The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (Vintage) (64 page)

Ford's spiritual proclivities produced some rather unconventional doctrines. He told reporters that, since “the earth is just a clearing station between past and future lives,” surely life existed in the universe outside of the earth's confines. “We don't know anything about what's on those other planets, except life. I'm sure there's life there.” He also became a believer in mental telepathy, arguing that thoughts could be passed from mind to mind without need for print or speech. “There is nothing to me that is more thoroughly established than thought transference,” Ford told Ralph Waldo Trine. In his view, thought consisted of “a stream of little living organizations” that swirled about an individual at all times. “When thought goes out some of the energies of personality go out with it” and are conveyed to other people.
⁹

But Ford's spiritualism, ironically, also nudged him in the direction of certain Christian traditions. His endorsement of reincarnation and a pervasive Master Mind, for example, produced a doctrine very much like that of Protestant predestination. “I feel that I have never done anything by my own volition. I was always pushed by invisible forces within and without
me,” Ford confessed. “In all likelihood every human range of experience is predestined…. Forces beyond our control determine the highway we take through life.”
¹⁰

Ford struggled to come to terms with the background from which he had emerged. Although rejecting the letter of Christian doctrine throughout much of his adult life, he sought to meld its spirit into his expansive new worldview. He took great pains to profess Christian loyalties. “I believe in God and in Jesus Christ. I was brought up in the church. I belong to the church. I attend church. I never go to hear a sermon, whether it is by a preacher in a small church or a large one, that I do not get help,” he told the New York
Times.
He publicized the pledge he had taken during World War I, along with President Woodrow Wilson and evangelist Wilbur Chapman, to read a chapter in the Bible every day—a pledge he labored to keep. He even supported a move “to get the Bible back into the public schools,” arguing that it provided a wealth of valuable moral and ethical directives.
¹¹

Most of the time, however, Ford tried to bend Christianity to fit the shape of his mystical convictions. His view of life as gaining experience produced some singular interpretations. Speaking of the scriptures, Ford said, “I look upon it as a record of experience. No matter what knocks we receive in life, we find, reading the Bible, that others have received similar knocks. It is a true book of experience.” Jesus offered one example. In Ford's words, “My belief is that Jesus was an old person, old in experience; and it was this that gave him his superior knowledge of life.”
¹²

In the last few years of his life, Ford relented somewhat in his unorthodoxy and drifted closer to Protestant tradition. In a series of interviews and articles in the mid-1940s, he meditated upon his religious convictions in the New York
Times,
the
Christian Herald, Woman's Home Companion,
and the
American Magazine.
He professed his love for the old Protestant hymns he had heard since boyhood and claimed, “The associations of the church are beneficial to all.” The Sermon on the Mount, Ford said, was the greatest pronouncement ever made in human affairs. Talking with a reporter, Ford pulled from his suit pocket a well-worn volume of biblical quotations, and suggested that he “read it every now and then. It is surprising how much help you will get from it.” Even in old age, however, he quietly affirmed his long-standing belief in reincarnation and a vague “Power that is everywhere for good.”
¹³

Ford's eclectic blend of spiritual notions did not fit neatly into any religious category or denomination. Mainstream Protestants undoubtedly regarded his ideas as unsettling, even horrifying. His unorthodox spiritualism, however, found kindred spirits in a much broader cultural movement in
early-twentieth-century America. Combining elements of religion, success ideology, and therapy, this cultural crusade cut a swath through great sections of the populace with its promise of mental and economic abundance.

In 1928, Ralph Waldo Trine traveled to Dearborn to meet with Henry Ford. Trine had written a number of popular inspirational books over the previous three decades, such as the best-selling
In Tune with the Infinite: Fullness of Peace, Power, Plenty
(1898). Having read certain of Ford's religious ruminations in the press, he was determined to interview the industrialist and claim him as a spiritual brother. Ford, Trine believed, was a prime example of what new-style religious thinking could produce in the modern world.
¹⁴

Ford eventually found Trine to be something of a pest, with the interview stretching over several days, but initially he greeted him warmly. He told Trine he had read
In Tune with the Infinite
around 1914 and found it so insightful that “I used to keep a stock of your books in my office to give to friends or associates who, I thought, would be benefited by them the same as I.” As their discussions unfolded over many hours, the two men touched upon a host of matters regarding religion, reincarnation, success, positive thinking, diet, metaphysics, and the general meaning of life. The result was Trine's
The Power That Wins: Henry Ford and Ralph Waldo Trine in an Intimate Talk on Life
(1928), which recorded their exchange of views. The book's subtitle,
Things of the Mind and Spirit, and the Inner Powers and Forces That Make for Achievement,
suggested how Ford's spiritual notions were entangled with the larger New Thought movement.
¹⁵

New Thought had emerged in late-nineteenth-century America as a loose confederation of individuals and groups committed to the powers of positive thought and the possibilities of material and emotional abundance. Rooted partly in transcendentalism, with its emphasis on an “Over-Soul” and intuition as a window into reality, and partly in new therapeutic doctrines associated with study of the human psyche, this metaphysical movement stressed the restorative, generative, healing qualities of the human mind. In many ways, New Thought combined traditional religion with modern psychology. Founded by the self-educated healer Phineas P. Quimby, and inspired by the metaphysical philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the New Thought movement was led by figures such as Trine; Mary Baker Eddy, the originator of Christian Science; and Annie Payson Call, whose mind-cure program appeared in her popular book,
Power
Through Repose
(1891). Its disciples plumbed the human “subconscious” to retrieve mental powers that could be mobilized to increase emotional vigor and material success.
¹⁶

