Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories - Italo Calvino [109]
HENRY FORD: There were some troublemakers who wanted to stir up conflicts between Ford and the workers, conflicts for which there could be no logical reason. I had worked out everything in such a way that the workers' interests and the company's interests were the same thing! These people came up with arguments that had nothing to do with my principles, nor with the principles that arise from the laws of nature. There is a work morality, a morality of service that cannot be overturned, because it is a law of nature. Nature says: work! prosperity and happiness can only be achieved through honest toil!
SPOKESMAN: But what people called Fordism, or at least your more popular ideas about society - stable jobs, safe salaries, certain level of affluence - generated new aspirations in the workers' minds. Were you aware of that, Mr Ford? Out of a shapeless, unstable mass, you helped to create a workforce with something to defend, a workforce with dignity and with an awareness of its own value, and hence a group that demanded security, guarantees, contractual power, the right to decide its own destiny. It was what they call an irreversible process, that your paternalism could no longer either contain or control…
HENRY FORD: I always look to the future, but in order to simplify things, not complicate them. Yet all those engaged in planning the future, proposing reforms, seem to want nothing better than to complicate things over and over. They're all the same: reformers, theorists, politicians, even presidents: Wilson, Roosevelt… Again and again I found myself fighting a lone battle against a poindessly complicated world: politics, finance, wars …
SPOKESMAN: You're not going to deny th&t wars brought certain advantages to your business …
HENRY FORD: Those advantages weren't part of my plans. I've always been a pacifist, no one can ever deny that. I was always against American intervention, in the First World War and in the Second. In 1915 I organized the Peace Ship, I crossed the Adantic to Norway together with influential people from the Church, the universities and the newspapers to ask the European powers to break off hostilities. They didn't listen to me. Then my own country joined the war too. Even the Ford Company started working for the war. So I announced that I wouldn't touch a cent of the profits on war contracts.
SPOKESMAN: You promised to return those profits to the State, but it doesn't seem you ever did that… henry FORD: After the war I had to face an extremely critical financial situation. The banks …
SPOKESMAN: The banks were always another of your betes noires.
HENRY FORD: The financial system is another pointless complication which hinders manufacturing rather than helping it. As I see it money should always come after work, as the result of work, not before. As long as I steered clear of the financial markets everything went well: I came through the Crash of 1929 because my shares weren't quoted on the stock exchange. My goal in my work is simplicity…
SPOKESMAN: But you played a very important role in setting up this economic system you say you don't approve of. Don't you think that rather than being inspired by simplicity, your considerations are somewhat simplistic?
HENRY FORD: When it comes to business I always relied on simple American ideas. Wall Street is another world to me … a foreign world … oriental…
SPOKESMAN: Just a minute, Mr Ford … No doubt you have every reason to be annoyed with Wall Street… That's one thing, but to identify the financial world and all your enemies with people of a particular origin, a particular religion … to write anti-Semitic articles in your papers … to collect them in a book… to support that fanatic who was soon to seize power in Germany, these…
HENRY FORD: My ideas were misunderstood … I had nothing to do with the obscenities that were to happen in Europe … I was speaking for the good of America and for their good too, these people who are different from us, and who, if they wanted to take part