Henry Ford's Own Story. Rose Wilder Lane
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Rose Wilder Lane
Henry Ford’s Own Story
How a farmer boy rose to the power that goes with many millions, yet never lost touch with humanity
Published by Good Press, 2021
EAN 4064066442422
Table of Contents
FOREWORD
BY ROSE WILDER LANE
Fifty-two years ago [1] a few farmers' families near Greenfield, Michigan, heard that there was another baby at the Fords'—a boy. Mother and son were doing well. They were going to name the boy Henry.
Twenty-six years later a little neighborhood on the edge of Detroit was amused to hear that the man Ford who had just built the little white house on the corner had a notion that he could invent something. He was always puttering away in the old shed back of the house. Some times he worked all night there. The neighbors saw the light burning through the cracks.
Twelve years ago half a dozen men in Detroit were actually driving the Ford automobile about the streets. Ford had started a small factory, with a dozen mechanics, and was buying material. It was freely predicted that the venture would never come to much.
Last year—January, 1914—America was startled by an announcement from the Ford factory that ten million dollars would be divided among the eighteen thousand employees as their share of the company's profits. Henry Ford was a multimillionaire, and America regarded him with awe.
Mankind must have its hero. The demand for him is more insistent than hunger, more inexorable than cold or fear. Before a race builds houses or prepares food with its hands, it creates in its mind that demigod, that superman, standing on a higher plane than the rest of humanity, more admirable, more powerful than the others. We must have him as a symbol of something greater than ourselves, to keep alive in us that faith in life which is threatened by our own experience of living.
He is at once our greatest solace and our worst enemy. We cling to him as a child clings to a guiding hand, unable to walk without it, and never able to walk alone until it is let go. Every advance of democracy destroys our old hero, and hastily we build up another. When science has exorcised Jove, and real estate promoters have subdivided the Olympian heights, we desert the old altars to kneel before thrones. When our kings have been cast down from their high places by our inconsistent struggles for liberty, we can not leave those high places empty. We found a government on the bold declaration, "All men are born free and equal," but we do not believe it. Out of the material at hand we must create again our great ones.
So, with the growth of Big Business during the last quarter of a century, we have built up the modern myth of the Big Business Man.
Our imaginations are intrigued by the spectacle of his rise from our ranks. Yesterday he was a farmer's son, an office boy, a peddler of Armenian laces. To-day he is a demigod. Is our country threatened with financial ruin? At a midnight conference of his dependents, hastily called, he speaks one word. We are saved. Does a foreign nation, fighting for its life, ask our help? He endorses the loan.
We contemplate him with awe. In one lifetime he has made himself a world power; in twenty years he has made a hundred million dollars, we say. He is a Big Business Man.
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