The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (Vintage) (63 page)

Ford's support for rural life and his desire for the modernization of farming also inspired the most sweeping item on his agenda: decentralization. Ironically, the man who had masterminded the great River Rouge plant emerged in the 1920s singing the praises of small, integrated industrial sites that would dot the rural landscape of the United States and meld the tasks of the farmer and the worker. Ford envisioned modest village industries where small factories making a single item would employ part-time workers who also would spend a portion of the year doing farm labor. These institutions would offer fresh air, sunshine, and an opportunity to work the land to industrial workers, and steady work and income to farmers too often laid low by market forces. “I want to see mixed work,” Ford said. “In the winter months a man should work in industry and in the summer months on a farm.”
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In his 1918race for the Senate, Ford proposed the decentralization of manufacturing to help rural residents. “What I am going to do is to establish plants for manufacturing parts of Ford cars and Fordson tractors in places where they will be within easy reach of farming districts, and provide employment for farmers and their families in winter,” Ford explained during the campaign. Promoting decentralization in subsequent years, Ford the populist blamed cities and financiers for “robbing the worker and manufacturer of normal human conditions.” He ritually denounced “the unnatural conditions of American cities, with their injurious effects on mental, moral, and physical life,” and offered an alternate vision. “I want to see the
day when the country will assume the ascendancy over the city in the affairs of men,” he declared.
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Ford also used his autobiography to drum up enthusiasm for decentralization.
My Life and Work
offered a blueprint for a “combination of farm and factory.” Each venue had slack times during the year, but with decentralization farmers could go to the factory and factory workers back to the farm as circumstances dictated. In Ford's words, this would “take the slack out of work and restore the balance between the artificial and the natural.” He offered an idyllic vision of an America dominated by village industries: “You will find the smaller communities living along in unison with the seasons, having neither extreme poverty nor wealth—none of the violent plagues of upheaval and unrest which afflict our great populations.”
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To the end of his life, Ford maintained a deep-seated affection for rural America. He hoped to save the farmer by wedding the organic connection of rural life with the efficiency of urban life, agricultural vitality with industrial productivity. In 1939, when he was an old man, Ford was asked by a reporter what he would do if he suddenly became director of the United States. He replied, “I'd put as many people on the soil as I could and manufacture farming tools at such low prices that everyone could find basic security on the land. I'd try to get as many city boys out into the country as I could and as many country boys into the city as possible. That would be a good exchange and both would profit.”
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In this area, as in many others, Henry Ford proudly donned the mantle of an old-fashioned moralist. His defense of rural life, like his upholding of the traditional family and his crusade against alcohol and tobacco, sought to save traditional virtues both by defending them on their own terms and by bringing science to their support when necessary. By whatever means necessary, Ford hoped to nourish the virtues of self-control, hard work, and domestic “separate spheres” that he had absorbed as a youth. As with so many aspects of his career, however, the evident nature of his beliefs masked hidden complexities. Henry Ford's role as Victorian moralist, though played with enthusiasm and conviction, barely muffled a simultaneous attraction to several social and cultural projects that were ushering in a new era. These impulses gained much strength from the expansive energy of early-twentieth-century America. Paradoxically, they slowly eroded the very traditions that lay near to Ford's heart.

Henry Ford appeared the very epitome of Victorian gentility in his private life. His emotional self-control, dignified demeanor, domestic attachments, rural loyalties, and adherence to the work ethic bespoke the provincial, bourgeois culture of the nineteenth-century Midwest in which he had been reared. But, as is usually the case with most human beings, the truth was more complicated. For all of his traditional sensibility, Ford was not insulated from the impact of a changing cultural climate. In fact, throughout his adult life he became involved with certain ideas sweeping through the prosperous classes that were undermining the traditions he revered.

As a mature man, Ford became a public devotee of religious mysticism, mental revitalization, and physical vitality. In his private life, he engaged in a long-term intimate relationship with a much younger woman that reflected the new morality of a post-Victorian society. In one sense, as historians have discovered, the new movements that attracted Ford aimed to prop up a Victorian tradition that had grown brittle from excessively rigid expectations and weak from attacks by working-class immigrants and bohemian intellectuals. As early as the 1890s, nervous Victorian champions such as Theodore Roosevelt had campaigned for regeneration by urging prosperous citizens to adopt “the strenuous life.” By the early decades of the new century, such calls for revitalization widened and intensified. In this atmosphere, vigorous new strains of religious thought, success ideology, physical well-being, and moral conduct blossomed.

At the same time, however, these cultural movements brought unintended consequences. Instead of just regenerating the culture of Victorian self-control, advocates of vigor and personal development nudged American values in a new direction. Ford, like countless others, encouraged a great cultural transformation that gradually replaced self-restraint with self-fulfillment, salvation with self-realization, and scarcity with abundance. Not
surprisingly, this new ethic provided the emotional and intellectual fuel for the new consumer economy.

In Ford's case, the role of cultural revolutionary was largely unintended. He did more than he knew. Never a sophisticated thinker, Ford offered a mishmash of half-digested concepts and visceral intuitions rather than systematic analysis, so his social and cultural speculations did not probe very deeply. Ultimately, his ideas worked to push forward the notion of personal self-fulfillment in a consumer society. In religion and social values, as with so many other things, Henry Ford stood at the cutting edge of a great shift in the American experience that changed the accepted definitions of what was important in life. Ironically, the staunch advocate of Victorian tradition subverted it with his cultural enthusiasms almost as much as he did with his economic innovations.

