“Can’t you make them understand we haven’t any jobs?” he asked the employment manager. The man, disheveled, breathing hard, and hoarse with his efforts to make his voice heard, shook his head.
“The police are coming,” he said.
“Then there’ll be somebody hurt,” Ford predicted. “We can’t have that. Get the fire hose and turn it on the crowd. That will do the business.”
A moment later a solid two-inch stream of water shot from the doors of the Ford factory. It swept the struggling men half off their feet; knocked the breath from their bodies; left them gasping, startled, dripping. They scattered. In a few moments the white stream from the hose was sweeping back and forth over a widening space bare of men. When the police arrived the crowd was so dispersed that the men in uniform marched easily through it without using their clubs.
For a week a special force of policemen guarded the Ford factory, turning back heartsick men, disappointed in their hope of a comfortable living wage.
It was a graphic illustration of the harm done the whole machine by the loss of energy stored in money, held idle in the hands of a few men.
CHAPTER XXVI
MAKING IT PAY
“When I saw thousands of men in Detroit alone fighting like wild animals for a chance at a decent living wage it brought home to me the tremendous economic waste in our system of doing business,” Ford said. “Every man in those crowds must go back to a job—if he found one at all—that did not give him a chance to do his best work because it did not pay him enough to keep him healthy and happy.
“I made up my mind to put my project through, to prove to the men who are running big industries that my plan pays. I wanted employers to see that when every man has all the money he needs for comfort and happiness it will be better for everybody. I wanted to prove that the policy of trying to get everything good for yourself really hurts you in the end.”
He paused and smiled his slow, whimsical smile.