The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (Vintage) (61 page)

In 1914, Henry Ford published a passionate denunciation of cigarettes under the arresting title
The Case Against the Little White Slaver.
Vacationing with Thomas Edison that year in Florida, he had discovered that his idol shared a conviction about the evils of tobacco. He returned to Detroit determined to act, and secured the help of Len G. Shaw, a writer for the Detroit
Free Press,
to solicit testimonials from teachers, doctors, athletes, and social workers. Ford added a powerful personal statement of his own. The resulting pamphlet, reprinted several times over the next few years, was one of the first serious attacks on cigarette smoking by a public figure. It clearly indicated Ford's loyalty to a tradition of moral self-regulation.
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His opposition to tobacco had not developed suddenly. As early as 1908, Ford had insisted that salesmen at dealerships avoid smoking cigarettes and not “get yourself up like some young sport whose chief aim in life is to take
his lady friends joy riding.” A few years later, he issued an edict banning smoking in all Ford sales branches, even for customers and visitors.
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But
The Case Against the Little White Slaver
provided a full airing of Ford's beliefs about smoking. He prefaced his pamphlet with a letter from Edison, who denounced cigarettes because the burning paper wrapper formed a substance “producing degeneration of the cells of the brain …[that was] permanent and uncontrollable.” Ford followed with his own essay, “To My Friend, the American Boy.” Older smokers were addicted, and young women were not susceptible to the allure of cigarettes, he believed. But young males were a different matter. “Boys must be educated so they will know why cigarettes are bad for them,” Ford wrote.
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Ford drew upon expert testimonials to illuminate the health problems caused by cigarettes. Under the heading “Some Scientific Facts,” a long list of stories drawn from newspapers, magazines, health journals, and private letters illustrated the degeneration. Some pieces focused on cigarettes' contribution to “a decrease in mental efficiency,” a slowing of brain activity, neurosis and other nervous diseases, and, in extreme cases, outright insanity. Ford's pamphlet quoted Dr. D. H. Cress, a Detroit physician whose analysis had appeared in
The Medical Times
: “The cigarette strikes a direct blow at the most vital organ of the body. It weakens the heart action…. The boy with a weakened heart is more apt to succumb to typhoid fever, tuberculosis, or other acute diseases which especially tax the heart…. It is generally recognized that any habit of life which places an extra tax upon the kidneys, heart, or other vital organs wears them out prematurely.” As Ford summarized, “It is evident beyond question that the use of tobacco by the young man is injurious to his health.”
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The Case Against the Little White Slaver
underlined its health argument with a focus on athletics. A long list of doctors, coaches, sportswriters, and athletes explained smoking's physical costs. Dr. Frederick J. Pack, of the University of Utah, contended that smokers were only half as successful as nonsmokers in gaining a place on college football teams. Grantland Rice, the sportswriter, argued that tobacco use inhibited both physical and mental preparation in sporting competition. “A cigarette smoker would have but little chance in any red-blooded competition against one who stuck to training,” he concluded of athletes. Connie Mack, the successful manager of baseball's Philadelphia Athletics, testified that “players who do smoke never amount to a great deal in the profession.” Even Ty Cobb, the hard-driving bad boy of professional baseball, declaimed against “the evils of cigarette smoking. It stupefies the brain, saps vitality, [and] undermines one's health.”
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But Ford reserved most of his passion for a moral denunciation of
tobacco. The title of the pamphlet, connecting smoking to slavery, suggested this theme. In his introduction, Ford did likewise. “If you will study the history of almost any criminal you will find that he is an inveterate cigarette smoker,” he claimed. “Boys, through cigarettes, train with bad company. They go with other smokers to the pool rooms and saloons. The cigarette drags them down.”
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A battalion of experts in
The Case Against the Little White Slaver
supported Ford's claims of moral corrosion. Dr. Winfield S. Hall of Northwestern University argued that smoking encouraged the twin failings of “the dissipation of money for things unnecessary” and “sense gratification,” both of which handicapped the young man seeking success. Other witnesses claimed that “the cigarette smoker is more likely to cheat, lie, and steal than the non-smoker.” Judge Benjamin B. Lindsay of Denver asserted that smoking was pervasive among the young criminals who passed through his court because it “invited all the demons of habit to come in and add to the degradation that the cigarette began.” Booker T. Washington described the smokers he had encountered during his many years at the Tuskegee Institute: “Their will power is broken down, their moral sense is blunted, and it is very difficult …to make anything of them.”
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Ford underscored his moral critique of smoking with vignettes reminiscent of nineteenth-century Victorian reform tracts, illustrating how youth succumbed to the temptation of cigarettes and fell into moral ruin and social dissolution. A commander in the U.S. Navy, for example, related how a fellow officer's craving for cigarettes finally drove him from the service and to an early death. Another, longer tale described a star political reporter for a prominent newspaper whose insatiable appetite for cigarettes eventually undermined his journalistic writing. He lost his job and became an itinerant farm laborer, then fell even further to the status of panhandler, hobo, and part-time potato peeler in the county infirmary. Finally, he became a pathetic derelict, filthy and barely clothed, who could be seen drifting around the city while he “pulled away at a cigarette butt he had picked from the gutter.” Inventor and scientist Hudson Maxim aptly summarized the pamphlet's moral assault on smoking: “If all boys could be made to know that with every breath of cigarette smoke they inhale imbecility and exhale manhood, it ought to deter them some. The yellow finger stain is an emblem of deeper degradation and enslavement than the ball and chain.”
