All in the Day's Work: An Autobiography

by Ida M. Tarbell

Like a poet and a philosopher, Henry Ford was unhurried. He was no slave to his desk. I saw it practically abandoned when he was wrestling with the successor to Model T. “Mr. Ford does not often come in,” my conductor told me. “He is wandering through the factories these days. We never touch his desk.”

He was boyish and natural in off hours. Coming into the private lunchroom for officers at the plant, where I judged a place was always left for him, I saw him throw his long right leg over the back of the chair before he slid leisurely into the seat.

“I have got an idea,” he said. “People complain about the doors of the car—not convenient. I am going to put a can opener into every car from now on and let them cut their own.”

He delighted in the flow of Ford jokes, wanted to hear the latest, to see it in the house organ.

When he saw me, it was he who did the talking, and he seemed to be straightening out his thoughts rather than replying to my questions. When I asked him his reasons for mass production he had a straight-away answer.

“It is to give people everything they want and then some,” he said. And then he went on to enlarge in a way I have never forgotten.

“There’s no reason why everybody shouldn’t have everything he needs if we managed it right, weren’t afraid of making too much. Our business is to make things so cheap that everybody can buy ’em. Take these shears.” He picked up a handsome pair of large shears on his desk. “They sell for three or four dollars, I guess. No reason you couldn’t get them down to fifty cents. Yes, fifty cents,” he repeated as I gasped. “No reason at all. Best in the world—so every little girl in the world could have a pair. There’s more money in giving everybody things than in keeping them dear so only a few can have them. I want our car so cheap that every workman in our shop can have one if he wants it. Make things everybody can have—that’s what we want to do. And give ’em money enough. The trouble’s been we didn’t pay men enough. High wages pay. People do more work. We never thought we’d get back our five dollars a day; didn’t think of it; just thought that something was wrong that so many people were out of work and hadn’t anything saved up, and thought we ought to divide. But we got it all back right away. That means we can make the car cheaper, and give more men work. Of course when you’re building and trying new things all the time you’ve got to have money; but you get it if you make men. I don’t know that our scheme is best. It will take five years to try it out, but we are doing the best we can and changing when we strike a snag.”

What it simmered down to was that if you wanted to make a business you must make men, and you must make men by seeing that they had a chance for what we are pleased to call these days a good life. And if they are going to have a good life they must not only have money but have low prices.

There was much more, I soon found, than five dollars a day and upwards that was behind the making of men at Ford’s. There was the most scientific system for handling mass production processes that I had ever seen. Tasks were graded. A workman was given every incentive to get into higher classes. But I was not long at Ford’s before I discovered that it was not this system, already established, it was not the five dollars, it was not the flourishing business, it was not advertising—deeply and efficiently and aggressively as all these things were handled—which at the moment was absorbing the leaders of the business. It was what Mr. Ford was calling “the making of men.” It was a thoroughly worth-while and deeply human method. Mr. Ford knew that, do all you can for a man in the factory—a short day, higher wages, good conditions, training, advancement—if things are not right for him at home he will not in the long run be a good workman. So he set out to reorganize the home life of the men.

It was done by a sociological department made up at that time of some eighty men all taken out of the factory itself, for Mr. Ford’s theory was then that, no matter what you wanted done, you could always find somebody among the eighteen thousand “down there,” as he called it, that was qualified. So they had selected eighty for social service work and these men were doing it with a thoroughness and a frankness which was almost as important as the five dollars a day had been.