HENRY FORD

Greymouth Evening Star, 16 March 1937, Page 3

HENRY FORD

VISION OF THE FUTURE Imposed upon the walls of a building in River Rouge, home of the Ford Motor Company, is the aphorism: “If we had more social justice, we would need less charity.” The words embrace, in brief, the philosophy of a mechanical genius whose dreams as a youth on a nearby farm brought him world renown at a stage of life where many men already live in the past, stated the “Christian Science Monitor,” recently. It is the philosophy born of an ambition, not to accumulate enormous wealth; not to “change the course of the world,” as some have said, nor to win for himself “a place in that select company assured of perpetual fame,” but to “make- of the world a better place in which ot live.”

The building houses. many exhibits of the far-reaching interests of Henry Ford, now in his seventy-fourth year, still a mechanical genius, still active, optimistic and enthusiastic and still convinced the next 50 years will bring greater economic and industrial progress than the last half century. History records no predecessor to Henry Ford. Whether the future will produce a successor even the most daring seer hesitates to predict. Mr. Ford to-day is one of the very few survivors, if not actually tile last, of the pioneers in the automobile, field. Leng since gone are such noted figures as the Duryea brothers, the Appersons and Haynes, the Lelands and Wintons and others who contributed so much to the development of the automotive industry.

They were the men who, while not wise in the ways of finance in the early days, built with their hands the forerunners of to-day’s 27,000,000 motor cars. To Mr. Ford alone, however, goes the credit for making of the industry a. really competitive institution and an ever-lengthening shadow of his own stature.

Of his great wealth Mr. Ford speaks almost invariably in the abstract. He usually carries only a little small change in his pocket.

.MOST-PRIZED POSSESSIONS II is more than likely Mr. Ford does not know the actual amount of the wealth that came to him out of the experiments he conducted in a little red brick barn in Bagley Avenue. Detroit. II years ago. The car, the barn, and the lathe used in processing it are among his most-prized possessions.

He believes the soil can be made to produce not only all the things man requires for food, but all the things he now looks to industry Io provide. Probably no one thing in this connection interests him quite as much as proving his contention that agriculture and industry have a very definite affinity for each other and must be "good neighbours."

Mr. Ford is proving a large part of this theory by utilising the soya bean as the base not only for plastics used in motor-cars but also for paint for body finishing in the industry. And this, ho contends, is only a beginning. Wholly different is his view of industry and finance, "industry is one thing," he. asserts; "finance is another." Ever since his brush with Wall Street in 1921, the year his company "almost went broke,’.’ Mr. Ford has

been his own financial partner. Mr. Ford started the present Ford Motor Company on the proverbial “shoestring,” 28,090 dollars of a 100,000 dollars capitalisation was actually paid in when business began in 1903. It produced nine multi-millionaires before Mr. Ford bought out the original stock-holders in 1919, and concentrated solo ownership in himself, his wife and his son. There is a story, never officially confirmed or denied, that Mr. Ford once refused an offer that ran above the billion dollar mark for his holdings long before they reached their present value. But. Mr. Ford has his own conception, of money. “Money,” he once said, “is like the belt on a. machine; it must be kept moving round and round to be of any real value. 1 am not interested in money but in the things of which it is the smybol." Discussing an indicated (57,000,000 dollars loss in income in one depression year, Mr. Ford said:

“We went on buying materials just the same. The money was not loss; it was distribution.”

FIRST MASS PRODUCER To the industry Mi 1 . Ford is identified not so much as the man who heads an industrial empire reaching into the far corners of the world, but as the pioneer who introduced mass production, who successfully fought the Selden patent case to make the automotive industry actually competitive, and as the employer who started the industrial world by establishing a 5-dollars-a-day minimum wage scale at a time when average compensation in automotive plants was 2.31 dollars a day.

Mr. Ford was ridiculed in 1911 for his 5-dollars-a-day minimum wage almost as much as he was in 1892 for believing a self-propelled vehicle could be popularised. "There is something sacred about wages,” Mr. Ford held. “They represent homes and families and domestic destinies. People ought to tread very carefully when approaching wjages. On the cost sheet wages tire mere figures; out in the world wages tire bread boxes and coal bins: babies’ cradles and children’s education—family comfort and contentment. "Even though they are the highest in the world, American wages are not nearly as high now (193(1) as they are going to be when this country really gets started. The only threat I sec to higher wages in this country is from threatened political and financial control.”

The story of the career of Henry Ford is one of the most romantic in history, but it has been embellished in the popular thought with many things that are more fanciful than accurate. Contrary to one generally accepted misconception, Mr. Ford was not the son of poor parents. His father was an Irish immigrant who became a justice of the peace and sufficiently well-to-do to be able to offer his son a farm as a wedding present. Another erroneous impression concerns Mr. Ford’s early schooling. He received the education of an average farm youth, finishing the course before, seeking work in a Detroit machine shop. Subsequently he became chief engineer of the Edison Illuminating Company in Detroit. It has been said the late Senator James Cottzeits, an early associate of Mr. Ford, played a large part, in the successful development of the Ford

Motor Company. Senator Couzcns did have much to do with the financial affairs of the company and for a time drew as large a salary from it. as did Mr. Ford himself. No one has challenged the fact, however, that the company was founded and progressed upon the Ford mechanical genius.