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For Ford, however, the moral nadir of smoking came with the sabotage of a young man's career prospects. He filled an entire section of his antitobacco pamphlet with tales of how smoking created barriers to success. A long list of prominent businessmen detailed their objections to cigarettes, and Ford put them under headlines such as “Cigarettes Spoils Boys for His
Business,” “Non-Smokers Given Preference,” “Cigarette Fiends Not Employed,” and “Cigarettes Detrimental to Development.” In Ford's assessment, employers had discovered that “the boy who is not addicted to the use of cigarettes will return larger dividends on the investment both to himself and his employer…. He will get to the front more rapidly.” Ford's own policies reflected this belief: smoking was banned at all company plants, and this rule remained in place until after his death.
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Yet, however vehement Ford's opposition to smoking, it was perhaps surpassed by his disapproval of another American habit that had drawn the ire of reformers since the early nineteenth century: alcohol consumption. Ford was a temperance man. Throughout his adult life, he declared unequivocally, “Liquor never did anybody any good. I'm against it in every form…. Business and booze are enemies.” His sociological department had made the eradication of drinking among company employees one of its central tasks. In his private life, Ford lived up to his public admonitions. As a 1923 magazine story announced, “It is a well known fact that Mr. Ford does not engage in intoxicating liquor in any form.”
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As with most temperance reformers, Ford saw alcohol as the great enemy of self-control. The ability to regulate one's appetites was the key to virtuous character, controlling one's work and talent was the key to success, and liquor undermined all such capacities. Not surprisingly, Ford emerged as one of the most outspoken advocates for Prohibition in the 1920s. He gathered together his temperance declarations and published, at his own expense, a pamphlet entitled
Three Interviews on Prohibition
(1930).

Ford insisted that liquor, at the personal level, destroyed character. “Brains and initiative are dulled by even the occasional use of alcohol,” he wrote. “They are made permanently dull by even the most moderate habitual use, and they vanish altogether in the steady, heavy drinker.” Liquor channeled energy in wrong directions, subverted the capacity to work, and tempted the imbiber to improper behavior. The result was an individual who could not control his impulses or navigate his way in the world. In the author's words, drinkers “are not at home inside themselves. But a man cannot get away from himself; a man's or woman's drinking is just his or her confession of failure to be an interesting person, an alive person.”
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Ford dismissed the argument that banning liquor subverted personal liberty. On the contrary, he asserted that the sloth and impropriety brought on by alcohol were a much greater danger to individual freedom. “I have never seen beverage alcohol do anything but destroy personal liberty,” he insisted. “Not only does it destroy the personal liberty of the drinker, but it seriously curtails the personal liberty of his relatives, shopmates, and fellow citizens.”
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Perhaps the greatest danger came from liquor's assault on women, children, and the family. The drunk's proclivities toward violence and unemployment threatened to undermine the stuff of domestic happiness— benevolence, material comfort, affection, respect. For centuries, liquor had caused a “mass of human misery,” and “women and children were the chief sufferers.” The sanctity of the family demanded that intelligent people confront the fact “that prohibition is a home problem, that it affects every man and woman and child in the country, their economic and spiritual welfare, their physical health and their happiness and work.” As Ford concluded of Prohibition, “The whole world is benefiting from it—the family most.”
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Three Interviews on Prohibition
also argued that alcohol caused serious social problems. By impairing the skill and dexterity of workers, it hindered productivity in the modern factory. The worker “needs a keen brain. He needs a fine coordination between hand and brain,” Ford explained. “But any use of alcohol at all seems to destroy that exact coordination, and the result is either slow work or spoiled work—or both.” When drinking was widespread, factory owners could count on only three effective workdays a week. Echoing a lament about “St. Monday” made by employers since the early nineteenth century, Ford contended that they “used to fight beer and whiskey continually—and it was a hard fight—in order to have a fairly representative labor roster on Monday mornings.”
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But perhaps the greatest social consequence of alcohol-addled behavior, in Ford's opinion, was poverty. As an idealist and industrial reformer, Ford lamented the manner in which drinkers seemed to fall behind in gaining good wages and a higher standard of living. Liquor threatened the ideal of widespread abundance. “The executive who drinks cannot so plan that high wages will result in low prices, while the workman who drinks cannot work intelligently enough to earn high wages,” Ford argued. For him, Prohibition meant prosperity, and drink meant poverty.
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Ford's depth of feeling against liquor appeared in the historical comparison he drew upon. The Prohibition crusade, he said, could be compared only to the abolition of slavery. “If you will look back into our history, you will see that agitation against liquor began before the Civil War. This agitation was sidetracked, for a time, by the agitation against slavery,” Ford wrote. “It happened that slavery got into politics first and brought on the Civil War which ended slavery. Otherwise, the abolition of alcohol would probably have come first.” Liquor consumption, like slavery, obliterated self-control and gave rein to dangerous impulses. For Henry Ford, they were the twin evils that respectable Americans had been fighting for a century. Finally, with Prohibition, both had been vanquished.
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Ford's temperance views, though mustered in support of Prohibition in
the aftermath of World War I, harked back to an earlier age of moral reform. In similar, if more ironic fashion, certain of his endeavors on the socioeconomic front also looked toward the past. The architect of modern industrial and consumer America sought to protect the rural life that he had done so much to destroy.