Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories - Italo Calvino [110]
SPOKESMAN: You achieved an enormous amount in the area of manufacturing, Mr Ford … And you theorized a great deal too … But while things always behaved as you forecast and planned, men didn't, there was always something in the human being that escaped you, that fell short of your expectations … Is that right?
HENRY FORD: My ambition wasn't just to make things. Iron, laminates, steel, they're not enough. Things aren't an end in themselves. What I was thinking of was a model of humanity. I didn't just manufacture goods. I wanted to manufacture men!
SPOKESMAN: Could you explain a bit more clearly what you mean by that, Mr Ford? May I sit down? Could I light a cigarette? Would you like one?
HENRY FORD: Nooooo! You can't smoke here! Cigarettes are a vice and an aberration! Cigarettes are prohibited in Ford factories! I dedicated years of energy to the anti-smoking campaign! Even Edison said I was right!
SPOKESMAN: But Edison smoked!
HENRY FORD: Only cigars. I can forgive a cigar or two. Likewise a pipe. They are part of the American tradition. But not cigarettes! Statistics show that the worst criminals are cigarette smokers. Cigarettes lead straight to the gutter! I published a book against cigarettes!
SPOKESMAN: Don't you think that, as well as cigarettes, you might also have concerned yourself with the effects of rhythms of work on health? Or of the pollution your factories generate? Or of the stench of the exhaust emissions your cars produce!
HENRY FORD: My factories are always clean, well-lit and well-ventilated. And I can demonstrate that when it came to hygiene no one took as much care as I did. But now I'm talking about the moral aspect, the mind. For my plan I needed sober, hard-working, good-living men, with happy family lives, with clean and orderly homes!
SPOKESMAN: Is that why you set up a group of inspectors to enquire into the private lives of your employees? To stick their noses into the love affairs and sex lives of other men and women?
HENRY FORD: An employee who lives in an appropriate way will work in an appropriate way. I chose my personnel on the basis not just of their performance at work, but their morality at home too. And if I preferred to employ married men, good fathers and home-makers rather than libertines, drunkards and gamblers, there were reasons of efficiency for doing so. As far as women are concerned, I am happy to give them factory employment if they have to support their children, but if they have a husband in work then their place is in the home!
SPOKESMAN: Yet your first opponents were the pious puritans who fought against the spread of the motor car because they saw it as a danger to the family! Preachers and moralists thundered against it as something lovers could use to meet far from their parents' watchful eyes; something that encouraged families to gad about on Sundays instead of going to church; something people would mortgage their houses and dig into their sacred savings to buy; they said the car prompted an otherwise thrifty people to desire long trips and vacations; the car generated envy amongst the poor and stirred up revolutions …
HENRY FORD: The reactionaries are like the Bolsheviks: they can't see reality, they don't know what people need for the elementary functions of human life. I always acted in line with an idea too, I had my model. But my ideas are always applicable.
SPOKESMAN: Of course, the Bolsheviks … What do you think of the fact that right from the beginning Soviet communism took Fordism as its model? Lenin and Stalin admired your organization of production and to a certain extent became disciples of your theories. They too wanted the whole of society to organize itself along the lines of industrial productivity, they too wanted to have their factories and workers operate as in Detroit, they too wanted to produce a disciplined and puritanical workforce…
HENRY FORD: But they were unable to give their workers what