On the day of President William McKinley's funeral in September 1901, Oliver Barthel lent Henry Ford a book entitled
A Short View of the Great Questions,
by Orlando J. Smith. Barthel, a skilled engineer who assisted Ford in his early automotive projects, had studied spiritual, philosophical, and metaphysical issues, and he hoped to stimulate the interest of his friend. Smith's brief volume examined various questions of human origins and destiny and summarized theories of materialism, religion, and reincarnation. In later years, Ford claimed that
A Short View of the Great Questions
changed his life. “I adopted the theory of reincarnation … from a book by Orlando Smith,” he told a reporter in 1928. “When I discovered reincarnation it was as if I had found a universal plan.” This belief that after death the human spirit goes on to inhabit another physical body seemed to connect with Ford's sense of destiny. It launched him on a long religious journey that took some strange twists and turns before it ended.
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Ford had been raised in a traditional Christian home. Baptized and confirmed in the Episcopal church, the boy had absorbed Protestant fare that was moderately demanding but not strict. He sang hymns and heard Bible recitation at home under the influence of his mother, a religious woman. In grammar school, as was the custom in the nineteenth century, he participated in daily “devotions” from the Bible and recited in unison the Lord's Prayer. The Ford family favored tolerance over orthodoxy, however, and Henry developed a sense of integrity, morality, and fair play but little spiritual passion.
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As a young adult, Ford paid scant attention to any church. “I was never especially religious,” he admitted during this period. “Man has made many
gods. How do I know and how can I find out which, if any, is the genuine one? I won't try. I'll just keep busy.” After marrying, Ford and his family attended various churches in the Dearborn and Detroit area before settling in at Dr. Samuel S. Marquis' Episcopal cathedral. Then he became attracted to reincarnation, and by the 1910s, his views had become heavily tinged with mysticism. As Marquis observed, “He is not an orthodox believer according to the standards of any church I know.”
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In fact, Ford became notorious for his rather outlandish religious ideas. He spoke often of reincarnation. Upstanding Protestant citizens with a belief in the infallibility of the Bible must have been startled to read his declaration that “the body, by its instincts, [and] the soul, by its intuitions, remember and utilize the experience of previous lives…. We all retain, however faintly, memories of past lives.” To an interviewer, he claimed that the earth had nourished and lost many civilizations over millions of years that had developed modern items such as cars, airplanes, and radios. “What is ‘new’ about each individual is merely a new combination. The human mind is a channel through which things-to-be are coming into the realm of things-that-are,” Ford said.
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He did not shy away from airing such beliefs. In fact, the thought of life's regenerating itself seemed to inspire him, and he wanted to share that feeling. “I expect to go on and gather more experience. I expect to have opportunities to use my experience,” he once observed. “I expect to retain this central cell, or whatever it is, that is now the core of my personality. I expect to find conditions of life farther on, just as I found conditions of life here, and adapt myself to them.” Ford frequently confessed his beliefs privately. Irving Bacon, an artist who painted many works for Ford on commission, recalled a conversation in which his patron announced, “We have lived several lives before. Memory never dies. We remember things from past lives in our present life.” Similarly, Ford's cousin Artemus Litogot once heard him say, “You know, when a person dies I think their spirit goes into a newborn baby. I think that's why some people are so much further advanced in knowledge than others and are gifted.”
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Ford's belief in reincarnation led him to a fundamental conviction about life's meaning. A person's time on earth, he told anyone who would listen, was meant to gain experience, and when you learned everything you could, you died and went on to another life. In such diverse venues as
Forbes
and the London
Express,
Ford claimed, “What you're here for, and what every living person is here for … is to get experience. That's all we can get out of life.” The process of accumulating experience through several lives provided “an ideal, a purpose beyond it all, that keeps up the human procession.”
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Ford's spiritual speculations led him away from Christian tradition and into the expansive atmosphere of religious mysticism. He came to view God not as the divine presence revealed in the Bible but as “a Master Mind which sends brain waves or messages to us—the Brain of Mankind, the Brain of the Earth…. There is a Great Spirit. Call it creative evolution or world mind. Call it collective intelligence or call it God. It is this Spirit which determines our actions and our thoughts.” Ford became attracted to the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, which he kept scattered about his house and read regularly, and his theorizing mirrored the New Englander's notion of an “Over-Soul.” Like Emerson, Ford believed that divine power permeated everything at all times and was “the essence and the substance of all there is. What we call spirit and what we call matter is one, and the All.”
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Ford's conception of the human soul overflowed the model provided by Christianity. He did not deny the soul's existence. “The wind is invisible, electricity is invisible, the soul is invisible. They are, nevertheless, real,” Ford contended. “Air can be weighed, electricity gauged, and I am sure that some day it will be possible to measure the soul.” But he rejected the Christian duality of body and spirit by insisting that “a fundamental unity underlies all things. Matter and mind are one. They are different aspects of the same thing.” He also moved away from Christianity in his stress on the self as the seat of universal consciousness. Ford was convinced that each person is “a universe in miniature, with the Self as the center and numberless millions of entities making up the thing we call I—that we function not only on the planes we see, but on others we do not see.”
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