New Thought advocates promoted several ideas. They postulated that the human mind was the primary causative force in the universe; that God was an immanent spirit ever-present in everyone and everything; that the remedy for all defects and disorders lay in the mental and spiritual realm; that evil was not a permanent reality in the world but merely the temporary absence of good; and that health and abundance were available to those who could effectively muster their spiritual and mental resources. The influence of New Thought spread widely at the turn of the century. Its adherents ranged from respected thinkers such as William James, the psychologist and philosopher, to popular magazines such as
Good Housekeeping,
which by 1908ran a regular column for women on “How to Become Beautiful by Thought.” Within a few decades, New Thought would enter the American cultural mainstream with the likes of Norman Vincent Peale, the influential minister whose message of positive thinking resonated powerfully with a large Protestant audience.
¹⁷

Though never formally affiliated with any New Thought group, Henry Ford clearly displayed an affinity with their beliefs. His advice on achieving success endorsed not only the work ethic but newfangled techniques of positive thinking and mental mobilization. The new consumer age, he argued, had created a desire for goods, and there was great opportunity for achievement and advancement. In Ford's assessment, “We are entering the comfortable age, and the opportunity to make life more comfortable offers us the widest field mankind has ever known.”
¹⁸

In this atmosphere of abundance, Ford believed, positive thinking would work wonders for the success-seeker. “I refuse to recognize that there are impossibilities,” he told a reporter in 1923, and he urged others to adopt the same attitude. One of his “Half Dozen Rules for Success,” offered in
Leslie's Illustrated Weekly,
was “Be Optimistic.” When interviewed by Allan Benson in the early 1920s, he waxed effusive about positive thinking. “I was never discouraged in my life,” Ford insisted. “Most men are entirely too confident of their ability to fail—and they fail. If they were as confident of their ability to succeed, most of them would succeed.” He reported his stock answer to inquiries about how his day was going: “The best day I ever had in my life.” As Ford told friends such as Irving Bacon, “I never keep anything that reminds me of sorrow, trouble, disagreeableness, or bad things.”
¹⁹

It was imperative for the positive thinker, Ford believed, to abandon habits shaped by an older economy of scarcity—namely, the urge to save
money constantly and hoard psychological resources. In the modern atmosphere of abundance, he was certain that it was far better to “invest in yourself.” “Spend your money! Spend it for things that will put you ahead of where you were yesterday,” he urged. “It is time enough to save when you can earn more than you can spend wisely.” In addition, Ford urged the positive thinker to muster his mental resources and focus them in a constructive way. “After work, the next duty is to think…. Your thought makes great advances possible,” he told the New Thought journal,
National Brain Power,
in 1923. Ford offered a dictum: “Let every man think for himself. Let him call a conference of his powers, his common sense in the chair, his desires and his knowledge of things as they are pleading the case before him.” In his view, the positive thinker must cultivate a “belief in your ability to accomplish that which you set out to do.”
²⁰

Ford probably revealed his New Thought agenda most fully in his interviews with Trine. Prompted by one of the leaders of the movement, he reflected at length upon the nature of modern society and the qualities required to thrive in it. Abundant opportunity beckoned to the individual. “There was never a better time to be young,” Ford told Trine. “These times are richer in material for new combinations of knowledge, of grit and of power than any…. Here are over a hundred million people, inexhaustible resources and no limit to expansion.” He denounced fear, praised positive thinking, and urged readers to focus their mental powers: “Intensify your thought and you set up attraction. Concentrate on a job, and you attract all the things necessary to accomplish it.” He endorsed visualization as a technique for achievement. “To see a thing clearly in the mind makes it begin to take form,” he explained. Every person harbored abundant psychic resources, Ford assured Trine: “A man is like a well. There is a vast amount in him, if he can only get it out.”
²¹

During the Trine interviews, Ford strove to connect positive thinking and mental focus with reincarnation. He argued that individuals who galvanized their mental powers also galvanized palpable spiritual forces—“little entities—invisible lives—that are building him up, and adding to and building up whatever he is doing. Whatever he has concentrated his thought and work upon is helped and shaped by these little lives that come to him…. These entities are the material of growth and achievement.” These tiny forces, he insisted, “become a part of us; and then they work under our direction, and according to our character.”
²²

Toward the end of his discussion with Trine, Ford neatly tied his spiritual and psychological beliefs to economic reality. He suggested that a New Thought orientation naturally reflected a new atmosphere of consumer abundance:

Ford's belief in mental revitalization and the power of positive thinking reflected broader currents of change in early-twentieth-century America. It captured both the sense of unlimited opportunity that was spreading in a society of abundance, and the determination of New Thought advocates to take advantage of it. But his faith in the power of an energized mental state expanded to take in physical activity. He came to believe that the body, like the mind, could be used to generate vigor, energy, and creativity.