The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (Vintage) (45 page)

Once on the Atlantic, the Peace Ship became a scene of controversy as delegates feuded over principles and tactics. Within days, the situation had degenerated into a fiasco. News of President Wilson's message to Con-gress—though reaffirming the neutrality of the United States, it also called for a program of military preparedness—caused a rift. Pacifists in the group circulated a resolution denouncing Wilson's policy, and most of the delegates signed it. A significant minority, however, believed the resolution to be unpatriotic and unnecessarily political, and threatened to leave the group upon reaching Europe if it was adopted as the official platform of the Peace Ship. The two factions denounced each other, and, according to one reporter, “the conversation veered from acrimonious debate to violent altercations, in which the language became not only personal, but occasionally profane.” The tense political situation was not helped by the fact that nearly all of the voyagers, having never traveled on the ocean, spent many of the first days violently seasick.
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Meanwhile, a group of over fifty reporters, increasingly bored and liberally lubricated with drink, were delighted by the Peace Ship spat. They formed the satirical Viking Press Club—it met daily in the
Oscar II
's bar, featured an insignia of a nut bound upon the brow, and adopted as its secret signal “a violent and horrified clasp of the hand upon the forehead”—and reveled in detailing the disputes among the peace missionaries. They composed such headlines as “Ford Ship Is Scene of War” and particularly savaged Mrs. Schwimmer, who refused to discuss or display important mediation documents she claimed to have from European leaders. Cartoonists depicted shipboard battles between squirrels and doves and showed the French and German armies fleeing in fear from the angry peace pilgrims. According to an American newspaper, only one tactic could restore harmony among the feuding delegates: “chartering a vessel for each member of the party and then keeping them a mile apart.”
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Ford's own position aboard the Peace Ship grew increasingly awkward.
During the thirteen-day cruise across the Atlantic, he courted the press by holding conferences with reporters twice daily. He tried to mediate among the acrimonious delegates and assured dissenters that approval or disapproval of Wilson's message would disqualify no one from participating in the peace mission. But his patience wore thin. Trying to navigate between bickering delegates and openly contemptuous reporters was stressful. Ford's irritability became noticeable when he saw an employee drinking at the ship's bar and snapped, “You cut out the booze on this trip, or I'll have you fired.” His resolve also was eroded by the persistent, subtle pressure of Samuel S. Marquis, who, at the insistence of Clara Ford, had accompanied her husband to look after him. Marquis maintained reservations about the expedition and lost few opportunities to question it in conversations with his boss.
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Interestingly, however, the same reporters who detailed every shipboard dispute and described most of the peace reformers as buffoons came to respect Ford. They found him to be open, honest, and free from the self-righteousness that afflicted most of the peace delegates. “I came to make fun of the whole thing,” confessed one, but “I believe in Henry Ford and I'm going to say so even if I lose my job for it.” Another, who had initially seen Ford as a manipulator, concluded that he was a man “of goodness, of genuineness, of sincerity.” The Viking Club met as a group during the voyage and agreed that Ford deserved more respectful treatment than that accorded to the more flighty members of the group. As the correspondent for the New York
Times
summarized, the reporters “have learned in these few days an immense respect and liking for the character and abilities of Henry Ford.”
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But Ford's personal standing could not salvage the mission of the Peace Ship. The nadir of the
Oscar II
's unhappy voyage came with an outbreak of influenza that swept through the crew and passengers about halfway to their destination. The disease incapacitated many and produced one death when it turned into pneumonia. Ford himself became very ill as the
Oscar II
sailed into European waters. By the time the ship made its way through the North Sea, endured a none-too-friendly inspection by the British Royal Navy, and finally approached the shores of neutral Norway, Ford was sick and depressed. Thin and ashen-faced, he avoided reporters and public dignitaries when the Peace Ship docked in Oslo in the early-morning hours of December 18. He left the ship in a temperature of twelve degrees below zero and immediately went into seclusion in the Grand Hotel.
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Contrary to the assurances of Mrs. Schwimmer, the Peace Ship was not greeted by cheering throngs. Many Norwegians favored preparedness and maintained a skeptical posture toward the peace delegates. Given this decidedly
muted reception and his own poor health, Ford remained out of sight for four days. He finally met the press on December 22 but talked little about the peace crusade. Instead, he expressed the peculiar hope that armament manufacturers could make more profit from a new product he was interested in, tractors, than from instruments of war. He also gave a public statement pledging $10,000 for the construction of a student clubhouse at the University of Christiania.
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Clearly, Ford had had enough. “Guess I had better go home to Mother,” he told Louis Lochner. “I told her I'll be back soon. You've got this thing started now and can get along without me.” On the evening of December 23, Ford slipped out of his hotel suite and, accompanied by Marquis and Ray Dahlinger, his chauffeur and bodyguard, booked passage to the United States and left on a ship departing from Bergen. After an uneventful voyage—an ill, exhausted Ford spent most of the time resting in his cabin—the steamer
Bergensfjord
arrived at a Brooklyn pier on the morning of January 2, 1916. Ford was greeted by his wife and son and then, avoiding reporters, was taken to the Waldorf Hotel. After a consultation with William Jennings Bryan, who had traveled from Washington to meet him, Ford held a brief press conference and departed for Detroit.
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Ford's state of mind was curious. Though he had obviously deserted his Peace Ship associates before their mission in Europe even began, he denied that the expedition had been a failure. He insisted that the accompanying publicity had made it a success because discussions of peace replaced war propaganda. “It's got people thinking, and when you get them thinking they will think right,” he told reporters. He also claimed that he had modified his critique of the war. Bankers, militarists, and munitions manufacturers were still guilty of fostering the conflict, he believed, but the mass of common people must also shoulder part of the blame. “The trouble is that [Europe's] citizens don't take enough interest in the government,” he said. “They should express their own minds.” More disturbingly, Ford made private comments that called his sincerity into question. When presented with a bill for the Peace Ship, Ford commented cynically, “Well, we got a million dollars worth of advertising out of it, and a hell of a lot of experience.”
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Nonetheless, Ford's loyalty to his antiwar position remained steadfast. “If necessary I will go back [to Europe],” he told reporters in New York City. “If it will help matters I will charter another ship.” Ford also continued to foot the bill for the efforts of the Peace Ship delegates who organized themselves as the Neutral Conference for Continuous Mediation. They met at The Hague for over a year, until early 1917, by which time their efforts had come to naught, and Ford ceased covering the group's expenses. Throughout 1916, he paid for full-page antipreparedness statements that
appeared in newspapers and periodicals all over the country. They denounced military bills coming before Congress and the economic and political interests that supported them. Thus evidence of Ford's sincerity in opposing war was overwhelming. But where did his antiwar fervor come from?
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Ford never explained clearly the intellectual or emotional source of his antiwar views. Usually he stood on pragmatic grounds. “My opposition to war is not based upon pacifist or non-resistant principles,” he claimed. “But the fighting never settles the question. It only gets the participants around to a frame of mind where they will agree to discuss what they were fighting about.” Numerous public and private statements, however, suggested that Ford's denunciation of warfare had deeper ideological roots.
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First of all, Ford's worldview as a modern industrialist led him to view warfare as a wasteful folly. Everything he valued in terms of economic and social endeavor—an ethic of work and productivity, keen standards of efficiency, consumption and abundance among the mass of people—was violated by the wartime destruction of human beings and material resources. In a long string of pronouncements, Ford made it clear that he viewed war as an economic disaster.

