CHAPTER XXIV
“THE GREATEST GOOD TO THE GREATEST NUMBER”
The response to that first Christmas gift from the Ford company to its employees was another proof of Ford’s theory that friendliness pays. In the following month the production of cars broke all January records. Salesmen, with a new feeling of loyalty to the firm, increased their efforts, worked with greater enthusiasm and their orders jumped.
The fight with the association still raged in the courts and in the newspapers, but the factory wheels were turning faster than ever before. More cars were pouring out, more people were buying. That year the Ford organization made and sold 10,607 cars. Ford had made good his prophecy that the new factory would produce 10,000 cars in one year.
The phenomenal growth of his business had begun. His own fortune was doubling and doubling again. America had produced another self-made millionaire.
Ford himself believes that any one who will pay the price he has paid can make a financial success as great.
“Poverty doesn’t hold a man down,” he says. “Money doesn’t amount to anything—it has no real value whatever. Any young man who has a good idea and works hard enough will succeed; money will come to him. What do I mean by a good idea? I mean an idea that will work out for the best interests of every one—an idea for something that will benefit the world. That’s the kind of an idea the world wants.”
This country has produced hundreds of men whose lives prove this statement—men who have built railroads, telephones, telegraph systems, great merchandising organizations. These men have subordinated every personal pleasure to their work. They have exhausted their minds and bodies, driven themselves mercilessly, used every ounce of energy and ability, and won.
The tragedy for them and for our country is that in winning the fight most of them have lost their perspective on it. They themselves have become absorbed by the machine they have built up. The money they have amassed usually means very little to them, but business is their passion. With millions upon millions piling up to their credit, they continue to hold down wages, to protect their profits, to keep the business running as it has always run.
That business has been built only because fundamentally it was for “the greatest good to the greatest number,” but in the long fight they have lost sight of that fact. Let a new project arise which is for the general good and “it will hurt business!” they cry in alarm.
Ford kept his viewpoint. Partly because of his years on the farm, where he worked shoulder to shoulder with other men and learned essential democracy; partly because most of his work had been in mechanics rather than in business, but most of all because he is a simple, straight-thinking man, the tremendous Ford organization did not absorb him.