Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [56]
Despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that the machine he had made available to millions of Americans was changing society irretrievably—hastening the march of the urbanization and new codes of morality he deplored—Ford was incurably romantic about the simple pastoral America into which he had been born. He held on tightly to the populist values of a late nineteenth-century Midwestern farmer throughout his life.
At his birthplace of Dearborn, Ford constructed a replica nineteenth-century farming community, supported a back-to-the-soil movement, collected Americana and encouraged old-fashioned folk dancing. He himself was an enthusiastic and energetic dancer. In 1918, Ford bought his local newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, which he intended to use as the mouthpiece for his homespun philosophy. “Mr. Ford’s Own Page”—which he did not write—discussed homilies like “Opportunity will not overlook you because you wear overalls.”
But there was a darker side to Ford’s nostalgia for a lost rural heartland. For two years, between 1920 and 1922, the Dearborn Independent took on an overtly anti-Semitic tone. The “International Jew” was described as “the world’s foremost problem” and blamed for the high rents, low morals, short skirts, gambling and drunkenness that Ford believed were destroying America. His outspoken views earned him an interesting fan: Adolf Hitler was said to have had Ford’s picture on the wall by his desk in Munich in 1922 and copies of his books scattered around his office. The flow of anti-Semitic articles stopped as suddenly as they had started, probably because Ford was thinking of running for president and realized that a hate campaign would not serve his interests. Lawsuits had been threatened.
It was typical of Ford’s contrariness that although he openly expressed his anti-Semitic views, he also had a number of Jewish friends. In 1927 Ford shut down the Dearborn Independent altogether, running a long apology for everything he had written against Jews in past issues; this did not stop him accepting the Grand Cross of the German Eagle from the German consul in 1938 on his seventy-fifth birthday.
With his distrust of foreigners, bigoted views and pride in his limited education, Ford represented the successful side of political fundamentalism. “Facts mess up my mind,” he said; one might add that abstract thought seems to have done the same. Despite his hypocritical contempt for “big business,” he was a single-minded businessman with the morals of a robber baron, who spared scant consideration for the workers who made him rich. To him, they were simply cogs in the machine. His factory was an altar to capitalism, “a vast, satanic cathedral of private enterprise.”
There were some ways in which Ford was a good boss. One book he had read was Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays, which inspired him with a strong sense of social justice. As long as they could do the job required of them, he was happy to hire black workers, women, the disabled, immigrants (including Jews) and ex-convicts. A sociological department at Highland Park urged Ford’s workers to be clean, healthy and family minded, rather than spending all their money in speakeasies; foreigners were encouraged to learn English. Ford also paid his workers generously—a previously unheard-of $5 a day for factory work—because, he said, he wanted them to be able to afford the cars they were making. Ford’s paternalistic philosophy epitomized the idea of “welfare capitalism” that 1920s politicians hoped would arise out of a business-dominated society.
But Ford expected an awful lot for his $5: he was known for raising “the pain threshold of capitalism.” Obsessively high standards of workmanship, as well as of behavior, were insisted upon. Philanthropic innovations were intended less to please his workers than to make them more efficient. From Ford’s point of view, the most important