The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (Vintage) (83 page)

Not just recreation but larger cultural issues lay at the heart of the dance revival mounted by Ford. Traditional dancing, he believed, also advanced a moral agenda. He saw the revival of the waltz and the two-step as an antidote to the degeneration of modern American culture represented by jazz and lurid dances such as the Black Bottom and the Charleston. In
Today and Tomorrow,
Ford complained that modern dancing had become commercialized (crowded onto cramped floors at supper clubs rather than spacious ballrooms) and privatized (two people using it as an excuse to engage in sensual groping). In contrast, he argued, “old American dancing was clean and healthful.” It involved “rhythm and grace of motion, and people are thrown together and have to know one another. The old dances were social.” Moreover, traditional dancing had rules of deportment that were still upheld at his balls. “There is no holding up two fingers for a dance and no ‘cutting in.’ The ladies do not enter the room unescorted and must slightly precede the gentlemen…. Everything is formal.”
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Lovett shared his patron's view of the larger purposes of traditional dancing. He believed that it strengthened community ties by promoting “friendly relationships, neighborliness, and closer human understanding.” He also felt that this activity taught self-discipline and self-respect. He became convinced that “social training” was the most important achievement of his classes. “We believe that physical, mental, and social benefit will come to every boy and girl in the public schools who is taught these old American dances and the social training that goes with them,” he explained to his students and guests. “Among the benefits derived are consideration for others, courtesy under all circumstances, and an ease of manner which is far removed from the rudeness and selfishness which have crept into society these latter years.” If he could start over again, Lovett wrote, “I would choose the same profession, for in my capacity of Dancing Master, I believe I am, in a practical sense, a builder of character.”
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Lovett explained the Fordian moral agenda in a dance manual carrying the rather awkward title
Good Morning: After a Sleep of 25 Years, Old-Fashioned Dancing Is Being Revived by Mr. and Mrs. Ford
(1926). In addition to explaining traditional steps, it contained a moral primer on physical restraint and propriety that came straight out of Victorian culture. “There should not be bodily contact in the dance except through the arms. A gentleman
should be able to guide his partner through a dance without embracing her as if he were her lover or her rescuer,” Lovett said. The gentleman's right hand should have only its thumb and forefinger touching the lady's waist, as if it were holding a pencil. This was sufficient bodily contact to allow him to guide his partner through the dance.
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But
Good Morning
also took pains to place traditional dancing at the heart of a cultural retrenchment. In a conservative critique of modern values that smacked of nativism, the manual contended that dance reflected “the racial characteristics of the people who dance them.” The degeneration of modern dance stemmed from the fact that there had been “imported into the United States of recent years dances that originated in the African Congo, dances from the gypsies of the South American pampas, and dances from the hot-blooded races of Southern Europe.” As these waves of “foreign importations” swept over the United States, they encouraged the sensuality and moral laxity characteristic of modern dances and jazz culture. But, with Ford's backing, the revival of old-fashioned dances “is now shifting toward the style of dancing which best fits with the American temperament. There is a revival of the type of dancing which has survived longest among the Northern peoples.”
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In 1937, Henry Ford commemorated his great regard for the dancing master from New England. Having built a beautiful ballroom on the second floor of a building appended to the Ford Museum, he named it Lovett Hall. Lovett would work for Ford until 1943, when the latter's physical and mental frailty finally forced him to give up one of his greatest passions. But for almost the previous two decades, Lovett and Ford had deployed swirling, waltzing couples and stamping square dancers as skirmish lines in a larger cultural campaign to reclaim and defend American values and practices from an earlier day. Ultimately, this crusade reflected Henry Ford's larger understanding of American history. Despite his penchant for crude comments that often captured headlines, those views were surprisingly complex and sophisticated.

To many observers, Ford's embrace of tradition as he entered old age appeared ironic to the point of farce. Indeed, the picture of the creator of the mighty Rouge factory growing misty-eyed over butter churns, blacksmith shops, and square dancing seemed ludicrous. After all, Ford had probably done more than any other individual to create the modern industrial mass-produced world that had overwhelmed America's agricultural past. “It is as if Stalin went in for collecting old ledgers and stock-tickers,” said the
New York
Times.
How did Ford reconcile his industrial labors with his veneration for the horse-and-buggy world? Some observers offered a psychological diagnosis of split personality. “With his left hand he restores a self-sufficient little eighteenth-century village; but with his right hand he had already caused the land to be dotted red and yellow with filling stations,” suggested
The Nation.
“With one side of his brain he has dismissed all history as useless; with the other side he has indulged a passion which is almost a mania for the kind of history he can understand.” Others pointed to guilt.
The New Republic
contended, “Mr. Ford might be less interested in putting an extinct civilization into a museum if he had not done so much to make it extinct.”
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Ford's earlier rhetoric contributed to the problem. Since arriving on the national scene in the early 1910s, he had missed few opportunities to denounce history as the dead hand of the past restricting movement into the future. In the 1919 Chicago
Tribune
trial, he gained much notoriety from his reported statement that “history is bunk.” Though newspaper headlines oversimplified his testimony in this case—in fact, he stated only that history “never served me very much purpose”—there is no question that Ford liberally applied the word “bunk” as he stridently denounced history throughout his career. He told the Chicago
Tribune
in 1916, “What do we care what they did five hundred or one thousand years ago? It means nothing to me. History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker's dam is the history we make today.” That same year, Ford told John Reed, “I don't know anything about history, and I wouldn't give a nickel for all the history in the world…. I don't want to live in the past. I want to live in the Now.”
