The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (Vintage) (94 page)

Ford's unconventional notions about health and spirituality continued to play an important part in his life. He performed daily “eye exercises” to improve his vision, holding his eyes in cold water and moving them about, determinedly looking into the distance as far as he could for a period of time, moving his sight lines to the right and then the left, over and over. He was full of peculiar medical advice, telling friends that chronic colds could
be cured by eating buckwheat pancakes, cold sores would disappear if the victim stopped eating eggs, and drinking too much coffee would cause deterioration in the strength of the fingernails. As for religion, Ford leavened his frequent attendance at the Martha-Mary Chapel with a continued belief in reincarnation. Robert A. Smith was surprised to hear his boss's views. During a casual conversation, Ford, who was relaxing with his feet up on a table, suddenly announced that he had been killed in the Civil War. “I guess I looked kind of startled,” Smith remembered, so his boss “went on to explain that he had hunches that he was an engineer in the Union Army. And was killed in the Battle of Gettysburg.” Ford later brought Smith a couple of books on reincarnation.
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For all his private preoccupations, Ford did not abandon his public career in the 1930s. He merely changed directions. His interests broadened, as he threw himself into numerous projects that engaged his public spiritedness. Ever restless and alert to new ideas, he initiated several educational endeavors that he hoped would improve the lot of average Americans in the same way that the Model T had done twenty years before.

In 1930, Americans became aware of a new side of the nation's premier maker of automobiles. “Henry Ford will devote the remainder of his life to education, and in developing his ideas will spend perhaps $100,000,000,” the New York
Times
announced. “Henry Ford has definitely begun the execution of a plan of education which has been forming in his mind for many years,” added the
Ladies' Home Journal.
“It is his largest life work and he hopes it will be his most enduring contribution to the world.”
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These stories explained how Ford planned to build throughout the country schools where one million youngsters could gain practical experience in a trade as well as book learning. Although the numbers proved to be hyperbolic, within a few years Ford had founded or funded educational projects that pursued his vision of practical education. His social idealism overflowed into other channels as well: crop experiments, tractor development, and community renovation. Stepping away from his earlier, wholehearted dedication to providing a sturdy automobile for the masses, Ford increasingly turned his attention to developing other kinds of vehicles for improving American life.

By 1930, Ford had become devoted to the reform of education. Convinced that it had been separated from real life, he agitated for change in numerous newspaper and magazine articles. “We have thought of getting an education and earning a living as two different kinds of activity, but they should not be very different from each other,” he told
Good Housekeeping
in 1934. “While a child is acquiring an education he should be doing things that are close kin to the things he will have to do while he is earning a living…. Learn to do by doing—that's my favorite principle in education.”
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In part, this emphasis on practical education stemmed from Ford's suspicions about book learning. In the 1920s, he had described reading as a “dope sickness” in modern life and insisted that real wisdom lay not in paper abstractions but in areas where people had to find real solutions to real problems. “I could never get much from books,” he claimed in 1931. “When you have to solve a problem that nobody has yet thought about, how can you learn the solution from a book?”
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Ford pursued two goals in his pedagogy. First, he sought to tailor instruction to the needs of children rather than adults. “Children are our only real assets,” Ford observed in
Nation's Schools.
“Nothing else is worth much, and all of our thinking, planning, and working are simply means for making our world a better place in which our children may live and work.” He believed that instruction should augment children's natural eagerness to acquire knowledge about the world around them. “It isn't really necessary to teach children,” he insisted in 1938.”All you need to do is let them learn. They're trying to learn all the time.” This orientation led to Ford's second goal—the creation of productive, self-supporting citizens who could create and enjoy prosperity. A proper education would not just prepare brilliant students for college but train a body of well-informed citizens who could get good jobs and, in his words, “defeat poverty by providing plenty.”
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As with so many other aspects of his worldview, Ford's notion of proper education was a curious combination of the modern and the old-fashioned. He embraced a model propounded by progressive educators, which held that learning was best achieved through hands-on activities, projects, and a child-centered curriculum. He also promoted the vocational training advocated by many educational efficiency experts. But in some ways, Ford supported a traditionalist, even reactionary model, whereby students met in one-room schoolhouses, recited from primers, and had older children tutoring younger ones. This potpourri of approaches betrayed his lack of pedagogical sophistication, but also revealed loyalties that were divided between tradition and innovation. He was willing to use new means (up-to-date curriculum and industrial training) to create traditional habits (the work ethic and character formation) to inspire modern success (efficiency and consumer prosperity). Ford's template for education reform was part John Dewey, part William H. McGuffey, and part Frederick Winslow Taylor.
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His ideas bore a variety of educational fruit. As early as 1916, he had started the Henry Ford Trade School at the Highland Park facility. Under the direction of Frederick E. Searle, it taught boys history, English, and chemistry while also training them in the mechanical arts, such as tool-and-die making. They were paid wages for the shop work; after graduation many
of them joined Ford and some took jobs with other companies. By 1928, the school's enrollment stood at about two thousand. In 1931, it moved to the River Rouge plant, where it remained open until 1952.
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Henry Ford's interest in this practical-minded academy was genuine. When he found out that hundreds of students were waiting to get in, he boosted funding to raise enrollment. He believed that such trade schools provided a bracing dose of the real world to an ordinary curriculum sunk in theory and abstraction. As he described in a 1930 article, his school was one “in which academic training and industrial instruction go hand in hand.” When a representative from Yale University approached Searle to ask if twenty theological students could come to the school for summer training, Searle took the gentleman to Ford, who asked the reason for the request. The Yale official said, “Well, when they get up in the pulpit and on the platform, after they've been in the shop they won't tell so many damned lies about industry!” Ford grinned and exclaimed, “Bring fifty of them!”
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He launched another educational project with the Edison Institute schools in Greenfield Village, seven of which he started between 1929 and 1943. Dedicated to instructing students from first grade through high school, they met in old buildings in the village, such as the Scotch Settlement School and the McGuffey House, and featured small classes, individual instruction, and a strong measure of practical projects and field trips. All students were expected to attend nonsectarian religious services every morning in the Martha-Mary Chapel. The Edison Institute High School (or Institute of Technology, as it was sometimes called) had its own building next to the Ford Museum with classrooms, laboratories, a library, and an auditorium.
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As with his trade school, Henry Ford took a personal interest in the Greenfield Village schools. Sitting in on classes and taking the children on excursions, he became known for his lax attitudes toward discipline. When children threw rocks through the windows of buildings, they were not punished. In fact, Ford delighted in one of their pranks. Creative students discovered that hard, smooth soybeans were the perfect ammunition for pea-shooters. As the children turned classrooms into pea-shooter battlefields, teachers cracked down and forbade the weapons. Ford, however, seemed as excited as the children, and mischievously brought bags of soybeans for the skirmishes.
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His success with the Edison schools prompted him to extend the project into the Michigan hinterland. In the 1930s, he began paying large subsidies to some fifteen school districts lying within a hundred-mile radius of Dearborn, in the rural, southeastern section of the state, where he owned great chunks of land. He also supported two schools in Michigan's Upper
Peninsula, as well as a trio of “Wayside Inn Schools” in Sudbury, Massachusetts. All of these institutions were modeled on the Edison Institute schools.
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The educational institution that earned Ford's greatest financial support, however, lay in the Georgia countryside, some fifty miles northwest of Atlanta. The Berry School, founded by Martha McChesney Berry in 1902, sought to bring college education to the people of the Southern backcountry. Its curriculum combined academic instruction with work programs in which poor students from rural areas filled jobs around the campus in farming, construction, cooking, and upkeep, both to learn skills and to support the institution. This “self-help college,” with its emphasis on productive work and character formation, appealed greatly to Ford.

