Henry Ford: An Interpretation

Introduction to Henry Ford: An Interpretation

HENRY FORD AN INTERPRETATION INTRODUCTION THIS book is all about Henry Ford, so far as it goes, but it is not the story of his life, not a record of events beginning with his birth and brought down to the present hour. The Ford chronicles make interesting reading, but they have been done in reel and rime and reams of prose. It yet remains to set them to music, and one of these days we may have a Ford symphony beginning with the faint flute notes of an infant's cry, swelling into the tremulous tragic tones of the strings, expressive of early struggles, and bursting finally into a veritable din with crash of cymbals, roll of drums and flare of trumpets, giving a tone picture of the roar of Ford factories and the rumble of the chariot wheels of success, and ending—but I leave that to the musicians. 1 INTRODUCTION Those who like to do that kind of thing may set down in order the events of Mr. Ford's life — the stories of boyhood days, the struggles of early years, and the achievements of later life. Personally, I am more interested in the operations of that mental machine which he carries under his hat than in all that other machinery of iron and steel massed under the roofs of thosevast buildings in Highland Park and on the banks of the Rouge. I know of no study more absorbing than the Ford psychology , and I find myself turning to it in my leisure hours as to a form of pleasure and recreation. One finds so many things in it that are not in the books. So, what follows, is not the life of Henry Ford, but an attempt at an interpretation of him in a series of brief chapters, or essays, which are not strung together on any logical or chronological string. They are as beads loose in a box, and you are at liberty to take them up and examine them in any order you please. I have not written with the public in mind but rather because the fascinating character 2 INTRODUCTION of the study I was pursuing made it necessary to get it out of my mind in order that I might turn to other things. I have not worked as at a task, but as at an absorbingly interesting as well as a more or less entertaining pastime, as one would work at a psychological puzzle such as the unusual mind and baffling personality of Henry Ford presents. As a matter of fact, what follows was meant to be a brief introductory chapter to a book of another sort. But that first chapter slipped its tether and ran away with itself and with my thought and time. It seemed endowed with a sort of amoebous power to divide and subdivide itself until, instead of a brief introductory chapter to another book, it became a little book in itself. So there you have what this book is all about, what it aims to be, and how it happened to be just what it is. 3 ...