work the land?╙ Churchill had said that they could not raise enough food; they had to buy food and make things to sell to other people and that kind of talk. ╥I told him they should raise their own food and the next day I bought a farm to prove it.╙
He talked of the Boreham farm experiment. From that he passed to his soya bean growing and showed some of the wool ╤ but not the famous Ford suit made from the wool ╤ and spoke of the plastic made from the beans and the cars that were to be made of that light plastic.
About animals, he had doubts of their qualifying for survival. One of these days we would probably get quit of them. The cow╒s chance was particularly thin but he said nothing about the mechanical cow that he was said to have devised. Constantly he referred to the land and how it could be better used for the good of mankind. On the wall of the gigantic rotunda where the Ford models are shown is the motto that seems to crystallise the great mechanic╒s code ╤ ╥With one foot on land and one on industry America is safe.╙ One wondered if there was ever another great industrialist who put the land first as Henry Ford did.
One part of his achievement that must interest the social historian, I have thought, was the biological difference he had made to the United States by enlarging the area of marriage selection of rural communities from a buggy ride to a motor-car ride ╤ say, from ten to 150 miles ╤ and so made the melting-pot really melt. Henry Ford, as in everything discussed where there was a side of self-appreciation, brushed that away. It might have made a difference, he admitted, and continued, ╥The motor-car is the greatest educator we have got. A man takes his family 500 miles in his car on holiday and they meet some other family from the other side that has come the same distance. They talk together, tell their experiences to one another, and back they go to pass some of it on to their home folk. That is good mixing.╙ I suggested that the motor-car was preventing the United States from having a peasantry. He said everyone came into town now, perhaps too much.
Of, course much of the talk was about the war but nothing that is significant now. War was all wrong; you could get around a table and settle everything. Would Mr. Ford sit round a table with Communists if they had seized his works? He replied that he had never seen a real Communist, although he had seen plenty that called themselves so. He had a respect for the mechanical organisation and ability of the German people. ╥War was the best worst thing that could happen,╙ he ruminated. He said that he liked the English, and when I spoke of the hefty-looking workmen on his assembly lines he replied that the men at Dagenham were every bit as good, healthy, upstanding men ╤ ╥all in one model too ╤ English.╙
But the English people did not work hard enough. The Americans did not work as hard as they should either. He admitted that he had never been to the Clyde or to Bradford or Birmingham and that he had not seen much of Manchester, but he insisted that he had seen a lot of England.
Speaking of the Ford Peace Ship in the first world war that was ╥to get the boys out of the trenches by Christmas,╙ he said that there were 26 women on board. The ship got to Denmark and the newspaper folk came in, and the discussions on board got worse and everybody talked and talked. The result of it all was, he said, that he got an idea of the forces and the schemers he did not know of behind the war, so he quit. It cost him $400,000, but it was worth it.
It is hard to give an idea of the energy, ingenuity, freshness of mind, naivete
in many ways, originality, native wit, shrewdness, optimism tinted with caustic experience, kindness and flinty hardness, and a strange kind of humbleness (╥I am just a tool╙) in that industrial king. His face in repose had the remote look that we call ascetic, expressive of the rare will-power that can produce periods of complete mental concentration. ╥Faith is what we gather from experience╙ was one of his sayings.
Like many another he had entertained his mind with ideas of having lived before. The thing that really mattered, he said, was what experience we got from a former life and what we gathered in this to pass on to help other people for their next life. It is the sum of what we carry on from one generation to another that makes the essence of experience the thing, he said. As we passed on to lighter themes I asked him if in a future incarnation he would leave old-fashioned things like motor-cars and concentrate on a small aeroplane with, say, a gyroscope. He replied that he did not know anything about that or what he would like in another life. ╥The only thing is,╙ said Henry Ford, ╥I should like to be sure of having the same wife.╙
╥That╒s the difference between you and me, Mr. Ford,╙ his interviewer ventured to say, ╥I hope that my own wife will have better luck in the next world.╙ ╥There you are, Henry,╙ said Mrs. Ford, who was sitting near, ╥you only think of yourself, but your friend thinks of his wife.╙ ╥It means the same thing,╙ said Henry Ford, delighted with the turn the talk had taken, and he put out his hand and we shook hands, and the conversation grew in warmth. They had celebrated their golden wedding two years earlier. Ford was 77 when I saw him, and although he could not touch his toes without bending ╤ he tried to do it that day ╤ he could do a crouching exercise at a chair that few men could do at fifty and could dance old-fashioned dances with his wife at family parties.
As I left his home I noticed a bicycle in the hall and that it had no brakes. I asked why it had no brakes. ╥Ah, what is the good of a brake going round the garden?╙ said Henry Ford. ╥Just a weight and you don╒t need it.╙ ╥`Then why did I have to take the gravel out of your face, Henry?╙ asked the doctor. ╥Aw ╤ that was the milk girl,╙ said Henry Ford; ╥if I had not fallen off I╒d have run her down!╙ The last words as I left were: ╥You╒re hidebound╙; and he added, after a pause, ╥Maybe I╒m hidebound too.╙
