The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (Vintage) (46 page)

Ford's long-standing populism also led him to denounce militarism. The same respect for ordinary people and hostility toward entrenched wealth that had inspired his vision of the Model T were now marshaled to criticize war as a machination of the powerful and privileged. As he put it in a private conversation later that year, “Take away the capitalists and you will sweep war from the earth.”
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Antiwar sentiment, of course, had been a crucial part of the populist tradition. The Populist Party, in its criticism of financial power in industrializing America in the 1890s, had described war, like high-interest loans and discriminatory shipping rates, as another tool of exploitation wielded by greedy corporations, banks, and social elites. Anti-imperialism, antimilitarism, and isolationism remained strong within the populist movement up into the early 1900s, as evidenced by William Jennings Bryan, the populist who became Woodrow Wilson's secretary of state before resigning in opposition to American preparedness for war. Ford was immersed in this tradition. “Henry Ford was a product of an agrarian society with its basic thoughts. He never got out of it,” noted a colleague. “The city was all on the edge of his life; the farm and the tool shed were always in the center of it.” “He thought the cities were deadly,” observed another. “He always liked the village life; he felt that it was the natural life.” Populist values offered an ideological foundation for Ford as he constructed his scathing indictment of warfare.
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He launched his populist campaign against militarism with a stinging attack on the powerful economic interests that supported it. “He felt that there were sinister forces in the world that fed on war. He talked to me that war was for profit, that if it were not for the profit, there wouldn't be as many wars,” a company colleague reported. “He definitely subscribed to the so-called merchants of death theory.” In many public statements, Ford described these companies as “militaristic parasites …whose business is war.” As “an organized body of war traffickers who promote war and preparation for war,” they “pile up the armament of all nations … [and] will find an enemy for any country they arm.” Ford reduced his critique to a dictum: “No one can fight and honestly work at the same time. No one can manipulate stocks and honestly work at the same time.”
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In the United States, Ford particularly blamed Wall Street bankers and financiers, whose emphasis on profit rather than productivity made them warmongers. Louis Lochner noted that their discussions about war and
peace often touched on “the financiers of Wall Street, of whom he had always spoken in contemptuous terms.” Bankers and finance capitalists were mere “speculators,” in Ford's view, who produced nothing useful but sought to take over profitable companies. “If they can only gain control of it they can reap rich benefit from all the honest effort that has been put into it,” Ford argued. “They can …squeeze every last dollar out of the public, the product, and the workmen.” War offered these greedy speculators an opportunity for moneymaking on a massive scale. Throughout 1915 and 1916, Ford denounced “Wall Street Tories” and militaristic businessmen who aimed at “arming both sides” in World War I to generate maximum profits.
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Against these powerful economic elites, Ford placed the interests of ordinary citizens who experienced war as death and destruction. He denounced war for “its foul sustenance upon the blood, the labor, and the toil-earned happiness and goods of the worker.” For the average citizen, war “can tear him away from his home and family to send him forth to a death against his will, death inflicted by another human worker.” The fight against militarism, Ford said, was an exercise in protecting the interests of average people. He believed that a referendum on war provided the best protection for the people's interest.
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At the same time, Ford grew frustrated by people's meek acceptance of their roles as cannon fodder in wars prompted and manipulated by elites. “The people, infinitely more numerous and infinitely more powerful than these men in authority, have let them work their will,” he stated in a newspaper interview. “Why do vast masses of mankind allow themselves to be marched off to the slaughter when in their hearts they know that when they die it will be in no good cause, but will be solely to satisfy the ambition of some greedy individual?” After returning from his mission on the Peace Ship, Ford spoke even more harshly. “I don't blame an ammunition maker for making and selling ammunition, but I do blame the ignorant, thoughtless people who not only allow the manufacture of murder machines, but rob their stomachs, stultify their brains, and break their backs to pay for them.” Ford was saddened that in this war, as in every war, “the people acquiesce in it.”
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Inspired by ideals of economic efficiency and populism, Ford drew upon his finely honed instinct for publicity to stir opposition to militarism. “The mission in reality is to arouse public sentiment against the horrors of war and in favor of peace,” he told reporters. “Publicity, after all, is what keeps the wheels turning.” According to Lochner, Ford was scheming to attract attention long before he boarded the Peace Ship. On the train from Detroit, a smiling Ford said, “We'll have some fun the next few days….
I'm sure that New York is the place for giving it publicity.” The phrase “out of the trenches by Christmas” was part of Ford's master publicity plan. “Expert advertiser that Mr. Ford is, he knew that he needed something startling to attract world-wide attention,” Lochner explained of this slogan. After spending several months in close contact with his benefactor, Lochner concluded that, even though Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson had reputations for understanding the value of publicity, “either of them might have learned a thing or two from Henry Ford.”
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Critics may have branded Ford's antiwar rhetoric as self-indulgent and ineffective, but many Americans responded to his appeals for peace. After returning from Europe, Ford enjoyed substantial support, even from some who had denounced the mission itself. The New York
American,
which had ruthlessly lampooned the Peace Ship, now argued that Ford “deserves respect, not ridicule.” If America's political leaders had “put forth one-tenth the individual effort that Henry Ford put forth,” it wrote in an editorial, “the boys would have been out of the trenches by Christmas.” The Saginaw, Michigan,
Herald
said that Ford had gained much sympathy from his efforts. “Mr. Ford stands before the people now very much like the farmer who stood on the railroad track and defied the train,” it said; “they do not respect his judgement, but they admire his nerve and extend him sympa-thy.”