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Ford pushed the “bunk” concept well into the 1920s and 1930s. “History is bunk. What difference does it make how many times the ancient Greeks flew their kites?” he said to the New York
Times
in 1921. Fifteen years later, he was still attacking history textbooks as “just one man's misinformation or prejudices. Most history as written is bunk.” By 1940, Ford had worked himself into a kind of repetitive apoplexy. “I say history is bunk—bunk—double bunk. Why, it isn't even true,” he burst out in an interview. “They wrote what they wanted us to believe, glorifying some conqueror or leader or something like that.”
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But Ford's “bunk” barrage masked a view of the past that was more complicated and sophisticated than it appeared at first glance. First of all, he saw history in surprisingly modern terms, not as the empirical recovery of absolute truth but as
interpretations
of the past. As early as 1916, he reflected, “History is being rewritten every year from a new point of view. So how can anybody claim to know the truth about history?” When Ford denounced
history as bunk, therefore, he meant only traditional renderings of the past. His own notion of history turned on two central ideas—populism and progress—that lay at the heart of the American experience. These twin ideas inspired his historical collections and re-creations in Dearborn.
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Ford insisted that “real” history focused not on politicians, wars, and great events but on ordinary citizens and their daily labors. He constantly told associates that he was determined “to preserve what he appreciated as the contribution of plain men who never got into history.” Fred Black often heard Ford claim that history was rooted in the everyday life and work of ordinary people. “He always said the history of America wasn't written in Washington, it was written out in the country,” Black reported. Ford “was very enthusiastic about bringing to the attention of the present generation the development of the past, in mechanics, different little trades, how men made barrels, how men made horseshoes,” as one employee put it. Ford's populist history focused on the struggle of ordinary people to survive and prosper.
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His public pronouncements elaborated on this theme. In the
Ladies' Home Journal,
he argued that in Greenfield Village, “by looking at the things that people used and the way they lived, a better and truer impression can be gained in an hour than could be had from a month of reading.” In interviews, he said that his museum would “show in a material way the actual steps the people have made and therefore will constitute the true story of their minds.” A reporter for the New York
Times
captured perfectly Ford's populist sense of history. In his museum, she wrote, “a pewter bowl from the humblest kitchen in the colonies would be of equal interest with one from that of George Washington.”
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But Ford also believed that history must tell the story of progress, particularly in terms of technology and material life. While politicians bickered and orated, he concluded, “the real revolution was going on quietly in a laboratory.” Over the past two centuries, the real changes in human life came not from parliamentary debates or presidential edicts but from such pioneering work as that of James Watt and the steam engine, Thomas Edison and electricity, and Alexander Graham Bell and the telephone. Ford was determined to promote this perspective at the Ford Museum and Greenfield Village. As he explained, the purpose of the facility was “to remind the public who visit it—and sometimes there are thousands a day—of how far and how fast we have come in technical progress in the last century or so. If we have come so far and so fast, is it likely we shall stop now?” Several years after the museum had opened to the public, he reflected on the “continuity of progress” that it tried to illustrate. “One of the eternal truths of this world is that there is nothing permanent in it except change, but the change
is that of growth,” he told a reporter. “To our students and to our visitors we are showing some of the changes which have taken place as generations have improved upon the past.”
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This message of history as progress permeated information disseminated by the Ford organization. Jimmie Humberstone, a young man who led tours of Greenfield Village, habitually described it as “a complete exhibit of American historical progress.”
Looking Forward Through the Past
(1935), the first handbook distributed to visitors to the village, also stressed this theme. “Behind us are limned the trails of progress we have traversed. No one can truly appreciate the present, or even dimly picture the future, who is insensitive to the past and to the advances men have made…. It is worthwhile to observe how our ancestors groped their way from the primitive to enlightenment.”
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Ford's historical path of progress clearly led to a final destination: modern consumer society. In 1928, a journalist noted that his history showed a process whereby each generation added to the production of material goods, “forever relegating luxuries to the status of necessities and adding more luxuries.” In an article entitled “The Idea Behind Greenfield Village,” Ford stressed that modern Americans had grown accustomed to consumer comforts. But they needed to appreciate the work habits and skills of an earlier day, when their ancestors “were building toward today's standard of living which … is higher than has ever been attained elsewhere.” In other words, while enjoying the fruits of consumer abundance, Americans should be careful not to lose sight of the work ethic that had produced them. Journalists took their cue from Ford and often described his museum and village as depicting progress toward modern consumer prosperity. In the words of one, these attractions represented “an engineer's vision of history … of the main advances of national life—the progress in general conditions of living, in invention and efficiency, in comfort and taste.”
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There were also two other building blocks of Ford's view of “real” history: a sentimental attraction to the past, and a devotion to the practices and values of old-line American stock. These twin ideas of nostalgia and nativism reflected his growing cultural conservatism, which saw suspicious signs of decline everywhere in the modern world.