He grew indignant about war's economic wastefulness. It destroyed human and material resources and offered a stark contrast to the positive ethos of modern industrial production. On the eve of the Peace Ship's departure, Ford issued a statement noting that the vessel carried “a spirit that appreciates the useless waste of war…. The business world wants the thing stopped so that it may go on in its work of construction—that is, all except that part of the business world that is turning out guns, battleships and other useless but costly products.” For Ford, the horrendous sounds and images of war stood in contrast to those of a smooth-running factory. “Isn't it better fun to hear an engine purr than it would be to hear a big gun roar?” he observed to one reporter. “The one will give good men their living; the other would give good men death.”
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Ford also believed that war hindered long-term economic growth. “The manufacture of munitions is a thing of the minute, and after the war the whole business will crumble,” he declared in 1915. The losing side in the European conflict would likely suffer destruction of its economic infrastructure, and even the winners “will be suffering under heavy war debts and taxes.” A greater stress on business efficiency would discourage rather than encourage warfare. “If every man who manufactures an article would make
the very best he can in the very best way at the very lowest possible price the world would be kept out of war, for commercialists would not have to search for outside markets which the other fellow covets,” he argued.
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Ford contended that war profited only a minority of businessmen. “Preparedness means war, and war, for some few business men, means big, immediate profits,” he argued in one of his newspaper advertisements in 1916. But small businessmen faced a situation where wars “materially depleted the financial resources of the world, and the effects have been felt in all countries and localities, whether they were directly involved or not. It requires a good deal of time to recuperate from losses created by disturbances of this kind.” Big business, particularly those involved in producing munitions and armaments, might favor wars. But the majority of business, Ford reported over and over in this period, sought to avoid armed conflicts in order to concentrate on making goods, providing jobs, and generating steady profits. In the business world, he insisted, productivity trumped destructive impulses.
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The debacle of destruction in Europe illustrated the economic folly of war, Ford believed, but another situation brought it even closer to home. By the mid-1910s, domestic unrest in Mexico had grown acute, and the threat of revolution raised talk about American military intervention. Ford was horrified. “We mustn't go down there with a rifle. We must go down there with the plow, the shovel, and the shop,” he said to a reporter in April 1915. “Instead of sending soldiers down to Mexico we should send industrial experts down there—missionaries of the true and holy gospel of get down to work.”
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Ford's economic misgivings about war appeared most clearly, perhaps, when he contrasted the European carnage of World War I with the efficient industrial operation of the factory in Highland Park. As he observed in an interview:

For Ford, industrial and mental progress went hand in hand, and war was the enemy of both. “Why not begin now to build a machinery of reason to do the work that the machinery of force has not accomplished?” he asked. “That is the great duty facing those who govern.” The image of the businessman
and that of the warrior stood opposed and Ford clearly preferred the former. The destruction of war was anathema to this modernizing, pro-gressive-minded businessman for whom economic abundance and work were the twin pillars of happiness.
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