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Perhaps the clearest indication of the admiration accorded Ford, however, came from an unexpected direction. Those in the press and the political establishment who viewed his entry into public affairs with contempt received a shock in the spring of 1916. Voters, acting of their own volition, pushed him front and center on the national political stage. In a development that few had foreseen, Henry Ford emerged as a genuine, if unorthodox, politician.

In 1916, Woodrow Wilson ran for re-election on the Democratic ticket while the Republican Party searched for a viable candidate. The leading contenders included former President Theodore Roosevelt, Charles Evans Hughes of New York, and a variety of favorite sons such as Senator William Alden Smith of Michigan and Senator Albert B. Cummins of Iowa. But as returns from the first presidential primaries came in, political strategists for the party were startled. Without mounting a campaign, or even announcing his candidacy—in fact, he said publicly, “I do not want anything to do with politics or political offices. The filing of my name … was a joke”—Henry Ford won the primary in Michigan and came very close in Nebraska. In
both of those states, friends and supporters had placed his name on the ballot by popular petition. A few days later, Ford received about five thousand votes in the Ohio primary as a write-in candidate. When the St. Louis
Times
conducted a poll on potential Republican candidates in May 1916, he topped the list.
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Ford reacted coyly to these surprising developments. He described his electoral support as “an expression of the majority of voters that they believe, as I do, against military preparedness and the exploitation of the workingman by the moneyed munitions interests.” But he shrank from a declaration of his candidacy. In New York City, he told reporters that political office should seek the man rather than the other way around. “I don't think any man should run for President,” he declared. “In business, if we want a man to do certain things we look him up…. I think he [a presidential nominee] should be chosen without active participation on his part.” Ford carefully noted, however, that he thought “a government should be run as a business organization.” Reporters drew the obvious conclusion. “Ford Willing to Run If the People Call Him,” ran the headline in the New York
Times.
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Another sign of Ford's popularity was the letters pouring into Highland Park urging him to run. “I am just a humble farmer,” wrote a North Carolinian, “but my three greatest desires are to vote for Ford, own a Ford, and see Ford elected president by the greatest majority given any man.” A steelworker in Minnesota offered to use his knowledge of several foreign languages and go on the campaign trail stumping for Ford. A group of citizens in South Dakota printed handbills with the message “No names are greater in the whole universe than George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Henry Ford.” Ford's popularity also prompted the American Party and the Prohibition Party to court him actively as a third-party candidate during the summer of 1916.
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Ultimately, however, this upsurge of political support for Ford was channeled in a different direction. Assistants in his office drafted a form letter informing supporters that Ford had no interest in public office. More important, Ford threw his support to another candidate. After Wilson was renominated by the Democratic Party at its June convention in St. Louis and adopted the slogan “He Kept Us Out of War,” Ford moved steadily toward his corner. According to Ernest G. Liebold, his executive secretary, Ford met with members of the Democratic National Committee in New York City and agreed to help fund Wilson's campaign. At the recommendation of Liebold, who studied the election carefully, much of Ford's money went to California, where the election promised to be extremely tight. By mid-September, Ford had publicly endorsed Wilson's candidacy.
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Not surprisingly, he provided the public with a populist reading of the election, picturing it as a struggle of peace and democracy against war and economic privilege. In a long interview with the New York
World
in early October, he declared, “I hope every workingman who knows me and my attitude toward workingmen will vote for the President's return.” Ford praised Wilson for his support of eight-hour-workday legislation and argued that the President was a protector of “the welfare of industrious people.” He praised Wilson's peace sympathies, contending that the President would not “be pushed into carnage by the 'unseen hands' of Wall Street.” As for the Republican candidate, Charles Evans Hughes, “Wall Street and all the big interests are all for him.”
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Ford mounted an advertising blitz of full-page newspaper ads for Wilson. In “Humanity and Your Vote,” which appeared under his name, he warned citizens to “guard against Wall Street influence again securing control of our government.” “Although nominally a Republican all my life,” he wrote, “I am for Wilson and urge my fellow citizens to stand for him.” He praised Wilson's attempts to keep the United States out of war and chastised the “special interests” who complained that “he has not plunged the country into war for their profit.” Given Wilson's principles and record, Ford posed an obvious question: “Why should we make a change?” This essay, as well as other political advertisements, appeared in some five hundred newspapers in October and early November.
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Ford remained a loyal Wilson supporter after the President's reelection. He even muted his antiwar, antipreparedness rhetoric and followed Wilson in accepting the inevitability of American participation in World War I. Though some accused Ford of betraying his pacifist principles, it was more a matter of patriotism. Wilson, Ford argued, had tried everything possible to keep the United States out of the conflict and mediate a resolution. In contrast, Germany had been aggressive and treacherous in its policies, using submarines to attack American ships and trying to gain a political toehold in the New World by plotting in Mexico. Thus, when the United States severed diplomatic relations with Germany on February 3, 1917, Ford declared, “I will stand with our President, and in the event of a declaration of war will place our factory at the disposal of the United States government and will operate without one cent of profit.” A few weeks later, on April 6, when the United States declared war on Germany, the case was clinched. As Ford explained a few years later, his support of American neutrality “had no application, once the United States entered the war. From April 1917until November 1918, our factory worked practically exclusively for the government.” Ford was not alone in his conversion. “A declaration of war closes discussion,” noted William Jennings Bryan. “There is no
country in the world whose citizens would be so willing to die for their liberty as this one.” Ford the peace activist moderated his views, musing that “perhaps militarism can be crushed only with militarism. In that case I am in on it to the finish.”
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