Berry and the Fords became acquainted in the early 1920s, and in 1923 Henry and Clara visited the campus. They were impressed by the young men's farming and carpentry and the young women's cooking and sewing. During a lunch that was cooked and served by female students in their log-cabin dining hall, Ford agreed with Berry that education must teach the hands as well as the mind, and expressed his admiration for the fact that the students of the school made everything on the campus, from buildings to roads to meals and clothing. At the end of the meal, the Fords volunteered to buy a new stove for the school and to rebuild its kitchen. These modest contributions presaged a flood of money over the next quarter-century. The Fords funded the construction of a dining hall and a dormitory; Henry purchased a dilapidated brick plant and modernized it to provide work for Berry students as well as steady income for the school. With the construction of the Ford Quadrangle, a beautiful campus of Gothic buildings, including classrooms, dormitories, a recreation hall, offices, and a chapel, the Fords contributed some $5 million to the Berry School.

From the mid-1920s to the mid-1940s, the Fords visited Berry once a year for a stay of several days. They would tour the grounds, inspect ongoing projects, meet with the students and staff, and enjoy the quiet rural atmosphere. Henry particularly loved the natural beauty of the surrounding countryside. While Clara observed the girls in their weaving, sewing, and dyeing of cloth, he would visit the students working in the fields and workshops, nose about the community, talk to old farmers, and hike in the local mountains. Ford felt so comfortable at the Berry School that he even overcame his aversion to public speaking. During one visit, Martha Berry asked him to come to the platform during a chapel meeting and say a few words to the students. Grimacing, he muttered, “Well, I suppose if she sent for me, I must go.” Once at the podium, Ford began, “I've never made a speech in public, but it's very difficult to turn Miss Berry down. If I were going to
speak, I think it would be easier to talk here than anywhere else.” He then presented a short, heartfelt talk that affirmed his belief in training hands as well as minds. “As I look about the place, I know that all the money in the world wouldn't build a school like this,” he concluded. “It takes a great deal more than money.” Ford maintained a great admiration for Berry and her efforts. At her funeral in 1942, he looked at her grave and commented to several mourners, “Here rests the greatest teacher since the time of Christ,
the
Teacher.”
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Ford's enthusiasm about educational reform was matched by his passion for research into new applications for that unfamiliar agricultural crop, the soybean. This plant had been known in China for thousands of years but, although introduced in the early twentieth century, had achieved little popularity in the United States. Around the beginning of the Depression decade, Ford began investing in research involving the soybean—planting and harvesting many varieties, and exploring its uses for food, oil, meal, fertilizer, and industrial applications. Like the village industries, this was part of his larger crusade to modernize the American farm and link it to industrial processes. Ford viewed soybeans as a commodity that could revive rural America and provide new products to enhance the lives of all consumers. As
Fortune
noted in late 1933, he “is as much interested in the soya bean as he is in the V-8.”
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